Younger (14 page)

“Because it makes me want to run away.” The truth.

And because it was only if he didn't say it that I could let myself enjoy him feeling it, and that I was able to feel it myself.

O
n Thursday morning, I sat at my desk, peering around the edge of my cubicle every few moments to check whether Teri might have somehow sneaked into her office without my spotting her. Maggie's reassurances notwithstanding, I'd been trying to leave her place even earlier every morning than usual, so as not to collide with the adoption people. I used the time to work on my proposal, which was literally under my fingertips, awaiting Teri's approval. I'd counted on having time for revisions before the meeting—not that Teri ever had anything to change or add. She simply okayed my work and put her name on it. But now, on the day of our big proposal, she was a full twenty minutes late.

The phone on my desk trilled, making me leap off my chair. I was relieved, and then alarmed, to hear Teri's voice.

“My kids have the flu,” Teri said. “All three of them.”

“But can't the babysitter watch them?” I said. “I mean, at least long enough for you to get to the meeting.”

“The babysitter has it too.”

“The backup babysitter?” I gasped.

In one of her lectures on working motherhood, Teri had told me that the key was having not merely reliable child-care help, but a rock-solid backup, “like hospitals have emergency generators in case of a blackout or an earthquake.”

“She moved to Montana with the pizza guy,” said Teri. “But that's not the point. The point is, I'm not coming in.”

“But the meeting—,” I said.

“We're going to have to reschedule. Or postpone.”

“All right,” I said, flustered. “What should I tell Mrs. Whitney?”

“Tell her…shit,” Teri said. “This is a problem, not a solution. She's not going to like this.”

“No, she's not,” I agreed.

I felt my brain slipping into the high problem-solving gear that I'd perfected over my years of caring for a house and child. Furnace broken down/dinner burned/book report due by tomorrow morning? No matter how daunting the combination of problems, I could always come up with a dozen solutions.

The trouble, right now, was that I wasn't sure what the problem was. How to put off the meeting without ruffling Mrs. Whitney's feathers? How to arrange child care so Teri could get to the meeting? Or how to conduct the meeting without Teri? Which, it was beginning to dawn on me, might mean I didn't have a problem at all.

“I could talk privately to Mrs. Whitney's assistant—maybe this meeting isn't even on Mrs. Whitney's radar, and she won't notice if we reschedule,” I said.

“Mrs. Whitney told me yesterday how anxious she was to hear my plan,” Teri said.

My
plan, she'd said, not our plan, never mind
your
plan. Screw her, I thought. Her not being there was the best thing that could have happened to me. I'd go in there, do the presentation giving myself full credit, without having to suffer her angry looks.

But as soon as those thoughts occurred to me, an arrow of guilt pierced my heart. It wasn't Teri's fault that her kids had gotten sick, that her babysitter was out of commission. In fact, for the first time she seemed fallible, sympathetic—downright human.

“I know,” I said.

Did I really want to say what I was thinking of saying? She didn't deserve it. On the other hand, it was the right thing to do, the thing that, should I ever claw my way to a position like Teri's, I'd want my assistant to do for me.

“I could take the train out there,” I said. “I could babysit for you. I'll bring the memo along so you can review it on the train back in, and then you can run the meeting yourself.”

“Impossible,” Teri said, without even pausing to consider the offer. “There is absolutely no way you could handle three sick children.”

“Really, I wouldn't mind,” I said. “I've babysat before, lots and lots. I took care of this one little girl through the stomach flu, pneumonia, through the chicken pox, mono—”

A procession of Diana's sick faces, weak and pathetic, paraded across my mind.

“I don't know what kind of mother would leave a child that sick with a young babysitter,” Teri said. “It's totally out of the question; you'd have no idea what to do. I'd feel more confident leaving you in charge of the meeting.”

“Honestly,” I tried again. “I assure you—”

“I've made my decision,” Teri said. “You will conduct the meeting, and just ignore my absence. In fact, tell Mrs. Whitney that I've delegated this project to you. That way, if it fails, it won't be my fault.”

“But I better tell you…,” I said. “You haven't even seen…”

There was a distant sound of retching, and then a bloodcurdling scream, followed by a hurried, “Oh, God,” from Teri.

“E-mail me the proposal,” Teri snapped. “If I have any changes, I'll send them to you. Just make sure it's my name on the top of that report.”

And with that she hung up.

 

My hands were slick with sweat. My stomach was cramping. I had to force myself to pull in a long slow breath, and then consciously direct myself to let it out. I was so nervous, waiting my turn to present my report to Mrs. Whitney, that I thought I might collapse over the arm of my chair and throw up.

Steady, I told myself. You've been waiting for this moment for more than twenty years. The only one who knows more than you about Gentility Press, the only one who
believes
more in Gentility Press, is Mrs. Whitney herself, and she's right here, waiting to listen to you. She is a smart woman, she is a fair woman. Plus, as I knew from dissecting the historical sales figures, she was a desperate woman, her company on the edge of bankruptcy if somebody didn't come up with a fresh marketing solution, fast.

My idea was Gentility's best hope, I was convinced of that. Yet I wished, perversely and fleetingly, that Teri was there to back up the ideas with her marketing expertise. But her name was on the proposal, I reminded myself—it just wasn't on the portion of the presentation that was mine alone. Only Lindsay knew that I had prepared ideas with only my name on them, and from across the room she shot me an encouraging smile. She'd given Thad a sneak preview of my thinking, and even he had been impressed.

“Alice Green?”

Mrs. Whitney was looking around the room. I fumbled to my feet.

“Here I am, Mrs. Whitney.”

Florence Whitney looked hard at me.

“We had another Alice Green who was here very briefly, years ago,” she said.

I was stunned that the head of the company would have any recollection of my name. I felt the heat rise to my face.

“Smart girl, bright career ahead of her,” Mrs. Whitney was saying, continuing to study me. “As I seem to recall, she left to have children. Utter shame.” She seemed to meditate for a moment on the tragedy of childbearing. Then she looked up at me sharply and said, “You look enough like her to be her daughter.”

I burst into relieved laughter. “Well, I'm not.”

Mrs. Whitney's memory of my long-ago self made me somehow feel less anxious, more substantial. I was not someone totally inexperienced, I reminded myself, someone just starting out. I'd been doing things, difficult and interesting things—including raising a child, which hadn't been a shame at all—for over two decades.

Drawing in one more deep breath, feeling at last like the oxygen was crossing into my cells and animating my brain, I moved around the room, passing out copies of the report to Lindsay, Thad, the sales director, the art director, the publicity person, a handful of other editorial staff, and Mrs. Whitney herself.

“This is the report that Teri talked to you about, outlining our new ideas for marketing the classics line,” I said. “The last major change Gentility made in the line was ten years ago, when Teri came on board and did away with the introductions by the big women's-lib writers from the sixties and seventies.”

“Like me!” Mrs. Whitney laughed. “Yes, I'm afraid we'd become old hat. Teri argued that the women she was at college with didn't think of themselves as feminists anymore. And your generation has never even heard of us, have they, Alice?”

“I have,” I said. Though when I'd mentioned
Why Men Must Die
and similar titles to Lindsay and Josh, I'd been met with completely blank looks.

I propped a chart that Josh had helped me devise on the computer against one wall.

“Gentility's strength in the women's market has always been its female-centered viewpoint,” I said. “But we haven't taken advantage of—”

I stopped myself. I was putting it in terms of a problem. I began again.

“It's time we took advantage of the most recent phenomenon in books written for and marketed specifically to young women, with their bright sexy covers and lively writing. These books are selling millions of copies.”

“I like those numbers,” said the sales manager. “But I don't see how we can hope to do anything like that with Jane Austen.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mrs. Whitney impatiently. “Where is the solution in this?”

“I'm…we're…proposing that we enlist the stars of the new generation of female writers to help sell our classics, just as we did with Mrs. Whitney and other famous writers of the feminist era,” I said. “A lot of those writers are fans of Austen's and Wharton's and the Brontës' and would be honored to write an introduction to a book like
Pride and Prejudice
or
The Age of Innocence
.”

“We don't have the money to pay these big modern writers,” said one of the editors.

“But we can offer them status,” said Lindsay, standing up and brandishing a sheaf of papers. “I have here preliminary commitments here from ten of the top women writers to write introductions to our classics. For free.”

Mrs. Whitney frowned. But I knew her well enough to recognize it as the frown that meant: This is intriguing, but I'm not convinced it's going to work.

“We've been working on a new cover look, too,” I chimed in. “This is a new and surprising direction.”

I'd picked out covers I remembered my reading group friends finding especially attractive, and Lindsay had helped me back up the success of those books by researching sales figures. I had even asked Maggie to do a few drawings for me—a red lace bra peeking out of the bodice of a nineteenth-century gown, a stilettoed foot arching beneath the hem of a long dress—though I'd been uncertain, when I expected Teri to be in the meeting, whether I'd actually show them.

Now, though, I lifted the first rolled-up drawing above my head and let it unfurl.

The room was silent, but I was stuck behind the drawing, my arms beginning to ache, so I couldn't see anyone's reaction.

“Wow,” the art director said finally, getting up from her chair and, I could hear, walking over to where I stood. “Is this a Maggie O'Donnell?”

I peered around the edge of the heavy paper at her.

“Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”

“I love her work,” the art director said. “I've been trying to get her to do a cover for me ever since I started working here. How did you persuade her?”

“She's an old friend.”

“Well, I'm very impressed,” said the art director.

“So am I,” said Mrs. Whitney. “Bravo, Alice.”

Then she did the most amazing thing. She began applauding. At first, the rest of the room was silent, but then Lindsay began clapping, followed by Thad and the art director, and then the sales manager, until everyone had joined in.

“I want you all to look into implementing Alice's idea as soon as possible,” Mrs. Whitney said, standing up to signal that the meeting was over. “I want these writers contacted about doing the introductions, I want new covers commissioned for all the books as soon as possible, and I want press releases on this new direction to go out once we have everything in place.”

I cleared my throat. “Lindsay did a lot too,” I said. “And Teri, of course. I'm part of Teri's team.”

Then Mrs. Whitney paused and looked directly at me.

“Where is Teri, anyway?” she asked.

“She, uh, she had a scheduling conflict,” I answered.

“Well, tell her how pleased we all are with the new direction. This kind of fresh young thinking is exactly what our marketing department needs.”

I was thrilled. Until I imagined Teri's reaction when she heard about the meeting. Then I was terrified.

D
irectly after work, Lindsay and I headed downstairs to Gilberto's to celebrate our success. We sprang for two champagne cocktails, toasting our brilliant futures, and then Lindsay suggested we order another round.

“I can't,” I said. “I'm meeting Josh.”

He had been the first person I'd called after the meeting, and he wanted to take me someplace special tonight in honor of my triumph.

“Blow him off,” Lindsay said. “Go out with me.”

“What about Thad?”

“He left for a weeklong business trip to California right after the meeting,” she said. “Come on, this is our chance for a big girls' night out.”

I hesitated. I certainly wanted to encourage Lindsay to make a move independent from Thad. But I also felt terrible about canceling on Josh.

“I can't just pull the plug on Josh,” I told her. “He was so supportive about this project, doing all those charts for me, really getting into helping me figure out how to handle it.”

“I thought you weren't serious about this guy.”

“I'm not. But I really like him. I mean, I really really like him.”

“But you don't want to marry him.”

I shook my head firmly. “No.”

“Never.”

“No.”

“So do you see yourself, like, living with him forever, like Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell or something?”

“He's going to Japan in a couple of months, and I have no intention of letting our relationship drag on after that.”

“So what do you feel bad about?!” Lindsay cried. She drained her second champagne cocktail and waved to the bartender. “I think I'm going to switch to apple martinis,” she said. “What about you?”

“I definitely can't handle apple martinis.”

“Well, you need something to loosen you up. I don't understand you, Alice. If you have no intention of making a commitment to this guy, why are you wasting time being all monogamous with him? You should be going out! Having fun!”

I had to admit, she had a point.

“I'm the one who's practically married,” Lindsay said, “at least in my dreams. But until that ring is on my finger, I'm reserving my rights as a free agent.”

“A free agent?” I'd never heard Lindsay refer to herself this way, or even admit she found any appeal in the concept.

“At least in theory,” she said. “I'm sick of Thad taking me for granted. Maybe if he didn't assume I was sitting at home every time he went away on a business trip, he'd be motivated to propose.”

“There's no reason you shouldn't go out,” I told her.

“You either,” she said, reaching over to undo my blouse two more buttons. “You're not in the Third World anymore.”

She insisted on sitting there watching me as I dialed Josh's number and told him that I couldn't meet him after all tonight, I was going out with Lindsay. He was so understanding, so sweet, I felt even worse about not seeing him, wished all over again that it was him I was going out with. As I began apologizing again, for probably the tenth time, Lindsay grabbed the phone out of my hand.

“Don't wait up, Joshie baby,” she said, giggling into the phone and then snapping it closed.

“Come on,” she said to me. “I'm going to show you how to have a good time.”

Instead of ordering her apple martini at Gilberto's, Lindsay hopped off her stool and marched out the door, leaving me to scurry behind, calling back over her shoulder that we were heading to Martini, a bar that specialized in all varieties of the drink. I was surprised at how warm it was outside, and how light. There was an almost festive feeling to the evening, a celebration of nothing more or less profound than having made it through another winter, that fueled Lindsay's and my high spirits.

We walked for nearly an hour, laughing and reveling in the success of our presentation. This
was
fun, and I felt glad I'd let Lindsay talk me into going out with her. I was always claiming that Josh and I weren't serious, that ours was a short-term relationship, yet I was letting my feelings for him run away with me. As I had with Gary, as I had with everything else I'd ever cared about in my life. It was good I was forcing myself to be more independent, bolder,
wilder
, the way I swore I would be when I first wished I could be younger.

Finally we reached Martini, a dark, gleaming bar with blue lights and curved steel walls. From the menu listing 128 different kinds of martinis, Lindsay ordered us both Speeding Tickets: vodka and cold-drip espresso served straight up in a glass with a sugared rim.

“For energy!” Lindsay said, lifting her glass.

We were standing near the bar, surrounded by a crush of people. Every single woman, it seemed, was beautiful. And every single man was gay.

“What's with the guys here?” I said in Lindsay's ear.

“What?”

“They're all gay.”

Lindsay surveyed the room.

“No, they're not.”

I looked again. I saw guys in tight black T-shirts and black leather pants, guys wearing bracelets and boots with heels and bright striped shirts fluttering open over bare skin. One guy had on a T-shirt that read “Vixen.”

“They look gay to me.”

“Metrosexual!” cried Lindsay.

I knew about metrosexuals, guys who liked clothes and food and art and shopping, but were straight. Josh had the interests and the temperament but not the wardrobe of a metrosexual; Thad was the anti-metrosexual. But these guys in the bar, I was convinced, had crossed over to the other side.

“I don't believe you.”

“Okay,” said Lindsay. “I'll prove it.”

I laughed. “How are you going to do that?”

“You'll see. Who do you think is the most gay-looking guy in the room?”

There were so many choices, but I finally zeroed in on a delicate-looking man with blond hair and a lavender shirt.

“Good choice,” Lindsay smirked. “This won't take long at all.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Follow me.”

I waded through the crowd behind Lindsay, and then hung back as she approached the lavender-shirted man.

“Fuck,” I heard Lindsay say, in a southern drawl that was pure theater. “I'm hotter than butter sizzling on a griddle.”

I couldn't help rolling my eyes at the ceiling, but I heard Lavender Shirt laugh in response.

Lindsay went on to flirt outrageously, so that every time I stole a glance in her direction, Lavender Shirt had moved in closer. First he was just laughing, but soon he was leaning in and touching Lindsay's elbow, then her waist, and then he had his hand resting on Lindsay's hip, and finally I saw him move in and begin grinding against Lindsay to the rhythm of the background Beyoncé in what I supposed was a dance move.

Before I could so much as stick out my tongue in disgust, Lindsay kissed Lavender Shirt lightly on the cheek and darted back in my direction, taking me by the wrist and leading me toward the door.

“Convinced?” Lindsay said, when we had made our way outside.

“I am. But maybe one of those other guys would have turned out to be gay.”

Lindsay shook her head. We were walking fast down the street, past knots of people standing outside bars smoking.

“You can't tell by how somebody looks,” she said. “Or even necessarily by what they do. Didn't they have metrosexuals in the Third World?”

I laughed. “Shouldn't we stop and get something to eat?”

Walking through the crowded streets, I realized I felt light-headed not only from the liquor but from the lack of food.

“We're drinking our calories tonight,” Lindsay said.

“I think I need something to eat.”

“Then order your martini with an olive.”

We turned onto a narrow street lined with stately town houses, their facades painted white and gray and pink, and then onto another residential lane. We were heading farther and farther west into the Village, where the streets were darker and less populated. Finally, Lindsay grabbed my hand and led me across a busy avenue and pointed to a knot of people on the sidewalk ahead, on a block that dead-ended at the whizzing lights of the West Side Highway, with the river and the hulking cliffs and high-rises of New Jersey beyond.

“That's our place,” Lindsay said.

The only thing that distinguished the red brick building from the blank facades of what might have been warehouses or industrial offices that surrounded it was the crowd of people lingering outside, and the velvet ropes that cordoned off the shiny silver steel door. Lindsay pushed her way confidently through the crowd, kissed the enormous Asian doorman on the cheek, and pulled me through the battered steel door behind her. We wound down a black-lit stairway into a cavernous basement space, which was packed with people dancing to what sounded like disco music.

Maggie and I had gone to see
Saturday Night Fever
a dozen times, dancing to the sound track in my bedroom with all the lights off except the disco globe that had cost me nearly twenty hours' worth of babysitting money. At Mount Holyoke, liking disco was considered highly uncool—the girls there were more into Joni Mitchell and the Roches—and so I had kept my curiosity about Studio 54 and my love for the BeeGees under wraps. And now, I thought as the music hit me and I began to move my shoulders in time to the beat, I could let it all out.

“Night Fever!” I called over the noise to Lindsay.

Lindsay looked at me strangely.

“My friend Maggie and I used to listen to this back in—”

And then I stopped. Realized what I was about to say, and also that I couldn't say it. And at the same time, began to suspect that this song wasn't “Night Fever” after all.

Lindsay ordered us another pair of martinis, and I knew as I began to sip that I was about to slip over the border from being pleasantly tipsy to being truly drunk. I hadn't been drunk in—how long? Since the night after Gary left me, and before that, since my honeymoon, drinking margaritas all day with Gary while lounging in the sun. And before that, it had been college.

“Is this disco music?” I said into Lindsay's ear.

We were dancing now, drinks in hand.

“Trance,” Lindsay said.

“It's just called dance?”

“No,
trance
. You know. Trip-hop.”

I shrugged and took a long pull on my drink. Lindsay danced away from me and toward someone else, so I danced for a minute with a tall man wearing a red sweater and then closed my eyes so I could dance happily alone. I'd always loved to dance, but it had never been one of Gary's specialties, and then, as Diana had gotten older, she'd teased me about my dancing so relentlessly that I had stopped being able to let go and enjoy it at all, even when I was alone.

But I was enjoying it now, in the dark with the lights pulsing, the crush of bodies all around me. Everyone in the room, I felt, was younger and more beautiful than me, but rather than making me feel self-conscious, that made me feel free. It had been liberating, before Maggie made me over, to be a frankly middle-aged woman, whom no one ever noticed. I'd come to fully appreciate the liberating quality of being invisible only now that I was once again prey to so much attention based on my looks. But in this place, I was nothing special, invisible once more—which might have been a bad thing if I'd been looking for sex, but was a good thing for dancing.

“Martini time!” Lindsay sang into my ear.

We elbowed our way back to the bar and ordered more drinks. The room was definitely starting to spin now. And then I noticed something else I hadn't seen before.

“All right,” I said to Lindsay, pointing at all the pairs of women arrayed around the bar, making out. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“What do you mean?” said Lindsay.

“Now,
this
is a gay bar!” I said.

“No, it's not,” said Lindsay, looking utterly serious.

“Come on.” I gestured toward the kissing women. “We're not just talking about clothes here. This is genuine action!”

“Oh, that?” said Lindsay. “They're not gay.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Where have you been? It's a thing. Even the pledged virgins do it.”

Now I was totally lost. “Pledged virgins?”

“The girls I went to college with back in Nashville who wore the rings pledging they would stay virgins till marriage. Even they go to bars and make out with their girlfriends.”

I asked the only question that made any sense to me. “Why?”

“Oh, you know, it's ‘wild,' ” said Lindsay, making little quote marks with her hands. “And it's safe.”