Second Acts by Teri Emory

Author:Teri Emory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Female friendship, Middle-aged women, Interpersonal relations, Love stories, Contemporary Women.
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Published: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Beth:

Lost and Found

“Well, then, what’s to be the reason

for becoming man and wife?”

—Noel Paul Stookey

Six-thirty. The morning after the party. I’ve slept fitfully and not long enough. With effort, I raise my head; there are streaks of mascara on the pillowcase because I fell asleep before I washed off my makeup. Jim has already left for the office. His new partners will need him night and day until they return to London. He’ll sleep in the city all week.

“Call you later,” I heard him whisper as he tiptoed out.

The party was a grand success. Everybody said so. There were no marital brawls or unruly political squabbles or regrettable drunken incidents. (We’ve had all three at previous gatherings.) The parking valets neither lost anyone’s keys nor damaged a single car. MaryJo’s Catering managed to find ripe blood-oranges for the salad and ventresca di tonno, the rich tuna in olive oil that makes a perfect sauce for cold veal. In spite of his hesitation about an evening of theme music, Sam Humphrey did a masterful job playing the movie scores I requested. I knew the music would be just right, not too intrusive or too stuffy. The kind that stirs up nice feelings.

The cleaning crew is due at nine. Carmen is coming to supervise them. Nothing urgent for me to do, nowhere I have to be today. Half asleep still, I tilt my head to scan the framed pictures on the dresser. A Sears Studios Portrait of Adam, age four, and Nicole, less than a year old, smiling as they sit in the doorway of a façade meant to look like a playhouse. A black-and-white of Jim’s parents strolling on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, wheeling Jim in a fancy pram. Sarah, Miriam, and I amid a sea of bodies in front of the Washington Memorial, holding aloft a banner that reads, “Give Peace a Chance.” A shot of me at the Bocca della Verità in Rome. I am pretending, Roman Holiday/Audrey Hepburn-style, to be frightened as I tentatively reach towards the gaping Mouth of Truth.

“Put your hand in, and tell me I’m the best lover in the world!” Andrew had called to me as he snapped the picture.

My eyes come to rest on a Polaroid of Jim and me, tanned and gleeful, festooned with leis at a luau in Maui. There’s no hint in our smiling faces of the knotty truce that led to our being in Hawaii, or the restive months that preceded the trip. It was the vacation we took, Jim says, instead of getting a divorce.

__________

Carmen was at the house with me six years ago when I found out about Jim’s affair. Jim and I had celebrated Valentine’s Day a few days early, the night before he left on a business trip to Tokyo. The work on enlarging our pool and putting in a new cabana had just begun, and Jim’s gift to me was a white hooded terry cloth beach robe and a pair of iridescent flip-flops in the same shade of blue as the designer logo on the pocket of the robe.

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