Better Off Without Him (11 page)

I sighed. Yes, I did know how they thought. “Anything else?”

“Forty-five is a tough age to sell. Can she be younger?”

“No, she can’t. What’s wrong with forty-five? Not every woman who reads a book is twenty-three.”

“I know that. But there’s marketing to deal with, and forty-five is a hard sell.”

“What happens to all the forty-year-old marketing people? Are they all sent to the large print division, or just given a walker and shown the door?”

“Don’t shoot the messenger, honey. I’m just saying.”

“I’m sorry. Listen, I’ll deal with Frannie. I’ll send her the stuff right away, and I’ll convince her. I have faith.”

“Okay, Mona. Then I’ll have faith too.”

My daughters and I have been going down to the Jersey shore for the summer since the twins were in still diapers. We go down to Long Beach Island, a long sliver of sand dotted with tiny towns and miles of beach and homes that have become so overpriced it’s like the Hamptons but without the pomp and circumstance. Going down there year after year has resulted in a number of summer-only friendships for the girls and myself, so the house is always noisy and happy and crowded. I love the long mornings with coffee on the porch, listening to the sound of the ocean. I love grilling fish and making salad and dicing fruit and pretending I’m being healthy. Fred loves romping on the beach every night, chasing seagulls, and being walked everywhere we need to go. The girls love sleeping late, Froot Loops for breakfast, trolling on the beach, and wearing as little clothing as possible. They also love the Keegan boys.

The Keegan boys are now seventeen, sixteen and fourteen. They are all tall and very good-looking. I’ve always assumed they took after their mother, although I never met her. Doug and his ex-wife parted right after the youngest, Mike, was born. Doug apparently made a boatload of money designing a very popular video game, and when he sold his tiny company to Sony, the ex-wife imagined a lifestyle quite different than what Doug imagined. So she took half the loot and did the Paris-London-New York thing. Doug stayed in Pennsylvania. His one concession to wealth was a house on the Jersey shore where his boys stay with him for the summer. He and the boys arrived three years after we did, and the kids grew up together.

Doug is the ugliest sexy man I know. Or maybe the sexiest ugly man. I’m not sure which comes first – the ugly part or the sexy part. He’s short – no more than 5’6” with a wedge-shaped head, high forehead, small, close-set eyes and very high cheekbones. All in all, a fairly hideous package, except for his mouth. May I, just for a moment, wax rhapsodic about Doug’s mouth?

His lips are wide and full, a bit too wide, some may argue, but wide enough that the ends are turned up in a quirky, slightly naughty smile. His lips are also full, Botox full, but they’ve been like that since before Botox was a twinkle in some plastic surgeon’s eye. His lips are also red, and smooth, and very soft looking. And moist. They always look like he just licked a little something off his lips.

He’s also very sexy. His body is amazing – he spends all his time playing with his sons. They ride bikes every morning to the community pool where Doug does a bunch of laps while the boys score with the cute female lifeguards. They rollerblade, shoot hoops, throw Frisbees, windsurf, and bodysurf. As a result, Doug has a broad chest, muscular arms, washboard abs and an ass that’s tight as a drum. All the man has ever worn are shorts and half-buttoned Hawaiian shirts. The kind Magnum PI wore.

Doug also has great hair – thick and curly, a little too long, a beautiful chestnut color barely shot through with gray.

But the sexiest thing about Doug Keegan is that he makes you feel like you’re the most important person in the room. He looks right at you, talks right to you, listens to every word and laughs in all the right places. Consequently, he always has a string of very attractive, usually much younger and always intelligent and successful women who hang around him like bees around a hive.

Doug started another business and made another bunch of money on another video game. During the summer, he leaves his company to spend time with his sons, where, on rainy days when they can’t be outside doing healthy things, they stay inside and test all of the new games Doug is developing on any one of four or five different game systems Doug has scattered around his house.

I once had a brief flurry of worry that the two families would suffer a summer romance that would ruin the carefully built and very successful friendships we’d established. But the girls talk about the boys like brothers, and the three boys always seem to have other girlfriends to keep them busy.

Every summer, it’s the same routine. We leave early in the morning, stop at Costco and spend a half the summer’s food budget on steak, fish and junk food, get to the shore house by 1 p.m., have lunch, and spend a few hours cleaning and opening windows. By late afternoon, my daughters take Fred for the first of many long walks around the neighborhood as they wait for the Keegan clan to return from whatever activity they’re engaged in. Then, the girls pile over to the Keegan house, Fred drags his hot and tired butt up onto our tiny, shaded side porch, and Doug comes over to welcome me back to the shore.

This year, just like clockwork, he yelled hello from the front door and came into the kitchen, just as I was finishing stowing away all the freezer food. Doug never seemed to realize that we had not seen each other for nine months. Or perhaps it just didn’t matter to him.

“I have discovered,” he announced, “the perfect use for all that mint we planted a few years ago. The Mojito. You smash together lots of fresh mint with sugar and lime, then add white rum. Top with seltzer. It will make our summer perfect.”

“It sounds wonderful. Can we make it by the gallon?”

“Sure.” He rooted around in a cardboard box, pulled out Doritos and opened the bag. “So, the girls tell me you finally got rid of that asshole husband of yours.”

I stared at him. “Doug, I thought you liked Brian. I thought you two were, well, friends.”

He crammed a few chips into his mouth. “Hey, I love Brian,” he said after a few chews. “Brian is the perfect friend. Funny, knows sports, good drinker, a great talker. But let’s face it, Mona, as a husband, he must have really sucked.”

I nodded and cleared my throat. “Doug, all I’ve heard for the past two months is what a shitty husband Brian was. Why didn’t anybody tell me? Why didn’t you?”

He wiped Dorito schmutz off his chin. “Come on, Mona, what was I going to say? Hey, I think your husband is a great guy, but he’s treating you like pond-scum? What would your reaction to that be?” He settled his still-admirable butt against the counter. “You’d deny it, yell at me, call me jealous or something equally ridiculous, and we wouldn’t be friends anymore.” He shrugged. “I just figured you were smart enough to figure it out yourself, eventually.”

I munched a Dorito. I had just stashed eighty dollars worth of swordfish steaks into the freezer, so I could start the healthy eating thing later. “But, Doug, that’s the thing. I didn’t figure it out. Didn’t the girls tell you? He left me. For another woman. Younger, skinnier, blonder. French.”

“Hmmm. French, uh?” His eyes narrowed, and as they’re pretty small to begin with, they practically closed. “He’s such a moron. He mentioned her.”

“Mentioned her?” My voice rose three or four octaves. Fred, out on the porch, lifted his head and actually whimpered. “He mentioned her? When? What did he mention?”

Doug looked apologetic. “Last summer when he was here. We were drunk, of course, and he told me there was a French woman that he was, well, infatuated with. I told him he was a fool. I told him to stop before it was too late. That he couldn’t risk losing you.” Doug shrugged. “Moron.”

“You didn’t tell me,” I yelled. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Doug sighed patiently. “Would you have believed me? No. You would have thought I was jealous and all that other crap and, bingo, not friends.” He shrugged. “I thought he’d outgrow her, just like he outgrew all the others.”

I froze. “Others?”

Doug sighed again. “Oh, shit. Now I’m the moron.”

“How many others?” I asked carefully.

He tried to look nonchalant. “Oh, three or four. Maybe six. Usually he met them on business trips, and they lasted just a few weeks. Seven. No more than ten.” He swallowed. “Ten.”

I tried to think. “Doug, we’ve known you for ten years. That means that every summer that Brian came down here, he told you about a new one?”

“No, no, Mona. That’s not how it was at all.” He thrust the bag of chips in my face. “Have another Dorito.”

I munched rebelliously. “Okay, then, how was it?”

“It’s only been in the past, oh, five years. He just started talking one night how he had gone to New Orleans for something and met a woman, and he said –“

“Said what?”

Doug took me gently by the arm. “Let’s sit outside,” he suggested.

My house is a converted Cape, the whole first floor a combination living-dining-kitchen with a bathroom and my bedroom tucked into the back. I have a tiny side porch off the kitchen, but the whole back of the house is a screened-in porch with comfy wicker furniture, ceiling fans and white Christmas lights. It’s where we spend most of our time. That’s where Doug and I sat as he told me all about the Great Adventures of Brian Berman and his Marvelous Wandering Penis.

Doug is a great story-teller. He’s bright, very articulate and has a terrific sense of humor. If he hadn’t been relating my own husband’s infidelities, it would have been a very entertaining visit. As it was, I sat there and started feeling angry all over again, angrier than I had for been for, say, sixty-seven days. Ever since Brian walked out of the house.

“Mona, I’m sorry,” Doug said at last. “I’m sorry Brian was such a prick. I’m sorry I had to keep this from you because I’ve always considered you a much better friend than Brian. And I’m really sorry that I told you all this. But I think that you needed to know, because Brian is going to want you back. I don’t care how hot or skinny or blonde this one is, she’s nothing compared to you, and even a jerk like Brian will figure that out. You need to know so that when he comes crawling back, you can tell him no.”

“He’s not coming back,” I said dully. “Didn’t the girls tell you? He’s happy as a pig in shit. Dominique has him puttering around the house singing. He even cooks when the girls visit him for the weekend. He never cooked a day in his life with me. He never did any of the things for me that he does with Dominique – the ballet, chick flicks, God, he even walks her dog.”

“Exactly,” Doug said. “He hates shit like that. So how long do you think he’s going to continue to do stuff that he hates just to impress this broad?”

I had stopped considering the possibility of Brian coming back. Brian and the girls had reached a truce by the middle of May, and the tension of those relationships had lessened, taking quite a bit of pressure off me. After their first few visits to their father’s new residence, they spread fantastic tales of domestic harmony and bliss. They tried not to appear too obvious, but Brian was deliriously happy and wasn’t shy about spreading the word.

I looked at Doug through narrowed eyes. Maybe it was the sun. Maybe it was the white of Doug’s teeth gleaming from between those amazing lips. Whatever. “You really think he’ll want to come back?”

Doug nodded. “Yes. And you have to promise me, Mona. When he does, you have to say no. Can you do that? Can you promise?”

I nodded. “You betcha.”

Life at the shore is always relaxed. No pressure to get anything done, no place to go, all the people you want to see are right there, so it’s always a time for me to let go of the reins and let the girls go pretty much their own way. I usually managed to be between books in the summer, and it had been years since I’d had to write while down the shore, but this summer I’d be writing like I never had before. Frannie had gotten me until the first of October to turn in a new manuscript, and it had been a long and hard battle. Everyone liked my first idea, and couldn’t understand why I felt the need to change anything.

“Mona,” Frannie had said, “you’ve got the makings of a nice little success here. Sydney is very appealing, has an exciting job, terrific wardrobe, and lots of sex appeal. You’ve got two great guys for her to fool around with, sexual tension, a little danger and suspense, and a happy ending. It’s practically perfect.”

“But Frannie, that book has been written a million times. Did you read the synopsis of the new book? Didn’t you like it?”

“Yes, Mona, it sounds fine, but older female characters usually aren’t featured in romantic stories, you know that.”

“This isn’t a romance. Just because she has sex doesn’t make it a romance.”

“Exactly. That’s the whole problem, Mona. You say she’s involved with two men, but since she doesn’t end up with either of them, it’s not a romance. Is it a comedy? Because, there were a couple of times in those first few chapters that I laughed out loud.”

I felt the spot behind my eyes start to burn. “No, it’s not a comedy. Sydney happens to have a sense of humor about her life, and the people around her also have a sense of humor. Characters don’t have to be so deadly serious all the time.”

“Okay. Not a comedy, not a romance. Maybe you could give her a series of obstacles, you know, maybe with her house, bad plumbers and faulty wiring, that kind if thing. We might get by with hen lit.”

I closed my eyes and took a cleansing breath. “Hen lit?”

“Well, not chick lit because, frankly, she’s too old.”

“There’s such a thing as hen lit?”

“Have you thought about a ghost? Or a vampire?”

We finally agreed that I would send additional chapters, and by the time the June deadline came and went, I’d been granted another four months. Four months sounded like a lot of time, but I was still plagued by bouts of sadness, anger, and a total loss of self-esteem. My only hope was that down the shore, away from the home that Brian so carelessly broke apart, I might be able to crank out some serious work.

I had lunch with the Mavens a few weeks before. Trying to get a group of busy women to find an open afternoon for lunch may not sound complicated, but it really is. We had, years ago, tried to establish a regular luncheon date, but with all our crazy schedules, no one wanted to commit to any set time. So now we just e-mailed each other whenever someone got the urge, and whoever could make it, did, and those who couldn’t didn’t.

We had settled on an afternoon in mid-May at the Pierre Hotel. We like hotels because the food is always great and we can settle into the bar afterwards and talk for hours with little or no interference, as long as someone is buying a drink or two. And since we never drive ourselves to these luncheons, we all end up buying a drink or two. Or three. Or six. But those were white wines and shouldn’t count as much as, say, six Vodka Gimlets.