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had a mean punch. "I was in three, meeting the new tenant."
    "Ah." Rich nodded. "I saw her the other day. Very nice-looking." He squinted at Alex. "She's older than you are."
    "You should talk," Alex said.
    "No, no, that's good." Rich leaned closer. "Older women know things."
    Alex hated to ask, but he had to. "What kind of things?"
    Rich raised his eyebrows. "Things. You'll find out." He sighed. "Of course, she's no Norma. They broke the mold when they made Norma."
    "I always figured Norma broke the mold because she didn't want the competition," Alex said, and Rich roared with laughter.
    "Didn't want the competition. Wait'll I tell Norma. She'll love that one."
    "Yeah, and if she doesn't, she'll come down and beat the tar out of me," Alex said, and Rich laughed again and went jogging up the stairs with Norma's pizza.
    "Older women, huh?" Alex said to his retreating back, but Rich was too far away to hear.

    * * *
    "I read an article on menopause yesterday," Nina said to Charity, who was sitting on the oriental rug on Nina's living-room floor, looking elegant and sexy in a black silk catsuit. Nina looked down at her own blue-striped cotton pajamas and sighed. You are what you wear, she told herself, and went back to the feast that she and Charity had assembled on the floor around them: nonfat pretzels, nonfat potato chips and a blender full of chocolate Amaretto milk shake.
    And Fred.
    Fred was turning out to be a world-class mooch.
    Charity rolled her eyes and fed Fred a pretzel, which he took gently in his mouth, dropped on the ground, pushed with his nose, examined closely, and then, deciding it was exactly like the other three pretzels he'd had earlier, ate. "Don't rush into anything, Fred," Charity told him and then turned back to Nina. "Why are you reading about menopause, for heaven's sake?"
    "Because I'm forty now." Nina crunched into a pretzel. "'It said that perimenopause starts in the forties."
    "Nina, you've been forty for about forty-eight hours. Estrogen deprivation won't start for at least another week." Charity leaned over Nina's blue-striped lap to grab the potato chip bag. "I can't believe you're torturing yourself like this."
    "There was a list of symptoms," Nina went on. "Warning signs. They were awful."
    "Hot flashes." Charity nodded. "I get those every time I think of Sean. Only I think it's rage not menopause."
    "One of them is that your pubic hair starts to thin," Nina said.
    Charity stopped with a chip halfway to her mouth. "I did not need to know this."
    Nina nodded. "So I was in the shower last night and I looked, but the thing is, I never paid that much attention before, so I don't have any idea if mine's thinner."
    Charity dropped the chip back into the bag. "Nina, loney, you're losing your grip."
    Nina stuck her chin out. "I just want to know. I want to be prepared."
    Charity shrugged and went back to the chips. "So ask Guy."
    Nina shot her a withering look. "Ask my ex-husband to check my pubic hair to see if it's thinned in the year we've been divorced? No, I don't think so."
    Charity beamed at her. "Well, there's always Rogaine."
    "Thank you very much." Nina slurped up more of her milk shake. "And then there's this thing I'm developing for younger men. I was watching 'Friends' the other night and caught myself wondering what Matthew Perry is like in bed."
    "I've wondered that myself," Charity said. "You know, whether he'd stop wisecracking long enough to—"
    "Charity, I could have given birth to Matthew Perry."
    Charity looked at her with patient contempt. "Nina, Matthew Perry is not a real person. He's an actor. He doesn't count. Now, if you were having hot thoughts about MacCauley Culkin, I'd worry.
    But Matthew Perry, no."
    "He counts," Nina said stubbornly.
    "Hell, I think about James Dean and he's dead," Charity went on. "That doesn't mean I'm heading for the cemetery with a shovel. Fantasy is not the same as reality. You don't have to feel guilty about it."
    "It's happening in reality,