Wreathed (14 page)

“Nothing wrong with
that.
You deserve a little fun every once in a while, sis. Take him to Barbados, drink some rum punch, and frolic on the beach.”

“That’s the problem,” I explained. “If he suggested that, I would go. Tomorrow. Well, maybe not tomorrow, but sometime. But that would be a romantic thing for him to do, and he’s not the least bit romantic, and it’s bothering me.”

“You just met him,” Pacey said. “Give him time.”

“It’s important to me. If he’s not able to be romantic, I’m maybe better off looking for someone else.”

Pacey slammed the door of the dishwasher shut and pushed the buttons to set it running. “You are going about this totally backward,” she said. “When are you going to see him again?”

“Friday. Dinner in New Brunswick. He lives in Freehold and it’s halfway. The practical approach, you see. Not very romantic.”

“At least he’s moving fast, though. Well, you had the facial. That’s a good start. What’s your schedule look like the rest of the week?”

“Work. I have some catching up to do, I expect.”

“Can you take Friday off?”

“Why would I need to?” I asked.

“Wendy,” she said. “Wendy, Wendy, Wendy. You need your hair done, for a start. Mani-pedi. That’s an absolute
requirement
. Leg wax, if you have time.”

“Pacey, for God’s sake. I am not getting my legs waxed. I had it done once and it hurt like fire.”

“It’s meant to. You ought to think about the Brazilian while we’re at it.”

“Pacey!” I yelled.

Just then, Benjy came running in to the kitchen. “You two! Cut that out!” he cried. “
Right this second!
”

Pacey stared at her son. Then she started laughing so hard that she couldn’t stand up, and sank to her knees. Benjy came over and gave her a big hug.

“Does Mommy say that to you and your brother?” she asked.

“All the time,” Benjy said.

“They repeat everything,” Pacey said. “Which is why I am going to spell it out for you. B-R-A-Z-I-L-I-A-N.”

“It’s not funny,” I said.

“Benjy, is Aunt Wendy funny?”

“Yes,” he said.

“See? There you go. Proof. Go play, sweetie. Show Grandmama your stuffed tiger.”

“You are out of your mind,” I told Pacey, after Benjy had toddled off.

“You realize, I am only suggesting that you get one because I don’t have time to get one myself. And because I think Henri would make fun of me. But the closest thing I am getting to a date this week—more like this month— is living vicariously through you. So listen to your big sister. Get the mani-pedi, even if you don’t get the Brazilian.”

“But why?” I asked. “He already likes me. Why go to the extra effort?”

“Because, my dear, romance is the socialized expression of frustrated sexual desire. Repeat that, please.”

“Romance is the socialized expression of frustrated sexual desire,” I said.

“So how does that apply in your situation?”

“If I want to heighten the romance,” I reasoned, “I have to heighten his sexual desire. Hence the hairstyle, and the nails, and a nice outfit and heels.”

Pacey smiled a knowing, evil smile. “Absolutely correct. And then, you have to
frustrate
him. You want romance? Then make him
work
for it.”

Chapter 17

A late-season cold front ran through northern New Jersey late that night. I got up at about eleven o’clock on Sunday morning to find that the world had turned to slush overnight. I despise cold weather and have been known to indulge the occasional elaborate fantasy about moving someplace where the frosty breath of winter doesn’t reach, like Venezuela or Nairobi or the surface of the sun. I microwaved a bowl of oatmeal, loaded it down with brown sugar and raisins, and tried to think warm thoughts.

I spent a few ineffectual hours trying to sift through all the social media nonsense that had accumulated over the last few days. I gave up the project as a bad job after the sugar rush from breakfast wore off. The good news was that the post-funeral Gawker piece was very brief, didn’t mention me by name, and didn’t say anything one way or another about my mother outside the fact that she showed up. My guess was that Vanessa had tried to savage me in print out of revenge for knocking her Long Island iced tea–drinking ass down at the funeral, but that cooler heads in the Gawker
editorial department had prevailed. To celebrate, I broke out a French bread pizza from the freezer and put it in the oven, and managed to eat it without burning the inside of my mouth. Things were looking up.

I was putting my plate in the dishwasher when it occurred to me that I’d been so busy looking at my personal social media nightmare that I hadn’t bothered to look at Adam’s Facebook page. He hadn’t sent me a friend request, and I didn’t want to send him one, because that would make me look needy or worse. But he had quite a few pictures that he’d made public, enough for me to get a good idea about how he liked to spend his time. A few of the pictures showed him working on a house, including one of him with his shirt off, standing on a partly shingled roof. I bookmarked it for later review. Some other pictures showed him somewhere on the Shore, fishing. I was equivocal about this aspect of his life, because I like eating fresh fish but have no real idea how to cook fish, and absolutely no desire in my life to clean fish or to have fish scales in my sink.

For the last six months, the only pictures of Adam on Facebook were either selfies or shots taken by one of his friends. Going back farther than that, though, someone else started appearing with him in the pictures. Her name was Marie Lawrence, and she was short and thin and brunette and adorable, and I hated her on sight. Marie and Adam had taken trips together—Southern California last summer, Stowe before that, Aruba over Thanksgiving, and what looked like three weeks in Australia two years ago.

I clicked on her name, which said that she was “in a relationship” with someone named Trey, and was living in West Hartford, which made her much less of a threat than I initially worried she was. Still, she was very cute, and had obviously had an extensive long-term relationship with Adam. I wondered what had happened. Had he done something to drive her away? Maybe she was his type and I wasn’t. Or maybe he had decided that she wasn’t his type, and that tall, awkward, buxom blondes were. Or so I hoped.

I didn’t get back online until right before I went to bed, which is to say after I had downed two shot glasses of Frangelico and cinnamon vodka, which I christened the “Coffee Cake,” if anyone wants to put it on their cocktail menu. It was quite tasty—too tasty, actually, because I would have liked another one, or six, but I had to go to work the next day and it was probably a good idea to start thinking about dialing back the alcohol intake.

I had two e-mails that I couldn’t delete out of hand. One was from my mother; there was a picture attached to it. I opened the file and it was, of all things, a Polaroid picture of the house on Idaho Street. The house was painted a subtle shade of aqua in the picture, but the pitched roof and scrollwork hadn’t changed in the intervening years. A young girl stood in front of the house in the picture, with a fetching smile on her face.

The message read, “I knew I recognized this house. It’s where we spent our honeymoon, back in 1963. It seems that rat Sheldon bought it to give to me for some bizarre reason. What’s the best way to get rid of it at this point?”

I took another look at the picture. It seemed impossible that the happy girl with the sunshine in her hair and the wide smile on her face had grown up to be my mother, but she clearly was. I wrote her a note back that agreed with her that the whole thing was odd, and I’d figure out the best way for her to dump the house once I got the chance to look at the paperwork. If the house was worth less on the resale market than it was mortgaged for, the easiest thing to do would be to have Mother sign a quitclaim deed turning the house back over to the estate. It would take me just a second to draft that up, but there didn’t seem to be a reason to hurry. It never hurts to have all the information in place before you make a decision.

The other e-mail was from Pacey, and it just had a link to a Pinterest board she had made for me. I checked it out, and I was immediately impressed by the amount of time that she had spent to make it for me. Everything after that was horrifying beyond words. About half of the board was given over to maps to places that she thought I should go before the big date. The largest of the maps was for a local establishment devoted to the forcible removal of unwanted genital hair, which, hand to God, was called “The Pretty Kitty.” I made a note to start my own Pinterest board of different ways I could get my revenge on Pacey for butting into my personal hygiene like that.

The one picture that looked intriguing was a pair of suede heels in a very fetching dark-red hue. The heels were higher than I would have liked, and the shoes were open-toed, which I could have done without. But they were on sale and Pacey had included a coupon code to get them online, shipped free tomorrow. And the shoes went with a nice sleeveless Ralph Lauren dress Pacey had found. I looked around a bit and found a knockoff with a slightly lower neckline at Forever 21, so I ordered that, too. Pacey had suggestions about a matching bra and panties set. What she had picked out was a bit risqué—especially if I had followed her other suggestion—but I decided I could always dash out at lunchtime and go to Victoria’s Secret and pick out something nice if I felt the need.

I was in the middle of making an online appointment for Friday afternoon with Pacey’s hairdresser when I started wondering what I was doing. I hadn’t questioned Pacey when she said that romance was nothing more than the expression of frustrated sexual desire. It sounded reasonable on the surface, but it wasn’t the whole story.

I wanted romance in my life, which meant that I wanted Adam to behave towards me in a romantic way. But what did that mean? Flowers? Flowers would be nice. A nice bottle of chardonnay?
Yes, please
.

But that was a very mercenary outlook. I didn’t want Adam to just give me stuff for the sake of giving me stuff. He didn’t have to give me anything. Not that I wouldn’t
take
a nice bottle of chardonnay, because I am human and fallible and I really, really like chardonnay, especially the old French vintages that I don’t get to drink very often because I am trying to pay off student loans. But my neighborhood is well-stocked with liquor stores. I don’t need to be in a relationship to get alcohol or chocolate or flowers if that’s what I want.

What I wanted was for Adam to look at me as though I were the most important thing in his life.

And, yes, that was a function of frustrated sexual desire, and yes, one way to encourage that was to get my hair done and get a manicure. And since the shoes I had just bought were open-toed, that meant that I had to get a pedicure, too.

But was that the best way to go about it?

I went over to the counter and found my purse and dug out the yellowing packet of letters I had taken from Sheldon’s apartment. I hadn’t shown them to Mother the day of the funeral, and I completely forgot about them after that. I picked a letter from the middle and read it carefully, the way Sheldon had through all those lonely nights.
I love you
, the letter said, each time underlined in red.
I want you. I want to feel your hands entwined in mine. I want to feel the sweet slickness of your tongue in my mouth. I want to feel your kisses, hot and desperate on my neck. I want to feel the hard muscles of your chest pressing against me, my hands exploring, searching, finding. I want everything you are and everything you can be.

That’s what I wanted, and if a day at the salon could help me get it, then that’s where I needed to be. I put the letters in a safe place in my desk, and went back to the computer to look at the shirtless picture of Adam for a few minutes before I went to bed. It took me longer than usual to go to sleep.

Chapter 18

The restaurant that Adam picked out for our date was a converted warehouse that backed up against Route 18. I am not saying this because I am picky, because I am not. I would happily have met Adam at the meanest dive or the fanciest bistro in Central Jersey, so long as they served alcohol. The problem with this particular place was that it did not have a parking lot. I drove past the building twice looking for one before I figured out that there was complimentary valet parking. Then it was a matter of finding a valet, and there didn’t seem to be any of them around. I was late, and headed past the fashionable side of being late, and I didn’t want to take the chance that Adam might think that I’d stood him up. I pulled the car over to the next block and found a convenient parking garage.

It was late March, and winter was still hanging on like an unwanted houseguest. The weather had been vile and miserable all week, and there was still slush on the sidewalks. It was drizzling and cold and I could feel my hands turning blue. I managed to make my way down the slick sidewalk in my brand-new heels without a mishap, although I cursed myself for picking out the ones with the open toes.

I took my coat off just before I opened the door to the restaurant. I didn’t know if Adam was waiting for me at the bar, or if he had gotten us a table already. I wanted him to see me resplendent in my new dress before he saw anything else, and it was worth putting up with the chill for that. The dress had been designed for someone a bit shorter than me, but that meant that I got to show a little leg, which was all to the good. It was an arresting shade of garnet that just matched my shoes.

It had taken all day, and cost me in terms of vacation time and in next month’s credit card bill, but I looked fabulous. My hair had been unleashed from its usual conservative, professional style. I felt confidence radiating through me. When I walked into that restaurant, I felt self-assured and dynamic, like I was being carried along on the crest of a giant wave.