Younger (12 page)

Now I felt overcome by my excitement, so that I lost all sense of myself and of what we were doing. Did he feel so different because he was not Gary or because he was young and so strong, so eager? Who cared? It was thrilling that as strong and eager as he was, I felt every bit as strong, and a lot more eager. All that exercise—I'd taken more Krav Maga classes with Lindsay, and was back at the gym running on the treadmill and lifting weights—fueled my energy now, and I felt as if I could keep going all night. At one point it seemed as if he came, but that barely slowed him down. He lay on his back with his eyes closed while I moved slowly above him, and then he joined back in.

I wanted to talk to somebody, afterward. Is it like this, I wanted to ask, for you? I thought of all the women I'd known, my old Homewood friends Elaine and Lori, my neighbors and the moms of Diana's friends, even Maggie, even Lindsay, and I couldn't imagine they felt this way about sex. If they did, they'd be having it every second. They'd be grabbing men—or women, in Maggie's case—in the street and doing it every chance they got.

But maybe I just felt this way because it had been so long. Because it had been, I thought with a laugh, forever. I was a forty-four-year-old virgin, I thought. A forty-four-year-old virgin who had all the mechanics down pat.

“That was amazing,” Josh said.

I looked at him in surprise. I'd nearly forgotten he was there.

“Really?” I said. “It was for you, too?”

“Of course,” he smiled, turning onto his side and running his fingertips lightly over my torso. “You're incredible.”

“I am?” I said.

He nodded solemnly. “You seem like you really like sex.”

“Doesn't everybody?” I asked, really meaning, Don't all young women like sex? Because I was thinking it was probably just my generation that had so much trouble getting started. Girls today, with the magazines, the how-to books, with
Sex and the City
, seemed to have such an easier time.

“Not that much,” he said. “You're different.”

“You're different, too,” I said.

He was different from Gary, of course, and from Thad, from all those men who lived within their own egos. And he was different from the dreamier young men I'd dated in college, too: less gallant and more interested in my life, not as macho and more willing to let me take the lead. He's a lot, I realized now, like I always wished men would be, back when I was dreaming of Prince Charming. A lot like I assumed Gary was, back when I was blinded by love.

Or maybe Gary was really more like this back then, when he was studying in England and writing poetry. His poems had been beautiful, and he had been so serious about them, about his search for beauty and truth. I would come home to our tiny apartment in the early days of our marriage, during my first tour of duty at Gentility, to find Gary staring unseeing and openmouthed at the wall, or a few times with tears streaming down his face, immersed in the feelings and the words.

“Can I ask you a question?” Josh said.

He was not quite looking at me, I noticed.

“All right.”

“How old are you?”

I stopped breathing. He knew. He had guessed. He could tell by my crepey skin, my stomach, my thighs.

I hesitated for a moment, trying to decide which I wanted more: to tell the truth or to keep him wanting me. “I'm older than you,” I finally said.

“That's what I thought,” he said.

I was relieved, now that it was out. I was glad that he had brought it up, because I was obviously too much of a coward to do it myself. When he learned the full truth, I wondered, would he run away? But better to have it all clear now.

“Really?” I said. “What are you, twenty-five?”

“Bingo,” he grinned. “How did you know that?”

“Lucky guess,” I said. “That's how old Lindsay is, too.”

“I figured she and I were about the same age,” Josh said. Then he laughed, his eyes dancing. “Though I figured Thad for at least fifty-eight.”

And then I had to ask: “How old do you think I am?”

Please, I thought. Don't let him say over forty. Though I fully intended to tell him the truth.

He grimaced, and I held my breath.

Finally he spoke. “I'd guess you're…twenty-nine.”

T
eri arrived a few minutes early at the office, clutching a Starbucks cup as big as a vase in her black-gloved hand. I'd already been there for an hour, working, as had become my habit, on my classics project, sketching rough ideas for a new cover direction. As soon as I saw Teri I curled my arm over my notebook, just like I used to do when Bobby Mahoney tried to copy off me at St. Valentine's.

“What's that you're doing?” Teri said, stopping dead in her tracks and sliding her enormous dark glasses—on her sharp little face, they made her look like an alien—down her chiseled nose.

“Oh,” I said. “It's just something I'm working on.”

“What is it?” Teri said, a smile flickering on and off her lips like a lamp with faulty wiring.

“It's not quite ready,” I said. “I want to get it completely pulled together before I present it to you.”

Lindsay had advised me to outline my idea in writing and give it to Teri in a memo. That way, Lindsay said, she'd at least have to give me credit for what was documented as mine.

“Let's have a preview,” Teri said, dropping her briefcase and already reaching across my desk.

What could I do? Tell the teacher? I showed her the notebook—I wanted to be able to carry my notes back and forth from Maggie's with me, and besides, I was paranoid about entrusting the plan to the computer before I was ready to show it to Teri—and explained my idea in broad terms. Teri listened, looking not at me but at the paper, nodding as I talked. I felt vaguely guilty, thanks to my Catholic girlhood, for working on this project without telling her, or maybe I was just afraid that she was pissed off. Which she looked. Though she looked like that almost all the time.

“This has possibilities,” she said when she'd finished reading. “I'd like to see this more fleshed out.”

My heart soared with relief and pleasure. I was finally on the right track. My boss liked my idea and had given me the green light to develop it. I imagined myself presenting the idea to Mrs. Whitney, with Lindsay providing backup, Thad lending his support, Teri looking on with the pride of a mentor.

Which she certainly could be, now that I was open to giving her a chance. Maybe the problems between us had been more my fault than I'd acknowledged. I'd been holding back from her, not bouncing my thoughts off her or asking her to tell me about marketing. Maybe, as Maggie pointed out about my attitude toward Josh, I was just a big old age bigot, and I'd discounted Teri's expertise because I knew she was a lot younger than me. If Lindsay saw Teri as being from a different generation, so did I, but in my case it was a younger, more callow, less creative and less sensitive generation—the kids who came of professional age during the dot-com boom and congratulated themselves, rather than history, for it.

But she had more than a decade in the workplace on me, I reminded myself. She had a degree in marketing, a field I barely knew existed a month ago, and she successfully balanced a high-powered career with a houseful of kids, something I hadn't managed to do. Sure, she was tough, but you had to be tough to accomplish as much as she had. Teri Jordan deserved my respect, and I vowed to improve not only my job performance but my attitude.

Most of the day I spent energetically working my way through the in-box on my desk, which Teri always managed to keep piled with projects. That day I tripled my efforts, actually managing to deposit the last completed item on Teri's desk just as she was leaving for a meeting with Mrs. Whitney.

“Is there anything else you have for me right now?” I asked her. “Because if not, I thought I'd spend some time on the classics project.”

“Good idea,” Teri said, disappearing in an efficient hustle out of her office.

This was great. Now I could work on my project during regular hours rather than having to do it before Teri got in in the morning or at Maggie's at night. I could be open about what I was doing rather than having to sneak and hide. The new openness fueled my energy for the project itself, so that I managed to finish my list of titles and possible authors for the introductions while Teri was still in the meeting. Printing it out, I brought it into her office to set on her desk with the pile she always took home with her to read in the evening.

That's when I saw it: the memo Teri had written to bring into her meeting this afternoon. She usually asked me to spell-check and copy her meeting memos, and it briefly crossed my mind as odd that she hadn't today, but I'd dismissed my misgivings. Maybe she'd decided not to do a memo, and maybe she simply saw how hard I was working and decided not to bother me with what was essentially a mop-up job.

But now I saw the real reason Teri hadn't asked me to prepare the memo. There it was, in the heading for the very first paragraph:
NEW DIRECTION FOR CLASSICS LINE
. And there was an outline of my idea, presented as Teri's exclusive work, even including the cover ideas I'd been working on when she'd arrived this morning.

“What are you doing in my office?”

It was Teri, back from her meeting. I was standing there, holding the memo. Despite myself, I felt my cheeks color.

“I was just putting something on your desk,” I said, feeling my face begin to burn even hotter, “but then I saw this.”

“You have no business rifling through my papers.” Teri wasn't looking at me. Instead, she hurried to position herself behind her desk, gathering everything into a pile.

“I can't believe you presented my idea when I told you it wasn't ready,” I said. “And you didn't give me any credit at all.”

“I've made it very clear,” she said, “that I'm the only idea person in this department.”

“But you're not!” I cried, forgetting about what I should or shouldn't say. “I mean, this was completely my idea, and I think I deserve at least some of the credit.”

“That's not how it works,” Teri said.

“But that's how it should work,” I told her.

“Listen,” she said, finally looking at me. “This was all outlined during the interview. I've already had one problem with you around this issue on your very first day of work. I'm starting to think that maybe there's no way you're going to be happy in this job.”

I opened my mouth to speak, and then I just stood there, the words choked in my throat. How had we gotten to this point with such dizzying speed? Was she about to fire me? I was afraid that if I asked that question, she'd say yes. And then it would be over. And I was not going to let her get rid of me so easily. I was not going to do that to myself.

“I can be happy in this job,” I said finally.

“Good,” she said, beginning to pack up again. “As long as we understand each other.”

“We understand each other.”

I understand, I thought, that you're a self-aggrandizing control freak. But I'm not going to let you get the better of me.

“Good,” Teri said again. “Then it should be clear to you that it's a compliment that I take these ideas into a meeting with Mrs. Whitney.”

Teri took her coat off the hook and shrugged it on, then slipped on her sunglasses, even though it was already nearly dark outside. “Now that I know you're capable of so many excellent ideas,” she said, “I'll expect nothing less of you.”

“Right.”

“I already set up a meeting with Mrs. Whitney for Thursday to present the full concept, so you'll have a memo ready by then.”

“Thursday?” I croaked.

She patted my arm so enthusiastically I was afraid she was going to raise a bruise. “I have complete confidence in you,” she said. “Remember, we're a team.”

“Of course, Teri,” I said to her retreating back, wondering whether it was possible to sue for spiritual harassment. Was there any way for me to hang on to my job and at the same time keep her from sucking my soul?

 

“Just don't tell her your ideas,” Maggie said.

She was working on a new sculpture, only now she had moved on from encasing a cow's heart in a cement cube to embedding a duck's heart in a papier-mâché sphere. She'd dropped the duck heart into a condom—more symbolically powerful than a balloon, she claimed, even though, like the heart itself, no one would ever know it was there—blown up the condom, and then layered the papier-mâché over that until she'd created an enormous globe.

“I have to tell her my ideas,” I said miserably. “She's already set up a meeting with Mrs. Whitney for Thursday to do the full presentation.” I shook my head. “I never thought I'd long for the day when all she expected from me was a good cup of coffee.”

“Insist you be included in that meeting,” said Maggie.

“And then announce in front of everyone that the concept is really mine?” I shook my head. “Teri would flip.”

“What if you held out some ideas from the main proposal?” Maggie said. “I mean some of your best ideas. And then at the meeting you could pipe up with them as if they'd just occurred to you.”

She stepped back and cocked her head, surveying the ball. “Does it bother you knowing there's a lot of air around the duck heart?”

I gave her the look that remark deserved. “It bothers me knowing about the heart, period,” I said. “Everything else seems beside the point.”

“I'm afraid it's going to rattle around in there,” she said.

I didn't think a real live—or in this case, real dead—heart could actually rattle, but rather than debate that hypothesis, I pointed out that it was unlikely that anyone would be able to shake a sphere as big as a Volkswagen around to find out.

I wished my mind were clear enough to focus on such problems as the sounds emitted by dried duck hearts, but I was too distracted by my concerns about handling Teri and the upcoming meeting. I worried I wouldn't have the nerve to publicly present an independent slate of ideas, having already experienced Teri's wrath.

“She's not going to attack you in front of everybody,” Maggie pointed out, “and the important thing is that you get credit for your great ideas. Make sure your little friend, the editor, is in the meeting, and her boyfriend the honcho too. That way you'll have more ammunition on your side in case Teri tries to fight back later.”

I knew Maggie was right. If I was going to succeed, I was going to have to swallow my anxieties and take on Teri at her own game. I was going to have to be brave enough, finally, to act like a grown-up.

Maggie moved back a few paces and then stepped forward to smooth a bubble from her papier-mâché.

“Did I tell you?” she said. “The Vietnamese adoption people are coming to check me out.”

“They're coming here?” I cried. Maggie was still hoping she was pregnant, but she was also going ahead with the adoption application, to keep all her bases covered. “When?”

“Sometime this week,” she said, applying a fresh sheet of wet newspaper. “They deliberately leave it vague.”

“What?” I said, looking wildly around the room. I wasn't sure how a place with so little furniture in it managed to look so messy. “We've got to clean this place up!”

Maggie shook her head with an elaborate show of unconcern.

“It's fine,” she said. “They just want to see how I live. I don't have anything to hide.”

“But they want to be sure this would be a good place to raise a baby,” I told her. “We should at least pick up a little, clean up all this glue, maybe put a rug down.”

Maggie stopped working, holding her sticky hands in the air like a surgeon's.

“I have no intention of putting on a big show,” said Maggie. “I'm an artist, and any child of mine is going to be raised in a creative environment.”

“Of course,” I said. “It's just—”

“I don't want to get a baby under false pretenses,” she said.

“Right,” I said, feeling as if a big faker like me didn't have a right to argue with Maggie's purity. “Of course.”

She was still holding up her hands. “Shit,” she said. “I have to go to the bathroom. I guess I should start wearing rubber gloves, but I just love the feel of that cold glue on my hands.”

I heard the water blasting in the bathroom as she hurried to wash her hands before she used the toilet, and I experimentally reached out to touch the glue, which did feel weirdly cold, as if it had come from somewhere deep in the earth. I wished then with a pang sharper than I ever could have anticipated that I had a creative career of my own, something I alone was in control of, something no one had to give me and that no one could take away. I thought of the aborted novel I'd never looked at after I'd packed it away in the attic. It seemed now that, as with so many other things in my life, I'd given up too easily because I was so terrified of failing. That was something I couldn't let happen again.

“Shit,” I heard from the bathroom. “Shit shit fuck fuck.”

The bathroom door burst open, and there stood Maggie, looking as if she was about to cry, something I hadn't seen her do since third grade.