“Sometimes an Ex-Boyfriend is just an Ex-Boyfriend.”

—Sigmund Freud’s Ex-Girlfriend

This book is dedicated to:

My mother, Marianne Nappo.

You gave me not only love, but courage. Congratulations

on finding your soul mate.

My father, James Curnyn, for always believing.

Rose Nappo and Lillian Curnyn, the original city girls.

Linda Guidi, my redheaded sister,

and most inspired and inspiring friend.

Tony Chiaravelotti, my love, my friend,

my “Dear,” and my Ex-Boyfriend Extraordinaire.

Confessions of an Ex-Girlfriend
Lynda Curnyn

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Special thanks to the following people for advice and endless support:

Joe and Joanne Scotto di Carlo, for believing in the magic of the Skinny Scoop man. My lovable brothers, Jim and Brian Curnyn. Kim Castellano-Curnyn and Trina Palumberi, who not only had cool NYC apartments, but snagged great guys.

Dave Webber, the great guy who snagged my mom mere moments after I penned the proposal.

Linda Jean Curnyn, whose struggle to maintain sanity on the home front did not go unnoticed.

All the city girls, ex-girlfriends all at one time or another, who lent their womanly wisdom: Anne Canadeo, Lisa Sklar, Jennifer Bernstein, Alison Stateman and Karen Kosztolnyik.

My editors, Joan Marlow Golan, whose encouragement and creative spirit guided me through this first writing adventure, and Margaret Marbury, whose hipness I trust emphatically and whose solid advice I came to count on. Margie Miller, for creating the coolest cover!

My wise, dear friend, Roberto Lugo, for keeping me not only blond but sane.

Laura Wilkes and Todd Smith, the most lovable lawyers I know, for helping me keep the details straight, and for cheering me on. And let’s not forget Bismarck (the rabbit), of course, who, like Lulu, may just have matchmaking qualities. You never know….

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

One

“Ex-Girlfriends are made, not born.”

—Emma Carter, recovering Ex-Girlfriend

Confession: I should have seen it coming.

M y friend Jade claims that if you’re dating a serial killer, he will, however subtly, let you know his intentions from date one. And if you are especially attracted to said serial killer, you will merely nod and smile at this admission, then promptly forget it.

It’s true that on our first date Derrick told me he’d be moving to the West Coast just as soon as he sold his first screenplay. But since this comment came just moments after our first kiss—complete with a sunset view of the Hudson, along which we were romantically strolling—I did not register that he would one day be leaving me but only that a) he was an amazing kisser, and b) he was a writer, which essentially translated into soulmate for me. I was a writer…of sorts.

Now it’s a horrible fact of New York City life that every man you pine for is either too ambitious, too creative or too desired by the rest of the world to even have the time of day for you. Yet somehow, after spending the past two years of weekend nights curled up with Derrick on the futon in my rent-stabilized studio, I had mistaken us for a couple Meant-To-Be. Especially considering how we got together against all odds.

We met on the West 4th Street Subway platform, the uptown side. The main reason I noticed Derrick was that we were dressed similarly, in black T-shirts and jeans. And there was something so stumbling and shy about the way he was trying to catch my eye, I could hardly resist. “Hi,” he said, meandering closer.

For a neurotic instant, I thought of those nutballs who had lately been pushing unsuspecting women onto the tracks, but when I saw his neatly trimmed goatee, I felt an odd sense of security. There was something soothing, yet edgy, about a man with a goatee. I also remember being startled by the clear blue color of his eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses. Oh, and the glasses got me, too. I love a man in glasses.

It was summer, and the air hung thickly around us. “Hot down here,” Derrick remarked.

“Like an armpit,” I replied, not thinking.

This was exactly the kind of blunt little vulgarity Jade had warned me against time and again. “There are some things you just can’t say to a guy if you ever hope to have sex with him.”

Derrick did look at me rather oddly, then gave a half laugh and proceeded to move on to introduce himself, “I’m Derrick, by the way.”

“Emma,” I blurted, as the subway car pulled up, rescuing us from our awkward dialogue.

In fact, the thing I loved about Derrick immediately was that he was so “unsmooth”—so unprepared to seduce me that I was immediately seduced. “Heading out of town for the weekend?” he asked, eyeing my oversize pocketbook.

“No,” was my less-than-scintillating rejoinder.

“Oh.” He studied my bag with a frown. “I am. Jersey shore.” And he held up a bag which, to me, looked like it would barely hold a bottle of suntan lotion and a change of underwear. But then, I was talking to an attractive man—this was not the time to mince words.

When the train pulled into Penn Station—his stop—just moments after I had explained that I was headed up to 85th Street to check out the Guggenheim exhibit on “Phallic Inevitability and the Surrealist School”—a conversational gambit that earned me an eyebrow raised in admiration—I made my first tactical error. Although Jade had advised me endlessly never to make the first move, I jumped off the train right after Derrick. What could I do? Seeing him on the platform fumbling for a pen to take my number as the doors stood temptingly open but in serious danger of swinging shut at any moment—destroying my every hope for happiness—I panicked.

“Oh, I thought you were going…” he began, puzzled.

“It’s better if I transfer here,” I replied quickly, hoping he wouldn’t realize this didn’t exactly make sense.

With a look that resembled relief, he produced a pen and a small scrap of paper and handed it to me. When I was done, he wrote his number down on the same paper before nervously tearing it in two and handing me half. Glancing at his watch, he mumbled a brief but endearingly warm goodbye. Then he was gone, leaving me dreamy-eyed on the platform.

Dreamy-eyed for all of three minutes.

Because as I stood there contemplating the two of us entwined in intimate conversation over drinks at some hip little boaîte downtown—maybe Bar Six or Lansky’s Lounge—I felt a flicker of doubt. To verify that I did, in fact, score an incredibly cute guy’s phone number, I glanced at the folded scrap of paper still clutched in my hand. With sudden horror, I realized the number I held was my own.

“Made for each other,” Jade said when I told her the story. “Neither one of you is ever going to get laid, judging by the number of attempts you probably have between you.”

I turned to my friend Alyssa for comfort, instead. Unlike Jade, Lys always managed to see a brighter side to things. When I explained how I hadn’t even given him a last name so he could look me up, she said hopefully, “Maybe he’ll take out an ad in the personals, looking for you. You know, some people do that. They even have a page devoted to things like this in the Voice. You’ve seen the ads: ‘Saw you on the A train. You, brunette, soft green eyes—’”

“My eyes are hazel.”

“‘Shy and sweet.’”

“Me?”

“Well, on first impression you can be!” Once again adopting the voice of the man she had never met but believed capable of such grand romantic gestures, she continued, “‘Me, writer looking for a beauty like you. Thought I found you but you got away. Please call….’”

“Not a chance. Guys don’t do that sort of thing.”

“Then you do it, Em. Take an ad! C’mon, what have you got to lose?”

“My sense of self-worth?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I used to read those ads, Lys,” I explained. “All the time. I used to think they were romantic, too. But the more you read the personals, the more you realize there are a lot of pretty desperate people out there. I mean, c’mon. To think that somebody might mistake a random encounter—the equivalent of stepping on someone’s foot in a crowd—for Kismet. Gimme a break.”

“Oh, here she comes. The cynic.”

It’s true I was a cynic in the pre-Derrick period. But who could blame me? At the time, I was twenty-nine years old, and had dated enough men to know that my soulmate would likely turn out to be nothing more than a good-fitting pair of shoes.

But then, destiny intervened. Two weeks after the hapless sub way encounter, as I shared coffee and the Sunday night blues with Alyssa at the Peacock Café, I spotted Derrick, sitting two tables away and wearing the most perfectly faded pair of Levi’s I had yet to find in my own endless thrift-store searches.

“Hey,” he said, jumping up and almost knocking over the tiny table in front of him. “It’s you.” And suddenly he was standing over the table looking down at me in amazement.

I stood, too, staring at his adorable face in disbelief and leaving Alyssa to gawk up at us, a smile spreading across her features.

“I can’t believe what an idiot I was that day,” he said.

“Me too.” I replied, Jade’s warning voice a mere whisper as I stammered through a ridiculously elated dialogue about how absolutely retarded I’d felt when I discovered the mix-up.

“I told you it was fate,” Alyssa said dreamily when he left our table fifteen minutes later, my number safely tucked in the pocket of his denim jacket.

Fate. This had come from the very same Alyssa who days ago had officially declared Derrick the man I needed to put out of mind. Forever.

Confession: Contrary to popular belief, I am not better off without him.

Even Derrick had the gall to attempt to come up with reasons why I should be happy, even though he was leaving me. According to him, I had a dream life. How many people, he argued, could claim that they had spent the better part of their twenties in the best city in the world?

“If it’s such a great city,” I argued back, “why are you leaving it?”

Then he explained once again, in the calm, rational voice I had begun to abhor in him during those last, angst-ridden days, that all his career opportunities were in L.A. That now that he had sold his screenplay, the studio wanted to hire him on as a script doctor. That he was better off on the West Coast.

Without me, I thought in silence that followed his speech. And as I considered throwing myself at his feet and begging him to take me away from this glorious city, he changed tactics.

“You have so much here,” he argued. “Your own apartment. A career.”

Now this statement requires some clarification.

First, my apartment. If the words “walk-in closet” send a tremor of longing through you, think again. My walk-in closet contains a bed, a dresser, a desk and a bookshelf that has seen better days. Oh, and did I mention the Barbie kitchen along one wall? Yes, that’s right. My apartment is a walk-in closet. Of course, there is something to be said for the fact that it’s not only rent-stabilized but below 14th Street—the only neighborhood really worth living in, in my opinion.

Now as for my career…when asked the inevitable “what do you do?” question at parties, the answer I give is that I am a writer for a national women’s magazine. This is not a lie, though my job is hardly as cool as this sounds. In truth, I am a contributing editor at Bridal Best, where I compose captions, headlines and—with ever-increasing frequency—articles on such subjects as “Hot Honeymoon Escapes” and “Wedding Dresses You Can Breathe In.”

At best, my illustrious career at Bridal Best could be called a happy accident, for it started as a two-week stint as an office temp which turned into a permanent position when Carolyn Jamison, the senior features editor I work for, took a personal interest in keeping me on. How could I resist all her encouragement when, up till then, the master’s degree in Creative Writing I had gotten at NYU had resulted only in a handful of unpublished stories and a full-time waitressing position?

Now, as I sat filled with self-loathing in an editorial meeting on the Wednesday morning of Derrick’s departure, counting the minutes until his plane left the ground and carried him away from me, I began to wish I hadn’t resisted the impulse to call him at 3:00 a.m. to let him know what a heartless bastard he was.

Looking up from my cloud of despair, I saw Patricia Landers, Bridal Best’s editor-in-chief, stand up to give us her weekly address. “At Bridal Best our editorial mission is to speak to the bride in every woman,” Patricia began, “whether she is simply dreaming of that special day, or taking the first steps toward making that day happen.”

Step 1: Don’t let your boyfriend leave the state.

I sighed, suddenly weary of the wedding planning mantra that was sure to issue forth from Patricia’s thin lips. As I studied her wispy blond hair, pale face and crisp blue eyes, I wondered if this would be my fate. To be the ultrathin, somewhat prim yet rather well-kept editor-in-chief of a national magazine. A career woman who needed no man, only a fat paycheck and enough take-home assignments to make her forget that there was so much more to life than work.

Then I remembered something else.

Unlike me, Patricia was married. And as dubious as that marriage was rumored to be, it set her miles apart from a manless and struggling contributing editor like myself.

My eyes moved frantically about the table, where the illustrious editorial team of Bridal Best sat, seemingly transfixed by Patricia’s words. There was Rebecca, the only office colleague I deigned to call a friend and who shared my enthusiasm for taking pott shots at the powers-that-be. But Rebecca had a boyfriend—worse, an incredibly perfect boyfriend, who not only had a high-paying accountant job but came from money. Big money. Then there was my boss, Caroline, of course, who was round with her fourth child, compliments of the hardworking husband she kept back at her sprawling Connecticut home. The other three senior features editors were married, too. Sandra, whose wedding to Roger two years earlier had been almost as splashy as Patricia’s; Debbie, pushing fifty and married for so many years no one even remembered what her husband looked like; Carmen, who not only had a husband but—according to our production assistant and resident office gossip Marcy Keller—a boyfriend on the side. Janice in production was married two times over, despite the hairy mole on the side of her face. Who was left among us single folk but the editorial assistants, who were too young to care?

I glanced down at the end of the table and swallowed hard as I caught sight of the strange trio who sat clustered there: Lucretia Wenner, the angry copy chief who neither woman nor man could truly love; Nancy Hamlin, the bodily pierced and butch admin everyone suspected was a dyke; and Marcy Keller, who spent so much time studying everyone else’s personal life she barely had one of her own. I quickly closed my eyes, shutting out the hopeless look in their eyes that not even their bitter smiles could mask.

Oh God, was this what I had to look forward to?

Confession: I am not ready to be an ex-girlfriend.

This fact became glaringly apparent on my first real weekend of singledom. Derrick had flown out only three days prior with a promise to call once he was settled, though we had agreed that from now on, we were strictly friends. I will confess right now that he is the only “friend” I have ever had whom I secretly wished would fail miserably. In fact, I was practically preparing for the day when he would return to NYC, tail between his legs, begging me to take him back.

Though Jade had invited me out for a girls’ night out with a couple of her friends from Threads, the fashion magazine where she worked as a clothes stylist, I opted to avoid an evening of gyrating on a dance floor looking fat and unfashionable next to Jade and her pseudosupermodel friends, in favor of a quiet evening at Alyssa’s.

“You’ve been denied your right to be angry, Em,” Alyssa explained after she’d set me up with a martini. Two sips of it made me fall into a state of self-pity that I was attempting to wallow in until Lys cut me off with her “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” brand of advice.

Sighing long and deep, I watched as she slid mushrooms expertly into a pan for the gourmet dinner she was cooking for her live-in boyfriend, Richard, who had yet to arrive home from his high-powered—and, need I say, high-paying—job as a corporate lawyer. Alyssa was a lawyer, too, but one of those earthy-crunchy ones who fight to save trees and make tap water fit for human consumption. In addition to being a top environmental lawyer and all-around hell of a gal, she liked to whip up heart-healthy, mind-expanding meals with names like wheat gluten casserole with roasted baby corn. Somehow these qualities, which I’d always admired in Alyssa before, began to depress me as I watched her cook. Is this what it took to maintain Girlfriend status? Maybe I should have made more of an effort with Derrick, whipped up something heartier than coffee with Cremora on all those Sunday mornings we spent together.

“Just because he had a perfectly good reason to leave doesn’t mean you don’t have a perfectly good reason to be angry,” Alyssa continued, sautéing in earnest now, her curly brown shoulder-length hair swept up into a ponytail, her brow furrowed over her bright blue eyes.

Though Alyssa knows me better than most, when it comes to this ex-girlfriend business she cannot relate. After all, Lys has been successfully dating since puberty. Once I asked her how she always managed to have a boyfriend on hand, and she laughed, saying she usually hung on to the guy long enough for them to grow completely sick of each other, then broke up with him just as New Boyfriend stood waiting in the wings.

Now if this were any other girl, I might have said Alyssa suffered from Chronic Boyfriend Syndrome—a condition that leads many women not only to date, but also to plan their lives around men who are for the most part reprehensible but seem preferable to the other option…which is no boyfriend at all. But I can honestly say that despite her claims, I am sure Alyssa never dated a guy out of this kind of neediness. It is just that she is utterly lovable—so lovable, in fact, that most men upon meeting her wish they had an Alyssa of their very own.

Her current beau, Richard, the first man Alyssa has ever dared live with and, I must admit, the best guy she’s ever been with, is a perfect example of this. Richard was the roommate of Alyssa’s last boyfriend, Dan. They were all in law school together, and since Alyssa pretty much lived at Dan’s place in order to avoid her own awful roommate, Richard took every opportunity to bond with her whenever he was in her warm and fun-loving presence. I can just imagine his joy when Dan up and moved back home to Ohio to practice law with his father’s firm, leaving Alyssa free and clear for Richard, who had already fallen hopelessly in love with her from the sidelines.

Now, as Alyssa looked up from her mushrooms, silently demanding my assent to her psychobabble, I struggled for words to explain how I felt.

“I don’t think I’m angry, Lys. I think I just miss him, is all.”

“Well, get angry, Em,” Alyssa said, turning from her sauté to look at me. “You’re not going to get over this unless you do.”

The thought of getting over Derrick horrified me. Derrick was the man I loved. My soulmate. Getting over him was not an option.

“Mmm-hmm,” I muttered vaguely in response, and while I sat pondering the audacity of her suggestion, I found myself agreeing to stay to dinner with her and Richard, which, I realized later, was a mistake. As I watched them exchange tidbits of their day along with meaningful glances, one thing became very clear: I needed to get a life. A life that didn’t involve…couples.

Confession: I have been operating under the mistaken belief that I would never, ever, have to enter the dating world again.

I called Jade first thing Saturday morning and practically begged her to have brunch with me. And despite a slight hangover, best bud that she is, she agreed to drag herself out of the house before dusk.

We met at French Roast, mostly because they had outdoor seating and Jade would be able to smoke. As I sat waiting for her at five to one—I am chronically early, a habit I developed probably to have something to hold over the chronically-late-but-otherwise-perfect Derrick’s head—I looked forward to some solid single-girl bolstering. After all, Jade was one of the few friends I had who seemed fearless in the face of the battleground that was the NYC dating scene. She never seemed to suffer the same kind of losses other women did. When she gave out her number, the man always called. Sometimes she didn’t even pick up the phone—that’s how sure of herself she was.

At one-fifteen, she breezed up to the sidewalk table I had secured, looking effortlessly gorgeous in capri pants and a tank that showed off her toned shoulders. Jade is one of those women who was born to wear clothes—a perfect size 6 with just enough bust to matter and no hips. Her hair, a deep, rich shade of red, fell in soft waves down her back, seemingly without effort or design. Her eyes are green, her skin smooth and flawless over high cheekbones. She is the kind of woman other women would hate if they could, simply by virtue of the fact that no man can ignore her when she is in a room. But there is something about her that is irresistible to both men and women. It amazes me sometimes that we are even friends, she graceful and self-assured, me always fumbling and often angry. Yet we’ve known each other since grade school and are bonded together by shared memories of first bras, first boyfriends and first successful undereye coverage finds. When she was edging toward twenty, a photographer encouraged Jade to put together a portfolio and she did, but when the time came to submit it to modeling agencies, she shrugged off the opportunity, as if it were something anyone could do. As it turned out, after various attempts at other careers, she landed a job on the other side of the camera, working as a clothes stylist for Threads Magazine.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, giving me a solid one-arm hug, then pulling back to look into my eyes—gauging my mood, I suppose—before she slid into the chair across from me. First we ordered, she the niçoise salad—not because she needed to eat light, but because she liked to, believe it or not—me, the smoked salmon hash with eggs—a fancier version of the kind of greasy, carbohydrate-laden meal I chose whenever I was throwing myself a pity party. Then she said, “Okay, spill. What’s going on with you? Are you moping? I can see you’re moping. He’s not worth it. No guy is, really.”

And so I began my discourse on how my life had suddenly lost all meaning now that I had gone from Happily Coupled-Off to Horribly, Achingly Single…and all before Memorial Day weekend, no less.

“Alyssa says I’m unable to get angry because he left me for a good reason. It’s true I can’t really get angry at Derrick for going after his dream. I mean, all he’s ever wanted to do was make a living at writing, and when he sold that screenplay, he got the chance to do it—in L.A.”

Jade lit a cigarette, making me painfully aware that I no longer smoked, despite the occasional desperate urge I suffered. “So let me ask you something. If you are so heartbroken without him, why don’t you go after him? Move to L.A.”

Leave it to Jade to go straight for the jugular, asking the question I didn’t even want to ask myself. “And give up my career?” I said, practically parroting Derrick’s rationale for not inviting me with him, a point that still jabbed at my ego.

“At Bridal Best?” she asked, her eyes bulging in disbelief.

“I am next in line for a promotion, you know,” I said defensively, realizing how ridiculous I suddenly sounded, glorifying my day job. The very job I took great delight in mocking whenever Jade and I got into a gripefest about work, usually over drinks during a Friday night happy hour. But how could I explain to Jade, who knew that all I’d ever wanted to be was a writer, that for the past two years of my life—The Derrick Years as I imagined I would one day call them—my creativity had been confined to my role as editor at a magazine? A magazine, as I often joked, that thrived on the fact that happily-ever-after was not only every woman’s ambition, but a prosperous industry. There had been room for only one writer in our relationship, and Derrick, with a screenplay under his belt as well as a string of short stories published in literary journals, had won the role hands down. As for myself, I hadn’t written a word for the last year and a half. Not that Jade knew that. No one knew, really. Except Derrick. There was no hiding your failures from someone who spent seventy-five percent of his life in your one-room studio.

“Besides, how could I give up my rent-stabilized apartment?” I added weakly as the waitress came by with our meals.

While Jade blew out a last puff of smoke, staring at me as she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, I tried to bury myself in my meal, avoiding her gaze. Jade knows me better than anyone, sometimes even better than I know myself, and I was not yet ready to face whatever ugly truths I was hiding from myself.

“Emma—”

“The truth is, Jade, he didn’t want me with him while he went off to become rich and famous. He doesn’t want—me.”

Her eyes were soft when I looked up again, and somehow her pity stung more than her anger might have.

“What you need is a nice rebound relationship. And I know just the guy,” she said, resolve firming in her eyes as she dug into her salad. “I just styled him the other day for an outerwear shoot.”

“I don’t date models.” Translation: they don’t date me. “You don’t even date models anymore.” After months of trying to keep one around long enough for at least one evening of unparalleled ecstasy, even Jade finally realized they were too self-absorbed to truly seduce. At least I hoped she realized that.

“C’mon, Emma. You know the best thing you can do for your self is get right back out there. Besides, this guy might even be nice.”

“Then why don’t you go for him?” I asked, studying her expression. I always distrusted the idea of dating the men Jade passed over herself. She was such a solid judge of masculine virtues, I knew that if she didn’t want the guy, she must have found some serious flaw she would never fess up to while she was trying to sell me on him.

“He’s not my type.”

Now I knew he was flawed. “Forget it.”

“I might even be able to line him up for next weekend.”

“Next weekend?” I said, shocked she might even suggest that I—with that extra five or so pounds of relationship flab firmly intact on my thighs and my emotions still tattered and flapping in the wind—might be ready to sit across a smoke-filled table from a startlingly handsome man and utter meaningless words designed to make myself seem just as accomplished and attractive as he was. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to get through this weekend, never mind next. Speaking of which, what are you doing later? Want to see a movie?” I asked, hoping to avoid an evening alone.

“Can’t. I have a date.”

“Really? With Steroid King?”

“You mean Carl? No, he’s history,” she said. “I told you—he couldn’t, you know, perform. I don’t think you should have to deal with penal dysfunction in a man unless you’re in love with him. You remember what I went through with Michael?”

Michael was the man I would say came the closest to being the love of Jade’s life, except that he brutally dumped her for some dippy little blonde from his office after she struggled for over a year to put up with his vanity, his immaturity and, worst of all, his impotence—not that he ever called it that. He just claimed not to be interested in having sex with Jade, which did wonders for her ego. Ever since their breakup two years ago, Jade has done everything in her power to keep her heart out of it and go strictly for kicks—all those kicks she never really got from Michael, sexually speaking. But the great irony of her life has been that despite the fact that she is beautiful, intelligent and financially self-sufficient, she can’t seem to find a man in all of NYC capable of delivering a satisfying sexual experience. Having gone through some dry spells myself since moving to NYC, I could sympathize. In fact, we often joked that we could start our own sitcom, called No Sex in the City. Carl had merely been Jade’s latest dating experiment—a musclehead so pumped up on steroids, he couldn’t seem to get a rise out of any other part of his anatomy.

“No, this is a guy from the gym, too, but he’s the real thing. Gorgeous, in that lean, surfer’s body kind of way.”

“Let me guess…he’s a model.”

“Yeah, but he’s very down-to-earth,” she argued, leaning back from the salad she’d barely touched to sip her water.

Though Jade didn’t like to hear it, I firmly believed her trouble with men began with her selection. She had always been a connoisseur of the beautiful people, which was probably why she was such a high-in-demand stylist in the fashion industry. But what she apparently hadn’t figured out yet was that that beautiful men all had one thing in common and that was an inability to love—or even desire—anyone more than they loved themselves.

“I know what you’re thinking, Em,” she said, “but this time I have the best of both worlds. Ted is beautiful, but I get the feeling he doesn’t even realize just how beautiful.”

“Hence, his career choice.”

“Please. The guy was living out in the middle of a cornfield in the Midwest when a scout spotted him at a club.”

“This story sounds familiar.” Why was it that no models ever seemed to actually apply for the glamorous, high-paid jobs they wound up in?

“He almost seems…innocent,” Jade continued. “I mean, he practically blushed when I gave him my phone number.”

“You’re kidding?”

She started to laugh, then lit a cigarette. “So what are you going to do tonight? Go out with Alyssa?” Jade and Alyssa had become fast friends from the moment I introduced them in college, despite their very different personalities.

“No, no. She’ll probably be doing something with Richard. And there is no way I can deal with a night of hanging with the Happily-Almost-Married.”

“Well, I don’t think you should stay home,” Jade advised. “Want to meet up with me and Ted for drinks?”

“His name is Ted?”

“I know. Doesn’t it sound almost…harmless?”

“Very boy next door.”

“Well? What do you say? Drinks with me and Ted Terrific?”

“Naw. No, really. I want to stay home. You know. Get into myself again. Maybe I’ll do a little renovating. I’ve been meaning to move my bookshelves. Maybe hang a few pictures.”

“Are you sure?” Jade demanded.

“Of course I’m sure. It’s not like I’ve never spent Saturday night alone before.”

Confession: I have not spent Saturday night alone for two years.

This wasn’t exactly true, as there had been times when Derrick spent Saturday night home writing, and I spent Saturday night home alone, also writing. Or at least that’s what I told Derrick whenever he suggested we take Saturday off to catch up. “Oh, sure. I’ve been meaning to get started on a short story I’ve been thinking about,” I would always say. After we hung up, I would turn my computer on, and as it booted up, I would start hand-washing all my lingerie or organizing my sock drawer. If things got really desperate, I would take an old toothbrush and some cleanser to the grout in the bathroom. If Derrick happened to call during these binges of avoidance to ask what I was up to, I always replied, “working.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

Now I didn’t dare turn on the computer. Couldn’t even bring myself to gather up the hand-wash, for fear of the memories it might conjure up. Instead I curled up on the bed, fetus-style, contemplating the night ahead of me.

I had already called Alyssa and learned that she and Richard were going to Richard’s sister’s house for dinner, confirming that I was, indeed, alone for the evening, without even friends to call. There was always my office pal, Rebecca, but she and I have never ventured into weekend territory together. Then there was Sebastian, my hairdresser and sometimes friend—that is, when Fire Island or some handsome new man didn’t beckon him away. But I hadn’t spoken to Sebastian in a while and felt like a fraud calling him up now, expecting him to be there for me when I hadn’t been much of a friend to him lately.

“Do something for yourself,” Alyssa had said when we spoke on the phone, “take a hot bath, do one of those home facials, curl up with a good book.” I knew she was right. That was what I should have done. It was, in fact, what was advised by every woman’s magazine and every relationship self-help book—not that I’d read any, but my mother always reads enough for both of us.

Instead I gorged myself on a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, overplucked my eyebrows and proceeded to pore over old photos of Derrick and me on vacation last summer in East Hampton, where we had rented a house with some of his friends. I studied that face I loved so much, saw the happiness in his eyes as we stood, arms entwined, tanned, rested and utterly in love. Or so I thought.

What had gone so wrong? I wondered now.

The phone rang, shattering the gloomy silence of my apartment. I picked it up, then remembered—too late—that I should be screening on this first Saturday night alone.

“Emma! You’re home! I didn’t think I’d catch you—”

“Hi, Mom.” There I was, caught by my mother, home on a Saturday night. “Yeah, well, figured I’d stay in tonight, catch up on a few things. How are you?”

“Fine, fine. Clark just went out to get some milk and eggs for the morning and I just thought I’d try you, see if you were around.”

Clark was my mother’s current boyfriend, and despite the fact that they had been together close to three years, I didn’t trust things to last. It wasn’t that Clark wasn’t the greatest guy in the world for my mother, it was that my mother didn’t have the best luck with men. I was starting to wonder if it was hereditary.

“So how’s everything with Derrick?” my mother asked. This question was a fairly routine one, occurring as it does at least once during our weekly phone calls. There was a subtext to it, which my mother will firmly deny if challenged: Is everything progressing normally? Will there be an engagement announcement soon? Am I ever going to see a grandchild?

I tended to ignore the subtext and answer with a cheerful “Everything’s fine.” And somehow, despite the fact that my mother would more than likely never see that grandchild now that her thirty-one-year-old daughter’s last chance had just up and left for L.A., putting that daughter—who had an average rate of two years between boyfriends, with one in three of those boyfriends actually being tolerable enough to consider propagating with—pretty much out of the running for motherhood. Despite all of that, I stuck to my faithful reply: “Everything’s fine. Derrick is fine. We’re fine.”

I don’t know why I lied. Maybe I didn’t want to get into it. I knew I would tell her. Eventually. I just didn’t want to hear how I had failed while my insides were still aching with the loss of him.

As it turned out, my mother had other things she wanted to talk about anyway.

After babbling on for a few minutes about her job as office manager at Bilbo, a pharmeceuticals company where she’d worked since I was a kid, she got to the real reason for her call. “I didn’t want to tell you this on the phone, but I don’t know when I’m going to see you again—” This was another point of contention with my mother, who apparently didn’t believe my monthly treks to Long Island to pay homage to her in her cozy Garden City home were quite cutting it.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Well, Clark and I have decided…that is, we’re going to get married.”

Now I must admit that upon first hearing, I was ready to completely disregard this statement. After all, this would be husband 3 (almost 4) and another in a long line of men my mother fell hopelessly in love with and considered marrying. Admittedly one could make the argument that my mother always went into marriage with the best intentions. It was the men she chose who always threw a kink into things.

There was my father, first of all, whom my mother discovered—after twenty years of marriage—to be a raging alcoholic. “He was always such fun at parties,” she once declared, remembering happier times. Then there was Donald—almost husband 2. After a whirlwind courtship that ended in a trip to Las Vegas to tie to knot, Donald was nailed by airport authorities with a warrant for his arrest…on three counts of embezzlement. Then came Warren, whom I would venture to call my mother’s true love…had their marriage lasted long enough to stand the test of time. After an eight-year courtship—my mother wasn’t taking any chances that time—they were wed in a small ceremony in our backyard, with me standing in as maid of honor. Unfortunately, Warren died of a heart attack within weeks of the honeymoon.

Now there was Clark. Sweet, lovable Clark, an English professor with a lopsided smile and a fondness for quoting from seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry, a trait my mother found absolutely charming.

But there was no shrugging off this announcement, I realized, when she began rattling off the details of the ceremony. “…I’m thinking mid-September…a small cruise ship, just the family. Clark and I, of course. Grandma Zizi. You and Derrick. Shaun and Tiffany…” Shaun is my married brother. Married younger brother, I might add. “Clark’s son and daughter and their kids,” she continued. “We’ll take a short sail through the Caribbean to St. Thomas, where Clark and I will be married with the waves crashing in the background and the family standing by. Kind of like a family vacation and a wedding all tied up into one. Won’t that be fun?”

Loads.

Two

“Don’t knock denial until you’ve tried it.”

—Name and age withheld

Confession: My breakup has turned me into a pathological liar.

T he following Monday at work, I slid into the guest chair of Rebecca’s cubicle. Though Rebecca is mainly an office buddy, we have been known to make excursions out to local bars for happy hours together, to commemorate a good review or gripe over a particularly menacing co-worker. However, these outings have become few and far between, mostly due to the fact that I have been doing the relationship thing, avoiding all friends other than Jade and Alyssa, in favor of takeout and a video rental with Derrick. Though Rebecca had been with her boyfriend, Nash, for about as long as I was with Derrick, she always seemed to make time for friends, and never seemed to mind the occasional late-night crunch to make a special assignment deadline, even if good old Nash had made them dinner reservations. In fact, I think she prides herself on her ability to be both good friend to all and steady girlfriend to one, which makes me suspicious of her, and somewhat jealous, I’ll admit.

“My mother is getting married again,” I announced, with some exasperation.

“What fun,” Rebecca replied, peering up at me from a layout she had been reviewing, her eyebrows raised and a bright smile on her face.

Something about her cheerful reaction to my news made me immediately put up my antennae. One of the things Rebecca and I had always shared, especially during our after-work-cocktail outings, was a healthy disdain for the perky little world of wedding planning that is Bridal Best. How else could we separate ourselves from an office of people who waxed poetic over everything from choosing the right place settings to the proper thickness of paper for invitations, except by mocking them? If I didn’t know Rebecca better, I might have thought she’d been bitten by the Bridal Best marriage zest after all. Because at Bridal Best, every marriage, even your mother’s third, is an event worth getting hysterical over.

“Yeah, well, it’s hard for me to summon up any sort of enthusiasm for this wedding. I mean, my mother’s track record is a lesson in how not to find everlasting love.”

Rebecca studied me for a moment, as if I were speaking in a foreign language. “You should be happy for your mother. It’s not every woman who can fall in love again after so many missteps. She has a lot of courage.”

“Either that or she’s taking enough Prozac for it to not matter.” Ever since she lost Warren, my mother was a firm believer in the kind of happiness that was available in easy-to-swallow caplets.

“What’s gotten into you? You seem more cynical than usual. Did you fight with Derrick this weekend?”

Her question caused a minor panic inside me, as if my sudden state of stressful singledom had somehow become glaringly apparent. I stumbled around for a moment or two as I studied her careful blond bob and perfectly plucked brows, the neat way she had lined up her pencils on her desktop. Suddenly I was filled with distrust. Even the shiny eight-by-ten framed photo of Nash she kept in her cubicle seemed to glint evilly at me. There was no way I could tell her the truth.

“No, no. Nothing happened with Derrick. Everything is fine. Great, in fact.”

“Terrific,” Rebecca said, turning back to the layout before her. “Then that will give you a clear head to help your mom out with this wedding. Gosh, you could practically plan this thing yourself, if you had to.”

“Sure, if I had to.” If I didn’t die of heartbreak first.

Confession: Marriage suddenly seems like a social disease.

Back at my desk, I was faced with my greatest challenge since The Breakup: attempting to muster enough perkiness to write a short to-do list for the bride-to-be that I had secretly titled, “How to Make Your Wedding Day Happen Without All Hell Breaking Loose.” As I struggled to come up with an opening paragraph, I started to feel some of that anger Alyssa had encouraged in me. What about us non-bride-to-be’s? I wondered. Even my own mother had put me to work in the service of her wedding day by asking me to start looking up cruise ships and “getaway” weddings on my handy little database. Worse, she had gleefully offered to take one of the many vacation days she’d accumulated during her twenty-year career at Bilbo to meet me for lunch the following week to see what I had come up with.

Why was my job so convenient for everyone else? Why was it that everyone else had a burning need to pick my brain for suggestions on everything from romantic-honeymoons-that-don’t-require-a-tan to effortless-and-elegant hor d’oeuvres? Working in the warped little world of wedding planning had led me to one conclusion: If you don’t get married in this world, you get nothing. Once, in an editorial meeting, I jokingly suggested that a woman should get a bridal shower when she turns thirty, wedding or not. Everyone looked at me as if I were some kind of nut. I am thirty-one years old, am I not entitled to free Calphalon yet?

The phone rang, saving me from starting the dreaded article.

“Hey, Em,” came Jade’s voice over the line.

“Jade. Thank God.”

“Were you expecting someone else?”

“I was hoping for anyone who is not getting married.”

“No fear here. What’s going on?”

“Nothing, nothing. You know, the usual. Deadline pressure high, motivation factor low. How did the date with Ted Terrific go?”

“Terrific, of course. We did drinks, went to shoot some pool. Did I mention that he has the most beautiful forearms I’ve ever seen? Nice and thick and just the way I like ’em. He’s even got a couple of tattoos. And you know how I feel about a man with tattoos.”

“Uh-oh. You’re finished.”

“If I don’t sleep with him, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Marry him?”

“What’s gotten into you this morning?”

“It’s my mother. She’s getting married again.”

I held the phone away from my ear as Jade shrieked with joy. “That is so wonderful! She and Clark are too cute together. Oh, I have to call and congratulate her. I should probably pick up a card at lunch….”

I should have figured Jade would be my mother’s biggest champion. After all, she’d known my mom since husband 1. “Jade, am I the only person in the world who’s not excited about this?”

“Well, you should be,” she said, censure in her tone. “She’s your mother! Don’t you want her to be happy?”

“Happy, yes. I’m just not too clear on the fact that marriage is the way to get happy. You do realize that this would be Husband 3, almost 4?”

“Em, I think you need to get over that. Not everybody lives a cookie-cutter life. So what if your mother has spent a lot of her life searching? As long as she finds what she wants in the end.”

“I suppose you’re right.” I let out a sigh. “Maybe I’m not looking forward to the Big Day, especially since she’s got the whole family cruising to the Caribbean together for the ceremony. And guess who will be the only guest in the single cabin? Of course, my mother doesn’t know that yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about Derrick. I don’t know why…I just…couldn’t.”

“You’re going to have to tell her eventually. When’s the wedding?”

“She’s hoping to get something together by the end of September.”

There was a silence, as if Jade was pondering. “That’s not much time, but who knows what could happen before then. You might be in love with someone else. Or you might find yourself a cute waiter on the cruise ship to share that single room with.”

“Somehow I doubt it. But maybe I can dig up someone to take with me.”

“Ah, yes. The old Boy Under the Bed.” This was our term for the ever-present male friend who was suitable to take to such events as weddings or office picnics, though for one reason or another not someone you had any sort of desire to truly date. Mine used to be Cal, who’d been a fellow waiter at Good Grub, the restaurant I waitressed at during grad school. Cal was a perfect Boy Under the Bed—a great dancer, tall enough so you didn’t tower over him in heels, and just unattractive enough not to cause any instances of drunken groping on the dance floor that might later prove embarrassing. The problem was, Cal had up and gotten married during the Derrick Years. Men were such bastards.

“I just realized my Boy Under the Bed went AWOL. Cal got married last year, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” She paused, and I heard her inhaling on a cigarette. “What about Sebastian?”

Sebastian was always a possibility, of course. But he was more a Boy Out of the Closet than a Boy Under the Bed, which made choosing him as a wedding date a bit of a problem. “I don’t want to be the fat older sister turned fag hag at this affair.”

“You’re not fat.”

“Well, you never know what could happen by September. I ate an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough over the weekend. And not even the frozen yogurt version. I went for the gusto—twenty-four grams of fat per serving, four servings per pint.”

“Big deal. Don’t worry, Em, we’ll find you someone. There’s always that model I told you about.”

“You know how I feel about models.”

“Well, you don’t have to marry him. And consider how good you’ll look together in the wedding pictures.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, reluctantly.

“Now there’s the Emma I know and love. Don’t worry. Everything will be just fine.”

Confession: I would marry for a below-market one bedroom.

I somehow managed to muddle through the rest of the week without any major emotional disasters. And after making it through a second weekend alone without completely falling apart, I felt almost proud of myself. In fact, as I walked down my tree-lined street on my way home from work on the verge of week three of the Post-Derrick Period, it suddenly occurred to me that being single in the greatest city in the world wouldn’t be all that bad. I even lived on the nicest street, I thought, as I passed the pretty brownstones on West Thirteenth Street.

Then I reached my building, with its faded facade of peeling paint and row of dented garbage cans and I couldn’t help but sigh with dismay. Why, oh, why, couldn’t Derrick and I have made it as far as shared real estate? He would never have left me if we had landed a below-market one bedroom downtown. No man in his right mind would walk away from that kind of find.

And no woman, I realized now, hating Derrick more for denying me my real estate dreams. With another sigh, I started up the steps.

Derrick was fond of calling my twenty-four unit apartment house The Building of the Incurables, because it was filled with tiny studios that housed—other than students struggling through until graduation—old people with ailments either mental or physical, which kept them from moving on to apartments with a living space large enough for an area rug that didn’t say Welcome on it. There was Beatrice on the first floor, for example, who had been hit by a piece of scaffolding on West Thirty-ninth Street sixteen years ago and whose injury required a metal plate in the head that had put her on the permanently disabled list. Now in her fifties, she was collecting social security and painting watercolors, which decorated the walls of her tiny cube on the first floor. Then there was Abe, who could have been anywhere from sixty-five to eighty-five and who, every morning, emptied the entire contents of his apartment (except for the furniture, which wasn’t much) into two trash bags, loaded them into a shopping cart, and went off to God knows where for the day.

Then there was me. Neither student nor psychotic, yet stubbornly holding on to my rent-stabilized studio as if my very life depended on it. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a great address—just a few short blocks from the subway, the Film Forum, the downtown bar scene, the Peacock, NYU and just about anyplace anyone wanted to be in the downtown area. And it was easy enough for me to bear up to my lack of closet and living space for the kind of location that drew looks of envy whenever I spouted my address at parties. Besides, with Derrick in my life, there was always that lingering hope of the one bedroom we would one day share, once Derrick realized the two-bedroom dive on the Lower East Side he shared with a foul-mouthed bartender just wasn’t cutting it. I used to fantasize about our dream apartment, complete with wall shelves displaying our combined, heady collection of film and literature titles. It was that hope that kept me sane, and safely apart from my in curably psychotic and old, or annoyingly young and transient, neighbors.

But once Derrick was gone from my life, I fell out of my Safely Coupled category and into…Something Else. And that something else was yet to be determined, I realized, as I entered the building.

“Emma!” came Beatrice’s shrill cry as I stepped into the foyer and found her at the mailboxes, arms laden with every mail-order catalog you could imagine, and an assortment of envelopes.

“Hi, Beatrice, how are you?” I said in the usual singsong voice I reserved for small children and adults like Beatrice, who weren’t, as they say, all there.

“Oh, I’m all right—”

“Good,” I replied quickly, starting for the stairs.

“—except for this crazy sinus condition. Every morning I wake up, stuffed nose, clogged ears. And my molars. Oh—” Her gray eyes opened wide behind her thick glasses. “It’s unbearable.”

“I hear what you’re saying, Bea,” I replied, bracing one foot on the steps, preparing for flight at the first opportunity. Beatrice did like to get into a thorough discussion of her ailments, and I still hadn’t managed to figure out how to effectively avoid listening to her litanies. She’s lonely and it means a lot to her that I listen, I often rationalized after a good ten minutes hearing about everything from nasal congestion to hot flashes.

But instead of carrying on with the details of sinus drainage, which I thought was sure to come next, she abruptly stopped talking, her eyes roaming over me from head to foot in a way that made me feel faintly ill. Beatrice, with her thick, squat body shoved, more often than not, into flannel shirts and stretchy pants, always looked to me like the butch half of a lesbian couple—except she was permanently sans her other half—and so her inspection, especially during this vague Post-Derrick Period of my life, was anxiety-producing. “You do understand, don’t you?” she said, her mouth dropping open as it did whenever she was captured by some thought.

As I started to proceed up the stairs with a hurried wish that she feel better soon, she called out, “Wait!” and turned her attention to the mail in her hands. Shuffling through the catalogs, she pulled out a thick, glossy volume and held it out to me. “I thought you might be able to use this,” she said as I reluctantly took the catalog from her.

I stared dully at the cover, which featured a tall, large-framed woman dressed in a flannel shirt similar to the ones Beatrice favored, and dark jeans.

“It’s got great deals on styles for women like us,” she continued, staring up at me, a pleased expression on her face.

Women like us? I started to get defensive, but thought better of it and made my escape. “Thanks, Beatrice. I’ll return it when I’m done.”

“Oh, no need,” she replied, beaming a mouthful of brown teeth at me as I fled up the stairs.

Confession: I’m not convinced a fish wouldn’t be happier with a bicycle.

“Why aren’t we married yet?” I asked Jade later that night on the phone.

“Because we’re strong women,” she replied.

This answer was beginning to bother me. “What does that mean, exactly? That I’ve got metal in my head and can withstand numerous blows?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maybe we aren’t looking hard enough.”

“Oh, I’ve been looking all right.”

“Oh, yeah. So how are things going with Ted Terrific?”

Big sigh. “Turns out he’s more likely to be Ted Bundy.”

“What?”

She sighed. “He didn’t call.”

Needless to say, I was shocked…and slightly horrified. Of every woman I knew, Jade was the only one who never got snubbed by a guy. Men always called Jade. She was my one last hope that women didn’t have to forevermore be left waiting by the phone. Good grief. What did this mean for the rest of us if Jade, the Über-Single Girl, was having trouble getting to date number two?

Understanding all too well the frustration that followed such blow-offs, I offered the one thing every woman who has been left hanging by a man always needs: anger. “Clearly he’s an asshole.”

“Hmm.”

“Or gay. Or mentally deficient. I mean, what kind of moron goes out with a beautiful, intelligent girl like you and then neglects to pick up the phone, even just to tell her he’s happy she’s alive and he had the opportunity to spend a few hours in her presence?”

“He probably couldn’t handle the fact that I beat him in two out of three games of pool.”

“Wimp.”

There were a few moments of silence, while we ruminated over the question of how Ted Terrific had taken a turn for the worse.

“Maybe I was too aggressive,” Jade offered.

“You’re kidding, right? Jade, I’m sure you did nothing—”

“I did invite him up. I mean, not to sleep with him or anything. But I’d just gotten the new Jamiroquai CD, and I knew he was into the same kind of music, so…”

“Did he come up?”

“No. He said he had to get up early. Gave me this killer kiss in front of my building, then took off. It just doesn’t make sense. The whole night, right down to that kiss, was amazing. We had drinks, shot pool and talked like we’d known each other all our lives. We liked the same music, hated the same clubs. I couldn’t believe how well we clicked. How much we had in common. And the chemistry…forget about it! I wish he had come up, so at least we could have had sex before he disappeared. I’m sure it would have been nothing less than incredible.”

In truth, I was stumped, but concluded that maybe we had just assumed things all wrong. “Maybe he’ll still call. What night did you guys go out?”

“Last Saturday. As in the weekend before last. Granted, I did leave town on Thursday to go on a shoot for the weekend, but he didn’t know that. I came home on Sunday morning to no message.”

It didn’t look good. One week, okay. But to go to week two without even a quick hello-had-a-great-time-wish-I-could-see-you-again-when-I’m-less-busy call, was not a good sign. He was history. “Maybe he got hit by the Second Avenue bus. Doesn’t it run right past your gym? He could have been coming out late, after a workout, and wham-o.”

“Yeah. If he’s lucky.”

I knew we would never truly find an answer. Why He Didn’t Call was one of the great mysteries of single life. A life, I realized, I was now reluctantly a part of.

Confession: Marriage—any marriage—is beginning to look good.

As if the idea of newly tackling single life wasn’t exhausting enough, the next day at work I was forced to take on the facade of one of the Happily Coupled-Off when Rebecca dropped by my cubicle to regale me with tales of her romance-filled evening with her boyfriend, Nash. “He just seems different lately,” she said with a glimmer of excitement in her eyes. “More committed.” Then she went on to tell me about the great little French restaurant on the Upper East Side where they’d had dinner the night before. “Maybe if you and Derrick ever venture uptown,” she added, “we could all go to dinner there together sometime.” To which I responded, with what I hoped was a convincing smile, that maybe we would, all the while knowing that it would be a miracle if Derrick ever ventured to the East Coast again, never mind the Upper East Side.

By the time I dragged myself home that evening, I was convinced that the key to life was finding someone—anyone—who would stick around long enough for you to lure him to the altar. Someone stable and reliable like Nash. Or better still, Richard.

As if to punctuate this realization, my father called. Though he had managed to drown a good portion of his life in Johnnie Walker Black, there was no denying that my father had been a good catch in his day. By age thirty, he had worked his way to the top of a financial investment firm. Even when he’d asked my mother to marry him at the tender age of twenty-five, he was making a respectable salary and had “upwardly mobile” stamped all over him. Life had been pretty cozy growing up in our sprawling Garden City home. It was no wonder it took my mother twenty years to realize her husband loved no one and nothing more than the bottom of a bottle.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, “how are you?” This question was still asked with some trepidation, despite the fact that it had been over a year ago that my father’s second wife, Deirdre, had dragged him off to the rehab center for the third time in their twelve-year marriage. It amazed me that Deirdre, who hadn’t realized what she was getting into when she’d married him, didn’t leave him at that point, despite his big house and fancy landscaping. But maybe she had made the right choice. After all, he had managed to stay sober since that last incident, and passing the one-year mark constituted a new record for him. Still, none of us quite trusted that he wouldn’t fall off the wagon again.

“I’m fine, fine. Finally got that settlement on that toaster oven that exploded on us,” he said, satisfaction in his voice.

The end of my father’s drinking career did have one side effect: He had become extremely litigious. Ever since he’d made his first attempt to go off the bottle a few years back, he’d begun suing anyone he believed had slighted him—whether it was his firm, which forced him into early retirement three years ago without (according to my father) sufficient compensation, or this most recent episode, in which his toaster oven allegedly burst into flames unbidden. It only took a little research for my father to find out the model had been recalled six months earlier.

“How’s my little girl?” he asked now. “Make your first million yet?”

“You’ll have to count on Shaun for that, Dad.” At twenty-nine, my baby brother was making more money annually at the dot.com he’d gone to work for three years earlier than I’d ever hoped to make in my four years combined at Bridal Best.

He laughed. “I don’t know, Em. You might still be in the running, with that good noggin of yours. How’s what’s-his-name?”

Despite the fact that I had been with Derrick for two years, my father always made a point of not remembering his name. And though I knew it would give my father great delight to know I was no longer dating a dog-walking, bartending “bum” (my father never did buy into Derrick’s claim that he was in the service of a higher cause and thus couldn’t chain himself to a real profession), I could not seem to tear myself from the path of lies I had only begun to traverse. “He’s okay,” I replied. “Did I tell you he sold his screenplay?”

No matter what had happened between Derrick and me, somehow I still felt the need to defend him to my father as a perfectly suitable and upwardly mobile sort of boyfriend. It all seemed silly now, but here I was babbling on about how many opportunities would open up for Derrick now that he had his foot in the door. I neglected to mention that the rest of his body had followed that foot to L.A.

“Hmm,” my father responded, distracted. This was the part of the conversation where he usually tuned out, probably to contemplate how his daughter would survive if she married a man who had no hope of a pension plan. “How’s that Alyssa doing?” he said now. “Still dating that lawyer?”

As my father had been handing most of his own pension over to the attorneys he hired for his various lawsuits, he had developed a new respect for this particular breed of boyfriend material. “Yes, they are still together. I imagine they’ll eventually get married, though Richard is so focused on trying to make partner, he probably won’t pop the question until after that happens.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” my father replied.

“Jade’s doing great, too,” I continued. “One of the layouts she worked on last year just won an award.”

“Oh, yeah?” he replied. Then he laughed. “That Jade. She al ways was an artsy one. I guess she’s still not dating anyone, huh?”

“You know Jade. She’s always dating someone,” I replied, trying not to remember that her latest someone had suddenly turned into a no one.

“Hmm…” Again my father had tuned out, probably worrying that Jade’s success at singledom might spur me into some kind of complementary spinsterdom.

“So how’s Deirdre?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s having a ball now that I’ve given her my blessing to purchase a new living-room sofa. I’ve never seen so many swatches of material pass before my eyes in my life. She was just asking about you. Wants to know if you’re planning on coming in for Memorial Day weekend.”

Uh-oh. How was I going to come up with a Derrick-double by then? “Umm… I haven’t really decided. Uh, Derrick and I might be doing something in the city.”

“You’re going to spend Memorial Day weekend in the city?” he asked. My father, who had spent the last thirty years as a com muter into this “dirty rathole,” as he referred to Manhattan, still couldn’t believe I willingly chose to live here, and in a postage-stamp-size apartment no less. He was one of those homeowners who always went bigger with each new house he bought, despite the fact that his family had gotten smaller after the divorce. His current house, a sprawling Victorian in Huntington, was a monument to this philosophy.

“I don’t know what I’m doing over Memorial Day. I haven’t decided yet,” I said, anxiety creeping into my voice.

“All right, all right. No pressure. Deirdre was just asking because we were thinking of going away that weekend.”

“Oh.” And here I was worried my father and Deirdre would suffer from my absence at the annual family barbecue. “Okay, well, don’t let me stop you from making plans,” I said, hoping he and Deirdre would go out of town and leave me and my phantom boy friend to ourselves.

We talked for a little while longer before hanging up. Then, with a sigh that descended into a groan, I gave in to temptation and grabbed a photo album off my bookshelf. Flipping to the first photo of Derrick and me that I came across, I stared deeply into his enigmatic eyes looking for answers as to what went wrong. And as I studied his smiling face, I realized that despite all the good times we’d had, our relationship had amounted to a whole heap of nothing. Then I remembered the admiration in my father’s voice when he’d asked about Richard.

Maybe my father had something there. Maybe I should be going for a man with more prospects and a solid career. A man who had made a name for himself in the world and was now looking for a wife to come home to. That’s the kind of man I should be dating. Someone like Richard, where there wasn’t a question of Will He Ask, only How and When.

I called Alyssa, hoping to hit her up for a hot lawyerly prospect. At the very least, I would get a date for Memorial Day weekend. Maybe even for my mother’s wedding as well.

“Why a lawyer?” Alyssa asked when I made my request.

“You say that with such disgust in your voice, Lys. And last time I checked, you were not only living the life of a lawyer, but living with one.”

“I’m talking about you, Em. You never wanted one of my fix-ups before.”

“That’s because I hadn’t realized the value of dating a lawyer until now.”

“Uh-oh. Here it comes.”

“Well, all my observations of the male species over the years have led me to one conclusion: Men will only consider marriage when they reach a certain income level. And assuming most lawyers our age would be just about hitting that comfort mark—or are even likely beyond it—I figure my odds of marriage are better with a lawyer. At the very least, I could argue my way to the altar.”

“Wait a sec here. Back up. Since when are you so gung-ho about getting married?”

“I’m thirty-one years old. I ought to start thinking about it, don’t you think?”

“I’m thirty-one, too, and you don’t see me rushing out to buy a dress.”

“Lys, not to be mean or anything, but it’s a lot easier to be brave about your unmarried status when you have Husband 1 living under your roof.”

“Nothing’s definite between Richard and me.”

“Yeah, but you guys are clearly in—” A twinge of panic shot through me as realization dawned. Something was up. “Wait a sec. What’s going on with you?”

“Oh…nothing.”

“Please don’t tell me you and Richard are on the rocks. You would be destroying my last lingering belief that soulmates do exist. That people can actually follow falling-in-love with happily-ever-after.”

“Everything’s fine, I guess.”

“Lys—”

“Okay. I met someone else.”

“What?”

“It’s not like I planned it or anything.” She never did. Men just fell in love with Alyssa without warning.

“Who is it?”

“Don’t laugh.”

“I promise.”

“Dr. Jason Carruthers.”

Leave it to Alyssa to go from a lawyer to a doctor. “Let me guess…your ob-gyn?”

“Don’t be ridic—”

“Your optometrist? Your dentist?”

“My vet.”

“Your what?” Suddenly my head was filled with images of a scrawny, softspoken man with patchy facial hair. After all, I had never seen a vet who hadn’t eventually turned out to look somewhat like the patients he treated.

“I told you Lulu has been having trouble with her bowel movements? Well, I went to her old vet, except he had retired. And in his place was Jason.”

“Jason? You guys are on a first-name basis already?”

“I know what you’re thinking. It’s just that I never met anyone like him before. And it’s not only that he’s gorgeous. There’s a certain…tenderness about him.”

“Oh God. Don’t tell me. Have you guys—”

“No—no! Nothing like that. I mean in the way he handles Lulu.”

I began to become suspicious. Lulu was Alyssa’s Lhasa apso, the dog she grew up with on the Upper East Side and the last vestige of her mother, who had died two years ago. Alyssa’s father had a fatal heart attack when she was a teenager, and her mom had gotten her a puppy during that difficult year. Alyssa loved that dog as if it were the last family member she had. And Lulu was, really. If you didn’t count me and Jade, of course.

“How is Lulu?”

“Not good. Jason thinks it may be her kidneys.”

Aha. “Well, don’t do anything rash, Lys. Just see this thing through with Lulu, and then look at where things stand. You and Richard have a long history together. That’s not something you should regard lightly.”

“I know. I know. It’s just that…things have changed between us. I…I sometimes feel like I don’t even know Richard anymore. Maybe he’s changed. Hell, maybe I’ve changed.”

“Lys, all I’m saying is don’t do anything—”

“Oh, shit. Got to go. Richard just got home. Listen, Em, let’s keep this between us. I haven’t even told Jade. You know how she can be—and I don’t feel like being ridiculed right now. I’ll look into the lawyer date thing. Maybe Richard knows someone. I’ll call you….”

“Alyssa—”

“Hey, maybe we should all get together for dinner Saturday night? Richard’s going out of town on business, and it’s been a long time since we’ve had a real girl’s night out. Is Jade around? Let’s plan something.”

“That’s fine, Lys, but don’t think I’m letting you get off easy with this one.”

“Okay, okay. I promise I’ll be good. At least until Saturday.”

Three

“Getting married is the easy part.”

—Virginia McGovern, mother of Emma Carter

Confession: My mother’s wisdom is starting to make sense to me (God help me).

T he next day was my planned lunch date with my mother, who was still under the lovely-though-absolutely untrue assumption that her only daughter was on the sure path to happily-ever-after with her own dream man. Though I hadn’t yet decided how I was going to handle the Derrick subject, I headed off to the restaurant she’d chosen near my office, armed with catalogs and travel brochures filled with all sorts of ideas for how to pull off this wedding she was dreaming of.

She was already there and seated at a table in the back when I arrived, and suddenly I realized where I might have gotten that five-minute-early arrival technique. Was I more like my mother than I realized? I wondered with sudden horror.

“Emma!” she exclaimed as I approached the table. She got up and gathered me into a warm, apricot-scented embrace. When we pulled back from each other, I realized that taking after my mother wouldn’t be so bad after all, at least in the looks department. Though she was fifty-nine years old, she was still a beautiful woman, with wavy chestnut-brown hair framing her high-cheekboned face. Other than the fact that she had the same hazel eyes as mine—though hers seemed more definitely green—no one would have guessed we were mother and daughter. How had I wound up with straight mousy-brown hair and no cheekbones to speak of? Maybe these things skipped a generation.

“How are you, sweetie?” she said, studying my face once we sat down across from each other.

“Good, good,” I said, immediately hiding my face in the menu to disguise any glimmer of unhappiness that might betray me. “Tired. Work is nuts, as usual.”

“Sometimes it’s nice to take a break in the middle of the day. I was just reading this new book, A Mental Space of One’s Own, and it talks about how we can renew our creative energies just by taking as little as fifteen minutes each day to meditate.”

“They won’t allow us to burn incense in the office, unfortunately.”

“Oh, Emma, you don’t have to—” She stopped, probably realizing she was going to get nowhere with me, as usual. “Why do you always have to be so difficult?”

“I’m sorry, I—” Then I caught sight of the ring, a large deep blue stone that sparkled magnificently on her left hand. “Oh, is that it? I mean, is that the ring Clark gave you?”

She beamed and held out her hand. “Isn’t it absolutely perfect? We decided to stay away from diamonds after— Well, you know, I’m starting to think they’re bad luck after the first two… Anyway, when Clark gave me this sapphire, he told me that the ancients believed it to be the truest blue in the world, a reflection of the heavens above. He wanted me to have it as a symbol of his faith, his sincerity.” Then she blushed. “You know Clark. Always thinking like a poet.”

The look on my mother’s face was positively beatific. I began to suspect that maybe this was the real thing. Until her next words.

“Clark and I have decided to take a vow of celibacy.”

“What?” Now my mother’s sex life, or lack thereof, was a subject I strictly avoided. But I couldn’t help asking, “Forever?”

“Oh, no. Of course not!” Then she glanced around and leaned close, confiding, “It’s only been a week, and Clark’s having a hard enough time as it is. Just the other night—”

“Okay, okay,” I said, interrupting her, not wanting her to get into any details I couldn’t bear hearing. Over the years, my mother’s intermittent single status often put me in the position of confidante, given that I was the only other close female in her life for long periods. But despite that, there were some lines mother and daughter could never cross. “Let me guess. Until the wedding night?”

“Yes! So you’ve heard of couples doing this?”

“Yeah. I think we did a story on it once in Bridal Best. Something about recapturing the romance of an old-fashioned wedding night.”

“Exactly. I knew you would have heard of it. Clark thought I was crazy at first, but you know how agreeable he is.”

“Can I bring you ladies something to drink as a starter?” the waiter said, when he finally showed up at our table.

My mother looked up and beamed him such a smile he almost blushed. “We’re ready to order our meals, I think,” she told him. Then looking over at me, she asked, “Have you decided, Emma?”

No, but that wasn’t about to stop my mother, who’s had this thing for time-efficient behavior ever since she read Twelve Time-Saving Strategies That Might Just Lengthen Your Life. “You order first. I’ll be ready in a minute,” I said, my eyes roaming frantically over the menu.

“I’ll have the grilled chicken salad, dressing on the side and a sparkling water,” she said. Then, looking up at me, she continued, “The salads here are really good, Emma.”

Now this is the kind of statement my mother makes that immediately sends me into paranoid speculation. Clearly I had gained weight, and my mother was subtly guiding me back from the brink of bulging midsections and mornings spent obsessing in front of my closet in search of an outfit to disguise my sudden change of dress size. If there was one thing I could count on my mother for, it was a careful monitoring of weight fluctuation. If I relied on my own eyes, which tended to deceive me during periods of my life when I felt a pressing need to gorge myself at any opportunity, I worried I would wake up one day requiring a crane to get me out of bed. “I’ll have the Cobb salad and an iced tea,” I said, handing my menu to the waiter, who gave a quick nod and scurried off.

“So have you told Derrick about the wedding yet?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” I said, then quickly moving on, “Told Jade, too. She’s thrilled to pieces for you.”

My mother stopped, staring at me hard for a moment. “And you aren’t so thrilled, I take it?”

Here it comes. Confession time. “It’s not that I’m not happy…” I began.

“You don’t trust it,” my mother said. “I was worried about this happening.”

Whew. I was actually going to be saved by psychobabble. I felt my mother about to take over from here, explaining away her reasons for running to the altar for the third time.

“I know for much of my life I’ve looked like I’ve had my head in the sand, and in truth I probably have,” she acknowledged.

She was looking at me in earnest now, and I saw a burning need in her eyes to make things make sense to me. “It hasn’t been so bad for you…” I said, attempting to erase whatever anxieties she might still be having about the zigzagging course her life had taken thus far.

“It has been bad at times. And I think it was because I simply refused to see what was in front in me. But I look at Clark and I see everything. His warmth. His compassion. His kind, kind heart.” Her eyes misted. “But I also see his flaws. For example, I know he sometimes gets so wrapped up with his work or with his students that he tunes out my needs. And he sometimes has a hard time adjusting to change—and you know my life is nothing but change, it seems.” Then she smiled. “And he snores. Loud.”

“You snore, too, Mom.”

“Oh, Em, I’m quiet compared to him.” She laughed before growing serious again. “But the one thing I know for sure is that I love him in a way I’ve never loved anyone else. I would do anything for him. Go anywhere to be by his side. Tend to him if he were ill, God forbid. And I know—this time I know for sure—that he would do the same for me.”

Her words rang through me, clanging in ways I wasn’t ready to hear. The question rose, unbidden, of whether Derrick and I were really the soulmates I dreamed we were if we were so unwilling to give even a little of our lives to each other. But I quickly swallowed this doubt down around the lump in my throat. And, fortunately, the waiter took that moment to come by with our salads.

Once he was gone, Mom said, “Does any of this make sense to you?”

I saw in her face how much she needed my acceptance of this latest turn of events in her life, and though for various reasons I wasn’t ready to swallow it whole, I was ready to start seeing her hopes and dreams in a more sympathetic light. “I understand. And I’m happy for you, Mom. In fact, I’ve got a stack of ideas with me on just how we can make wedding number three the charm.” Then I laughed, not able to end things without some kind of ironic touch. “Because you know as well as I do, Mom, it isn’t really about who you marry. It’s how you marry.”

And with that, we dug into lunch, as well as the stack of wedding-day dreams I had packed into my tote bag. Things were pretty much on an even keel after that, which is why I didn’t understand the lump of emotion that emerged once our salad plates had been cleared away and we sat poring over the last few pictures of brides gazing thoughtfully into the camera as they stepped beneath various archways and gazebos that could be rented and transported to the location of your choice.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt something inside of me go slack. And before I knew what I was saying, I had told my mother everything. About Derrick’s disastrous departure and my newfound misery. And after we shed some tears and angsted together over the “whys” behind the breakup—my mother is especially good at this type of relationship analysis, having submerged herself in self-help books as each relationship ended in her own life—we indulged in giant slices of Mad Mocha Mud Cake for dessert. Even ate it with heaping clumps of vanilla ice cream on the side.

“You know what you really need,” Mom said, when we’d finally emerged from our dessert dishes. I stared at her, sensing some significant bit of wisdom would be forthcoming.

“Highlights.”

Confession: There are some ailments only good hair can cure.

Though agreeing with my mother is not my strong suit, I had to admit, she was right—I had relationship hair. Long brown locks that spoke of Saturday nights at home, wrapped in Derrick’s sweatshirt and boxers while we watched videos and stuffed ourselves full of whatever goodies we had managed to find at the bodega on the corner. In order to remedy the situation, I did what I had done in the Pre-Derrick Period when dye jobs were a regular part of my regiment. That night I called Sebastian, my erstwhile hairdresser.

“Emma, what a surprise!” he said, a hint of censure in his tone, when I got him on the phone. This is the problem when you first befriend the person who ultimately becomes responsible for your hair. They expect you to adhere to the boundaries of friendship, even when all you need is a few blond streaks. And since I hadn’t spoken to Sebastian in more than six months, I had to smooth things over by inviting him out for drinks.

“Oh, I don’t drink anymore, Emma. Tea, perhaps?” he said, naming some veggie joint on West 3rd Street and suggesting we meet there the following evening.

The nondrinking stance should have forewarned me, but I was so focused on my forthcoming transformation, I missed the signs. So as I headed down to West 3rd Street after work the next day, I looked forward to catching up with Sebastian and swapping zany stories of New York men and other strange creatures. When Sebastian and I first met, he was dating a college friend of mine, Keith. And though Keith and Sebastian lasted no longer than a semester, it was enough to seal the bond between Sebastian and me. I held his hand through the breakup, downed some serious drinks with him and bitched about the sad state of the male species, excluding Sebastian, of course. And when all was said and done, Sebastian started dyeing my hair.

It was a difficult relationship from the start, though my hair never suffered. Sebastian took me through every shade of blond, a few hues of red, and even a rich chocolate-brown—which, coming from his magic hands, even seemed a bit dangerous and exciting. He was an artist, but like all artists, he was temperamental. He insisted his friends didn’t have to pay, then complained he was being taken advantage of. It got to the point where I was forced to surreptitiously leave money on his countertop as I left his apartment after a color session, like a lover leaving secret gifts for his inamorata. And he was alternatively open, then secretive, about his love life, so I never knew when it was a good time to ask how things were going between him and whatever luscious boy—and they were always gorgeous—he had in his life.

“Emma,” he called, waving lazily at me as I detangled myself from the velvet drape hanging between the juice bar and the dining area where Sebastian sat, presiding over his surroundings like the queen that he was. Somehow Sebastian had managed to find a place that matched his unique look—a mixture of wholesomeness and exoticism. Amid gilt-framed pictures of various plants and herbs and swaths of rich fabric hanging from the windows and walls, Sebastian, with his lush golden curls and Asian eyes set in a cherub’s face, looked at home.

Once I reached his table, he enfolded me in a hug—a departure from the practice of kissing both cheeks he had instituted the last few times I saw him.

“Sit, sit! Isn’t this place fabulous?” Sebastian insisted, studying my face with a mixture of reverence and concern. Whenever I was with Sebastian, the same insecurities came over me that I felt when ever I was in the presence of a beautiful woman—that my eyebrows needed shaping, my lipstick updating. In short, I felt woefully sub-par in the femininity department.

“How are you?” he asked once we were sitting across from each other, giant scarlet menus—in some textured fabric that was clearly impractical for a food environment—before us.

“Good, good. How are you?” I said, peering at him over the top of the menu. “You look…relaxed.”

“Do I? Oh! I have so much to tell you.”

“Can I take your order?”

Turning away from my menu, I was confronted with a pierced belly button and low-slung jeans. The waitress, a lanky girl whose bored expression spoke of her utter indifference to our needs, stood beside our table poised and waiting. She looked exhausted and I noticed a faded ink stamp on the back of her hand, probably from some East Village club. Had it not been for her softly spoken question, I might have thought she was going to lie down on the bench beside us.

“Darjeeling for me,” Sebastian said, naming some substance I assume was tea.

Noticing a woeful lack of caffeinated beverages on the menu, I ordered chamomile, deciding that if I wasn’t going to get a jolt, I might as well go to the other extreme.

“So, tell me, tell me, tell me. How’re things? Derrick?” Sebastian asked, settling into the cushions surrounding his seat.

“Things are fine. Derrick’s…gone.”

“Gone? As in…?”

“Got a job offer, moved to the West Coast.”

“Oh, dear.” Sebastian’s pretty little nose scrunched up in sympathy.

“Yeah, well, I guess you can’t say he didn’t warn me.”

“That’s the trouble with ambitious, creative, gorgeous men. They’ve always got something better to do than you.”

Picking up my glass of water, I clinked it into Sebastian’s. “Here’s to slackers.”

“Slackers with trust funds,” Sebastian replied, picking up his glass to drink. “Men without money are no fun.”

“It’s true,” I agreed. “I’ve been thinking of going upscale in the man department. I’ve got the boobs, all I need is the dye job. What do you say, Sebastian? Are you up for it?” I laughed, trying not to sound too desperate. I needed to be blonder, and Sebastian was the only one I trusted to take me to that next level.

“Oh, Emma. I’ve discovered that hair color—even good color—can’t solve all your problems.”

Now this is where I began to realize that Sebastian had changed in some elemental way. Fear began to invade me. “Do tell,” I replied, trying for a light tone.

“Remember John? Impossible John?”

“Are you guys back together?” I asked with disbelief. John was the man who had tormented Sebastian for the better part of three years. A struggling actor, John was notorious for pledging his undying love to Sebastian just moments before he ran off with some buff production assistant or wardrobe boy from whatever set he was currently working on.

“No, no. Never, in fact,” he said, puckering his lips as the waitress placed our tea before us and slithered away once more. “John has been permanently replaced.” He began fishing around in the shiny tote he had with him. Pulling out his wallet, he flipped to the photo section and handed it to me.

I was shocked to find myself looking at a photo of an Indian woman dressed in traditional robes, a bindi firmly in place on her forehead, a gentle smile on her lips. Not only was she female—an unimaginable possibility as a new partner for Sebastian—but she was alarmingly unfettered by the kind of female things that normally gave Sebastian pleasure—like lipstick, cleavage and a well-groomed brow.

“Meet the woman who saved my life,” he said, smiling.

I stared at him, perplexed. “I don’t get it.”

“Emma, I have undergone the most amazing transformation.”

“You haven’t gone straight, have you?”

“God forbid!” he cried, shaking his head. “No, it’s nothing like that. This is my guru!”

“Guru?”

He smiled pleasantly, as one might at a small child in serious need of enlightenment. “Let me start at the beginning. I ran into John a couple of months ago, and you would not believe what he looked like. Completely bald, for one thing.”

“John?” I said, remembering how much he had always treasured his long dark locks.

“I know, I know,” Sebastian said, looking sad for a moment, as if the loss of that beautiful head of hair might still hurt, despite whatever revelations about life he had recently been given. Getting hold of himself once more, he continued, “He had this look of serenity about him. It had almost changed his face—he was even more gorgeous, if you can imagine that!” His eyes widened at the thought. “I asked him how he’d been, and he began telling me that he was following a new path in his life. When I questioned him further, he told me he was practicing a form of Hinduism—and was training to be a healer.”

“Wow. Who would have thought,” I said, gulping chamomile and suddenly wishing it were something else…like a martini. I had a sinking feeling about my hair prospects, especially when I suddenly noticed that Sebastian had let his eyebrows grow in. Not a good sign in a man I once worshiped for his beauty regime.

“Next thing you know, he was inviting me to a meeting,” Sebastian said, lifting his teacup and holding it between his hands in front of him. “I will confess that when I first agreed to attend, I had sex on the brain. You know that no matter what happened between John and me, we never had trouble in that department. But from the moment I stepped through the doors of the Holistic Center for Life Healing, I was a new man. Within weeks, I was on the path, and now I’m close to being certified as a healer myself. I’ve even planned a trip to India in the fall, to meet the guru. I can’t wait to go.”

I felt contrite. He did look happy. Who was I to mar his happiness with my own selfish desires? “That’s wonderful, Sebastian.”

“I knew you’d understand, Emma. In fact, I’ve been meaning to call you and invite you to a meeting. I think you, especially, could really benefit from it.” He put down his tea, then reached across and grabbed both my hands in his.

I will admit, I felt something like a soothing strength in those fingers. Of course, unable to acknowledge such things, I made one last halfhearted, half-humorous, plea.

“So I guess this means a few ash-blond highlights are out of the question, huh?”

“Oh, Emma,” he smiled beatifically at me, releasing my hands. “That world seems so removed from me now.” Then he winked. “Besides, you know I always saw you as a golden blonde.”

Confession: I get in touch with my inner career woman—and discover she is out to lunch.

The next day as I was poring over some old notes in an attempt to put together a piece on current trends in floral arrangements, Marcy Keller, the production assistant and resident office gossip, slipped into my cubicle.

“What’s up, Emma?” she said, sitting down in my guest chair.

I immediately went on red alert. The only reason Marcy Keller would ever sit down in my guest chair to chat would be a) because she had some juicy bit of gossip she had already shared with everyone in the office and I was her last resort or, b) she had some juicy bit of gossip about me that she was coyly trying to verify.

A shiver went through me. They knew. They knew about my recent, brutal breakup. But how?

“So what brings you to this corner of the world, Marcy?” I asked with trepidation.

She looked up and leaned close, her eyes narrowing to slits behind the big square black frames she wore on her sharp little hook of a nose. “Sandra quit,” she hissed at me. Then, smoothing her short, dark brown hair behind her ears, she leaned back, folded her arms over her painfully thin frame and watched her words take their effect.

Relief swept through me, followed by a realization. Sandra was one of the three reigning senior features editors at Bridal Best and had just given up one of the few management positions a contributing editor like myself could aspire to. Now I understood why I had been chosen to receive this particular bit of gossip. Since I was the contributing editor with four years’ experience under my belt and the most seniority, I was the most likely candidate to apply. So Marcy had come on a verification mission. I decided not to give her the satisfaction.

“Sandra quit?” I began, leaning back in my chair. “That’s wild.” I paused, pondering this for a moment to increase the dramatic tension. “Huh. And I thought she’d be a lifer. What has she been here, five, six years?”

“Seven and a half,” Marcy said, glee in her voice at the scandal created by such a long-term employee’s leaving. “I heard that she and Patricia had it out.”

Now I knew she was embellishing. Our editor-in-chief was soft-spoken, poised, and probably the least likely person to start a brawl at Bridal Best, the magazine that was her life’s blood. Which made me wonder about this battle she’d allegedly had with Sandra, who wasn’t exactly a brute, though she had been rumored to have a temper. “Huh. That’s hard to imagine.”

“Yeah, well, you know Sandra. She can be a bitch when things aren’t going her way. And they haven’t been, ever since her husband left her.”

“Her husband left her?” I asked, suddenly sucked in, in spite of myself.

Marcy rolled her eyes behind her square frames. “That was six months ago. God, Emma, where have you been?”

I snapped my gaping mouth shut. “Well, usually I’m too busy with work to pay attention to the gossip,” I replied, deciding now was probably the perfect time to put Marcy in her place.

Marcy swallowed hard and began backpedaling. “Yes, you do work a lot. I’ve even seen you here late a few times,” she said, changing tactics when she realized ridicule wasn’t going to get her anywhere with me.

“Yeah, well. Once in a while. When I’m on a deadline,” I replied, embarrassed that someone might think me one of The Devoted, some of whom had given up their lives, their dreams and, apparently, in the case of Sandra, their husbands, for the sake of getting out a monthly magazine on how to make happily-ever-after a reality.

“No, you work hard,” she protested, gazing at me steadily and making me notice for the first time that her eyes were actually gray behind those thick black cakes of liner. “I read your piece ‘The Cinderella Syndrome: Finding the Perfect Wedding Day Shoe.’ It was amazing.”

Now she had me. “Ah, well, thanks. I kinda liked working on that piece.”

“I just loved the way you captured the anxiety of finding a shoe that’s both comfortable and captivating. And the fairy-tale angle was very clever. What was that line you opened with?”

Leaning back in my chair with something close to an embarrassing pride curling my lip, I quoted, “‘Now that you’ve found a Prince Charming who’s your perfect fit, it’s time to get serious about the shoe you step into to take that long—and potentially painful—walk down the aisle.’”

“Yes, yes!” Marcy said, sitting up higher in her chair. “That was awesome.”

“Thanks, Marcy. Gosh, I hadn’t even realized you read the magazine.”

“Are you kidding?” Marcy leaned back in her chair once more. “You’re good, Emma. Really good. How long have you been here now? Three and a half years?”

“Four years and two months next week.”

“Wow.” She beamed at me, then her eyes narrowed speculatively. “You know, you’d be a shoo-in for the senior features position.”

“That’s nice of you to say, but—”

“I mean, you’ve got the most seniority of all the contributing editors.”

“I know, but that doesn’t mean—”

“And everybody knows you’re the best writer we have on the staff,” she finished, throwing in the pièce de résistance with a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes.

“They do?”

“Oh, Emma. You don’t have to be so modest with me. I mean, I just assumed you’d be going for that promotion. You are the strongest candidate, after all.”

I leaned forward in my chair. “Well, now that you mention it, I had thought of talking to Caroline about opportunities within the company.” It was true that I had recently had vague thoughts about talking with my boss regarding my future. But in my fantasies I always imagined entering her office with a prepared speech, then arbitrarily breaking into a rant about how no one recognized what a huge talent I was. It was this that always kept me from initiating any sort of dialogue with Caroline on the subject. But now it seemed—according to Marcy anyway—that everyone was quite impressed with me.

“You should talk to her.”

“Hmm. Maybe I’ll talk to her some time next week. I mean, I’ve got this piece to finish and another one to proof—”

“I wouldn’t put it off too long,” Marcy cautioned. Then she stood, leaning in close for the final kill. “I mean, you don’t want someone else to move in first.”

She had a point. “Yeah, that’s true.” I looked up at her, trying to find some glimmer of camaraderie on her face, and discovered something there that resembled sympathy and goodwill, but I was too far gone to discriminate at the moment. “I’ll do it. First thing Monday morning. Then maybe she can advise me on how to approach Patricia.” Though the thought of approaching the editor-in-chief regarding the position put a pit in my stomach. I doubted Patricia even knew I existed. But it was necessary if I was really going to go through with this.

And it looked like I was, judging from the triumphant smile on Marcy’s face as she made some hasty excuse and rushed out of my cubicle, more than likely to find someone worthy of her latest bit of news—that Emma Carter, disenchanted editor on the verge of career despair, had just put herself on the block for the highest promotion a girl with no giddiness over marriage and all its may hem could ever hope to aspire to at Bridal Best.

Oh God. What had I done?

I immediately sought out Rebecca, hoping that she at least might be able to offer some insight on this latest development.

“Hey,” I said, sliding into her guest chair.

“Hi,” she said, slowly pulling herself away from her computer screen, where she’d been typing furiously.

“I’m not interrupting, am I?” I asked, suddenly aware that she seemed so focused on what she was doing, I was more of an obstruction than an office buddy at the moment.

“No, no. Just wanted to tie this article up before lunch,” she said, saving her file and turning to me.

Finish an article before lunch? When had Rebecca become so efficient? Not having the time to ponder such matters, I started in, “Did you hear about Sandra?”

“Oh, yeah. Marcy already made the rounds,” Rebecca said, rolling her eyes.

“I’m thinking of going for it.”

She hesitated for the briefest moment, but long enough for me to see the surprise on her face.

“You don’t think I should?” I said, suddenly becoming defensive. Just what was it about me that Rebecca thought wasn’t senior features editor material yet? And who was she to judge, having signed on only a year and a half ago?

“No, no. That’s not it.” Then she smiled. “You should go for it. If that’s what you really want.”

“Of course it’s what I want! I mean, what am I going to do? Sit around here for another four years, making the same schlocky salary? After all, it’s not like these opportunities happen every day. It took Sandra seven and a half years to up and leave that position open.”

“That’s true.” Then she sighed. “Things haven’t been the same for her since her husband left.”

“Gosh, I just heard about that office shocker. They only got married two years ago. Didn’t that throw you for a loop?”

“Yeah,” Rebecca replied, “I always thought she and Roger had the perfect marriage.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Uh-huh. Sandra had Nash and me over to dinner about a year ago. She went to Sarah Lawrence, too, graduated a few years ahead of me. I guess she figured we had a lot in common. It was a fun evening. Sandra’s really down to earth, once you get to know her.”

“Yeah…” Now this bit of news really threw me. I never would have envisioned Sandra and Rebecca as pals. Again my suspicions about Rebecca were aroused. Just how entrenched in this loony little world was she, anyway?

I found out, moments later, when I heard her next words.

“I think you should go for the senior features editor position, Emma,” she began, “if you feel that’s the direction you want to take.” Then she looked down briefly at her hands clasped in her lap, before meeting my eyes again. “But to be fair, I think you should know that I’ve already applied for the position myself.”

Confession: My inner career woman has left the building.

“Who does she think she is?” Alyssa asked, her brow furrowed in indignation as she stared at me across the table in the dimly lit restaurant. We had met for dinner at Bar Six, one of our favorite haunts in the West Village. Jade was joining us, too, though she had yet to arrive. We sat in the bar section, so that Jade could smoke once she got here, and drank cosmopolitans while I filled Alyssa in on the gory details of my newfound competition with, of all people, Rebecca.

“She hasn’t even put in the time,” I complained. “Of course, she has put in the time with good old Sandra. Sandra probably primed her on how to get the position without even trying.” I took another slug of my drink, hoping to dull my senses and ease the irritating ache between my eyeballs. “Why does this kind of thing always happen to me?”

“What kind of thing is happening to you now?” Jade asked, arriving just in time to hear me gripe. She quickly swooped down to embrace each of us in greeting, before sliding into the third chair.

“Rebecca is competing with Emma for a senior features editor position at Bridal Best,” Alyssa informed her.

Jade’s gaze swung to me, assessing. “You’re going for a senior features editor position?”

“Yes,” I hissed at her. On the defensive, I argued, “Why is that so hard to believe? I’ve been writing and editing for the magazine for the past four years—and quite brilliantly, I might add. Just the other day my boss commended me on a piece I wrote about undergarments to wear with your gown. It was positively brilliant—I mean, for a piece on underwear. I even had this great inspiration for the title—‘The Bride Beneath.’”

I sat back, breathing hard, as I contemplated Jade’s carefully blank expression.

“Sounds…clever,” she said, lighting a cigarette as the waiter approached to take our order. He was young and gorgeous, as the waiters at Bar Six tend to be, with a vaguely Mediterranean look about him. I watched Jade give him the complete once-over as I retreated into myself to sulk.

I knew what was going through Jade’s mind. She was thinking about the fact that I had suddenly pledged my heart and soul, staked my entire self-worth, on a career that up until a few weeks ago, I couldn’t care less about. But she was wrong. She didn’t know that during the Derrick Years, my role at Bridal Best had taken on epic proportions. It had become my whole raison d’être. No one knew—besides Derrick, of course. Derrick, who had always admired the fact that I was one of the lucky few who had actually gotten a day job writing, while he had done everything from waiting tables to walking dogs in order to make a few bucks while practicing his “art.” Derrick, who admired me so much, he hadn’t even called yet to let me know he’d settled into his life without me.

When I tuned in again, I heard Alyssa calmly laying out the reasons why I was eminently more qualified for the senior features editor position than Rebecca was. Good ol’ Alyssa. I could always count on her to stand by me while I harbored my illusions. Jade, on the other hand, was a bit trickier.

“Okay, okay,” Jade was saying now. “I see your point.” The waiter came back, carefully placing a cosmopolitan before her while she took in his forearm, his hands. Then she glanced up at us with a look that said, “Look who’s coming for dinner.” Once the waiter had safely escaped her perusal for the moment, she lifted her glass. “So if we’re going to get behind this promotion thing, let’s do it right.” When we had lifted our glasses, too, she said, “To Emma’s next incarnation—as Leader of the Stepford Editors.”

We froze, glasses in midair. Alyssa cracked an exasperated smile. “Jade!”

“Okay, okay. Forget it. Let’s move on to a toast I can really get behind,” she said, sending a last cutting glance in my direction. “To our waiter. For being just luscious enough to keep alive that lingering hope that I will have sex again.”

We clinked, Alyssa laughing and me relieved that we had moved on to topics that didn’t have anything to do with my sudden touchiness over my next career move. Though Jade wouldn’t allow me to delude myself, she knew when to back off.

“So what’s going on with you?” Alyssa said to Jade. “Emma told me you met a great guy. Ted, was it?”

“Ted.” Jade sighed. Then, sipping her drink, she shrugged. “I guess Emma didn’t get to the part where Ted disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“What happened?” Alyssa asked.

“What else? He didn’t call.” She stamped out her cigarette, then gave another shrug.

Though she carefully tried to mask it, I saw something in Jade’s eyes which made me think this particular failure somehow got her where she lived. I wondered why. Then figured it was probably because Ted had been the first guy she’d ever dated who had disappeared into that giant vacuum of Men Who Never Call. It was the kind of void that left a woman aching not with heartbreak, but a resounding why? which tended to turn against her rather than him, with responses like “Maybe I’m too fat too boring too broke too confident too insecure too aggressive too passive too happy too depressed….” But this thought was followed by the realization that this was not Jade’s normal line of thinking but mine. Still, even the strongest could waver in the face of the silent-but-deadly blow-off. Perhaps she needed another reminder that Ted Terrific was not so terrific anyway.

“I read somewhere once that muscle size is directly disproportionate to brain size,” I began. “Didn’t you mention that Ted was pretty thick in the muscle department?”

Jade gave a half smile. “All right, all right. I know what you’re trying to do. And no, I said that Ted was lean. Like a surfer. But that’s not the point.”

“What is the point?” Alyssa asked, and I could see she, too, was aware of some simmering unease in Jade.

“The point is, I thought we really had some kind of connection. I mean, we liked the same music. He was into the same clubs. And he even liked Simply Red. And you know how I feel about Simply Red.”

“Well, it was only one date,” said Alyssa, ever the logical one.

“One amazing date,” Jade argued. “And that doesn’t happen too often.”

Jade had a point. If there was one thing I knew, it was that in a city this large, where any sort of interaction with the opposite sex is swallowed up by the rush of time or traffic or whatever it is that keeps people from their mating rituals, one meaningful evening with a man constituted a serious beginning to something. Which was why losing Derrick, after two years of sharing everything from soulful conversation to toothbrushes, was something just short of disaster.

“They’re all heartless bastards,” I chimed in.

“Yeah, well, if I ever hope to have sex again, I have to figure out how to keep one of those heartless bastards around long enough.”

“Maybe you’re focusing too hard on the end result, Jade,” Alyssa said. “Maybe you should take a more Zen-like approach to this whole dating thing.”

“Easy for you to say when you have a live-in boy toy,” Jade said, though it was hard to envision Richard as a boy toy in his dark suits and tasseled loafers. Don’t get me wrong—with his chiseled good looks and tall, athletic build he was quite delectable. But Richard was the kind of man women fantasized about marching down the aisle with, not swinging from a rope in the Tarzan room of the Fantasy Land Motel. Then again, Jade did like to say I lacked vision when it came to men.

“The grass is always greener,” Alyssa said, dropping her gaze.

“Oh?” Jade countered, warming to the subject. “Let’s see about that. It’s been six weeks and four days since I last had sex—and I’m not counting Carl, because I’m talking penetration here. When was the last time you and Richard did it? And if you say last night, I will be forced to be envious.”

Still regarding her glass, Alyssa replied, “Three months ago.”

“What?” Jade and I said in unison.

Alyssa looked up at us and sighed. “Well, that’s not exactly true. We did have sex about three weeks ago, but it was the kind of effort that’s better left unmentioned. All mechanics, no emotions. As if we’re just blowing off some steam after a hard day at work.”

“What’s going on with you guys?” Jade asked.

“I don’t know. Everything has just been…different between us the past few months. As if we’re only going through the motions of a relationship.”

“Maybe you’re just in a rut,” I said, desperate to find any reason why things had suddenly gone astray for the last two people in the world I was sure were Meant-to-Be. “I mean, isn’t Richard trying to make partner? He’s got to be under enormous pressure at work. And you’ve been working on that class action suit for quite some time….”

“Maybe.” Alyssa sighed. “But it’s like we don’t really even see each other anymore. I feel more like a roommate. The girl he shares the laundry hamper with.”

“You just gotta shake things up,” Jade said. “Do something to remind him that he’s living with a beautiful, intelligent woman who any guy would snatch up.” Then she arched her brows as sudden inspiration hit. “What you need is some serious competition to suddenly show up, give old Richard a run for his money.”

Alyssa immediately glanced at me with a guilty smile, and I couldn’t help but smile back, thinking of her vet and imagining how a man who probably spent a good deal of his day dodging dog feces was going to give Richard, a successful corporate lawyer who could probably eat him for lunch, a run for his money.

“What’s going on?” Jade asked, suspicious.

I looked at Alyssa, leaving the confession to her.

“Well…the truth is…I have met someone else.”

“You’re kidding,” Jade said, and I had a feeling she was wondering, as I had, how Alyssa always managed to keep the men coming, no matter what her circumstances. “Who? And most importantly, how?”

“You have to promise not to laugh.” Alyssa looked hard into Jade’s eyes.

“Laugh, nothing. If you’ve got some method I should know about, who am I to judge?”

“Okay. Well, I don’t know if this method would work for you, because it requires you to get a pet.” Alyssa paused, glancing at me for reassurance. “You see, Lulu hasn’t been feeling well lately, so I took her to the vet. And, well, the old vet retired, leaving his practice to a new, young…gorgeous…vet.”

“You’re sleeping with Lulu’s vet?”

“No!” Alyssa and I shouted in unison, the sound of my own anxious denial making me realize just how important it was for me that Alyssa didn’t do anything to jeopardize what she had with Richard.

“Then what? You’re sharing housebreaking tips? Flea baths? What?”

“Nothing is going on really,” Alyssa said. “It’s just…”

“She has a crush on him,” I said, butting in. “You know, puppy love.” Then I glanced at Alyssa. “Uh, no pun intended.”

“I don’t know if it’s just a crush,” Alyssa protested. “I mean, it’s just like you said you felt with Ted, Jade. I feel a real connection with him.”

“Yeah, well,” Jade said, “you can take that for what it’s worth, Alyssa.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” Alyssa began.

“Look, no apologies needed, Lys,” Jade countered. “There’s just one thing you need to think about, and think hard. Just how important is this cute little pooper scooper to you? Enough to risk losing Richard for?”

When Alyssa didn’t respond, I turned to gape at her. “Alyssa!”

“Hey,” Jade said, lighting a cigarette and leaning back in a sort of blasé-about-relationships pose she’d adopted ever since Michael had torn whatever romantic streak she’d formerly had out of her. “If it means that much to you, I say go for it.”

“Jade, don’t encourage—” I began, but Jade leaned forward then, confidingly.

“But whatever you do, please do it outside of his office. I can’t imagine all those wee wee pads and antiseptics making for much atmosphere.”

“Ha, ha,” Alyssa said, lifting her drink to her mouth to try to hide her smile.

A smile, I might add, which said she was planning on doing just what Jade suggested, and with a man whose only distinction so far was in making Lulu’s most recent bellyache go away.

I had to face facts. Alyssa and Richard were truly on the rocks. And Jade, who I saw light up as our handsome waiter returned, had gone from Girl Who Couldn’t Get Enough to Girl Who Couldn’t Get It At All.

Then there was me, of course, who didn’t have a hope in the world of convincing the man I loved that he’d just made the greatest mistake in the world by moving across the country away from me, especially considering the fact that the creep hadn’t even taken a moment to call yet, even to say hi.

The question that was stuck in the recesses of my mind, wedged in tight by anxiety, suddenly wafted up, unbidden.

What would become of us?

Confession: Things could definitely get worse.

After an evening that ended with Jade—egged on by Alyssa—successfully securing our waiter’s phone number, I woke up the next morning resolved to make myself a smash success at Bridal Best. Maybe it was Alyssa’s encouragement, or maybe it was a rebellion against Jade’s utter disbelief in my decision, but I wound up spending part of Sunday preparing a presentation to make to Caroline on Monday, and giving myself a French manicure that I hoped would somehow raise me to some new professional level. On Monday I donned the only thing in my closet resembling a suit—a pair of black trousers that didn’t look too faded against the one black blazer I owned, and a white shirt that looked less than my others like your standard T—and headed for the illustrious midtown office where my new destiny awaited me. My intention was to discuss my decision with Caroline and get her approval to move on to the next step: persuading the Powers-That-Be at Bridal Best that not only was I the best candidate for senior features editor they could hope to have, but that I was, in fact, of one mind with the editorial mantra “Give me marriage or give me death.”

Once I arrived, I walked with purpose to my cubicle. I kept my gaze focused forward to avoid seeing any raised eyebrows over my sudden upgrade in office attire. “Confidence,” Alyssa had said as she hugged me goodbye after dinner. “All you need to do is show them how sure you are of your ability to do the job.” But all I could do once I sat at my desk in order to practice my seemingly unrehearsed speech was think about Sandra and Rebecca, sitting over lunch while Sandra dictated the surefire route to senior features editor to her protégée. How could I compete against that kind of inside track? Everyone knew what an incestuous business this was. It was as if the most coveted positions were carefully kept open for those chosen few who managed to emulate their superiors so perfectly that the Powers-That-Be couldn’t help but strive to make the little mini versions of themselves grow up to be the new Powers-That-Be.

Now one could argue that Rebecca, with her perfect boyfriend and her perfect bob and her stylish little silk blouses and knee-length skirts, did not even remotely resemble Sandra, who tended more toward a disheveled, layered look. But I was certain now that a bond had formed between them from the moment Rebecca had joined the staff. At the time, Sandra had recently joined the Happily Married, and I imagined her taking one look at Rebecca, with her pedigree schooling and her upwardly mobile boyfriend, and seeing enough of herself and her happy little life to reach out. After all, it had been only mere months since Sandra had landed her own financially stable husband and Upper East Side Duplex, and I’m certain she couldn’t help but see a dinner party with Rebecca and her beau as nothing less than a prime opportunity to bring out the Lenox china she had obsessed over and ultimately registered for in the months before she marched off to her ill-fated marriage. And despite the fact that Sandra had now, for whatever reason, just joined the Disastrously Divorced category, I knew that ultimately she had shared something with Rebecca that night—something that would only grow now that Sandra had given up her role as Successful and Married and needed to hand the mantle on to someone else. Someone as polished, as poised, as perfect as Rebecca.

How was I going to compete with that? Me, with my scuffed pumps pulled from the bottom of the closet and phantom boy friend?

“Looking sharp,” came Marcy Keller’s voice as she popped her head around the wall of my cubicle and gave me a conspiratorial wink.

Feeling horribly grateful for the compliment, even coming from a woman more known for her calculation than her camaraderie, I actually smiled at her, which gave her just enough invitation to slide her spindly form into my guest chair.

“So you’re finally going to do it, huh?” she asked, in a kind of harsh whisper that suggested I was going to take a machine gun to my colleagues rather than go in to my superior to ask for a promotion.

“No better time than the present,” I replied with false bravado.

“I agree,” she said, nodding vigorously, eyebrows arched above her big black frames. “Especially since Rebecca has already put together her clips and her résumé and handed them in.”

“She has?”

“Of course.”

I glanced over the gaping “to be filed” box where I had stuffed everything of personal relevance, from bedraggled clips and old vacation memos to takeout menus for local eateries. “Do you think I should put together something before I go in to Caroline?”

Her gaze followed mine to the pile of papers, and I saw her eyes widen briefly. “Nah,” she replied, swatting her hand through the air in a gesture that suggested I was worrying for nothing. “That would take too long. You’re best off going in there and at least letting her know you are interested. Then, afterward, you could pull together something for when you go in to see Patricia.”

Suddenly I saw the benefits of befriending Marcy. She was a wealth of information on how to negotiate the politics of getting promoted. I hadn’t even thought of putting together my clips. I just assumed Patricia would have seen my work at one point or another. I mean, she is the editor-in-chief of this fine periodical.

“And I would probably try to include some clips outside of what you’ve done for Bridal Best,” Marcy continued, as if reading the unasked question that lingered in the back of my mind. “I think Rebecca included a bunch of stuff from that trade newspaper she used to work for.”

Panic began to invade me. Rebecca had other clips. What did I have, other than a few half-finished short stories and some self-deprecating poetry I had written during a previous post-breakup pity party? “Other clips?”

“You know, stuff you might have written freelance, or in a previous job,” Marcy continued, then sucked her cheeks in when realization struck. “Oh, that’s right. You’ve never had a previous job.”

She was right, other than my stint at waitressing and a run of office temp jobs that had resulted in nothing but callused feet and bad fiction. Even my illustrious career at Bridal Best was really a result of random luck and Caroline’s somewhat misguided belief in me.

“Have you ever done any freelance?” Marcy was asking now. She actually seemed really concerned for me, which I found oddly heartening. Maybe I’d had Marcy pegged all wrong.

“Not really,” I replied, my confidence slumping to an all-time low.

She studied me for a moment, as if trying to assign a promotability value to me and coming up short. Then she shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said, standing up. “I mean, after all, Rebecca was working on a trade publication anyway.” Her nose wrinkled, as if the idea that anyone would work for an industry newspaper that languished on the desks of some back office somewhere, rather than a magazine being prominently displayed on the racks at your local newsstand, was somehow distasteful.

“I guess,” I replied, unconvinced.

Glancing at her watch, she said, “Well, duty calls. Knock ’em dead, Emma.” Then after skipping somewhat merrily out of my cube, she popped her head back in, “Oh, and good luck.”

You’ll need it. The implication she had not voiced sped through my mind nonetheless as I stared at her retreating back.

Confession: My life has become some sort of inside joke—and I’m the only one who doesn’t get it.

“Come in, come in,” Caroline invited, once I finally gathered up the courage to actually go in and make my now somewhat pathetic-seeming bid for the senior features editor position. Thank God, I had Caroline to practice on first, before having to make my case to Patricia. Ever since I had come to Bridal Best, Caroline had been my champion, lavishing praise on my early writing efforts and encouraging me to go for the contributing-editor position when it opened up. Now, as I headed into her sunlit, plant-filled office, the shelves overflowing with everything from the international dolls she collected to photos of her and Miles, her husband, and their three picture-perfect children, I was glad she was my manager. But as I seated myself before her, it suddenly occurred to me that the theory I had recently constructed of the solid bond formation between Sandra and Rebecca didn’t hold water when it came to Caroline and me. There was no way I was the miniversion of Caroline, with her warm, loving home in Connecticut strewn, I was sure, with the hand-made crafts she excelled at and smelling of the fresh-baked cookies she tucked into her children’s lunch bags before sending them off to posh private schools carefully chosen according to each gifted child’s unique talents. Even her husband, a general contractor who was ever ready to build a new wing onto their already sprawling home to accommodate the next adorable addition to the Jamison family, seemed from some male mold I had yet to encounter in my own life. Not that I had ever been invited to said happy home or met the husband and kids, but I had gathered much from Caroline’s softly spoken stories at the communal lunch room table of the joys of family life. Even now, she was radiantly pregnant with Perfect Baby Number Four beneath her floral and feminine maternity dress. Everyone was always faintly amazed at how she returned to the office baby after baby, ever ready to do her part for the greater good of Bridal Best.

“I’m glad you stopped by,” Caroline said now, once I had made myself comfortable in the chair parked next to her wide desk, which was a maze of carefully stacked papers. Somehow, no matter how busy Caroline was, she was always prepared to offer you a chair and an ear to discuss just about anything that was on your mind, whether righteous indignation at your piece getting bumped from an issue, or dismay of a more personal nature, should you dare to share it with it a superior. Not that I ever did. And I wouldn’t dare share my recent Derrick Disaster with anyone in the office now that I was allegedly making so much progress in my life that a pro motion seemed like the next, natural thing. After all, whoever heard of a disgruntled editor and new member of the Recently Dumped making senior features editor at the nation’s most comprehensive guide to happily-ever-after?

“Did you want to talk to me about something?” I asked now, worried suddenly that Caroline, in her gentle way, was about to inform me that she had realized how seriously lacking I was in most areas of my life and work.

“No, no. Nothing specific. It’s just we haven’t really spoken in a while, and I was wondering how things were going. You know, sometimes with all the flurry of deadline pressures and, well, life, we forget to take stock of things. How are you?”

“Good, good. Great, in fact,” I replied, striving for the tone of a woman in charge of her life and ready to tackle any professional challenge that came her way.

“Wonderful.” She smiled, her hand going to her softly rounded abdomen and caressing it gently.

“How’s everything with you? Feeling okay, with the baby and all?”

“Oh, yes.” She laughed. “I’m an expert at this baby thing by now. Miles always jokes that I’m going to be given my own monogrammed paper gown by the maternity ward.”

My glance fell on the photo of Miles smiling out at me with the strong white teeth and tanned skin of a man designed to make a woman happy. “I bet you and Miles are just as excited about this baby as you were with your first,” I said, suddenly realizing I had forgotten the name of her first baby and hoping I would be saved from an awkward moment in this all-important friendly banter. After all, I didn’t want my seeming indifference to the children she loved more than life itself to become glaringly apparent. It wasn’t that I didn’t care—her kids were actually quite adorable, at least in their photos. It was just that I couldn’t keep up with her output.

Fortunately Caroline saved me from disgrace. “Oh, we are excited. But my Sarah never lets us forget who is the oldest in the house. I swear the way she bosses her brother and sister around, I wouldn’t doubt she has a management position in her future.”

“Funny you should mention that,” I said, finding my segue and readying myself to take the plunge and launch into how I was verifiably the smartest, sanest and strongest candidate for a senior position with the magazine. Oh God.

“As you know—” I began, gripping the armrests in an attempt to take the tremble out of my fingers “—I was promoted to contributing editor two years ago.”

“Yes, and you’ve been doing a fine job,” Caroline said with a smile.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling a measure more confident and relaxing my grip. “During that time, I’ve been a solid contributor, often initiating ideas for articles and getting more involved in lay out. I even wrote a lot of the promotional copy on our most recent subscription contest.”

“Your copy was lovely, Emma, as always.”

“Thank you,” I replied once more and rather calmly, I thought, considering that my insides were shrieking I’m in, I’m in! “I think my writing skill, as well my strong knowledge of the magazine gained over the past four years,” I continued, “make me an excellent candidate for the open position of senior features editor.”

Caroline’s expression fell, eyebrows dropping down as surprise spread over her features. “Oh.”

Oh? My stomach plunged.

“Interesting,” she murmured, her brow becoming furrowed as she studied me.

Interesting? What did that mean, I wondered, my newly fostered hopes crumbling. “Um. I’m wondering. That is, I want—uh, what do I need to do to…uh, apply for the position?”

Finally she smiled, her trademark warmth returning and giving me a small shred of courage once more. “Well, the first thing you would need to do is talk to Pat, of course,” she said, her use of the editor-in-chief’s nickname a privilege allotted to management, apparently, as I had never heard anyone else refer to Patricia in this manner.

“And would you recommend pulling together clips for Patricia?” I said, hoping my question would show her how aware I was of the next steps in the promotion process.

“Good idea,” she replied. “You also might want to update your résumé, to give Pat some sense of your whole career.”

Gulp. I wondered how my stint at Good Grub and string of temp jobs was going to hold up against Rebecca’s experience as a trade editor and God-only-knew what other accomplishments. “Hmm. Yes. That is a good idea,” I agreed.

Caroline’s brow furrowed once more as she studied me. After a few painful moments she said finally, “As you go through your clips and update your résumé, Emma, take the time to take stock. It’s a good opportunity for you to see the work you’ve done, analyze your strengths and think about future directions.” Leaning back in her chair, she continued, “After all, it’s not every day we think about what we want to be doing over the next few years.”

Wasn’t that the truth? In fact, if I had thought about my future, I might have realized a few things: like the fact that there was no way in hell I would ever be able to compete against Rebecca, who seemed to be growing in accomplishments by the minute. I might have even figured out, for that matter, that I would be manless at thirty-one years old rather than married to Derrick, seeing as he had scheduled his departure from our relationship from day one. But I said none of this to Caroline as I stood up, murmured a few words of thanks and headed off, I was sure, to my next and imminent disaster.

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