Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [43]
His children, when I finally met them, were what I’d expected: overbred, overprivileged trust-fund brats with big white Kennedy teeth, thin lips, and suspicious eyes. One of the boys was in a band (of course, I thought to myself, keeping my smile on my face as he told me about how one of their songs was blowing up YouTube), the other boy was a lawyer working for Marcus (of course, take two), and the girl was an associate in the objet department at Kohler’s. I didn’t like the way she looked at me, narrowly, across the dinner table, then again while I was washing up (Miss Thing, of course, hadn’t bothered to clear so much as a teaspoon). I could practically read the balloon over her head, the one that said gold digger. Let her think it, I told myself. Let her imagine the worst. When it comes down to a battle between two women, whether it’s wife versus mother-in-law or girlfriend versus daughter, the woman who wins is the one he’s taking to bed.
After five dates, Marcus told me he loved me. True, he’d been having an orgasm at the time, but it still counted. I’d wiped off my mouth on his thigh and wriggled toward the headboard until I was cradled in his arms. I would never challenge him, never argue, never behave as if I was his equal. I’d be his comfort, his cheerleader, his appreciative audience, his unconditional supporter. Love you, too, I whispered, kissing his cheek, smoothing his hair off his forehead, acknowledging, to my surprise, that it almost felt like it was true.
One night in June, we went to an opening at the Museum of Modern Art. At the dinner, I was seated across from the honored guest, Laurena Costovya, a Polish performance artist in her sixties who’d come to America for a retrospective of her work. For three months, young artists would re-create some of her most famous pieces—the one where a man and a woman danced a topless tango, bashing their bodies against each other until they bled; the one where a man balanced naked on stilts for ten hours at a time, his face hidden behind an executioner’s black leather hood.
Stately as a statue at the head of the table, Laurena wore a kind of nun’s robe made of raw white silk, with her hair, still brown, in a heavy plait over one shoulder, and no makeup except for a single slash of red on her lips. When she was in her twenties, she’d carved swastikas into her belly with a shard of glass, and done installations where she’d run face-first into pillars until she collapsed. She’d lit her long hair on fire, and stood perfectly still for hours with her partner holding a switchblade to her throat, his thumb hovering over the button that would pop the knife into her neck. Here in New York, she was performing a piece entitled See/Be Seen, where she’d sit at a table for eight hours at a stretch, across from whoever cared to face her. After dinner, there was a preview. I remember the appreciative murmur as she gathered her skirts and crossed the room to take her seat. I thought about how silly the whole thing was, how far from what I thought of as “art,” as she took her seat, arranging the folds of her skirt. To me, art was a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music, not some senior citizen sitting behind a desk.
“Go on,” said Marcus, urging me toward the empty space across from the artist. I crossed the floor, heels clicking, and sat down, my smile firmly on my face, my hair swept into an updo, my makeup professionally applied (at two hundred dollars a pop it was an unwelcome expense, but I couldn’t skip it, not with photographers on hand).
Laurena regarded me. I looked back, legs crossed, hands folded in my lap. My eyes were on hers, but my mind was wandering. I was thinking about how many calories I’d consumed that day and whether the walk I’d taken at lunchtime, twenty blocks up Fifth Avenue with a circle around Bryant Park, had burned most of them off. I was wondering how soon Marcus would ask me to marry