Looking for a Love Story (2 page)

I opened the dreaded closet, found the jogging suit with the top that was long enough to cover my hips, and pulled it on. Then I forced myself to look in the mirror. Even when I’m slim, I’m built like one of those heroines in old-fashioned novels everyone describes as
sturdy
. No one has ever been able to explain why I am this way. My father’s family, the Sewells, are tall lanky
WASPS.
My mother’s father was Greek American, and the women on his side were all downright skinny. The wild card in my genetic mix is my maternal grandmother. I’m not sure what her original heritage was, since she died when my mother was three and no one talks about her much. But I figure someone in her family tree must have had child-bearing hips. And sturdy thighs.

From my mother I get red-brown hair that has a tendency to frizz, a mouth that is too full, a nose that is definitely on the long side, and blue eyes, which I actually like. For years I thought I was homely, to use an old-fashioned word, but then I finally learned how to put on makeup. I’ll never be the kind of natural beauty who can just hop out of bed in the morning and glow, but I can do a lot
with the right shade of blush and properly applied eyeliner. When I want to. When I remember to do it.

I went into the bathroom, flicked on the professional stage lights that surround my vanity, and suddenly I saw it.
It
was a problem our friend Andy had hinted about a few months earlier: my chin. To be honest, the hinting hadn’t been all that subtle. “You need to get your chin done, Francesca,” was what she’d said. “You’ve developed a little pouf of flab right under the jaw since you gained weight. You probably haven’t noticed it because you look at yourself every day, but I haven’t seen you for a couple of months.” Andy lives in LA, but she flies in and out of Manhattan all the time. “If you take care of it right now, you probably won’t need anything more than a little nip and tuck.”

I have to admit I was pissed. Especially when I told Jake about the conversation afterward and waited for him to say something like never in a million years would he let anyone touch my chin, because he adored me just the way I was. Jake didn’t open his mouth. That was when I had to face the fact that my husband had probably noticed the damn pouf of flab himself. I already knew he was less than thrilled about my weight gain. Well, why wouldn’t he be? It is hardwired into the brain of every American male that skinny is sexy, and my guy was not one to buck trends. To be fair, he’d never said anything about it, but I’d really wanted him to jump to my defense—and that of my flabby chin. When he didn’t, I went into a riff about elective surgery being a temptation to God to hurt you, maybe give you permanent Creepy Android Face. I cited the example of several celebrities whose eyebrows are hanging off their hairlines. I thought I was being really clever, but Jake never cracked a smile, not even his big fake one.

Now that I thought about that moment—and the looming Talk—it seemed to me that he’d started pulling away from me right after that.

So I took another look at my chin in my mirror. Andy was right. If I didn’t have it done in another year—or maybe sooner—I’d have to start hiding it. Or I’d have to become my mother’s daughter, not give a damn, and let it all hang out. My mother, Alexandra Karras Sewell, is an old-school feminist who considers it a political statement that she hasn’t purchased a tube of lipstick in over thirty years. It would never occur to her to worry about a wobbling chin. But I have never been the woman she is, so I knew the day would come when I’d be shopping for turtlenecks and scarves. When you looked at the situation—and my frigging chin—from that perspective, Jake was actually being supportive. He knew I was letting myself go and he was concerned about it. And, okay, he liked glamorous women, and my jawline and I didn’t fit the bill anymore. Come on, the man didn’t say he was shallow for no reason.

So why not get a chin job? Yes, there was the issue of pain and danger and maybe looking like a female impersonator—but if it made Jake happy, wasn’t it worth it? And if I told him about it right now, and it made him so happy that we avoided the Talk, where was the harm in that? Somewhere in the back of my mind I heard my mother drawing in a big hissing breath of disapproval, but I reminded myself that she’d never been a poster child for hanging on to your man. Of course, there was absolutely no guarantee that surgery would help me hang on to mine, but I wasn’t going to dwell on that.

“I’m going to walk into the living room and tell Jake I’m getting rid of the pouf,” I said to Annie. “And don’t look at me like that, because I’m fine with it.” But I would have killed for a big, thick chocolate bar.

Jake had gone out, without leaving a note. I know how this is going to sound, but I was relieved. “Maybe the Talk wasn’t all that
important,” I said to Annie. “Maybe I overreacted. I’ve got to watch that.”

When I’m in denial, I can be a total idiot.

The living room felt empty with Jake gone. “Come, Annie,” I said with false cheer. “Go for a walk!”

She gave me a withering look—Annie considers exercise something that happens to dogs who are being punished—and headed back to the bedroom. I threw on my coat and left without her. Exercise isn’t my favorite thing either—who do you think Annie learned from?—but I needed some air.

Outside the apartment, I started off, not running exactly but walking briskly toward Central Park. As I walked, my mind went back to the beginning with Jake—to the good times. Suddenly, I realized I’d been doing that a lot in recent weeks. Reminiscing had become my favorite pastime.

Life lesson: When you find yourself frequently strolling down Memory Lane, you’re probably in trouble.

CHAPTER 2

I met Jake because of a book I wrote. It was called
Love, Max
, and it was about a divorce as seen through the eyes of the family dog. The family in question was one of those enlightened clans living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. You know the kind I’m talking about: Each child has a shrink, and a professional mediator is hired to make sure the divorce experience is a positive one for all involved. In my book, only the dog, Max, was pissed off about the loss of his family and his home until the last chapter, when everyone got all emotional and more than a little ugly, but they realized how much they cared. The book reviews included phrases like “a slyly biting commentary on modern mores.”

I wrote it because, like Max, I was pissed off. I probably had been ever since my parents went their separate ways when I was a kid. Like my imaginary characters, Mother and Dad had one of
the cheeriest divorces on record. This was, in part, due to their liberal ideology, and in part because they were so delighted to be getting away from each other. I don’t think it dawned on either of them that anyone—like me—could actually be in mourning for our little family unit. My brother, Peter, who is younger than I am, wasn’t. Hell, even our dog, Fierce, was happier when he moved to southern California with my dad. I was the only one who was upset—which didn’t make me any less angry about the whole thing.

But it wasn’t the actual divorce that led to my writing
Love, Max
. (For one thing, I was only twelve when my parents split.) What did it was my stepmother’s remarriage.

I’m not going to argue that I am one of the world’s most logical thinkers—Pete says I’m a couple of Brazil nuts shy of a fruitcake, and for the most part I agree. So I’ll try to make my admittedly convoluted thinking clear. My father married Sheryl—the woman he’d been sleeping with while he was still unhappily wed to my mother—and moved to the West Coast with her. So, technically speaking, Sheryl was the catalyst for my parents’ breakup, and after my father moved to Pasadena I tried to dislike her out of loyalty to my mother. But that was hard to do when my mother so clearly regarded Sheryl as the one-woman cavalry charge that had saved her—my mother—from the burden of having to try to be a wife. Instead, I proved my daughterly loyalty by never using makeup or having a fashion sense, and let myself like Sheryl. I can’t imagine anyone actually disliking Sheryl. (Pete managed to pull it off for a while, but eventually even he caved. And he’s made of steel.)

Sheryl is kind, generous, and caring. I suppose she would have felt guilty about ending Dad’s marriage to my mother if Mother hadn’t been so happy about it. Sheryl is the kind of person who wants everyone to be happy. She adored my father, and—an even
more radical concept to me at the time—she seemed to think that keeping him content was all the career she needed. She kept her incredible legs in shape with exercise sessions that would have appealed to the boys who cooked up the Spanish Inquisition, because, as she once told me with a giggle, Dad was a leg man. She ran his home in Pasadena like a four-star hotel because that was the way Dad liked it. And, she told me, when he came home from work at the end of the day, she was always as excited as she’d been the time she’d asked Barry Manilow for his autograph after a concert and he’d given her a kiss as well. Sheryl isn’t my mother’s equal in the brains department—not even close—but my father was blissfully happy with her. So I cast Sheryl in the role of Dad’s True Love, a blond California Juliet to his considerably older Romeo. I wanted desperately to believe in Romeo and Juliet. I was already looking for the perfect love story even back then; a romantic tale of love at first sight. And, most importantly, a love that would last forever.

Then Romeo died. It was a heart attack that came out of nowhere, and I still can’t talk about it a lot because I start to tear up. He was only fifty-six.

After a year of mourning, Juliet started dating again. I was devastated. It wasn’t that I wanted Sheryl to stop living—no matter what Pete said, I didn’t expect her to toss herself on Dad’s funeral pyre. I accepted the fact that she would develop a new life and new interests; she could have taken up scrapbooking, for example. I would have been fine with that. But I did want her to stay true to Dad’s memory forever, and I never
ever
expected her to replace him. Yes, in the kid part of the brain that we can’t control, that’s how I saw it when, after two years of widowhood, Sheryl got engaged to someone new.

How I reacted to this was … unique. I realize that. I joined an
adult-ed class called Write Your Bestseller! that was being offered at a college on the Upper East Side. I’d always had a secret yen to write; in college I’d taken a writing run by a failed novelist who probably drank too much. After one particularly blurry session, she’d called me to her office and said, “I never encourage my students, because the last thing the world needs is more lousy fiction, but Francesca, you may just have some talent.”

Armed with this somewhat dubious praise, and desperately needing to find an outlet for all the boiling emotions I couldn’t admit to because they were way too childish, I signed up for Write Your Bestseller! And spurred on by all those messy emotions, I produced
Love, Max
in two semesters. The book was my answer to the whole concept of divorce as a damn growth experience. And no, thank you, I have no desire to discuss any of this with a good shrink.

I’M SURE YOU’RE
wondering what all this history has to do with Jake and me. Hang on, because I’m getting there. But first you need to understand where my life was before I wrote
Love, Max
.

My brilliant mother was one of the nation’s major go-to lawyers for women’s rights, and I had taken my LSATs after college and failed them twice. I was also the older sister of a genius architect—that would be Pete—who raced around the world designing green housing for the impoverished. While he was collecting awards at the UN for his work as a humanitarian and an environmentalist, I was still living at home—Alexandra’s apartment—with a job working as prop person for a lesbian theater group in SoHo. The gig had come through one of Mother’s political connections and paid enough to cover my daily round-trip on the subway. To say I had some heavy-duty sibling rivalry going on would be a massive
understatement. I probably had a major dose of mommy envy as well. Okay, scratch the word
probably
.

On top of all this, I was usually dating some man who gave new and more poignant meaning to the term Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Love, Max
changed all of that.

CHAPTER 3

I’d been so busy remembering the past that I hadn’t noticed that I’d wandered across Central Park. By the time I looked up, I realized I was standing in front of the co-op apartment building where my mother had moved with Pete and me after the divorce. She’d sold the co-op after I moved out—which I did as soon as I had the check for my book advance in my hand—and traded down to a smaller apartment three blocks away, staying in the area because she said she didn’t have the time to learn a different neighborhood. My mother never gave a damn about her surroundings; all she ever wanted was a place in her beloved Manhattan that was low–maintenance and had a good Chinese restaurant around the corner. All her apartments looked the same: There were unpacked boxes stacked in the corners—I think some of them were wedding presents she’d never bothered to open—and there was always a roll of paper towels tossed on the side of the bathroom sink instead
of a hand towel. Alexandra Karras Sewell was the anti–June Cleaver and proud of it.