“What about sizeism? I can sue him for being sizeist, can’t I?” Janey pleaded.
“That’s not a thing,” Ronald Applebaum drawled, coughing once on his own cigar smoke. “Anyway, this sounds like sibling rivalry to me.” He was making a joke. All of the Sweets and the people who worked for them considered Beau to be family. They were like siblings, and that was one of the things (one of many) that made this situation so intolerable and made Janey feel like even more alone.
The attorney was clearly finished with the conversation. “May I ask how much you weigh?” he asked uneasily.
“I don’t even know.” Janey had hung up the phone determined to do whatever it would take to lose whatever weight she’d gained as quickly as possible, go back to work, and take the entire goddamned company from Beau.
Janey walked over to the fridge to grab another Diet Coke. She looked at a photo strip of pictures of her and Beau, ripped it off the fridge, and tossed it into the trash bin.
Ivy changed the subject. “Are you dating? Maybe you need to take your mind off work for a little.”
CJ answered for her. “She hasn’t had a date in six months.”
“I’ve been busy.” Janey’s fists began to clench.
“You’ve been lazy,” CJ continued. Janey never thought it was fair for CJ to appraise her personal life when she’d been happily married to the love of her life for the past decade.
“The options are limited.”
“You haven’t even looked at the options.”
Ivy interrupted the spat between the two women. “I’m seeing someone. It’s new. I met her on the bike. You know, at SoarBarre. I know it’s probably not great to be hooking up with clients, but it is soooooooo much easier than Tinder, and sometimes these girls just throw themselves at me after class. She’s a kindergarten teacher on the Upper East Side. Every time I curse she makes me put a twenty into this jar she keeps on top of her fridge. At this rate we’ll be able to go to Jamaica for Easter based off my filthy, filthy mouth.”
“When did you become a lesbian?” Janey asked, surprised only because Ivy’s daddy was a very well-known Baptist preacher.
“I’m not full gay yet. I just identify as LGBTQ right now.” Ivy shook her high ponytail. “Anyway, I’m having the best sex of my life with a chick and she’s wonderful. I think maybe everyone is a little bit gay these days. I know a lot of divorcées who go gay.”
Janey found “divorcée” an irritating label, one that denoted failure and marked her as the kind of person who wasn’t very good at things. Janey considered herself one of the most, if not the most, capable women she knew, and she despised the idea that she wasn’t good at something, even if it was something she hadn’t much enjoyed. She was always surprised to notice, however, that remembering her ex-husband, Michael, didn’t trigger any kind of emotion for her. She knew she was supposed to be sad, to miss him, or to hate him, have any really strong emotion. She’d read somewhere that losing a spouse, through divorce or something worse, was like the severing of a limb. For Janey it was much more mild, maybe a sprained ankle. There were little things she missed. He made her English muffins with cheddar cheese when she worked late at night. She liked the way their feet touched beneath the blankets in the morning. But she didn’t ache for him.
On the surface there was nothing wrong with Janey’s husband. Just the opposite. He was good-looking, tall, handsome, a young Cary Grant in a perfectly cut suit. They first hooked up after meeting at the Cap and Gown eating club, just one week into her junior year of college. CJ was home with the flu or food poisoning or a wicked hangover and Janey found herself scanning the room for a place to sit. Michael caught her eye, and even though they hardly knew each other, he raised a friendly hand and beckoned her to join him. He had a joke ready to break the ice. “How do you pronounce the capital of Kentucky? Lou-ah-ville or Loo-ee-ville?” His eyes sparkled waiting for her answer. But Janey was one step ahead of him. “Neither,” she replied, unfolding her napkin onto her lap. “Frankfort is the capital of Kentucky. Try another one.”
They broke up a couple of weeks before graduation. We’re too young. We should see other people. We should see the world. After college he went to work with all the other upwardly mobile Ivy League graduates on Wall Street. They reconnected at a benefit to save the western Congolese gorillas from going blind at the Museum of Natural History, where he made her smile with his Louisville joke all over again. They dated for three years before getting engaged and had a lovely society wedding in Charleston. Everyone she knew married the guy they were dating at age twenty-nine. It was just what you did, and Lorna desperately wanted to throw her only daughter the wedding of her dreams. Lorna’s dreams, not Janey’s. Janey felt so bad about disappointing her parents when she didn’t come home to work at Sweet Chocolates that she felt obligated to give her mother this one thing.
Michael’s only aspiration at the time was turning other people’s money into more money, and Janey cared about little else besides making sure Beau was pleased with her work. But when banking became less glamorous after the housing market crash, Michael wanted to be an entrepreneur and join the armies of young men marching down Silicon Alley with their ideas for apps and widgets and e-commerce companies.
“We’ll be fine on your salary,” he’d protested with too much confidence, and without consulting her quit his very well-paying job at Morgan Stanley to learn how to code. Janey didn’t mind being the breadwinner exactly, but there was something uncomfortable about his assumption that she’d simply take to it. It also annoyed her that being a tech entrepreneur seemed to involve a suspicious amount of video-game playing on the part of her thirty-five-year-old husband.