Younger (10 page)

As soon as Lindsay wafted out of the kitchen, I set to work unpacking the bags, lining up the ingredients, tearing up lettuce, and putting a big pot of water on to boil. This shouldn't take long, as soon as I got everything organized. Back in Homewood, I threw parties for a hundred three or four times a year, and got so practiced I could pull the whole thing together in less than twenty-four hours.

By the time Lindsay returned, the ingredients were lined up along the backsplash in order of when they needed to be cooked, the countertops were cleared and wiped clean, the lettuce was washed and nestled, wrapped in paper towels, in a salad bowl, and three enormous cloves of garlic were soaking, smashed and covered in kosher salt, in a bath of olive oil for the Caesar dressing.

“How did you do this?” Lindsay asked, her mouth open.

“It just took a little tidying up. The only thing I couldn't find was the dessert.”

“Oh, no,” said Lindsay. “I knew I forgot something.”

“Don't worry. We'll call down to that deli on the corner and get them to send up eight packages of Hostess cupcakes. Everybody will love it. How's it going out there?”

“Great.” Lindsay grinned. “Thad is already on his third martini, and Josh said everything smelled great.”

I laughed. “The power of suggestion. Okay, let's get busy.”

I hadn't realized how much I'd been missing this kind of thing in the time since Gary had been gone. I'd tried once or twice to throw dinner parties in Homewood on my own, but all our old regular guests had seemed uncomfortable coming to a party with no Gary, even though when Gary was there, all he did was sit at the head of the table looking as if he'd rather be watching TV.

But I loved cooking, I remembered as I sliced and sautéed and stirred, especially cooking for a crowd, on a deadline, with the sound of laughter rising from the next room.

“Where did you learn to cook like this?” Lindsay asked, as she darted around, acting as my sous-chef.

“I know it might seem hard to believe,” I said, not letting her see my smile, “but I learned to cook in New Jersey.”

As the work neared its crescendo, I sent Lindsay out to set the table and reveled in spending the final moments in the kitchen alone, tossing the salad and running the bread under the broiler for just long enough to make me faint with the aroma of hot buttered garlic.

“Now it really does smell awesome.”

Josh was standing in the kitchen doorway.

I shot him a smile. “The secret ingredient is always garlic.”

“I'll eat it if you will,” he said.

“You have to eat it because I already have.”

“Let me taste,” he said, moving toward me.

And then before I had a chance to actually respond, his lips were on mine, the tip of his tongue flicking out to taste me.

“Mmmmm,” he said. “Definitely delicious.”

My whole body flamed. Oh, God, perfect time to have my first hot flash.

“Go tell your buddy Thad,” I said, “it's time to sit down.”

If Lindsay was worried about Thad questioning her role in preparing the dinner, she needn't have been: he accepted the appearance of the food as nonchalantly as if it sprang fully prepared, all by itself, from his stove every night. The other guests gushed about how delicious the food was, and I insisted that Lindsay take all the credit.

Thad held forth at the table, ignoring not only me but all the other women there, addressing his comments to the men, especially Josh. Yet Josh made a point of redirecting every one of Thad's questions and remarks toward one of the women at the table. “I don't know,” he'd say. “What do
you
think of the Supreme Court decision, Lindsay?” Or Alice or Liz or Sarah, the other two women who were there. “Interesting, Thad—I'd love to hear Alice's take on that.”

He even tried to help Lindsay and me clear the table when we were done eating, but Thad stopped him—I actually thought Thad might throw himself bodily across the path of Josh's hand as he reached for a dirty teaspoon. For what I hoped was the last time in my life, I found myself supporting Thad.

“Go ahead,” I told Josh. “I'm just going to give Lindsay a hand, and then we can leave.”

But after one pass over the table, I realized I was working alone. As I moved around the table clearing the last of the wineglasses, I heard Thad droning on in the living room and caught sight of Lindsay perched on his lap.

Screw it. I'd been intending to tie on an apron and begin loading the dishwasher, but then I told myself, Stop being such a mommy. Anybody can do dishes. Even Thad.

I went into the living room and laid a hand on Josh's shoulder.

“It's time to go,” I said.

Thad looked up in surprise. “I'm just finishing up a story about when I was publisher of the
Crimson,
” he said, opening his mouth to resume his speech.

“Sorry,” Josh said, standing up and putting one arm around me, at the same time extending his right hand. “Great night. Thank you.”

God, he was smooth. If he ever wanted to get rid of me, I'd be cut loose before I even saw the glint of the knife.

 

Out on the street, Josh slipped his hands inside my coat and pulled me close. At first I was nervous, thinking of what I'd thought when he so adroitly extricated us from the clutches of Thad. Then I was nervous, thinking about what might lie ahead tonight. And then finally I let myself relax against him, resting my head against his chest, unsure if what I heard was the beating of his heart or my own.

When at last I looked up at him, he said, “Thank you for introducing me to your friends.”

“Thad is not my friend.”

Josh laughed. “That's who I was afraid of becoming.”

“You're nothing like him.”

“It can happen so easily,” said Josh. “You don't even realize it, and suddenly you're this stodgy prick.”

He was right. That had happened to Gary. Gary hadn't always been an endodontist with a thirty-eight-inch waistline. He had been a poet, slender and romantic. But it was so much easier to pull off being a slender, romantic poet at twenty-two than it was at forty-four.

Sitting on the subway beside Josh, hurrying down the dark streets with him, my hand tucked in his pocket, I could sense his energy but his insecurity, too. It was the insecurity more than the self-confidence, I felt, that had driven him to go to business school and get engaged when he claimed never to have wanted those traditional trappings. His conventional side, under wraps now but still in there somewhere, was more frightening to me than the sneaker-wearing gamer. Just as I was more afraid of my own inner housewife than of the young woman I was pretending to be.

It was the inner housewife who threatened to betray me when I squeezed into the hot and crowded club behind Josh. It was so loud in there, louder than anything I had ever heard in my life. And the music sounded unbearably horrible, all squawks and squeals and arrhythmic pounding. I wanted to—my inner housewife wanted to—clap my hands over my ears and scream, “Stop that racket!”

But Josh, whose left arm was stretched out behind him so he could keep hanging on to my hand even as he continued pushing forward toward the stage, was nodding his head to the music, as, it seemed, was everyone else in the room. Most of the people there looked to be about the same age as Lindsay and Thad and the other dinner party guests, but it was as if this crowd was being young in a different era. They had shaggy hair or shaved heads, pierced noses and tattooed necks. The girls were wearing huge trousers or tiny skirts—or sometimes both—and tops that barely existed, cropped and shredded across their breasts. The guys looked as if they had stepped off a fashion runway or rolled out from under a car.

I felt something bump me on the left and was startled to find a couple dancing there—or rather grinding without touching, the girl in front facing away from the guy and rotating her butt. The guy in back thrusted toward her and looked as if, any second, he was going to come. I moved closer to Josh.

“Are you okay?” he called back to me.

I nodded, thinking of how primed this man seemed to be considerate. He'd been so generous when he'd complimented Lindsay on her food, when he hadn't smirked, not once, at Thad.

“Wanna dance?” he shouted into my ear.

Quickly, I shook my head no. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who would mimic intercourse with me in a public place, but this was one chance I wasn't willing to take.

Josh turned to watch the band, and a little while later I felt someone tap my shoulder from the other side.

“Eeeee?” a girl said into my ear.

“What?”

She looked momentarily confused, but then obviously decided to change tactics. “Exxxxxxxxxxx?” she asked.

I scrunched up my face and shook my head in the universal language for, “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.” The girl opened her palm and thrust what looked like a handful of miniature smiley-face buttons under my nose.

“Ecstasy!” the girl said.

I let out a yelp.

“Oh, no!” I cried. “No, thank you!”

I felt so straight, so out of it, so
old
. But at the same time, I realized I would never have fit in here, no matter what my age. I had always been the girl curled up on the window seat, reading about nineteenth-century England, while all around me people got high and blasted music and danced wildly.

“I have to go,” I said suddenly.

If this had really been college, if he had been a boy I'd been out with back then, I would have suffered on through the concert, would have even pretended to enjoy it. But despite Josh's good behavior at the dinner, despite my genuine fondness for him and a powerful desire to press my cheek against one of his very broad shoulders, I simply could not go on.

He looked down at me, surprised, starting to protest.

“I'm sorry,” I shouted, already pulling away. “I've got to go.”

Where was I going, exactly? And why? I felt confused about everything except my need to escape that place. It was as if I'd dived into an ocean that had looked fun and exciting from the shore, but had found myself getting knocked down by waves that up close proved far too wild for me. All I could think about was making my way back to the sand.

It wasn't until I was out on the street, gulping the clean air and beginning to look around for a taxi, that I realized Josh had followed me, that he was even now smiling and opening his mouth to speak as he reached for my arm.

His grip was so perfect, not too grasping, which would have only made me tear away from him, but not too flimsy either. Maybe if we were on a desert island, I wanted to say, and we didn't have to deal with the world around us, we could be together. Maybe if I weren't so determined, after all these years, to remake my life exactly the way I wanted, we could find some middle ground. Maybe if I wasn't so scared of revealing my real self, I might be able to get close.

“I really like you, Josh,” I said, letting myself touch his arm, which in itself nearly did me in.

His smile faded. “Why do I sense a ‘but' at the end of that sentence?”

Of course there was a but. So many buts.

But you're way too young for me. But I'm way too old for you. But there's no way we can ever find a middle ground.

“But this isn't right for me,” I said, gesturing toward the building, the people huddling on the sidewalk around us, all of it.

“This place isn't me, Alice,” he said, attempting to pull me toward him again.

Part of me, a bigger part than I wanted to admit, longed to melt into his embrace, to let go of the control I was struggling so hard to maintain.

But I couldn't let myself melt. I couldn't lose control. I had to be true to my new self, to my determination to do things differently than I'd always done them before.

I swung around and, without another word, darted off into the dark streets of downtown Manhattan, alone and—it didn't even hit me until I was nearly at Maggie's—entirely unafraid.

“W
hy did you run away?” Maggie asked me.

We were in the big ABC Home store, where Maggie was shopping for a mirror. Not too big: her Snow White's Wicked Stepmother mirror covered that base. And not too small: she needed enough reflective surface to fulfill her purpose.

What Maggie was looking for was a pretty mirror to hang on the wall opposite the main door of the loft. The reason: Maggie, the skeptic, the nonbeliever, had consulted a feng shui expert on reconfiguring her loft to maximize her baby luck. I half expected the feng shui guy to decree that my red tent had to go, but
au contraire
, he thought its location and color most auspicious. His most insistent recommendation was placing a mirror across from the door, to send any bad chi flying right back out to the hallway.

For Maggie, though, such a purchase could involve hours, days, even months of searching for the perfect item. It stood to reason that a person who'd lived in one place for twenty years and had managed to collect only two pieces of furniture was fairly picky.

“I don't know,” I said, picking up a square mirror in a hammered silver frame and showing it to Maggie, who made a face as if she'd tasted cleaning fluid. “He's just not right for me.”

“I thought you really liked him,” Maggie said. Her eyes were not on me but on the huge jumble of brightly colored wares as we drifted through the store. “I thought the only issue was that he was young.”

“But that's so big,” I said. “I mean, his age kind of determines everything else about him: his tastes, his values, how he likes to spend his time—”

Maggie stopped and looked straight at me then. “Don't you think that's a little hypocritical?” she said, putting her hands on her hips.

She was wearing her black sleeping-bag coat again, and standing like that, with her elbows out and her legs planted apart, she completely filled the aisle, intimidating as Ursula the Sea Witch in
The Little Mermaid
. Afraid that at any moment she might sic her electric eels on me, all I could do was stammer that I wasn't sure what she meant.

“You're rejecting him because of his age!” she thundered, waving her padded arms, threatening to send iron candlesticks and silk shantung pillows and Venetian chandeliers rocketing to the ground. “It's the very thing you hated when people were doing it to you!”

My shoulders sagged as all the air left my body. “You're right,” I said.

Maggie let her arms drop and smoothed the front of her coat. “Damn right I'm right. I thought what was important here was who somebody was inside. I thought the whole point was that age blinded people to each other's real and essential qualities. I thought we were trying to transcend all that and triumph over age prejudice.”

What could I say? It was all true.

“I guess I'm a prime offender,” I finally admitted.

“I guess you are,” said Maggie. “Maybe that's why age was so important to you in the first place.”

My shoulders sank even farther, so that now my head was hanging toward the floor. I was staring at the toes of my new red sneakers.

“You're right,” I repeated. “I'm a terrible person. I should just give this whole thing up.”

“Oh, don't be ridiculous,” Maggie said, resuming her mirror search so precipitously I nearly fell over trying to collect myself to scurry after her.

“You've done splendidly!” she was saying when I finally caught up. “It's only been a month, and you've gotten yourself a job, a friend, even a guy! Now you just have to stop being afraid of embracing it.”

“I'm not afraid,” I said.

She stopped short. If we had been cars, I would have rear-ended her.

“Then tell me this,” she said. “Why didn't you sleep with that cute boy last night?”

I laughed nervously. “I already told you,” I said. “The age thing aside, he's not my type. He's kind of scruffy, he likes horrible music, he has this totally impractical dream of being a video game designer, of all things. I just can't take him seriously.”

“Hmmmph,” said Maggie. “You want the BLT?”

As if she hadn't given it to me already. As if she was even going to wait for my answer.

“He sounds like exactly your type,” she told me. “In fact, he sounds exactly like Gary. The young Gary. The Gary you fell in love with.”

That insight hit me with the force of a Pakistani armoire—we were now surrounded by them, red and green and crying out to shelter a TV—toppling onto my back. Once again, whether I liked it or not, Maggie was right. Josh was quite a bit like the Gary I'd gone crazy for on the streets of London, the Gary who'd made my soul soar along with my body.

“Furthermore,” said Maggie, using the word for perhaps the first time in her life, “I think that's exactly why you ran away from Josh last night. I think you take him
too
seriously, and that totally freaks you out. You're afraid you're going to fall in love with this guy.”

“That's ridiculous,” I said. But I could feel my heart pounding. “The first time I met him, he told me he wasn't interested in a commitment.”

She paused again and peered at me here, as if she were trying to diagnose a disease of the skin. But I was afraid she was looking deeper than that. I put up my hands and covered my cheeks, as if that might keep her from seeing right through me.

“So maybe that's what's worrying you,” Maggie pointed out. “You're wildly attracted to him, you really like him, and you're worried that he's going to reject you. You're afraid to risk going forward, no matter how much you want to.”

Suddenly her focus shifted and she looked up, beyond me to a spot somewhere to the right and above my head, as if harking the voice of an angel who'd appeared on high.

“Wait a minute,” she said, nudging me out of the way and standing on her toes to reach way up.

“Be careful,” I said, thinking of the bean-sized baby that might be hatching inside her.

At my words she cradled her stomach with one hand, and then returned to earth grasping a round mirror, the size of a dinner plate, rimmed in a red frame embedded with a hundred smaller mirrors, glistening like stars.

“This is it,” Maggie said, her face breaking into a smile as she stared at herself in the glass. “I feel luckier already.”

 

“So do you think you'll marry him?” Lindsay asked.

We were sitting in her cubicle, where I'd come to thank her for dinner, though what I really wanted to talk about was work. I wanted to get Lindsay's thoughts on an idea I had for marketing the classics line, see whether she'd back me up on the editorial side and how she thought I should present it to Teri. As I'd discovered in the short time I'd worked with her, Lindsay was brilliant on everything to do with the publishing business. The trick was getting her to talk about it.

“I don't see that happening,” I said.

I hadn't told Lindsay about fleeing from Josh outside the club. I'd already chewed over the incident with Maggie, and I couldn't tell Lindsay the real reason behind my misgivings anyway. Besides, I was afraid if Lindsay thought I wasn't going out with Josh, she'd renew her efforts to fix me up with Porter Swift.

“Why not?” she pressed.

“I'm not really interested in getting married right now,” I said. “Listen, Lindsay, what do you think of the idea of getting modern women novelists to write new introductions for the classics line?”

“You can't distract me that easily,” Lindsay said, grinning. “Come on, I want to know the story. He's one of those guys who's terrified of commitment, right? Thad's like that. You're probably doing the same thing I'm doing: playing it cool because you're afraid that if he knows you want to get married, he'll run the other way.”

“But I don't want to get married!” I told her. “I want to work! I want to do well at this job!”

“Oh, you'll do well,” Lindsay said, waving her delicate pale hand, as if success was something you could conjure at will from the air. “You have so many great ideas. Like that one you just said.”

“So would you help me with that?” I asked her. “I mean, ask some of your writers if they'd consider doing that?”

“Of course, of course,” she said, making a note to herself on her calendar to call two well-regarded writers I already had on my unspoken wish list. Then she dropped her pen and looked me straight in the eye. “Now tell me why you don't want to marry Josh.”

“I don't want to marry
anybody
,” I said.

That momentarily stumped her, sending her swiveling to and fro in her big black-upholstered chair, which completely swamped her little black-clad body.

“Okay, maybe not
today
,” she said finally, “but soon this is something you're going to have to get serious about, if you want to have children. I figure it's nearly too late for me already.”

I could tell Lindsay had spoken without a drop of irony, but I couldn't help letting out a chuckle. “Oh, come on, Lindsay,” I said. “You have
tons
of time.”

“No, we don't,” Lindsay said, not so much as cracking a smile. “I figure I've got ten years, tops, to get married, spend a little alone time with my husband, and have all my children. And that's if I have the whole plan in play right now.”

Lindsay launched into a rundown on the math of her reproductive future as if it were a bonus question on the SAT for life. Even if by some miracle Thad were to propose tomorrow, she said, she would need a minimum of a year to plan the wedding, then another year to spend on their own before they got pregnant, then
another
year if everything went perfectly to conceive and give birth to the first child, then a two- or three-year gap before the second…

“But what about your career?” I interrupted her. “What about just being young?”

“We don't have time to be young,” she said.

“Speak for yourself,” I told her. “What makes you so sure Thad's the one?”

Especially when it seemed so clear to me that he wasn't.

“He has a good job,” she said, looking away from me for the first time, opening her top drawer and taking out a pen, which she proceeded to chew. “He makes a lot of money. He'd take good care of me.”

“It looks to me like you're doing a good job taking care of yourself,” I said gently.

“Yeah, but that's because I
have
to do it,” she said. “That doesn't mean I'll always
want
to do it. Definitely when I have kids, I'll want to take some time off.”

Suddenly, the air in Lindsay's cubicle seemed to drop ten degrees. I felt her before I saw her, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.

“What's this little coffee klatch?” Teri Jordan said from behind me.

Feeling my face flame as if I'd done something wrong, I turned around and said, as casually and convincingly as I could, “Oh, hi, Teri. I was just asking Lindsay her opinion of an idea I had for the classics line.”

“The classics line, hmmmm?” Teri said. “I heard something about taking time off after having kids.”

“That was me,” Lindsay said. “That's something I want to do.”

“Big mistake,” snapped Teri. “All these young girls think they can take a few years off and then step right back onto the merry-go-round, but it doesn't work like that. By the time you try to start up your career again, it's often too late.”

I had to admit, Teri had a point. But before I could agree with her, Lindsay started talking again.

“Nothing personal, Teri, but I don't want to be in some office when I could be home with my baby,” said Lindsay. “Once she's in school, fine, then maybe I'd look for something part-time, something flexible.”

“But if you stop working, you won't have the seniority to command flexibility,” Teri said. “And when your kids are older—I mean middle school and high school older, when they've outgrown their nannies but are ripe for getting into trouble with drugs and sex—that's when you really want to be able to work at home sometimes.”

“Things have changed,” Lindsay said. “Women have more options now.”

Teri raised her severely plucked eyebrows. “Yes and no,” she said. “In theory they've changed, but in practice I've had a lot of experience with this and seen a lot of other women face the realities of trying to balance family and career, and I know it's still really difficult.”

It was really disturbing me to be having this conversation with these two women, and find myself so thoroughly on Teri's side.

Lindsay opened her mouth to speak, closed it, and then opened it again. “I appreciate it that older women like you opened doors for us,” she said finally. “I think it's going to be different for me.”