Good Mourning (21 page)

“You're pulling my leg,” she said, fully amused. “The two of you? An affair?
Ha!
”

Tony and I nodded in agreement. Even he knew it was ridiculous. The guys I went out with were twenty years younger, ten times richer, and a hundred times more attractive. Not that those were requirements or anything, but that was just reality; an overweight, graying family man was hardly the guy I was trying to bag. Mom had suffered enough already. Elaine would have up and died. I might have been the rebel in the family, but I wasn't a freaking masochist.

“So what do we do about this?” said Tony. “They're saying they've seen us out to dinner together, that they ‘know' this is happening. It's out of control.”

Pattie still couldn't get over it. “An affair, I swear, I've heard it all,” she said, still smiling. “In your dreams, Tony!”

“Okay, okay, we get it, it's ridiculous,” said Tony. But when he went on to say that the staff had called his wife—and that as a result, he had tensions at work
and
at home—Pattie became more serious. I added that I was starting to feel like I couldn't work there anymore; Monica was straight-up harassing me, and I was awake at night with anxiety thinking about what she would say about me next. The
notion that Tony and I were sleeping together was laughable, but the situation itself was anything but funny.

Pattie's instructions were twofold: For starters, Tony and I were to spend less time together. “Just until this dies down,” she said. From there on out, we were only to converse when absolutely necessary and would need to work on separate funerals. I would have to go back to a normal schedule, meaning no more Monday through Friday, which had been approved months before by both Tony and the president of Crawford. It actually had nothing to do with playing favorites; the simple fact was, when I worked with a family on a service, they expected me to be
at
that service. And since my days off had been Tuesday and Friday, and Upper East Side clients usually wanted to plan funerals for weekdays before their friends left for their weekend country homes, it was impossible to guarantee I would be there without Crawford having to pay me overtime to come in. But all the staffers saw was that I had a nine-to-five, weekday-only schedule—something that was almost unheard of in the funeral business.

Pattie also said that I should talk to a therapist about my work stress. I scoffed at the idea; I hadn't even gone to therapy after my dad died, so the idea that I would go now over some bitchy coworker seemed crazy. But when Pattie wrote down the name of a therapist that took union insurance and said that she would call me the next day to confirm that I had made an appointment, I knew it was less of a “sugges
tion” and more of a requirement. Crawford had to cover its ass, and apparently that required examining my head.

In a stroke of luck, the therapist was actually just fifteen blocks from my apartment. Before my first session, I called my friend Ben for lunch. His hedge fund office was nearby, and he was able to scoot out of work to meet me at Café Boulud—his fancy suggestion—for a bite before I bared my soul to some poor woman in librarian glasses on a couch. (At least that's how I pictured it; like I said, I had never actually been to therapy before.) It would have been much more practical to meet for salads or sandwiches, but this was Ben, who did everything to the max—including lunch.

“What kind of therapist takes union insurance?” said Ben, chewing on a slice of bread. “Everyone knows the top doctors in this city don't bother with
any
insurance.”

“I don't know,” I said. “The payment plan is the least of my problems.”

Ben called the waiter over and ordered a bottle of vio­gnier, with two glasses. I told him I couldn't drink—going into my first therapy session with a buzz hardly seemed like the most amazing idea. But Ben insisted it would shake off my nerves and instructed the waiter to pour me a “healthy serving” to go with my salad.

“Drink,” he said, raising his glass to his lips and instructing me to do the same.

“I can't,” I said. “This is serious.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Liz, there is
nothing
serious about
this. It's a fucking joke. Do they really think you're going to sleep your way to the
top of a funeral home
?”

“I know it sounds crazy,” I said. “But that's the situation.”

“Bullshit. You're not even sleeping with me. If you're not sleeping with me, you're sure as hell not sleeping with
that
guy.”

I chuckled and took a sip of the wine to appease Ben but didn't touch the rest of it. The truth was, my stomach was in knots. I wasn't super into the idea of spilling my guts to a total stranger, and I was worried she would judge me. It was too easy for people to label me as the spoiled rich girl—granted, I was lunching extravagantly on a weekday—and who was to say that this therapist, a union therapist, no less, would be any different? Ben spent the rest of lunch trying to get me to skip the appointment and drive out to the Hamptons with him on his new BMW motorcycle. I loved bikes, and I didn't mind the Hamptons, but that wasn't my life anymore. I wasn't the get-up-and-go girl I had been a couple of years before. This was my job. I had to see it through.

The therapist's office was on a beautiful tree-lined street, but the inside of the building itself was shabby. It looked more like apartments than offices, and I was surprised when I walked straight into the office rather than into a waiting area. “You must be Elizabeth,” said the therapist, who simply went by Sue. (Not Dr. Sue, just . . . Sue. Although to be fair, she
wasn't a doctor.) Sue was wearing a long skirt with a baggy cardigan, with her curly hair frizzed out all over the place. It was all very nineties chic, if, you know, the nineties had been chic.

The office wasn't much better. Bookshelves lined the walls; there was even a shelf in front of the one lonely window in the whole unit, blocking all the light. The wood floor creaked when I walked, despite the burgundy rug covering most of it. The blinds were plastic. The furniture didn't match. Everything smelled like dust. I immediately regretted not drinking more of the wine.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, trying to decide where in this hellhole I would sit. Sue took care of it for me, motioning for me to take a seat on the couch, which was made of navy blue pleather.

“So you're having some trouble with the other staff members,” Sue began.

I shrugged. “Yeah, you could say that.”
How did I get roped into this again?

“Why don't you take me to when the problems started and walk me through it. Does that sound like a plan?”

“You mean, my first day? I thought we only had forty-­five minutes,” I said.

“You've been having trouble since you started?” said Sue, writing something down in her notebook.

“Yup,” I said, folding my hands in front of me.

“Give me the CliffsNotes, then,” said Sue, flashing a warm smile.

I sighed loudly and started telling her what happened—how Monica hated me from my first day, people stealing my lunch, Tony giving me a promotion, the incident with the
shomer
, the rumors about an affair. Sue was scribbling nonstop, taking down notes and occasionally muttering, “Uh-huh,” or “Okay, got it . . .” After a full twenty minutes of listening to me explain the situation, Sue took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, and set her notebook down on the small side table next to her chair.

“Elizabeth, where do you live?” she asked. I suspected she already knew the answer.

“On Fifth Avenue,” I said.

“That's a pretty ring,” she said, pointing to my sapphire. “Do you wear that to work?”

“It was a gift from my parents,” I said. “I wear it all the time.”

“And that watch?”

“Yes. It was my father's,” I said, starting to get annoyed. “But me living in a nice apartment, and having nice things, does not make it okay for people to harass me at work and make my life hell.”

“You're absolutely right,” said Sue. “It doesn't. But you're the outsider in this situation. You don't speak their language—figuratively
and
, in the case of this Monica woman, literally.”

“So how do I fix that?” I asked, feeling a little flustered.

Sue shook her head. “You don't. If they're getting to you
this badly, it might be time to look for something else. There's not much I can do to help you.”

I didn't want to let Monica and her stupid friends win. In the world I grew up in, people didn't always get along perfectly, but they could put on a happy face for the sake of appearances. No matter where you went, you were bound to run into
someone
you didn't like. A party, a fund-raiser, the Met Ball—they were chock-full of people who hated each other's guts but knew how to kiss on both cheeks and move on. As Elaine used to say, “Friends close, enemies closer.”

“That can't be the answer,” I said. I didn't want to cry, not in front of this stranger. But the idea of giving up because of the way other people were behaving did not sit well with me.

Sue had stopped taking notes entirely and was now leaning forward in her chair, her elbows on her thighs. “Tell me if I have this right,” she said. “You shop on Madison Avenue. You drink . . . I don't know . . . green juices for breakfast. You get weekly manicures. And that bag you're carrying . . . I bet it's not a fake.”

Normally this kind of overgeneralization would offend me, but Sue was pretty spot-on. She also spoke in a kind way, like she was verbalizing something nobody else at Crawford ever would. I
was
different. I
was
an outsider. And while the middle-aged men in the business weren't threatened by me (they were mostly confused about why someone would ever
choose
to work funerals), Monica was a different
story. It suddenly clicked: I was probably everything she hated about Manhattan women, all rolled into one. And not because I was a bad person, but because people—including Crawford clients—had been treating her like she was inferior for years.

“They're never going to understand you fully,” said Sue. “And you need to realize that you don't understand them, either.”

I nodded slowly. Sue was right. As much as I'd focused on how Monica and the rest of the staff had me all wrong, I didn't have a true sense of what their lives were like, either. Accepting defeat wasn't my strong suit, but I had a sense that I wasn't going to win this time. I thanked Sue for her time, and the two of us agreed that we didn't need to do any more sessions. For the time being, I would just keep my head down at work and stay away from Tony as much as possible . . . at least until things had eased up for him at home. Sue was pretty sure that all the drama would pass; eventually, Monica would find something else to gossip about. But none of that would happen if the staff felt like I was getting special treatment. They needed to see me doing more of the grunt work, and that would mean that I wouldn't be able to spend as much time with the clients—which was my
actual
job. I started to feel like I might be moving backward.

More than anything, I wished that I could call my dad. He would have known what to do. Mom, on the other hand,
would have said to get out of there and land another,
better
job. I knew it was best not to go to her with problems about a career she didn't approve of to begin with. Even with how well we'd been getting along lately, there was too much risk of getting hit with a big “I told you so.” That was one defeat I wasn't willing to accept.

TWO WEEKS
after Shomergate, and ten days after my one and only session with Sue, the gossip mill was starting to slow down. Tony spent most of the workday in his office, and word had it that he was interviewing someone to handle prearrangements. He started bickering with the receptionists to cut back on orders of things like tissues and latex gloves (yes, the ones the embalmers wear; not really something a funeral home should cut back on, methinks!) and was blowing up at people for small mistakes, which wasn't like him.

I did my best to keep my distance and spent more time in the prep room with Bill, reading over folders. It was colder than in my office, but at least down there I didn't have to deal with any awkwardness. Bill was never one to get caught up in work drama, and he barely even spoke about what happened, even though I was sure he knew. “Giants have a real shot,” he said, reminding me of our first conversations. He was trying to be business-as-usual, and I loved him for it.

The other new development was that Tony's wife started dropping by Crawford more often. I had met her before. Sometimes, she would come into Manhattan on a Friday after work, and she and Tony would go out to dinner or to see a Broadway show. But instead of cheerily waving hello to me and asking me if Tony had been a pain in the ass that day like she usually did, she barely looked in my direction. One evening, I went to grab a stack of Post-its from behind the reception desk when she was standing in the foyer, waiting for Tony to come down. I wanted to tell her, “Everything you heard was a lie, and these people are nuts, and—one last thing—I would never sleep with your pudgy husband,” but it's not like you can just
say
that to someone. So instead I simply greeted her like I normally would, but she looked straight ahead, only nodding coolly at me.