Chapter Four

“And two more, come on!”

“No! Oh, I hate you so much!”

Babette dropped the weights and shook out her arms. “God, that killed,” she moaned, pacing back in forth in front of the mirror, trying to ignore the muscleheads gathered at a nearby machine, checking her out. Who were those guys lifting weights all day? Did none of them have jobs? It seemed that no matter what time she had her monthly appointment with Thom, there was always this bunch of thick-necked creeps wearing little black gloves strutting to and from the water fountain.

“We must suffer to be beautiful, buttercup.” Thom came up behind her. “Look at that definition. Bring on the sundresses.”

She rubbed her left upper arm and wondered which part of the sticks he had come from. No one in New York had uttered the word “sundress” in decades.

“It feels like getting a shot,” she complained.

Thom ignored her cranky tone. “Okay, now, fifty sit-ups. Come on, lie down and I’ll hold your feet.”

“No, Thommie, do we really have to this minute? Can’t we take a break?”

“No, we cannot.” He looked at her face and regretted his tone. He knew that it was a struggle for her to pay his fee and that their sessions were important to her. Not only the exercise but his advice, which she sought on everything from guys to flea-market purchases. Oh, what the hell. She was twenty-five—his youngest client—and already in great shape.

“All right, just lie down and we’ll talk for two minutes.”

She brightened as he sat cross-legged next to her.

“So how was Rachel?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Not half as bad as you made her out to be. She told me right up front that she hates being told what to do, that she hurt her wrist once lifting too much weight and had no intention of doing it again, and that what she really needed from me was to figure out some programs for her to do once our sessions were over. I mean, at least she had a plan. So many people—not you, my pet, naturally—think Thom is here to reverse centuries of bad behavior.”

“I don’t care about her workout! What did she say about me?” Babette asked impatiently.

“You?” Thom raised his eyebrows. “I can’t say the subject ever came up.”

“It didn’t?” She looked hurt. “Well, why not? She knows I work at Boothby’s, too.”

“Well, maybe she doesn’t know that you train with me.”

That possibility had not occurred to Babette. “Well, then, what did she say about Ponce?” she pressed.

“Well, we certainly are Miss Nosy Pants today, aren’t we?” he said lightly.

“No, Thom, seriously, I want to know. I think that she and I could become really good friends.”

When he just nodded, Babette crossed her arms. “That was the moment when you’re supposed to say, ‘Of course, you guys would be great friends, why don’t I mention to her that she should get to know you better?’”

Thom shook his head. “Whoops! Sarcasm costs thirty seconds of rest time. Do your sit-ups, angel.”

She got into the proper position and began to raise and lower her torso, face set. As he grasped her ankles and counted out loud, Thom Johnston silently bemoaned his fate. Being a personal trainer in New York City was a balancing act, and a single misstep could cost you your livelihood. He worked mostly with women—rich, socially powerful, or sometimes just socially ambitious women—who all had secrets and big mouths. About a third of them actually knew something so good, so dangerous, that if he flapped his own mouth and someone traced it to him, he’d be back in Apalachicola quicker than lightning, praying the Wal-Mart would hire him.

Why, just two days ago he’d been told about a Park Avenue matron who’d walked in on her new husband having sex in the shower with her teenage daughter. As the husband ran through the apartment, naked and streaming water on the Aubusson rugs, the wife took after him with a hammer—only the maid got in the way and ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw. By this morning, Thom knew which New England boarding school the daughter was starting—next week—which lawyer the wife already had working on the divorce settlement, and which Caribbean island boasted the happiest real estate agent in history after an entire block of houses, enough for the maid and twenty of her nearest and dearest, had been bought and paid for. He would take it to the tomb, he’d promised his source. And meant it.

The key to success, Thom had discovered, was never to tell anything really important, only to repeat the same groundless gossip everyone else knew. Public domain, as it were. And, as if it really meant something, make the client swear on a stack of Bibles never to tell. He kept the high-grade crucial stuff completely to himself.

For instance: What he hadn’t told Babette was that Rachel Lerner was a much tougher nut to crack than he’d let on. She didn’t seem to know—and Ponce hadn’t seemed to have told her—that the unspoken rule of the personal trainer sweating over the deeply imperfect body of the client included the quid pro quo of serving up some dish to make it worth the trainer’s while having to endure the heinous sight of cellulite (a rare occasion, happily, in the winter months) or feel the rolls of fat sliding languidly up and down the midsection while trying to impart a lesson on the body’s core.

Granted, Ponce Morris, a client of his for years, provided almost no gossip at all. But she was such a good ol’ girl, with her array of Southern expressions—which made him just a bit homesick, he had to admit—that she was up and gone before he’d realize that she hadn’t spilled an ounce the entire hour. And of course he could never ask. He could only fish.

Rachel Lerner was significantly less enchanting.

“Christ, was that necessary?” she had huffed after fifty sit-ups. “I mean, I’m just starting out. Isn’t there some grace period or something?”

Her annoyance was so deep, so real, that Thom was thrown. Yes, he knew about Babette and Robin Brody—because Babette was so guilty she was dying to tell someone, anyone, and had spilled her guts during their previous session the moment she’d walked in. But he was dying to know if Rachel knew. Or if Rachel knew whether Ponce knew.

But the puss on her after those sit-ups! Usually, women fawned all over him, begging him for mercy, apologizing for being so revoltingly out of shape and making him work so hard.

“Look,” Rachel had said, wincing as she sat up. “Ponce Morris is a lovely woman who thinks she is doing me an enormous favor, and for all I know she is. But I’m not an actress or a dancer or a movie star. As long as I’m healthy and fit into my clothes, I don’t give a damn if my bikini doesn’t look hot on spring break—because I’ve been too old for spring break for ten years now. Do you follow me?”

He nodded and smiled and at that moment gave up all hope of ever securing one shred of information. Rachel Lerner was like the Wall Street guys Thom worked with: in, out, goodbye. But for a female client, it was definitely a first. What he didn’t realize was that Rachel had arrived knowing full well that Thom trained Babette Steele and was determined not to say a word he could repeat to her.

         

“Fifty. Perfect form! You rule!”

Babette groaned and rolled onto her side, clutching her midsection. “Thanks,” she panted. “Now listen,” she went on once she’d caught her breath. “Here’s the thing. I’m still seeing Robin, but I met this older man who I really like and maybe I won’t see Robin anymore. I don’t know how it’s going to work out yet, but I asked Shawsie if she could set up a drink with her and me and Ponce, and when that happens, do you think I should bring up her trying to have a baby? Because even though everyone in the office knows about it, maybe I’m not close enough and maybe I shouldn’t know.”

Thom was taken aback. “Well, you certainly have been busy,” he said. “I…I guess I don’t know, Babette. Don’t you think you should wait to have this drink until you’ve, uh, resolved your status with Robin? I mean, what if Shawsie finds out?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think she will. I mean, she hasn’t caught on to anyone else. Why would it be different with me?”

“She hasn’t found out as far as you know. But if you want my advice, cupcake, ditch the drink until you’ve got your ducks in a row, if you know what I mean.”

Babette mulled that over while Thom straightened out her mat.

This was exactly why he was a trainer, he thought. From the neck down, when the body did what it was told, you could see the results almost immediately. People would be so much better off if only they didn’t have heads.

“Maybe I should mention the baby thing to Ponce instead,” Babette went on. “Like if we had a drink together without Shawsie. Because she probably knows more about Shawsie’s condition than anyone but Neil Grossman.”

Thom felt it best to say nothing about the likelihood of Babette’s having a drink alone with Ponce. An editorial assistant meets a New York social icon in passing and expects the woman to become her best friend? Ridiculous.

“What’s the big push on Ponce?” he asked. “Maybe you should find someone else to bond with, my sweet.”

Babette shrugged. “Maybe I should. But when I think about the life I’d like to live, Ponce Morris is a perfect example.”

Thom snorted. “You mean you’d like to be a middle-aged divorced widow who, no matter how rich, still didn’t get nearly as much money as she could have, does volunteer work for a city agency, and stays home most nights?”

Babette didn’t laugh. “Not exactly,” she said. “Ponce is someone with genuine access to anyone in this city with power and money. You know Annabelle Gluckman, right?”

Thom nodded. And from what he’d heard about her, he was thankful he knew her by reputation only.

“Well, Annabelle is someone whose access comes entirely through her husband. And even though that’s how Ponce got hers originally, she’s made it her own. People really like her. Respect her. So, the way I see it, I’ve met her, she liked me, and she’s best friends with someone I work with. Access leads to access. Right?”

Thom considered. “I would say that if you do see Ponce without Shawsie,” he said, “you might still avoid the baby issue. I think she has her own issues to worry about on that front.”

He watched the girl rise immediately to the bait. Thank heavens she could only afford him once a month. She was too much effort for too little return.

“What do you mean?” Babette leaned forward eagerly.

He took a breath. “Well, you know that Neil Grossman’s office is in Chad’s neighborhood,” he said, referring to his boyfriend, the investment banker, who everyone assumed looked like Cary Grant in his prime (because that’s how good Thom looked), though truth be told, Chad, however sweet, devoted, and, yes, obscenely rich, really looked like a young Vincent Gardenia. “Chad has seen Ponce going in and out of Grossman’s office at all hours,” Thom reported. This was entirely in the realm of circulated gossip: A number of Chad’s neighbors had discussed it at a recent co-op board meeting when they needed a break after an unpleasant dustup about the wretched condition of the children’s playroom.

Thom lowered his voice so that no one else in the gym would overhear him. “Chad thinks Ponce is trying to get pregnant too, before it’s too late. She’s a little older than Shawsie, and Chad thinks that since she’s alone now, spending all that time helping kids, she’s going to try to be a single mother and keep Shawsie company. I mean, she can certainly afford it. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

Babette nodded gravely. “Wow,” she said. “It would be great for her and Shawsie to do it together, being so close and everything. I am so glad you told me.”

“Babette, I told you nothing.” The edge in his voice was real.

“No, no, I would never, ever say anything about you. Of course I wouldn’t! But it does make perfect sense.”

“Well, you just keep your eye on your triceps, my sweet. He who giveth perfect definition can also taketh it away.”

She reassured him some more, and he knew that she meant it. Although he had given her only meaningless information, she wouldn’t betray him. She was still too young and had too little. Not until she had lost something really important would she become as threatening as the rest of his clientele. She kissed him on the cheek, then turned and bounded past the preening musclemen.

Babette smiled benignly at the lot of them as she toweled off on her way to the locker room. What scoops Thom had! Truly, the money she paid this guy was so worth it!

         

It was the kind of punishingly cold January night that was made for staying in bed with a bowl of soup, Ponce thought, hunching her thin shoulders against the hard wind as she struggled down the block. She had on earmuffs, one pashmina shawl tied around her neck, another wrapped around her head, and still the tears flew back onto her temples. When she had set out from Fifth Avenue, it hadn’t seemed this bad.

Only for Red, she thought, finally pushing open the door of Marshall’s, an unglamorous hole-in-the-wall near the East River. The restaurant was on a block filled mostly with parking garages for the high-rise apartment buildings that crowded in around it; Marshall’s had been owned by the same family since the fifties, and what people liked best about it was how it never changed. Ponce had discovered it in her modeling days and had been going ever since.

New York was full of places like Marshall’s: a dark wood bar up front with a neighborhood crowd watching TV, wooden tables and vinyl booths in the back, with daily specials posted on a chalkboard. Quiche lorraine had been a special every night for thirty years, though these days, since one of the family’s younger members had joined the business, it was called Alsatian tart.

“No one ordered it then, no one orders it now,” the bartender joked with Ponce one night, and the regulars all laughed. They mostly recognized one another by sight rather than name: The older, still elegant men with meticulously trimmed mustaches who looked as if they’d been in fashion or advertising in a more glamorous day, sitting alone in their booths, reading a newspaper and sipping a single martini until their chopped steaks arrived. The younger men with loud voices and loosened ties, divorced fathers who had just endured an early dinner with children who refused to eat their chicken fingers and cried when they were returned to Mom. Those men sat up front, bantering with the bartender and drinking steadily, watching sports on television. They talked with their mouths filled with strip steak, and when the other team scored, they wadded up the aluminum foil from their baked potatoes and threw it at the screen. For the most part, women came in pairs and spent hours huddled in conversation, finally splitting a dessert, then the bill, with the aid of a pocket calculator.

Ponce and Shawsie had come here plenty through the years, and Ponce had brought Gus and Rachel, and Red and Cackie, though sometimes she just brought a book.

“Hey, how are ya?” The bartender greeted Ponce as the door blew shut behind her.

“Frozen,” she said, unwinding the scarf from around her head. “I can barely feel my face.”

“Go on back, Gigi’ll seat ya,” he replied. “Pinot Grigio, right?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Ponce hung her coat on a hook and saw that all the booths were taken. Honestly, at six-thirty on the Monday night after New Year’s! You would think everyone would be home, glad to be done with the holidays, or off on vacation somewhere. Then again, this kind of crowd didn’t have the money, generally, for lavish holidays. And for single people without families, coming back to a place like this on a regular weekday probably felt better than anything they had done since before Christmas Eve.

Ponce headed for a table and Gigi intercepted her. She was a matronly woman with upswept coal-black hair, bright red lipstick, and white face powder, a look she had contrived at seventeen and never forsaken.

“Hiya, hon,” she began.

“Happy New Year,” Ponce said.

“Don’t you see your guest, sitting there waiting for you?”

“What? Where?”

Ponce followed the waitress’s pointed finger to a back booth where a man was staring at her, somewhat embarrassed.

“Jeez, Poncie, it’s only been a year,” Red said.

Ponce stood a moment, gaping. “I am stunned,” she said. Though Red had never been her type—which Shawsie succinctly defined, when Ponce was still married to Lee, as “short and insane”—he was a dish from the old school, tall and broad-shouldered, with his thatch of auburn hair. Even when he was younger he had the worn air of a deadline hound: slightly sleepy, slightly amused, his dark brown eyes no less penetrating for the way they crinkled when he smiled. On the weekends when Shawsie went to meet him at the Yale Club, she laughed at how many of her girlfriends wanted to catch the same train home, so they might be invited up to join them for a last round. Red cut quite a romantic figure, Shawsie said, in his worn leather jacket, smelling like soap and cigarettes and, by that time of the day, gin. Each of her friends looked at him with a heady combination of shyness and excitement, which, Ponce knew, was the same way he looked when he’d see his own wife.

“Why don’t you try being stunned sitting down?” Red asked, flushing, as Gigi took in the scene until, mercifully, Ponce sat.

“Red Evans, how much weight have you lost?”

He looked away.

“I asked you a question.”

“Fifty pounds. But you know, I needed to lose at least thirty anyway.”

Ponce folded her arms. His hair was streaked with gray, that was nothing new. But he looked bone-tired, as if he hadn’t slept in months. His skin was sallow, the bags under his eyes practically purple. He looked nothing like Red Evans. At sixty-two, he looked like an unhealthy old man.

“Pinot Grigio?” Gigi set it on the table.

“I’ll have another one of these,” Red said, holding up an empty martini glass. “Three olives.”

Ponce sipped her wine and tried to regain her composure, which meant she was quiet for longer than she meant to be. “If Cackie could see what you look like, she would kill you,” she said finally.

Red nodded. “I’ve thought about that myself,” he said. “And you know, the hell of it is, Ponce, that sometimes when I look in the mirror I see her looking back at me. The her who was dying. ’Cause this is sort of what she looked like at the end. Wasted. Yellow. Half dead. It’s morbid, I know, but it makes me feel closer to her, seeing myself this way.” He ran his hand over his face. “I stopped shaving for a while, but I found it ruined the effect.”

Ponce just stared.

“When I talk to you on the phone, you sound just like yourself,” she said. “I never dreamed you were in this kind of shape.”

He motioned for Gigi to bring Ponce another glass of wine, even though her first was still full.

“Well, Poncie, you can see why I came, then. It was clearly time for a hamburger,” he said gently, as gently as if he were speaking to Shawsie when she was younger, or to one of his own kids. It worked. Ponce looked over at him, really looked into his eyes, and her own filled with tears.

“Red, I am so sorry. To be in this much pain. I should have just—”

“You should have nothing. I wouldn’t let you. I couldn’t. I mean, you know how it was with Cackie and me. I never thought she would die first. She was five years younger, for Christ’s sake. What the hell is that?” The storm that swept his face was instant.

Gigi returned with the martini and the wine. “Pork chops tonight,” she told Ponce, who nodded distractedly.

“Red, you need to speak to someone.” Ponce’s tone was urgent.

He sighed. “I suspect you’re right. That’s what my kids tell me, anyway. And the minister at my church.” He looked down at his hands gripping the edge of the table, then smiled. “But you know, the cashier at my local A&P thinks I look fabulous. Lovely woman, must be three hundred pounds herself. And every week, when she sees me, she says, ‘Honey, you got that Atkins thing workin’ for you! You look mmm-mmm good!’”

Ponce laughed. Red felt himself breathe again. “Shall we order?” he asked. “I believe I have an appetite.”

Ponce motioned for Gigi, who circled back in record time. “Two pork chops with everything,” Ponce said. “Even better than the hamburger,” she assured Red.

Gigi nodded. “I already put them away for you,” she said comfortably.

“Why, thank you,” Ponce said.

Red smiled again. “It’s good to be a regular.”

Ponce looked at him and made a decision. There was no point in ruining the night, no matter how shocked she was to see her friend this way. They needed to move forward. She smiled too. “It is indeed,” she said. “So, how about those Knicks?”

Red leaned back in the booth. “Well,” he said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

When they were through, around ten, Red pointed out a Bulls score on the television up front, and Ponce realized that the restaurant was empty save for two men at the bar. What the hell, they figured. Why not have a nightcap?

“Do you remember the time that I went with you and Cackie to that Shakespeare play?” Ponce asked. “I can’t for the life of me remember which one it was now, but you know, it was that big-deal one at Lincoln Center, and we were all so bored and Cackie got the giggles and you and I caught them and none of us could stop laughing, and then everyone around us started shushing us?”

Red laughed, his face buoyed by the memory. “And the minute the lights came up for intermission, we escaped to the Ginger Man?”

Ponce nodded. “And that time at the Knicks game when they were behind by two points and the guy next to you started screaming for the other team to win? And you started swearing at him, and he lunged for you, and Cackie got in the middle and stomped on his foot, and he started screaming that she’d broken it and he was going to sue you and you told him to fuck off and stop cursing at your wife?”

“Boy, was she mad! I thought that guy would never walk again.” He wiped his eyes. “What a gal.”

“She sure was.”

He drained his drink. “I should thank you, you know. For going to the ballet with her all those years so I never had to. I owe you for that.”

“Hell, Red, you owe me for nothing. I would have run barefoot over glass if Cackie wanted me to, because I’d know if she suggested it, somehow I’d have fun.”

They both got weepy then, she told Shawsie the next day. But the place was closing—in the nick of time, it felt like—and amazingly, they got a cab right away. Yes, Red had eaten every bite of his dinner, whether he wanted to or not. And yes, they had talked sports—forever, by Shawsie’s standards. Also politics. He hadn’t lost a step, except he clearly believed that he had. And no, he never once mentioned going back to work, and neither had she. There had to be some benefit to having dinner with a friend who knew better than to raise a subject like that—a family member would have bothered it like a loose tooth.

But the two most important things, Ponce told Shawsie, were that he had promised to get some counseling and he promised to come back to the city again for dinner. Soon. He didn’t say when. Only soon. And she believed him, Ponce said. He’d dropped her at home before going to the Yale Club. There was a moment right before they got to her block when it seemed they would both start talking about Cackie again, and that he might tell her everything that had happened to him for every hour of every day of the entire year since she died—but they just hugged instead, and said goodbye.

He will come back, Ponce told Shawsie. In his own time, when he’s ready. The rest of them could only wait and see.