the first half of our lunch.
As Gigi expertly twirled her pasta around the tines of her fork, using the bowl of a spoon to anchor the pasta, I took the opportunity to continue studying her face. She had wide-set eyes, a straight nose, and full lips, but in the sunlight I could see that she was wearing a thick layer of foundation and that there were wrinkles creeping out from around her eyes and lips. She looked older and less sprightly than she did on television or on the cover of her book jackets, but she was still arrestingly beautiful.
When we were finished with our entrées, Gigi ordered a bowl of gelato for us to share and spooning the creamy, cold ice cream into my mouth, I was reminded of my childhood in Minnesota. Whenever my sister and I did well on our report cards, my father would take us for ice cream at Byerly’s, an upscale grocery store in the suburb where we lived. This happened pretty infrequently since Annalise rarely studied—she was too busy with boys and cheerleading practice—so more often than not my father would take just me. We usually went on Friday nights when Annalise had a game to cheer, so she wouldn’t feel bad about her academic shortcomings, or at least that’s what my father said. Now, in hindsight, I think Dad was more concerned about making me feel better. After all, I was the one stuck at home on a Friday night when most kids were out with their friends, partying and whatnot.
Gigi wanted to know about my sister, so I told her that she had been the popular one and I the smart one. ‘A family of two daughters usually gets one of each,’ I said, adding that Annalise wasn’t exactly prettier than I was, but she had a better figure—larger breasts, longer legs—and had been the recipient of braces (whereas my parents, in their infinite wisdom, had decided I could go without) that had given her the killer smile that would eventually grace our local Dayton’s department store newspaper advertisements for its annual three-day back-to-school sale. Annalise, considered a minor celebrity in our high school thanks to those ads, was named Homecoming Queen her senior year. She had a string of boyfriends, tons of friends.
I didn’t.
I imagined this was why she couldn’t believe that I had married ‘well’ and she hadn’t. She was stuck in a shabby two-bedroom house with a husband who spent too much time watching sports (hockey, football, you name it…) on television and drinking beer (from a can, ‘not even a bottle’ she once complained bitterly to my mother, who then told me, even though I had on several occasions made it clear to her that I had no desire to know the inner workings of my sister’s marriage). It was down to Annalise to raise their two rambunctious boys—Jack, five, and Trevor, three—and fix things up around the house. My beauty-queen sister had to empty the gutters, mow the lawn, rake the leaves, shovel the snow, and on top of that clean the house and cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a grocery budget so small that they sometimes had to have hot dogs for dinner—five nights in a row. She couldn’t help but compare her life to mine and wonder where she’d gone wrong. It’s like I had disturbed the correct order of things, and she resented me to no end for it.
I explained this all to Gigi, who told me that she had a sister who was married, too, who was always jealous of her big city life until the day that Gigi started dating a Greek shipping magnate. In the beginning he was romantic and sweet and incredibly generous—he took her to nice restaurants and on lavish trips, and bought her expensive shoes. He also liked to rub her feet.
A little too much.
After a few weeks of dating, Gigi started noticing that her Greek magnate was getting a little too much pleasure out of touching her feet, and liked doing it at inappropriate times, like when he was driving them home from dinner or to his beach house in Bridgehampton. ‘He’d get hard just from touching the soft skin on the underside of my arch,’ she said. ‘That was his favorite part.’
Still, he was kind to her and seemed serious about their relationship—‘he told me that he couldn’t wait to introduce me to his parents’—so she put up with his sexual quirk. But then, he got mean. A few months into their courtship he started criticizing her. ‘If one of my nails was chipped, he’d tell me that I looked like a mess.’ One day she told him that if he cared so much about her nails, then maybe he should pay for her manicures. His response was to call her a gold digger and cut their meal short. Around the same time he became controlling about what shoes she wore. Sometimes, Gigi said, she had to change them four or five times before they went out.
She told me a story about one of their last weeks together, when they planned on meeting some friends for brunch at Felix, a restaurant and bar in SoHo. It was a cold Sunday in February and there was ice and snow on the ground. Gigi chose a pair of flat boots to wear with her jeans and sweater, but her Greek boyfriend pointed out that she’d already worn the boots once that week. ‘So I changed into my other boots that happen to have a lot of buckles, and he freaked out. He said they would be too hard for him to get them off. He threw a tantrum,’ she said.
The next day, she dumped him, and being a short man with a massive Napoleonic complex, he didn’t handle his dismissal well. For six months following their break up, he harassed her with vulgar, cruel phone messages and emails, and told all of their friends that he had dumped her because he figured out she was only interested in him for his money. ‘All rich men end up saying that. Even Jeremy has and John, if he hasn’t already, probably will.’
Gigi suddenly looked stricken and covered her mouth with her hands. ‘What am I doing? I’ve broken the most important rule of all. Rule Number Five: Never talk bad about your husband.’
I assured her that I was not going to tell anyone. ‘Who would I tell? I have no friends in New York.’ I reached across the table to squeeze her hand reassuringly.
‘No, sugar, you’ve got me now,’ she said.
The waiter cleared the bowl of gelato and took our coffee orders. One espresso dopio for Gigi, who explained that she needed the caffeine because she had been up all night with the baby and had to go to a meeting at her publisher’s after lunch. I ordered a cappuccino, extra foam, and told her that she didn’t have to justify her coffee order to me. ‘I drink way more than I should, and I don’t have kids or a job to legitimize my caffeine addiction,’ I said.
Gigi asked if John and I planned on starting a family soon, and, given the confessional turn of our lunch, I told her about my miscarriage. I didn’t say much about what happened in the hospital, because nobody wants to hear the gruesome details, but I did talk about the grief that followed and how I was trying to pick up the pieces of my life. She was careful not to ask too many questions and to dab the tears from her eyes before they had a chance to ruin her makeup.
Then, because our lunch was coming to an end and I didn’t want to leave her on a sad note, I told Gigi that I knew John and I were fortunate, that there was a lot in our lives that was a lot better than before. Better and bigger and brighter.
‘Our apartment has floor-to-ceiling windows in the living and dining rooms and we’re updating all our furniture to eco-conscious midcentury modern. It’s all clean lines, natural wood finishes, dye-free textiles, that sort of look. It’s what John likes.’
‘And you?’
‘Me? I don’t know the first thing about interior décor. Nothing matched in my house growing up. What do I know about bamboo flooring and hemp silk?’
‘Everyone likes splurging on something. What is it for you? Shoes, handbags? Mesotherapy?’
‘Meso-what?’
‘Nevermind. Better you not know.’
‘I guess I do like eating well. It’s nice to be able to order whatever I want when we go to restaurants. No more “Just the house salad for me, thanks.”’
She laughed. ‘Poverty is the best diet in the land.’
‘But really, there’s so little off limits, it blows my mind,’ I continued. ‘We bought brand new cars for our fathers. This summer John wants to rent a nice house in Southampton and last weekend he ordered a couple of custom made suits and a ton of shirts from a store on Fifty-Seventh Street.’
‘Turnbull & Asser.’