“HEY!” I yell.
Instead of a response, I hear the buzzer that indicates the front door is opening. I’m terrified, thinking they may be leaving for the night, that they forgot the almost middle-aged hag upstairs trying on a dress for someone ten years younger. Finally I hear footsteps, pounding up the stairs, letting me know that at last someone, somewhere, has remembered me. Without so much as a knock, the lock clicks and the saleslady comes into the room, followed by Henry.
“Zees is your girlfriend?” Franco Lady asks as if it’s incredible the gorgeous Henry would be caught with someone like me.
“This is her,” he says, searching my splotchy face. “I can take it from here.”
“Henry?” I frantically try to cover my back, which is exposed now in a three-way mirror. “You said I was your girlfriend?”
“She didn’t understand that I was using the past tense.”
“Look, Henry, I didn’t mean to go all damsel on you. I . . . I . . . ,” I sniff to him.
Taking charge, Henry turns me around and expertly begins unhooking me. “Belle, it was just fun to say the girlfriend word again. It’s no big deal.”
“Don’t think I tried this on for you,” I say as I grasp for composure.
“Oh, sure. I know that,” he says. I see him grinning in the mirror. “Anyway, I was only five blocks away when I got your email.”
“I probably could have done it myself . . . eventually,” I say while thinking that Henry has taken off my clothes a hundred times. He must have been thinking the same thing.
“Yeah, but I know what I’m doing here,” he says. “I’m familiar with the territory.”
“There’s more terrain now,” I say.
“Slight changes in topography,” he quips. “A real improvement, if you ask me.”
Women who have children really like being told they still have a nice body. I feel a rush of happiness flow to my heart while Henry’s hands linger for a moment at the nape of my neck.
When I look in the mirror, he looks like he’s still in his twenties, like we’re the couple who once went to Australia. The flush of exertion or embarrassment in my cheeks makes me look better too.
“I was just wondering if it fit,” I say weakly, still sniffing a little.
“And did it?” he asks as he unhooks the last eye, releasing me from my bondage and letting me take a whole breath of air again. I tug myself out of the sleeves and hold the dress up in front of me, grasping for modesty.
“It did not,” I finally answer.
“And”—Henry fake-coughs to hide the fact that he’s now laughing—“what have we learned from this lesson?”
I don’t know if I’m laughing or crying and breathing is a little hard again. I fall back onto the tulle-filled floor, my dress falls forward, and I sit there in my matching black lacy bra and panties that somehow found themselves on my body at the same moment of the same day and, in this trick lighting, make the person in the mirror look borderline stupendous. And there’s Henry in this perfect light, pulling the dress from under me, holding it in front of him, hanging it carefully on the four-inch-wide hanger, holding his hand out to me, lifting me from the floor, holding my hands up, pulling my work skirt over my head, zipping it back onto me, buttoning my blouse up, kissing me deeply on the cheek, and leaving.
CHAPTER 30
The Misery Index
I GET HOME from my dresscapade to find that Bruce has left the place like a crime scene. His message seems to be, “I’m leaving every overturned sippy cup, every empty wine bottle in exactly the position it was left in. I want you to see what you missed and then I want you to clean it up.”
I sit in the dark for a long time, trying hard to regulate my breath and to stop gasping. Something is smothering me with what feels like giant gobs of felt in my throat. I try some feeble form of meditation to calm myself and get this imagined gauzy film off my face and out of my nostrils. I need air. The only visual I can focus on, the only thing that my heart will listen to, is the scene where Henry’s hands are on my neck, unhooking that fish dress, releasing it from my skin an hour before. His fingers were so manlike, he was so in charge and responsible when things didn’t go as planned. With Henry I didn’t have to be the only one doing everything, all the time. What would that be like with a family? It’s the first time I think that I would be happier, that it would be easier to be with someone like him. It’s the first time I have let my thoughts go to a dangerous place.