The View From Penthouse B (21 page)

“Last time, meaning when I threw him out?”

“Correct.”

“No! I refused.”

“That doesn’t sound like you,” I said.

“How could it ever have been fixed? Did we have
issues?
Did we need help
communicating?
Was the problem fifty-fifty, his and mine, or was it one hundred per cent Charles in the headlines for screwing his patients? Who needed bullshit marriage counseling? I didn’t even want to be in the same room with him.”

“But now it seems doable?” Anthony asked.

“He wore me down. I’m not going because I want us to get back together.”

We waited, but she didn’t explain further. “Then why
are
you doing it?” I asked. “It can’t be all about an expensive lunch.”

“So he’d stop nagging me. I said no ten times before I said yes.”

“Addiction or no addiction, wouldn’t a guy want to speak privately to a counselor about his sex life?” I asked.

Margot said, “We’re not going for that. We’re going supposedly to find”—air quotes—“peace and harmony. And you know what would help? If the guy hypnotizes me so I leave with marital amnesia.”

“Wanna know what I think?” asked Anthony.

“I know what you think,” said Margot.

“I don’t,” I said.

Anthony patted my hand. “It’s my belief that Charles is looking for peace and harmony, all right . . . in his ex-wife’s bed.”

Margot rose. Did she look offended? Not at all. She yawned and stretched rather grandly. Body language translation?
You might be correct.

I reminded her, on what we were calling our daily constitutional now that the weather had inched into the sixties, that she was still dating Roy.

“Roy? Here’s the trouble with Roy: He doesn’t have a red cent. It’s no longer cute.”

“But you’ve known that from the start. And it’s not as if you have much in the way of disposable income, either.”

“I know! But I have the apartment. And my alimony. And my fabulous boarders. I don’t feel as poor as I actually am.”

I said, “I’ve never thought of you as someone who needed a rich boyfriend.”

“Rich? I didn’t say rich. I don’t need rich.” We were passing a market with fruit and vegetables displayed outside. An aproned young man was tossing out the old, the yellowed, and the overripe. “But would I like to stop picking up every check for two cups of coffee and two glasses of wine? Yes.”

“I guess the question is, do you like him anyway?”

Instead of answering, she asked the vegetable guy in pantomime if she could have the cabbage leaves he was paring off and presumably discarding. He handed her a plastic bag with a wave of the hand that said
Help yourself
.

She said with a grin,
“Sopa, sí?”

“
Sopa
,” he answered with an instant grin indicating some happy recovered soup memory.

That was so Margot. You could call it good manners or friendliness, but really it was charm.
“Cómo se llama?”
she asked him.

“Mañuel.”

“
Gracias
, Mañuel.”

He offered two bruised tomatoes, but she said, “
No mas!
Gracias
.” I knew she had exhausted her Spanish, which was limited to the vocabulary of menus and amenities, but still she’d won a friend.

After our adioses and a few blocks in silence, I asked, “Isn’t it going to be hard to break it off with Roy after you’ve been sleeping together?”

Margot said, “Not that hard.” She nudged me with her elbow. “Especially since I haven’t heard from him in a while. Tomorrow it’ll be two weeks.”

“Does that hiatus have something to do with Charles?”

“I am not admitting any interest in Charles. Nada.”

And then the question I’d been waiting for an opportune moment to ask: “How did it go today with Dr. Sadler?”

She headed for a bus-stop bench and I followed. “I was dying for you to ask! I enjoyed every minute. It was ladies first, so Sadler asked for a little history and what brought us there today. So I had the floor for the whole time! Of course, everyone thinks that appointment number two is Charles’s turn.”

“But it’s not?”

“I only agreed to go once, remember?”

“But wouldn’t it be fair to go for one more?”

A bus had pulled up and was waiting after two passengers disembarked. Margot yelled, “We’re just sitting. Thanks!” She slid closer on the bench. “You think I need to be fair?”

Reflexively, I said “No.” But then, “It depends. Do you want things to get better? I don’t mean a reconciliation. Just working toward . . . something more comfortable.”

“Oh, it’s plenty comfortable,” she said. “More than I saw coming.”

Should I request amplification? Betsy would. Anthony would, too. So I asked, “Have you slept with Charles since he got out of prison? You can tell me. I won’t be judgmental. I know that kind of thing happens.”

She said, “I’ve thought of it.
He’s
thought of it every night for the past—as he likes to put it—ninety-nine weeks. You’d think he’d been marking days off in chalk on his cell wall.”

I asked if she thought she’d have to forgive him in order to take him back into her bed.

When she didn’t answer, I said, “I won’t be shocked either way.”

“Do I think what he did was forgivable? No. But is he sorry? Extremely sorry? Insanely sorry? Yes. Do I have flashbacks about the good times? Yes. Do I think my bed is too big for one? Often. So maybe one answer is ‘Hate the sin but have sex with the sinner.’”

I didn’t expect I’d react with anything but surprise and scorn, but there was something about the image of an empty bed that caused my voice to choke. Eventually, I said, “You’re lucky. All you have to do is forgive Charles. Not everybody can be brought back with mere forgiveness and marital amnesia.”

“I know what you’re saying. I do. I worry: How would Gwen feel if one of us was able to turn back the clock. If we weren’t the team we are now.” An arm snaked around my shoulders. “Because you know what we are, don’t you? Two eligible women in the most exciting city in the world. Two dames on the verge of . . . something.”

That interpretation of us seemed to require more energy and action than merely sitting at a bus stop. We rose, and suddenly we were costars in a bygone movie—two sisters seeking their fortunes in Manhattan, cabbage leaves swinging from the elder’s resourceful hand.

Were we happy? Should we be? That unspoken question made me miss a beat in our tandem high-step. But I recovered. “Do we need these old leaves?” I asked. “Haven’t we had enough second-time-around cabbage soup to last a lifetime?”

“You surprise me, Gwen-Laura Schmidt.”

I said, “I know. I surprise myself.”

MetsFan9 to MiddleSister: I Iove making dinner for that special person. (steak or crab legs) with candle light and or bbq. Love to hold hands, cuddling, making love for hours, but very picky and choosy. Told I am a very good kisser, Very romantic, extremly sexual. NOT looking for a 1 night stand. Enjoy board games, cribbage, Scrabble, skinny dipping etc.

27

In Which I Go Out on a Date

W
HEN I ARRIVED AT
the beautiful hotel bar, dark wood everywhere, Mitchell rose from our small, votive-lit table and greeted me with a polite kiss on one cheek. He was wearing a dark suit, a starched white shirt, and a tie striped in orange and royal blue.

The waiter was there in seconds. I ordered a datelike Cosmopolitan before Mitchell chose from the bar menu a gin and tonic with grapefruit bitters and grapefruit zest, inspiring me to say, “Make that two.”

The waiter said, “It’s one of our signature cocktails. And a personal favorite of mine.”

And then we were alone. He complimented me on my choice of venues and told me I looked nice. Did I sense that he was somewhat taken aback by the grooming improvement? I said thank you, adding that this was the first warm day of the year, hence this cotton frock.

“Quite toasty,” he said. “And maybe not just the ambient temperature.”

I heard myself babbling that my dress was a hand-me-down from my sister Betsy, who had decided it was too long and she had no time to get it altered. Otherwise she and I are the same size. I’m taller. I’m the middle sister. She’s a banker . . . she wears suits to work . . .

“Was this the sister I saw you with at the deli?”

I told him no, that was Margot. Which led to more babbling about the population of penthouse B, i.e., Anthony Sarno, sterling roommate and excellent baker.

“How many roommates and how many bedrooms?” Mitchell asked.

I told him it was a large place. That, one by one, various undesignated spaces were being turned into sleeping chambers.

“Sounds nice,” he said. “Do you have your own room?”

I said, um, yes, I did.

“Me, too.”

“Do you have roommates?”

“What I have,” he said, eyes closed with the burden, “is joint custody of a college-aged daughter.”

I said, “I think that’s nice. Where is she in school?”

“College-
aged,”
he said. “Not college-enrolled. She works for my parents, which I think I told you about. We’re in dry cleaning.”

I asked if that meant he was inhaling dangerous fumes, and he said no, that was off-site at the plant. He did the books. “I have a bachelor’s degree from Saint John’s,” he added.

“I know. You mentioned that before.”

“And you? College?”

“Yes. Syracuse. English major.”

“Syracuse,” he repeated. “Do you follow basketball?”

I said sometimes, which was a stretch. Edwin was the one who had, on my behalf, adopted Syracuse, filling some vacuum, he always said, because his own alma mater, Juilliard, never made the sports pages.

“Saint John’s was eliminated in the first round this year,” Mitchell continued.

“That’s too bad,” I said, without asking first round of what.

“They lost to Gonzaga, which was seeded eleventh.”

I asked if this was that thing they call “March Madness,” and he said yes, exactly.

“Was Syracuse in it?” I asked.

“Not the Sweet Sixteen. They lost to Marquette.”

“You know a lot,” I said.

Our drinks arrived, and we concentrated on our first sips. He proposed a toast. “Thank you for joining me. What’re the odds you’d have seen my ‘missed connection’?”

I clinked his glass. “Slim. But you’re welcome.”

“I read those things all the time, but, honest to God, I never thought I’d try it myself.”

I changed the subject to a more businesslike one: reminding him that when we met at the deli, he was very keen about online dating.

“Did I tell you to do it? Because it stinks! The women post pictures that are twenty-five years old. I mean—be serious! They’re standing in front of a nineteen-eighty-eight Buick holding a kid in diapers!”

“Is there really a Renee?” I asked.

“There is . . .”

“But?”

Without looking up, he said, “Issues.”

When nothing followed, I asked, “Would you care to elaborate?”

“I don’t want to be a whiner. The major problem is that my daughter hates her.”

I took what I hoped looked like an offhand sip from my drink before asking, “Because . . . ?”

“She thinks Renee acts one way in front of me, and another way when it’s just the two of them.”

“So they do things together, without you?”

“Once. A movie I didn’t want to see. And believe you me—it was a disaster.”

I said, “I’d be scared to take the daughter of a man I was dating to a movie unless I already knew she liked me.”

“No kidding! And maybe you’d let her reach into your box of popcorn without asking her to first wash her hands.”

“That’s terrible,” I said, though I could recognize the impulse.

“Renee claimed that she didn’t know anything was wrong. Becca’s not a sulker, either. It didn’t help that when they got back to the apartment, Renee asked her if she had homework, and if so, had she finished it. Becca heard it as
Go to your room so I can be alone with your father.
And said something to the effect of ‘I graduated from bleeping school two bleeping years ago.’”

“And when was this?”

Mitchell frowned. “Last Sunday. A matinee.”

“Like three days ago? Or the Sunday before that?”

“Whatever. It’s for the best. Are you familiar with the term ‘exit relationship’?”

I said yes, of course. I’d been in a support group so I knew every term. How long after his divorce had he met Renee?

“I was still technically married. That happens. It takes a long time before a divorce becomes final.” He blotted his upper lip and brow with a cocktail napkin. “Enough about Renee. She blew it. And it never was a hundred percent.”

I asked what made something a hundred percent.

“Lots of things,” he said. And with that, unfortunately, came a rather fond and lingering gaze into my eyes.

What would throw cold water on this sudden romantic spell? “Obviously your number one priority is—and should be—your daughter’s approval,” I ventured.

“No! Not number one. ‘Good with kids’ falls under the heading ‘Bonuses.’ Trust me, numbers one through three are chemistry, chemistry, and chemistry.”

I made a quick downward check at my sweetheart neckline. Had it suggested to him that there was an accommodating woman across the table?

He continued: “Let’s be honest, even at my age there has to be good old-fashioned animal magnetism.”

I asked what his age was. “A young fifty-one,” he said, winking. “But don’t get me wrong. I’m careful. I’m a good dad. Becca shouldn’t have to wake up to a strange woman drinking coffee at breakfast in her negligee.” And then, as if I hadn’t already mentally excused myself from the table: “Is it awkward—having two roommates around all the time?”

I said no. Margot and Anthony and I were most compatible and respectful.

“I didn’t mean
everyday
getting along. I meant in terms of privacy. Private lives . . . as in entertaining guests.”

Was this the new territory I wanted to conquer, and this its indigenous species? Another woman might have hinted that penthouse B was awash with chemistry and queen-size beds. But I didn’t. I was flummoxed by his ambitious smile and felt nothing except his clammy hand on my thigh.