Sundays at Tiffany's Read online

  “Let’s just say that I’ve seen your mother in action. You know that she loves you, though?”

  I frowned. “Who wouldn’t? I’m so nice.”

  The waiter came by to take our order, which we split. I still didn’t have much of an appetite, which was strange, but good strange. I didn’t feel sick, just didn’t feel like eating.

  AFTER TWO ESPRESSOS and two Sambucas, we were heading south on Park. The rain had stopped, and I was using Michael’s umbrella as a kind of walking stick. I started tapping it in rhythm, then suddenly I burst into a mortifying version of “Singin’ in the Rain.” It was like watching myself jump off a cliff but being unable to stop. “The suuun’s in my heeeart, and I’m ready for looove…” Finally I got a grip.

  “Sorry. Don’t know what came over me. Just… goofy Jane,” I said, hot-cheeked with embarrassment.

  “I like goofy,” said Michael. “Besides, you were being cute, not goofy.”

  See? Things like that made me love him more. Looking up, I saw that we were only a few blocks away from my building already. We continued walking, both of us quiet for a change. Would I ask him up? I wanted to. I really, really wanted to.

  Trying to gather my nerve, I looked up at Michael, and then suddenly we had stopped and he was taking me into his arms again.

  My eyes flew open, then fluttered shut as Michael slowly, slowly leaned down. I almost gasped when I felt his lips press against mine, and my heart gave a giant leap that I was sure he could feel. My mind, which I thought of as being in tatters now anyway, was completely blown. Oh, Michael…

  In all my life, I’d never felt anything like it, nothing even close. Finally we broke apart. Staring up at him, pulling in air, I started to say—

  But then we were kissing again, and I wasn’t even sure who had started it, only that Michael was holding my face in his hands. Then he held me tight, tight, in a little bear hug that I loved. We inched apart, but then kissed again and again. Finally we clung to each other, not speaking, and it occurred to me that I’d be happy to do this for quite a long time, like maybe the rest of my life. And also that I was feeling light-headed. I didn’t want it to stop. Not ever.

  Forty-nine

  WHEN I GOT HOME from my “date” with Michael, and I definitely thought it had been a date, I didn’t have a chance to process any of what had just happened—because someone was in my apartment.

  The light in the foyer was on, and the kitchen overheads, and at least one lamp in the living room.

  I had a crazy thought: that it might be Michael. Who knows, maybe he could just make himself appear somewhere.

  Or it could be Hugh, because I thought he still had a key to my place.

  But if it was Michael, I didn’t want to call out “Hugh?” or vice versa. And what an ironic dilemma for someone who was historically so bad with relationships.

  So I took a deep breath and said, “Hello?”

  “Jane-Sweetie” came from inside the living room, and as I turned the corner, there was my mother, seated in one of my easy chairs.

  “I thought I’d come over,” she said, “for a little talk.”

  “Huh,” I said, thinking I’d rather be smeared with honey and tied to an anthill. “How did you get in?”

  “I still have a key from the remodeling.”

  Oh, and don’t get me started on that. Suddenly the idea of a little post-date (and it had totally been a date) cocktail sounded like an excellent idea. I headed for the cupboard where I kept my embarrassingly inadequate supply of liquor.

  “Can I get you something, Mom?” Vivienne winced at the name, but I loved to call her that, loved to know that I had an actual mom-type person. Plus, she’d just broken into my apartment, so “Mom” it was.

  “Sherry,” she said. “You know what I like, Jane-Sweetie.”

  So I went and got her sherry—and a stiff shot of whiskey for her put-upon daughter.

  I sat across from her in the other easy chair. “Cheers.”

  “Jane-Sweetie,” she responded, “I don’t know what’s going on with Hugh, or the other one, or any others there might be in your busy life.” Her tone of voice suggested that the jury was still out on whether I had a busy life, or even a life, for that matter.

  I just couldn’t help interrupting. “Wow, I’m impressed! My busy life!”

  “Please.” Vivienne held up a hand, palm out. “Let me talk.”

  I nodded and took a sip of my drink, making a face as the liquid fire trailed down my throat. I missed Michael a lot. Already.

  “Jane-Sweetie, what I came here to say is that—” My mother stopped, seeming uncharacteristically at a loss for words. I frowned and sat up straighter. Was she already engaged to Karl Friedkin?

  “Yes?” I said encouragingly, dropping the attitude.

  “Well, I’m not going to be around forever, and when I’m gone the company will be yours, and you can make whatever decisions you wish.” She finished quickly, then took a deep drink of her sherry.

  Okay, this was a completely new tack for her. I was starting to get concerned. “What do you mean, Mother?” I said.

  “Don’t interrupt. There’s one more thing. I never told you this, but my mother died of heart failure when she was thirty-seven. You’re thirty-two. Think about it.”

  Having said that, my mother rose to her feet, came over, and gave me a kiss on the cheek, and then she left the way she’d come in.

  What the hell had that been about? She thought I was going to die of heart failure? She’d been odd and unlike herself. Was she telling me that she had a heart problem? No, she would have been way more dramatic, complete with sweeping gestures and Bette Davis swoons.

  As usual, Vivienne had gotten the last word.

  Fifty

  OKAY, OKAY, OKAY. I understood that pushing the elevator button over and over again would not make the elevator appear sooner. But I couldn’t help myself.

  After my heart-pounding date with Michael (it was so a date), and my weird talk with the mysterious Vivienne, I’d gotten about twenty minutes of sleep. Now it was the next morning, and I was praying that Michael would be waiting in the lobby to walk me to work. God, I wanted to see him again, at least one more time. Please. Please. Please. Let him be downstairs. Don’t let him be gone from my life again.

  I considered running down the ten flights.

  My Saks Fifth Avenue shopper—Vivienne’s birthday gift to me (and what kind of gift says “you embarrass me” better than a personal shopper?)—had sent over a chic Lagerfeld suit, slacks and jacket in a pale bluish green silk. I thought that I looked okay in it, maybe even better than okay.

  Damn it, I looked good! I’d even lost three pounds!

  Three whole pounds. That had never happened to me before.

  The elevator finally arrived, and as I rode in it I wanted to jump up and down to make it move faster. Jane. Please! Relax, I told myself, and tried to listen to my own advice.

  When the elevator finally arrived at the lobby, I put a smile on my face, but my heart was racing off the charts. The doors opened. And then…

  Only the morning doorman, Hector, was standing there.

  “Good morning, Miss Jane,” he said.

  “Good morning, Hector. How are you?” I’m devastated myself.

  No Michael in the lobby!

  No Michael lurking outside the front door.

  No Michael anywhere that I could see.

  “May I get you a taxi?” asked Hector.

  I stalled for time.

  “I’m not sure. I may walk.”

  “Yes, of course. Beautiful day for it.”

  “Yes, it is lovely.”

  Maybe Michael was late. Fat chance. Michael was never late. Not once when I was a kid.

  “I guess I will need a cab,” I finally said. As I waited under the building’s canopy, I looked up and down the street in the hope that Michael’s face would suddenly appear in the sea of businesspeople and tourists and schoolchildren marching along Park Ave
nue.

  But Michael wasn’t anywhere in the crowd.

  Had he gone out of my life again? If so, I would kill him if it took me till the end of my days. Or at least put a collar on him, with a little bell.

  I mean, why had he bothered to come back in the first place?

  Fifty-one

  AS I WALKED into the reception area of ViMar Productions, I was feeling a little shaky, but strangely balanced, about myself, about who I was, and about where I ought to be going with my life. Was that the reason Michael had come back, because my confidence needed a little touch-up or, to be more honest, an overhaul? Was that what Vivienne was trying to say last night?

  I saw Elsie waving from behind the reception desk.

  “In your office,” she said. “It’s a surprise.”

  Oh yes, and I was so in the mood for something unexpected. I don’t like surprises even on good days, and today it was about to make me run screaming down the hall. When I opened the door I was certainly startled, but not in a good way. It was Hugh. And he was seated at my desk, going through my mail.

  “Now that you’ve done the snail mail, why don’t you check my BlackBerry?” I said, and threw it on the desk.

  He leaped to his feet. “Jane,” he said, walking toward me with his arms spread wide. He was wearing faded jeans, black Prada boots, the watch I’d given him last Christmas, and a pricey denim shirt distressed to look as if it cost ten dollars or less, though it probably went for a couple hundred.

  Ignoring my look of dismay and my rigid stiffness, he hugged me and moved in for a kiss. Grimacing, I turned my head so his lips brushed against my cheek.

  “I’m not mad at you anymore,” he said.

  “Wow. Wish I could say the same. Why don’t you please go now.”

  “I see you made it back safely from Brooklyn.”

  He waited for my reaction to his little joke, which, sadly for him, was a narrowed-eye look. I removed his hand from the small of my back, walked to my desk, and sat down. “Hugh, why are you here?”

  “I’m here because you’re my best girl. C’mon, Jane. Give me a break.”

  Unlikely. It wasn’t that my heart was cold, it was that my heart wasn’t registering Hugh at all.

  “Hugh, I’ve got a ton of work to do.”

  Suddenly a little-boy, have-pity-on-me look came over his face. “Jane, I need your help. I don’t ask for much.”

  My eyebrows raised, but he went on anyway.

  “Look, let’s be honest with one another. I need this movie role. I need Thank Heaven. Okay, are you happy now? I’m humbled and I’m humiliated.”

  I still said nothing, though I got what he was saying and even felt an iota of pity for him. Still, this was the same Hugh who’d wanted to trade an engagement ring for a movie part and who had left me stranded in Brooklyn.

  “It’s not going to happen, Hugh. I’m sorry, honestly I am. I am. But you’re not going to get the part. You aren’t Michael.”

  “I am! For God’s sake, Jane. I created that character.”

  “No. You did not. You had nothing to do with creating Michael. Trust me on that.”

  His eyes opened wider, and that mean little sneer of his appeared. “You disgusting little shit!” he spat. “Mama’s little girl pretending that she’s Mama. Still in a fairy-tale world from when you were eight years old.”

  I stood up behind my desk, expecting my hands to begin trembling, but they didn’t. “That was nasty, Hugh, even for you.”

  “You know where you can shove that little movie of yours? I was doing you a favor, volunteering to be in that piece of sentimental crap! It wouldn’t even be getting made if you weren’t Vivienne Margaux’s very needy daughter.”

  My eyes were filling with tears, but Hugh didn’t seem to notice, and that was the only good thing happening. He came closer to my desk, stabbing his finger at me as he talked. “You need me, Jane. I don’t need you. You need my talent. I don’t need yours. Which is a good thing. Because you don’t have any talent.”

  Everything went red, just like in books, and a burning rage filled my chest. “I wouldn’t be so sure,” I said. “Watch this, Hugh.”

  I pulled my arm back and punched Hugh in the face, as hard as I could.

  Silence.

  We were both stunned. Hugh had both hands over his left eye, but his right eye was wide and staring.

  A second later, intense pain filled my hand, and I looked down to see if I’d broken any knuckles.

  “My God, Jane, have you completely gone out of your mind?”

  With my typical luck, my mother had arrived just in time to see me slug Hugh. Excellent. I was sure I’d be able to live this down. Someday. Right after Vivienne finally recovered from the outfit I’d chosen to wear to my sixth-grade graduation, which I was still hearing about occasionally.

  “She has!” Hugh sputtered. “She’s gone nuts!”

  You know, I really couldn’t argue with them. I mean, what was I going to say? “I wouldn’t have had to hit you if my imaginary friend, possibly boyfriend, had been here”?

  I think not.

  Fifty-two

  MY MOTHER and those damn stilettos of hers had come click-clacking into the room, not to see me, but to make sure I had accepted Hugh’s lame-ass apology.

  “Jane, what is going on?” she asked.

  “She’s insane, that’s what happened!” Hugh cried.

  “Nothing, really, Mother,” I said calmly. “Hugh and I just formally broke up.”

  “Broke up?” she asked. “How? Why? What am I missing here? I’m lost, and I never get lost.”

  “I can see why you might be confused,” I said. “But after all, we were never very much of a couple to begin with. More like a solo act with a sidekick.”

  Wide-eyed, my mother stared at me, then leaned out my office door. “MaryLouise!”

  She must have been lurking outside the office door, listening to the fireworks, because she responded in record time.

  “Get me some ice wrapped in a linen towel,” Vivienne said.

  Leave it to Vivienne to specify the type of material for the towel.

  Hugh thanked Vivienne for her concern, and she led him to the three-seater sofa against the wall. “I’m okay,” he said. “I’ll just sit here a minute. Vivienne, I don’t know what I did wrong.”

  Well, as I said, he’s an actor.

  My mother turned her attention toward me.

  “See that, Jane? What has gotten into you? You can’t go around smacking people like Hugh. You could have hurt him.”

  “She did hurt me,” came Hugh’s muffled voice.

  “No more than he’s hurt me,” I said. “I guess you haven’t heard about the wedding proposal debacle.”

  “Jane, don’t be flip. I’m being serious.”

  “So am I. Or do my feelings not count, because it’s only me?”

  “Listen, Jane, this isn’t your fantasy world, where you can do anything you feel like,” Vivienne said.

  “Oh, good thing you cleared that up,” I said snippily, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “I can’t imagine anything Hugh could have done to provoke physical violence on your part.”

  “Really? Well, when you have a few hours, I’ll give you the list. As for now, I want the two of you to leave my office.”

  Vivienne’s cheeks flamed, and she walked toward me, stopping inches away from my desk.

  “This is not your office. This is my office. Every ashtray, every desk, every computer, every toilet, every scrap of paper, every Xerox machine…”

  My mouth dropped open.

  “You wouldn’t be working here if it weren’t for me. You certainly wouldn’t be working here if I knew you were going to physically abuse a talented actor like Hugh McGrath. I don’t have to put up with behavior like this.”

  “You’re right, Mother. You don’t.”

  Anger was boiling over inside me. I reached down and grabbed my black leather satchel. Then I swept as much as I could fro
m the top of my desk—papers and letters and pens and photographs—into the bag, making sure I got my Rolodex.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Jane.”

  “Oh, I’m not, Mother. I’m being as sane as I’ve been in years.” Then I added—because I’m me—“I’m sorry.”

  I walked past her, and I walked past Hugh. And suddenly I had a crazy thought: No kiss today, Mother?

  At the door I almost collided with MaryLouise.

  As I headed down the hallway toward the elevator I heard her say, “They didn’t have a linen towel, Ms. Margaux. You’ll have to settle for cotton.”

  Fifty-three

  THAT MORNING, Michael had donned his headphones and jogged over to the Olympia Diner to see Patty, to make sure she was all right, but she wasn’t there. So he sat down, had a big, greasy breakfast, and tried to make some sense out of everything that was happening. Like the fact that he thought he was falling in love with Jane Margaux.

  He had all the classic symptoms—pounding heart, sweaty palms, dreamy lapses in attention, a certain degree of immaturity, happiness in just about every part of his body. After last night, he had to see Jane again. Today. Worse, he had to kiss her again. He’d meet her at her office tonight. He couldn’t make himself stay away, even if it might be the right thing to do for all concerned.

  When he got home from breakfast, he nearly ran into Patty—and her daughter. They were leaving his building.

  What was this? Not good!

  Patty was crying, and the little girl looked sad and displaced too. Michael had seen that look many times before with his kids, and it always broke his heart.

  “Hi, Patty,” he said, then immediately bent down to talk to the little girl. “Hello, sweetheart. Your name is Holly, right? What’s going on?”

  “My mommy’s sad,” she said. “She broke up with her boyfriend, Owen.”

  “Yeah? Your mommy’s very strong, though. Tough as nails. Are you okay?”

  “I guess so. I talked to my friend Martha about it.” Then the girl whispered, “She’s invisible, you know.”

  “Ah, I do know, actually,” Michael said, since Martha was standing right there, looking concerned. She gave him a little wave. “Hi,” Michael said, and winked at Holly. “How are you, Martha?”