you like that sort of thing, but over the years I grew to hate it. Behind a friendly smile, he's really quite cool and measuring, predatory. He flirts energetically and ineptly; it's impossible -was impossible-to imagine him scoring with any woman. But he does. What is it about him?
For one thing, he's an earthy, passionate man- that's why I fell in love with him. And for another, he chooses needy, lonely, awkward girls, the pathetic sure things of this world-girls exactly like I used to be. I can't say if it's deliberate on his part, and therefore cruel and calculating, or only blind, unerring instinct. I've never been able to decide. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. I want to forgive.
This is not altruism, not saintliness. There's no room inside for bitterness anymore-it's that simple. At the risk of sounding fatuous, I'll make an observation that life is full of Bettys. I don't know whom I have to thank for this new, sanguine attitude, and it's amusing to think it may be, in part, my minister father's Lutheran God. But only in part. I'm equally drawn nowadays to what Emma calls woo-woo, meaning crystals and rocks, the Tarot, reincarnation, past lives, astrology, numerology, meditation, hypnotherapy-anything and everything under the rubric of New Age (anything spiritual other than orthodox Protestantism, according to Emma). I believe in them all. My friend's scorn knows no bounds, and yet she teases me so gently, so affectionately. It's a lovely form of play between us. Emma and I are closer than we've ever been.
I could tell her how purely delighted I am to see God in so many new places. The dual burdens of conventionality and rationality fell away when I realized I might die, I really might die. Now I'm free. Free and forty-nine, and so grateful to be starting life over again. Yin and yang. I've gone back to school, I've moved from Chevy Chase to Burleith to Adams-Morgan - a progression that speaks volumes all by itself. I color my hair. I might take a lover. Waking up in the morning isn't a tedious and dutiful act, it's the start of a possible adventure. I've recreated myself. No, that's not it. I have been recreated, by a new definition of mortality forced on me by circumstances. And it was worth it: all I had to give in return was a breast.
The deal of a lifetime.
5.
Emma.Bad news doesn't hurt as much if you hear it in good company. It's like-if somebody pushes you out a fifth-floor window and you bounce off an awning, a car roof, and a pile of plastic garbage bags before you smash onto the pavement, you've got a pretty good chance of surviving.
This analogy is too unwieldy to go on with, plus I can't decide whom to equate with the plastic garbage bags. So I'll just say, the night I found out Mick Draco was married, I thought of my three best friends as fall-breakers extraordinaire.
We were having dinner on a Thursday, our regular meeting night, at La Cuillerée in Adams-Morgan instead of at Isabel's apartment because her stove was broken. "My short story got another rejection," I had just announced to Rudy, Lee, and Isabel, and I was in the process of laughing off their concern and sympathy, even though it felt like balm, so they wouldn't know how wrecked I was-when all of a sudden Lee looked past my shoulder and said, "Mick Draco." I froze, disoriented-five minutes ago I'd been fantasizing about him. Lee read my mind, I marveled, and then, following her gaze, I glanced around and saw him. An X-rated dream come true.
She said his name again and waved, but since Lee's the kind of person who would rather eat a cockroach than raise her voice in a public place, he didn't hear her. But-Lee knew him? Flustered, I stood up and shouted, "Hey, Mick!" and he whipped around, grinned, and walked over to our table.
I had been thinking about him for the last four days, ever since our brief, pre-interview meeting in the seedy coffee shop across from his grungy art studio on Eighth Street. He'd told me he lived in nearby