Ellie picked up her wineglass, and when she spoke, her mouth was a hard line. “Actually, there was a man once who interested me. I liked him a lot, admired him a great deal. He was married with two small daughters and when he asked his wife for a divorce, everyone vilified him. They couldn’t believe he’d do such a rotten thing to his darling wife. But I defended him. I told him that I understood. And I defended him to people who cut him down. I think I had fantasies about his telling me what a great person I was, then he’d whisk me away from my unhappy marriage and . . .”
Ellie put the glass down and shrugged. “Didn’t happen. He married someone else and moved to another state.”
Leslie looked at Madison. “You must have turned down a million men.”
“I wish,” Madison said, as though what they were saying was a joke.
But Ellie and Leslie didn’t laugh. Instead, they stared at her.
“Okay, so I’ve had a lot of offers, mostly indecent ones, but there weren’t any that appealed to me.” Madison looked down at her cigarette, then back up at the women. They were looking at her without a shred of belief on their faces.
“All right, there was one man,” Madison said as she lit another cigarette, “but it was a long, long time ago, and I think it was the circumstances more than the actual events. I don’t think he would have paid any attention to someone like me if we hadn’t been thrown together that summer.”
Ellie jumped on that statement. “What does that mean? ‘Someone like me’? Do you mean, someone beautiful enough to make the stars jealous?”
Madison laughed. “I can see how you make your living. No, I don’t mean that. I mean, s
omeone uneducated. He had just finished his third year of medical school, and I was . . . Oh, well, it’s a boring story.”
“Doesn’t sound boring to me,” Ellie said as she picked up a handful of corn chips. “Sound boring to you, Leslie?”
“Not in the least. In fact, compared to the alternatives, an empty bed or the TV, I think this story sounds downright fascinating.”
Again Madison laughed. “You two are good for my ego. All right, it was right after I miscarried and—”
“What?!” both women yelped together.
Madison took a long, deep drag off her cigarette. Both women noticed that there was a bit of a tremor to her hand as she lifted the cigarette to her lips, but neither said anything. Madison drew in the smoke, then leaned back her head and exhaled slowly. “I’ve never been to therapy—not that I didn’t need it, mind you, I just couldn’t afford it—but I think maybe being with you two is like a group therapy session.”
“So tell us everything,” Ellie said eagerly.
“All right,” Madison said as she pointed her cigarette at Ellie, “but if I read one word of this in one of your books, I’m suing you.”
Ellie looked away for a moment, as if she had to think about that, and when she looked back, both Leslie and Madison were holding in their laughter. “Okay, I agree,” Ellie said, pretending reluctance, but she loved to hear a story as much as she loved to tell one.
“The miscarriage really has nothing to do with the story, but—” Madison put up her hand when both Leslie and Ellie opened their mouths to protest.
Madison took a deep breath, then an even deeper drag on her cigarette. “It was an accident, just one of those things that happens. Roger was still in a wheelchair, and—”
“Wait a minute!” Ellie said. “Wheelchair? Roger? Is this Roger the same guy who you did all his homework for and who dumped you for a college girl?”
Madison smiled into the smoke. “You make me forget an entire nineteen years. I might as well be sitting on that bench back at the DMV. Yes, this is the same man. Not long after I got to New York, Roger was in an accident. He was riding a bicycle and was hit by a car. It ran over his pelvis and crushed all the bones.”
“Yeow!” Ellie said.
“And you left New York and modeling to go back to him?” Leslie asked softly.
Madison stubbed out her cigarette. “Yes. But before you two start thinking of what I gave up, I want to remind you that modeling wasn’t my idea. It was the town’s idea.”
“You wanted to be a nurse,” Leslie said.
“Yes.” Madison smiled at them. It was nice to be remembered so well. “Roger called me from the hospital and said that he’d been told that he’d never walk again. Then he told me that he still loved me, that he’d sent his fiancée packing, so I went running home. It wasn’t any great sacrifice for me to give up the idea of modeling. I hated . . .” Pausing, she lit another cigarette.
“I didn’t like modeling,” she said after a moment, “so I was glad of any excuse that allowed me to return home. And Roger said all the right things. He blamed his dumping me on his father, saying that his father had threatened that if he married an uneducated girl like me, he’d be disinherited.”
“No wonder you have a chip on your shoulder about not having gone to college,” Ellie said under her breath.
Madison pretended she hadn’t heard Ellie. “So I went home and I married a man who was in a hospital bed in a body cast. Then, let’s see . . . How should I put this? Then I entered hell. Yes, I think that’s about right.”