How to Be a Grown-up (19 page)

I couldn’t even finish the question. Which was why Kathryn was Kathryn. I bet when her husband left her, he bowed and scraped his way out of the apartment in a ball gag, tossing money in the air like
The Wolf of Wall Street
.

To survive short term, I had to stay employed. But to survive long term, I had to stay on Kathryn’s good side.

“Messengering now,” I texted.

“Thnx,” she texted back. “You’re a rock.”

And having Kathryn Stossel telling you that you were a rock, rather than that you did rock, was the greatest compliment you could get.

So why did I still feel queasy?

Christmas Eve I took the kids to Jessica’s. Then I dropped them off at Cecily’s, a third-floor walk-up where I would have been thrilled to live—when I was nineteen. But Maya and Wynn were just happy to be there and, as much as I longed to perch on the counter and make the best of it with them, I wasn’t invited to stay. Over Blake’s shoulder I spotted the missing picture of the kids in the bath resting in the windowsill and he looked apologetic as he closed the door, which only made it worse. Like he’d gotten schoolyard dust on my new Chuck Taylors instead of detonating my whole life.

I went home, where Claire met me. This was the first Christmas where her mother’s Alzheimer’s had advanced to the point that the trek to Minneapolis no longer made sense. So we watched
It’s a Wonderful Life
, smoked pot, drank vodka, and pretended we were still in college—that life was one great big exciting unknown—until we fell asleep.

Here’s what I learned the following week as we went ice-skating, saw the Rockefeller Center tree, and made snowmen. Blake was the fun one. I had Neosporin in my purse, but Blake was always ready to dangle someone by their ankles or burst into tag. I tried. I really tried. Until Wynn put his hand on my shoulder as I gripped my cramping side and said, “It’s okay. You can stop trying, Mom.”

And then I dropped them back off at Cecily’s to drag myself to some New Year’s party as Claire’s plus one. Light eye, red lip. Because as far as I knew, no one had ever cried off their lipstick. The dress was a loaner. Chanel. The skirt made entirely of black feathers. I felt just like Holly Golightly, when she smashes everything and falls into bed hysterical with grief.

“You look amazing,” Claire said as I approached her on the Tribeca sidewalk.

“Let’s do this,” I said, as if she was escorting me into the dentist, instead of a former carriage house our host had renovated into five stories of . . . total batshit.

The wallpaper covering the entire stairwell was a blow-up of a Peter Beard photo of Cindy Crawford’s tits. Hands were chairs and animals were rugs and bowls were cups and each floor had its own DJ.

“Who is this guy?” I asked Claire as we walked through a stream of pulsing pink light. Every room was packed with a who’s who of a top ten of a one to watch.
Taylor would give anything to be working this crowd,
I thought.

“His family builds low-income housing,” she shouted in my ear.

“Gotcha. Do you ever just go to dinner parties?”

“Who,” she asked, “has dinner parties anymore? Not my actual friends who have kids. My donors. My donors have fucking dinner parties. And they suck.”

“Okay.” She was feeling feisty. I reminded myself I was not the only one who couldn’t quite believe this was how the year was ending. “Let’s get drinks.”

“Claire!” a handsome guy in a suit approached us, grinning, palms out.

“No, Drew, no.” She shook her head, pushing him away. “I have not had anything to drink yet. Try back in a few hours.”

He slumped off.

“What was that?” I asked as the top of his head disappeared down the stairwell past Cindy’s umbrella-sized areola.

“Producer from Charlie Rose. Never married. We’ve fucked a few times, but it never goes anywhere.”

“Maybe—”

“No,” she cut me off. “No maybes. Maybes are for thirty-somethings. Maybes are the garbage cans you put your time in so it can be collected at the curb.”

“Okay,” I said. “He just—he seemed cute.”

“Rory, if you are going to get out here and do this, you’re going to need to toughen the fuck up.”

“But I don’t want to get out here.”

“Well, no one does,” she agreed, running a hand over her Halston jumpsuit.

Further demoralized than I thought possible, we separated and I left her to be swarmed by her fans and admirers, the donors, the marrieds, the singles-for-a-reason.

The floor of the guest bath off the screening room was clear Lucite, with a view down to the master bedroom. Some other female guest had already carefully arranged all the linen-monogrammed hand towels in a ring around the toilet as best she could.

“Help,” the sound escaped my lips.

After washing my hands, I opened the door to find a guy waiting. “Is this the bathroom I’ve heard so much about?” he asked.

“I hope so.”

He had thick white hair, but he couldn’t have been much older than me. He was extremely good looking—and knew it.

“I’ve heard his parties are pretty out there,” he said as we swiveled to switch places.

“Aren’t we at one?”

“Oh, this is a family affair,” he said, his eyes twinkling at me conspiratorially. “I mean his
other
parties.”

“Ah,” I said as it sunk in. “How French.”

“I’ve been to an orgy,” he revealed matter-of-factly.

“And?”

He considered for a moment. “You’re never looking at what you hope you’ll be looking at.”

“That feels like the motto of a German porn site.”

“I like you . . . ?” he asked.

“Rory.”

“I like you, Rory.” He gestured inside. “Care to join me in the bathroom?”

He’d signed a lease. He had Cecily.

“Okay.” I walked back in and hopped up on the sink while he sat on the floor in his tuxedo and lit a joint.

“So, what do you do, Miss Rory?” he asked after he exhaled.

“I design kids,” I said, distracted by the kissing couple climbing onto the master bed beneath us.

“For the future?”

“Yes. I’m figuring out how to rid us of the gene for whining.”

“Your company is going to make a killing.” He smiled, squinting through the smoke.

“Right?” I asked. He held it out to me. “I’ve drunk too much,” I begged off.

“No such thing.” He snuffed it out on the toilet seat.

“I hope I haven’t offended you.”

“Not at all.” He waved his hand. “My ex felt the same way.”

“Does everyone have one?” I slipped off the sink, landing hard on my heels.

“New to the club?” he asked, looking up, a feather from my hem grazing his face.

I nodded.

“Is that self-recrimination I sense?” he asked.

I nodded again, looking down, wondering if he could see up my skirt.

“Rory, are you still best friends with your first best friend?”

I thought back to kindergarten and shook my head.

“Do you still work at your first job?”

I shook my head.

“Life is about accumulated experience. Perspective.” He reached for my hand and with a hard tug I had him on his feet. He unlocked the door and slipped a card out of his breast pocket. “Some day soon that will sink in for you. When it does, please call.”

“Okay.” I took it from him.

“Happy New Year, Rory.” He walked away back into the pulsing lights.

I glanced down at the engraved card. “Happy New Year, James Stanhope.”

And maybe it would be. Maybe, despite
everything
, it actually would be.

Chapter Twelve

I had never been a pioneer. When I was looking for my first rental, a broker steered me and my meager budget to the Tribeca waterfront. But I would’ve had to walk through blocks of abandoned lots to get home from late-night shoots. I said no thank you, preferring to live in a cubicle uptown than move somewhere sketchy, hoping bodegas and dry cleaners would follow. Of course, had I nut up, when that place eventually went co-op I could have bought at the insider price and ended up living next door to Matt Damon.

In Wynn’s class, we would be the sixth family to get divorced; we would be the first in Maya’s. I did not want to be inventing a new way of being or be the one to introduce this thorny topic into our community. Also, selfishly, I had no role models, no one close to me who could say,
Honey, I’ve been there, and here is how you’re going to get through this.

So in the absence of guidance, we were relying on an actor Blake had worked with a few times who seemed to have had the ideal divorce. To mark the signing of their dissolution papers, they threw a party to which she wore her wedding dress, cut short and dyed sunburst yellow. They got a DJ to play songs we’d danced to in college and kissed each other good-bye at midnight.

When Blake suggested we use their mediator, I was instantly on board. Especially if he came in a package deal with her tailor and their DJ.

I know it seems crazy, but I was still praying that Blake would come to,
Notebook
style, and remember me—the woman who’d spent months living with an unintelligible fiancé while he prepped for a theatrical adaptation of
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
. Who birthed him two children and still found energy for late-night pep talks, witty midday texts, and the occasional crotchless panty. Sure, there were times I’d been self-pitying and spread thin. But supportive? In our first weeks of dating, I fell asleep cupping the man’s balls. If I thought about it for more than a minute, I wanted to throw furniture out a window.

I’d assumed mediations took place in the same municipal warren as jury duty, but it turns out they can happen anywhere. Melvin the mediator worked out of an office building in Little Korea, just a few blocks from JeuneBug. The convenience and a dollar fifty barely covered a bubble tea.

When I got off the elevator for the first time, I discovered that at the far end of the hallway, past the periodontist and a CPA, sat a black-clad bouncer on a stool. A base beat thumped from the door beside him.

“Oh yeah,” Jessica said later when I told her of the clandestine karaoke club. “Those places are open twenty-four seven.”

“Who’s having a karaoke emergency at one o’clock on a Tuesday?”

“Are you kidding?” she asked in disbelief. “For two dollars you can get your own room for an
entire hour
. To sing anything. All by yourself.”

Which is maybe where Blake’s friends got the idea for their divorce party.

They certainly weren’t inspired by Melvin.

Melvin’s office was piled with so many files and knickknacks—yellowing certificates, tarnished penholders, ashtrays brimming with paper clips, a kitten calendar circa 1981—that we had to zigzag the five feet just to reach the chairs across from his desk. I wondered if, like a zookeeper at the pool’s edge, his secretary stood at the door to toss him the sandwiches that left his mouth dotted with mayonnaise.

But I quickly realized Melvin couldn’t be bothered with his surroundings because his organizational genius was entirely devoted to the systematic disassembling of his clients’ lives. As he clinically worked his way through ours, I found myself thinking about what it felt like to make chicken salad, ripping cold flesh from bones while flitting in and out of awareness that the carcass was once a breathing being. Melvin’s questions were like impervious fingers jamming between Blake and me, breaking the filaments that had secured us.

“What’s an equitable midpoint to split the photo albums? Your daughter’s birth? Can these homemade drink coasters from the trunks of your Christmas trees be equated with the sentimental value of the ornaments? The plaster handprint was a Mother’s Day gift?”

Most excruciating, sitting in the chair parallel to mine, Blake came to possess what in the monotonous parenting trenches I’d most longed for: otherness. There were nights when he’d reach for me and I’d try to actively conjure those days in college when I would have given a limb for so much as a glance. Over the years, inevitably, he’d become an appendage. I always knew when he’d kiss me next.

And now I didn’t.

So I found myself agreeing to everything just to get out of there.