Lipstick Jungle

  “You’re so lucky you have Shane,” Jenny said.

  “Yes. Well . . .” Wendy began. Shane hadn’t come home for dinner, which was totally unlike him, and he hadn’t answered his cell phone. She was beginning to get nervous. She’d left him two messages, but she didn’t want to keep bugging him, because if he was really pissed off about something, it would only make it worse. Shane was still capable of acting like a twenty-five-year-old guy who needed his “space.”

  Tyler roared into the room like a freight train. “I’m bored,” he announced.

  “You should be in bed, little man,” Wendy said, half scolding. “It’s nine-thirty.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, insistently.

  “No!” he shouted. God, he was at a difficult age. Magda had been so sweet at six. She grabbed his arm and pulled him toward her, locking her eyes on his. “You’re acting like a jerk in front of Jenny. You don’t want her to think you’re a jerk, do you?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” Jenny said airily.

  “Are you going to bed?” Wendy asked.

  He wrenched free. “Noooooo,” he said tauntingly, running around to the back of the couch.

  “I’m sorry,” Wendy said to Jenny, standing up. Now that she’d told Tyler to go to bed, she had to get him into bed.

  Where the hell was Shane?

  “Don’t mind me,” Jenny said, pouring the last drops of wine into her glass. She held up the empty bottle. “I’ll just open another bottle of wine.”

  Wendy nodded, chasing after Tyler. She groaned inwardly. Normally, she wouldn’t have minded if Jenny stayed. But normally Shane didn’t just disappear. Oh God. What if he was secretly on drugs . . . ?

  She grabbed Tyler from behind, and picked him up, kicking and screaming. She carried him to his room.

  All the children’s rooms were sort of makeshift chambers with plasterboard walls. She would have liked to live in a real apartment with real walls, but Shane had insisted on living in a loft because it was “cool.” Every now and again they talked about fixing the place up or moving, but she had no time, and Shane’s eyes glazed over at the suggestion of managing contractors or real estate agents. And so they had simply continued on, and every day the loft got a little bit more decrepit.

  She deposited Tyler on the bed. He started jumping up and down. Where was Shane? He usually got Tyler into bed, and then she would come in and kiss him good night. When she was there, of course. Sometimes she wasn’t there, she was on location, and even though she would never admit it to anyone except to maybe Nico or Victory or some of her other girlfriends, there were times when she really didn’t miss her family, when she was actually very happy to be a single, self-actualized person on her own without familial attachments stuck to her like extra appendages . . . Tyler put his hands over his ears and screamed.

  “That’s exactly how I feel, guy,” Wendy said, grabbing his shirtfront. And then he lashed out and hit her. Right in the face. With his fist.

  Wendy gasped and stepped back in shock. Her first thought was that there was no way he could have meant to do it. But now he was coming at her again, swinging his skinny little six-year-old arms. She couldn’t believe it. She’d heard about little boys who hit their mothers (and even adolescent boys as well). But she never imagined that her own son would turn against her, that her own little six-year-old boy would abuse her like she was some kind of . . . charwoman.

  She wanted to cry. She was hurt. Wounded. It was right there, not even under the surface: millions of years of men disrespecting women. And thinking it was their right . . .

  She was suddenly filled with a tearing rage. She hated the little bastard. Her breath came out in panting gasps. She grabbed his wrists and held them. “Don’t you ever hit Mommy again!” she said, right into his face. “Do you understand? You don’t ever hit Mommy!”

  He actually looked . . . confused. As if he didn’t really understand what he had done wrong. And he probably didn’t, Wendy thought, releasing his wrists.

  “Go to bed, Tyler. Now,” she said sharply.

  “But . . .” he protested.

  “Now!” she shouted.

  He meekly got into bed with his clothes on. She didn’t care. Shane could get him into his pajamas later. Or he could sleep in his clothes all night. It wouldn’t kill him.

  She went out of the room and shut the door behind her. She was still shaking with rage. She stopped and put her hand over her mouth. Tears welled up in her eyes. She loved her son. She really did. Of course she loved all her children. But maybe she was a terrible mother. Tyler obviously hated her.

  She couldn’t take all these emotions. That’s what having kids was about. Endless, endless emotions. And many of them not terribly pleasant.

  She felt a crushing guilt.

  She walked toward the living room. From the perspective of the narrow hallway, she could see Jenny Cadine framed in the living room like a beautiful girl in a fashion photograph. Her wavy hair was pinned up carelessly on the back of her head; her long legs stretched luxuriously in front of her. For a moment, Wendy hated her. Hated her for her life of freedom, for what she didn’t have to deal with. Did she know how good she had it?

  Wendy veered off to the kitchen, opened the freezer, and took out a bottle of vodka.

  Why had she had kids? she wondered, pouring herself a small shot. She drank it quickly. If she hadn’t had kids, she and Shane probably wouldn’t still be together. But that wasn’t the reason. She slammed the freezer door shut. The refrigerator was decorated with the kids’ drawings—the same way the refrigerator in her house growing up had been covered with her handiwork and that of her four younger brothers and sisters. She’d had children simply because it was the most natural thing to do—she’d never even questioned the possibility. Even when she was a kid herself, as young as Magda was now, she remembered thinking that she couldn’t wait until she was “grown up” (twenty-one), so she could start having children (her mother must have told her that that was the age when women could have kids), and she hadn’t been able to wait to have sex either. She’d started kissing boys at thirteen and lost her virginity at sixteen. She’d loved it. She’d had an orgasm the minute the boy had stuck his dick in her.

  “Everything all right?” Jenny called out.

  “Yes, it’s fine,” Wendy said, gathering herself together and going into the living room. She must have sex with Shane tonight. And proper sex. In the past few months, Shane had gotten very lazy about sex, or maybe he was just spoiled. He allowed her to give him blow jobs, but then afterward he rolled over and went to sleep. It really bothered her, but she didn’t like to hassle him too much. When you’d been married for twelve years, you understood that couples went through phases . . .

  She heard the key turn in the lock, and the world suddenly righted itself.

  Shane came into the living room, exuding his usual boyish good spirits. He still had a slight tan from their Christmas vacation in Mexico, and his cheeks were pink from the cold. There was always something deliciously male about Shane that caused the energy to shift when he walked into the house. The air seemed to expand, the house felt fuller . . .

  “Hiya,” he said, throwing his coat over a chair.

  “Shane, darling,” Jenny said, patting the cushion next to her. “We were just talking about you.”

  “Really?” he said, glancing over at Wendy. For a second, their eyes met. There was something hard in his look, but Wendy decided to ignore it. He probably felt guilty about missing dinner and was expecting her to give him a hard time. Well, she’d trump him. She’d ignore the fact that he was late; she wouldn’t even ask him where he’d been.

  “We were talking about how lucky Wendy is to have you,” Jenny said flirtatiously.

  Shane froze. “Is there any more wine?” he asked.

  “Tons,” Wendy said, “if you remembered to order some.” She suddenly felt a need to assert her authority over the situation.

  “W
ell, I didn’t,” Shane said.

  “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter,” Wendy said. She felt a little bit guilty, so she got up and went into the kitchen and got Shane a glass and then poured him some wine and handed it to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. He looked at her coldly, like she was a stranger.

  “Our movie’s going to be a hit,” Jenny said, leaning forward and touching Shane on the leg. “Did Wendy tell you about it?”

  “Of course it’s going to be a hit,” Shane said, taking a gulp of wine. “If you’re in it.”

  Jenny left forty-five minutes later. Shane walked her down to her car. When he came back, a chill seemed to descend over the apartment.

  Without looking at her, he went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of vodka. “What are you doing?” Wendy asked. She wanted to touch him, to make everything right, but there was a wall around him. She gave up. “I don’t know what your problem is, Shane,” she said. And then her annoyance finally got the better of her. “But I suggest you get over it.”

  He took a sip of vodka and looked down at the floor. “I wasn’t kidding, Wendy,” he said. “I want a divorce.”

  Chapter 4

  POOR WENDY, VICTORY THOUGHT, FOR THE MILLIONTH time that week.

  It had been about ten days since Shane had dropped his bombshell about the divorce and had left the apartment. Wendy had called her at eleven-thirty that evening, drunk and in shock, and Victory had thrown a coat over her pajamas and had run over. There was no explanation for Shane’s behavior, and the apartment was in chaos. Magda was out of bed, demanding to know what was going on, and the baby, sensing that something was amiss, kept trying to breast-feed, even though she’d been weaned for over a year. Wendy didn’t have any milk, but she let her suckle anyway, thinking that if it made the baby feel better, it was worth it. “Look at me,” she exclaimed, sitting on the couch with her shirt open and one side of her bra pulled down, the baby attached to the nipple. “This is my fucking life. I work seventy hours a week and my husband just left me for no reason. How the hell did I end up like this?”

  Victory looked at Wendy with concern. “You’re not going to go all Sarah-Catherine on me, are you?”

  Luckily, Wendy laughed.

  Sarah-Catherine was the quintessential example of a particular kind of girl who came to New York, thrived for a while, and then was eaten alive. She’d clawed her way to the top of the hotel business, and Bonfire had even featured a six-page story on her. But one evening, with very little warning, she went insane, window-shopping on Fifth Avenue naked at four in the morning.

  “I’ll never understand why Sarah-Catherine went crazy,” Victory said to Wendy. “It scares me sometimes. It could happen to anyone.”

  Wendy snorted, the baby still attached to her nipple. “She was crazy from the beginning. But she was successful, so no one noticed. She got away with it.”

  “Who’s Sarah-Catherine?” Magda demanded.

  “Someone you don’t want to grow up to be,” Victory said.

  “I’m going to grow up to be just like my mother-r-r-r-r,” Magda said, in that quirky way she had of speaking. “I’m going to be a queen and boss people around.”

  Wendy and Victory exchanged glances. “Mommy doesn’t really boss, darling. She tells people what to do. It’s part of her job.”

  “You bossed daddy. Everyone says he loved it, but that’s why he left.”

  Victory had managed to get Magda to go to bed, but only by promising to let her come to her showroom. Poor Magda was at that awful age, poised between being a little girl and an adolescent. She was pudgy and beginning to get breasts. Victory felt sorry for her, but what could you do?

  Poor Wendy! she thought again, looking out of the window.

  She was sitting in the backseat of a supercharged Mercedes SUV, feeling a little bit like a lamb being led to the slaughter. The intimidating vehicle belonged to Lyne Bennett, and had been sent expressly to pick her up. She’d tried to explain that she could get to the date under her own steam, but Ellen, Lyne’s assistant, had begged her to accept the ride. “He’ll get angry at me if you don’t,” she’d said.

  Lyne Bennett, she thought. Now there was an example of a person who was bossy.

  She picked up her phone and called Wendy.

  “Honestly?” Wendy said into the phone, her voice slightly muffled as if she were eating something. “I’ve been so busy the last two days that I’ve hardly had time to think about Shane. Is that sick or what?”

  “It’s good,” Victory said. “No matter what happens with Shane, at least you have your career. And your children.”

  “No one believes me, but I’m sure he’s going to come back.”

  “You know him better than anyone,” Victory said. Wendy, she thought, was either being brave or obtuse. Or maybe she was right. Shane probably would come back. Where else could he go? He had no money, unless he’d found some other woman to take care of him. Victory had been careful not to point this out, or let Wendy know how she really felt about Shane. If they did get back together, she didn’t want her feelings about Shane to be an issue. “Did you talk to him today?”

  “Yesterday,” Wendy said vaguely.

  “And?”

  “He says he’s thinking. So I’m trying to leave him alone.”

  “He’s probably just having a midlife crisis. He’s turning forty this year, right?”

  “Yup,” Wendy said. “Fucking men. Why are they allowed to have midlife crises and we’re not? One of these days, I’m going to drop everything and go to India on a spiritual journey. See how he likes it. Where are you?” she asked.

  Victory looked at the back of the driver’s head. “I’ve got that date. With Lyne Bennett,” she whispered. “I’m in his car.”

  “That should be fun,” Wendy said bitterly. “At least he can pay for dinner. But he probably has to take Viagra to have sex.”

  “Do you think so?” Victory asked. She hadn’t gotten that far along in her thinking about Lyne.

  “All those guys take Viagra. They’re obsessed with it. Especially those Hollywood types,” Wendy said with disgust. “I know Lyne Bennett lives in New York, but he’s actually very Hollywood. All his best friends are movie stars. You always see him on the floor at Laker games. It’s so creepy.”

  “Basketball?”

  “Viagra,” Wendy said. “I mean, if you can’t get a hard-on without medical assistance, isn’t that nature’s way of telling you that you probably shouldn’t be having sex?”

  Victory laughed. Wendy was upset about Shane, she thought, despite what she said. It wasn’t like her to be so bitter about men.

  They hung up and Victory looked out the window. The SUV was going up Madison Avenue, past all the expensive, five-thousand-square-foot designer stores like Valentino. She grimaced, just thinking about Wendy and Shane’s situation. She was afraid for Wendy—afraid for what would happen if Shane didn’t come back, and equally disturbed by what her life would be like if he did.

  When she’d first met Shane with Wendy years ago at a dinner party in Los Angeles, she’d seen Shane as Wendy must have seen him. She’d been surprised at first to find out that Wendy was married. Wendy was straightforward and tomboyish—she wore no makeup and her usual uniform was blue jeans with boots, a man’s small button-down shirt, and a navy blazer. Victory wondered if Wendy had defeminized herself on purpose in order to be taken seriously in the movie business, but she guessed that Wendy really was that way. There was a warm and easy familiarity about Wendy that reminded Victory of the kinds of girls she’d been best friends with as a kid. As a grown-up, Wendy was the kind of woman other women find beautiful and men scarcely notice, and in the first week that Victory had known her, she never once indicated that she had any kind of man in her life.

  Victory was shocked when Wendy appeared at dinner with an adorable young guy. Shane had a mop of unkempt hair and a round, cherubic face. He wasn’t particularly tall, but in a man as cute as Shane, it didn’
t matter. At first, the pairing made no sense. Shane had the demeanor of a boy who didn’t seem mature enough to be married, and the looks of a man who didn’t need to be. Victory was immediately suspicious—she wondered if Shane was secretly gay or was using Wendy. “I didn’t know you were married,” Victory exclaimed, looking from one to the other with surprise.

  “I’m her big secret,” Shane said, looking at Wendy adoringly. “She only lets me out on good days.”

  Wendy laughed proudly, and Victory felt like an idiot. She was stupid not to have considered the third possibility, that Shane was simply in love with Wendy. And why wouldn’t he be? She had known Wendy for only a few weeks then, and she was practically in love with Wendy herself. The fact that Shane was smart enough to see how wonderful Wendy was was enough to make Victory love him too.

  Her adoration, however, hadn’t lasted long. Once you got beyond his good looks, Shane was like a cheap piece of silver plate that, once tarnished, permanently loses its shine. He was so oily, always sucking up to Wendy’s movie star friends and colleagues. Wendy worked her ass off, while Shane pursued his various hobbies—golf and skiing and even skateboarding—and he was just like a girl when it came to his appearance. She’d been at Wendy’s several times when Shane had shown off new clothes he’d just bought at Dolce & Gabbana or Ralph Lauren or Prada, and he’d once pulled out a pair of alligator shoes from Cole Haan that had cost $1,500. Wendy just laughed. She thought it was funny, the way Shane went to day spas and had massages and manicures and pedicures. He even had the tips of his spiky hair highlighted. And he had botox—Wendy hadn’t even had botox (not that she needed it—she had no wrinkles, having that white skin that couldn’t take any sun). And he was talking about having his eyes done by a prominent Hollywood plastic surgeon.