What Have I Done For Me Lately?. Isabel Sharpe

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СКАЧАТЬ on Jenny’s feet. “By the way, I meant to tell you how much I love those shoes.”

      “Designer knockoffs. I got them at a discount outlet for thirty-nine ninety-five. No lie. Get yourself a pair.”

      “Oh, I couldn’t.”

      “Why not?” Jenny looked at her, direct, challenging. “If you like them so much, why not?”

      A flush of pink only slightly less loud than the sandals tinged Gwen’s generally pale face. “Oh, but, I don’t wear…shoes like that.”

      “Then start.” Jenny grinned. “That’s how it was for me. I just started. Felt like a complete imposter for a few weeks, and ended up growing into them. Trust me, if you love them, then you have a hot-pink-sandal-wearing person caged inside you, too. All you have to do is let her out!”

      “Oh, gosh.” Gwen’s blush deepened. “My husband would—”

      She clapped her hand over her mouth. Jenny winked. “I heard nothing. Buy the shoes and enjoy them. Next time I’m in Milwaukee I’ll call you and we can go out on the town in them together. Okay?”

      Gwen nodded doubtfully once, then more firmly. “Okay. Are you ready to eat? You must be hungry.”

      “Famished. I think I sweated off twenty pounds. Let me shower and change and I’ll be right out.”

      Dinner was the usual loud and fun affair after one of her lectures. Great food at a place called Eagans—she’d eaten in so many places in so many cities over the past six months she could hardly keep track—with women stopping by her table to tell their stories, confess their “sins” or ask her to sign their copies of What Have I Done for Me Lately?

      She still couldn’t get over how this had all happened. One month she’d been a bank teller and Paul’s fiancée. The next, she was single, living with her friend and roommate in college, Jessica, writing the book in an angry rush on nights and weekends while Jessica cheered her on. Some of the anger was directed at Paul, who had treated her so badly and cheated on her, but most of the anger she aimed at herself. How had she not seen this train wreck coming? How had she allowed herself to became so passive that Paul had cheated on her just to ease his boredom? She couldn’t blame him completely. Partly, sure, she had no problem with partly. Or even mostly.

      The sick irony of course was that he’d made her into that passive woman. Telling her what to wear, what to eat, what to say. Not outright, she wasn’t that weak. But subtly. “Wow, three of those cookies has twelve grams of fat,” as she was stuffing the fifth one into her mouth. “Sure, we can go to the movies tonight. Of course there’s an oldie on TV I was wanting to see.” “I like that dress. Or there’s that red one you look so much skinnier in.” Criticizing her conversation at parties, answering “no” automatically for both of them when waitstaff offered a predinner cocktail or dessert.

      Through it all, she sat, bump on a log, smiling graciously, pathetically eager to please, insisting she was madly in love, letting him make her over into a spiritless, mindless Paul-reflection.

      Not until she’d been without him a few weeks did it start to dawn on her how insidious their relationship had been, and how creepy that his control of her had felt so safe. And if this disaster had happened to her, a college-educated, upper middle-class woman from the liberal northeast, there must be others by the tens of thousands.

      If her nearly seven-figure book sales were anything to go by, she’d vastly underestimated that number.

      When the manuscript was finished, Jessica had shown it to a girlfriend who had a literary agent friend. Nothing would ever change Jenny’s life so radically, she was sure, as the day that agent called saying Xantham Press wanted to buy her book. Jenny had barely even comprehended what she was saying, let alone been able to foresee the changes in store for her life and for herself.

      Having her book published, having her words mean so much to so many women…it validated her existence and her worth in a way Paul could never even have begun to understand. More amazingly, she hadn’t really understood how much she’d needed it, either. With that nurturing, freeing validation she had blossomed into the kind of person she’d always dreamed of being, wearing what she wanted, saying what she liked, doing what she pleased. Growing up shy and overlooked in a country club town of beautiful people, she never would have seen herself evolving this far in a hundred years.

      Unfortunately, her publisher very understandably wanted a follow-up book, to keep her—and them—riding the wave. But writing a book that had poured out of her in an extended fit of passion and in a need to document her pain was very different from sitting down on purpose and conjuring something up. Her next book was tentatively titled Jenny’s Guide to Getting What You Want.

      What Jenny wanted was to be able to write the book. Three chapters lay on her desk, as they’d lain for the better part of the last year, each page practically red from all the revisions and crossouts and edits….

      In short, the book wasn’t happening. Her regular online advice column and the occasional pieces she wrote for women’s magazines presented no problem. They were satisfying and fun even if they were only rehashes of What Have I Done for Me Lately? So maybe this would be it for her, a one-shot wonder. Better to have shot once than never to have shot at all was how she’d decided to look at it, though she wasn’t sure her publisher agreed.

      After dessert at Eagans—she always ordered dessert now, without Paul to give her The Disapproving Look—she thanked her hostesses warmly and, declining their offer of a ride, walked the few blocks down Water Street to the Wyndham Hotel, enjoying the chilly night breeze off Lake Michigan on her still-heated face.

      Up in her room, she went into her antihyper routine, to calm herself down after the rush and excitement of a lecture/performance so she’d have some hope of falling asleep. First, the deep warm bath, then lavish amounts of perfumed powder and lotion so she smelled way too strong, then the bright coral silk teddy she adored, the kind Paul thought made her hips look big, and a long, leisurely emptying of a cup of herbal tea in bed reading the New York Times. Not that news was always restful, but fiction risked bringing on the can’t-put-it-down syndrome, and she’d never had a problem dropping the paper when sleep overwhelmed her.

      Halfway through a front section so full of natural and political and man-made disasters she was starting to get depressed, she rolled her eyes and picked up the Sunday Styles section. Nothing could be more soporific than that. A few pages of wedding and engagement announcements and grinning rich people at fund-raisers should put her right off to dreamland.

      Tomorrow she’d be on a plane back home to New York, arriving in time for a lunch date with her agent, then she and Jessica were going to the Metropolitan Art Museum to see—

      Jenny gasped, sat bolt upright and held the paper closer. Oh. My. God. Oh my god. Omigod.

      Ryan Masterson.

      Ryan Masterson.

      Only he didn’t look like Ryan Masterson. He looked like…she wrinkled her nose and peered at the awkwardly smiling tuxedoed image. Ryan Masterson’s boring twin brother.

      Was this what Wild Boy Masterson had turned into? Geez o Pete, was nothing sacred? The sexiest rebel alive reduced to posing at some society event with Frumpy Dame So-and-so and Squeaky Debutante This-’n’-that?

      Had hell, in fact, frozen over?

      She couldn’t stand it. What a waste.

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