She got out of the car and locked it. In the days when she had been here with Joseph, she had never had to lock the car. She blamed him for this. It had become her habit to blame him for so many things. That's what you get, Joseph--unfair and extravagant blame. A small price to pay for jettisoning your wife, for chucking her out to spin helplessly in the dark, infinite sky of elderly divorce.
A spurned woman has to look her very best when the spurned woman goes into the city to meet with the man by whom she has been spurned. Not to mention the lawyers who helped him. For this reason, Betty decided to buy a silk sweater at Brooks Brothers and a pair of gold knotted earrings at Tiffany's. Her credit cards were useless, thank you, Joseph, but Annie had added Betty onto her Visa for emergencies, and if this wasn't an emergency, what was? Then Betty bought a suit--ideal for a meeting with lawyers, elegant and dignified--at a large store full of overpriced well-made fashionable clothing. She remembered it as, in decades past, a nondescript men's shop. The store had prospered, and the suit she bought there, extremely expensive, was for those who had prospered along with it. She was not supposed to buy clothes like this anymore. But spurned women, like beggars, could not be choosers. No one could object to this girding of her loins, she thought, anticipating Annie's voice doing exactly that.
Betty took the train in. When the conductor punched holes in her ticket, she found the old-fashioned mechanical click comforting. The train was creaky, the window bleary. The drive into the city was just too much for her these days. Left cataract needed to be taken care of; she would have to get to that. Right now, it was important to get her hair done. She'd left herself plenty of time. Annie said she would have to stop going to Frederic Fekkai, but Annie, in spite of what Annie thought, was not always right.
Her lawyer met her downstairs. He was very solicitous, she noticed. A slight young man with short curly hair of a nondescript mousy brown. He looked like a mouse altogether, his features small and pointed, his little feet in their little shoes. Only his eyes were wrong. They were pale gray, not mouselike at all. How could this young, pale-eyed mouse, his hair so sad and unimportant, possibly do battle with Joseph, who in his efficient businesslike way had very little hair at all?
She sat at the edge of the dark pond that was the conference table. Across the pond sat Joseph. How impatient he must be. He disliked lawyers, he disliked formalities.
"Please sit down, Mrs. Weissmann," said Joseph's lawyer.
Yes, she thought, Mrs. Weissmann. Do you hear that, Mr. Weissmann?
She noticed he was wearing new cuff links. That, more than anything the lawyers said, more even than Joseph's coldness and distance, made her sad. Things were happening to Joseph and they were happening without her. Cuff links, barbells made of yellow gold, were happening to him.
"My client is a generous man," Joseph's lawyer was saying.
"My client is a reasonable woman," her lawyer was saying.
Joseph's eyes met hers, and in the fraction of an instant before they flicked away, she knew they shared the same amused, unhappy thought: Both our lawyers are liars.
7
The months of struggling against the ruin of her business had taken a toll on Miranda. She had phoned and cajoled and browbeaten and pleaded. She had called in every chit. But there was the stink of failure clinging to the Miranda Weissmann Literary Agency, and neither authors nor editors liked that odor much. No matter what she did or said, she could not seem to keep everything she'd worked so hard to build from washing away like sand beneath her feet.