only a minute chance that last night’s incident could have resulted in pregnancy, I didn’t want to give my boss any food for thought. Losing her assistant to baby fever was hard enough. Having her Senior Product Manager go on maternity leave during Roxanne Dubrow’s next major marketing campaign would be nothing less than betrayal in Claudia’s eyes.
Fortunately, she had her own beef against Ethan. “He used too many hair products. What was with that Brylcreem look he sported to dinner that night?” she said, referring to one of the few times I had put my sharp-tongued boss and my well-groomed boyfriend in the same room together.
“I think he was going for Antonio Banderas in The Mask of Zorro.”
“He looked more like Pee Wee Herman on his latest adventure.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “He had more facial moisturizers in his medicine cabinet than we carry in our winter product line.”
“There is nothing worse than a man with more beauty products than a woman.”
“Nothing,” I agreed, laughing harder, until Claudia’s office was echoing with the sound of our mutual glee.
Until I remembered that there was one thing worse than a man addicted to skin care. And that was no man.
“I’m never going to have sex again,” I said with a sigh.
“Please. As if a blond bombshell like you has ever had to worry about that,” she said.
She was right, I realized as I stood to leave her office a short while later. With a glance in the mirror on my way out the door, I felt my courage return. There I was, Grace Noonan, blond, busty and single for about the sixth time in as many years. Was it because a five-foot-nine-inch blonde with a 38-C chest and legs up to her eyebrows could afford to be choosy? Or was it because I couldn’t afford not to be?
I got my answer when I found myself in the foyer outside Claudia’s office once more, watching in horror as Lori struggled to swipe away the tears that were gushing from her eyes.
Alarmed, I rushed forward, crouching beside the chair where she sat, her thin arms folded against her narrow frame. “Lori, honey, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m s-so s-sorry, Grace,” she sputtered. “I just thought, you know, that some people were meant to be together.” She burst into a fresh avalanche of tears that I found, frankly, bewildering. But not one to turn away a fellow female in distress, I took her hand in mine.
“Lori, honey, it’s okay. Things with Ethan and me…were kind of going nowhere anyway,” I began tentatively, “We’re both…very different. There was no way it would have worked.”
Lori snuffled, then raised her gaze to me. “I thought…I thought he was the…one,” she said, and then, as if the very thought that Ethan Lederman the Third wasn’t Prince Charming destroyed her, she released a fresh torrent of tears.
Though I was surprised at this sudden display of emotion over a man who couldn’t even remember my admin’s name, although she had fielded enough of his daily phone calls to me, I wrapped my arms around her.
And as I rubbed a comforting hand over her back, I wondered if maybe I had jumped the gun with Ethan. After all, I never did let a man get the best of me in the whole breakup scenario, which often left me alone on more Saturday nights than I cared to count. But as I listened to Lori babble into my now-tear-stained silk blouse about true love and soul mates, I began to suspect her lamentations might not be about me and Ethan. She lifted her head, gazed at me with reddened eyes and said, “I know it’s only been a year and a half, but I really thought he was the one….”
Now I was positive this watery display had nothing to do with me and Ethan. After all, we had only been dating six months.
“What’s going on with you and Dennis?” I asked, honing in on her.
“Oh, Gracie, he’s applied to graduate school. In…in London! I know it’s something he’s wanted, like, forever, but I thought—well, I just don’t know what’s going to happen to us!”
As I pulled Lori back into my embrace for a soothing hug, I felt a depth of yearning I had not known for a long time. For the kind of love that could break hearts. For the courage to even seek it.
2
“There aren’t any hard women, just soft men.”
—Raquel Welch
Though I have mastered the art of the breakup, the aftermath always kills me. I’m not talking about regret. I’m not the kind of woman to cry over a man. I do just fine with these things. It’s everyone else I can’t deal with.
Like my friend Angela.
“Gracie, what the hell happened this time?” she said when she caught me on the phone, which I had been avoiding. I never call friends in the post-breakup period. Too much explaining when there really isn’t much to explain. Besides, I hate it when women overanalyze relationships. And though I love Angie dearly—have ever since I dated her older brother during our shared term at Marine Park Junior High in Brooklyn—she suffers from this particularly female malady.
I gave her the snapshot version.
“Asshole,” she said, succinctly summing up Ethan. At least I could count on Angela to agree with me, once given the facts. She wouldn’t have me accept anything less than worship from a man, now that she had settled in with her own worshipful partner, her roommate and best friend-turned-lover, Justin. Of course, she wasn’t about to let a little thing like one of my umpteen breakups slide, either. “I’m coming over.”
“No!” I replied, then realizing my abrupt rejection of her brand of girlfriend comfort had probably hurt her feelings, I hedged. “I mean, I’m tired. I have a big day at work tomorrow….” The last thing I wanted was to be soothed and coddled. I was fine, really. In fact, I felt almost…relieved. I was back to my natural state. Alone.
Knowing I wouldn’t be able to hang up the phone without agreeing to a least an hour of the sympathetic cooing and all-out Ethan-blasting on my behalf, I finally made plans to meet her for drinks that Thursday.
Then, because there was one other person to whom I felt some obligation to at least give the larger details of my life to, I called my mother.
As usual, I was not afforded the luxury of speaking with her alone, because as soon as she heard my voice, she beckoned my father to the phone. “Thomas, sweetheart, pick up the extension. Gracie’s on the phone!”
My parents had retired and moved to their dream house just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, four years ago, and though I was happy for them, I hadn’t had a private conversation with my mother since. Maybe it was because her naturally frugal nature demanded that a long-distance call involve more than two speakers, but she seemed to treat my every phone call as some wondrous event she couldn’t resist sharing with my father. Or maybe it was just that she shared everything with my father. He was, as she would often tell me over a glass of wine that would inevitably turn her dreamy-eyed and nostalgic, the love of her life.
“Grace?” my father’s deep baritone boomed over the line, a voice that up until his retirement had filled the awestruck college students who had frequented his seminars with reverence.
“Hi,
