After the Reunion (32 page)

They were both the same age and both from New York, but they would never have met the first time they were single, and if they had they would never have thought of going out together. No, not in the Fifties. Their early lives had been set in a pattern made by others. They might as well have grown up on opposite sides of the world.

And yet he seemed to know everything she was thinking, and there was nothing she could not tell him. He obviously felt the same way about her.

It grew dark, and they cleared away the dishes, and she made fresh coffee and they talked some more. It was like an encounter session. They talked all night. He even told her about the first girl he had been in love with, and she told him how she had thought she would never fall in love at all until Richard. Neither of them was hungry or tired. Their midnight confessions were their way of making up for lost time, and also a kind of flirtation. When the sun came up they were still lying on the living room floor by the dying fire, leaning on piled up cushions, finally peaceful and exhausted.

It had snowed during the night. The dogs had gone out through their dog door and were frolicking in the drifts. Daphne and Michael went outside and breathed the crisp, cold air. Plumes of smoke rose from their breath. It was very early and very still. He took her hand, and then they turned and kissed each other. It was as if they had sealed a pact, but she was not sure what it was.

She made scrambled eggs and toast and they ate hungrily. Then she gave him Matthew’s unoccupied bedroom to sleep in, and shaving things and a toothbrush and clean towels, and she went into her own bedroom, and they both slept until early afternoon. Day and night were upside down. They had a glass of wine. The Sunday paper was there, its bulk tied up with string. She looked at him and thought she had never been closer to anyone in her life, and they had never made love … but they would. She was sure of that. But now she had to take him to his train.

“Could we have dinner together one night this week in the city?” he asked.

“I’d love that.”

“I have to get up so early in the mornings … what about Friday? I have a car, so you take the train in and I’ll drive you back.”

“Perfect.”

And then he would stay over.

On Monday Daphne sent Chris flowers, and wrote on the card:
Thank you for the wonderful dinner and my new friend
.

By Wednesday both Chris and Annabel had called to find out what was happening. Daphne said she thought this probably meant she was dating. She laughed when she said it, because she had always thought dating was so different when you were grown up.

On Friday she met him at his office after work and they went to Woods, a plain, pretty little place with expensive, plain, pretty food. They talked as though the five days they had been apart had been endless and there was an enormous amount to catch up on, although nothing much had really happened to her. It was just that all week whatever she thought of she had saved for him.

After dinner he drove her back to her house in Connecticut. She had expected to be nervous. After all, this was the bed she had shared for so many years with Richard, and she had never done anything with another man but Richard in her life. But she wasn’t nervous at all. Michael was the one who seemed nervous, but only for the first moment before he touched her.

Lying beside him afterward, warm and happy, Daphne thought perhaps she was falling in love with him. In her old world that would have meant that he was in love with her too, and had Serious Intentions. She didn’t know what it meant in this new one.

They both had children. His weren’t away at school, so he had different responsibilities than she did. She lived in the country, so there was the problem of a commuting romance. She couldn’t stay overnight at his apartment because of his children, and he started his office hours so early and ended them so late that he couldn’t stay at her house during the week. Of course they would have dinner together a few nights a week, but that was all. They only had the weekends. In many ways it was like being back at college again, and that was very strange.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

But even though she could tell him anything, she didn’t know how to tell him that, because there was nothing either of them could do about it. Getting engaged to someone she’d only had two dates with was more like college than she could bear.

“I’m thinking about you,” Daphne said, and burrowed her head into his shoulder. She didn’t say anything more.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Waiting for the date of her operation, Emily found herself spending a lot of time looking in the mirror; gently pulling up her cheeks, smoothing out the skin of her neck, trying to imagine how she would look with her new face. She couldn’t help remembering those times so many years ago, during her nervous breakdown, when she had peered at her imaginary scar, the product of her anger and confusion, and had felt herself disfigured. Now there would be real scars, but they would be tiny, and most of them hidden inside her hair. Dr. Winthrop had warned her that she wouldn’t look twenty again, only like herself but refreshed and better; and she had told him firmly that she had no wish to look or
be
twenty again.

He was doing everything; her forehead, her eyelids, and the lower part of her face including her neck. When he told her he could do all that she was mildly insulted, because she hadn’t thought there was that much wrong with her, but then she decided that as long as she was going to suffer she might as well do as much as possible. Although the nurse had given her a three-page typed description of what was to be expected Emily made him tell her everything he was going to do, in detail. He seemed a little surprised, and she decided most people were too squeamish to want to know. But she did; it was
her
face.

“Are you just pulling up the skin or also doing the muscles underneath?”

“I’m doing the muscles too, of course.”

Good. Then the improvement would last longer. He asked her if she wanted general or local anesthesia and she said local. He looked pleased, and told her most patients didn’t remember anything afterward anyway. She would be in the hospital for three days, and then Peter would take her home. She stocked up on soft foods, because it would be uncomfortable to chew, and imagined herself looking like a chipmunk. Dr. Winthrop said she would be able to go anywhere looking normal by three weeks after the operation. It didn’t sound so terrible. She wasn’t even scared.

But then, it had happened so fast she hadn’t had time to worry. Suddenly she was in the hospital, about to be made new. Nobody had bothered to send her flowers, and her room was bland and impersonal without them. Emily supposed people only sent flowers if you were sick; a facelift didn’t count. It was strange to be sitting here all alone, waiting for tomorrow, feeling perfectly well and knowing you’d wake up feeling rotten. She could hardly wait.

Early the next morning a nurse gave her a shot and told her not to get out of bed again. Then they came and took her down the hall and in the elevator on a rolling stretcher, and then she was in the operating room. Her doctor had to introduce himself because he was all in his operating costume, swathed in pale green so she couldn’t see anything but his eyes. He asked her if she would mind putting her hands down for a minute. She said sure, and even lay on them, feeling happy, wanting to be more than cooperative. Behind and above her the doctors and nurses were talking about what they’d done that weekend, joking around, acting like people in an office. They acted as if she wasn’t even there. It seemed so casual to them, but she was going to be cut up, and that made her a little nervous. There was a large clock on the wall, but she couldn’t see the numbers because things were blurry. Closer, she could see her Before Pictures taped up.…

She heard instruments clicking and people talking, but now they were talking about what they were doing to her. She was suspended on the cloud of her drugs and couldn’t feel a thing.

“Turn her on her side, please …”

It was boring and she dozed. She awoke and listened to some more of it.

“Now I’m going to do her eyes.”

I certainly want to miss that
, she thought, imagining seeing the blood, and drifted away again.

“Beautiful,” the doctor said. “Beautiful.”

That’s me
, Emily thought, and went contentedly to sleep.

When she woke up in her room her private nurse was putting ice cubes on her eyes. There was so much bandaging around her face she felt as if she were wearing a gauze football helmet. She insisted she had to go to the bathroom, but when she got there, the nurse holding her arm because she was still so groggy, she went first to the mirror. She looked like the Easter bunny because of the bandages, and she could see so little of her face that she didn’t know what
it
looked like, except that it was various strange colors and her eyes were swollen slits.

“Beautiful,” she said.

“Don’t look,” the nurse said.

She was uncomfortable but not miserable. The pressure bandages felt scratchy. Her nurses gave her painkillers and acted thrilled when she asked for more ice cream, and she watched television all night. It was like being a child again, sick and allowed to stay home from school and have anything she wanted.

On the morning of the third day the bandages came off, some of the stitches came out, and Peter came to get her. He was polite enough not to look horrified. By now she was so swollen that her face looked like a round flat dish with an oriental face painted on it. It was still several colors, none of them attractive. Her ears were swollen and gigantic. There were metal staples in her scalp and crisscrossed black stitches all around her ears and knotted in various places in her head, and her hair was lank and greasy, coated with antibiotic ointment. She felt very vulnerable.

Dr. Winthrop came to look at her. “Very good,” he said, pleased. “Stay at home and rest, and come to my office Monday and I’ll start to take out more stitches.”

“I have only one question,” Emily said. “Did you take off my ears and sew them back?”

He laughed. “No, why?”

“Because I thought you replaced them with Lyndon Johnson’s.”

And to think she’d thought she would only look like a chipmunk.

For a week she had to sleep on her back, propped up on three pillows, the stitches hurting. Even after that, she wondered when she would ever be able to sleep comfortably on her ears again. But it was worth it. In ten days she looked almost normal, and in two weeks she was beginning to see what she was really going to look like. All the stitches and staples were out, and she no longer felt like something Dr. Winthrop had stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. In three weeks she was admiring herself. She looked sixteen. She knew that was because she was still so swollen that her normal expression lines hadn’t come back yet, but still there would be a great difference from before the operation.

Her rosy, innocent, almost poreless face smiled back at her in the mirror. Her eyes seemed enormous. She hardly even needed all those cosmetics Karen had gone with her to buy and showed her how to use; but she would want them for television, and newspaper photos. The glamorous new wardrobe that Annabel had helped her choose from the boutique was waiting for her in her closet. These clothes were certainly different from the ones that Ken had ripped up in his night of rage. And at long last she had finally been able to get out the last of the grease they’d put in her hair in the hospital. And then, since she had been feeling well enough to go anywhere she wanted to now, a month after the operation she went to the hairdresser to have her hair completely restyled, and as a final act of transformation, lightened a little; because the colorist said dark hair photographed like a lump.

The expanded Emily’s Cookies in Westwood was doing beautifully. She suddenly seemed to be surrounded by accountants, lawyers, advisors. Jared’s father was putting up more money, and everyone was talking about opening a new Emily’s Cookies in Beverly Hills. Imagine—Beverly Hills! Once it had seemed like a dream, the mark of final success. Now it seemed like a natural step.

And the next step was back to the press agent. The two months she had asked for were up.

She couldn’t wait to see his face when he saw hers.

“You did good, kiddo,” Freddie Glick said nodding, looking her over when she opened the door to her apartment. “A real good job.” She wondered if now that she was in her new incarnation she was henceforth to be addressed as Kiddo. “Now I’ve got something to work with,” he said.

“Well, then,” Emily said, “when do we begin?”

He started her with interviews on small local papers. It wasn’t hard for her to do these first ones; she remembered what Chris had told her and gave basically the same interview she’d done for
Fashion and Entertainment West
, leaving out anything she didn’t want to see in print. The women who interviewed her were younger than she, and seemed to find everything she said an interesting view of history. She supposed the beliefs of the times that had molded—and ruined—her life were indeed a part of modern history, and began to see her past in a more important light. Freddie made press kits containing photo offsets of these newspaper clippings, plus the one from
F.E. W
., included a biography he’d written and a new, very glamorous photograph, and sent the kits around. She got the Q&A column on the front page of the
Herald-Examiner
, which was a very big break, and then she started to do local radio.

She’d had no idea there was so much radio. She did interviews where she spoke into a tape recorder in a tiny room, and then she sat in other tiny rooms and spoke into a microphone. The first time she had to do live radio she was terrified. She didn’t tell any of her friends to listen, because somehow knowing nobody she actually knew was listening made it easier to pretend no one was listening at all. The interviewer was a man her age, and she was afraid he would be offended when she started to talk about how ludicrous the rules of the Fifties were for women, but to her surprise he agreed with her and said they were just as unfair for men. Soon they were having a conversation and she was actually having a good time, even though her palms were wet and at the back of her mind was the ever-present thought that if she said something outrageous and horrible and disgusting everybody would hear it.