Mating Rituals of the North American WASP Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Lauren Lipton

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Excepting page 108, Luke’s poems and poetry fragments throughout are copyright © 2009 by Lee Slonimsky

  Yeats’s poem “When You Are Old” is from the second edition of The Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran (Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983). Used by permission.

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  5 Spot is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

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  First eBook Edition: May 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55067-3

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FIVE SIGNS YOU’RE IN SMALL-TOWN CONNECTICUT

  “How I love this funny, smart, full of heart novel about the ‘I Do’ coming before the ‘I love you.’ Lauren Lipton is one of my new favorite authors!”

  —Melissa Senate, author of See Jane Date and Questions to Ask Before Marrying

  “Stylishly written, closely observed, and compulsively readable, MATING RITUALS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN WASP is an absolute treat. It’s The Undomestic Goddess meets The Gold Coast with fantastic results.”

  —Alison Pace, author of City Dog

  PRAISE FOR IT’S ABOUT YOUR HUSBAND

  “Striking a balance between silly and serious, this tale…will resonate with readers everywhere.”

  —Emily Giffin, New York Times bestselling author of Baby Proof and Love the One You’re With

  “Wickedly funny, yet deeply poignant, this book marks the debut of a sparkling new voice. Lipton writes with wit, intelligence, and, most of all, heart.”

  —Carol Goodman, author of The Lake of Dead Languages and The Ghost

  “Light-hearted and full of laughs…a fast-paced read…Lipton is an exciting new fictional voice.”

  —ArmchairInterviews.com

  “A humorous starting-over novel, It’s About Your Husband is chick lit with a twist…Lipton is a new voice, from whom readers will want more.”

  —BookLoons.com

  “Chock-full of delightful characters…will keep you entertained all the way to the surprise twist at the end…a lively, fun read that only gets better as the story progresses.”

  —FreshFiction.com

  “What makes It’s About Your Husband such an excellent read is not the plot so much as Lipton’s ability to capture the flavor of New York, the foibles of her characters, and the metamorphosis of a delightful heroine…We look forward to what Lauren Lipton has in store for us next.”

  —BookReporter.com

  To my father, Lew Lipton

  Who taught me how to catch lightning in a bottle

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am fortunate to have a gracious and serene agent, Laura Langlie, and an incisive editor, Selina McLemore. Thank you to Caryn Karmatz-Rudy, Elly Weisenberg, Miriam Parker, Latoya Smith, Melanie Moss, Tareth Mitch, Sona Vogel, Rick Willett, Claire Brown, and Allene Shimomura at Grand Central Publishing, and to Tooraj Kavoussi of TK Public Relations. Melanie Murray, thank you for believing in this book.

  Miriam Komar and Sarah Sheppard spent a year helping me shape my story and characters and pushing me to do better. I am indebted to them and to Carol Goodman, an exceptional teacher and writer. I’m grateful for the support of Davyne Verstandig, director of the Litchfield County Writers Project.

  Thank you to the many who gave generously of their time and expertise, including freelance television cameraman Pete Stendel, Connecticut divorce lawyer Steven H. Levy, Esq., and Napa Valley wine and port expert Paul Wagner. Lee Lipton, MA, PA-C, provided medical information. Mary Clare Bland, of East Side Tae Kwon Do in New York City, gave me a crash course in small business ownership. Tom Herman (Yale ’68) and Marilyn Lytle Herman took me to the Game.

  Litchfield, Connecticut, contractor Ben Buck explained how to apply roofing tar. Tedd Rosenstein, my Las Vegas bureau chief, described the Brooklyn Bridge at New York New York in painstaking detail. Thank you also to Reverend David Rockness, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Litchfield; docent Rosemary Sant Andrea of the Bellamy-Ferriday House; car expert Jonathan Welsh; and Stephanie Chang. I assume full responsibility for any mistakes or omissions in, or embellishments to, the information these sources provided.

  The Silas Sedgwick House is modeled on a real mansion in Litchfield County. Russell Barton gave me a tour of his exquisite home and let me take extensive photographs.

  Girls-in-the-know Melissa C. Morris and Sandra Waugh saw to it that the Sedgwicks served the proper appetizers, drank the proper liquor, and attended the proper church.

  The poet and hedge fund manager Lee Slonimsky not only advised me on Luke’s investments but wrote Luke’s beautiful sonnets and verse fragments (with the exception of the limerick, for which I take full blame). Lee, thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you.

  And without David and James, there would be no poetry in my life. I love you both.

  ONE

  Early Fall, September

  Something wasn’t right, and she knew it before opening her eyes.

  She’d been having the oddest dream about a man she was sure she’d never met in her waking life, though in the dream he was as familiar as an old friend. A man she would not be able to recall later, beyond that his presence had buoyed her with happiness. A man she only understood wasn’t Brock and was in fact someone Brock should never know about. And though she knew the correct thing to do was to go home to Brock at once and apologize for all of it—the argument, the way she’d left things, and now this—she couldn’t bring herself to break the spell. She and the dream-man were laughing and talking, about what she wouldn’t recall, either, as bells rang and cheers erupted in bursts, and smiling dream-people stood back to watch them in the manner of wedding guests ringing the floor for the first dance. Then, just as she and the man were about to embrace, Peggy Adams had a moment of clarity. Something isn’t right, she thought in her dream, and with that, it all dissolved.

  This was one of the many side effects of Peggy’s chronic anxiety: Traveling made her jumpy, and she could not get comfortable in a strange bed. Not even in a luxury hotel. She’d try to laugh it off—Hello, housekeeping? There’s a pea under my mattress—and go to sleep. But the pillow would be too plump or the fitted sheet would come untucked, revealing an expanse
of bare mattress inches from her face. The rest of the night she’d alternate between imagining exactly what might be on that mattress, thinking wistfully of her own bed, and chastising herself. When had she become afraid of everything? Why couldn’t she snap out of it?

  But this particular out-of-kilter feeling went beyond the dream and beyond Peggy’s sense that her world was closing in and it was her own fault. It went beyond her concern that her friends were leaving her behind, moving ahead with their lives while she remained in the same place. It certainly went beyond being in not-her-bed. The past two mornings, Peggy had awoken not to the distant growl of Manhattan traffic on Ninth Avenue or, depending on the day, the splash of Brock shaving in their apartment bathroom, but to the gusty air conditioner in a room at the New York New York hotel in Las Vegas, with Bex Sabes-Cohen—her best friend, business partner, and fellow bachelorette-weekend guest—rustling sleepily in the other double bed and a view of a reproduction Chrysler building out their window. It had caught her off guard Friday and Saturday, but it was Sunday, she’d be flying home later today, and with her everyday life within an afternoon’s reach, the foreignness of the hotel room, her remaining hours of contrived gaiety in Las Vegas, even her fight with Brock, seemed perfectly manageable.

  Still, Peggy wasn’t ready to face any of it. She burrowed into the unyielding pillow, suspecting she hadn’t slept nearly enough. Her eyes seemed glued shut, and she wondered, Makeup? Had she somehow not washed her face? She ran her left index finger across her lashes. They were gummy and stiff. When she moved her other hand under the covers, the clasp of her watch caught on the knit fabric of her cocktail dress.

  Watch? Usually, Peggy set it on the bathroom counter before brushing and flossing. Why couldn’t she remember brushing and flossing? Could she have forgotten to, just as she’d forgotten to remove her makeup, her watch, and…this was curious. Was she really wearing her dress?

  She opened her eyes. The curtains were open, and blue white sunlight shrieked in through the window. She shut her eyes, but not before registering that she was still wearing the low-backed black jersey number she’d chosen for the weekend’s climactic evening of dinner and drinks and blackjack with Bex and their other former college roommates.

  What in the world was going on?

  Peggy did remember having faced a wardrobe dilemma. Las Vegas had turned out to be a city of tourists wearing baggy T-shirts and shorts. Bex had already pointed out that the other bachelorettes weren’t much chicer. Jobs, relationships, and circumstance had flung their four New York University friends thousands of miles from the city and out into the wide world of sneakers and sweatpants and logos on everything. For the past two days, Andrea, the guest of honor, had lived in a white tracksuit with “Bride-to-Be” appliquéd across her backside.

  Peggy had had her dress over her head and been about to shimmy it down over her hips when she’d heard Bex come out of the bathroom.

  “Do I look like an alien from Planet Overkill?” Peggy had asked through the layers of fabric. When no response came, she slithered the dress all the way on, letting it brush silkily around her calves.

  Bex was wearing a camisole, black pants so snug that a thong would have left lines, and one skyscraper-heeled, pointy-toed, patent-leather boot. She laughed. “You’re asking the wrong girl.”

  Peggy adored Bex for her brash self-assurance, her unflagging trust in her own choices.

  Unfortunately, Peggy did not share these characteristics.

  “I’ll wear jeans.” She started to back out of the dress.

  “No, you don’t. You’re going to be festive this weekend if it kills us both.…” Bex had gotten a look at Peggy’s face. She stopped tussling with her other boot. “I know, sweetie. Fights—they’re miserable.”

  Peggy let the dress fall back around her and dropped onto the bed. “Thirteen months, Bex.”

  “I know,” Bex said.

  “Andrea meets Jordan, they go to dinner, they move in together, and poof—engaged.” She held up her palms, mimicking a scale. “Andie: thirteen months. Me: seven years.”

  Bex nodded. “I know.”

  “And I shouldn’t have yelled at Brock. I never yell at him. I don’t nag; I don’t push; I give him space. How long am I supposed to wait?”

  “I don’t know. I would have left him already.”

  “I’m not leaving him.”

  “I know,” said Bex.

  Peggy had registered the disapproval in her best friend’s posture and slipped on her shoes. Shoes that she now suspected—

  Her heart began to pound. She kicked the bedclothes off her feet.

  She was still wearing them.

  As for Bex, what had become of her? Bex, along with her bed and the Chrysler building outside their window, had disappeared. How was that possible? The only bed in the room now was Peggy’s.

  But Peggy wasn’t the only one in it.

  It took multiple tries to work through this last piece of information. Man. A man. A man in bed. In her bed. No, on her bed. He lay on his back on top of the coverlet, in a rumpled shirt and a diagonally striped tie, in slacks, socks, and burnished dress shoes that looked as if they’d been polished and repolished for the past twenty years. He had blond lashes and a peaceful face. His chest rose and fell gently. He could have been a sleeping boy, except for the red gold stubble on his cheeks.

  She had never seen him in her life.

  She scrambled to her feet, one high heel leaving a small, three-cornered tear in the hotel sheet, and stood swaying next to her bed—which, of course, couldn’t really be hers. She’d already forgotten the dream; her imagination was busy doing what it did best: spinning ghastly scenarios. He’d slipped her a drug, and they’d had wild, condom-free sex all night. He’d won her trust by dressing like a nice, traditional gentleman, gotten her drunk, and persuaded her to empty out her bank account. Or what about that urban legend where the traveler wakes up in a hotel room with a kidney missing?

  The man mumbled and stirred.

  Who is this person? Peggy tried to force down her rising panic, the choking, suffocating sensation that signaled she was especially anxious. She tapped him on the arm. “Excuse me.” Her voice was barely audible, a twig scratch on a pane of glass.

  The man didn’t move. “Excuse me,” she croaked louder, and tapped him again, then jiggled his arm. Nothing happened. I’m practically middle-aged, Peggy thought. She hadn’t done anything like this in her twenties, when it might have been excusable. She was thirty-four and mortified.

  She tottered into the bathroom, hoping despite all odds to find Bex washing her face. There was no Bex, only Peggy’s own reflection: chin-length hair falling in dirty blond strings across a forehead already traversed with worry lines like her mother’s; dark circles and the first signs of crow’s-feet. Yet even as Peggy was bemoaning her appearance, she registered the leather Dopp kit on the otherwise empty counter, and the full impact of the situation hit her.

  She’d passed out in a strange man’s room.

  Her next thought was, My purse!

  She half expected not to find it, but it was there, on a table with a scattered stack of papers, two smudgy champagne glasses, and a bottle nose-down in a bucket of melted ice. The man’s jacket was draped neatly across the back of a chair. Peggy swooped up her bag and wrenched it open. Wallet and credit cards—check. The photo of her and Brock at the Sports Emmys—check. Cash—not as much as she remembered, but a few bills, and the card to her own hotel room.

  A blast of electronic music shrilled. Peggy jumped and tripped over her feet to the door, fumbled with the safety latch, and stumbled out into the hall, holding the door ajar with her elbow. She reached into her purse for her phone and flipped it open. Mercifully, the music stopped.

  “Bex?” Peggy whispered. “Are you okay?”

  “Where are you? Brunch, remember?”

  Peggy was flooded with relief at the sound of her friend’s voice. She glanced back into the room. All she could see wa
s the lower eighteen inches of the man’s legs. He didn’t appear to have woken up. She shut the door carefully. “I’ll be right there,” Peggy said into the phone, steering herself toward the elevator.

  “Are you bringing your future husband?”

  Peggy made herself walk slower—the corridor was spinning. “What?”

  “You told us you were engaged. You were skipping around with that WASPy guy, calling him ‘my future husband.’ The two of you were all over each other. We couldn’t figure out what had gotten into you, Peggy. You wouldn’t let us take you upstairs. We finally left you at the roulette table. Did you actually go to his room?”

  Peggy pressed “Down,” and an elevator opened as if it had been waiting. There was a family inside—a mother and father and two children, all bright-eyed and fresh and well rested. “I guess so. I’m coming to ours now.”

  “We’re not there. Hilary and I packed and checked out for you. Meet us in the lobby and we’ll go straight to brunch.”

  The children were staring at her. The parents were pointedly trying not to. Peggy wished she could vanish. “I have to change my dress,” she whispered.

  “No time, sweets. We’ve all got planes to catch. Meet us down stairs. We’ll wait for you.”

  “Thanks, Bex. I owe you.”

  “You’ll pay me later,” Bex said. “I expect a full report of last night.”

  “All right, then, what about hepatitis?” Peggy worried aloud once the plane was in the air and pointing east. She was in the window seat, and she lowered the shade against the sun. Every women’s magazine cautionary tale she’d ever read, every casual-sex exposé about the dangers of letting one’s guard down for an instant, was coming back to her in a dizzying rush. She shook out a small white pill from a vial in her purse.

  Bex tilted back her seat and twirled her black-coffee curls into a chignon, which she secured with a pen from her handbag. “Come on, Neurotic Nelly, open your shade or we won’t see the Grand Canyon. And don’t take that. There’s nothing to be afraid of. The pilot knows how to fly the plane. And if you take the Ativan, you’ll pass out, and I’ll be lonely for the rest of the flight.”