Woman on Top (27 page)

“Kate. This is Heather, Bill’s wife,” she said hesitating.

Bill had been one of Len’s closest friends at one point. Surprise didn’t begin to capture the strange feelings her voice evoked in me.

“I’ve waited a long time. But I miss you and wanted to talk. How are you?” Heather continued.

“I’m good. Really good. How long has it been? Six months?”

“What I was hoping…that you might meet me for lunch one day this week and we’d catch up.” she said.

Bergdorf’s small restaurant on the lower level was filled with Ladies Who Lunch and we met there at one that Friday. Perfectly coifed, Prada and Chanel-clad women eating salads chatted away.

Heather stood waiting, dressed in her typically under-stated cashmere sweater and black pants. A tall blonde who allowed herself to age gracefully, she had an elegance that appeared more and more rare amongst the nouveau riche women inhabiting the Upper East Side of New York.

She wore simple earrings and no other jewelry. Her straight shoulder length hair and little makeup looked out of place in Bergdorfs. Then again, I didn’t look like I belonged there anymore either.

When she saw me she looked pained, which left me wondering just how good an idea this lunch might be. We ordered our Cobb salads and iced teas.

“Guess we should talk about Len and get it over with. Do you know the latest on what’s going on with him?” Heather said as she carefully placed the cloth napkin on her lap.

“How could I? And I’m sure you can understand I prefer not to. Although he has called my home a couple of times and hung up. Once, he called in the middle of the night, waking me up of course, and I kept saying ‘Hello? Hello? Hello? Who is this?’ He finally hung up.”

“He got married again, to a woman who just turned thirty. He must have called right before it,” Heather said.

“So I was replaced as easily as Judy?”

“He took her to Europe to propose, although not Paris. Sound familiar?” Heather replied.

“A few nights before we broke up Len said that if we didn’t make it as a couple, he wouldn’t date for a long time. He needed a time out to think about how he deals with relationships. Looks like he had already picked out his second wife. But at the end I knew something was going on.”

“How’d you know?”

“Over the summer, we had stopped seeing some of his friends, long-planned trips were cancelled, and I would find Len giggling at messages left on his voice mail. I asked him what the story was, who was leaving the messages. And he yelled at me, saying that I didn’t trust him.”

“Well, get this - she’s pregnant. He bragged about how pleased he was that he could get a woman pregnant at his age. I don’t know why, it’s not unusual.”

Heather frowned as she sipped on her iced tea.

“You didn’t know that I was pregnant a week before Len moved out?”

“With Len’s baby? You had an abortion? I’m starting to feel sick,” she said as she pushed her plate aside.

“Why are you here? Why did you want to tell me these things?”

“I felt so badly about what happened and it looks like I didn’t even know the worst of it. Now I feel really awful,” she said.

Heather appeared on the verge of tears as she leaned over the table and reached for my arm.

“Do you think she knew about you? I bet he didn’t tell her he was living with someone and the someone he was living with was pregnant.”

“I don’t care what she knew,” I said.

Heather stared at me apparently in shock at all she had heard.

“I’ve moved on. I don’t need to hear about Len. He’s still threatening me that he wants money for the security deposit. I used it to stay in the apartment while Ben finishes the school year. You can’t imagine how ugly this has become. He has sent some of the nastiest letters, even by his standards,” I said.

“Obviously, it’s not about the money since he doesn’t need it. He’s doing very, very well.”

“I reminded him in my letter that he often told me that when he was wrong he needed a graceful exit from an argument. To save face for him, I gave back all of the jewelry.”

I didn’t tell Heather but my friends had flipped when I told them about returning the jewelry. Every one of them argued they would have kept all of it and relished wearing it, to boot. They assured me that time would erase the memory that Len had purchased the pieces. And that the jewelry, at the time Len gave it to me, honored real feelings.

Despite my friends’ efforts, I felt good about returning every piece of it. The jewelry meant nothing to me and I never wanted it anyway. I certainly wanted no ties to Len. And I wasn’t so sure about those real feelings as Len’s motivation when he gave me the pieces. He probably just wanted the woman on his arm flashing expensive jewelry.

“He still says he’s going to sue me,” I said.

“How did you respond?”

“I spoke to a good friend of mine who’s a divorce attorney who’s used to men who are bullies. She advised me to write a simple note back saying go ahead and sue and ignore his threats. I haven’t heard from him since. He knows a lawsuit would be public and expose all the details of who he truly is.”

Heather looked around the restaurant as if searching for the nearest emergency exit door. Oh, how she must have regretted arranging this lunch.

“I’ve heard enough about Len for a lifetime. Tell me about Bill and your kids.”

Heather and I chatted for another ten minutes about our families. She always struck me as a kindhearted woman untouched by her enormous wealth and it should not have been a surprise when she reached out to me. But as we parted, exchanging hugs, I felt sure Heather and I would never cross paths again.

•  •  •

It was finally time to rebuild the woman Len had torn apart and try to believe in love again. For some women at this juncture, giving up on men and on love is the only possible course, even by default. For me, the end of Len was different than losing Jake. It was not a great loss but a betrayal. Maybe Len had done more damage to my head than Jake’s death had done to my heart. But I had forever learned from Jake to never give up, and I needed the sweet memories of him to believe in love again.

Jake was born in early April in a once in a lifetime blizzard. Twenty-two inches in one day. On his birthday each year of our marriage, I took note of the invariably spring like weather and teased him that snow on his birthday was simply impossible.

Now sitting in my office, looking out over the Hudson River, I remembered it was Jake’s birthday. The past week had been unusually warm, in the seventies, and the prospects of a boiling summer in New York City loomed ahead. But that day started out cold and overcast. And while I sat there, thinking about how much I needed to remember the love of a good and kind man, it began to snow. Within several minutes, the Hudson was blanketed with white flakes. Jake had sent a sign to me and the tears rolled down my face.

A colleague came running into my office.

“Can you believe it’s snowing?”

Nothing was impossible - not even snow from heaven that day.

That last summer with Len, I had soaked in the luxury of his enormous marble Jacuzzi, close to being another victim of his personalized version of corporate raids. Now that I was out of the elaborate maze he had constructed for me, I could again notice that the leaves were gorgeous.

All my adult life, people had told me how much they savored my joie de vivre. Len had almost sucked the joy out of me, leaving me no buffer against his unstoppable power.

And then on a crisp morning when Chloe was home from college for the weekend, I woke up and realized that in all of the time since I had lost Jake, I had never felt so good, so thoroughly pleased with my children and with myself. If I hadn’t been so desperate, I would have been done with Len years earlier. But he had smelled the desperation and the advantage was his.

Chloe and Ben sat at dinner that night laughing over our family joke of how Ben was born with both Chloe’s and his fair share of the athletic genes. Watching them I sat quietly, completely satisfied with the moment. Ben was now six foot four, almost as tall as his father and just as handsome with his father’s heart of gold. Chloe was now the daughter I had always wished for - strong, beautiful, hardworking but always ready to play. I had brought these two up singlehanded.

Gazing at the heavens from our twenty-second floor window, way above the twinkling lights of the City, I whispered a message back to Jake.

“I did well with your kids. You’d be so proud of them. And you’d be so proud of the woman I’ve become. You can rest in peace now. We’ll be just fine, Jake. I have survived the toughest one of all.”

•  •  •

Traffic in the Bronx crawled as Ben and I headed to his game on a Saturday afternoon. Ben looked stone-faced listening to music, getting psyched to pitch, while I prayed the pitching gods would smile on him. At the ballpark the mothers always huddled together in the bleachers, holding our collective breath until one of our sons walked off the mound after his last throw, either a hero or a bum.

The car windows opened to the spring air while Nirvana blasted on a tape. As we stopped at a light, a fire engine red Camaro pulled up next to my driver’s side window. The two guys inside bopped their heads in time to the sounds coming from our car.

“Hey mama, love your music,” one called out.

My music? I sort of smiled back at him trying to disguise the fortysomething woman chauffeuring her son around.

“Cool, very cool,” he said and they drove off.

“Guess your mama is cool,” I said bopping my head.

Ben cringed with teenage disbelief covering his face.

“You want to be cool?” he said.

I stopped bopping.

“You know my friend Tyler. His older brother just climbed Kilimanjaro. That’s cool. You’ve always had a lot of courage so why don’t you climb?”

And then Ben turned away to listen to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

Kilimanjaro? A native New Yorker who had never slept in a tent, let alone climbed a mountain. Was that a curve ball Ben threw me? But something about his comment left me wondering. There remained a void after Jake’s death that supposedly could only be filled by a man.

Standing on the top of the world’s highest freestanding mountain might be that moment that could make the past vanish in thin air. Literally. Hiking in Provence would not do the trick. It had to be this kind of challenge.

Yet what Ben didn’t know, just two days before a friend introduced me to Ted, an acquaintance of hers, at a party.

“Ted’s a criminal defense attorney who handles high profile cases that make headlines. He has his own firm. And if that’s not enough, he climbed Kilimanjaro two years ago,” she said that evening as he stood erect by her side.

With a pin stripe suit, Ferragamo tie and thick grey hair, he looked every bit the part of a senior partner on “LA Law”. The climber in him appeared evident in his tall, strong body.

“He’s divorced and very successful,” she whispered in my ear as she turned and left us standing alone.

“You have soulful eyes. Lots of deep emotion there,” Ted said.

Not sure about the proper response to that, I just kept my soulful eyes looking into his.

“I assume you came alone,” Ted said while he appeared to laser into my eyes as if he could take control of me if he did it long enough. Did this work when he cross-examined witnesses?

“I feel like I’m on the witness stand. You must be quite intimidating.”

“Of course I am. I’ve got some very important clients counting on that. Let’s have dinner. Give me your number?” Ted said as he took out his business card and handed it to me.

“If you’ll tell me about Kilimanjaro.”

After Ben’s comment, the thought of climbing Kilimanjaro consumed me. Since the end of my relationship with Len, I had vowed to never let anyone treat me like that, ever. And despite the deep wound of Jake’s death, somehow I wanted to open my heart and love completely again.

I wondered if I could risk loving like that once more knowing one day I’d have to feel the inevitable pain of saying goodbye. But I didn’t want to go through the next thirty years feeling nothing. Maybe by climbing Kili, building a core strong enough to climb that mountain, I could yet again engage in life and start over. Get a sense of our place in this world. And then by finding love and going with it. Uphill. One step at a time.

Ted and I met for dinner a week later at The Four Seasons, a meal that lasted for two hours while Ted unexpectedly poured out the story of his tumultuous life. Surrounded by the elegant décor and the power brokers of New York, Ted began when his alcoholic father physically and verbally abused him as a child.

Then he narrated the saga of his two failed marriages. As Ted retraced the wounds of his life, my mind reeled with the thought that Ted might just be another version of Len. The grown man never able to overcome and always compensating for a very damaged childhood.

The two hours passed before I interjected myself into his world, having literally not uttered a word for the entire time.

“Tell me about Kilimanjaro. I’m seriously considering the climb,” I finally said.