“No,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“No?” he said. “But…”
She waved good-bye and hurried down the street toward her family’s house, thinking again that some nights had good karma and some nights were cursed, and for a few moments, tonight had seemed like the former, but it had ended up the latter.
And as if Margot needed further proof of this, when she approached the house, she saw Jenna sitting on the top step by the front door, which no one but the mailman ever used. Jenna had her face in her hands. She was crying.
THE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 26
The Bridal Bouquet
I love flowers, this you know. One summer during college, I worked for a florist on Seventy-seventh Street called Stems—it’s long gone—doing deliveries, and later, simple arrangements. Stems had a beautiful built-in flower cooler with huge oak and glass doors, and I would take any opportunity I could to step inside that cooler and inhale the scent. If there is a heaven, it had better resemble the walk-in cooler at Stems, filled with roses, lilies, dahlias, and gerbera daisies in rainbow colors.
Bridal bouquet: Limelight hydrangeas, white peonies (tight, not blooming), lush white roses, jade roses, jade lisianthus, green hypericum. This combination will give a rounded, sumptuous effect with a perfect balance of white and green shades.
Bridesmaids: White hydrangeas and jade roses. Tie those up with matching green ribbon.
Please note that I’ve avoided adding Asiatic lilies, calla lilies and orchids. These flowers are too structured, too citified—they cannot coexist with the softness of the peonies. Trust me.
DOUG
In the master bedroom, in the king bed, Pauline reached for him. Her hands, with nails newly painted the color of brewing storm clouds, wrapped around his biceps. She pulled herself in close and breathed in his ear. Then the flat of her palm ran down his bare chest, over the softer flesh at his belly, and across the front of his boxers. Nothing.
This wasn’t unusual. Doug was getting older, and he didn’t always snap to attention the way he used to. He had considered seeing Dr. Fraker and getting a prescription, but that seemed like an admission of defeat. The only way he’d been able to sustain an erection with Pauline recently was to imagine her with Russell Stern from the Wee Burn Country Club. This was twisted, Doug knew—fantasizing about his wife with another man. And it couldn’t be any other man, either; it couldn’t be Arthur Tonelli or George Clooney. It had to be Russell Stern. Doug worried that he was somehow attracted to Russell Stern. Perhaps this was an indication of a latent homosexual urge? But further pondering brought Doug to the conclusion that he had been most attracted to Pauline when he’d suspected that Russell Stern was pursuing her. It had increased Pauline’s desirability. That Pauline and Russell Stern had once been a couple made it even better. Sometimes Doug fantasized about Pauline in her short, pleated cheerleader skirt and Russell in football pads taking her from behind in what he imagined to be the fetid air of the New Canaan High School locker room.
But that vision wasn’t working tonight. Nothing would work tonight. Nothing, Doug thought sadly, would work ever again. His sex life with Pauline was over.
He gathered her wandering hand in both of his and squeezed it. He wanted to be kind to her, but so often, kind was mistaken for patronizing.
“Pauline,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I understand, I get it, it’s only natural that you’d be thinking of her.”
“Thinking of whom?”
“Beth.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Beth.”
Pauline rolled over on her side so that her back was to him. “Of course you were.”
He wanted to say, Don’t tell me what I was or was not thinking about. You aren’t a mind reader. But Doug didn’t want to pick a fight. He didn’t want to act like any of his clients. People going through a divorce faced heightened emotion every single day. Just last week, Doug had received an e-mail in which the subject line read “Rough Morning.” The message consisted of a detailed description of how contentious the before-school routine in the Blahblahblah household had become. Mom and Dad both lived in the same apartment building, and little Sophie and slightly older Daniel were shuttled up and down on the elevator in search of clean clothes, breakfast, and homework while Mom and Dad screamed profanities at each other on their cell phones. Doug had read and answered a thousand such e-mails; he had a front-row seat for every imaginable variety of domestic discord. He loathed the thought of anyone—another lawyer, a therapist, or Rhonda—being privy to the inner workings of his relationship with Pauline. He just wanted the marriage to quietly go away. He wanted it to be a soap bubble he could pop with his finger.