As for men, I can hold my own with any of them. No little-girl games for me. I tell a man exactly what I want when I want it.
I have made myself into the heroine of a self-help book. I am what women who read self-help books want to become.
So what is wrong with me? Why aren’t I happy?
And, more important, why did I let a great guy like Steve go? How could I have let a man like him slip through my fingers? He was so wonderful that another woman snatched him away from me while he was still warm from my bed.
Yet, sometimes, I look back on Steve and think that he was a little too perfect and the two of us together were a little too perfect. We were like a couple out of a magazine article that described what a relationship should be like.
Sometimes I felt that what I really wanted was a man like, well, like Jamie. If Jamie had awakened and found me ignoring him at my computer, he wouldn’t have been understanding, he would have demanded my attention.
Sometimes I think my problem is laziness. Steve and I used to work out together; we were faithful to our trips to the gym, considering it a religion to keep ourselves in tiptop shape. Up until forty it’s been almost easy to maintain my looks and my health, but now there’s a part of me that just wants to give up. Am I going to have to deny myself chocolate cake for the rest of my life in a doomed-to-failure attempt to keep my thighs looking like a twenty-three-year-old’s? When do you get to rest from being inspected by a man to see how you compare to centerfolds?
For many years I was contemptuous of my parents’ marriage. It was so boring. I wanted excitement and romance. I wanted a man who was a great lover, a great friend, someone powerful in the world of business.
But now I remember my father handing my plump mother a piece of pie à la mode and her saying, “I can’t eat that. I’ll get fat.” Then my father would wiggle his eyebrows and say in a lascivious tone, “Yeah, fat.” Then they’d giggle together and my mother would eat her pie and ice cream.
Back then the whole scene was disgusting to me. And the fact that my parents had been married twenty-some years, my mother was about fifty pounds overweight, and yet they were still giggling, made me further sick.
Now the scene doesn’t make me feel ill. Remembering it makes me want to weep. Where’s the man in my life telling me I’m beautiful even though I’m overweight and my eyes have a thousand tiny lines around them? Where’s that boring man coming home to me every night and asking what’s for dinner? Where are those kids yelling, “Mom, did you iron my blouse for me?” and “Mom, guess what we did today?”
All in all I know I’m very lucky. I have my writing, which is even more satisfying to me than I could have ever imagined. I have friends and colleagues who I respect and admire and love. I have a good life, in many ways a successful life.
But, success or no success, it all comes down to the same thing: I am nearly forty years old and there is no love in my life.
Only, no one knows that. To the world I am a spunky, give-’em-hell woman who writes about give-’em-hell heroines who find fabulous men to love them forever. In my books my heroines say rude, cutting, even emasculating things to a man, yet he knows she’s the one for him. He not only comes back for more, he proves to her that he’s worthy of her.
But nothing like that has happened to me. Today it seems that men have the choice of any woman in the world, so you have to be nice, nice, nice to them. One wrong move and they will leave. There no longer seem to be people saying to each other, “I will love you even if you get fat, even if you become obsessed with a book, even if you ignore me for months at a time.”
Men no longer seem to have to make any effort to win you because there are so very many available women out there. So here I am, I’ve proven to myself and to the world that I can do anything: earn money, manage money, live alone. I’m utterly independent.
But somewhere along the way, I had messed up, and now I was alone.
What was it Nora had said? “You want a Grand Passion. A Great Romance. You want the stars and the moon.”
Yes, I thought. I would like that. I’d like to live out one of my romance novels with all the fireworks and magnificent sex. Maybe I wanted a man who was so magnetic, so, I don’t know, so powerful that I just plain couldn’t fall in love with anyone else, not a real man and certainly not one on paper.
I finished my gin and tonic and kept looking out the window and after a while I began thinking, Maybe my readers are feeling the same as I am. Maybe t
hey’re about to hit forty and feel Passion and Romance have passed them by. Or maybe they’re twenty-five and married with two kids and are wondering if this is all there is to life.
Whatever, maybe they’d like to read a story about a woman who delves into her past lives in an attempt to find out what’s wrong with this life. When I went to bed, I felt good about my next day’s appointment with Nora. I felt that a whole new area of exploration was opening up to me.
But whatever I did, I knew that getting my mind away from both Jamie and Steve would be the best thing for me.
3
You can’t be happy in this life because of what happened in your past lives.”
Those were the first words Nora said to me when I entered her office the next day. Nice antique reproduction furniture and not a crystal in sight.
I took the seat opposite her. She didn’t look so good today. Her eyes, the day before the size of saucers, were sunken into her head and were ringed with black. There was a definite slump in her shoulders.
“What happened in my past lives?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
At that statement I wanted to take her by her shoulders and shake her. But then I reminded myself that none of this was true so there was no reason for my anger. On the other hand…