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After All These Years by Susan Isaacs
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(Mass Market Paperback - REPRINT)
- Pub. Date: September 1998
- 512pp
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: September 1998
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Format: Mass Market Paperback, 512pp
- ISBN-13: 9780061091797
- ISBN: 0061091790
- Edition Description: REPRINT
Synopsis
E-book extra: "To the Mystery!," a speech to the Mystery Writers of America by Susan Isaacs.
Another model marriage ends with a corpse in the kitchen, and a spouse on the run. People magazine: "Isaacs scores again with this relentlessly funny... entertaining, and imaginative mystery."
Annotation
Richie Meyers tells his wife Rosie he is leaving her for a younger woman. Then he turns up murdered. Naturally Rosie is the prime suspect. Her only hope lies in uncovering Richie's secret life -- and his killer -- among the Manhattan jet set. A bestseller for Isaacs.
Chicago Tribune
Isaacs is once again at the top of her satiric form in After All These Years.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
"I can think of no other novelist -- popular or highbrow -- who consistently celebrates female gutsiness, brains, and sexuality. She's Jane Austen with a schmear," said National Public Radio's Fresh Air of Susan Isaacs.
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
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After All These Yearsby Anonymous
Reader Rating:
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February 28, 2007: My first book by this author. I like the way susan writes with humor and keeps you guessing until the very end.
After All These Yearsby Anonymous
Reader Rating:
See Detailed Ratings
April 25, 2004: Susan has given us another book to love!! She writes with such humor and 'real' feelings -- and her works are so smooth and seem to really flow -- there is NEVER a good stopping place so be prepared to keep reading! You will be 'hooked' from page one. A real 'meaty' novel.
Fact File
Name:
Susan Isaacs
Current Home:
Sands Point, New York
Date of Birth:
December 07, 1943
Place of Birth:
Brooklyn, New York
Education:
Honorary Doctorate, Queens College
Awards:
John Steinbeck Award, 1999
Biography
Susan Isaacs, novelist, essayist and screenwriter, was born in Brooklyn and educated at Queens College. After leaving school, she worked as an editorial assistant at Seventeen magazine. In 1968, Susan married Elkan Abramowitz, a then a federal prosecutor. She became a senior editor at Seventeen but left in 1970 to stay home with her newborn son, Andrew. Three years later, she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. During this time she freelanced, writing political speeches as well as magazine articles. Elkan became a criminal defense lawyer.
In the mid-seventies, Susan got the urge to write a novel. A year later she began working on what was to become Compromising Positions, a whodunit set on suburban Long Island. It was published in 1978 by Times Books and was chosen a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Her second novel, Close Relations, a love story set against a background of ethnic, sexual and New York Democratic politics (thus a comedy), was published in 1980 by Lippincott and Crowell and was a selection of the Literary Guild. Her third, Almost Paradise, was published by Harper & Row in 1984, and was a Literary Guild main selection; in this work Susan used the saga form to show how the people are molded not only by their histories, but also by family fictions that supplant truth. All of Susan's novels have been New York Times bestsellers. Her fiction has been translated into thirty languages.
In 1985, she wrote the screenplay for Paramount's Compromising Positions, which starred Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia. She also wrote and co-produced Touchstone Pictures' Hello Again. The 1987 comedy starred Shelley Long and Judith Ivey.
Her fourth novel, Shining Through, set during World War II, was published by Harper & Row in 1988. Twentieth-Century Fox's film adaptation starred Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith. Her fifth book, Magic Hour, a coming-of-middle-age novel as well as a mystery, was published in January 1991. After All These Years was published in 1993; critics lauded it for its strong and witty protagonist. Lily White came out in 1996 and Red, White and Blue in 1998. All the novels were published by HarperCollins and were main selections of the Literary Guild. In 1999, Susan's first work of nonfiction, Brave Dames and Wimpettes: What Women Are Really Doing on Page and Screen, was published by Ballantine's Library of Contemporary Thought. During 2000, she wrote a series of columns on the presidential campaign for Newsday. Long Time No See, a Book of the Month Club main selection, was published in September 2001; it was a sequel to Compromising Positions. Susan's tenth novel is Any Place I Hang My Hat (2004).
Susan Isaacs is a recipient of the Writers for Writers Award and the John Steinbeck Award. She serves as chairman of the board of Poets & Writers and is a past president of Mystery Writers of America. She is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle, The Creative Coalition, PEN, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the International Association of Crime Writers, and the Adams Round Table. She sits on the boards of the Queens College Foundation, the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, the North Shore Child and Family Guidance Association, the Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence and is an active member of her synagogue. She has worked to gather support for the National Endowment of the Arts' Literature Program and has been involved in several anti-censorship campaigns. In addition to writing books, essays and films, Susan has reviewed books for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and Newsday and written about politics, film and First Amendment issues. She lives on Long Island with her husband.
Biography courtesy of the author's official web site.
Good to Know
Some outtakes from our interview with Isaacs:
"My first job was wrapping shoes in a shoe store in the low-rent district of Fifth Avenue and saying ‘Thank you!' with a cheery smile. I got canned within three days for not wrapping fast enough, although I suspect that often my vague, future-novelist stare into space while thinking about sex or lunch did not give me a smile that would ring the bell on the shoe store's cheer-o-meter."
"I constantly have to fight against the New York Effect, an overwhelming urge to wear black clothes so everyone will think, Egad, isn't she chic and understated! I'm not, by nature, a black-wearing person. (I'm not, by nature, a chic person either.) I like primary colors as well as bright purple, loud chartreuse, and shocking pink. And that's just my shoes."
"I'm not a great fan of writing classes. Yes, they do help people sometimes, especially with making them write regularly. But the aspiring writer can be a delicate creature, sensitive or even oversensitive to criticism. I was that way: I still am. The problem begins with most people's natural desire to please. In a classroom situation, especially one in which the work will be read aloud or critiqued in class, the urge to write something likable or merely critic-proof can dam up your natural talent. Also, it keeps you from developing the only thing you have is a writer -- your own voice. Finally, you don't know the people in a class well enough to figure out where their criticism is coming from. A great knowledge of literature? Veiled hostility? The talent is too precious a commodity to risk handing it over to strangers."
"Writing is sometimes an art, and it certainly is a craft. But it's also a job. I go to work five or six days a week (depending how far along I am with my work-in-progress). Like most other people, there are days I would rather be lying in a hammock reading or going to a movie with a friend. But whether you're an artist or an accountant, you still have to show up at work. Otherwise, it is unlikely to get done."
Feature Interview
In the fall of 2004, Susan Isaacs took some time out to answer our questions about her favorite books, authors, and interests: What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?
For a couple of months during college, I was wowed by H. L. Mencken's book of essays, Prejudices. Its influence was both positive and negative. I loved the author's iconoclastic instincts, his razzle-dazzle language, and his contemptuous take on the assorted idiocies of American politics and culture. My infatuation could not last longer than a couple of months because of Mencken's off-the-cuff racist and anti-Semitic asides: How could anyone that smart be that stupid?
In any case, while in Mencken mode, I wrote an essay for the college newspaper defending the fraternity/sorority system. (Fortunately, I can find no trace of this piece and thus can avoid confronting my younger, dopier, and more arrogant self.) The response was, to me, astounding. More pats on the back then I could count and, on the other hand, a stunning number of outraged letters to the editor protesting what I had written. A grand fuss, but it brought me little pleasure. True, I loved the attention, but it didn't take me long to realize both the applause and the fuming was not for me, but rather, for my competent imitation of H. L. Mencken.
A little more than a decade later, when I began writing my first novel, I started to realize that all I had as a writer was my own voice. Sure, I could imitate Mencken or, for that matter, Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde. But that was just a clever college-kid trick. Mencken and Austen and Wilde were far better Menckens and Austens and Wildes than I could ever be. Besides, why would any reader bother with an imitation when they could read the real thing? All I could be, for better or worse, was Susan Isaacs.
What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
I'm an avid reader of nonfiction, too, so I have to add:
What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?
What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing?
If even a radio were playing in the house across the street, I would not be able to write. When I'm inventing characters and creating a universe, that of my novel, I can't have any distractions from the universe I'm living in.
My knowledge of orchestral music composed between Mozart and Gershwin is close to nil. As for opera, give me melody -- Puccini, Verdi, Bizet. I am a word person: The music I enjoy most has lyrics. So I love the standards, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, and so forth. For me, they are best sung by performers with the intelligence and sensitivity to get at the meaning of the words without sacrificing the music. Give me Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, and that most underrated of singers, Louis Armstrong. And of course I love rock, although what I enjoy most is the music of my childhood and teenage years. So it's Bill Haley and the Comets through the Beatles.
If you had a book club, what would it be reading?
Well, right now I've been listening to an unabridged recording of Anna Karenina. Over the years, I started it a couple of times but for some reason always gave up. Yet here I am most afternoons, sneaking off for time alone with Tolstoy. So my book club would feature books I've given up on which everybody else says are a must-read: Even if I still hated the book, I would read it in the hope of getting elucidated by my fellow book club members. Some possibilities: Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts?
Whatever strikes me. A bestselling novel, a worst-selling novel that looks intriguing, a big fat coffee-table book with photographs of bats, or French couture. A biography. A book on the development of language, or the thousand best recipes for cheesecake.
Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
What I have on my desk is usually a mess. Looking down right now, I see a pair of sparkly red, blue, and aqua clip-on earings that felt too tight a few days ago, a micro drive, malachite beads I brought home from Africa and plan to give to an old family friend, an empty eyeglass case, and a folded-up copy of Chapter 7 of my current novel, Any Place I Hang My Hat, with a footer that indicates it was printed out on July 31, 2003; my shopping list and "Ann and Al's anniversary" is scribbled on it. Near the lamp, there's a CD sent to me by a pal, a Vietnam vet who has lately fallen in love with World War II love songs. It includes guaranteed tear-jerkers like "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and "Something to Remember You By." And an empty Diet Coke can.
Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
No real horror stories. I was able to find an agent fairly quickly, and Compromising Positions was sold within a couple of months. It was only later that she told me it had been turned down by four or five publishers. The reasons were as varied as the publishers: The novel was too comic for a mystery; no one wanted to read a whodunit with a Long Island housewife as the detective; it might make a good paperback original published by somebody else; it was too different.
If you could choose one new writer to be "discovered," who would it be?
What I'm interested in is any new, original voice. I was so happy for the chance to choose a novel for the Today show Book Club, because having read Matthew Sharpe's The Sleeping Father, I said to myself, "Hey, this is an extraordinary talent, someone who can interweave humor with great sadness." I felt that same "what a unique talent!" thrill when I read Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist and Jennifer Weiner's Good in Bed.
What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
Most of all, keep writing. If you have finished a novel and have done everything you possibly can to make it good (no waiting around for a dream editor to work with you), then began another novel. Also, if you spent six months or four years writing, it should be worth a few weeks of your time to research finding an agent and also to work up a brilliant one-page query letter to be sent to agents.
From the Publisher
The day after her lavish wedding anniversary bash, Rosie Meyers gets a big surprise: her nouveau riche husband, Richie, is leaving her for a sultry, sophisticated, size-six MBA. So, when he's found murdered in their exquisitely appointed kitchen, no one is surprised to find Rosie's prints all over the weapon.
The suburban English teacher is the prime suspect — the police's only suspect. And she knows she'll spend the rest of her life in the prison library unless she can unmask the real killer. Going into Manhattan on the lam, Rosie learns more about Richie than she ever wanted to know. And more about herself than she ever dreamed possible.
Chicago Tribune
Isaacs is once again at the top of her satiric form in After All These Years.
People
Isaac scores again with this relentlessly funny...entertaining and imaginative mystery.
New York Times Book Review
You gotta laugh...Susan Isaacs has always done awfully well in her entertaining fiction, and she's done it again in After All These Years.
Chicago Tribune
Isaacs is once again at the top of her satiric form in After All These Years.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Pure fun.
New York Times Book Review
You gotta laugh...Susan Isaacs has always done awfully well in her entertaining fiction, and she's done it again in After All These Years.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Pure fun.
Kirkus Reviews
Again, Isaacs's (Magic Hour, etc.) formulaic plot device is almost beside the point as she tickles readers' funny bones in her latest Long Island melodrama-cum-satire—this time featuring a middle-aged millionairess who's accused of her estranged husband's murder. "After nearly a quarter of a century of marriage, Richie Meyers, my husband, told me to call him Rick," reports Rosie Meyers, a high-school English teacher whose husband struck it rich years before by cofounding a computer-research firm and thereby launching the two of them into the stratosphere of Long Island monied society. Had she not been so cheerfully enmeshed in her resolutely middle-class teaching career, Rosie adds, she might have seen the writing on the wall: Richie was in the midst of a midlife crisis that featured an affair with Data Associates's very young and very blond vice-president, Jessica Stevenson. Weeping (unrepentantly), Richie leaves Rosie shortly after their silver wedding anniversary, and Rosie suffers one long, miserable, solitary summer—until one night, woken from a Xanax-induced slumber, she stumbles across Richie on her kitchen floor, stabbed to death with one of her own carving knives. The police assume the spurned wife is the culprit, and Rosie is forced to flee to Manhattan to do her own investigating and prove them wrong. Along the way she learns some hard truths about her husband's secret life, and though the true killer's identity becomes clear far too early, Isaacs's ability to keep readers laughing through Rosie's darkest moments should prove cathartic for many among her loyal readers. Broad humor, ebulliently proffered.
Loading...Product Details
- Pub. Date: September 1998
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Format: Mass Market Paperback, 512pp
- ISBN-13: 9780061091797
- ISBN: 0061091790
- Edition Description: REPRINT
Read an Excerpt
After nearly a quarter of a century of marriage, Richie Meyers, my husband, told me to call him Rick. Then he started slicking back his hair with thirty-five-dollar-a-jar English pomade.
Okay, I admit I was annoyed. But in all fairness, wasn't Richie entitled to a life crisis? He was just two years from fifty. His jaw wasn't so much chiseled from granite anymore as sculpted from mashed potatoes. His hairline and his gums were receding at about the same rate. And when his shirt was off, he'd eye his chest hair in disbelief, as if some practical joker had plunked a gray toupee between his pectorals.
Well, I could empathize. At eleven months younger than Richie, I didn't exactly qualify as a spring chicken. Still, unless a man's taste ran to prepubescent milkmaids with braids, I would probably be considered somewhere between attractive and downright pretty. Shiny dark hair. Clear skin. Even features. Hazel eyes with green specks that I liked to think of as glints of emerald. Plus one hell of a set of eyelashes. And not a bad body either, although in the fight between gravity and me, gravity was winning; no matter how many abdominal crunches I did, I would never again be tempted to include getting my panties ripped off in broad daylight as a detail of a sexual fantasy.
Like Richie, I wasn't so crazy about growing old, especially since I had at last come to appreciate the unlikelihood of immortality. A person who can laugh in the face of eternal nothingness is a schmuck. So my heart went out to him. And I made a sincere effort to call him Rick. But after all those years of "Richie," I'd slip up every so often—like in bed. I cried out,"Oh, God! Don't stop, Rich . . . Rick." But by then he was shriveling, and seconds later, it looked as if he'd Scotch-taped a shrimp to his pubic area.
The signs were there, all right. I just didn't read them. That's how come I was surprised when, on the bright blue June morning after our silver anniversary party, which we'd celebrated on what our real estate broker had called the Great Lawn behind our house, in a white tent festooned with creamy roses and thousands of twinkly white lights, Richie told me he was leaving me for his senior vice-president, for—his voice softened, then melted—Jessica.
Jessica Stevenson had been one of the two hundred guests the night before. In fact, Richie had fox-trotted with her to a Cole Porter medley that had included "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To." Yes, Jessica was a younger woman. But not obnoxiously so. Richie wasn't one of those fiftyish guys who run off with twenty-two-year-old Lufthansa stewardesses. At thirty-eight, Jessica was a mere nine years younger than I. Unfortunately, she had luminous aquamarine eyes and was learning Japanese for the fun of it.
At what turned out to be the final party of my marriage, I kept waiting for Richie to say: "Look at you, Rosie! As beautiful as the day we were married!" He didn't. In the humid night air, the pleated, Grecian-style white silk gown that had caressed my curves in the fitting room at Bergdorf Goodman clung to my bosom and legs with crazed malice.
Jessica, naturally, did not look as if she'd wrapped herself in a wet sheet. No. She glowed in a gold lam‚ off-the-shoulder bodysuit tucked into a transparent cream chiffon skirt that hung, petal-like, in soft panels; her top was divided from her bottom by a four-inch-wide gold leather belt. It goes without saying she had a slender waist—although to be perfectly candid, her bosom was nothing Richie would normally have written home about; she was fairly flat, except for those overenthusiastic nipples men go crazy for, the kind that look like the erasers on number two pencils.
I had actually blown her a kiss as I raced by, searching for the caterer to tell him that a guest, Richie's banker's girlfriend, had converted to vegan vegetarianism the previous weekend. Jessica, in awesomely high-heeled gold sandals, was standing with a couple of the other Data Associates executives, laughing, squeezing a wedge of lime into her drink. She waved back with her usual energy: Rosie! Hello! With her gold bodysuit and the bronze highlights in her dark-gold hair, she looked shimmery, magical, almost like a mermaid.
But that Richie would actually leave me for her? Please! He and I had a history. We'd met in the late sixties, for God's sake, when we were both teaching at Forest Hills High School in Queens. We had made a life together. A rich life—long before all the money. We had children. So yes, I was surprised. Okay, stunned.
Across our bedroom, Richie's black-olive eyes were overflowing. He gulped noisy mouthfuls of air and was so choked up I could barely hear him. "I can't believe I'm saying this, Rosie." As he wiped his tears away with the heel of his hand, he turned crying into a manly act. "What gets me"—his chest heaved—"is that"—he sobbed, unable to hold anything back—"it sounds so damn trite."
"Please, Richie, tell me."
"For the first time in years, I feel truly alive."
The late-morning air was hot, sugary with honeysuckle, a reminder that lovely, sweaty summer sex was just weeks away. But, as the song goes, not for me. In spite of the season, I shivered and pulled the blanket tight around my shoulders. Sure, I was cold, but I suppose I also had the subconscious hope that all bundled up, lower lip quivering, I'd be an irresistible package.
I wasn't.
Richie was. With his combed-back steel-gray hair, his rich-man's tan, his hand-tailored white slacks and crisp white shirt and white lizard loafers, he looked like an ex-husband who had outgrown his wife. But his face was wet. His tears were real. "Rosie, I'm so sorry."
I couldn't think of a comeback. I just cried. He shifted his weight from one loafer to the other, and then back again. The confrontation was either horribly distressing or it was running longer than he'd expected and he had a lunch date. "Richie," I sobbed, "you'll get over her!" As fast as I could, I changed it to "Rick, please! I love you so much!" but by then it was much too late.
That summer, I went through all the scorned-first-wife stages. Hysteria. Paralysis. Denial: Of course Richie will give up a worldly, successful, fertile, size-six financial whiz-bang for a suburban high school English teacher. Despair: spending my nights zonked on the Xanax I'd conned my gynecologist into prescribing, regretting it was not general anesthesia.
I was utterly alone. Husband gone. Kids grown and off on their own. And our beagle, Irving, died the first week in August. I wandered through the house, weeping, remembering Richie's body heat, the children's warmth, Irving's cold and loving nose.
At least wandering was exercise. When Richie hit it big, he did not believe that less was more. More was more. One day we were in our Cape Cod, with its original, early sixties all-avocado kitchen, its off-the-track storm windows, its cockeyed basketball hoop over its one-car garage. The next, we were two and a half miles north, right on Long Island Sound in Great Gatsby country, in a Georgian-style house so stately it actually had a name. Gulls' Haven.
Admittedly, a nocturnal wanderer in a New York Shakespeare Festival T-shirt, pointlessly sexy black panties, and Pan Am socks left over from our last first-class flight to London (before Richie got even richer and we started taking the Concorde) given to rambles through a deserted house clutching a wad of damp Kleenex wasn't the picture "Gulls' Haven" ought to have evoked. But it was the truth. That's how it was on that fateful night.
Fateful? To tell you the truth, that night didn't seem any more or less ominous than any other. When we'd moved, Richie had ditched the digital radio-alarm on his night table for a brass carriage clock, so I'll never know the precise time I woke up or, more important, what wakened me. But it was around three-thirty. I realized I wouldn't get any more sleep because I was scared to take any more Xanax. My luck, the next pill could be the one to put me in what the doctors would diagnose as a persistent vegetative state. Richie, driven by guilt, would pay for the best custodial care, so I'd spend the last three decades of my life cosmically desolate and unable to read, a prisoner in the solitary confinement of my own body.
I wandered some more. When Richie had taken the hike that last week in June, he'd made the twenty-six-mile trip west into Manhattan with just an overnight bag. How could a guy want to leave nearly his whole life behind? But I was past sniffling in front of the closets full of his custom-tailored suits, touching the toes of his handmade shoes. I was able to get past them, and past his bathroom too, all rich green marble and chunky gold fixtures; we'd made love in his stall shower the first night we'd moved in.
Read a Sample Chapter
After nearly a quarter of a century of marriage, Richie Meyers, my husband, told me to call him Rick. Then he started slicking back his hair with thirty-five-dollar-a-jar English pomade.
Okay, I admit I was annoyed. But in all fairness, wasn't Richie entitled to a life crisis? He was just two years from fifty. His jaw wasn't so much chiseled from granite anymore as sculpted from mashed potatoes. His hairline and his gums were receding at about the same rate. And when his shirt was off, he'd eye his chest hair in disbelief, as if some practical joker had plunked a gray toupee between his pectorals.
Well, I could empathize. At eleven months younger than Richie, I didn't exactly qualify as a spring chicken. Still, unless a man's taste ran to prepubescent milkmaids with braids, I would probably be considered somewhere between attractive and downright pretty. Shiny dark hair. Clear skin. Even features. Hazel eyes with green specks that I liked to think of as glints of emerald. Plus one hell of a set of eyelashes. And not a bad body either, although in the fight between gravity and me, gravity was winning; no matter how many abdominal crunches I did, I would never again be tempted to include getting my panties ripped off in broad daylight as a detail of a sexual fantasy.
Like Richie, I wasn't so crazy about growing old, especially since I had at last come to appreciate the unlikelihood of immortality. A person who can laugh in the face of eternal nothingness is a schmuck. So my heart went out to him. And I made a sincere effort to call him Rick. But after all those years of "Richie," I'd slip up every so often--like in bed. I cried out, "Oh,God! Don't stop, Rich . . . Rick." But by then he was shriveling, and seconds later, it looked as if he'd Scotch-taped a shrimp to his pubic area.
The signs were there, all right. I just didn't read them. That's how come I was surprised when, on the bright blue June morning after our silver anniversary party, which we'd celebrated on what our real estate broker had called the Great Lawn behind our house, in a white tent festooned with creamy roses and thousands of twinkly white lights, Richie told me he was leaving me for his senior vice-president, for--his voice softened, then melted--Jessica.
Jessica Stevenson had been one of the two hundred guests the night before. In fact, Richie had fox-trotted with her to a Cole Porter medley that had included "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To." Yes, Jessica was a younger woman. But not obnoxiously so. Richie wasn't one of those fiftyish guys who run off with twenty-two-year-old Lufthansa stewardesses. At thirty-eight, Jessica was a mere nine years younger than I. Unfortunately, she had luminous aquamarine eyes and was learning Japanese for the fun of it.
At what turned out to be the final party of my marriage, I kept waiting for Richie to say: "Look at you, Rosie! As beautiful as the day we were married!" He didn't. In the humid night air, the pleated, Grecian-style white silk gown that had caressed my curves in the fitting room at Bergdorf Goodman clung to my bosom and legs with crazed malice.
Jessica, naturally, did not look as if she'd wrapped herself in a wet sheet. No. She glowed in a gold lam‚ off-the-shoulder bodysuit tucked into a transparent cream chiffon skirt that hung, petal-like, in soft panels; her top was divided from her bottom by a four-inch-wide gold leather belt. It goes without saying she had a slender waist--although to be perfectly candid, her bosom was nothing Richie would normally have written home about; she was fairly flat, except for those overenthusiastic nipples men go crazy for, the kind that look like the erasers on number two pencils.
I had actually blown her a kiss as I raced by, searching for the caterer to tell him that a guest, Richie's banker's girlfriend, had converted to vegan vegetarianism the previous weekend. Jessica, in awesomely high-heeled gold sandals, was standing with a couple of the other Data Associates executives, laughing, squeezing a wedge of lime into her drink. She waved back with her usual energy: Rosie! Hello! With her gold bodysuit and the bronze highlights in her dark-gold hair, she looked shimmery, magical, almost like a mermaid.
But that Richie would actually leave me for her? Please! He and I had a history. We'd met in the late sixties, for God's sake, when we were both teaching at Forest Hills High School in Queens. We had made a life together. A rich life--long before all the money. We had children. So yes, I was surprised. Okay, stunned.
Across our bedroom, Richie's black-olive eyes were overflowing. He gulped noisy mouthfuls of air and was so choked up I could barely hear him. "I can't believe I'm saying this, Rosie." As he wiped his tears away with the heel of his hand, he turned crying into a manly act. "What gets me"--his chest heaved--"is that"--he sobbed, unable to hold anything back--"it sounds so damn trite."
"Please, Richie, tell me."
"For the first time in years, I feel truly alive."
The late-morning air was hot, sugary with honeysuckle, a reminder that lovely, sweaty summer sex was just weeks away. But, as the song goes, not for me. In spite of the season, I shivered and pulled the blanket tight around my shoulders. Sure, I was cold, but I suppose I also had the subconscious hope that all bundled up, lower lip quivering, I'd be an irresistible package.
I wasn't.
Richie was. With his combed-back steel-gray hair, his rich-man's tan, his hand-tailored white slacks and crisp white shirt and white lizard loafers, he looked like an ex-husband who had outgrown his wife. But his face was wet. His tears were real. "Rosie, I'm so sorry."
I couldn't think of a comeback. I just cried. He shifted his weight from one loafer to the other, and then back again. The confrontation was either horribly distressing or it was running longer than he'd expected and he had a lunch date. "Richie," I sobbed, "you'll get over her!" As fast as I could, I changed it to "Rick, please! I love you so much!" but by then it was much too late.
That summer, I went through all the scorned-first-wife stages. Hysteria. Paralysis. Denial: Of course Richie will give up a worldly, successful, fertile, size-six financial whiz-bang for a suburban high school English teacher. Despair: spending my nights zonked on the Xanax I'd conned my gynecologist into prescribing, regretting it was not general anesthesia.
I was utterly alone. Husband gone. Kids grown and off on their own. And our beagle, Irving, died the first week in August. I wandered through the house, weeping, remembering Richie's body heat, the children's warmth, Irving's cold and loving nose.
At least wandering was exercise. When Richie hit it big, he did not believe that less was more. More was more. One day we were in our Cape Cod, with its original, early sixties all-avocado kitchen, its off-the-track storm windows, its cockeyed basketball hoop over its one-car garage. The next, we were two and a half miles north, right on Long Island Sound in Great Gatsby country, in a Georgian-style house so stately it actually had a name. Gulls' Haven.
Admittedly, a nocturnal wanderer in a New York Shakespeare Festival T-shirt, pointlessly sexy black panties, and Pan Am socks left over from our last first-class flight to London (before Richie got even richer and we started taking the Concorde) given to rambles through a deserted house clutching a wad of damp Kleenex wasn't the picture "Gulls' Haven" ought to have evoked. But it was the truth. That's how it was on that fateful night.
Fateful? To tell you the truth, that night didn't seem any more or less ominous than any other. When we'd moved, Richie had ditched the digital radio-alarm on his night table for a brass carriage clock, so I'll never know the precise time I woke up or, more important, what wakened me. But it was around three-thirty. I realized I wouldn't get any more sleep because I was scared to take any more Xanax. My luck, the next pill could be the one to put me in what the doctors would diagnose as a persistent vegetative state. Richie, driven by guilt, would pay for the best custodial care, so I'd spend the last three decades of my life cosmically desolate and unable to read, a prisoner in the solitary confinement of my own body.
I wandered some more. When Richie had taken the hike that last week in June, he'd made the twenty-six-mile trip west into Manhattan with just an overnight bag. How could a guy want to leave nearly his whole life behind? But I was past sniffling in front of the closets full of his custom-tailored suits, touching the toes of his handmade shoes. I was able to get past them, and past his bathroom too, all rich green marble and chunky gold fixtures; we'd made love in his stall shower the first night we'd moved in.
After All These Years. Copyright © by Susan Isaacs. Reprinted by pepermission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. loading...
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