Woman on Top (4 page)

“Yes, but my father was a wonderful, loving man. Guess I looked to him as my touchstone for men. Any other guys were aberrations. At summer camp, the mail arrived every day with a new handwritten love poem from my father. I still have all of them.”

“That will be hard to compete with.” Len chuckled.

“I hate to tell you but I’ve received some pretty good love letters and poems since my father.”

Len stared at me with his competitive, calculating eyes.

As soon as dinner ended, Len paid the check and we went out into the cold night. I found myself in the same position as after the first date, waiting for the kiss, although this time I had worn ballet flats.

“I’m going away for two weeks over the holidays with my kids. It will be our first vacation as a family without Judy. I’ll call you when I get back,” Len said.

He didn’t kiss me goodnight. Again.

It was lunchtime at The Oasis, a small but very crowded and noisy diner near my office in Hartford.

“No kiss on the second date. Maybe he’s gay,” I shrugged, almost desperately.

This caused a ripple of laughter at the table. My friends, who were also colleagues, and I met there almost every day for lunch. It provided us a welcome retreat from the confines of the office and a chance to do something that we did almost as well as practice law - gossip. They were three smart, witty, loving women - all lawyers. I adored them. We were professionals in a competitive environment and yet the best of friends.

“He’s not gay. Maybe he’s showing you some respect,” Bonnie said. Bonnie was my rational friend, always a source of good level advice. Bonnie married for the first time just two years before and seemed very pleased with her choice after waiting so long for a good man to come along.

“Kate, we all make the same mistake. We find a man and clearly don’t know the guy, but we think he’s special and hop into bed with him too quickly and get emotionally attached too soon. We don’t sleep around so we think it’s okay,” Zoë began.

“We’re confused, believing that the intimacy of sex is more than it is and then we wake up six months later and find out who this guy we slept with really is. And then the relationship ends and we’re hurt. Take your time. Don’t sleep with this man for at least three months.” Zoë said.

“I think men will show more of themselves if there’s more at stake. They tend to take the path of least resistance. So if you want to force a conversation and see if there is a relationship worth having, just say no to having sex for a while,” Bonnie said.

“But what if he doesn’t call? What if he meets someone while he’s away? I liked him,” I asked.

“What did you like?” Rachel said. Our offices abutted each other, and I often overheard her drill a point into opposing counsel in her quiet tone. She had mastered keeping a soft-spoken even cadence in a world of shrill litigators. Already on her third marriage, she would never dare to offer advice about relationships with her track record.

“He’s a widower, loves his three kids, is a partner at a major New York company and seems relatively normal. He’s not great looking - kind of an Edward G. Robinson type. But is it too much to ask for a kiss? How long can this go on? I’m used to men slobbering all over me. This is just so weird. And think of the men I’ve dated. I told you about the Cockroach Man, didn’t I?”

“Remember, we’re eating,” Zoe said.

“Before I met Len I was fixed up on a blind date with a very wealthy New York real estate developer. He was a tall, attractive man who had been married twice. We met for a drink at Crystals’s. Within an hour, he gulped down three scotches while I sipped a Chardonnay.

“First he asked me four questions: Did I work for the money? Did I own or rent my apartment? What did my father do for a living? How many bedrooms were there in the apartment where I grew up?”

“I can’t believe it. And they say that women are always trying to find out how much money men have,” Rachel said.

“He was trying to see if I was worthy of him. But then he began relating his psychiatrist’s take on his second marriage to a much younger woman when I noticed an enormous cockroach crawling up the wall between us. I couldn’t listen to another word he was saying and sat there wondering when he’d notice the insect. I just sat there and stared at the wall. But he didn’t notice and kept talking. And talking.

“Finally I motioned to the bug. He glanced at it smiled and then went on to describe his first marriage. At this point I took off my shoe, whacked that cockroach as hard as I could with it, put my shoe back on and left.”

“Only in New York,” Bonnie said.

But Zoe wasn’t paying attention to my story.

“I bet Len makes a lot of money. I bet he makes ten million dollars a year,” Zoë said.

A rare silence engulfed the table for a moment as we digested that possibility.

“But he’s a partner at that place and they’re usually such bastards. Be careful Kate. Do you think he’d be making that kind of money if he didn’t have something of the bastard in him?” Bonnie declared.

Zoë looked at her watch and interrupted.

“We need to get back to the office. Lunch tomorrow. Analysis of Len, part two.”

Bonnie looked at me, almost with pity.

“Something tells me we’ll be dissecting this man for a long time to come.”

WINTER 1995

CHAPTER 3

January

L
en called the night he returned from his holiday vacation. Snuggled under a thick duvet and reading the
New York Times Magazine,
the ring of the phone startled me. His voice sounded sweet and eased the frigidness of the cold night outside where beautifully untarnished snow laced the ground. I sank further into the sanctuary of my brass bed.

“How was your trip?”

“Good, but I’m glad to be back. I can’t wait to get to the office. And actually I did quite a lot of work while away. I need my work, my routines,” he said.

“Then we’re polar opposites. I dread the end of vacations and am miserable for days after I go back to work. I actually hate routines. They feel like heavy chains waiting to be broken. Routines mean boredom and predictability to me.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am unless I was willing to be the workhorse on the farm. So you’re the wild horse that makes a great ride but needs to be tamed?” Len asked.

“‘The Taming of the Shrew’? Not likely.”

We arranged our third date at Max’s Grill, in Litchfield, Connecticut.
Zagat
said that we’d like the contemporary ambiance. This time I made sure to be early and stood waiting in the crowded entrance at the door. Every time a patron came in, I was blasted with the cold night air. Len finally walked in, and kissed me on the cheek. Just a little peck on the cheek, but a little peck could be a kiss and a kiss was a kiss. I felt a small victory.

Dressed so casually this time, Len no longer resembled the uber Wall Street man. The sense of power that had infused his appearance on our previous dates disappeared in the corduroys and flannel shirt he had chosen.

We were guided through the crowd to our small table on the side. The restaurant decorated in black and gray tones looked filled with New Yorkers on their weekend out in Litchfield. Even the waiters had an air about them.

When we were seated, the waiter handed us our menus and I looked Len over. He had a slight tan but not much for having just spent two weeks in the sun.

“Do you always order fish?” he asked.

My eating habits were predictably the subject of discussion. Obsessed with exercise, health and maintaining a size six figure, the food I ate was perhaps the one area where routine and a sense of control gave me comfort.

“How was your vacation?” I said.

“Vacation felt good. When word got out I’m a widower, people on the beach were constantly offering me women’s phone numbers.”

“Did you take the numbers?”

And why the hell did he have to tell me this?

“No, it wouldn’t look right. It’s too soon after Judy’s death.”

Len caught me staring at the odd yellowish cast of his hair.

“I dye my hair,” he said.

“I realized that on our first date. It looks kind of unreal.”

“No you didn’t,” Len said as he frowned at me.

Then he put on a sheepish look and displayed the tiniest of smiles.

“Did you? When Judy was dying, she asked me to dye my hair to get rid of the gray so I’d look young again for her.”

“I thought you colored it after Judy died so you’d look younger. For dating purposes.”

“No. And I hate doing it. I feel like such a phony. I’m not doing it any more.”

Len’s face resembled that of the Everyman - a large nondescript look that could be found on hundreds of men walking the streets of Jersey City where he had grown up. But his eyes revealed an overwhelming intensity. I wasn’t sure if they scared me outright or if he used them as a warning signal “Don’t mess with me”.

“Why do you work as in-house counsel and not at a law firm? You know the only things that matter are money and power,” Len said.

“That’s such a cliché, isn’t it?” I asked. “I’ve never experienced either. My relatives have always worked in public service, universities, hospitals.”

His money and power had been impotent against cancer, unable to halt the suffering, unable to prevent Judy’s death.

“When Jake died, I had to get a job. I couldn’t bear to leave my children for any length of time so I started parttime in-house. The people I work with are really smart, they’ve just chosen to go in-house for quality of life reasons. We don’t have to work nights or weekends,” I said.

“I’ve been working non-stop for twenty-five years. I understand your predicament but those Harvard and Yale educated friends of yours. Why would they give up the money of a law firm to work in-house? What are they earning? A hundred thousand a year?”

Probably Len’s weekly income. For him to acknowledge the choices of my friends would be to abrogate all that he had worked for.

“Your kids are pretty lucky to have you,” he said.

“I’d do anything for my kids. I remember growing up, my father would look me straight in the eye and say ‘I’d die for you’. I thought it was a bit extreme at the time and never understood why he would say something like that. Now I do since I feel the same way about my kids.”

“My father was weak, just another victim of my mother,” Len said.

“So who loved you? What got you through all this? You were a child.”

“I have my mother’s strength. I used it.”

I was about to ask if he was like her in other ways but held my tongue for the moment just as the waiter brought our desserts. I thanked the waiter. Len barely nodded at him.

“You know, I didn’t shed a tear when my mother died. I felt relieved,” Len snarled.

Relief when his mother died? I remembered what they said in all those dating tips about how a man feels about his mother are clues to how he’ll treat you.

“I can’t imagine how that feels. The night before my father died his doctor told me that my dad would be gone in the next twenty-four hours. The doctor said later I didn’t even register what he told me that night. I had ‘disassociated’ from the whole experience. Guess I didn’t want to hear what I didn’t want to hear,” I said.

“Did you do that with Jake?” Len asked.

“I’ve been known to tune out what I don’t want to know or hear more often than I’d like to think.”

Len remained quiet, visibly computing what I had just said. Uh oh, I shouldn’t have told him that.

When dinner was over, I watched as Len scurried across the restaurant to get his oversized tan sheepskin coat. The coat, clearly the wrong size, drooped over his body and the color washed out his face. The small, quick steps he took radiated inexhaustible energy.

Wearing baggy greenish corduroy pants and a plaid flannel shirt, he appeared dressed for dinner possibly in Juneau, not Litchfield. His bulging pocket stuffed with his wallet and keys looked comical. What was he thinking when he dressed for our date? That I should see his casual side?

The bitterly cold wind slashed over our faces as we left the restaurant. The streets of the small Connecticut village looked deserted. Len put his arms around me and leaned in for the kiss. We placed ourselves to the left of the restaurant door as he held my face and very tenderly stroked my lips with his fingertips.

The kisses felt gentle at first but then he wrapped his arms around me and began to kiss me with swelling hunger. His breath kept getting faster, and suddenly, he began to wobble. He latched onto the signpost in order to continue kissing me.

I could only guess that he felt nervous, I laughed to myself, as the shaking didn’t stop.

“I ran a lot today and my leg is giving out from under me,” he said.

I preferred to think that he was apprehensive about kissing a woman other than his wife, the first new kiss in twenty-four years.

“It’s freezing. Let’s get in my car,” he offered.

We climbed into the front seat of his car and immediately began again. The kisses were long and deep. He began to open my coat and put his hand under my sweater on my breast. After several minutes he pulled my sweater up and began to suck on the nipple.