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, Dad,” I replied, a reluctant smile edging the corners of my mouth. It wasn’t that I didn’t love talking to my father. It was just that breakups resulting from sexual mishaps weren’t the kind of thing I felt I could confide in him.
So I described our demise as a couple as a desire for a “clean break.” “We didn’t really have the same goals,” I said, realizing that this was probably true. I mean, I did want to have a baby. Always imagined I would—someday. But I hadn’t realized the extent of my desire until the other night. Funny how something like a little broken latex can bring so much…clarity.
“Better you realize that now, Grace, rather than later,” my mother said, turning my recent relationship disaster into a triumph, as was her nature. Though she had been happily married to one man since the age of twenty-five, my mother seemed to have a different prescription for happiness for me. “Besides, you have your career to focus on now,” she said, as she’d been saying ever since I had landed the Senior Product Manager position at Roxanne Dubrow three years ago. In her mind, I was the single career woman she never was. My mother had studied the cello since she was nine and dreamed of joining the symphony. But she had given up that dream shortly after her marriage to my father, settling instead for a life as a music teacher in the public schools. She hadn’t, however, given up her belief that a woman’s first duty was to herself and her goals. She never failed to tell me how proud she was of me for staying true to mine. “If the girls at Hewlett High could see you now,” she always said, referring to my rebellious youth and somewhat colorful reputation. If my yearbook had allowed for those colorful attributions of yesteryear, mine would have read, “Girl most likely to single-handedly destroy her life.”
Yet now I was a shining beacon of success. Sophisticated. Cosmopolitan. Successful.
Even my father gave one of his familiar murmurs of assent—it was the only thing that reminded me he was still on the line—whenever my mother went off on how exalted my position at Roxanne Dubrow was, how magnificent my life.
I suppose it was pretty magnificent, I thought, once I hung up the phone and glanced around my apartment. At least from a real-estate point of view.
I live in a doorman building on the Upper West Side. That’s code for mega rent, though mine wasn’t up to current astronomical rates since I had snagged this apartment almost six years ago.
Six years. I had been twenty-eight at the time, and had just landed my first job managing my own product. Granted it was for a pharmaceutical company—not as glamorous a position as my current one—but I was jubilant. I finally had a salary fat enough to leave behind my third floor walk-up in the nowhereland of Kip’s Bay. I even had an assistant, though I barely knew what to do with her back then. I was moving toward my thirties still buoyant with the belief that I was entering the best part of a woman’s life, sexually, emotionally, financially. By thirty-five, I’d been told once by a college professor whom I admired, a woman usually has everything she wants.
I looked around my living room, decorated in soft whites. It was the kind of space I had always dreamed of having: lush, romantic, inviting. I thought about the fact that just this past summer, at our annual company summer outing at the Southampton Yacht Club, Dianne had told me that she thought I had “vision”—the kind of vision, she implied, that upper management at Roxanne Dubrow appreciated.
Yes, I did have a lot going for me, I thought. Then my eye fell upon two ticket stubs