“You’re lucky,” Victory said. “Shane is adorable. The only prospect I’ve got is Lyne Bennett. And I can assure you we won’t be spending the rest of our lives together.”
“You never know,” Nico said with, Victory thought, uncharacteristic dreaminess. “Love can come out of the blue.”
“I still believe in true love,” Wendy said, nodding. “But not necessarily with a man who’s fifty years old and has never been married. I mean, what is that about?”
“I don’t know,” Victory said. “Anyway, I don’t believe in true love. I think it’s all a crock.”
“Everyone believes in true love,” Wendy said. “They have to. I mean, what else really keeps us going?”
“Work,” Victory said. “The desire to do something in the world. Plus, the necessity of feeding and clothing oneself, and keeping a roof over one’s head.”
“But that’s so cold,” Wendy objected. “If people didn’t believe in true love, no one would go to the movies!”
“Exactly my point,” Victory said. “It’s a marketing concept. Designed to sell product.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Nico said, looking at Victory affectionately. “She’s just being contrary on purpose.”
“Oh, I know,” Wendy said. “Someday she’ll fall in love . . .”
Victory sighed. “I’m too old for that. I’ve accepted the fact that for the rest of my life—or for probably another ten years anyway, until all men stop wanting to be with me—I’m going to have cold, rather civilized relationships with men, in which no one will ever raise their voices, but no one will really care about each other either.”
Was that true? Nico wondered. Could you get too old for love and desire? The thought made her uncomfortable, and she wanted to change the subject. She thought she’d given up the idea of romantic love a long time ago.
“In any case,” Victory continued, “I can’t imagine why Lyne Bennett wants to date me. I’m not at all his type.”
Nico and Wendy exchanged glances. Wendy sighed. “Vic, you’re everyone’s type, don’t you know that? You’re beautiful and smart and funny . . .”
“And all the rest of those things women say to each other when they can’t find a man,” Victory said. “It’s so silly. Men always turn out to be disappointments anyway—how can they not, with all the expectations we put on them? And then you realize, once again, that you would have been better off putting that man-time into your own work. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing like the satisfaction that comes from creating something out of your own hands and brain . . . That’s something that no one can ever take away from you, no matter what happens.” She was thinking about her conversation with Mr. Ikito.
“I still love cuddling with Shane,” Wendy said, thinking wistfully that she hadn’t done that for a while. “I still love him. He’s the father of my children. We made those kids. The connection is so deep.”
“Do you feel that way about Seymour?” Victory asked Nico.
Hearing Seymour’s name suddenly made Nico feel guilty about what she was about to do to him. Should she tell them about Kirby? She was going to tell Victory, but then she’d thought better of it. So far, there really was nothing to tell. And Victory would be horrified. She would certainly be disappointed in her. Victory had never been married, and like most people who had never had the experience, she tended to be idealistic about it. She was very rigid in her ideas about how married people should behave. It wasn’t a judgment against Victory, it was just that if Victory were mad at her, she didn’t know what she would do. And it wasn’t right to make Victory or Wendy accessories to her crime.
She had to change the subject. “About Victor,” she said. “He’s capable of anything. I don’t think he’s the problem, though. I think it’s Mike Harness.” And she proceeded to tell them all about how he’d tried to take credit for the Huckabees meeting.
* * *
“BACK TO SPLATCH-VERNER?” the driver asked.
“Um, no, actually. Not right now,” Nico said. “I’ve got to make a stop. To pick up something for my daughter.” She delivered this information with her usual authority, but immediately realized it was a stupid excuse. There was no way, she thought, looking through her purse for the address, that picking something up was going to take more than a few minutes. But maybe she’d only be there for a few minutes. Maybe the minute she saw Kirby Atwood, she would realize the whole thing was a mistake and she’d leave.
“We could go for a walk in the park,” Kirby had said eagerly, when she’d called him that morning from her office. “The park’s real close to my house. I love the park, don’t you? I’ll even buy you a hot dog, pretty lady.”
“Kirby,” she whispered patiently. “I can’t be seen in Central Park with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m married, remember?”
“So you can’t take a walk in the park with a friend?”
“I could maybe meet you at your apartment,” Nico said, thinking that this was something Kirby should have thought of, unless he wasn’t really interested in having sex with her after all.
“Duh,” Kirby said. “I should have thought of that myself, huh?”
The fact that Kirby understood his mistake gave her hope.
She found the scrap of paper on which she’d written his address (a scrap of paper she intended to throw out after she saw him), and looked at it. Kirby’s apartment wasn’t at all near the park—it was all the way east on Seventy-ninth Street and Second Avenue. But she supposed that if you were a young man, five long blocks was nothing.
“I’m going to 302 East Seventy-ninth Street,” she said to the driver.
God, what was she doing?
She turned on her cell phone. She couldn’t be out of contact with her office for long. She called her assistant, Miranda, to get her messages. Should she give Miranda the same lie she’d given to the driver? Better to be vague about it. “I’ve got to make a stop,” she said, looking at her watch. It was just before two o’clock. If she and Kirby actually did do it, how long would it take? Fifteen minutes? But then she’d have to talk to him a little bit before and after. “I’ll be back in the office around three,” she told Miranda. “Maybe three-thirty, depending on the traffic.”
“No problem,” Miranda said. “You have a meeting at four. Just let me know if you’re going to be late.” Thank God, Nico thought, Miranda was as bright as a whip. She was certainly smart enough to know when not to ask questions. She understood that information was on a need-to-know basis.
She returned two phone calls, and then the car got stuck in traffic on Fifty-ninth Street. Why hadn’t the driver gone through the park? But of course, the park was closed at lunchtime. What a stupid, inconvenient rule. Hurry, hurry please, she found herself thinking. Once she had made the decision to call Kirby, there was no turning back, and she kept having these moments of extreme anticipation, unable to wait to see him and dreading it at the same time. It was like she was eighteen again, about to go on a first date. She felt slightly dizzy.
She should call Seymour, she thought. She didn’t want him calling her while she was at Kirby’s and then having to lie to him too.
“Hup,” Seymour said, picking up the phone in the town house. Ever since Seymour had decided to take up dog breeding two years ago, he’d adopted some strange affectations, one of them being this new way of answering the phone.
“Hello,” Nico said.
“What’s going on? I’m busy,” Seymour said.
Nico knew he didn’t mean to be rude. That was just the way he was, and he hadn’t changed since the night she’d met him fourteen years ago at a party and he had convinced her to leave the party with him and go to a bar instead, and then had asked her when she was going to move in with him. Seymour was absorbed by himself, his thoughts and his activities; he found himself endlessly fascinating, and that was enough for him. Nico supposed that all men were like him, really.
“Doing?” she asked.
r /> “Lecture. For the Senate subcommittee. Top secret,” Seymour said.
Nico nodded. Seymour was a genius, and had recently begun advising the government on something having to do with Internet terrorism. Seymour was a secretive person in general, so this new opportunity suited him. His official profession was political science professor at Columbia University, where he taught one class a week, but before that, he’d been a high-powered advertising executive. The upshot was that nobody ever questioned his credentials or his opinions, and he had access to some of the most brilliant minds in the world. “They come to you for glamour and pop-culture glitz,” Seymour once told her. “And to me for the conversation.”
Nico supposed she could have taken this as an insult, but she didn’t. To a great extent, Seymour was right. They each had strengths and weaknesses, and they accepted these differences in each other, knowing that together they made a formidable team. This was what made the marriage work. When Nico began making big money, they’d decided together that Seymour should quit his job to pursue his real interests, becoming a professor at Columbia University. Nico loved the fact that because of her, Seymour was able to pursue a meaningful, yet poorly paying career. Although, she thought with a wry smile, there were times when she wondered if Seymour hadn’t secretly been engineering it all along, from the day he met her, encouraging her and coaching her on how to succeed and how to climb the corporate ladder so he could quit.
Of course, she had proven to be an eager and adept student. It wasn’t like Seymour had had to convince her to succeed.
Now she said, “So you don’t have time to talk about the party?” They threw some kind of party every two weeks in their town house—ranging from small dinners for twelve people, to buffets for fifty, to cocktail parties for a hundred. The parties were business affairs, really, designed to keep Nico’s profile high, to form alliances, and to make sure they knew everything that was going to happen before it appeared in the news. Nico didn’t really like parties, but she knew that Seymour was right, and she did it to please him. And it was no difficulty for her, really. Seymour arranged for the caterers and ordered the alcohol and chose the menu, although nobody really drank at lot at their house. Seymour hated drunks. He hated when people lost control of themselves, and besides, he had a rule that they had to be in bed every night by ten-thirty at the latest.
“We can talk about it tonight,” Seymour said. “Are you coming home?”
“I don’t know,” Nico said. “There’s some breast cancer awareness thing.”
“You’d better go then,” Seymour said. “You should at least put in an appearance.”
He hung up, and Nico suddenly felt weary. She never really had any fun anymore. It hadn’t always been like that. At the beginning, when she was rising up and it was all new, life was nothing less than a blast. Every day was filled with delicious little thrills, and she and Seymour had ridden high on the glorious feeling that they were achieving and conquering. The problem was, no one ever told you that you had to keep conquering. You could never stop. You had to keep going, on and on.
But that, she supposed, was what life was about in the end. No matter where you were, you had to continually keep reaching down inside yourself to find the will to keep on trying. And when you couldn’t go on anymore, you died.
And everyone forgot about you.
Of course, she wouldn’t be around when she was forgotten, so did it really matter?
She looked out the window. They were finally heading up Third Avenue, but the traffic was still annoyingly bad. She mustn’t think morose thoughts. In just a few minutes, she’d be seeing Kirby. She imagined him as a wild card in her life, a jester in a colorful suit, a beautifully wrapped piece of candy.
“Did you say three hundred two East Seventy-ninth Street?” the driver asked, interrupting her thoughts.
Kirby’s building was a large tan brick tower with a driveway that curved off of Seventy-ninth Street. It was a middle-class building, but the driveway, which was probably more inconvenient than useful, was meant to lend the building a touch of class. Under the overhang were two sets of revolving doors and a sliding glass door that opened automatically, like the kind found in airports. Inside was a large desk, behind which sat a doorman who exuded a stormy persona.
“Kirby Atwood, please,” Nico said.
“What?” the doorman said, being deliberately obnoxious.
Nico sighed. “Kirby Atwood.”
The doorman glared at her for no particular reason other than the fact that she seemed to be disturbing him by requiring that he perform his job, and flipped through a three-ring folder. He picked up the phone and dialed a number.
“Wasyername?”
Nico paused, reminded of the fact that she had never done this before and wasn’t sure of the protocol. Should she give her real name and potentially open herself up to the possibility of getting caught? If she gave a fake name, however, Kirby probably wouldn’t get it, and that would lead to more awkwardness.
“Nico,” she whispered.
“What?” the doorman asked. “Nicole?”
“That’s right.”
“A Nicole here for you?” the doorman said into the phone. And looking at her suspiciously, said, “Go on up. Twenty-five G. Turn right when you get off the elevator.”
Three hundred two East Seventy-ninth Street was an enormous building, with apartments like shoeboxes piled up one on top of the other. The building was 38 floors with 26 apartments on each floor, designated by letters of the alphabet. That was 988 apartments in all. She and Seymour had lived in a building just like this one when they were first married. But they’d quickly moved out and up.
She heard a door open, the sound echoing down the narrow corridor. She expected Kirby’s beautiful head to pop out of one of the doors, but instead, a giant dog came bounding down the hallway at her, leaping joyfully at either the prospect of company or the fact that it had managed to escape from its box. The beast was close to a hundred pounds with a brindled coat, and sleek enough to make Nico guess that it was half greyhound and half Great Dane.
Nico stopped short, prepared to grab the dog on each side of its neck if it tried to jump on her, but just before the dog reached her, Kirby appeared in the hallway and said sternly, “Puppy! Sit!” The dog immediately came to a halt and sat down, panting happily.
“That’s Puppy,” Kirby said, striding toward her with a confident grin. He was wearing a dark blue shirt, open save for one button he’d fastened in the middle of his chest as if he had just thrown on the shirt, revealing washboard abs. Nico was impressed with his body, but she was even more impressed with his dog-training skills. It took a particular type of patience and benign authority to train a large dog so perfectly, she thought.
“How ya doin’, pretty lady?” Kirby asked casually, as if it were perfectly normal for an older woman to come to his apartment in the middle of the afternoon for sex. Nico suddenly felt shy. How was she supposed to behave? How did Kirby expect her to behave? How did he see her—and them? Having no other reference points by which to categorize the situation, she hoped he envisioned them as Richard Gere and Lauren Hutton in American Gigolo. Maybe if she pretended to be Lauren Hutton, she’d be able to get through this scene.
And what was up with that phrase, “pretty lady”?
“I’m sorry I was so stupid about you coming to my apartment,” Kirby said, starting down the hall. He turned back and gave her a smile that was so sweetly contrite, her heart melted. “And I really wanted you to see my apartment, you know? From the minute I met you, I don’t know, I just thought, I’d love to get her opinion on my apartment. Weird, huh? How you can just meet someone and want to know what they think? Because I’m thinking of moving. Downtown is cooler, but I just finished renovating my apartment and it seems kinda stupid to go through the hassle of moving again, dontcha think?”
Nico stared at him blankly. How was she supposed to respond to this? She and Seymour lived downtown, in a large town
house in the West Village on Sullivan Street. She supposed it was “cool,” but the real reason they lived there was because it was quiet and pleasant and within walking distance to Katrina’s school. Perhaps she should commiserate with him on the trials of an apartment renovation. It had taken a year to renovate the town house, but she hadn’t really been involved. Seymour had done all the work, and then they’d stayed at the Mark Hotel for three days while the movers came and the decorator did the finishing touches, and someone had given her a set of keys, and one day after work she’d gone to the new town house instead of the Mark Hotel. It was a matter of convenience, but thinking about it now, she suddenly realized it sounded spoiled and she would come across as thinking that she was better than he. She smiled awkwardly. “I really don’t know, Kirby . . .” she murmured.
“Well, you tell me,” Kirby said, opening his door with a flourish and holding the door open with his arm so that she had to walk underneath it to get inside. Her body brushed against his chest and the sensation made her blush. “Do you want some wine or water?” Kirby asked. “I said to myself, she seems like a white wine person to me, so I went out and got a bottle.”
“Really, Kirby, you shouldn’t have,” she said, feeling like a tongue-tied schoolgirl. “I shouldn’t drink in the middle of the day.”
“Oh, I know. You’re a busy lady,” Kirby said, going into the kitchen, which was a narrow slot located just to the right of the door. He opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of wine. “But you gotta relax, you know. It’s not good to always be going a hundred miles an hour.” He turned around and grinned.
She smiled back. Suddenly, his head darted forward like a snake and he ambushed her, closing his mouth down on hers. Still holding the bottle of wine in one hand, he pulled her closer with the other. She willingly curved her body into him, thinking that his mouth was like a soft juicy fruit—a papaya, perhaps—while his hard body provided an irresistible contrast. The kiss lasted for what felt like several minutes but was probably only thirty seconds, and then she started feeling overwhelmed and claustrophic, like she couldn’t breathe. She put her hands on his chest and pushed him away.