a new restaurant, La Luna Toscana. For some reason I cannot explain, whenever a new culinary trend gets under way in Manhattan, like Tuscan cuisine, it flies out to Kansas City (with a side trip to Emporia) before it can finally manage to schlep the twenty-six miles east to Shorehaven.
“It’s about Vanessa …” I went on. “I’m upset. … But not really touched. … Shit, I wish I could find the right words to express what I feel.”
“How about ‘shocked and saddened’?” Nancy suggested. “Tell me, when Bob died, did you get one single note that didn’t say ‘I was shocked and saddened to hear of your loss’? I mean …”
Her “I mean” came out “Ah main.” Although Nancy hasn’t been back to her native Georgia in thirty years, she has clung to its syrupy accent, convinced, correctly, that it adds to her charm.
“I mean, did anyone even have the originality just to transpose and say ‘saddened and shocked’?”
“Of course not. But writing condolence notes makes most people uncomfortable and they just want to get it over with. ‘Shocked and saddened.’ ‘In my thoughts and prayers.’ Thinking about death, or person dealing with the pain of a death … It’s distressing, and that’s with a natural death, like Bob’s. Someone like Vanessa committing suicide? It is genuinely shocking. Look, I know no one can get through life without pain, but she seemed so invulnerable to the usual slings and arrows.”
“Invulnerable? Stan Giddings dumped her for a younger woman less than a year ago? Try to not be vulnerable to that!”
Nancy lifted her wineglass, held it to the light, and looked perturbed. After her first sip, she shook her head with the world-weary sadness of a life of dashed expectations wine-wise, though she waved off the approaching waiter.
“Didn’t that snake Stan dump his first wife, too? You bet! For Vanessa.”
“Right,” I replied. “The first one was Barbara. It was all in your newspaper. Don’t you read it, for God’s sake?”
“Not the stories that pander to salivating semiliterates—though that’s at least half our readership.”
Several years earlier, Nancy had given up freelance writing to become associate editor of Newsday’s op-ed page.
“When I’m looking for true trash, I go right to the Post. They do it right. None of this refined suburban crapola like ‘The medical examiner refused to speculate why Ms. Giddings chose to end her life in a department store after taking an overdose of the drug Xanax, commonly prescribed to treat anxiety and panic disorder.’ ”
She finished off her wine and immediately poured herself another.
“Why bother with a glass? Just lift the wine bottle and glug away,” I suggested. “Save all that tedious pouring.”
“Why don’t you put a cork in it about my drinking?”
I sighed. It wasn’t so much the sound of that moment’s passive aggression/your drinking is getting out of control, merely an exhalation of my decades-long frustration with her imbibing. Then I moved back to the subject at hand.
“A woman like Vanessa doesn’t kill herself over a man.”
“If she was stupidly romantic enough to actually marry that slick, do-nothing piece of work, you don’t think she might decide to end it all when he took a walk?”
“First of all,” I said patiently, “I don’t see him as slick at all.”
In fact, the couple of times I’d seen Stan Giddings—at the Long Island Heritage Council’s annual dinner-dance, at Let There Be Bagels—I’d found him pleasingly unslick. Tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, given to rumpled denim work shirts and tweedy jackets, he looked like an East Coast version of the Marlboro Man, a non-smoker of course, with a mature jock’s deep, ruddy coloring. His gray-flecked brown hair was longish, chopped more than cut, and his smile was wide, yet somehow sensual. It let you know he was aware you were woman and he was man—and that he was tantalized by the difference.
“It’s about Vanessa …” I went on. “I’m upset. … But not really touched. … Shit, I wish I could find the right words to express what I feel.”
“How about ‘shocked and saddened’?” Nancy suggested. “Tell me, when Bob died, did you get one single note that didn’t say ‘I was shocked and saddened to hear of your loss’? I mean …”
Her “I mean” came out “Ah main.” Although Nancy hasn’t been back to her native Georgia in thirty years, she has clung to its syrupy accent, convinced, correctly, that it adds to her charm.
“I mean, did anyone even have the originality just to transpose and say ‘saddened and shocked’?”
“Of course not. But writing condolence notes makes most people uncomfortable and they just want to get it over with. ‘Shocked and saddened.’ ‘In my thoughts and prayers.’ Thinking about death, or person dealing with the pain of a death … It’s distressing, and that’s with a natural death, like Bob’s. Someone like Vanessa committing suicide? It is genuinely shocking. Look, I know no one can get through life without pain, but she seemed so invulnerable to the usual slings and arrows.”
“Invulnerable? Stan Giddings dumped her for a younger woman less than a year ago? Try to not be vulnerable to that!”
Nancy lifted her wineglass, held it to the light, and looked perturbed. After her first sip, she shook her head with the world-weary sadness of a life of dashed expectations wine-wise, though she waved off the approaching waiter.
“Didn’t that snake Stan dump his first wife, too? You bet! For Vanessa.”
“Right,” I replied. “The first one was Barbara. It was all in your newspaper. Don’t you read it, for God’s sake?”
“Not the stories that pander to salivating semiliterates—though that’s at least half our readership.”
Several years earlier, Nancy had given up freelance writing to become associate editor of Newsday’s op-ed page.
“When I’m looking for true trash, I go right to the Post. They do it right. None of this refined suburban crapola like ‘The medical examiner refused to speculate why Ms. Giddings chose to end her life in a department store after taking an overdose of the drug Xanax, commonly prescribed to treat anxiety and panic disorder.’ ”
She finished off her wine and immediately poured herself another.
“Why bother with a glass? Just lift the wine bottle and glug away,” I suggested. “Save all that tedious pouring.”
“Why don’t you put a cork in it about my drinking?”
I sighed. It wasn’t so much the sound of that moment’s passive aggression/your drinking is getting out of control, merely an exhalation of my decades-long frustration with her imbibing. Then I moved back to the subject at hand.
“A woman like Vanessa doesn’t kill herself over a man.”
“If she was stupidly romantic enough to actually marry that slick, do-nothing piece of work, you don’t think she might decide to end it all when he took a walk?”
“First of all,” I said patiently, “I don’t see him as slick at all.”
In fact, the couple of times I’d seen Stan Giddings—at the Long Island Heritage Council’s annual dinner-dance, at Let There Be Bagels—I’d found him pleasingly unslick. Tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, given to rumpled denim work shirts and tweedy jackets, he looked like an East Coast version of the Marlboro Man, a non-smoker of course, with a mature jock’s deep, ruddy coloring. His gray-flecked brown hair was longish, chopped more than cut, and his smile was wide, yet somehow sensual. It let you know he was aware you were woman and he was man—and that he was tantalized by the difference.
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