Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [51]
“Os-WHAT? Honey, you’re losing me with your big words,” Royalle replied. “KISS, KISS. Keep It Simple, Sunshine!”
If that wasn’t the kind of crazy, single-in-New-York night I’m supposed to remember, then I don’t know what is. But even then I was already thinking of it as an experience that would be better retold as a funny story than actually lived.
(And I was right.)
thirty-three
I wasn’t alone on the rooftop for long.
The husbands generally ignore me, except Mr. Dierdre, who sleazes all over me in his wife’s absence. Mr. Dierdre seems intent on adding me to the roster of barely-legal concubines ready to do his adulterous bidding. He’s always trying to impress me with his cash, his connections, his “comedy.” He’s got a pointy bald head, and too much flesh hanging around his neck. The resulting combination gives him an unlikely yet striking resemblance to an uncircumcised penis. I secretly call him Rumpelforeskin.
Rumpelforeskin always corners me at Bethany’s parties, which isn’t too hard to do because I’m usually lurking in the corner.
“You still working for that brainy magazine?” he asked, adjusting the tan knit cap covering his dome. I swear to God he looked just like a life-sized demonstration for Safer Sex Awareness Week.
“Yeah,” I said, barely able to mask my laugh with a cough.
“You’re so pretty,” he smarmed. “You should be working for Cosmo. Or that other magazine my wife reads…”
Were women really impressed by this? Enough to become his whore du jour? Just because he was rich? And why did Dierdre put up with it?
(Then again, perhaps Dierdre and the MILFs are on to something. They—my sister included—are a bit of a throwback to the early seventeenth century, when everyone married for money. Back then, as throughout human history, marriage was primarily a financial arrangement, more about the merging of property and assets than hearts and souls. If you were lucky, you eventually fell in love with the person you married, but it was by no means a given. Couples stayed together because of the stigma of divorce, of course, but also because they learned to live happily together within these lowered expectations. Ironic but true: It’s only when people started marrying for love, and not money, that connubial miseries intensified and divorce rates skyrocketed.
Okay. Bridget isn’t the only one who has done her research. You’ll forgive me for wanting to make an informed decision.)
“So where is your wife?” I asked, searching the rooftop for someone who would save me.
He ignored the reminder of the Mrs.
“Vogue? You look like the Vogue type.”
Rumpelforeskin was trying to spin lies into carnal gold. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I had borrowed an emerald green drop-waist silk jersey tunic from Hope. She wears it comfortably and fashionably over jeans, and promised it would work similar magic as a minidress on me. It did not. The green fabric billowed in all the wrong places and came off as a maternity muumuu. And when paired with the busted high school–era Chucks recovered from the MOM AND DAD box, the overall effect would certainly keep fashionistas guessing. Wait, are you going for a sort of knocked-up teen runaway look? I was definitely more vague than Vogue.
“Your wife reads Vogue?”
“Did I say wife? I meant my ex- wife. Actually, she’s dead. She died. That’s why I’m here now. Mourning.” He put on a pout, causing the fleshy overhang to retract just a bit.
“Oh, really? I could have sworn I just saw her tending to your children.”
“You must be mistaken. My wife died in a stingray attack,” he said, squeezing his voice in pretend sorrow, wiping fake tears from his eyes. “Just like the Crocodile Hunter. The barb tore right through her heart….”
Oh, did I mention that Rumpelforeskin was as topical as he was comical? And he went on, without any encouragement on my part other than the fact that I was still standing there and hadn’t jumped over the rooftop fencing and parachuted to safety with the excess fabric of