The Spinster Sisters (6 page)

But for whatever reason, neither Abbot’s sophistication and intelligence nor Ben’s infectious energy seemed the right Friday night entertainment this week. Lucky for me, Paige had been available, and we made plans that involved Thai food and a showing of the documentary
March of the Penguins
, which I had never seen.

“Some more stuff came in today about the wedding,” Paige says, handing me a folder.

“How bad?” I ask, riffling through a small stack of papers, mostly e-mails and letters.

“No death threats today, but we are starting to get some of the communication the PR people were worried about. Not the people who always hated us, but women who are feeling betrayed by the marriage.”

My eye falls on the top page of the packet.

 
“Oh boy. That’s not good,” I say. “Are they all like this one?”

“Not all. Some are just mean-spirited. Some are calling you guys frauds and saying that you just did it for the money. But they are coming in at a rate that makes me think actual press isn’t far behind.”

“Let’s have another meeting with the PR people, see what we need to do. Maybe we need to plant a couple of features with the journalists that like us to be proactive.”

“Should I get Jill in on this one?” Paige asks in a tone that implies she thinks yes.

“Not yet.” I shake my head. “I don’t want her troubled by this. Let’s try to take care of it quietly. And keep this shit out of her box, okay? She doesn’t need to see it.”

Paige shrugs. I know she disagrees with how I am handling this, but I’m not in the mood. Luckily, the buzzer rings, and I go downstairs to get the food.

The two of us are curled up on my couch, full of cucumber salad and pad see eiw from Sai Mai, and about two-thirds of the way through the movie, when my buzzer rings.

“I wonder who that could be?” I say.

“You don’t suppose it’s one of your boys?” asks Paige.

“They know better than to show up without calling first,” I say as I walk over to the intercom. “Hello?”

“Hey. It’s Brant.”

Oh, good Lord. What is he doing here?
“Hey, come on up.” I press the buzzer to let him in.

Brant and I have had a reasonably amicable divorced life. Brant fought the divorce pretty vehemently at first, but once he realized I was determined, he was resolute about the whole thing. Since neither of us owned anything, including the apartment in which we were living, and since we didn’t have any children, we decided to do it ourselves and not use lawyers. It went very smoothly, without any fighting, which I believe saved the friendship. He kept the apartment, and I moved in with Jill. He kept the cats, which had been his anyway. I was never much of a cat person. We split the joint assets right down the middle and divvied up the material possessions fairly easily. And while we both gave each other plenty of space in our lives, we do still have a presence. That is undeniable. But he can be something of a schmuck, and the longer we are divorced, the less time I spend invested in maintaining the friendship. He simply hasn’t ever really grown up, and I’m less and less interested in hearing about computer crap and how angry the new Star Wars movies make him. He can be sweet, and he is always nice to me, so I’m hard-pressed to cut him out completely. However, he should know better than to arrive unexpectedly at ten P.M. on a Friday evening.

I go to the door and open it, waiting to see him appear around the stair bend. But the first head I see isn’t Brant’s. Instead, I’m faced with a tiny woman with large breasts, long, straight, auburn hair, and cat’s-eye glasses. Two steps behind her is Brant, smiling at me.

She reaches the landing. “Hi Jodi, I’m Mallory,” the redhead announces, thrusting a hand at me excitedly. Super.

“We were on our way back from dinner and noticed the lights on,” says Brant. “Figured we’d stop by to say hello.” What a dumb idea that was.

Mallory pushes past me into my apartment, while Brant greets me with a kiss on the cheek.

“Wow,” says Mallory. “Some place you have here.”

“Hey, Paige,” says Brant, waving at her.

Paige raises one arched eyebrow. “Hey, Brant.”

Brant walks into the living room and sits on a chair. Mallory is looking longingly down my hallway.

“It really is a beautiful apartment,” she says.

I can’t fucking believe it. “Would you like a tour?” I ask her.

Mallory is Brant’s new girlfriend. They’ve been dating approximately two months and, according to Brant, have not slept together yet. I don’t really relish being the recipient of Brant’s dating information. But he doesn’t have very many friends, and since my business has become a success, everybody focuses on how great it is for me to be single, so I sort of feel like I owe him one. After all, he’s become even less than a footnote in my public persona, which he’s taken in stride, and even though I make no attempt to hide the fact that I have been married, most people assume I’ve always been single.

Apparently, Mallory used to work for a PR firm here in Chicago before going back to law school. She’s had some trouble passing the bar exam and is working as a paralegal for a large firm while studying to take her third stab at it. They met at a birthday party for a mutual friend, and Brant is very excited about the new relationship. So I feel like I have to be supportive. After all, just because he wasn’t the right guy for me doesn’t mean he should have to spend his life alone. Brant stays in the living room talking to Paige while I walk Mallory through my apartment.

Usually I’m very proud of my place. I designed it myself, painstakingly picking out furniture and fixtures. Every compliment usually goes straight to my ego. But this time is different; every kind word that Mallory offers makes me uncomfortable. She comments about the size of the apartment, the expansiveness of the rooms, the quality of the furniture and the artwork, the details in the kitchen and the bathrooms. I can just see her comparing it to my old apartment where Brant still lives. A third the size, in a lesser neighborhood, with hand-me-down furniture, and bookshelves made of planks and cement blocks. Not that Brant couldn’t afford better. Computer network guys always manage to make a pretty decent living. Brant never cared about aesthetics the same way that I did. If he has a roof over his head that doesn’t leak, heat in the winter and air-conditioning units in the summer, and the couch doesn’t fall apart when he sits down, that is good enough for him. But five minutes with Mallory makes one thing patently clear. She is ambitious. And I can practically hear the running tally in her head as she fingers the cherry cabinets and stainless appliances in my kitchen. We return to the living room, where the movie is clearly paused on my flat-screen television. Paige makes pointed eye contact with me as Mallory kicks off her shoes and curls up in a corner of the couch. I guess we’re having a real visit.

“So Brant tells me you’re an expert on relationships,” Mallory says.

“Well, I’d hardly say that,” I say. “The work my sister and I do has less to do with relationships to other people and more to do with the relationship you have with yourself. It’s about how to embrace your life no matter what your relationship status. And if you are in a relationship, how to not lose yourself. Our primary philosophy is that you can’t be a good partner to somebody else unless you’ve clearly defined who you are and what you want in the future.”

“Wow,” Mallory says. “I’m just lucky you didn’t have all that relationship expertise when you were married to Brant, or maybe I’d still be alone!”

Sweet Cap’n Crunch. What the hell is this bitch aiming at?

“Well,” I say, “I couldn’t ask for a better ex-husband. I’m probably one of the only people who can honestly say that getting married was one of the best things that ever happened to me, and getting divorced was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

Brant smiles. “See? That’s why you’re my favorite ex-wife.”

“What’s that I smell?” asks Mallory. “Vietnamese food?”

“No.” says Paige. “We had Thai.”

“Oh,” says Mallory. “I was just wondering because I’m very knowledgeable about Vietnamese culture. I lived in Vietnam for over a year. I speak the language. Do you speak any languages?”

“French,” I say.

I can’t look Paige in the eye. I know she’s got a look about her that says,
Who the hell is this woman?

“Actually, there’s a lot of French influence in Vietnam,” Mallory begins. And then proceeds to regale us for a full twenty minutes about her life in Vietnam, her study of the culture, her desire to return with Brant and show him her village. She talks a blue streak. And she has one primary topic: herself. We hear the entire story of how she and Brant met. We hear how she was a clarinet player of such caliber that she was recruited by the army to play in one of their orchestras, and that was how she paid for college. We heard about her privileged Jewish upbringing in Savannah, Georgia, and her subsequent estrangement from her family. She flops around on my couch, posing and posturing and letting one bit of information about herself lead into the next in a manner that practically sucks all the oxygen from the room. Brant sits on the chair, this strange look of pride and nervousness on his face.

What the hell is he thinking? I look at the clock over the television. It’s ten thirty. They’ve been here for a half hour. Mallory has not asked either Paige or me anything about ourselves. Nor has Brant participated in the conversation. It’s been a monologue on the wonders of Mallory and her exciting and dramatic life. All I want is to find out if the mother penguins make it back to the daddy penguins in time to feed the baby penguins so that they don’t die. Mallory pauses to take a breath, and I jump on the break to say, “That’s very interesting. You know, I feel bad; I invited Paige over to watch this movie, and we still have a half hour left. You guys are welcome to stay and watch with us, but I think we’ll get back to it.”

“Oh no, we couldn’t,” says Mallory. “We have shul in the morning.”

“Shul?” I ask Brant.

“Shul,” he says.

“Orthodox shul? With the curtain down the middle and all the Hebrew?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says.

“What’s that mean?” asks Paige.

“Apparently, it means my ex-husband has converted to Judaism,” I say.

Actually, Brant is technically Jewish. His mother was the granddaughter of a rabbi. But she gave it up when she married his Episcopalian father, and he was raised essentially without religion. He always referred to his family as humanist agnostic. He absorbed the Spingold traditions while we were married, celebrating the holidays with our usual focus on food and not so much on God. But still, it was more observant than he had been growing up. Looks like Mallory is having an even greater spiritual influence.

“Well then, don’t let us keep you,” I say, rising to walk Brant and Mallory to the door.

“It was very nice to meet you,” she says, slipping back into her clogs.

“Likewise,” I say. “I’m sure I’ll see you again.”

“Thanks, Jodi,” says Brant. “I’ll call you this week.”

“Okay, talk to you later,” I say.

I close the door and hear them heading down the stairs. Brant always walked like a herd of elephants, so I can hear his footsteps all the way down to the bottom. I go to the front window and see them exit the building and head out to Brant’s beat-up car. I go back to the living room and sit down.

“What. The fuck. Was that?” says Paige.

“I have no idea.” I sigh.

“Did you know they were coming?”

“Of course not. Don’t you think I would’ve mentioned it?”

“So he just showed up here unannounced with his new girlfriend. At ten P.M. on a Friday night.” Paige looks gobsmacked.

“It certainly looks that way.”

“You realize she did everything except piss on your furniture,” Paige says.

“Yes, I noticed that.”

“And what the hell was that big long speech about her life and her fabulous years as the queen of Vietnam, and how smart she is and how everything has been difficult for her, but she’s risen above it?” Paige is building a head of steam.

“I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

“And what was with needing to have a tour? And taking her shoes off and flopping all over your couch?” Paige takes a breath. “Jodi. I swear to God, if you would’ve come in to work on Monday and explained what just happened, word for word, without any embellishment, I would’ve thought you had lost your mind. I would’ve thought you were exaggerating to make the story funnier. I would’ve thought that you are perhaps feeling a little strange that your ex-husband has this new girlfriend in light of how hard he fought the divorce and vowed that you had ruined him for other women. In a million years I never would have believed you, had I not just seen it for myself.”

“Yeah, I know. Kind of amazing, isn’t it?”

“What the hell was he thinking, bringing her here?”

“You know Brant. He’s a great guy deep down, but he’s totally socially inept. I’m sure that he thinks it makes him look very cool and progressive to have such a comfortable, friendly relationship with his ex-wife. I think he was showing off for her. Announcing that we have the kind of relationship where he can just drop by because he saw the light on. That I would be welcoming and warm and want to meet her and be friendly and she could see us banter back and forth, and isn’t it all one big happy family? But he and I are going to have to have a little talk about the point at which it is appropriate for me to meet the woman in his life. I mean, Jesus Christ. They’re not even sleeping together yet! I don’t need to be part of his weird seduction plan. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that he wait until a relationship is really serious before he drags me into it.”