The joke fell on deaf ears. Kate sipped her tea and waved her pretty unpolished fingernails in the air. “Of course not. I’d love someone to do high-impact cardio and weights with me three times a week.”
Ivy made a note in her pink notepad. “Okay. I specialize in high impact. I’ve been working on a great new cardio workout that’s like ballet with weights. Are you working with anyone else right now?” She didn’t want to just come right out and ask Kate why she’d stopped using Sara Strong as her personal trainer.
“Not right now. I worked with the same trainer for a long time, but we ended up having very different opinions about what was actually healthy.” A cloud passed over Kate’s sunny face. “I’m in the market for someone new.”
Ivy knew better than anyone that personal trainers really were the new therapists. She had clients tell her things they wouldn’t have dreamed of telling anyone else. She’d recently trained a corporate attorney who admitted to Ivy and only to Ivy that Caitlyn Jenner inspired him to begin transitioning to become a woman. For years he’d been raiding his wife’s closet when she went out of town on business. Now that she had passed away he was finally doing something about it. And he needed her help to get rid of his back fat. He hated how his chubby back looked in Agent Provocateur corsets. Sweating together created an intense closeness. She had no doubt Kate would open up about Sara Strong within a session or two.
“When do you want to get started? I teach at SoarBarre in the morning and the late afternoon, but I’m free in the middle of the day.”
“Let’s do Friday? I have a good feeling about this, Ivy. Can I get anyone a uterus tea or mustard oil for the road?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There was one hour of the day when sunlight streamed directly into the front windows of the Wandering Juice. The rest of the time it dodged and weaved behind other, grander buildings downtown, but Janey found herself in that glorious patch of March sun as she sipped a Red and plotted the final logistics of her St. Lucia trip. Who would watch Boo Radley and water the plants? How long did her food delivery subscription need to be put on hold? Should she Airbnb her apartment? How did she sign up for Airbnb anyway, and how could she make sure she wasn’t renting her place out to a bachelor party in town from Tampa? Or a Hungarian producer shooting Internet porn? She had a friend who rented her Hamptons beach shack for a month last summer only to learn it became the backdrop for more than one hundred lesbian pornos. It was her husband who pointed it out, which led to other issues.
She’d stopped into the juice shop with the intent of saying good-bye to Jacob, and he invited her to go to a human bowling alley with him in Brooklyn that night. Apparently the pins were people and the ball was made of pleather. Why did anyone want to do that? Since it was her last night in town she’d been hoping Hugh would ring her and ask her for a drink. Of course, she could also ring him. But she didn’t.
She was also thinking about her chance run-in with Beau. She wanted to text him. The knowledge that he’d been planning to oust her from the company they built together depressed her terribly. But, at the same time, maybe this was the exit strategy she needed.
She raised a hand to her forehead to shield the light as she looked across the narrow street at the growing line outside of BRO-th. It was now all the rage for both gay and straight men from their twenties to fifties, all of them lined up in their wool skullcaps and grey peacoats for pig, beef, and chicken BRO-th.
She took a break and distracted herself with a few moments on Instagram, scrolling through CJ’s pictures of the boys visiting the Bronx Zoo over the weekend. She was definitely Facetuning. The twins looked positively anorexic with exotic parrots perched on their teensy heads.
Wow. Sara Strong had more than 250K Instagram followers. How was that even possible? Janey scrolled the trainer’s feed. It was mostly nonsensical inspirational sayings like “Don’t let anyone treat you like a yellow Starburst. You are a pink Starburst” and “Blessings come in as many shapes and sizes as a rock on the beach.” All of them were tagged with #Fitspo, #Strong, #Sweat, #Fit4Life, #ObstaclesMeanNothing. Another post just said, “You. Exactly the way you are. I love you.” The caption on the bottom read, “To all my sisters out there in the world, I love you more than all the depths of all the universes. Be your own being. Be my being. Be all the beings.” Janey wasn’t certain the sentences were written in English, but they made her feel lighter, happier. They didn’t need to make sense. Maybe everything made too much sense. God, now she was thinking in Sara Strong’s aphorisms. Janey found it interesting that you rarely saw Sara’s face in any of these photographs. She was always shot from behind, typically gazing off toward some fuzzy beautiful horizon or with her hands forming a victorious V over her head.
The girl at the next table noticed Janey before Janey noticed her. She could feel her eyes glancing up to stare at her every couple of minutes. Finally, Janey looked over the top of her computer to see who it was. Long legs, wide-set cat eyes, shiny dark hair, no makeup needed. It was none other than Beau’s new muse peering shyly in her direction. They made eye contact and she gave Janey a tentative smile and wave before gliding toward her table.
“Ms. Sweet?” she said politely when she approached. Janey stiffened.
“I’m Alizza. From B. I was at that awful boot camp with Beau. The one with the terrorists.” The girl stretched her long elegant left hand toward Janey, a slight sliver of an emerald-cut diamond set in simple rose gold on the ring finger. Out of the corner of her eye Janey could see Jacob peering out from behind the counter. She wouldn’t have blamed him for giving this girl the once-over. All the young women at B were stunning. Beau surrounded himself with an army of beautiful women, each one taller and younger and thinner than the next.
“I don’t want to bother you,” the girl said shyly. “I just thought I should introduce myself. You’ve always been such a huge inspiration for me. I was disappointed we didn’t get to work together when I was at B.”
“You’re not with B anymore?” Janey said quizzically.
“Beau fired me yesterday.” Janey looked over to the table she’d been sitting at and noticed it was covered in pieces of sketch paper filled with designs.
“I just saw the two of you together last week. You looked like peas in a pod,” Janey said, hoping to keep the bitterness out of her voice. To her credit, Alizza looked slightly ashamed.
“You know how Beau is. He loves you one minute and can’t stand you the next. I think he kept me around because he was missing you.” Now the girl had Janey’s attention.
“What’s that you’re working on?” Janey nodded to the pieces of paper littering Alizza’s table.
“Oh, it’s nothing.”