Saturday Night Widows (22 page)

Denise cut the evening short. “I’m not in that kind of place,” she told him a couple days later. “If you are looking for a response, I can’t do that now.”

He kept calling and e-mailing, but Denise stood firm. To her credit, she didn’t seem too shaken by the loss of the friendship. Having the mettle to let an uneasy connection go, I thought, was a form of corner turning, too.

Tara’s phone lit up again, and she handed it to Dawn to read in the dark.

“Nice … serene … hope it never ends.”

“What’s he reacting to?” Marcia asked.

“A picture of all of us,” Dawn said, “at the fire.”

“That was really sweet,” Tara said.

Lesley was right: Tara fancied him.

Marcia yanked the cork out of a bottle of a full-bodied Spanish Granache and got down to the business of her wine tasting, pouring sips into glasses and handing us each a printed form to note our responses in categories like color, smell, and taste. I took
a critical sip and wrote
dark cherry
next to color and
raspberry
next to taste.

“What are you doing?” Marcia said indignantly. “You’re not supposed to write words. You’re supposed to rate them with numbers, one to ten.”

The rest of us were baffled. “How do you rate a color in numbers?” I asked.

“You rate how pleasing it is,” said Marcia.

We couldn’t help but laugh. Only Marcia among us would try to quantify something as subjective as taste and smell. I randomly wrote down some sevens and fours. Is cherry a five? Maybe an eight. But Marcia filled in her form with certainty. It was Marcia’s job to establish the worth of things, their worth in numbers, anyway. Her work done, she sat back in her rocking chair and let us tease her about the forms for a minute as I wondered whether anyone else she knew had the nerve to make fun of her. Her husband probably had. I saw her mouth move to the side as she fought the urge to grin. It was the half grin I’d seen before when she talked about work, the same one I saw when she triumphed in the hula hoop class, the one I’d been seeing as she watched the rest of us kid around by the fire. Marcia waited for an opening to raise something new. She was trying to turn a corner, too.

“Guys,” she said, “I saw an apartment a few months ago. I put a bid on it, but the guy wouldn’t negotiate with me. He won’t come down, and I really want this apartment.” She was fighting to keep her mouth straight, fighting that grin. “If I want it, I’m going to have to overpay.”

Marcia cave on a business deal? Unthinkable. It would violate every tenet of her creed. And yet. She was looking at Tara and
Dawn, watching for reactions, and they saw what I was seeing. Marcia wanted this place. Marcia wanted it so much that she was considering paying more than it was worth. She wanted it so much that she was considering going against her very nature. She wanted it so much that she was looking to Tara and Dawn for advice.

Buying this condo, she said, wouldn’t be sensible. There were a lot of built-in shelves, so there might not be room for a mahogany bed from her husband’s family. Not such a downside, we thought. We did a quick survey—everyone else but Denise so far had replaced the bed since her husband died. The marital bed was a zinger, for sure.

I thought that would be the end of it. But Marcia repeated, “I really want this apartment. It has this great open view over the city. It’s got”—she chuckled, half embarrassed at the frivolity—“a pool on the roof. There’s a steam room, a Jacuzzi …”

“I think I paid more for
my
new house than it’s worth,” Lesley said. “But it came down to this: this is where I want to live. I haven’t looked back.”

Tara began, “If you are going to be happy there …”

Lesley broke in. “Marcia, is your life about money or passion?”

The question seemed new to her. “You know, that’s an interesting point,” she said. “I make enough that it’s not a big issue.”

“It sounds like you would have fun there,” I said. “You can hula-hoop on your roof, the whole city at your feet.”

Everyone whooped at the image. Marcia’s eyes crinkled, and her mouth tried to curl up into a full-blown smile as she fought the impulse. The effort showed, but she succeeded. This was serious. She was measuring the value of pleasure.

“I’m trying to be disciplined,” she said. “I’m a lawyer. I do this
all the time. When you do deals, you decide on an amount, and you won’t cross that line.”

“But this is personal,” said Dawn, pleading. “Personal is different.”

Marcia looked obstinate. I feared that a year from now, she would still be living in that depressing dorm-like apartment, scoring a victory for business over pleasure. The chance of Marcia giving in where money was concerned? I rated it a two.

“All I can think about,” Tara repeated, “is Marcia in that hula hoop class.”

Maybe a four.

chapter
FIFTEEN

i
t depended which Marcia showed up at the table—the one in the Politburo suit, or the one in the kick-ass cowboy boots. From what I’d seen of Marcia up to now, it was the unrelenting dealmaker who usually dominated, and I do mean dominated. I still remembered how she cowed me during our first telephone conversation. She interrupted me with brusque asides to her assistant. “Tell him I’ll call him back in five minutes,” she barked. Or: “I don’t even know who that
is
. Take a message.”

I tried to explain my theories about overcoming grief, and she cut me off there, too. “I heard you are starting a group. I want to join your group.” Bottom line.

She knew what she wanted, but did I? I doubted whether Marcia would fit in with what I hoped would be a merry gang. I could almost hear her saying, “Let me in the group. Cross me and I will crush you.” My resistance crumbled, and I heard myself agreeing to meet her for dinner at a plush expense-account place near her office, around nine, after she wrapped up at work. She ordered foie gras to start.

Marcia reminded me of one of those Galápagos tortoises, a thick shell protecting her from unwanted scrutiny, a blunt tenacity compelling her to thrive. She wasn’t like anybody else I knew. But as we set aside our menus and began to talk, her head poked out of that shell, just a bit, and I saw the gentle gaze of a tortoise that is visible only up close. This formidable woman had loved her husband, and for the first time in her life, she felt uncharacteristically weak. “I want to join your group” was less a command than a plea, however it sounded.

Her cryptic expression gave little away as I coaxed out her life story. “I knew that whatever I did with my life, I had to use my intellect,” she said of her childhood in New York. But I began to discern an essential dry humor as well. After law school, she briefly joined a litigation practice with her father. “We’d butt heads all the time, because he was pigheaded and I was pigheaded.” So she headed into corporate law instead, negotiating contracts. Even now, she often found herself the only woman at the conference table, but no one dared to patronize Marcia. “Even if they are inclined to in the beginning, it takes them about twenty minutes to change their minds,” she said, gratified at her power to intimidate. Her sharp mind knew its stuff, and her sharp elbows defended her turf. After a merger with another company, she and a new colleague overlapped in expertise. “They had to separate us before we killed each other.”

She never lost her temper, she assured me. “If I go after the other side, it’s very calculated. If you want respect, you have to stay in control. I’m by nature, as I’m sure is apparent, very controlled.”

Very apparent. We were halfway through sculptural French-Asian entrées at that first encounter before I saw the first crack in her shell.

“I
love
doing a deal,” she told me. “The excitement—it’s amazing.” In the heat of negotiation, she allowed herself to be consumed by the action, but there were also constraints. “You don’t want the guys you’re dealing with to identify you as an emotional woman,” she said. “You want them to see that you’re stable, that nothing’s going to crack you, that no matter what happens, you’re not going to break.”

Her description of her husband, Martin, hinted at another side. He was a holistic healer with an advanced degree in biology and the jovial host at their weekend parties in the country. He also hung out in local pubs with John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, two of the biggest carousers in rock ’n’ roll. Marcia’s father had set the unlikely pairing in motion after he conducted a legal negotiation with Martin’s father, who had brought Martin along. He had a soft way with his stubborn parent, could get him to yield without going at him directly. He seemed like the perfect counterbalance for Marcia. “You want to meet my daughter?” her dad asked.

This union of opposites flourished for twenty-nine years, but the last five months, following Martin’s diagnosis of stage four colon cancer, were fraught with friction. “He desperately didn’t want to do chemo, even if it meant he was going to die,” Marcia said. It was too late for surgery, so she went along with his plan for alternative treatment, wanting him to have a better quality of life, but when the disease progressed, she was all for blasting those tumors with the strongest stuff traditional medicine had to offer.

For the first time since she and I sat down at the restaurant, Marcia’s assurance wavered. “The last few months were really tough. Because not only was he dying, but our relationship … there was a lot of tension in it. I was trying to get him to appreciate that the treatment wasn’t working.”

“The cancer had already metastasized to the liver,” I said, wanting to reassure her. “The odds were against any other route curing him.”

“I always tell myself that,” said Marcia with the same crisp assurance she adopted when she spoke about her job. “Otherwise I’d go insane.”

Marcia and I shared some of that ability to suppress emotions, along with a sense of displacement once we were widowed. Her friends, like mine, were married. Like me, she had no children. She was close to three nephews, nearly grown up, her godsons on Martin’s side, but she wasn’t close to the rest of Martin’s relatives, who no longer included Marcia in family events. She worried that she and the boys would become estranged now that Martin was gone.

She joined a widows’ support group, but the others were older, and none of them worked. For Marcia, now more than ever, work was everything. Weekends were bleak, so, like me, she planned ahead. She took an advanced photography course, learning to operate a super-complicated camera, but everyone in the class was younger. Younger people, older people—like me, Marcia had difficulty finding people like her.

I dithered over whether she belonged in the group I was forming. I explained that we were supposed to be freeing ourselves from the past and freeing ourselves from grief through adventure and experimentation. Everyone needed to be open to change. On the surface, Marcia struck me as someone wedded to routine. But I saw that she might engage her drive and intellect in what we were doing if she viewed it as a project, that the idea of participating in an experiment based on ideas might appeal to her. She weighed the logic of my argument, and then warily said she would give it a shot. I
warily agreed to include her, half kicking myself that Marcia would forever be the odd woman out.

I’
LL GIVE HER CREDIT
; for the first few meetings, she dutifully followed the program. The spa was a little more free-form. It would have been easy for Marcia to hole up in her room reading legal briefs. We had negotiated a sweet group rate that included all sorts of vigorous or not-so-vigorous self-improvement activities, so the morning after our fireside wine tasting, we went our own ways. Denise headed for back-to-back yoga sessions. Lesley signed up for a hike. Tara and Dawn kept up an all-day patter through fitness classes and facials and pedicures.

I took a kayak out on the lake, pondering how to raise the prickly subject of the final trip I envisioned for the fall. I’d spent the last few weeks talking to adventure travel organizers, salivating at the options, and I’d sent potential itineraries to the others, but no one had breathed a word about it since we arrived. It looked like I’d have to force the issue. But first, I let Denise talk me into getting in touch with my inner something-or-other at
Meditation to Quiet the Mind
. Forty minutes of envying Denise’s posture and trying not to fixate on how the lotus position aggravated my knee only confirmed what I’d long believed—that remaining perfectly still while thinking about nothing was not my idea of entertainment. I repaired to the pool and hot tub, wondering what Marcia was up to.