Then Came You (13 page)

I woke up in the recovery room, on a hospital bed, alone, with an IV needle stuck into the back of my hand, in a room with tiled floors and drab green walls that smelled of disinfectant. Tears trickled down my swollen cheeks. My forehead stung from the needles; my torso and thighs felt like an entire football team had been kicking them. The anesthesia had left me queasy. When it wore off I knew I’d be starving. I hadn’t eaten the day of the operation, and I’d been dieting for the month before; the looser my skin, the doctors had said, the easier it would be for them to suck out the most fat.

A nurse asked how I was feeling and helped me to sit up. A while later, Dr. Perez came in to see me. He touched me gently—my jaw, my nose, my cheekbones, tapping and prodding, murmuring to himself, before pulling open my gown. I’d been bandaged, bound from my breasts to just above my knees, in the stretchy bodysuit that I would wear for the next two weeks. “No mirrors yet,” he cautioned, and I smiled, even though it hurt, imagining the state my face was in. When I’d healed, I looked just the way I’d hoped: glamorous, quietly sexy, with full lips that fell naturally into a pout and a nose that seemed made to turn skyward.

I spent three months recovering. When I told my boss I was moving to New York she sighed, scratched with her capped Montblanc pen underneath the wig she’d worn since her chemo and promised me a job in the firm’s Manhattan office. After eight years in New York, years of handling actors and singers
and Broadway stars who wanted you to help them pretend they were straight when they were photographed at places like the Man Hole, I went out on my own.

Six years after that, I met Marcus in the coffee shop. Less than three hours later he’d called, saying that he was on his way to Japan for a few days but would be back that weekend, and would I like to have dinner?

“Ah. Japan,” I said, leaning back in my chair, kicking off my shoes, and crossing my legs, squeezing them together to keep them from shaking. “I was just there last week.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked.

“I think,” I told him, “that it’s all about the emerging markets right now.”

“Are you free Saturday?”

“I’m afraid I have plans,” I said. I didn’t have plans, but I knew that I had to at least give the impression of being busy on a Saturday night. “But Sunday could work.” This wasn’t strictly adhering to the playbook, but Marcus was the real deal, and I couldn’t put him off long enough for some other girl who’d been waiting for her big chance to swoop in and take what could have been mine.

He took me to Eleven Madison Park, which had just gotten four stars in the
Times,
a fact that should have made it impossible for a civilian to get a reservation. Marcus was no civilian. “Mr. Croft! Welcome!” said the man behind the podium, sounding as if Marcus was a long-lost family member who’d come, maybe bearing good news about a dead relative’s will. I stood in the vestibule, my new dress snug around my body, and inhaled the scent of fresh flowers and buttery sauces, roasted meats and rich desserts, a fragrance that meant money. I could feel my body respond, my nipples tightening, my heartbeat speeding up.
Easy,
I told myself as Marcus slipped off my coat and handed
it to the pretty young girl who’d materialized to whisk it away. They never hired ugly people in places like these. How they got around the civil rights laws I have no idea, but I had never seen an unattractive bartender or waitress or coat-check girl in any of the best restaurants in Manhattan. Maybe no ugly person ever applied. Maybe they all just know to stay away.

The maître d’ led us to the center of the room, past a table set with a dozen oversized glass vases, each containing a single stalk of hydrangea leaning at an angle. I ran my fingers over the creamy paper on which the day’s menu had been printed—minted pea soup, roast spring chicken stuffed with foie gras, baby suckling pig, a dozen other delicacies that made my mouth flood. All I’d had that day was chamomile tea and a wheatgrass shake. After Marcus’s call, I’d embarked on a five-day juice fast that had left me six pounds thinner and a little wobbly . . . but six pounds was six pounds, and I needed every ounce of advantage I could get.

With my right hand, I lifted my wineglass. With my left hand, I gripped the table so that he wouldn’t see me trembling.
Don’t screw this up,
I told myself.
Don’t lose this one, too.

My normal dinner was broiled fish and steamed greens, but I knew that men liked to see women eat. So I’d allowed myself an ambrosial Parker House roll, soft as a cloud in my hand, with fresh, unsalted, locally sourced butter. I’d started with a salad, but one with lardons sprinkled over the lettuce and a poached egg on top, and I had that foie gras stuffed chicken, crisp-skinned and succulent, every juicy bite of it exploding in my mouth, the flavors and textures, salty, sweet, rich, dancing over my tongue.

“You’re very pretty,” said Marcus. I set my fork on my plate.

“You’re not so bad yourself.” He wore the uniform of a successful New York businessman, but his voice was midwestern, plangent and nasal, not Chicago, like I’d guessed, but Detroit. His father had owned a garage, and his mother did the
books. Marcus had invented a way to heat car seats, a technology he’d patented, then sold to the automakers, becoming a millionaire by the time he was twenty-five.

“Confidentially,” he said, lowering his voice to suit the word, “that wasn’t my first business.”

“Oh?” I didn’t have to fake my interest or my smile. Marcus was easy to listen to and not bad-looking, for his age. While he was across the room, exchanging handshakes and backslaps with a tableful of businessmen, I’d slipped a handful of
gougères
into the empty zippered makeup case I kept in my purse. I was, I knew, long past the point where I had to steal bread from the basket, or crudités from the free spread at a bar, just to be sure I’d have something to eat the next day—I had money, plus a refrigerator full of fruit and Greek yogurt and a single emergency bar of dark chocolate studded with candied orange peel—but it was a habit I couldn’t break. Maybe when I was a lady who lunched, kept in the style to which I wanted to become accustomed, I could go into therapy and figure it all out.

“So what were you,” I asked, leaning forward to give him the tiniest glimpse of my candlelit cleavage, with the cheese puffs warm in my lap, “before you were a seat-heating mogul?”

He grinned, looking, with his broad, round face, like a little boy who’d gotten away with something, timing the punchline he’d clearly delivered more than once. “I sold pot.”

I widened my eyes and turned my mouth into a perfectly lipsticked O of amusement. “I’m shocked.” I wasn’t. I’d looked him up online beforehand. The pot anecdote was one he’d told before. But I knew my lines in this play.

He gave a little shrug, a charming smile. I could smell the starch of his suit, the juice from his filet on his china plate, his cologne, layered and complex. His big hands rested on the white tablecloth; his teeth gleamed in the candlelight. “It was the eighties,” said Marcus. “You wouldn’t remember.” I remembered
the eighties just fine, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I bent my head over my folded napkin, soft hair brushing my cheeks. It was like a fencing match, parry and thrust, advance and retreat. Flash him a smile, then turn away, tracing a fingertip over the tines of my fork. Lick my lips, then let him hear my skirt rustle as I recrossed my legs; get him so bewitched that he wouldn’t even feel the blade slide in.

I smoothed the fabric of my dress, a three-thousand-dollar Jil Sander that I’d bought at Saks that afternoon and was wearing with the tags tucked against my skin. I’d take it off as soon as I got home, sponge off any deodorant residue, run a lint brush over it, zip it back into its garment bag, and return it the next day on my lunch hour.
I’m sorry,
I’d tell the salesgirl, with a sorrowful expression on my face.
I adored it, but my husband, not so much.

Marcus had finished his meat and was using a bit of bread to mop up the juices, turning it in circles around the plate until the porcelain was shiny. “So how about you?” he asked. “Are you a native?”

I kept my answers short, talking about how much I loved New York: my apartment, my friends, my freedom. After the waiter handed us dessert menus, I told him about the weekends I’d walk all the way to Brooklyn (never mind that I hadn’t done it in eight years, and when I’d done it last it was because I didn’t even have two bucks for the subway). I said that I loved the theater and the museums, and that thanks to my job I got invited to premieres and parties, special exhibits and opening nights.

“No children?” he asked.

I paused, knowing I had to be careful to sound like I didn’t care one way or the other, because what if he didn’t want more kids? But saying I didn’t want them would make me sound cold. “I guess . . .” I began. “Well, you know. It’s probably the same for lots of women. Maybe I was too busy, and I was definitely too picky.” That last part, the “picky” part, was important. No man
wants to feel like he’s just the latest chump to buy a ticket for the merry-go-round, the last one aboard a horse that everyone else has already ridden.

“You think it’s too late?” he asked. Then, “Was that a rude question? Forgive me. I haven’t done this much—this dating.”

I looked down again, arranging my face in an expression that was just the right combination of rueful (over the kid thing) and amused (by him). “I don’t know if it’s too late. I’ve never really tried.” This was the truth—the one time I’d gotten pregnant, I had definitely not been trying. I let it out as a sigh, then raised my eyes to his. “All I know is, when I do it—if I do it—I want it to be right.” I hesitated, considering whether I was saying too much, but I’d had four glasses of wine by then, Riesling with the appetizers and a syrupy Shiraz with the chicken, and booze on top of a juice fast tends to loosen one’s tongue. “I want a nest egg,” I said. I’d started to say
money
before remembering that people who had lots of it rarely said the word. “More than I’ve got now. I’ve got some savings...” Again, true. I had a decent-size investment account, a nicely diversified portfolio that hadn’t taken too hard a hit in the latest downturn, but it wasn’t even close to being true fuck-you money, and true fuck-you money was one thing I was sure I wanted. Money, and what it could buy; what it could do, what it could keep you safe from.

Marcus sat back in his chair, his eyes unreadable. I imagined the feeling of a fishing line, formerly taut, going slack in my grip.
Shit,
I thought. I lost him. Then, unexpectedly, he leaned across the table and took my hands.

“I like you,” he announced. It had the tone of finality, like a manager saying
you’re hired,
or a groom saying
I do.
I felt my body uncoil. My head was humming with relief and the wine. His hands were big and warm and strong and dry—all the things you’d hope a billionaire’s hands would be. Even better, they felt no different than the hands of a man my own age, which was
encouraging, because I suspected—correctly, it turned out—that his body, while well maintained, would reflect his age. Things drooped—his ass, his balls, the flabby little man-breasts that you couldn’t see underneath his made-to-measure shirts with his monogram in violet thread on the cuffs.

Marcus took me to dinners and on trips that made Kevin’s steakhouses and long weekends look like jokes. Together we went to the best restaurants and the fanciest hotels, spending long weekends in the George V in Paris and on islands you could only reach by private jet. We had tickets to the opera (I guzzled Red Bull in the ladies’ room to keep from dozing off during the arias) and invitations to museum openings and galas. I’d take him places, too, getting us tickets to events that I thought would amuse him and establish my hot-younger-woman-about-town credentials: a rock concert in a club downtown; out for a falafel, which he ate gamely, licking tahini sauce from his fingers, tucking a paper napkin on top of his tie.

His children, when I finally met them, were what I’d expected: overbred, overprivileged trust-fund brats with big white Kennedy teeth, thin lips, and suspicious eyes. One of the boys was in a band (
of course,
I thought to myself, keeping my smile on my face as he told me about how one of their songs was blowing up YouTube), the other boy was a lawyer working for Marcus (
of course,
take two), and the girl was an associate in the
objet
department at Kohler’s. I didn’t like the way she looked at me, narrowly, across the dinner table, then again while I was washing up (Miss Thing, of course, hadn’t bothered to clear so much as a teaspoon). I could practically read the balloon over her head, the one that said
gold digger
. Let her think it, I told myself. Let her imagine the worst. When it comes down to a battle between two women, whether it’s wife versus mother-in-law or girlfriend versus daughter, the woman who wins is the one he’s taking to bed.

After five dates, Marcus told me he loved me. True, he’d
been having an orgasm at the time, but it still counted. I’d wiped off my mouth on his thigh and wriggled toward the headboard until I was cradled in his arms. I would never challenge him, never argue, never behave as if I was his equal. I’d be his comfort, his cheerleader, his appreciative audience, his unconditional supporter.
Love you, too,
I whispered, kissing his cheek, smoothing his hair off his forehead, acknowledging, to my surprise, that it almost felt like it was true.

One night in June, we went to an opening at the Museum of Modern Art. At the dinner, I was seated across from the honored guest, Laurena Costovya, a Polish performance artist in her sixties who’d come to America for a retrospective of her work. For three months, young artists would re-create some of her most famous pieces—the one where a man and a woman danced a topless tango, bashing their bodies against each other until they bled; the one where a man balanced naked on stilts for ten hours at a time, his face hidden behind an executioner’s black leather hood.