Icing On The Cake

Chapter 6

“Liz, darling! Isn’t this a nice surprise?” Sally busses both my cheeks. “But whatever are you doing here?”

She means how dare you, darling, show up at my apartment on the Upper East Side, and not telephone first. But, kiss, kiss, of course, I love you.

“I need to talk, Sally. Can I come in for a minute?”

She gives me a Carol Channing smile. “For you, darling, I have all the time in the world.” This means, she’s alone. “Come in, come in.”

Sally Blake reminds most people of Jackie O. At five-foot-nine-and-one-half inches with thick dark hair and a willowy figure, she has the same square face, at once formidable and vulnerable. The same strong brows, as if the artist became too generous with his charcoal. A wide, pretty mouth proclaims her ultrafeminine and yet positively patrician. That’s where the similarities to Jackie O end. Sally is as driven as Ethel Merman, with the same larger-than-life persona.

Oh, Sally is my mother.

From the crib I was taught to call her Sally because in 1958, nice girls didn’t have babies out of wedlock. Certainly a potential Rockette didn’t.

“Taking dance classes in the city,” I was much later told was the official explanation when Sally went to a maiden aunt in Baltimore to have me. Meanwhile my grandmother, a taxi dancer during the Depression, announced that she and Grandpa Horace had decided to adopt. Sally dubbed me Liz Taylor Blake, in the hope that a famous name would inspire me to become famous. My grandmother, who saw the drawbacks to such a moniker, made sure I was legally named Elizabeth Jeanne Blake.

Three years later “big sister” Sally was high-kicking in the most famous chorus line in the world, the Radio City Rockettes, while I was learning to tell when a bagel was done.

I don’t come to Sally for maternal comfort. I come for worldly advice. She’s the ultraglamorous older sister who swoops in occasionally with dazzling tales of her globetrotting adventures yet willingly listens to my “what I did at the bakery today” type life stories.

She leads me through the maze of boxes and furnishings into a room with a panoramic view of Central Park. She moves when the mood strikes, sometimes as often as every year. Sally says a smart woman doesn’t hang about Radio City Music Hall in a leotard and heels without finding ways to network. When the time came to segue from the stage into a different glamour profession, she had backers lined up. Today she owns a boutique Manhattan real estate agency. Successful, are you kidding?

When she pauses before a grouping of beige suede sofa units that could sleep three, her wide-legged stance opens the side slit in her Oscar de la Renta tweed pencil skirt. Who can blame her for showing off? Looking more than a decade younger than her sixty-three years, Sally can still high-kick a hat off a man’s head.

“What do you think of my new pied-à-terre?”

I give the room’s view a drop jaw gaze. What can I say? “It’s spectacular.”

“I’m undecided. Tony likes it.”

Tony Khare is Sally’s lover. They met five years ago when she sold him his first Manhattan condo. An Oxford-educated Indo-Englishman, Tony made scads of money long before it was news that American industry was outsourcing to places like New Delhi and Bombay. Tony is darkly gorgeous with that witty yet ineffable English reserve that’s a perfect foil for Sally’s old-fashioned glamour. The fact that he is twelve years her junior bothers neither of them.

“Look at you,” she says just as I’m thinking, let’s not. We may have the same thick dark hair but mine tends to frizz, and I am shorter with a not-so-willowy frame. You don’t try to emulate a mother like Sally Blake. You only envy and adore.

“You look wonderful, as always. What are you doing?”

“Pilates.” Sally runs a palm across her drum tight midriff. “You should try it. Customers would flock to the antioxidant properties of your spinach and tomato focaccia if they thought it gave your skin a refreshed glow.”

“It wouldn’t be true.”

“Darling. Success is about selling the sizzle, not the steak.”

For about three seconds I actually think about this approach, which just goes to show how desperate I am for new customers.

“I’ll just ring for sherry. No, something more festive. “When her Brazilian housekeeper appears, Sally announces, “Gimlets, Ines!”

She waves me into a herringbone-stenciled leather side chair. “Tell me all about your life. Is it thrilling?”

“Let’s see. I’m still parenting two grown daughters. I own a business trying to claw its way back into public consciousness. Oh, and I rent and have a business mortgage I can barely meet.”

“So then, sell and relocate.”

Sally always says sell the bakery. It’s the only thing she and Ted agreed about, ever. But relocate? That’s new. “Where would I go?”

“Miami?”

“Too hot.”

“Tampa.”

“Ditto. You know I blotch in tropical heat zones.”

“There’s no humidity in Tucson, or Santa Fe. Or Denver?”

“Altitude makes my head feel like the lid’s on too tight.”

Sally sighs and subsides onto her sofa. “I did try to help. Remember that, when you and the cat are moldering away.”

“Can we discuss something else?”

“Certainly. What did Ted the Bastard leave you?” Though Sally has followed the family tradition of no cussing, since the divorce she always refers to Ted as if ‘the Bastard’ is part of his legal name.

I fiddle with the metal tip of the drawstring to my pants. “Why would you expect him to leave me anything?”

“The bastard stole you blind. If you’d have let me hire a real divorce attorney…” Sally’s expression completes her thought. She’s swimming in money and would gladly share an end of her pool with me, if I hadn’t inherited her stubborn determination to live on my own terms. Even if it kills me. “Why wouldn’t he leave you something if he cashed out first?”

“He had a new wife maybe?” I throw up my hands. “Oh, I don’t know why I’m being coy. It’s still so un-fricking-believable! Ted forgot to update his will. The one he had leaves everything to me.”

Sally’s brows peak in interest. “How much?”

I take a deep breath and say the words quickly. “Fourteen million.”

“Darling!” Sally claps in delight. “You’re set.”

“Not quite. The will leaves Talbot Advertising to me plus one million and change in insurance to the girls. So, she’s suing.”

Not even Botox injections can keep faint frown lines from forming on Sally’s face. “He left nothing to the slut?”

“Technically no. There were things already in her name, like the house, some cars, a few tanning salons—”

“A few what?”

“Don’t ask. But the will itself leaves her nothing.”

“How absolutely delicious!” Sally’s smile is wicked. “Yes, yes, Ines, put the drinks here.” She pats the place in front of her for her maid, in a black-and-white uniform, to lay out refreshments. She blows Ines a kiss then gives a little finger wave of dismissal.

She passes a gimlet to me then clinks her glass to mine. “To you, darling! Take the money and run!”

I can’t drink to that. I can’t even explain what I’m feeling. So I start with the least logical emotion. “I don’t need charity from a man who walked out on our marriage.”

“What charity? This is vindication. Ted saw the error of his way in leaving you and Mr. Can’t Admit I’m Wrong used his departure to make it up to you.”

“Sally, this was an accident, like a clerical error. He screwed her by mistake.”

“You bet his screwing her was a mistake! And now she’s going to pay for it. It’s karma, dearest.”

Sally believes in karma, kismet, ouija boards and pretty much anything else that will give a girl a psychic edge. “Ted created bad karma by cheating on you. So then forgetting to rewrite his will was the unpleasant ripening of the karma he created.”

“How about being sued by my ex-husband’s widow? This sounds like an improvement in my karma?”

Sally makes a moue. “Darling, I never criticize. Yet I’ve never understood how you thought marrying Ted young validated your need for independence. It should have been a starter marriage. If such things had been in fashion in my day, it would have saved so much fuss and bother.”

“What bother? You said you never wanted to marry my father.”

She shrugs. “If I’d known we were only practicing being married, I might have for your sake, knowing the relationship wouldn’t outlive the sex. Of course, the sex was spectacular. But who knew at fifteen how rare that would turn out to be?”

“Too much information, Sally.”

She gives me a strange look. “I’ve never understood how I reared a prude.”

“Overcompensation.”

“So then, dearest, listen to the voice of wanton reason.” Sally drains her glass. “Take what Ted’s will gives you. If not for yourself, then do it for every wife who’s ever been dumped by her husband for the other woman.”

“So it’s as if I won the payback lottery?”

“But that’s perfect!” Sally sits forward. “I know just how to capitalize on this! I’ll call my friend in booking at Good Morning America. She’s always looking for human interest stories from the American heartland.”

“I’m only in New Jersey. Besides—”

“Oh, and I might be able to pull a favor and get you a small mention, as my little sister, in Vanity Fair. Well, maybe not, since you’re not celebrity status with anyone but me.” She blows me a kiss.

“Can we table this discussion for now?”

“Certainly.” Sally tosses a throw pillow, which probably cost more than my phone bill, onto the floor and curls her legs up on the sofa. “So, what else is new in your life? Is there a wonderful man in it?”

The only topic that interests Sally as much as money is men. I hesitate only a second. “Harrison is fine.”

“Oh, dear. Not the car salesman?”

“He owns two Lexus dealerships. That’s a little different.”

She shrugs. “Is he at least entertaining in bed?”

“It isn’t that kind of relationship.” I avoid her eye while trying not to think of my one-time sex act with Harrison. Micro-expressions are Sally’s specialty.

“If he doesn’t set your hair on fire, Liz, what’s the point?”

“You’re right. I’m going to stop seeing him, when I have time to explain.”

“Darling, no! Never, ever explain. That will only cause an argument, which will make you feel bad. Remember karma. Cut him cleanly from your life. No calls, no notes, no regret. Why do you have such difficulty with men? You never learned it from me.”

That’s an understatement. “Do you know what my earliest memory of you is?”

Sally lifts a hand of protest. “Don’t tell me if it’s the reason you’re in therapy.”

“I’ve never been in therapy.”

“Really? Good for you. Tell me.”

“Grandma and I were waiting for you in a cab outside Radio City Music Hall. You came out still in full makeup, wearing a skimpy Santa suit with spangled tights and silver shoes. Following you was this good-looking man in a cashmere topcoat.” Sally taught me to recognize quality materials when other girls were learning their shapes and colors. “He was shouting, ‘Why? Why?’ You simply closed the door and told the driver to take off.”

Sally blinks. “I don’t recall.”

“Why should you? It must have happened many times. But I remember because no man has ever looked at me with the yearning I saw on that man’s face as we pulled away from the curb.”

“My, aren’t we feeling sorry for ourselves today. At your age I was fielding three suitors at a time.” Sally leans forward, as if to impart a secret. “The only reason you’re not living the life you want is because you don’t demand it. What have I always said?”

“There will always be the next great opportunity, the next great adventure, and the next great man.” And this is why I come to Sally. She sees no roadblocks. Why should she? Life and love have always been willing to batter down her door.

We chat a little longer, wherein she gives me legal pointers about contesting a lawsuit and offers the services of her own attorney, which I promise to think about. Then she announces that she has an appointment and, really, I must come again when she has time to plan and we’ll do tea at the St. Regis.

Once on the sidewalk I am reminded that, while Sally is high on life and it on her, I live on the ground level where a sudden chilly rain can blow in and soak a person who didn’t think to bring an umbrella.

As I stand under the apartment awning shivering while I wait for the doorman to flag down a taxi, I wonder what sort of cosmic jokester thought it would be fun to dangle solvency before me with only one stipulation: that I deal with her.

Maybe it is the karma I deserve.

I should have been happy in my twenties and thirties being a striving career woman who worries about calories, checks her bank account obsessively because she can’t pass up purchasing that “have to have” wardrobe item, and fields her share of disappointments in love and life.

But I am Sally’s child, and whenever she swept into my middle-class upbringing, contrary to what she says, she had expectations.

Being destined to be somebody is a burden, especially if it’s someone else’s version of your life. A plan like that needs the raw material of some kind of talent. When I grew up, Madonna had not yet made an art of doing nothing well, spectacularly.

When I was sixteen Sally coaxed her gentleman friend of the moment into footing the bill for me to attend a Swiss finishing school, Surval Mont-Fleuri on Lake Geneva. For eighteen months I lived with seventy-five nice but lonely girls from six continents who only had in common their parents/guardians desire that they become the ne plus ultra of international hostesses. The course load was surprisingly heavy: forty-two hours a week of French and German, International Etiquette, Protocol, Savoir-Vivre, PR, Floral Art and Table Decoration, Enology, etc. My electives were cooking and pastry classes. And I fell in love, with baking, again.

When I graduated, and to show off my education, Sally arranged for me to prepare a seven-course meal for my benefactor and his select friends. At the end of the very successful evening, Sally said, “Just think what she’ll be able to accomplish after a term at the Sorbonne.”

But I’d had enough of formal education and said that if another sojourn in Europe was required I’d just as soon it was at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

My patron said he hadn’t spent twenty thousand—a considerable sum in those days—on somebody else’s little sister just so she could become a pastry chef.

Sally, bless her, came right back at him and said that was because he was too bourgeois to appreciate truly excellent cuisine. And, by the way, the “pasty chef” had inventoried his wine cellar and said it was execrable.

There was a howling fight. Shortly thereafter, Sally left for Paris. I stayed home and went to Rutgers. Then married, because Ted asked me.

Looking back, I can admit marrying Ted was a quick fix of stability. Women do that, knowing all the while that they are making a mistake, like choosing an inexpensive fun fur over a full-length mink because it looks so “right now” when waiting to have the money for the real thing that would have kept them warmer and remained timelessly chic.

What if by marrying Ted my karma is permanently skewed?

That would be so sad.

As I enter the miracle of a rainy-day cab, my heart begins to pound in my ears. And I’m holding my breath. Panic attack?

“Oh, no,” I moan, and stretch out flat on the back seat of the taxi.

“Lady, you okay?” I hear the driver ask nervously.

“Okay.” Breathe, I command myself, just breathe.

The last time this happened I was a year past the divorce and trying to cope with being completely on my own. I went to see my doctor. He said that stress can have that affect on an otherwise healthy person.

“Can’t you just give me a pill?” I asked.

“I could, but it won’t help what you’re suffering from.”

“What’s that?

He smiled kindly. “In layman’s terms, lack of a personal life. You’re a healthy woman with needs. Go out and get a life.”

Feeling the smothering sensation subside, I sit up.

The cabbie spares me a glance. “You need me to swing by an emergency room?”

“No, no thanks.”

What I need is a few spectacular moments in my life. Sally’s right. From now on, forget the steak. I’ll take the sizzle!

Once inside Penn Station, I remember to turn on my cell. Sally detests interruption by modern conveniences. I scroll through to see Sarah and Riley have each called three times, Celia twice, oh, and Harrison once.

Oh, joy! His message reminds me of what I’d forgotten. We have a date for dinner tonight.

I’ve been avoiding him since we mistakenly tumbled into bed together.

So then, this is the perfect opportunity to break things off. A chance to change my karma!

Chapter 7

“I understand that you need your space, Liz. Still, I hoped after our last time together, we’d reached a new level of understanding.” Harrison tries to take my hand, which I avoid by reaching for my glass of Shiraz. “I’d hoped you’d let me be the one you come to when you need someone to turn to.”

“That’s nice, Harrison.” Oh, brother! What’s a woman supposed to do with a man whose idea of romance is reciting lyrics from an eighties Carpenters’ song?

Deprived of my hand he leans in to capture my gaze with his. The effect of this soulful glance makes him look slightly cross-eyed. “How about we drive down to Cape May for the weekend?”

There it is! It’s the reason I’m as tense as he is nervous. He means when are we going to have sex again?

The answer is never. Not ever.

If it had been great sex I doubt I’d remember he tooted between thrusts.

Why hadn’t I listened to my gut, which told me never bed a man as an “oh well, what the hell” response. I have only myself to blame.

“This is the weekend of the Fine Arts and Crafts Show. I have a booth to manage.” I look around in hopes of spying a waiter.

Thankfully our waiter was waiting for a cue and comes over to take our orders.

I don’t usually eat red meat but we’re at Luigi’s Trattoria, Harrison’s favorite restaurant. Frankly, It’s so-so. The marinara sauce is too tomato-y and lacks a “fresh” herb flavor. The pastas have a thick, cling-to-the-teeth gummy texture that is not what’s meant by al dente. So I order the porterhouse, medium rare. There’s only so much a cook can do to a steak.

Sarah says I’m too critical. Riley says I have an “elitist foodie bias against the proletarian need for basic food consumption.” I remind her that basic consumption includes chemically enhanced beef and chicken, and potatoes deep-fried in trans-fatty oils.

When the waiter’s done Harrison scrapes back his chair and rises. “Excuse me. I need to water the petunia.”

I smile but think jeez.

Sally’s right. “Car dealer” has a certain slippery-snake-oil-salesman image. But Harrison’s not just another guy on the lot with the pompadour and picket-fence smile. He’s “The Negotiator,” the owner of a pair of northern New Jersey Lexus dealerships.

I was still working with Ted at Talbot Advertising when we came up with that slogan. Come to think of it, I came up with it. It’s been one of Talbot Advertising’s most successful slogans. It lifted Harrison out of the field of in-your-face car ads and gave him a profile with his targeted audience. I should have left the relationship at that.

A few months ago when I went in to get my car serviced, he came out to talk to me. It was easy enough to slip into the conversation that he divorced a year after I did and that neither of us was seeing anyone. When the bill came it was marked paid.

Now, I’m not one to knock free service but I was uncomfortable with the implication. I told him so when I handed him a check written for the full amount.

He said I was the first woman to turn down the offer. He went on to say that his high-profile business sometimes interferes with his love life. He was looking for someone who didn’t want anything from him.

I told him his explanation of the “bill paid” test could be seen as bragging, paranoia or just plain manipulative. Anyway, I didn’t like being tested without my consent.

There was an awkward pause before he asked if I’d consider accompanying him to a Rotary Club dinner the following evening.

I said yes.

There is something appalling about being single after a long marriage. It’s like rising from your seat at the end of Act III, only to realize there’s another play starting that you hadn’t anticipated. The first three acts had such symmetry: career, marriage and children. To find that the next act of your life has put you back in the prologue of a whole other play is disconcerting and frightening. I felt the need to push on to the opening of a new Act I. That explains my seeing Harrison Buckley.

Oh, we’ve had a pleasant time. I call him to escort me to a Friends of the Library fund-raiser and he calls for things like the Better Business Bureau or Kiwanis functions. But there’s no spark.

At twenty I was clueless. At forty-six my libido’s stronger. Not so surprising then that in a weak moment, a couple of days after Ted’s demise, Harrison found me rather distraught and one thing led to another in a way that never should have been.

Until that night whenever we had the rare one-on-one dinner, we ended up talking about our respective businesses over dessert.

Yes! That’s when I’ll break the news to him, over dessert. I’ll say that this was never meant to be a romance. We agreed we were just friends. We both deserve a chance at more.

Yeah. That sounds good, nonjudgmental and positive.

Hungry and edgy, I stare balefully at a basket of rolls, bulk manufactured like the kind sold in grocery stores. Even the breadsticks come in individual cellophane sleeves.

“Here we are.” I glance up to see Harrison’s back. Our meals arrive right after him.

“Now, that looks good.” He eyes my steak in a way I don’t want him eyeing me.

I slide my knife into the meat and peel back a bloodred center—no, the interior looks like it’s fresh from the cow.

“Is something the matter?” the waiter inquires with dutiful concern. After I explain that the cook didn’t do enough with this steak, he whisks away my plate.

“Here you are.” Harrison holds out to me a forkful of fettuccini con pancetta.

I smile and shake my head, wishing I didn’t have to wait for dessert. Sally would have sent him on his way months ago, thinking that he was just about the luckiest fella on the planet to have even known her.

I’m going to botch this. I can just feel it.