Woman on Top (18 page)

At this point, nothing one of these uber wealthy men said to me would be shocking.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said.

“No apologies needed. I’m in the midst of a very ugly, very expensive divorce and just venting.”

“Do you have any children?” I asked.

He paused to take another long drink.

“My daughter is forty and just separated from her husband. Her ex-husband is a wonderful guy but they never should have been together in the first place. She’s a bitch. All women are bitches.”

At that moment the eighteen-piece band began to play and I threw a look at Len. A desperate look of get me out of here. I also loved dancing and had managed over time to get Len to dance most times I asked. He had a funny little move where he bounced up and down and looked silly, so unlike the dignified image he so carefully constructed.

The band began to play “Twist and Shout” and Len, having had several glasses of wine during the cocktail hour, began to twist with me. He was doing the whole thing - up and down and round again. Laughing at his lack of inhibitions, his apparent joy in twisting, I hugged him when the music stopped.

“I don’t recognize him,” one of his friends said to me as we were making our way to retake our seats, “I have never seen Len like that.” The continuous comments from his friends about the sea change in Len were encouraging to me. Len was finally enjoying himself.

We sat down at the table. Thankfully Donald wasn’t there. But I couldn’t help but overhear Len’s conversation with his friend on his right.

“Len, you look so happy,” his longtime friend said to him.

Len paused.

“It’s so difficult still,” Len replied somberly.

He couldn’t possibly confess to his friend what he had revealed to me recently.

“I’m so happy with you, Kate. Does that mean it was good that Judy died?” he asked.

“Life does go on,” I had answered.

My experience after Jake’s death was that the world did not stop while one grieved. You had to choose one day to catch up with the world and yet I had grieved and grieved for years. Memories of the depths of those years were as good as reason as any to stay with Len, turning a blind eye to all he stood for.

“I loved Judy when we got married and she was perfect for me when we were twenty. But we grew apart and by the time she died, she was not the woman I would have chosen to be with. But you’re not the woman I could have handled at twenty. I needed Judy at twenty. Now I need you.

“When we were in college, Judy wrote a four-page love letter to me. I rewrote the letter in my handwriting and sent it back to her. She called me, all excited thanking me profusely for the letter, not realizing what I’d done. She was the right woman for when I was twenty.”

At dinner the next night in a secluded New Jersey steak house with Len’s friend Thomas and his wife Linda, we discussed the recent revelation amongst Len’s colleagues regarding the fiftyish chairman of a huge multi-billion company. He had resigned his position, left his wife and four kids and run off with a thirty-year old secretary.

“I can understand his desire to feel young again,” Thomas said.

Linda, sitting next to him, appeared easily into her fifties.

“Len, how would you feel if Jennifer came home with a fifty-two- year old man?” I asked.

Len cringed.

“I get why the older men do it, but why would a woman in her thirties get into bed with a man in his fifties?” Thomas asked.

Was he kidding? Women in their thirties only got into bed with rich men in their fifties.

“Well, I’ve never dated a woman younger than forty. I’d be too embarrassed for Jennifer’s sake,” Len declared.

“If much older men did not lavish much younger women with jewelry, trips, clothes and a lifestyle, we could actually discern if the woman really cared about the guy. Maybe there really is love between the two of them. But I bet a man in his sixties is so grateful to have his arm candy that he’d never put it to the test,” I said.

“Well, I have friends who are in the sixties and they won’t date women any older than forty-five. My friend Bob is sixty-eight and dating a woman in her forties and said he’s getting the sex he wants. He thinks women in their fifties lose interest in sex,” Thomas said.

I looked at fiftyish year old Linda who remained silent.

“I’m in my forties and I wouldn’t go near a sixty-eight year old man. And I know two women in their thirties who told me they never had much interest in sex. It’s ridiculous to write off women by their age. Don’t you think it’s surprising and unpredictable who turns out to be a great lover and who does not?” I said wondering how Len would react.

“So Len’s been that surprising and unpredictable great lover?” Thomas laughed.

Len put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed it tightly so everyone could see.

“I am under no pressure to say he definitely has been.”

“Why wouldn’t you want a trophy wife?” I asked Len as we drove to his house.

“Because I am the trophy.”

I laughed. Trophy women were beautiful. But Len had meant it.

We were driving along dark unlit roads on a moonless night with thick woods on either side of the road. Len turned on the windshield wipers as light rain drizzled on the car. I missed the bright lights of the City.

Len was speeding along the curving country roads.

“You know Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment?”
he said.

I didn’t answer. The last time I had thought about Raskolnikov was my freshman year of college in a Russian lit course.

“He is the one in a million man who tried to get away with murder. I am that one in a million man,” Len said.

“You’re kidding?”

“Not at all,” he replied.

“Raskolnikov was an arrogant man who thought that the moral restraints of ordinary men didn’t apply to him. He thought he was superman,” I said warily.

“Yes, do you remember when he says ‘I wanted to turn myself into a Napoleon, and for that purpose, I even committed murder’?” Len asked.

That night as the rain began to pound on the car and we drove the dark, back roads, I got the chills. The connection between Len’s arrogance, his love of money and power, his disdain for my common friends and his identification with Raskolnikov was alarming. And then my skin crawled with the thought that I had chosen to give my heart, for only the second time in my life, to this particular man.

CHAPTER 22

August/September

O
ur move to Manhattan forced Chloe to evaluate her schooling options, and after rejecting out of hand the idea of carving her niche among high school seniors in New York City, she decided to spend the year abroad in Spain. She hadn’t been exactly pleased with my decision to uproot the family, but also realized that months of fighting with me would have no impact at all on my decision.

As the summer passed by quickly both Chloe and I soon began to comprehend the reality of her upcoming departure. I watched helplessly as her eyes grew wider with fear as each day passed, as the letter from the family she would be staying with in Barcelona arrived, as she desperately tried to form sentences in Spanish with a woman who lived in our building who knew no English.

“I’m not going to be with my friends this year,” she said one morning.

“But you’ll make new friends. Why don’t you find out the name of someone going on your program who might live nearby? You could make a friend before you go,” I said.

Chloe called her program immediately and found that Dave, who was also going to Barcelona, lived an hour away. She phoned him and they agreed to meet that weekend. At least there was one potential friend in sight.

“I’m scared. I hate making changes! What if I have no friends?” she asked as she lay shivering in my bed.

She asked the same questions over and over, her mind distant in a far off unfamiliar world.

“You hated when first grade finished. You cried and told me you didn’t want to go to second grade. And after second grade, you said you were too sad and didn’t want to go to third grade. You’ve been uncomfortable with transitions ever since then. And I understand, but they always seem to work out great for you” I reminded her.

“I’m so worried about Chloe,” I confided in Len one night.

He said nothing.

“I hope she makes friends. I hope she’s not too homesick,” I continued.

“Jennifer wouldn’t behave like Chloe is behaving.”

“Why do you always have to compare them? Jennifer is an adult now and Chloe is a teenager,” I asked.

“Because Jennifer never behaved like Chloe.”

“How would you know? You were never home.”

The surprise bon voyage party I arranged for Chloe was held in the back of a small unpretentious SoHo restaurant. Thirty of our friends and family sat in Café Rouge waiting for her to appear. Len volunteered to pick her up and deliver her to what was billed as a farewell dinner with my mother and a few relatives.

As Chloe walked into the restaurant, she squinted and tried to focus her near sighted eyes on the people in front of her. Her glasses were back at home as usual. She was practically in our laps before she covered her mouth and let out a scream of surprise finally making out the faces of her friends who had come in from Connecticut for the evening.

We sat Chloe down in the middle of our group and Lyla, one of my friends, began.

“Chloe, everyone here knows that you are a little bit scared about your new adventure, a bit intimidated to go off to a foreign country without knowing anyone, without knowing the language even well enough to get fed!”

Chloe was busy nodding her head.

“Well, because your mother is such a thoughtful, compassionate person, she has at great expense flown over from Spain your new family!”

“She what!” Chloe looked panicked that I might have done just that.

“And here Chloe is Maria, your new Spanish mother.”

At that moment I emerged dressed in a rented toreador’s costume: red short tight pants, a red jacket with gold and black braiding and epaulets and a black velvet hat. Chloe burst out laughing and buried her face in her hands.

“And now, Chloe, here is Eva, your new Spanish aunt.”

With that, my sister-in-law pranced out dressed as a flamenco dancer with her body squeezed into an off the shoulder flimsy black blouse and a flaring red skirt. She flitted around Chloe.

“Finally Chloe, we all know how much you’re going to miss your grandmother. So here is Alba, your new Spanish grandmother.”

My mother, eighty years old, dressed in a furry bull’s costume, charged out at Chloe. Only her face and thick glasses peered out of the dark grey headpiece topped with horns.

Everyone roared with laughter, and most had tears rolling down their faces. The smile that appeared on Chloe’s face was the first in quite a while.

•  •  •

Nothing could measure the day that I had to drive Chloe to Logan for her flight to Barcelona. Tears kept falling like rain from her delirious eyes and her breathing was so deep and heavy that I was forced to pull the car over to calm her. Despite the fact that she was going with a group organized by one of the premier private schools in the country, it was a surreal experience preparing to put my teenaged daughter on a plane to Spain for a year, and one a mother can never quite prepare herself for. I wondered if she would actually board the plane.

Yet as we arrived at the meeting room and she began to greet the other sixty teenagers who would accompany her on the trip, I watched as the calm and color returned to my daughter’s face. After a meeting of the parents and the kids held by the director, it was finally time for the kids to depart.

We stood, facing each other in front of the bus that would take her to the plane, and she smiled and hugged me goodbye. Optimism had filled her worn down body with a slight sense of relief, and for this I was glad. Yet, as she boarded the bus, I began to lose it. Watching the bus pull away seemed like an eternity, with me frozen in an instant of separation and loss, an emotion that had become too familiar.

As I walked the corridors of the airport slowly back to my car, I suddenly remembered that Len had promised to meet me at Logan for the drive home. He couldn’t understand why the group flight wasn’t leaving out of JFK for which I had no response. It was the last thing on my mind.

I turned a corner of the long hallway and a glance revealed his sympathetic and familiar face. He had flown to Boston that afternoon to drive me back in my car to New York. His support was welcomed with open arms, as I never could predict when I might expect it. It was these acts of kindness that were so random that I never knew what would elicit them, and certainly not how to reinforce them.

SPRING 1989

CHAPTER 23

March

T
he doctors treated Jake with more heavy-duty drugs to get him out of crisis. Now his blood counts were going to fall and this was the beginning of an unpredictable siege.