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Rose stared at her best friend, thinking that at least one of them had changed since the misery of junior high. By ninth grade, Amy had grown to six feet tall, weighing in at perhaps a hundred and ten pounds, and the boys in the class called her Ichabod Crane—just Ick for short. But she'd gotten comfortable with her gangly frame. Now she wore her knobby wrists like expensive bracelets and wielded the fine bones of her face and hips like unusual pieces of art. She'd had dreadlocks in college, but after graduation she hacked her hair off and dyed it a dark red. She wore tight black tops and long black boot-cut jeans, and she looked fabulous. Exotic, and mysterious, and sexy, even when she opened her mouth and her thick, unreconstructed Jersey-girl accent came out. Amy always had at least half a dozen boyfriends, former boyfriends, and would-be boyfriends lining up for the privilege of buying her deep-dish pizza and listening to her dissect the state of hip-hop music in America. Plus, Amy was a chemical engineer—an occupation that typically garnered at least a few interested questions from strangers she'd meet at parties—while Rose was a lawyer, which usually drew one of two responses: the first, typified by Mr. Lawyer Joke, and the second, Rose was pretty sure, soon to be elucidated by the tall, pale fellow in glasses who'd parked himself on the couch beside her, interrupting her special private time with the bowl of cheese curls. "Amy tells me you're a lawyer," he began. "You know, I'm having a bit of a legal problem myself." Of course you are, Rose thought, her smile spackled to her face. She glanced at the clock. Almost eleven. Where was Jim? "There's this tree," the guy said. "It's growing on my property, see? But the leaves fall mostly into my neighbor's yard ..." Yeah, yeah, yeah, Rose thought. And you're both too lazy to rake the goddamn leaves. Or he chopped the tree down without your permission. And instead of just talking about the tree like normal people, or, God forbid, actually hiring a lawyer of your own, you want to unload on me. "Excuse me," Rose murmured, cutting the guy off midway
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through his saga, made her escape, and twisting through the crowd until she found Amy in the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator, twirling a glass of wine in her fingers, head tilted back, laughing at whatever the guy in front of her was saying. "Hey, Dan," Amy drawled. "This is my friend Rose." Dan was tall, dark, and gorgeous. "Pleased to meet you," he said. Rose gave him a weak smile, clutching her purse—and within it, her cell phone—tightly to her side. She needed to talk to Jim. He was the only person that could soothe her and make her smile and convince her that life wasn't pointless and that the world wasn't full of joke-spouting idiots and litigious tree owners. Where was he? She eased herself away from Dan and reached into her purse, but Amy was right behind her. "Forget it," she said sternly. "Don't chase. It's not ladylike. Remember? Men like to be the hunters, not the prey." Amy took the cell phone from Rose's hand and replaced it with a slotted spoon. "Dumplings," she said, pointing Rose toward the stove, and a pot of steaming water. "What have you got against Jim, anyhow?" Rose asked. Amy gazed at the ceiling, then leveled her eyes at Rose. "It's not him, it's you. I'm worried about you." "Why?" "I'm worried that you're more into it than he is. I don't want you to get hurt." Rose opened her mouth, then shut it fast How could she convince Amy that Jim was just as into it as she was when he w asn't even here? And there was something else, something catching at the corner of her mind, something about the night he'd showed up late, with his arms full of flowers, and how he'd smelled of scotch, and rose blossoms, and, faintly, of something else. Perfume? she'd thought, and then stopped the thought in its tracks and built a wall around it, a wall composed largely of the word no. "And isn't he your boss?" "Not exactly," Rose said. Jim wasn't her boss any more than any
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other partner was her boss. Which was to say, he was at least somewhat her boss. Rose swallowed hard, shoved that thought to its accustomed hiding place in the back of her head, and steamed a batch of shrimp dumplings. When Amy's back was turned, she grabbed her purse again, hurried down a hallway lined with African masks, ducked into Amy's downstairs bathroom, and dialed Jim's work number. No answer. She dialed her own number. Maybe he'd misunderstood her and stopped by her house instead of heading straight to Amy's. "Hello?" Drat. Maggie. "Hi," said Rose. "It's me. Did Jim call?" "Nuh-uh," said Maggie. "Well, if he calls tell him . . . tell him I'll see him later." "I probably won't be here. I'm on my way out," said Maggie. "Oh," Rose said. There were a dozen things she wanted to ask: Going where? With what friends? With what money? She bit down hard. Asking Maggie would only infuriate her, and sending an angry Maggie out on the town was a little like handing a loaded gun to a two-year-old. "Lock the door behind you," she said. "I will." "And please take off my shoes," Rose said. There was a pause. "I'm not wearing your shoes," said Maggie. Sure, because you just took them off, thought Rose. "Have fun," she said instead. Maggie promised that she would. Rose splashed cool water on her cheeks and wrists and stared at herself in the mirror. She'd smeared her mascara. Her lipstick had evaporated. And she was stuck at a party, steaming dumplings, alone. Where was he? Rose opened the door and tried to edge past Amy, who was standing in the doorway with her long arms crossed on her bony chest. "Did you call him?" she demanded. "Call who?" asked Rose. Amy laughed. "You are just as crummy a liar as you were when you had a crush on Hal Lindquist." She took a cocktail napkin and wiped mascara from underneath Rose's eyes.
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"I did not have a crush on Hal Lindquist!" "Oh, sure. You just wrote down exactly what he was wearing every day in your math binder because you wanted future generations to have a record of what Hal Lindquist wore in 1984." Rose smiled at herself. "So which one of these guys is your date?" Amy made a face. "Don't ask. It was supposed to be Trevor." Rose struggled to remember what Amy had told her about Trevor. "Is he here?" "Indeed he is not," said Amy. "Check this out—we're at dinner." "Where?" Rose asked dutifully. "Tangerine. Very nice. And we're sitting there, and the lights are low, and the candles are flickering, and I haven't spilled any couscous on myself, and he tells me why he broke up with his last girlfriend. Evidently he'd developed certain interests." "What interests?" "Shit," said Amy, with an absolutely straight face. "What?" "You heard me. Consenting acts of defecation." "You're kidding," Rose gasped. "I shit you not," Amy deadpanned. "And so I'm sitting there, absolutely horrified. Needless to say, I couldn't eat another bite, plus I had to spend the rest of the meal making sure I didn't fart, because he'd think I was flirting ..." Rose started laughing. "Come along," said Amy, pocketing thee napkin and thrusting a beer into Rose's hand. "Join the party." Rose went back to the kitchen, heated up artichoke dip, replenished the cracker basket, made conversation with another one of Amy's wannabes, although at the end of it she couldn't remember a word of what either one of them had said. She longed for Jim-— who, based on the available evidence, was not longing for her.
TEN
Jim Danvers opened his eyes and thought the same thing that he thought every morning: today I will be good. Lead me not into temptation, he recited, dragging his razor over his jaw, staring at himself sternly in his bathroom mirror. Get thee behind me. Satan, he said, pulling on his pants. The trouble was, Satan was everywhere. Temptation lurked around every corner. Here it was, leaning against a building, waiting for the bus. Jim slowed his Lexus and grabbed an eyeful of the blond in tight jeans, wondering what her body looked like beneath her bulky winter coat, wondering how she'd move in bed, how she'd smell, how she'd sound, and what it would take to find out. Stop, he ordered himself, just stop, and punched the radio into life. Howard Stern filled the front seat, his tone leering, wise, and knowing. "Are those real, honey?" he inquired of the morning's starlet. "Real silicone," she giggled. Jim swallowed hard and switched to the classical station. It was so unfair. Ever since a wet dream on the third night of a Boy Scout camping trip at age twelve had heralded the advent of puberty, he'd dreamed of women with a concentrated fierceness, the abstract longing of a starving man stuck on an island with back issues of Eon Appetit. Blondes, brunettes, and redheads, small-breasted willowy girls and short
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bouncy curvy ones, black, Hispanic, Asian, white, young, old, and in between, and even, God help him, a cute girl in leg braces he'd glimpsed on the Jerry Lewis telethon—in his fantasy world, Jim Danvers was an equal opportunity employer. And he'd never been able to have them. Not at age twelve, when he was short and pudgy and frequently out of breath. Not at fourteen, when he was still short and no longer pudgy but fat, and his face was riddled with what Dr. Guberman swore was the worst case of cystic acne he'd ever seen. At sixteen he shot up six inches, but the damage was done, and the nickname Fudgie the Whale unfortunately followed him to college. What followed was the classic vicious circle—he was miserable because of his weight. He ate to stanch his misery, feeding his pain with pizza and beer, which only made him bigger, which only pushed the women further away. He'd lost his virginity senior year to a prostitute who'd looked him up and down, cracking her gum in a meditative fashion before insisting that she be on top. "Not to criticize, hon," she'd said, "but I think what we've got here is a liability issue." Law school could have been different, he thought to the soothing strains of Bach. He'd gotten even taller, and after the embarrassing ten minutes with the prostitute he'd taken up jogging, tracing Rocky's route through the Philadelphia streets (although he was pretty sure that even initially Rocky could make it farther than three blocks without having to stop and catch his breath). The weight came off. His skin cleared up, leaving behind only a fading webwork of interesting scars, and he'd gotten his teeth fixed. What remained was a crippling shyness, a paralytic lack of self-esteem. All through his twenties, through his years rising steadily through the ranks at Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick, whenever he'd heard women laughing he'd assumed they were laughing at, or about, him. And then, somehow, everything had changed. He remembered the night he'd made partner, how he'd joined three of his recently elevated colleagues at an Irish bar on Walnut Street. "It's Nanny
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Night," one of them had said, giving Jim a meaningful wink. Jim didn't know what he meant, but he soon found out. The bar was packed with Irish lasses, blue-eyed Swedes, Finnish girls with French braids. A half-dozen lilting accents chimed over the brass-and-mahogany bar. Jim was stunned into speechlessness and immobility. He stood frozen in a corner and downed champagne and stout and lager long after his colleagues went home, staring helplessly as the girls giggled and complained about their charges. On his way to the men's room, he'd bumped into a red-haired freckled girl with twinkling blue eyes. "Steady there!" she'd said, laughing as he mumbled an apology. Her name was Maeve, he'd learned, as she led him back to her table. "A partner!" she'd cooed, as her friends looked on approvingly. "Congratulations!" And somehow he'd wound up in her bed, spending a joyful six hours tasting her freckles, filling his hands with the crackling fire of her hair. Since then he'd turned into a slut. There really was no other word for it. He wasn't a Don Juan or a Romeo; he wasn't a stud or a cocksman. He was a slut, living out every one of the fantasies of his frustrated adolescence in a city that suddenly seemed full of good-natured girls in their twenties, all of them just as eager for a no-strings-attached romp as he was. He'd turned some kind of magical corner where what he was (and what he earned) had somehow trumped the way he looked. Or his looks had improved. Or, to women, the words "I'm a partner" sounded exactly like "take off your panties." He couldn't explain it, but suddenly there were nannies and students and secretaries, bartenders and baby-sitters and waitresses, and he didn't even need to go to bars to find them. Why, right in the office there was a certain paralegal who'd be happy to stay late, to lock his office door behind her and take off everything except a lilac brassiere and a certain pair of sandals she had that laced around her calves, and . . . Stop, Jim told himself. It was unseemly. It was embarrassing. It had to stop. He was thirty-five and a partner. He'd gorged him 94 Jennifer weiner
self at the all-you-can-eat flesh banquet for the past year and a half, and it should have been enough. Think of the risks, he instructed himself. Disease! Heartbreak! Angry fathers and boyfriends! The three guys who'd made partner when he had were already married, and two of them were fathers, and although nothing explicit had ever been said, it was clear that they'd chosen the kind of lifestyles the firm's powers approved of. Home and hearth, with possibly a discrete diversion on the side, that was the way to go, not these wild weekends of girls whose last names he didn't always catch. His colleagues' attitudes had already started to shift from awe to awed amusement. Soon they'd be looking at him with just amusement. And after that would come amused disgust. And there was Rose. Jim felt himself soften as he thought of her. Rose wasn't the prettiest girl he'd ever been with, not the sexiest. She tended to dress like a repressed librarian, and her idea of sexy lingerie was when her cotton panties matched her cotton bra, but still, there was something about her that bypassed the hot wiring below his belt and grabbed directly at his heart. The way she looked at him! Like he was one of the coverboys from her romance novels come to life, like he'd left his white steed at a parking meter and had charged through a thicket of thorns to rescue her. He was surprised that the whole firm hadn't figured out what was going on between them, in spite of the rules about partners dating associates. Then again, maybe he was being blind. Maybe everyone had figured it out already. And here he was, tempted $ hundred times a day to break her heart. Sweet Rose. She deserved better than him, Jim thought, piloting his Lexus into the law firm's garage. And for her, he'd try to be as good as he could be. Already he'd swapped his hot secretary for a sixtysomething motherly type who smelled of lemon Luden's cough drops, and he'd stayed out of the bars for an unprecedented three weeks running. She was good for him, he told himself, stepping into the elevator that would take him to his office. She was sharp and smart and kindhearted; she was the kind of girl he could see
