Magic Hour, Susan Isaacs [life changing books txt] 📗

He’d tried to be a decent husband, and it got to be too much of a burden.”

“How was he a decent husband? I thought you said he cheated on you—with some socialite.”

“Decent for Sy. He held doors open. He remembered birthdays, anniversaries. He had great style; one Valentine’s Day he bought me a new tackle box, and when I opened it, there was a beautiful long strand of fourteen-millimeter pearls.”

“What are fourteen-millimeter pearls?”

“Big pearls.” Her hands described a sphere that was about the size of the average classroom globe. It annoyed me that she liked such an expensive gift. I wanted her to say, I told Sy to take back the pearls; I only wanted the tackle box. But she didn’t. “You have to understand Sy,” she went on. “He couldn’t be faithful. He couldn’t be straight. He had to be…I don’t know if ‘crooked’ is the word. He had to manipulate every situation. Some of it was money. He was always afraid someone was cheating him, so he played one stockbroker, one lawyer, one accountant, against another. But he cheated people all the time. He hid personal expenses in movie budgets. I’m not just talking about a sweatsuit and a set of barbells; his second movie paid for a gym and a hot tub in our apartment in the city. And you couldn’t use words like

‘illegal’ or ‘immoral’ with him, because in a weird way, he took them as compliments. He saw his finagling as an adventure and himself as a kind of swanky Robin Hood. But all he was doing was robbing from the rich to give to the rich.”

“You didn’t see any of this when you agreed to marry him?”

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“No. I just saw this charming, cultured man with crinkles around his eyes who was crazy about Cowgirl and who knew all about westerns. Not just a superficial knowledge: I remember him describing one of Tom Mix’s silent movies— Cactus Jim’s Shop Girl. Actually, he seemed to know about everything: Cambodian architecture, the Big Bang theory, the linguistic connection between Finnish and Hungarian.

But I think what got me most about Sy was that he appreciated me. My work. My eyes. My hair. My…All the usual stuff.

This man was such a connoisseur, I thought: Lord, am I something!”

She concentrated on massaging her knee, a slow back-and-forth motion, the way you do to ease an old injury. Suddenly she glanced up at me, then, quickly, back down to her knee.

I knew what she was thinking: despite our very different résumés, I was like Sy. Oh, how I had appreciated her that night: I swear to God, I’ve never met anyone like you, Bonnie. Bonnie, your skin is like warm velvet. You know what, Bonnie? Your eyes are the color of the ocean. Not a summer ocean. Like on a bright winter day—so beautiful. I could talk to you for hours, Bonnie. Bonnie, I love you.

“But Sy’s enthusiasms never lasted. He had a closet with equipment from sports he’d tried a few times and given up: golf, racquetball, scuba diving, polo, cross-country skiing.

And if he could have put women in a closet, he would have; he was on to other enthusiasms by our two-month an-niversary.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Actually, it got to be amusing.” She lifted her chin and gave a little closed-lipped smile, a superior city-slicker expression that overflowed with savoir faire. It was fake as hell. “I could tell who he was having an affair with by the way he dressed. One day he put away his nipped-in-waist Italian suit and

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took out a torn T-shirt and bleached jeans, and I knew he’d stopped with the production designer with the surrealist jewelry and taken up with the third-string Village Voice movie critic, this girl with a lot of hair who was about ten minutes past her Sweet Sixteen. You couldn’t help but laugh.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

The blanket on the bed, which the architect had probably decided was a grand bucolic design statement, was a pukey green plaid. Bonnie traced a thin, dark-green line with her finger. “All right,” she said quietly, “what he did to me stank.

More than that. It broke my heart. I’m not the kind of woman men fall for. Then, finally, one did. I was so happy. But before I could even finish the love poem I was writing to him, a sonnet—fourteen lousy lines—he stopped loving me.”

“So the marriage was over before it was officially over.”

She nodded. “We still had sex, but there was no love, and not much companionship. On the nights he was home, he’d hole up in his study and read scripts or make phone calls.

After the separation, I went on with my life. It wasn’t hard to do; we hadn’t really been a couple.”

“But your economic situation, your social status, changed.

What was your life like?”

“What do you mean?” She got very engrossed in following another, thicker line in the plaid.

“Happy, sad, wonderful, terrible?”

“It was okay.” She didn’t look up at me.

“Come on, Bonnie.”

“Why is this necessary?”

“Because I want to know the circumstances surrounding your taking up with Sy again.”

“The circumstances were that I was—am—an independent woman. No ties. My mom died when I

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was seventeen: a brain tumor. My dad remarried—to a woman from Salt Lake who gets pedicures. He sold his store and they moved to Arizona, to a retirement community; they play bridge. My brothers are all married, with families of their own.”

She got quiet, thoughtful. She stopped with the blanket and reached back and played with the end of her braid. Ab-sentmindedly, she unwound the rubber band. She unplaited her hair, and, as she began to talk again, stroked it, as if comforting herself. In the light of the green-shaded lamp, it gave off soft copper glints.

“My life: I live in a lovely town by the ocean in a part of the country I don’t belong in. I