7
“My husband and I were happy for twenty-five years . . . then we met.”
A few weeks later, a production assistant from Law & Order finally called regarding my small-screen debut, but my excitement would have to be on hold, as they wouldn’t shoot my glamorous rigor mortis self for almost a year. As winter’s chill started to thaw, Miles and I took a fun trip to Disney World over April break while Tim was at a management directors conference in Duluth. It was something I’d sworn I’d never do, but it was actually fun. I’d never felt so thin. Everywhere I looked people were eating fried cotton candy. Like regular ol’ cotton candy was too healthy. They would dunk the pink plumes into vats of boiling oil, then dredge it out with tongs: hot fried sugar. Only in America. You could almost hear the people getting fatter.
When we came home from our vacation, Miles started extended sports after school—two hours longer than the former school day. I had such a lump in my throat watching him board the bus at 7:55 a.m., knowing that I wouldn’t see him again until 5:00 p.m., and I needed wild horses to not be a loser mom who runs to the window and puts my hand on his tiny paw through the glass. I was going to be on my own now more than ever. It would be a season of working out, eating right, and feeling good. It was going to be a spring of Me Time.
I blithely lied to Tim about my whereabouts whenever I wanted to see Kiki, which was every week. It was actually getting easier and easier to lie to him because he was traveling so much. When he’d check in on the phone, we’d talk mostly about Miles’s cute comments about school or how Tim’s meetings went, or which errands I’d run. So when he was in Chicago for two days, it was perfect timing for me to help Kiki move in to her brand-new loft in TriBeCa and get settled.
She’d decided to swap her temporary uptown digs for a hipper new space, the physical move echoing her mental turning of a corner, the crisp white paint like a big, open, three-thousand-square-foot clean slate. It was younger, fresher, and far away from what she called “the reversible name, roman numeral set” uptown.
“Those fucking gray flannel drones on the Upper East Side, I won’t miss those,” she said, raising her glass at Bubby’s after we’d unpacked the last of her gazillion boxes. “Stiff everywhere except their cocks.”
I almost spat out my cheese grits (a last-hurrah pre-diet) but contained myself, looking both ways for eavesdroppers to her comments. “It’s like Kim Cattrall said on Sex and the City,” she continued. “ ‘The higher the roman numeral after their name, the worse they are in bed.’ ”
“Nice, Keeks,” I said, semihorrified by a potential septuagenarian listener nearby. Kiki seemed to have a microphone implanted in her larynx. And while I loved her brashness, quiet lunches were kind of impossible.
“Hey, what time does Miles come home today? Why don’t you come with me to Williamsburg? I’m looking at this Tauba Auerbach drawing for the living room at Pierogi Gallery. Will you come with? Pleeeease?” She begged like a seven-year-old wanting ice cream, her blue eyes yearning and her beautiful face tilted to the side. I could often see why men fell at her feet when she switched on the charm and went from vixen PR viper to innocent pouty pretty girl; they were snowed by her confidence and power but then loved that she played the vulnerable beauty card for them.
I looked at my watch. I had three hours. “I can come, but . . . how will I get home?” I wondered aloud.
“Holly, news flash: It’s Brooklyn, not Mars. You said you used to go there and see bands all the time! What happened? Now it’s like you and Tim fucking think you’ll burst into flames if you cross a bridge! Trust me, they have oxygen over there, you’ll be fine.”
I know, I was lame. But when you don’t normally make the trek, even if it’s geographically close, it feels like oceans away. I didn’t want to disappoint her, though. “Okay, okay, I’ll come,” I conceded. “I always loved Williamsburg.”
“Me, too. The guys are so damn hot,” she purred. “Last week, I screwed this guy I met at Lux, and when I woke up I was so disoriented, I needed a fucking compass. I went to go to the bathroom and saw the Manhattan skyline out the window and almost fainted. But I started walking and got my bearings and, I’m telling you: the restaurants, the galleries, the clothing boutiques—all amazing. I’m obsessed.”
“So why didn’t you move there instead of TriBeCa?” I asked, semireeling over her roll in the hay with some random dude.
“I’m not that obsessed,” she said. “I like somewhat gentrified. Not edgy-now, nice-in-ten-years. I’m thirty-two; it’s too late for that grunge shit.”
An easy fifteen-minute ride on the train later, we hopped out onto Bedford Avenue. And Kiki was right. The energy was palpable. The people all seemed a decade younger. Even those in their thirties looked like kids, thanks to hip outfits, various facial piercings, and tattoos aplenty. I suddenly felt like one of those uptown crones Kiki spoke of, but I was excited by the whole new world. I watched a bunch of guys carrying their guitars up some stairs to a practice space, and a crew of miniskirt-wearing girls with funky-colored hair and bloodred lips popping in and out of stores. I remembered having the same feeling when I went to Kings Road in London in 1983. It felt cool and raw, and even though I was a tourist passing through, I got excited that there were people doing something punky and different. This time, though, instead of looking up at them as older, cooler people portending my adulthood, it was more of a bittersweet looking back. I was the older one, and they held all the promise of becoming artists and musicians or prostitutes, who knows. But they sure did look amazing.
“It’s up here,” Kiki said, gesturing as we walked around the corner toward the gallery. “I think it’s like two blocks down on the left—” She froze. Halted in her Manolo Blahnik’d tracks.
Uh-oh, great. I couldn’t entirely keep the whine out of my voice. “Please tell me we’re not lost, Kiki. Because I have to be home to get Miles in a couple—”
She silenced me by calmly putting her hand on my arm and squeezing firmly.
“Ow!” Her grasp clenched my wrist. “Holy sugar! That hurts!”
“Shhh,” she commanded in a mute daze, grabbing me even harder.
I was about to complain again when I noticed her huge, widened eyes staring in a forty-five-degree angle across the street. What? Was there a mugging in progress? Slowly I turned my head to follow her fixed gaze as she pulled me back into the shadow of a parked van. My eyes landed on what she had beheld, the sight that had made Kiki, the most talkative person on planet Earth, silent, the vision that had caused the most nonstop, kinetic, ants-in-her-pants live wire stop cold, turned her normally warm hand to ice on my wrist: It was my husband making out with another woman.