Herself

by Leslie Carroll

  August 7—Day 1 A.D. (After David)

  In madcap movies there’s always one main character who remains the straight man, the centrifugal force about which all the zany characters spin and dazzle and do their thing. All my decision making seems to have been taken out of my hands this week. My closest friend and my self-absorbed cousin are calling the shots today. David called the shots yesterday. Actually, I really need to admit, right here on paper, that David has been calling the shots, emotionally, ever since we first became romantically involved. How did I let that happen? And for so long? I’ve always thought of myself as in de pen dent, resilient, and relatively forthright about my needs. Do I see a different me than others do?

  I want a man to take me in his arms and tell me he can’t live without me; that he thinks about me several times a day; that he can’t wait to come home to my smile and the scent of my skin, or anticipates with heart-thudding happiness the moment when I’ll cross the threshold and step into his arms. I want to hear him say that I make him laugh; that he’s not afraid to cry in front of me; that he doesn’t want to spend another day apart if he can help it.

  David never said he loved me. In all those years, never in so many words. What “so many”? Three. But he never actually said them. That secret finger gesture he would make in response to mine really meant “me, too.” Not the same thing as articulating those three monosyllables. As his speechwriter, perhaps I should have scripted them for him. Now, that was snarky, Tess. But I feel angry and sarcastic right now and I think I have a right to vent. Besides, this is my journal; who’s going to see it?

  Seven

  “Would you just go off to Italy like that if your husband cheated on you?” With both eyes still on the TV, Imogen reaches for a fistful of popcorn and chases it with a gulp of wine.

  “Faster than you could say pronto. And I’d put my trip on his credit card,” Venus adds. “God, that’s gorgeous,” she says, pointing to the television. “Ahhh, Tuscany,” she sighs. “I love this movie.”

  “Funny how it has almost nothing to do with the book,” I say. “The book is about the house, almost as a metaphor for where she’s at emotionally, and the movie is all about a romance with a younger man as the road to fulfillment—even if it tanks. And the central character in the book hardly resembles Diane Lane.”

  “They always do that when they make the movie,” Imogen says. “Would you want to spend two hours of your time watching a frowsy woman of sixty fixing up a farm house?”

  “Don’t diss frowsy women of sixty. With any luck, we’ll all get there ourselves one day.” The decidedly un-frowsy Venus stretches her long legs and releases a cramp in her instep. “Has either of you ever gone out with a younger man?”

  “Nope,” I reply immediately. “They’ve never done anything for me. Different tastes in music, different…I don’t know…men always act so much younger emotionally than we do, that I think you’re really letting yourself in for it when you get involved with a chronologically younger one. It would be like dating your son or something.”

  “Surely you exaggerate,” Venus purrs.

  “Surely I don’t. But I wouldn’t know. Since I have no experience in that realm.”

  Venus gives me the sloe-eyed look that has sent countless men to their knees. Or reaching for their wallets. “Surely you do, T. Exaggerate. Trust me.”

  Imogen is uncharacteristically silent. Venus and I both stare at her until she feels compelled to contribute to this particular conversation.

  “Well…I’ve been happily married for so many years that I wouldn’t…” She studies the inside of her wine glass, then decides to replenish the contents, filling it almost completely. “What the hell. I left the car in a garage; I can always crash here to night, right, Tess?” My cousin takes another sip of wine, and Venus and I watch as her features begin to soften, and her eyes take on a glow that seems to light them from within, as if there is an ironically kinder, gentler Mr. Hyde being released from the wellspring of her soul. “Younger men…listen to you. They treat you like you’re some kind of special, precious creature. They don’t take you for granted. You know how fantastic that feels to a forty-three-year-old mother of three teenagers, one of whom is a nubile young girl about to go off to college? Younger men don’t think you’re fat just because you’ve gained a pound or ten since your twenties. There’s something to be said for that ‘in praise of older women’ thing.”

  I’m too surprised by this odd confession to do more than remark upon the concept in the most generic sense. Inside I’m thinking, My God, Imogen, after years of holier-than-thou goody-two-shoes blather about how great marriage is, you’ve been knocking it off with some young stud?? Instead I say, “It’s not that a younger guy’s not as smart as I am, but—unless we’re referring to someone just a couple of years younger, which is still more our less our age, then I can’t imagine what we’d talk about. I mean, what would I say to a twenty-two-year-old guy?”

  “Fuck me!” Imogen looks like the Cheshire Cat.

  I laugh, and the sound suddenly strikes me as coming from someone else. goody-two Hyper-aware for a moment, I recognize it as David’s laugh. And I’ve been doing it for years. When did I stop sounding like me?

  Imogen, too, bursts out laughing, spilling her wine in her lap. “Oh, shit. Sorry about that, Tess.” She fixates on the remainder of her wine. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” she suddenly giggles drunkenly. “Oh, damn, now I’ve given myself the hiccups.”

  “Is there something you’d like to tell us?” I ask her, trying very hard not to leer, which somehow seems a more preferential attitude to take. Utter shock (knowing my cousin) is where my brain is really at, but since Imogen is releasing the heretofore unseen racy side of herself, I figure I’d get more details if I acted more salaciously curious than judgmental.

  My cousin looks as though she can’t decide whether she needs another fortifying glass of wine, or whether her little mishap was an indication that she’s had quite enough. “Every Thursday I drive into the city for a massage. Well, that’s what Sid thinks. I’ve told him time and time again there are no good day spas in Great Neck.”

  “You’re having an affair with your masseur? God, that’s classic!”

  Imogen fixes Venus with a withering gaze. “You must think I’m a real ‘Desperate House wife.’ You didn’t let me finish,” she whines. “I’m not even getting a massage every week. Well, not from someone at Bliss or someplace like that.” She lowers her voice conspiratorially. “Okay…you’ll never believe this…it’s the party planner! For Jacob and Emily’s bar and bat mitzvahs!”

  I frown, thinking something doesn’t quite tally. “You must have found the only heterosexual male party planner on the eastern seaboard.”

  Imogen shrugs happily. “Sid thinks Roger is gay, too. Which is fine by me.”

  Mentally I kick myself for jumping to stereotype. After all, David is 100 percent straight, and ever since the swimming pool incident, the New York press and his political opponent have been making as much hay as they can out of hinting that he’s a closeted gay.

  “Ladies…you can’t believe how creative this man is! I’m telling you! He made me see stars.” Imogen’s eyes are like saucers.

  “Well, I’m all for great sex,” Venus says, raising her glass.

  “No, I mean he showed me what we could do with a planetarium theme. Jacob’s been thinking lately about being lowered into the catering hall in a spaceship, although Roger thinks the theme’s been done to death; you know, from ‘Today I am a man’ to ‘One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.’ So we’re considering the possibility of trying to alter the gravitational field in the dining room. Something like that. To make it really special. Though it might cost a bit extra. All those spacesuits and oxygen masks for every guest. Gets a bit pricey.”

  “And orange isn’t my color,” I add. “Besides, where’s the crime in having a bar mitzvah be a religious celebration? Without rocket ships and DJs a
nd zero gravity. And if you’re going to spend fifty grand on a kid’s thirteenth birthday party—double that since you’ve got twins—what do you do for an encore? For Emily’s sweet sixteen? Or for their weddings?”

  “I’d rather hear about the hot young party planner,” Venus says.

  Imogen grins. “A triple-threat.” She lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “He’s twenty-seven, hung like a bellpull, and he listens to me.”

  Imogen never talks this way. It’s because Venus is here that my cousin is getting down and dirty. By her own admission, Imogen lives in “a very quiet cul-de-sac, not on Wisteria Lane.” Her racy talk is an attempt to compete with a glamorous heiress who has seen—by virtue of her former career—plenty of men of all stripes. “Did you ever stop to consider,” I posit, “that he listens so well because you’re paying him the cost of feeding a moderate-sized developing nation just to stage your kids’ bar and bat mitzvahs?”

  Imogen looks wounded. “God, Tess, it’s not like I’m paying Roger for sex!” She places her wineglass on the coffee table and begins to pout—the same look she’s been perfecting since we were kids. “I wouldn’t be throwing stones if I were you.”

  “Yikes!” If she weren’t my relative, she wouldn’t be my friend. Not to night, anyway. I wonder if Sid even suspects his wife’s infidelity, or if he’s too deep into other people’s gum tissue to notice. “How’d we get on this topic anyway?” I ask tipsily.

  “Jetting off to Italy after your husband betrays you,” Venus answers. This is the woman who, in addition to the wine, had also brought over a gift-wrapped copy of It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken. “I know that’s not how it ended with David but I still think you should take a leaf from Diane Lane’s book—well, her character’s. Go to Italy to clear your head from him: from his body; from his campaign promises to you; from his asking you to continue to write his speeches—which as far as I’m concerned is the ultimate act of chutzpah and insensitivity, no matter how much he really does need you—for that, at least. If men had a clue how that kind of thing sounds, and how much it hurts, and how lousy their timing is, they wouldn’t say it. Bask under the Tuscan sun,” she commands me. “Recharge your emotional and spiritual batteries. Meet a younger guy who murmurs words of amore in your ear that you don’t understand but which sound wonderful and make your soul wet. Have wild sex. Drink terrific wine. Meet his family. Fall in love. You know the drill. It’ll be good for you. You need a change of scene. Manhattan may have every material dream at your fingertips but this thirteen-mile-long strip of skyscraper-planted schist has a way of beating a vulnerable person down even further.”

  “I don’t have the energy,” I groan.

  “Don’t have the energy for a vacation?”

  “That, too. I mean for Italy, V. I think I remember how to ask where the bathroom is and how to say ‘no cheese, please’ on my pasta, but after that I’ve exhausted my vocabulary. I don’t know how to say things like ‘Prego, signore, please take your hand off my thigh.’”

  “Why would you want to?” Imogen finds this hysterically funny. Mr. Hyde-the-salami has emerged in full regalia. She’s in no shape to drive home, that’s for certain. And I really don’t need her sleeping on my couch because she can be a real pill when she’s hung over. Not to mention—as much as I did want to live with David, which is different because he was my long-term lover—I do covet my privacy. Imogen snoops.

  “Well, if you’re not up for someplace where there’s a language barrier, pick another venue. Trust me, you do need to cry in your beer somewhere other than New York City, T.” Venus’s lovely face lights up as she has an epiphany. “That’s it! Beer!”

  “Ireland?” For the past twenty years or so we’ve had the ability to complete each other’s thoughts and sentences, something Imogen and I, despite our blood relation, have never been able to accomplish. I let the Ireland idea sink in for a bit.

  “Think of those lovely musical accents; oh-so-fascinating rogues with sparkling eyes—which just might be the whiskey talking, come to think of it—who’ll charm the pants off of you, tell a grandly entertaining yarn, and speak your language. Of course they won’t marry you until their mothers die,” she adds somewhat ruefully, then raises her Eire banner once more. “All the fish and chips you can eat; oh, and if the Guinness is too strong for you, ask the bartender to toss in a shot of cassis—black currant liqueur.”

  “I know what cassis is, Venus. I used to drink it with vermouth when I was sixteen.”

  But she ignores me. “Inexplicably magical encounters with leprechauns and the sí; indescribable mystery; glittering pots of gold at the ends of breathtaking rainbows. Great music, good food, no snakes, fabulous walks—”

  I point at Venus’s mane of red hair and laugh. “Enough! You sound like an ad from the Irish Tourist Board.” And somehow, before I can come up with a reason not to visit Ireland on the spur of the moment, Venus has convinced me to log on to the computer and book an airline ticket and a room—in a charming-looking, if somewhat pricey, little hotel on St. Stephen’s Green. This is what I get for being rather squiffy on champagne when the minutes have ticked well past midnight. I feel like Cinderella with two fairy godmothers as the three of us pull an all-nighter, planning my traveling wardrobe, doing last-minute laundry, nestling David’s model ship into a cardboard Fresh Direct box which gets shoved onto the top shelf of my coat closet, and getting me packed and ready to go.

  The next afternoon, over glasses of drinkable pinot at the nearly empty Boat house Restaurant in Central Park, I give David my decision. Well, sort of. I could have left a message on his answering machine, but part of me felt that would be too cold, and another part of me really wanted to see him, even though I’d asked him not to contact me. In his favor, he’d kept his side of the agreement and allowed me to make the overture. There’s also a part of me that wants to look at him again, be in the same room with him, to prove to myself that it’s over and that I am capable of inhabiting the same space without still wanting him, a way of convincing myself that I’m getting over him. Now that I’m sitting across from him in a clean, well-lighted place, I ask myself, Who am I kidding?

  “I told you the other night that I’ll need time,” I reiterate. My gut tells me to say, You must be out of your tiny fucking mind to have the gall to ask me to continue to work for you after you’ve just chucked me, much less for no apparent reason, or for one so vague that my sensibilities are still parsing it out. That’s more or less the eloquent version. But I go with the promptings of my brain instead. “At the moment, David, the breakup wounds are raw and un-sutured, so I’m incapable of behaving with anything remotely approaching professionalism. I can’t turn on a dime or switch gears and behave as though we’re nothing more than colleagues—and it’s even worse than that, because you’re my boss. Believe me, it wouldn’t be doing either of us any favors. Which brings me back to needing time. And space. I’m heading out of town to night—”

  “Where to?” He looks surprised.

  “Ireland. Because it’s there, because I’ve never been, because Venus talked me into it, because I want to try a pint of Guinness drawn properly, and because I want to clear my head someplace that’s far, far away.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “A week.” I hold up my hand to silence his inevitable response. “David, I know Dobson and the media have got you in the hot seat, and that you need to put the focus back on the issues, before your constituents think that a man who made a mint running a leash and flea collar company called Pet-o-Philia is more fit than you are to sit in the House of Representatives; but I can’t give you what you want right now. What you need. You’ve got other speechwriters. Gus is a terrific—”

  “He’s not as good as you are, Tess.”

  I place my wine glass on the table and dab the corners of my mouth with the linen napkin, suddenly feeling naked and vulnerable without the prop to hide behind.

  David sighs. “I do understand
, you know. I know you feel that my decision seemed to come out of left field. And I know you’re hurting. I’m not insensitive to your feelings. It wasn’t easy, Tessa. It was just…the right thing to do.”

  “For you, maybe.” David isn’t sure what to say to this. Clearly, right now he could use a speechwriter. Ironic, isn’t it, how some of the most articulate people you know are lost without a script. Feeling angry and resentful I begin to tear up, but stifle it immediately when I catch the waiter looking in our direction. I’m in a public place with a public figure, and throwing crystal and cutlery isn’t my style anyway. This meeting is self-consciously civil. I’d love another glass of wine, but in my psyche’s present condition, I’d end up flying hung-over. “I’ll give you my final answer when I return from Ireland. You’ll just have to wait a week or go with Gus. He’s not exactly a slouch, and he served you quite well as a speechwriter before you met me.”

  David frowns. “It’s not that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “You know what it is. You know better than anybody. I hate to lose.”

  “Well,” I sigh, “even Admiral Nelson had his bad days.”

  Eight

  Much later that night, I board an overnight flight bound for Dublin.

  The plane is packed to the gills with travelers, of both the tourist and homebound variety, many of whom seem to have exceptionally large, young, and noisy families. I’d been hoping to get some sleep, but that seems unlikely in this airborne daycare center.

  Right after I ensconce myself in my window seat as cozily as I can manage and fire up my laptop, hoping to squeeze in some last-minute work (notes to myself, mostly) before takeoff, a large turbaned gentleman sits beside me, taking up an extraordinary amount of my personal space. I try to become absorbed in my typing, but I can’t manage this without my left elbow touching him. He seems to enjoy it. So I try to keep my arms as close to my own body as possible, but I can’t work this way, so I store the laptop and take out a novel to read instead. For some reason, every time I need to turn a page, I am having the same close encounter with his ample torso. I know the quarters are cramped, but he seems to be purposely invading my territory, such as it is. I try to convince myself that his too-proximal behavior is a cultural thing, and that therefore, I should give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s a long and crowded flight, and we all need to be respectful of one another or it’s going to seem even longer.