Arm Candy

Table of Contents

 

 

Also by Jill Kargman

The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund
Momzillas
The Right Address
(Co-Authored)
Wolves in Chic Clothing
(Co-Authored)

DUTTON

Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, May 2010

Copyright © 2010 by Jill Kargman

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Kargman, Jill, 1974-
Arm candy / Jill Kargman.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-42943-3

1. Chick lit. I. Title.
PS3611.A783A89 2010
813’.6—dc22 2009047899

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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To my small band of true friends: I’d always rather be quirky us than the Beautiful People.

1. You feel closer to the people in the Obits section than the Weddings section.

2. You are now in the same age bracket as people who may buy oil paintings of a dog with a monocle or attend a crafts fair.

3. You catch yourself telling young people, “When I was your age, there wasn’t any Internet.”

4. The reason you keep a diary is to remind yourself what you did yesterday.

5. You have to skip encores at rock concerts because you want to beat the stampede and get home at a reasonable hour.

6. The president of the United States is in your age group.

7. In the newspaper, you look at the real estate section before the party pictures.

8. Two words: sensible shoes.

9. When friends book a reservation for nine thirty p.m., you want to shoot them in the head.

10. Your kid thinks your vinyl records are “antiques from the olden days.”

11. You realize there are smart, grown-up people born in 1990.

12. Your joints and scars are starting to forecast rain better than the Doppler 7000 meteorologist Stan Storm.

13. You can admit that when you were your kid’s age, you carried a Walkman instead of an iPod, used pay phones instead of cell phones, and typed term papers on a typewriter or “word processor” instead of a computer.

14. You keep telling yourself laugh lines are sexy but then notice that no models have laugh lines.

15. You were once a model yourself, and now the beauty that the world valued you for is starting to fade. And you’re seized by the fear that you’ll never be able to find love again.

F
or Eden Clyde, there was nothing on planet Earth as nauseating as moving boxes. Starting over with new walls and an unfamiliar ceiling to stare at during sleepless nights stressed her out more than anything else. Well accustomed to cardboard paper cuts and packing-tape hell, the stunning but weary model sat, at thirty-nine years old, crying her green eyes out. It was as if she had a bungee cord harnessed around her and was about to take an emotional cliff dive. She didn’t know if she could stomach it.

Despite her breathtaking looks—a more severe, sexier Audrey Hepburn meets a young Demi Moore meets those
Sports Illustrated
bikini girls you want to strangle—Eden Clyde was like so many beauties before her: lottery winner in all twenty-three chromosomes but unlucky in love. But she knew deep down it wasn’t so much about chance—it was also about the choices she had made, some of them at an age so tender she couldn’t fathom the consequences. But now, after nineteen years livin’ in sin (as her small-town, rectangular-shaped Red State neighbors would have scoffed), she sat brokenhearted with a giant hole punched through her chest. It was like someone had shot a cannon through her, but she miraculously lived, forced to walk the misty Manhattan streets feeling empty and miserable. And
forty
. Well, almost. Isn’t one’s entire thirty-ninth year by nature a reckoning of sorts? A fifty-two-week shadow that is cast from the moment the candles are blown out?

Eden exhaled, her head bending down to her hands.
Deep breaths,
she instructed herself, eyes damp and closed against her thin, ringless fingers.
You have to power through this
. She had never been the religious type, but as they say, there are no atheists in the trenches. Life-changing moments will send even the least pious souls into prayer. A passenger on a turbulent flight or a mother about to give birth. For Eden, the piles of brown boxes were suddenly her unlikely steeple.
Please, God, let me get through this. Please tell me that I will be happy again.

Eden was a beauty icon. Her career as a model and muse made her recognizable to the fashion and art world cognoscenti all over the globe. She received whistle blows from local construction workers and was the subject of schoolboy fantasies. But what would she do now that the one reason everyone worshipped her was slowly ebbing, day by day, from her without her control? She was hardly the crypt-keeper; it was forty looming, not eighty. But every New York minute, there were girls less than half her age hopping off the Greyhound, staring wide-eyed at the skyline outside Port Authority, just as she had, duffel bag in hand, hope in her heart. It felt like another life. And in many ways, it was.

—Tom Stoppard

 

 

 

W
hen Eden, née Szciapanski, hit her teen years, she really started to notice people noticing her. People on Main Street, men, women, children—
everyone
stared at her. As each pair of eyes gazed upon her, they lit a spark inside the girl from the dreary small town, making her feel special, different. Her confidence swelled as she blossomed more and more from gawky and lanky into a sexy, all-American girl, igniting an ambition deep within her soul. Maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t like everyone else in Shickshinny, population 3,274. Maybe there were bigger things out there for her.

Her mom, Carol, definitely thought so, a former beauty queen turned courtroom stenographer, whose splurge was weekly French-manicured gel tips. She praised Eden’s perfect features and encouraged her to raid her closet and “flaunt whatcha got.” Carol hoped Eden’s good looks would help her pole-vault out of their tin-rooftop town, bidding adieu to small minds, big asses, and aluminum siding for good.

“I shoulda left this goddamn town when I had the chance,” Carol lamented to herself one morning as Eden filled her backpack for school. Eden looked down at her sophomore social studies homework pages one last time and zipped up her bag as Carol stared out the rain-splattered window dreamily and took another drag of her cigarette.

“Let’s unpack the rest of those boxes tonight, Mom.” Eden and her mom had moved eight times in twelve years, all within town limits, whenever the rents would rise. Then they’d fold up their life, find a new place nearby, and unfold it again.

“Yeah, I can’t stand looking at ’em anymore,” Carol said, looking back at Eden. “Have a good day at school.”

“Thanks, Mom. You, too.”

“Jason picking you up?”

“Mm-hmm.” Eden smiled with an excited hair flip.

“Hold on to him, honey,” Carol said between puffs. “He’s got it all. The looks, the dough, and he’s a good kid.”

Eden smiled. She was crazy about Jason. He was romantic (long-stemmed roses in a box at each month’s anniversary), fun (surprise adventures like county fair opening night), had a warm smile, and gave the best bear hugs.

A honk sounded in the front yard of Eden’s quaint
Edward Scissorhands
-esque street, rows of little houses, except with no dinosaur topiaries and zero color, just white, white, white. The paint and the people.