Lipstick Jungle

“So you can’t take a walk in the park with a friend?”

“I could maybe meet you at your apartment,” Nico said, thinking that this was something Kirby should have thought of, unless he wasn’t really interested in having sex with her after all.

“Duh,” Kirby said. “I should have thought of that myself, huh?”

The fact that Kirby understood his mistake gave her hope.

She found the scrap of paper on which she’d written his address (a scrap of paper she intended to throw out after she saw him), and looked at it. Kirby’s apartment wasn’t at all near the park—it was all the way east on Seventy-ninth Street and Second Avenue. But she supposed that if you were a young man, five long blocks was nothing.

“I’m going to 302 East Seventy-ninth Street,” she said to the driver.

God, what was she doing?

She turned on her cell phone. She couldn’t be out of contact with her office for long. She called her assistant, Miranda, to get her messages. Should she give Miranda the same lie she’d given to the driver? Better to be vague about it. “I’ve got to make a stop,” she said, looking at her watch. It was just before two o’clock. If she and Kirby actually did do it, how long would it take? Fifteen minutes? But then she’d have to talk to him a little bit before and after. “I’ll be back in the office around three,” she told Miranda. “Maybe three-thirty, depending on the traffic.”

“No problem,” Miranda said. “You have a meeting at four. Just let me know if you’re going to be late.” Thank God, Nico thought, Miranda was as bright as a whip. She was certainly smart enough to know when not to ask questions. She understood that information was on a need-to-know basis.

She returned two phone calls, and then the car got stuck in traffic on Fifty-ninth Street. Why hadn’t the driver gone through the park? But of course, the park was closed at lunchtime. What a stupid, inconvenient rule. Hurry, hurry please, she found herself thinking. Once she had made the decision to call Kirby, there was no turning back, and she kept having these moments of extreme anticipation, unable to wait to see him and dreading it at the same time. It was like she was eighteen again, about to go on a first date. She felt slightly dizzy.

She should call Seymour, she thought. She didn’t want him calling her while she was at Kirby’s and then having to lie to him too.

“Hup,” Seymour said, picking up the phone in the town house. Ever since Seymour had decided to take up dog breeding two years ago, he’d adopted some strange affectations, one of them being this new way of answering the phone.

“Hello,” Nico said.

“What’s going on? I’m busy,” Seymour said.

Nico knew he didn’t mean to be rude. That was just the way he was, and he hadn’t changed since the night she’d met him fourteen years ago at a party and he had convinced her to leave the party with him and go to a bar instead, and then had asked her when she was going to move in with him. Seymour was absorbed by himself, his thoughts and his activities; he found himself endlessly fascinating, and that was enough for him. Nico supposed that all men were like him, really.

“Doing?” she asked.

r /> “Lecture. For the Senate subcommittee. Top secret,” Seymour said.

Nico nodded. Seymour was a genius, and had recently begun advising the government on something having to do with Internet terrorism. Seymour was a secretive person in general, so this new opportunity suited him. His official profession was political science professor at Columbia University, where he taught one class a week, but before that, he’d been a high-powered advertising executive. The upshot was that nobody ever questioned his credentials or his opinions, and he had access to some of the most brilliant minds in the world. “They come to you for glamour and pop-culture glitz,” Seymour once told her. “And to me for the conversation.”

Nico supposed she could have taken this as an insult, but she didn’t. To a great extent, Seymour was right. They each had strengths and weaknesses, and they accepted these differences in each other, knowing that together they made a formidable team. This was what made the marriage work. When Nico began making big money, they’d decided together that Seymour should quit his job to pursue his real interests, becoming a professor at Columbia University. Nico loved the fact that because of her, Seymour was able to pursue a meaningful, yet poorly paying career. Although, she thought with a wry smile, there were times when she wondered if Seymour hadn’t secretly been engineering it all along, from the day he met her, encouraging her and coaching her on how to succeed and how to climb the corporate ladder so he could quit.

Of course, she had proven to be an eager and adept student. It wasn’t like Seymour had had to convince her to succeed.

Now she said, “So you don’t have time to talk about the party?” They threw some kind of party every two weeks in their town house—ranging from small dinners for twelve people, to buffets for fifty, to cocktail parties for a hundred. The parties were business affairs, really, designed to keep Nico’s profile high, to form alliances, and to make sure they knew everything that was going to happen before it appeared in the news. Nico didn’t really like parties, but she knew that Seymour was right, and she did it to please him. And it was no difficulty for her, really. Seymour arranged for the caterers and ordered the alcohol and chose the menu, although nobody really drank at lot at their house. Seymour hated drunks. He hated when people lost control of themselves, and besides, he had a rule that they had to be in bed every night by ten-thirty at the latest.

“We can talk about it tonight,” Seymour said. “Are you coming home?”

“I don’t know,” Nico said. “There’s some breast cancer awareness thing.”

“You’d better go then,” Seymour said. “You should at least put in an appearance.”

He hung up, and Nico suddenly felt weary. She never really had any fun anymore. It hadn’t always been like that. At the beginning, when she was rising up and it was all new, life was nothing less than a blast. Every day was filled with delicious little thrills, and she and Seymour had ridden high on the glorious feeling that they were achieving and conquering. The problem was, no one ever told you that you had to keep conquering. You could never stop. You had to keep going, on and on.

But that, she supposed, was what life was about in the end. No matter where you were, you had to continually keep reaching down inside yourself to find the will to keep on trying. And when you couldn’t go on anymore, you died.

And everyone forgot about you.

Of course, she wouldn’t be around when she was forgotten, so did it really matter?

She looked out the window. They were finally heading up Third Avenue, but the traffic was still annoyingly bad. She mustn’t think morose thoughts. In just a few minutes, she’d be seeing Kirby. She imagined him as a wild card in her life, a jester in a colorful suit, a beautifully wrapped piece of candy.

“Did you say three hundred two East Seventy-ninth Street?” the driver asked, interrupting her thoughts.