Lynda Curnyn - Killer Summer

I didn’t even feel like going out the night I met Tom. But Amanda insisted. She had gotten invites to some kind of fund-raiser. I had been dragged to enough of them by Amanda to know that they were boring as hell. Filled with the kind of people who identified themselves by what class they came out of Harvard or Yale. I usually went and entertained myself by making up identities as I went along. When I had too much to drink—and I drank at lot at these humdrum affairs—I was Maggie Germaine, reporter for Rolling Stone. Or Maggie Germaine, brain surgeon.

But the night I met Tom Landon, I didn’t care about impressing anyone. I was simply Maggie Germaine, the fifth child of an otherwise unremarkable family living on the South Shore of Long Island. Usually I never admitted to South Shore, except to give some vaguish impression that I lived somewhere near Southampton, the more desirable part of the South Shore. But the truth was, I grew up in Shirley, later restyled Mastic Beach, though the real estate values never came up to par with the kind of name that suggested cocktails and cabanas. Mastic Beach was more Budweiser and monster truck shows. To Tom, the only son of a North Carolina manufacturing family, Long Island was the legendary home of Howard Stern and the Shoreham nuclear power plant. It was bizarrely exotic in the way a seven hundred pound cat on the cover of the National Enquirer is. Though you don’t want to understand the forces that could bring such a thing into being, you can’t look away.

It seemed Tom couldn’t look away the night we met, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the Long Island upbringing I’d tossed in his face. But when I forked over my phone number, it was with the kind of blasé indifference born of having had this kind of conversation one too many times already.

Of course, it was just the kind of indifference that works like a charm, at least according to Amanda.

He took me to La Grenouille on our first date. I figured he was trying to impress, but the truth was, dining at places like La Grenouille was a way of life for Tom. Not so for me. My typical culinary experience in Manhattan included the All You Could Eat Ribs Night at Dallas BBQ. Which was probably why, over four courses filled with foods I had never heard of, much less considered, my indifference morphed into insecurity. I was suddenly very aware of the cheap rayon cling of the dress I wore, embarrassed that I could barely choose a wine and a bit overwhelmed by the understated elegance of it all. “Old Money,” was what Amanda had called Tom Landon. “Old man,” was what I had thought at first. Not so once I was sitting across that pretty table from him, surrounded by lush flowers, soft candlelight and simpering waiters with French accents. Tom brimmed with the kind of confidence I had not experienced in men up to that point. Maybe that’s what attracted me most to him. That and the fact that he opened up to me a world I had been shut out of for most of my life. He had everything a man could want. An Upper East Side palace, a garment industry empire. You might scoff at Tom, thinking he’d been handed that empire on a silver platter. It didn’t hurt that his father was the man behind Landonwear, a moderate ladies’ wear line that Thomas Landon Senior ran from the manufacturing hub in North Carolina. But Tom struck out on his own, moving to New York after getting an MBA at Harvard. By the time I met him, he had just made a name for himself with his own company, Luxe.

Amanda didn’t understand why I came home that night scoffing at everything from the fingerbowls to the fancy French menu. She couldn’t comprehend my resistance.

Not that I really resisted. I went out with him again. And again. A part of me secretly enjoyed the raised eyebrows and whispers that broke out at the sight of me, young, blond and wide-eyed on Tom’s arm. I guess everyone assumed I was simply soothing whatever ills lingered after Tom’s divorce from Gillian, his first wife and the mother of his daughter, Francesca. But that was just it. There were no wounds to heal. Tom accepted his lot as divorcé and weekend dad with the same pragmatism that guided his business deals. Out with the old and in with the new. And since I had all the glitter and good wine and food that went along with being “the new,” I didn’t allow myself to wonder at his apparent lack of feeling for the woman he had left not a year earlier, the child he traveled to see for a few short hours on the weekend. I simply accepted his devotion to me like a kind of amused spectator. I threw my past up into his face, my underachieving alcoholic father, my bipolar mother, my pack of redneck brothers. It was as if Tom didn’t hear me. Or didn’t care.

Which was why when he declared, on our fourth date, that he would one day make me his wife, I laughed mercilessly. But my insides clamored with a mixture of fear and maybe even longing. I hadn’t heard this sort of confident declaration from a man since I was sixteen and Luke, my then-boyfriend, told me he would love me till the day he died. Which I suppose was true, since not two weeks after I dumped him he did die, in a drunk-driving accident. But I wondered what it was that made Tom so certain about me when I wasn’t sure of anything. My life. My career prospects. I felt challenged by his faith in me, challenged to be the cool, confident woman he saw staring at him across that candlelit table. I suppose the fact that I succeeded can be measured by the gap between the hard-living rock-and-roll groupie I once aspired to be to the careful, perfect wife I became.

Tom always wanted the perfect wife. I just wish he could have loved her a little more.

I wish I could have loved her a little more.

Zoe

Is it hot in here or is it just me?

“She looks, um, good,” I said to Sage once we were seated at the back of White’s Funeral Home on East 71st.

Sage gave me a look, and I knew exactly why. I hate when people say that at wakes and funerals. Who looks good when they’re dead? But the truth was, Maggie did look good. At least better than the last time I saw her. I couldn’t get the image of her sightless eyes and pale skin out of my head. I guess that’s what wakes were for, I thought, remembering the last one I’d been to for Myles’s father. But that had been a whole different thing. One of those sprawling affairs on Long Island, sprawling mostly because Myles’s father was not only a father of five and brother to six, but a Suffolk County cop, killed in the line of duty. You can imagine how big that wake was. It even made the papers. People came from miles around, in such numbers that they had to limit the viewing hours just so Myles and his family could have some time to grieve in peace. And grieve they did. I’d never seen Mrs. Callahan so broken up. And Myles’s sisters. I had always been so close to them, especially Erica, the only one who was still single and close to my age. I didn’t even know what to say to Erica—to any of them. Myles had been so sweet, so good, trying to stay strong, keep it all together while everyone else fell apart. I knew he was grieving, had held him tight when he finally did cry the night after they buried Mr. C.

Which was why this sophisticated and utterly dry-eyed event had me wondering. If it wasn’t for Maggie’s mother, sobbing silently in the corner with Maggie’s brothers, I would have wondered if anyone here even cared that Maggie had been cut off in the prime of her life. I looked over at Tom, standing up front near the entrance, smiling and greeting people just as merrily as he had during the first dinner party on Memorial Day weekend. Only it was his wife’s wake. I turned to Sage again. “Don’t you think it’s kinda strange how unfazed Tom seems to be?”

Sage flicked her gaze over to Tom. “People grieve in different ways,” she said.