He, at least, had good news. If I sold my apartment, I could take advantage of a tax break. Paying off the mortgage three years earlier had been a smart move—the market had gone up, and with the one-time tax break I was able to make a profit.
Enough of a profit I realized, that if I was very clever and bought the cheapest real estate I could find, I could just afford a small one-bedroom in the city and a small, run-down house on the edge of a former fishing village in the Hamptons. A place in this hamlet was something I’d been hoping to secure ever since Marilyn moved out there two years ago.
Like me, she, too, had suddenly and inexplicably soured of the city.
Actually, that isn’t true. Like me, she’d experienced a series of insults that made her feel like the city was trying to get rid of her as well.
Literally. The small family-owned building near the High Line where Marilyn rented for twelve years was going to be demolished to make way for an apartment tower.
Marilyn had no idea what to do. Then she lost a client who moved back to LA. And her dog needed a three-thousand-dollar operation.
It was the middle of winter and Marilyn couldn’t stop talking about how it was so cold that if you went to the end of a pier and took your clothes off, you could freeze to death within twenty minutes. She said she’d looked it up on the internet.
This was alarming. Marilyn, who’d been taking Prozac for fifteen years, was one of the happiest people I knew. She talked to everyone and was one of those rare souls to whom you could safely confess your biggest fears without fear of being judged. And so at 8:00 a.m. on a cold morning in April, Marilyn went to see a shrink.
The shrink sent her home with some prescriptions that Marilyn filled at the drugstore. Then she went up to her apartment and promptly consumed an entire bottle of sleeping pills. I know, because I called her at 9:15 to see how the appointment had gone seconds after she’d consumed the last pill. She was barely awake but managed to answer the phone.
I called 911.
Thankfully she recovered, and it seemed like a good time for Marilyn to take a break from the city and regroup.
* * *
And so Marilyn headed out east to stay in a friend’s cottage overlooking the bay in the Village. At first, she thought she’d stay a week or two. That turned into a month. Then two. It wasn’t long before she became friends with a real estate agent who had the inside scoop on anything that might be affordable for a middle-aged single gal. Meaning properties with ancient appliances and peeling paint, the kinds of places developers wouldn’t touch because there wasn’t enough profit to be made.
Three months turned into a season and then a year, and it was winter again. And one morning, after Sassy had slipped on ice on her way back from Pilates and torn a muscle, she started complaining about how the city wasn’t the same anymore and how great it would be if we all lived close by again. This gave Marilyn an idea. She was going to find us cheap houses and we were all going to live in the Village.
Years and years ago, Sassy, Marilyn, and I had lived on the same block and were always in and out of each other’s apartments. And probably because we were fifteen years younger those times seemed exciting and happy, as successes built upon successes and one was quite sure that the future would take care of itself. Things changed, of course, but we always stayed close, and probably because we never had children or pressing familial obligations—Sassy’s parents were dead and Marilyn’s family was back in Australia—we still had holidays together.
Things don’t usually work out as planned, but in this case, they did. With the help of the real estate agent Marilyn had befriended, both she and Sassy found houses and had taken up residence a few months before. Now, with my windfall, I would join them.
* * *
That spring I moved into a quaint run-down farmhouse about half a mile from Sassy and a mile and a half from Marilyn. At first it was just the three of us, but it wasn’t long before Sassy ran into Queenie, whom we’d both known from our single days, and discovered she was living in the Village as well.
Back when we knew her in the city, she was a society it girl. But one weekend she came out to the Village to visit her mother, who was a famous artist and an even more famous grand doyenne. Eager to get out of the house, Queenie went to a bar, met a local guy, fell in love, got pregnant, and then after a brief, two-year attempt at staying married, got sectionorced. She’d lived in the Village since then and knew everyone.
Still, her boyfriend of the past ten years lived in another state and her daughter, now seventeen, had her own life, so soon Queenie joined in on our girls’ evenings. This concept of being one of the girls was newish to her. She always said “the girls” as if with quotes, as if hanging out with other single women in your fifties was something that needed to be separated from her own life—with punctuation at least.
And then came Kitty.
Kitty was another mutual friend who, having landed her Mr. Big fifteen years ago, had happily disappeared into married bliss. Or so we thought. Now, as would turn out to be the case with so many of our friends, Kitty was all of a sudden getting sectionorced.
This was a shock. Kitty was my only friend who unreservedly believed in true love. All through her twenties and thirties she’d rejected men right and left because they weren’t soul mate material. And then one day she walked into a neighborhood restaurant and sat down next to an older guy. They started talking. She went home with him that night, moved in with him the next day, and married him six months later.
Kitty and I lost touch for a while, but we reconnected while she was still married. I remember being struck by how in love she and her husband were. He told everyone that he couldn’t live without Kitty and he’d rather spend time with Kitty than with anyone else.
I remember wishing that I, too, could have had a love like Kitty’s, but knew it probably wasn’t my fate. And I certainly didn’t expect Kitty’s marriage to end—or to end so abruptly—the way it did one Saturday afternoon when Kitty’s husband came home unexpectedly early. He’d been playing golf and he was drunk, as was his golf buddy. Stumbling up to Kitty, he said, “You’re a cunt” (he was English) and handed Kitty sectionorce papers.
Or tried to, anyway.
“Are you insane?” Kitty screamed at him. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen him in this condition in the past few months; like most of the people in this story, he had issues. But the sectionorce papers were a new development.
Despite the fact that Kitty ripped them up, the papers were real. As was the airtight prenup. Which meant that Kitty had to move out and fast.
She rented a house in the Village so she, too, could be near her friends.
Kitty made it five.