Bleeding Hearts(134)

Standing in the middle of this large room with its formal bar on one side and its collection of mock-French empire chairs on the other, Magda didn’t think there was anyone left on earth who would have called her plain. She was a small woman, but she was very slender and very delicate. She looked, her husband Simon Roveter sometimes said, like a high-fashion line drawing from the 1920s come to life. In spite of the fact that she didn’t have the stature, she had the composition. Everything about her was elongated and tapering. Even her face was long and thin. Magda made it look longer and thinner by wearing her hair piled on top of her head. She made her eyes look wider and bluer by ringing them with eyeliner and highlighting them with pastel powders. She made her lips look fuller by painting them past their natural outlines. She left nothing to chance, and because she didn’t, she never had to bend to the will of her mother’s all-powerful nature.

Until now. The room Magda Hale was standing in was the formal living room of a house on Edge Hill Road in New Haven, Connecticut. The house belonged to one of the minor investors in the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio, whose wife had decided to give a supper party for no good reason Magda could tell. Magda Hale was not a party animal. She did not entertain or allow herself to be entertained unless there was a business reason for it. She didn’t understand why so many people wanted to waste their time standing around in stuffy rooms drinking bad wine with people who bored them. She only knew that people did want to, and that sometimes she had to keep them company to keep them from getting unhappy.

She had been standing in this same place in this same room for almost half an hour when it started, a pain in her left leg that felt like a needle traveling jaggedly through a vein. She was holding onto a glass of mineral water that she had barely touched. She was talking to three middle-aged women—two lawyers and an academic in Yale’s English department—who looked frumpy and big bottomed and definitely annoyed at her. All three of these women had once been members of the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio. All three of them had quit the Studio and stopped working out at least a year before. All three of them looked it. That’s what happens when you let yourself go, Magda told herself, shifting from one leg to the other to try to get rid of the pain. That’s what happens when you let nature take its course. Even the clothes these women were wearing had been affected. The lawyers were wearing beige evening suits that looked like they could have come off the rack at K-mart. The academic was wearing one of those drop-waisted dresses that were supposed to disguise oversize hips, but never did.

“What I can’t understand,” the academic was saying, “is why you don’t realize what effect institutions like Fountain of Youth have on the lives of women in America.”

“I don’t think Fountain of Youth has that kind of effect yet,” Magda said pleasantly, shifting legs again. The pain was getting worse instead of better. “Maybe after this new campaign, when we go aggressively national—”

“Magda thinks the effect Fountain of Youth has on the women of America is positive,” one of the lawyers said.

“I don’t see what’s supposed to be positive about being told we’re supposed to look seventeen for the rest of our lives,” the other lawyer said. “And all those bean sprouts and steamed vegetables on rice. I don’t see what’s so wonderful about making six figures a year and eating like a graduate student.”

“I didn’t eat like that when I was a graduate student,” the academic said. “I drank twelve cups of coffee and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day.”

“I slept with a lot of people I didn’t like very much,” the first lawyer said. “I thought I was supposed to.”

The pain in Magda’s leg had settled in, a long thin line of it that seemed to be bolted to Magda’s ankle, knee and hip, like a crepe paper banner held to a wall by carefully spaced thumbtacks. Magda put all her weight on her other leg and lifted the one that hurt off the ground.

“It’s the attitude I’m interested in,” Magda said, thinking that these three women were all at least fifteen years younger than she was, and that they all looked older. “You can go about your life just accepting things as they come, or you can take charge of yourself. I prefer to take charge of myself.”

“But you can’t take charge of everything,” the second lawyer objected. “We all have limitations. There isn’t anything any of us can do about getting old.”

“I think there is,” Magda said.

“Magda has very good genes.” The first lawyer made a face. “Most of us get wrinkles in our forties. Magda just sails on through.”