by Jane Porter
Leaving the ladies’ room, I go in search of Tessa and Josh, but before I make it very far, someone grabs my hand.
I look up, a long way up, straight into a mask.
He’s tall, and he’s wearing a loose white shirt and strange-looking pants and he’s carrying a... whip.
My mouth opens, closes, as he snaps the whip and it makes a sharp cracking, hissing sound.
“That’s... impressive,” I say.
The masked man laughs and uses his whip to push up his mask onto his forehead. Brian Fadden smiles down at me. “You think so?”
I make a face. “So what are you?”
“A eunuch.”
“A eunuch?”
“I’m in charge of the sultan’s harem,” he answers quite seriously. “It’s an honor.”
“Yeah, after you’re castrated.”
“It was quite painful.”
“I’m sorry.”
He smiles. “If I’m allowed to compliment you, you look...” He shakes his head and exhales. “Hot.”
“I am hot. I’m sweating like a pig.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant,” he says delicately.
Brian has always been able to make me laugh, and I laugh now. His humor is such a relief. It’s wonderful to feel light, easy. “So what are you doing here? I didn’t think this was your kind of thing.”
“It’s a good cause.”
“So people say.”
“And I’d hoped I’d see you,” he admits.
I blush, suddenly shy. “It’s a lot of money if you just wanted to see me.”
“The ticket was donated.”
“Well, there you go. I’m a cheap thrill.”
“You’re a thrill, but cheap... no. This outfit cost a fortune.”
“Never mind the castration.”
Brian’s blue eyes glint. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about that.”
“Sensitive subject?”
“Very.”
“Pointed comments getting to you?”
“You’re a funny girl, Holly Bishop.”
“I try.”
He takes my hand, fingers wrapping around mine. “Come on. Let’s dance.”
And we do.
Brian and I spend the rest of the night dancing, and it’s close to two thirty when he finally puts me into the back of a cab. We don’t make any plans to see each other again, but somehow I know we will. I just don’t know when.
Chapter Sixteen
Halloween is anticlimactic after the outrageousness of the Leather & Lace Ball. I stay home Halloween night in case I have trick-or-treaters, and there are just a handful, which leaves me alone with a big bowlful of miniature Butterfingers, Milky Ways, and Baby Ruths.
November third I throw out what’s left of the candy, which isn’t as much as it should be.
At City Events it’s always intense and frazzled, and even though the Leather & Lace Ball is over, Olivia is tougher than nails on me and even less forgiving of errors.
I hit the gym frequently, not just for my hips (well, those chocolates have made an appearance on my butt and thighs) but also for my sanity. Nothing seems to make Olivia happy anymore, and I’m constantly biting down, holding back, hoping that eventually she will lighten up.
The Beckett School’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebrations are organized. The details for Bloomberg, Bloomberg and Silverman’s holiday party are set. Oracle’s big shindig, scheduled for January, is nearly complete, and I’m spending one day every week meeting prospective clients, showing the City Events portfolio, telling them how we can help and what we do.
The weather has been mild in San Francisco—the fall is always one of the city’s nicest times of the year—and before I know it, it’s Thanksgiving week, and I’ve just two more days of work before I head home for turkey and cranberries and stuffing.
Tessa shoots me an e-mail Tuesday: “What are you doing this weekend?”
I answer without thinking, “Going to Mom’s.”
And the second my finger hits “Send,” I remember she’s from the East Coast and doesn’t have family here. Immediately I type another e-mail. “Do you want to come home with me for turkey?”
She sends an answer. “Josh has invited me to his house.”
“Great,” I type. “That should be fun.”
“No, it won’t,” she replies. “You know how he said his parents are stiffs? He was right.”
“All parents are stiff,” I type back, thinking we might as well be instant-messaging, or talking to each other face-to-face. It’d be much more efficient timewise.
I get a new e-mail from Tessa. “Your mom isn’t.”
My mom would be flattered.
Driving home Wednesday afternoon, fog shrouds the fields lining the highway, and massive, gnarled oak trees look like lone soldiers in the sea of gray, their dark green leaves soupy with clouds.
I’ve heard others say this drive through the Central Valley is lonely and boring, the winter fog depressing, but it’s a melancholy beautiful to me. The fog is symbolic somehow of what we see and don’t, what we imagine versus what we know.
We’re always wanted at home for the holidays, and usually it’s just Ashlee and me who make the trip home.
I don’t know why Jamie can’t fly in from Phoenix. It’s not as if he couldn’t afford the airfare. He’s got a good job in sales, and a serious live-in girlfriend who enjoys the house and lifestyle he provides.
But even though Jamie’s not coming home for Thanksgiving, Mom’s still excited and has been baking all week. She’s a great cook. Her pies are the best I’ve ever had: perfect flaky crust, fillings that are light, flavored just right.
Jean-Marc used to say he fell in love with me after eating one of Mom’s banana-cream pies.
Mom loved it when he said that. She’d blush and shake her head, get that little-girl shine in her eyes, that little-girl smile.
I hated that she’d get so excited over a compliment about pie, but I understand it now. It’s wonderful when someone can make you feel good. Important. Valuable. God, I used to take that for granted. No more. I swear, I will never look a gift horse in the mouth again.
Ashlee arrives home late Wednesday night, and within a half hour of kissing Mom and downing a Diet Coke, she’s out the door to hook up with friends she hasn’t seen since her last time home.
Mom’s face falls as Ashlee blithely sails out the door in a cloud of Bliss beauty products and Estée Lauder Happy perfume. “Are you going out, too?” Mom asks.
I think of the friends I could call, people I know who are sure to come home from Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento. It’d be great to get drinks with my old high school crowd, compare notes, but most of them don’t know about the divorce, and I’m not sure I’m ready to explain. “Nope. I’m here for the night.”
Mom’s pleased. “We can make the pies together, then.”
In the kitchen, Mom tackles the pie crust and I start the filling. The radio’s on, and we’re chatting about Christmas and we’re doing great until she asks, “So what’s Jean-Marc doing this weekend?”
I nearly drop the nutmeg. “Why would I know?”
“You were married.”
“For about three weeks.”
“It was a year.”
I grind my teeth together, dump the nutmeg in the bowl, and focus on the cinnamon, hoping Mom will take a hint.
She doesn’t. “You are still friends, aren’t you?”
I sigh exasperatedly. “No.”
“Why not? There’s no reason you can’t be friends.” She’s rolling out the first pie crust, and I don’t understand how her touch with the dough and rolling pin can be so deft, so light, while her conversational sensitivity is next to nonexistent.
“You’re not friends with Ted,” I say, dumping the cinnamon on top of the nutmeg.
She frowns as she lifts the crust, turns it. “You shouldn’t call him Ted.”
“Okay. Bastard Ted.”
“Holly.”
>
“He is a bastard. He left you, left us—”
“He didn’t leave you kids—”
“Bullshit.” I attack the pumpkin mixture with the wooden spoon. “He did. He left us, all of us—you, Jamie, me, Ashlee. He’s a rat bastard, and Jean-Marc is a rat bastard, and I won’t forgive either of them.”
Mom looks at me reproachfully. “That’s not very nice.”
“Maybe I’m not nice.” I set the bowl down, but I set it down hard, and little globlets of pureed pumpkin splash up and out. “Maybe I’ve never been nice.”
Mom’s lips purse. “That’s not like you, Holly.”
“Why isn’t it like me? Why do I have to be nice? You never cared if Jamie was nice”
“He’s your brother.”
“A man, right,” I say in disgust. “And it’s okay for men to be competitive, territorial, insensitive, but women have to be good. Sweet. Nurturers.”
“Holly, I don’t want to fight.”
“And I don’t want to be stepped on.” I take a quick breath. “Being nice is overrated. Being nice gets you ignored. Forgotten. Being nice means you wait and wait and never get a turn.”
She looks at me for a long moment, her flour-dusted hand resting on the yellow Formica counter, and I see she’s had her nails done for Thanksgiving. Burgundy polish with squared tips. “Are you mad at me?”
“No.” I reach for the pumpkin puree bowl. “I don’t know. I just wish you hadn’t read me all those, fairy tales growing up.”
“You loved fairy tales.”
“They’re not true.”
“That’s right. They’re stories.”
Stories. Good guys. Bad guys. Towers. Dungeons. Heroic men and imperiled women. “They all ended happily.” I give the pumpkin a halfhearted stir. “But life’s not like that.”
“You don’t know that. You’re still young.”
“And what about you? Are you still young?”
Mom pulls back as if I’ve struck her. “Yes. Well.” Her voice is soft, bruised, and she’s reaching for a dish towel, briskly wiping the flour off her hands. “I’m not complaining.”
“Maybe you should.”
She just shakes her head and swiftly, expertly crimps the edges of the crust and doesn’t look at me.
“Maybe we could go slay dragons together, Mom.” I’m trying to make a joke, get her to smile. “We could be the first mother-daughter dragon-slayer team out there.”
“Sure, Holly. If that would make you happy.” But she’s dismissive, and it’s gentler than Olivia’s dismissals but it’s still a dismissal, and our mother-daughter time is over for the night.
Saturday night I vow never to eat turkey again in my life, since I’ve now had it in all its glorious forms: hot turkey, cold turkey sandwiches, turkey tetrazzini, turkey stew, turkey soup.
Bleck.
I pack my bag after the dinner dishes are done, since I plan on leaving early in the morning. Once my bag is packed, I head out, climbing into my car for a drive downtown.
I’ve got to escape the house. Have to escape the TV and the worn, faded chintz sofa and the framed school photos on the wall. I feel trapped here sometimes. Scared.
I go to the Starbucks on Main Street, and it’s a proper Main Street. I love this town. You could go all over the valley—Hanford, Tulare, Sanger, Porterville, Exeter, Kingsburg—and each one has its Main Street with its turn-of-the-century brick buildings and the one big high school stadium and the trees.
It’s not really foggy yet, but it’s cold, and only a few people are walking around, heading either to or from one of the theaters or restaurants that have sprung up downtown.
But at Starbucks I find a crowd, and I wait in line with everyone else before carrying my coffee outside, where I sit on a chilly green metal chair and clutch my warm paper cup.
My breath comes out in little clouds, and as I sit there, the red-and.-white candy cane swags that have been strung up and down Main Street for tomorrow night’s Candy Cane Parade turn on. Red and white lights glow everywhere, and it’s both gaudy and wonderful.
I watched the Candy Cane Parade every year growing up. I used to love Christmas—the stockings, the carols, the pretty wrapping paper—but after Bastard Ted left, it was never the same.
Mom tried. God knows she did. But it wasn’t the same.
I bite my lower lip and stare up at the red and white lights, the colors glowing through the fog. I’m not going to cry. It’s silly to cry. And yet my chest aches for the girl I was and the woman I am.
Who am I? What am I? And when is my skin going to fit?
When do I get porridge that will taste just right?
Standing up, I toss away my now empty cup and head back toward my car.
It was relatively easy moving to the city, I think, but it’s been damn near impossible taking the small town out of me.
The paperwork arrives in the mail two weeks later, on December 7.
Standing on the front steps of Cindy’s butter-cream Victorian, I open the envelope, look at the piece of paper for a moment, not understanding what it is. I read the legalese, see the various stamps and dates, and then it hits me. My divorce is final.
It’s over, I think, feeling nothing. No sadness, no pain, not even relief. I read the wording again and again before slipping the folded paper back into the envelope.
The marriage should never have happened, and now it’s as if Jean-Marc and I never were.
In my bedroom I file the paper away before taking out a notepad. Time to concentrate on Christmas shopping.
Christmas comes and goes, leaving me with all kinds of new credit card debt.
I spend New Year’s with Katie and a couple of her crowd up at Lake Tahoe. I’m not a great skier, but I rent equipment and give it a go, spending much of each afternoon sliding down slippery mountain slopes on my butt. But I tried, and that’s what counts, I tell myself.
In January I work hard, bringing in lots of new business, and in the first February all-staff meeting David gives me a gift certificate in front of everyone as an award and a thank-you for bringing in the most new business in the new year.
I’d hoped that by my working hard Olivia would see I was a team player and would relent in her hard-ass attitude toward me, but the award from David, as well as the gift certificate to Neiman Marcus, makes her even snarlier than usual.
Valentine’s Day approaches, and the Schlessenger wedding demands hours of Olivia’s and Sara’s time because this wedding, with the black-tie reception for five hundred at the Palace Hotel, seems cursed. Everything that could go wrong does, and what should have been a slam dunk threatens to unravel even up to the last minute.
I’m just glad the wedding’s not my problem, and I spend Valentine’s night at home alone, watching old movies and eating microwave popcorn kettle-corn style.
I shouldn’t be eating kettle-corn popcorn, though. If I were smart I’d lose another five to ten pounds and get really expensive highlights and learn something about fashion and attitude.
Instead of lying on my couch in mismatched sweats, I should be working harder to make myself look like a million bucks so I can go after a man who has a million bucks.
If I were smart, I’d just give up on love and the whole idealistic, romantic thing and become a realist.
I’d know that love and passion never last, that infatuation is based on a mixture of pheromones, novelty, and projection. Which reminds me, there’s a great book published called Why We Love, packed with research. The author did all these MRIs of the brain, studying romantic couples, people hopelessly besotted, and in every case the brain chemistry was markedly different. You see, love changed the brain. But the research also revealed—tragically—that even with those hopelessly besotted who’ve become addicted to love (yes, romantic love leads to obsession, making one crave the beloved just as a junkie craves his drug of choice), love goes.
Love goes.
Despite my pessimism, only a week later I’m accepting my firs
t date in nearly five months.
He’s a man I met last October at the Leather & Lace Ball, a friend of David’s. Ed Hill’s his name, and he sat at our table and apparently has had a soft spot for me ever since.
I’m a bit worried that this man, Ed Hill, fell for me when I was wearing a bustier, a leather G-string, and fishnet stockings, because I don’t usually wear leather, G-strings, or fishnet stockings. But David has assured me that Ed knows it was a costume and not a personal fetish, so I accept the date when Ed calls.
Dating is still not all that appealing, but at Katie’s urging, I’m determined to approach relationships differently. I’m not going to wear rose-colored glasses anymore. I’m going to be practical, unemotional, and logical.
And being practical, I check out Ed Hill’s company’s Web site and discover he doesn’t just work for Arrow Software—he’s the founder. And the CEO. I surf around the Web site, discovering that Arrow has offices all over the world, including Australia, the UK, Germany, and Japan. I’m impressed and read whatever I can, including posted press releases (company profits are up; new growth opportunities abound) and a bio about top management execs, including Ed.
And continuing to be practical, I study Ed’s head shot on the Web site, trying to remember him from the ball, and I do but I don’t. Ed was quiet, I think, and not a particularly big man—medium height and slender, definitely not flashy and not dressed in anything outrageous,
I’m nervous about the date, but David has assured me that Ed is a really nice, genuine man, and he’ll treat me very well, and isn’t that the first step on the road to recovery? Stop dreaming about unavailable men and date those who are available?
I dress for my Saturday-date with care.
Ed’s offered to pick me up, but I tell him I’m happy to meet him at the restaurant, and I do.
I sit outside in my parked car, just across the street from the restaurant, and watch people arrive. I spot Ed as he steps from his sports car. It’s a nice car, and he’s pleasant enough looking—not handsome, rather nondescript—but as he locks his car and heads toward the restaurant door, adjusting his sport coat, I think he has a kind face.