There was a time when I wanted to have a lot of money. I wanted the best of everything because I’d come to realize that expensive things were truly made better, lasted longer, and helped you live longer. Expensive cleaning products did not cause cancer. Chanel nail color lasted at least four days longer than the kind they used in regular salons.
All of that was still true but now I thought of life differently. What I wanted most in that moment—in what I felt might be the last year of my life—was to be poor, with a child. To go through the drive-through at a fast-food restaurant and order two items from the secret menu plus a Coca-Cola to share. Sit in the Dodge, both of us in the front seats, pretending to eat delicately, like we were at a queen’s tea party instead of in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. The yellow splash of light from the sign would illuminate the crud in the cupholders. In the morning we would eat milk and biscuits, the kind you can get for free in the breakfast rooms of travel lodges.
In the store I tried on a beautiful pair of emerald suede sling-backs. The salesgirl had nothing better to do so she watched me. My feet were dusty. I lifted my dress to see how the shoes made my calves look.
I paraded around in the green heels. I was trying to feel normal, or not even normal but at the very least like the girl I was before I met Vic. Of course I knew I was half dead already by the time I met Vic—a great many segments of myself I pictured to look like the baba au rhum my mother used to love, little yeasty cakes saturated in rum. My lungs, for example. When at night I couldn’t breathe I imagined my lungs were soaked in sweet liqueur.
By the time I got to California it was even worse. I was embarrassed that I’d ever thought I could be a mother. The desire to be beautiful had been replaced by the lowly fear of looking ugly. But seeing Alice had done something I hadn’t expected. Her beauty made me remember my own.
My phone rang and I picked it up because it was a familiar-looking number and I thought it might be my aunt even though she was dead.
It was a woman with whom I’d never spoken but about whom I knew a lot.
—Is this Joan, she said.
—Who is this?
—My name is Mary. I’m Vic’s—I was Vic’s wife.
THE FIRST TIME VIC AND I had sex was in Scotland, but sex has little to do with any first time. For some it might mean the hand on the knee. The clearing of sticky hair from someone’s forehead.
The whole team was in Jekyll Island for a conference. I’d already begun to take oceanfront rooms for granted. The first morning I skipped the group breakfast and went alone to the breakfast room called Jasmine Porch, where I ordered sweet tea and grits and red-eye gravy with a side of country ham. I sat in that spacious dining room looking at all these people who hadn’t lived a lot. They were mostly older than me but I could tell this was their first time drinking from a glass with an iced orchid inside.
I was tan and young and careless. The waiter filled my large coffee cup from a polished silver pot. I saw a woman in her early thirties enter the restaurant, using two canes to walk. Her husband and their child walked ahead of her, following a hostess to a table, and an older woman, her mother probably, was holding the younger woman’s elbow. I had this urge to send over something, French toast for the table. After all, the firm was paying for our meals. I called the waiter, but before I could ask him, Vic materialized.
I wish I could include a picture of him. I don’t have any. He was more of a feeling sometimes. His nice but too-big suits. So much suit material, like a factory.
—Hey, kid, he said, looming.
—Oh, hey.
—Rolling solo?
—I wasn’t feeling a group situation.
—Me neither. Mind if I intrude?
I had with me a Departures and wanted badly to be alone. I knew the precise color I wanted my coffee and how to have an orgasm in under thirty seconds. I needed everybody in the world—including waiters—less than they needed me.
—Sure, I said.
—Sure you mind, or?
He was terribly afraid of me. He was the most gorgeous listener in the whole world.
—Of course I don’t mind.
How had he found me? How did he always seem to find me? One time, inexplicably, he found me on the second floor of a deli with buffet islands of old but glistening orange chicken.
He sat down and I forgot about sending over the French toast to the handicapped woman. I didn’t remember until later that night in Vic’s grand hotel room with the ocean just below us. I’d never stayed in such places with my parents.
It was me and this other girl who worked at the copy desk and who’d brought a complaint of unwanted sexual aggression to HR, and this young man, a sort of lackey of Vic’s, but then everyone was. Vic had a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue and we were drinking it on the balcony from rocks glasses with pebbled bottoms. Vic’s room was a suite so he had a couch out there and we’d dragged two chairs from the bedroom. It started out with the two of us girls on the couch, but at some point the
