Chapter Two

It was another short cab ride from Neil’s office back to her apartment building on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-second Street. As she got out of the taxi, Ponce drew her sable coat tight around her.

“Good evening, Raoul,” she said to the doorman.

“Mrs. Morris, good evening,” he replied, rushing to close the taxi door behind her.

“Chilly night,” she said, taking long strides through the lobby.

The elevator man waited for her, tipping his cap. “Oh, ma’am!” He started toward her, but she held up a hand.

“Mike, you’ll get a broom and sweep it up later,” she said as the rhinestones left a pinging trail on the marble floors.

“Yes, Mrs. Morris.”

“It’s my own fault for wearing something so silly, then going ahead and ripping it.” She followed him into the elevator and he closed the door. Three flights up, he waited as she stepped into the tiny foyer and unlocked the door that led straight into her apartment. “Thanks, Mike.” She turned and put two separately folded fifty-dollar bills in his hand. “Tell Raoul, too, sorry for the mess,” she said. “Good night.”

With the door closed, Ponce released her coat and the pants fell in a heap. She stepped out of them and her shoes, dropped her ripped blouse, and walked over to her answering machine. One message.

“Poncie, it’s Red. I’m all ears on the postmortem. Talk later.”

The clock read 12:35 a.m. Best to leave that for tomorrow.

She got into the shower, letting the water stream through her hair, feeling what little body was left at the end of the night flatten in her hands. Her damn hair was the bane of her existence. Thin and fine as spiderwebs—well, practically—it just hung without the help of a curling iron.

As she sat down at her mirror to swab away the remains of her mascara, Ponce scrutinized her jawline from both sides. Softening. Damn.

Yes, at forty-two, she knew she still looked good, but compared to Ponce Porter, fresh off the bus from Harding, South Carolina, she was just a whisper, really. She remembered how the booker at the Ford agency had come personally to fetch her from the Port Authority, taking her straight to the Fords’ house, where she spent a summer grueling enough to give her pause about her new life. Mrs. Ford ran that house like a general, and Ponce and the two other girls who lived there had loathed the punishing curfews.

But Ponce never let her unhappiness show. Sure, this woman was tough, but Ponce’s secret was that she was tougher. She had spent her life with a far worthier opponent—her very own mother. Oh, Mother had pretended to be lovely—and loving, for that matter—but her youngest child knew better. Dolores Porter had had three girls already when the fourth arrived to herald her forty-first birthday, so she named the child after Ponce de Leon and his fountain of youth. This was her baby, Dolores decided, the one who would stay home with her and keep her young forever. She took to reciting this unlikely notion to anyone—the postman, the group down at the beauty salon—and always in front of her youngest daughter as she reached greedily for the girl’s hand, hair, or, hell, even a toenail would do. Ponce thought peevishly that she had spent her whole childhood trying to twist out of her mother’s reach. The woman could never leave her be. So when Ponce got off that bus in New York City, she knew she was here to stay.

She worked hard, starting small, with catalog shoots and store ads. She auditioned for television commercials and actually got a few—where she didn’t need to speak. Her accent was a killer, they all told her that. By the time she was twenty-one she was picked for Black Magic perfume’s “Come Closer” campaign, and a shot of Ponce—her hair dyed ebony—stretched clear across one wall of Grand Central Terminal. That particular assignment had kept Mother busy for months, Ponce knew, boring the neighbors deaf, dumb, and blind with the rolls of film she had shot during her interminable trip to the city.

Ponce climbed into bed and snuggled against a mass of pillows. She had loved this apartment from the moment she saw it and was grateful it was hers. Her marriage to Lee Morris changed her life in every way she had hoped. During her five years of modeling, Ponce had lived on the Upper East Side in a series of dreary walk-ups all along First Avenue, with pitted linoleum floors and rust-stained sinks. At the sound of the buzzer you dropped the key from the window down to the sidewalk, where the beau of the moment waited. They all blurred together, those beaux, most of them long-haired photographers who liked to shoot her as she slept (God, she hated that), but she had especially liked that sweet-natured drummer, the one who wrote poems comparing her to the wind, who shared countless drinks with her at the Lion’s Head, down in the Village. Then they would walk the streets until the sun came up.

But although the work she got was steady, and something like the Black Magic gig was a big success, her achievements were mostly local, and she never broke through to be a national star. Her look was too similar to Cheryl Tiegs’s and Christie Brinkley’s, Mrs. Ford told her. She didn’t stand out. And people were ready for something new. Ponce reverted to her Black Magic hair for a while, but without the right lights and the right makeup her deathly white skin made her look like a corpse.

By her fifth year in town, Ponce found herself in the unwelcome position of scheming to make ends meet. She temped as a receptionist in some of the big advertising agencies, flashing her smile often enough to fill her appointment book with lunch and dinner invitations Monday through Friday. Weeks would pass when she didn’t need to buy groceries at all. Although she had not grown up poor, she had grown up thrifty, and she knew how to stuff an overused pair of shoes with newspaper when she needed to—yes, even that pair of Chanel flats she had worn home from a shoot and never returned.

In between bookings—and those periods got longer and longer once she saw the back end of twenty-three, there was no denying it—Ponce would sit at the reception desk at some agency or other and study the help-wanted ads. She had barely made it through high school, and in her haste to escape South Carolina and see the world, she had never even considered college. That, she came to realize, was a mistake.

So when her Ford booker called one day, not with a job but to say that Lee Morris was throwing a party at his Sutton Place duplex and that Ponce should do herself some good and go, she didn’t need to be told twice. She could either face the fact that her modeling career was ending and that her best shot at supporting herself was to become a saleswoman at Bergdorf’s or Tiffany, where the commissions were high, or she could do exactly what she had been raised to do, and marry up—a time-honored tradition, not only in the South.

Lee Morris, half of the legendary team of Morton/Morris Productions, was notoriously brilliant, difficult, and drop-dead rich. It was he, in the early days of television, who figured out that the best way to sell suds to housewives was to give them suds to watch. His iconic soap operas—Along Main Street, One Hope, One Heart, and The Sands of Time—on all three networks were the first examples of what would later become known as daytime drama. He was written up everywhere—the women’s magazines followed his every move—and four more of his soaps became hits as well.

But though he was beloved by the detergent companies and the networks alike, Lee could never bring himself to appreciate his own success. He simply could not shake the feeling that his contribution was cheap somehow, nowhere near as prestigious as that of, say, Walter Gluckman, who was, after all, a pillar of television news. When Kennedy was shot, Walter was right there, running his network’s coverage. And what had Lee Morris begat by comparison? Serial weepers about women so dim they couldn’t figure out that their own husbands were cheating on them in towns that measured six square blocks.

Like other hard-driving men of his generation, Lee overdid everything to get ahead. Raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he’d dropped out of ninth grade to become a messenger boy for a local radio station, but he read all of Shakespeare’s plays and every book in the public library. Twice. He was fluent in French and German (as were his immigrant parents), and once he started making money he traveled extensively, hiring Ph.D.s as his tour guides. He taught himself enough about modern art to become a major collector. And after two decades of daytime triumph, he finally consoled himself for missing out on a career in news by buying thirty television stations and a syndicated newspaper chain instead.

Through the years, Ponce had read some of these things about him. And she knew from the modeling grapevine (he often called the bookers to send over girls as last-minute window dressing for his parties) that his diminutive height (5’5”, people guessed) added to his insecurities. But that only sounded like a challenge to Ponce.

When she arrived at the party—in flats—she found herself to be at least a head taller than Lee. Later, she liked to say she had already outgrown him, but that night she laughed at his jokes, told him all about her mama, and watched him fall in love. They were married within the year.

What she felt most was relief. She was twenty-four and he was sixty, and at that point she was grateful to be granted a supporting role in someone else’s oversize life. She wasn’t sure what to make of most of it, but Lee had opinions about everything and Ponce took them all as gospel. That he was so much like her mother didn’t dawn on her until later. With all the traveling and the new friends and redecorating the duplex on Sutton Place, Ponce didn’t realize that Lee wanted nothing more than to program her every move, to show the world that this stunner he had snared would do his bidding. And only his.

The other similarity between Lee and her mother concerned show business. As a girl, Dolores Porter had imagined a life on the stage. Or screen. Just how she thought that might happen hanging around Harding, South Carolina, was a mere detail, Ponce often thought pettily. She, certainly, would never have had the guts to leave and go to New York City. Then again, Dolores Tulp had loved her mama, and the idea of leaving her was as awful as her show-business dreams were fantastic. Ponce Porter, certainly, had no such problem. Yes, she cried at twelve when her daddy drove her to boarding school, but after a few days there she would look around and sigh with amazement not to find her mama hanging on to her, grasping her hand to inspect the state of her cuticles, coming up behind her with a brush to run through her pretty yellow hair, oh, just this once. The entire notion of mothers giving life to their children was lost on Ponce Porter. Her mother was hell-bent on stealing her daughter’s life back for her very own self.

She had known this, Ponce used to think, as early as kindergarten. When her daddy had taken her to her first day of school, Ponce wailed mightily, like all the other children. But after the rest had dried their tears and been lured inside with the promise of brand-new crayons and graham crackers with milk, Ponce was still bawling on the playground. Bill Porter had never seen such dramatics, not even in a house where his wife read movie magazines all day and cried over nothing at all, where his three other daughters minced and shrieked over nothing at all but cheered “Daddy!” just as loudly as they could when he came home—well, living in a house full of females was a certain lot in life.

But this child was something else again. The first time Ponce had seen a spider she must have been, what, three years old, and she carried on so insistently that he and Dolores had to change her bedroom, move the girls all around, because Ponce flat-out refused to set foot in that room again. He had never seen such an iron will, not even in his wife. And now he stood in front of the school as his daughter howled insistently, and the teacher, one hour into the job and already looking worn behind her small, square glasses, pulled him aside and murmured, “Mr. Porter, you know that in the state of South Carolina, kindergarten is still optional.” And even though he suspected that she was telling him a convenient lie, he scooped up the squalling child and carried her right back home.

Dolores Porter was disconsolate. “Ponce cannot just sit in the house,” she cried. “What will people say?” And indeed, if Ponce had been old enough to figure out that no school would mean more Mother, she might have reconsidered. Instead, she refused to leave her room and wouldn’t mind her mama, no matter what, so each night at dinner there was a brand-new litany of Ponce’s insubordination, until Bill Porter could stand it no longer. He called his old friend Chuck Crosby, who ran the one movie theater in Harding, and they worked out a deal: Every day, for a solid school year, after Bill came home from his hardware store for lunch, he would drop Ponce off at the Playhouse where she would sit through the same movie every day for a week, until it changed.

The very first afternoon, Ponce wasn’t sure about her daddy just leaving her there alone and opened her mouth to cry. “You just remember, you are here because you are too special to go to kindergarten like the other children,” he told her. “I’ll be back for you in time for supper.”

Well, free of her mama, free of school (and, Dolores was right, the scandalous talk of the town: Whatever is the matter with the youngest Porter girl? Maybe she’s mentally retarded. That must be it. Only she does have the loveliest manners, once you speak to her), Ponce sat happily in the darkness, thrilling to the screen, near the back where the door opened, so that Mr. Crosby could always find her. Ponce loved Disney pictures like Fantasia and Mary Poppins, but The Parent Trap took her breath away. To be rid of your mother and then scheme to bring her back again? Ha! But so many times it seemed that even the newer movies never made it to Harding on time, so Mr. Crosby would play the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers films he kept around, and those were Ponce’s favorites. She memorized every word and vowed right then that she wanted to go to New York City, preferably on an ocean liner, but however she got there, New York City was the goal, filled as it was with men and women dancing at elegant parties and falling in love. Never had a six-year-old been more content, or done a more knowing imitation of lighting a cigarette, than she.

Finally, after her year of special education at the Harding Playhouse, Ponce went to public school like everyone else, and it wasn’t until the sixth grade that trouble started again. At the age of twelve, she showed the beginnings of turning from a beautiful child into a beautiful teenager, and Dolores Porter clamped down harder than ever. Even Bill Porter had to admit that his wife was going overboard, putting Ponce’s hair up in rag curls every single night, smearing cold cream on her face “to protect her complexion.”

Ponce had always been a finicky eater, and at that point, she practically stopped eating altogether. She developed an elaborate system of taking the newspaper that her daddy had thrown out the night before and folding a sheet or two inside her cloth napkin, where most of her food would go when her mother turned away to fuss over her sisters. Then, when Ponce cleared her plate from the table, she would slip her package underneath her shirt and run outside, pretending that she was going to play with the other kids in the neighborhood.

Instead, she would take her dinner over to Mrs. Van, a black widow who took in laundry and lived a few blocks away. Ponce always told Mrs. Van that the food was leftovers and that she hoped she would enjoy it. In Sunday school Ponce had been taught to help the less fortunate, and she had always liked Mrs. Van. Even during her moviegoing year, when everyone in town whispered and pointed at Ponce, Mrs. Van was kind to her. In the mornings sometimes, Ponce would tell her mama she was playing outside, then walk over to Mrs. Van’s house. Often, the older woman would be out in her vegetable garden, and when she saw Ponce she never looked at her funny, the way other people did. She would just start talking to her, telling her about picking pea pods in the summer and planting yams for the fall. Ponce wasn’t always sure what she was saying, but she listened. Most mornings, Mrs. Van would take a break and sit on her back steps with a knife and an apple, and first she would cut the peel in one long strip and then she would cut a slice for Ponce and before long, the little girl started following her inside to watch her work.

Ponce loved the smell of the laundry and was never scared by the hissing steam of the iron. Mrs. Van could take any crumpled heap up out of the basket, sprinkle some water on it, and right in front of Ponce’s eyes white shirts appeared crisp enough for Fred Astaire himself. Ponce told Mrs. Van that her shirts were just like the ones in the movies, but the older woman laughed and shook her head. These were churchgoing shirts, she said. No movie stars here in Harding.

After the year she skipped kindergarten, Ponce continued to visit her friend. Mrs. Van told the child stories about growing up in Alabama, and about her grandparents, who were the children of slaves. But what Ponce liked best about Mrs. Van was that she never once told her she was pretty. She told her she was smart. She liked how Ponce was always reading from a book—which, Ponce thought when she got older, may have been the only reason she paid any attention in school at all. In her sixth-grade year, she would sit with Mrs. Van and read her lessons, then show her some stories in the newspaper. Mrs. Van had learned her ABCs, she told Ponce, it was simply her eyesight that stopped her from reading. But the child figured out the truth, and after she had laid out her uneaten dinner they would sit with the funny pages and Ponce would read them out loud. Mrs. Van just loved that.

Well, after the day in late April when a pork chop fell from underneath Ponce’s shirt and hit the kitchen floor, Dolores Porter got wise. Ponce couldn’t remember seeing her that angry, ever. And once her mother discovered that this “catering service,” as she called it, had been going on for the better part of a school year, she vowed to stop it. It had taken forever to disabuse the town of the notion that her daughter was mentally retarded—just spoiled to death was the ultimate verdict—and now to have this same child take up with the colored laundress? Whatever was the matter with her? To have all that beauty and so little sense.

So despite the awful cost, boarding school it was. Ponce wrote Mrs. Van a letter every week and, when she came home for Thanksgiving, went over to her house and read them all to her. They kept that up every year Ponce was away, and when she finally graduated and was ready to move to New York City, having landed a modeling contract even before she got there, Mrs. Van was so proud. She sat Ponce down and gave her a Bible that had belonged to her grandfather.

“I know all my Bible stories here anyway,” she said, pointing to her head. “And you know about my eyesight. I always thought I’d have one of my own children to give this to, but Mr. Van died before that ever happened.”

She and Ponce cried and embraced, and that was the last time Ponce ever saw her. When Mrs. Van died, two years later, Ponce got a package in the mail from the pastor at the older woman’s church. Inside were all the letters Ponce had sent through the years, along with some pictures of her in one or two ads she had sent as well. After Mrs. Van died, Ponce didn’t go back to Harding for five years.

Of course, distance didn’t stop her mama from her nagging—or what she preferred to call “helpful suggestions.” Since Ponce was already modeling in New York City, why didn’t she become an actress, too? But unlike Dolores Porter, Ponce didn’t aspire to stage or screen. She couldn’t sing a note, and the only acting she was ever proud of was the moment she announced “Mother, I will miss you so” as her daddy started the car for the long trip to boarding school.

Dolores’s pain at Ponce’s absence was eventually obliterated when her daughter married Lee Morris.

From one in the afternoon until three each weekday, every housewife in Harding had always stopped whatever she was doing to watch Lee’s shows, all three of them, in a row. If the men of Harding marked time with paychecks and football games, the women did the same with their “stories,” as they called them.

Then, the children would come home from school, and the telephoning began. “Do you think she’ll ever leave him? Do you think he loves her after all?” The kids would grab their cookies from waiting plates and slam the screen doors behind them while the women stretched the phone cords across their counters to peel potatoes as they marveled at the dramas of the day.

So when Ponce snagged Lee Morris for her very own, they all agreed there could not be a better husband. Never mind that he was a Jew. They all read Life magazine. Jews ran show business, anyone could tell you that.

         

From her bed, Ponce did a quick scan of the news channels, then realized she had better get up and get rid of her ruined clothes before Juanita found them the next day. She turned off the ringer on her phone—she had no intention of getting up one second before noon—and looked at her appointment book. It wasn’t a court day, but she wanted to make sure she had canceled her trainer. The book fell open to the page for the previous week, when she had taken Rachel Lerner to lunch in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons.

She closed the book and smiled. She liked Rachel. Ponce almost never had lunch with anyone—it was a spectacular waste of time, in her view—but she wanted to get to know Rachel better. Honestly, though, the appetite on that girl! She ate a huge spinach salad and two crab cakes and had an eye out for dessert (though she skipped it), while Ponce pushed a plain, albeit perfectly cooked, omelet around her plate.

“I didn’t see that on the menu,” Rachel had said.

“It’s not listed, but a good kitchen will always make it for you,” Ponce said absently—one of the many facts of life she had learned from Lee. She gave a curt wave to Annabelle Gluckman, who, thankfully, was traveling with a group of suits into the Pool Room.

“Cleavage in midday, what a treat,” Rachel said, watching her go.

Ponce smiled. “That look had a lot more mileage when Annabelle first came to New York,” she said. “Before she met Walter, she had a reputation for being quite generous with her favors, if you catch my meaning. Lee said the men called her ‘the British Open.’”

The conversation had taken off from there, and Ponce found herself telling Rachel things about her relationship with Lee that she hadn’t thought of in years. She reminded herself that the point of the lunch had been for her to get to know Rachel better, but wasn’t that always the way when you talked to a writer? You ended up spilling your entire life story before you even realized it. And Rachel was an eager audience. She couldn’t get enough, and Ponce found herself enjoying the attention.

Yes, she said, she had been captivated by Lee, who was smart about so many things. Though marrying him, she added, was most definitely a career choice. She recalled how he used to ask her, mockingly, “Would you still love me if I weren’t rich and famous?” To which she would reply, “Would you still love me if I weren’t young and beautiful?” Ponce laughed. “That always shut him up,” she said.

“But really, the jig was up for me,” she went on. “If I didn’t marry Lee, what was I going to do with the rest of my life? I hadn’t gone to college, which was stupid. I know I should have been a better student, but I must say, where I grew up, being beautiful was more important than anything else. It meant that you would marry well and be taken care of for the rest of your life. So yes, I married for the money, but I was never bored. I learned so much on the job. And the minute I got sorry, I left.”

Well, maybe not the minute, and she soon admitted as much to Rachel. Lee, who had been in analysis for most of his adult life, had lobbied for years that Ponce go herself. Finally he insisted. But as decrees often do, that one backfired, serving to sow the seeds of his own destruction. Ponce’s analyst, highly recommended by Lee’s own, was an older Jewish intellectual—a fabulous woman with a beautiful face and an imposing bun—who was so horrified by her Southern belle client that after the second session she insisted that Ponce go out and buy a copy of The Feminine Mystique, incredulous that so many years after the fact she had to spell Betty Friedan’s name for her. Then, for months, she berated Ponce for her disgraceful lack of education. Before long, Ponce enrolled at NYU.

“Once I read Betty Friedan, I got it,” she told Rachel. “It took me a while, but finally I did. All those movies I watched growing up! All those elaborate parties I wanted to go to. That’s what I thought was important. Well, I went to those parties and I went to school. I learned I was perfectly capable of doing both. And even though that marriage saved me from some real financial shit, I realized I was in it for more than the money. To this day still, Lee is the most interesting man I’ve ever met. And he surrounded himself with creative, talented people. Writers, actors, directors, I just loved them. That life of the mind was the draw for me. The lawyers? The Wall Street people? Bored me to death.”

Rachel nodded. “Same,” she said, in between bites.

“If I had really cared about the money, I would have had kids,” Ponce went on. She turned to signal a waiter for coffee, but one was already at her elbow, setting her up. “Why, thank you,” she purred, waiting for him to leave before she spoke again.

“Because, you know, there is no easier way for a woman to make money in New York City than to marry rich and breed,” she went on. “With a good lawyer, you can make a living for decades. But I’ve got a missing gene, I guess. I never wanted a child. For some reason—my mother, most likely—I only see doors closing and windows slamming. I’d rather be shot.”

Now Ponce set down her appointment book and looked at the clock. Nearly two a.m. She realized that she was hungry. Of course, she hadn’t had more than four mouthfuls all night, worried as she was about keeping Jacqueline upright. In the kitchen, Ponce broke into the stash of cheese crackers filled with peanut butter that Rachel had given her. Rachel liked to shop for groceries on the computer, get those huge packages of things—like thirty rolls of toilet paper all at once—and under the table at the Four Seasons she’d presented Ponce with a shopping bag filled with forty-five individually wrapped packages of her favorite snack. “A lifetime supply,” Ponce had joked, but now she was glad to have them.

On the way back to bed she walked into her darkened living room to look out onto Fifth Avenue. It was picture-perfect, empty, the bench in front of the Park lit by a streetlamp. This was exactly what she had hoped for, all those years ago at the Harding Playhouse. Of course, had she been just a bit smarter—as every woman she knew had told her incessantly—she could have had this view and so many more. But when it came to having a child, she just refused to give in.

Not that it mattered to Lee. Ponce was his fourth wife, and he’d already had four children, none of whom he particularly liked. Once he realized that Ponce genuinely didn’t care about children, he let it go, though his awareness that such a vast revenue of potential control had been squandered continued to nag him. As Ponce enrolled in more and more classes and took up more and more hours with her studies, Lee became something of a child himself.

“I got sick one time,” she told Rachel at lunch, “with a fever of 103. And Lee said, ‘I don’t care, I want to have sex. Right now.’ And I said, ‘Lee, I can’t believe this. I am really, truly ill.’ And he went right ahead.”

“What a bastard!” Rachel exclaimed.

Ponce sighed. “Well, the more time I spent on school, the madder he got. I think he would have liked to have gone back himself and graduated high school, gone to college like all the rich kids had. But he was too proud for that. And too impatient, really. He could read fifteen books in a week, he’d never sit still for teenagers who were too busy partying to pay attention. Knowing something, learning something, those were life-and-death issues for Lee.

“Anyway, then he demanded I take tennis lessons. He decided I wasn’t good enough and needed to work on my game. I told him I couldn’t possibly read up on the fall of the Roman Empire, do the flowers for a dinner for thirty, and perfect my backhand all in one day. He told me I absolutely could. And you know what? I did. Whether I wanted to or not. You want to know why I always sleep late? I’m still exhausted from my marriage.”

Rachel looked stricken, but Ponce laughed.

“I’m not being fair here, Rachel, only telling you the bad parts. Lee was actually quite proud of me—on his good days. I mean, the thing about him, for all his craziness, was that he so loved literature and art and history that I think he was glad I could finally appreciate how much he knew—if not the literature, art, and history themselves!”

Rachel shook her head, and Ponce could see she was riveted. It was so unlike Ponce, really, to talk so much about herself. But she found she didn’t want to stop.

“We went along like that for a few more years,” she continued. “I graduated from college and decided I wanted to go to law school. I liked the logic of the law, the reasoning behind it. But I took a year off first, just to get some rest, and then somehow—oh, I remember, I sat next to Mike Posner at a dinner party and he told me he was giving money to a literacy program up in Harlem. And I had known a woman when I was growing up who couldn’t read, and just loved her—but that’s a whole other story.

“Anyway, I went up there and volunteered. I worked with an Irishman named Joe Murphy who was almost sixty—he looked something like my granddaddy, truth be told. He was a janitor in the public schools. Well, I met with him three times a week for nine months, and I’ll tell you, when he got his diploma, or certificate, whatever they call it, and he stood up and read a speech he had written thanking me, I just about cried for a week. It meant so much.

“But Lee didn’t like it at all. He didn’t like my going to Harlem. He said he’d be happy to write them a check without me wasting my time. He’d say, ‘You think Mike Posner is spending five minutes up there? You and your strays, your hard-luck cases.’”

“Lovely,” Rachel said. Her tone was harsh.

Ponce nodded. “I know. He wasn’t really that way, it was just, well, he wanted me to pay attention to him, not to Joe Murphy. And once I got into law school that spring, things got worse. Lee had me throwing a party a week, which I went ahead and did, and I told him I’d be happy to keep it up right until the moment school started in the fall. But once it did, he pretty much left me alone. I mean, all our friends knew I was enrolled, so he had to lay off.”

She actually ate a forkful of her omelet. “After I graduated, though,” she said, “and started at Corning Hilliard as an associate, suddenly all he wanted to do was travel. He would just have to go to Paris, and he would force me to ask for vacation time I hadn’t even earned. Well, we fought it out a while longer—we’d been married twelve years by then—and finally I left. I just packed a suitcase with none of my jewelry, none of the stuff he was always so afraid someone would take away from him. I didn’t give a damn about that. I moved into a studio apartment, started an affair with a novelist, and that was that. I tell you, when I get done, it is so done it’s ridiculous.”

Rachel loved that line, laughing with delight, and Ponce had been amused. The girl’s face was like a slot machine. You knew within seconds if you had won or lost.

“Of course, the divorce was ugly because Lee made it that way,” Ponce said. “He didn’t like being left, he was used to doing the leaving himself. The partners at Corning insisted I fight for more than I wanted—they were right, of course, I realized that in retrospect—but I wanted it to be over, and eventually it was.”

The waiter arrived to pour more coffee. Ponce asked for the check.

“No, forget it, it’s not over,” Rachel said after the waiter left. “Gus said you were still friends after the divorce. What happened next?”

“You are a reporter,” Ponce said, amused. “Let’s see. About a year passed, maybe a little more, without our ever running into each other. Then one day, there he was right in front of me, at the Museum of Modern Art, of all places. I don’t know which of us was more surprised. We went for a drink and ended up talking for hours, and incredibly enough, after that, we did become friends. Much more than when we were married. But by that point, life had changed for Lee. He was, what, seventy-three, and had no intention of remarrying. He dated plenty after our divorce, and naturally he found something wrong with every woman he met. So he didn’t mind just having some company.

“We’d go to the theater together. Have dinner. When I saw the apartment I live in now and told Lee I thought it would make a good investment, he went ahead and bought it for me. He loved that kind of grand gesture—especially after our divorce, when he did things like insist I return the frame of the one painting that was actually mine.”

Ponce smiled wryly. “He was still difficult,” she went on, “no mistaking that. But when I didn’t want to take his shit, I left and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. He wanted sex and I didn’t? Too bad. That part of it was over.

“Then, a few years later, he got sick. Liver cancer. Within six months he was gone. Well, Lee hated being sick more than anything. I knew that, and for most of that time I never left his side. What’s fair is fair. That man gave me a life I could only dream about back in Harding, South Carolina, and I’ve never spent a day when I’ve forgotten it.

“His children suddenly appeared—all grown, of course, some of them older than me—playing these big scenes about how he never loved them and never gave them enough money. On those days I would just hide in the kitchen with the cook. That was the last place anyone thought to look for me! I got him a platoon of nurses, just the nicest women alive, but he was convinced they were stealing from him, so I offered to stay over and sleep right next to him, keep an eye out.”

Rachel nodded, and her smile was sad.

“I also took a leave from the firm, which I must say was the smartest thing I ever did,” Ponce continued. “I never gave a shit about making partner, and quite frankly no one there did, either. They knew about my life outside the office, and even though no one ever came out and said anything, they resented it. They questioned my commitment, and they were right to.

“After Lee died, I quit altogether. It turned out that he had left me some money—which he said he’d never do, I’d gotten enough in the divorce. Then again, for Lee, it really was only some money. But it was enough so that if I invested it properly, I wouldn’t have to work again. I bought myself a Metro-Card and started going down to the courts twice a week, doing pro bono legal work for a group that places children in foster care. I like it—the people I work for, the kids who get to go home with people who actually want them there. It’s so much better than working at Corning. All those grueling hours just so one company could buy another, or some hospital could kill someone and get away with it.”

“Absolutely,” Rachel said earnestly.

“So these days,” Ponce went on, “when someone like Jacqueline calls me in a frenzy, I’m available. That poor girl. I mean, she’ll be okay. She said her lawyer thinks she might even keep half the places—but you know, that’s not what she ever cared about. She really loved Mike Posner. If he had been happy to live in even one of those houses with her, it would have been enough. But he has that Wall Street mentality I never could stand—the rush of the buy, and the next and the next. Jacqueline knocked herself out to fill those places with everything beautiful, but as she said, the one thing in each home he never wanted was her.” Ponce sighed. “That’s why I’m helping her,” she said. “One of my strays, as Lee would say.”

She picked up her bag to dig out her credit card. “Also,” she added, “working two days a week leaves me plenty of time to watch my sports.”

Rachel’s face fell, and Ponce laughed.

“No, no,” she said. “For me that’s heaven—watching the tennis and golf, football, baseball, basketball, as much as I want. Lee was bored to death by it. I learned to love it when I was growing up. Daddy and I watched all the time. It surely was another way to escape Mother, who just hated sports, but it was something I really enjoyed. And I liked my father. Oh, he was handsome! It’s funny, that’s not something I ever noticed until I got older and all my friends from boarding school would meet him and swoon. He was a quiet man, serious. Didn’t talk much. But when it came to sports, he talked plenty, and I was the only one in the house who knew what he was talking about. And since he died—that was a year or so before Lee—well, it brings him back to me.

“I can also keep caught up on the papers now. You know, I’m a political junkie, just like Gus.”

Rachel rolled her eyes. She believed that all politicians were liars, and whenever Ponce and Gus took off on one of their tangents, she glazed right over.

“But that’s also where Red Evans comes in,” Ponce said. “For that friendship alone, I’m grateful to Lee. Red is such a smart writer, with such a great political mind. And he’s a genuine friend. Some days we talk for hours. I mean, obviously, he’s still grieving. Cackie died, what, just a year ago?, and they were married for thirty-two years. She was a marvelous girl, you would have liked her.”

Rachel started to say something, but Ponce cut her off.

“No, he’s not coming to the Jacqueline dinner. He says he will, but I know he’ll cancel the day of, so I’ve just let it go. I’ve tried everything to get him in from the country—to see theater or the Knicks—but he won’t budge. He won’t work, either. All he’ll do is sit in that house in Connecticut where Cackie died, and drink and talk on the phone. The only visitors he’ll allow are his kids.” She shrugged. “He’ll leave when he’s ready, but I’m just grateful for the phone.”

“You were really close friends with her, too, weren’t you?” Rachel asked, and Ponce nodded.

“You know, the thing I find interesting about you,” Rachel continued, “is that you seem able to have friendships with both people in a couple, which for everyone else is the hardest thing. Because there’s always one person you like better, even though you’re stuck with both of them.”

Ponce signed the receipt. “I agree,” she said. “And there are plenty of couples where I only see the person I like. But what I’ve found is this: Even people wildly in love, like you and Gus, don’t always love to do the same thing at the exact same moment. Gus and I can talk politics for hours, which bores you. You and I can talk for hours about Lee and the horrors of Annabelle Gluckman, which bores Gus.”

Rachel thought a minute. “Yes, but here’s what’s odd. You’re a perfect audience to both sides, which is something men always expect but women never get because they’re too busy doing it themselves. You’re like a spare wife, even to the wife. Which is why the women are never jealous about your relationship with their husbands.”

Ponce shrugged. “That may be,” she said. “But I just like who I like. My friends are the most important thing in the world, and I have no room for any new people in my life. Well, besides you, of course. I’ve known Gus forever, and I told him not to marry Terry—”

Rachel’s eyebrows shot up, but Ponce kept talking. “You never mind about that,” she said. “That is for another day. But the point is, I have plenty of people to care about, whether they’re married or not. And they care about me.”

Rachel thought a while longer. “Were you ever in love with Lee?” she asked, still seeming dissatisfied.

Ponce considered. “I guess I never was in love with him,” she said. “But I loved his mind, his energy, the world he gave me.” She watched Rachel watch her, maybe even judge her, and sat up straight in her chair. “You’re still young,” Ponce said. “What are you, thirty-two?”

Rachel nodded.

“You don’t know yet that falling in love is not a given,” she went on. “Most people never fall in love. Some people never miss it. It took me a very long time to recognize that intimacy is not an easy fit for me. So goodbye, marriage. But without my friends, I’m not sure I’d want to stick around.”

They got up then, and Rachel hugged her. They walked through the empty restaurant—it was past three-thirty—and Ponce stopped at the reservation desk. Rachel heard her confirm a table for Christmas Eve.

“You come here on Christmas?” she asked. “Why?”

Ponce shrugged. “Every year I take Lee’s cook and his housekeeper out for Christmas dinner,” she said. “One is a widow”—she pronounced it widduh—“and the other doesn’t have any family here, they’re back in Switzerland.”

Rachel looked bewildered. “You mean, you spend the holidays with the help instead of with your own family?”

Ponce’s eyes narrowed. “‘Help’ is the right word for those women, Rachel,” she said in a tone that got the younger woman’s attention. “When I was having a hard time in my marriage, trying to keep it together and go to school, all they did was help me. I learned a long time ago that the people who are kind to you, who love you and care about you, are not necessarily the ones you were born to or raised with. You learn to find your family in all sorts of places.”

The younger woman nodded soberly and thanked her new friend for lunch. The two embraced before going their separate ways.

But that really was true, what she had said, Ponce thought, pulling back the bedcovers. And certainly, if her mama knew that from the very first year of Ponce’s marriage to Lee that a high school senior from the Harlem public schools had gone on to attend four years of college, all expenses paid, under the Martha Van Scholarship, awarded annually to a young woman of exceptional promise, well, she would just spit, wouldn’t she?

Ponce smiled and switched off the light. She was ready to sleep now.