Authors: Emma McLaughlin
“
GET UP HERE. NOW
,” was the text from Lindsay that woke me the next morning. I scrambled over the piles of paper in the dark, more printed information than a Twenty First century campaign should require, and tugged on my sweatpants. The sun was just rising as I waited impatiently for the elevator and forty some odd floors below the LuluLemon-clad joggers were making bright streaks in the park’s foliage.
I tentatively knocked on their door. “It’s open!” shouted Tom. Lindsay was hysterical. Tear-streaked, the hotel bathrobe over her pajamas, she was upending the contents of the dresser drawers into her suitcase. “Linds, you can’t leave,” Tom tried to placate her. “The Met Ball is tonight—we’re hosting a table.”
“You can go fuck yourself. Amanda, help me pack.”
Tom glared at me and I had absolutely no idea what to do. “Amanda, don’t help her do anything. She’s not leaving—Linds, we’ll fix this.”
She paused her flurry of destruction and looked at him, wiping her face with her terrycloth sleeve. “How?”
“We have a team. Let’s let them figure it out.”
“Figure out how not to look like
you’re married to your mother?
” The words came out in guttural spurts, like rain through a clogged drain-pipe. Oh God. Was the press covering last night’s event already in?
“You don’t look like my mother,” he said jovially, trying to put his arm around her. “My aunt, maybe.”
She tugged away. “And what time did you even get in last night? You’re so concerned about appearances? You can’t be seen drinking yourself under the table in the bar. It’s a fucking disgrace.”
Jeanine pushed in without knocking, trailed by the dour Margo. In their workout clothes they had absolutely no trace of reaction to the scene, as if tearful clients and trashed hotel rooms were all part of a day. “We just need to make you over.” Jeanine waved her hand in the air like it held a magic wand, instead of an apple. “I made Katie Holmes look ten years older—I can make you ten years younger.”
“Try twenty,” Margo said into her iPad. I peaked over her shoulder as she parked herself at the round table by the window and rapidly clicked through the morning’s headlines. It was bad. Yes, Jeanine had succeeded in putting Lindsay on the media’s radar, but any thing substantive she might have said on the red carpet was totally overshadowed by the cattiness of the celebrity web sites. Even the Onion ran the headline,
Davis Using Wife as Test Case for Geriatric Policies.
“I can get someone up here to Botox you by by ten. We’ll make you blonder. Laser those liver spots, some dermabrasion, easy peasy—then the facelift we can take you off the grid for.”
“Facelift?” Lindsay balked.
“Nothing Housewives—think Barbara Walters. Think Gretta Van Susteran.”
“I don’t want a Facelift,” Lindsay said vehemently. “I’m scared of anesthesia, knives, cutting, all of it. No. My friend, Wendy, they did it too tight, the sutures popped and she has a black ring around her face that’s permanent—what about what happened to Sally Jessy Raphael?”
“We’ll get you someone good.”
“Jeanine,” Lindsay said, catching her breath, “We’re trying to convince donors that Tom and I are the real people who have real solutions to the public’s very real problems. How am I supposed to do that with a face full of Styrofoam?”
Tom was silent—had been since his aunt comment, and I was waiting to see which woman he was going to tell to back down. Lindsay must have been waiting, too.
There was another knock. “It’s open,” I called.
It was the dress for the gala. Jeanine had asked Pamela Rolland to make something Leger-inspired, because she frequently dresses Christina Aguilera for the red carpet and “understands sucking shit in.” I took the garment bag from the bellboy and brought it in to unzip, pulling out something that looked like a long glove.
“I can’t wear that,” Lindsay said flatly.
“It’s all in the structure,” Jeanine said dismissively. “At least let’s try it on.”
“I’m a fifty year old mother of three—why can’t I look like a fifty year-old mother of three? Why can’t I be myself?”
“Because,” Jeanine slapped the table, “You are auditioning to represent this country and the current first lady will be leaving some very high, very expensive, very sexy shoes to fucking fill. America does not want to follow up the FLILF with Whistler’s Mother.”
I looked to Tom—to break in, to tell Jeanine she had gone too far, but he was staring out the window down to the traffic circle. He said nothing.
“Knock, knock!” The door opened and in walked Tom’s actual mother in her travelling outfit. “Who’s ready for a party?” Dispensed with were the pearls and silk scarf, Belle’s attempts at being an Anne manqué. Instead she rushed over to hug her son in a hot pink velour tracksuit with a sequin flamingo on the back, just like the one Ray Lynne used to have—in a ‘who wore it better’ Ray Lynne would have taken the vote. She planted a big kiss on Tom’s cheek with her freshly inflated lips that bobbed on her newly unlined face like a floaty on a windless day.
“How’s my handsome boy?” she asked over his shoulder. “And Lindsay, you look like hell, honey. What’s the matter? Is it the kids?”
Tom pulled back, struggling to suppress his reaction to his mother’s new face. “Mom, we’re just a little hung-over from last night—those research scientists really like to throw down. Why don’t you and Dad enjoy the buffet and I’ll swing by your room in a bit?”
“Oh, great. I’m so excited! I bought a Louis Vuitton from the nicest African man downstairs. Do I have an hour to go to Times Square today? Your daddy and I want to get a picture with that Naked Cowboy.”
“How about with a giant M&M instead?” Jeanine suggested, steering her to the door by the elbow. “I think I could clear that.” Jeanine and Margo walked Belle out.
“I’m just going to—” I started to follow.
“Is
that
what you want me to look like?” Lindsay asked Tom before I could make it to the door.
“Linds—”
“Because she looks
cheap
and
tacky
,” she leveled at him. “How dare everyone sit here and think they can make me over?” Her voice was like a circular saw. “Have they
seen
your college pictures, Tom? Have they seen your mullet and your acid washed jeans? Without me you’d be a paralegal, living in some shitty town and saving up to go to Red Lobster.”
“I worked my ass off in law school,” he growled back at her.
“
Who
wrote your application, coached you on the LSAT, tutored you through L1? Who fucking paid for the whole thing?”
His eyes went to the floor. I held my breath. “You did, Linds.” He swung his head like he was sliding marbles back and forth between his ears. “Look, I gotta meet that guy from Cornell. You do what you want. Leave. Stay. Wear a fucking bedspread. But to come this far just to have them use our marriage as a punch line . . . it’s not going to get us a fucking cent.” He shut the door firmly behind him.
I dared to look at her.
“Well.” She shrugged. “Now you know everything.” She was barely audible. “Will you get Jeanine back up here? I’ll see you at five.”
“Do you still want to visit the—”
“At five.”
The hotel corridor was now teaming with people checking out or heading out and I self-consciously crossed my arms over my thin nightshirt. In my room I took six steps, dropped the key card, picked up my phone and dialed a number from memory.
“Hello?” Pax answered on the first ring.
“Were you ashamed of me?” I asked. All these years later and Lindsay still saw the guy she had to give a haircut to integrate into her world. ‘Some shitty town.’ Next door to my shitty town. And in some place in her brain that got poked with a stick this morning—he still lives there.
“Amanda?” his voice was sandy with sleep.
“Was it my family? Do I mispronounce things without realizing it? I used to say ‘nave’ instead of naive because I’d only read it, never heard anyone say it. Am I tacky? Am I cheap?”
“Amanda—”
“You realized I was a fuck-against-the-wall girl, not the one you build a life with, is that it? You figured it out. Well?” I thought for a second maybe the call had dropped.
“Where are you?”
I looked around the sun-soaked room for a moment, the silk décor, the extraordinary view of the city all the way out to the ocean. “I’m on the forty-third floor of the Manhattan Mandarin Oriental,” as if that was where I
was
. At that moment I didn’t know how to sum up my life, just my location.
“I’m at the Essex House one block away. I’ll be right there.”
I opened the door minutes later still in my pajamas. His cheeks were flushed from running. We looked at each other a long moment before he backed me into the room until I was pressed against the fan-patterned wallpaper. He placed a hand on my face. “Despite every aching molecule in my body,” he said quietly. “I will not fuck you against this wall, because I don’t want to do anything more to contribute to this crazy idea of what kind of girl I think you are. You are one of the fiercest, bravest people I have ever met. I think you have more substance in your gorgeous pinky finger than I have in my whole body.” He broke his gaze. “And I got scared you would figure that out. You were just suddenly in such a real place—with your job and your family and I freaked out. I didn’t know if I was ready to support you through that when I’d just finally started setting some long-overdue boundaries with my own Mom.” His eyes returned intensely to mine. “I fucked it up, Amanda. But the longer I went without calling, the more of a shit I knew I was, the less I could face you.” He almost leaned in. I almost let him. “So you can hate me, that I can take, that I deserve, but I cannot live with you, Amanda Beth Luker, thinking that I thought you weren’t good enough for the fucking Westerbrooks.” Our faces fell closer together until our foreheads were touching. “I’d be so unbelievably lucky,” he whispered. “If you forgave me.”
Feeling my cheeks dampen I turned my head to the side. He gingerly put his palm against the back of my neck and pulled me close. Remembering the reassuring firmness of his chest, that china-doll feeling he induced, I let myself sink against him. His free arm encircled my waist, his palm spreading over my back to press me against him as if trying to merge our bones. I didn’t know how he could see past Tallyville when I couldn’t, but in that moment—with his heart beating against my ear and the sun revealing the air for its particles around us—I believed him.
It turned out that Pax was in town because Pym had bought a table at the Met gala and he was courting the kind of deep-pocketed lefties who might want to back the financial reform lobby. So suddenly I was in the mall under our hotel squeezing myself into a knockoff Leger bandage dress and hoping my ponytail looked kind of Paltrow-esque. Then back up to Tom and Lindsay’s suite to make sure she didn’t need anything before they left.
“Amanda,” Lindsay’s face fell when she saw me. “Sweetie, we don’t have a ticket for you. God, I wish we did because I don’t think I’ll get through this.”
I was struggling to keep my face from falling in turn. The Roland dress she was wearing was so, so wrong. She looked like she had been sucked into one of those Space Bags they show on infomercials. And Jeanine’s makeup people had caked her in purple eyeshadow.
“Pax is back,” I shared gamely and she abruptly grabbed my hand, the corners of her eyes watering.
“Oh,
see
,” she said intently, “New York
is
romantic.”
“Don’t cry,” I said. “Your pretty makeup will run.”
“Lindsay.” Her mother-in-law swanned into the room wearing what was probably an original Leger that she managed to make look like the knockoff of my knockoff. But mostly what I was staring at was the two hard semicircles of her cleavage, like someone had halved a baseball. Belle was so taut I expected her to turn around and reveal a series of clamps from her scalp to her ass. “Get a move on. Tom’s waiting. Oh Lord, honey, at least let the girls have some air.” She reached her claw-like hands toward Lindsay’s breasts as Tom and Jeanine came in. Lindsay jumped away.
“I can do it myself.” She reached into her dress and dug around to lift her assets out of the couture cling wrap. Suddenly she got a strange look on her face.
“Lindsay, what is it?” I asked.
“Jesus,” Tom barked. “Can we just go already? We’re late.”
“There’s no point if you don’t do the carpet,” Jeanine echoed.
“Lindsay,” I said, trying to read her panic. I looked desperately around the room for something she could wear to obscure the ridiculous dress. “Wait—here.” I swiped the kimono-print silk throw off the bed. “Wrap this around your shoulders like a pashmina.” I held it out, but she didn’t take it. “Lindsay,” I prompted.
“Lindsay,” he said.
“Lindsay!” Jeanine snapped.
Her hands were still frozen inside her gown, her eyes on the black carpet, her voice barely audible. “I have a lump.”
Chapter Eight
Here’s what I learned in the first few weeks following Lindsay’s diagnosis. There is a social chain that organically forms in these situations. Each friend or family member finds someone who will grip their hand and say to them, as many times a day as they need to hear it, “
it will be okay
.” Because then they leave the doctor’s office—or hospital hallway—or kitchen—and find themselves saying the same thing just as urgently for someone else involved. Tom convinced Lindsay. Lindsay convinced me. I convinced Michael. Who cheered up Jeanine, who yelled at the campaign staff not to be “fucking maudlin.”