unruly brown hair that keeps falling down from behind her ears. Large green eyes, lovely skin, a mouth that could be sensual if she’d let it.
“In these catalog pages that you okayed?”
“Yes?”
“I found two errors.”
“You’re kidding me.” Anne takes fierce pride in her attention to detail.
“See the extra space between the period and the start of the next sentence here? And ‘pate’ needs an acute accent over the e.”
The last thing most temps will do is take it upon themselves to review the boss’s work.
“You’ve got a good eye, Edna.”
The phone rings.
“I’ll get it myself… Anne Turner.”
“Anne, it’s Judith Arnold.”
Her gynecologist. Anne stiffens.
“The test is in. Hope you and Charles have some champagne on ice.”
“You’re positive?”
“No doubt. You’re going to have a baby.”
Anne can feel the blood rush from her head and then, just as quickly, her face flushes hot red. She sits in a gray chair she’s never sat in before. Christ, she wishes the rain would let up; she can’t think through its splattery tattoo. And she needs to think.
“It’s Emma.”
She’s forgotten that the young woman is still in the room. “What?”
“My name. It’s not Edna, it’s Emma.”
“Thank you, Emma. Hold all calls.”
When the girl is gone, Anne looks out the window again. But now all she can see is her own reflection, staring back at her with fear and contempt.
3
Anne strides down the cavernous hallway of the Central Park West apartment in her bra, panties, and the new Manolo Blahnik heels she paid six hundred dollars for at Bergdorf’s. She hates heels, they’re uncomfortable and send the wrong message. But today is a heels day-some days just are. Anne has spent the last week in a state of low-level panic. She called Judith Arnold back and swore her to secrecy about the pregnancy. She also asked for some pills to quell her anxiety, but was told they all carried too many risks. Anne reminds herself constantly how important it is to keep going. The next couple of weeks are going to be about Charles and the book. After that, she’ll have time to think. To decide.
She and Charles have been moving through the house as if in parallel universes. He began to slip down that black hole of his, but then, to his credit, he started work on a short story to take his mind off things. He’s also running compulsively, for hours at a time, and then polishing off two bottles of wine during their tense, desultory dinners. Anne knows that the less she says the better-they just have to wait and see how the release of Capitol Offense plays out. She yearns for the connection and release of lovemaking, but Charles loses all interest in sex when he’s depressed or resentful and right now he’s both.
In the kitchen-the kitchen that recently graced the pages of Metropolitan Home — Anne digs into the perfectly ripe papaya half Magdalena has left, as per instructions, on the bare white vastness of the room’s center island. Anne adores papaya-fat free, good for the digestion, and when perfectly ripe it literally melts on the tongue. Fifty percent of eating is texture, the other fifty percent is guilt. She looks around the gleaming room with its glass- front cabinets. None of that au courant clutter for her, thank you very much. The mania for baskets-woven grease- magnets she calls them-sets her teeth on edge. Anne is glad they bought the apartment, in spite of the squeeze it has put them in. She loves the space, the light, the views. In the past year their dinner parties have become coveted invitations, in no small part because people want to see what Anne Turner has done in her own home.
Anne listens. Beyond the door-the door that leads to Charles’s domain, the chaotic domain of Charles Davis- she hears nothing. She never does, although that never stops her from listening.
The kitchen phone rings.
“Yes.”
“Good morning, darling.”
Anne runs her fingers through her hair-this is the last person she wants to talk to today.
“Hello, Mother.”
“You didn’t answer my E-mail.”
“I’ve been swamped. Where are you?”
“Palm Beach. Did you forget? Tory Clarke’s wedding is this weekend. You were invited.”
“I’d rather book a root canal than go to Tory Clarke’s wedding. She’s as narrow-minded and right wing as the rest of her family.”
Damn! Ten seconds into the call and she’s already regressed from successful thirty-six-year-old to hostile teenager. Her earliest memory is of her mother dragging her to riding lessons, telling her she was going to win a gold medal in the Olympics. Then there were the French lessons, the dancing class, the B-minus in math that cost her the class trip to Catalina.
“Is everything all right, Anne?”
Anne can imagine Frances-who’s on her second face-lift and third husband-flushed from her morning workout, perched on the edge of a chaise in the guest suite of some friend’s mansion, sipping tea off the tray the maid delivered, looking out at the ocean, and patting on $100-an-ounce under-eye cream.
“I sent Tory a present. Give her my best. How are you and Dwight?” Anne’s current stepfather is a real estate developer who rode the southern California population boom straight to the Forbes 400. Her real father, an aeronautical engineer whom Anne adored, died of cancer when she was eight years old. His death bewildered and terrified her and left her with a haunting fear that the worst always happens, a fear she denies, even to herself.
“We’re wonderful, although Palm Beach is awfully humid. Why does anyone live on the East Coast? Listen, darling, I just wanted to check in and see how Charles’s new book is doing. We’re all breathless with anticipation.”
Frances Allen has never really approved of Charles, and Anne is sure she’d like nothing better than for the new book to fail. She groomed her daughter to marry a titan of industry, someone with serious money, places in Bel Air and Pebble Beach, private planes and entree into the highest levels of government. Not some novelist who’s part of the condescending East Coast cultural elite.
“The book is doing well,” Anne says.
“Have any reviews come out?”
“No,” Anne lies.
“Then how do you know it’s doing well?”
Anne takes a deep breath.
“I’ve got a big day, Mom.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Give my best to Dwight.”
“Listen, darling, we’re going to be in New York next month. Or at least I am. You know how your stepfather feels about that city. I’ll be at the Plaza Athenee.”
“Let me know the dates. Good-bye, Mother.”
Anne hangs up and immediately scoops out the rest of the papaya. The call was par for the course-not one question about Home, about how Anne is doing. Frances is a raging narcissist who sees her own life in color and everyone else’s in black-and-white. She hates her daughter for being younger and prettier than she is, for forging a career that eclipses Frances, for-Stop it! Anne has no time for those old tapes. Not today. Not ever.
