Page 19 of Best Woman
Ben steals one more kiss and pulls back, swiping my bottom lip with his thumb. “It’s such a relief to know I won’t have to spend Aiden’s wedding cruising for someone to take home after.”
I nip at his fingers. “Got a hot date lined up?”
“No, but I happen to know the best woman has a dirty mind and truly incredible stamina.”
“I hate to break it to you,” I say, pulling back to stretch out a kink in my neck, “but though you’re correct about my stamina, you’ll have to make other plans. I have my sights set on someone even prettier than you.”
“No one is prettier than me,” he says, and he’s charming enough that it isn’t obnoxious. It’s also kind of true.
“Kim Cameron is.”
His eyes widen and he scoffs. “As in newly minted maid of honor Kim Cameron?” He draws back, looking thoughtful. “I suppose it does have a nice symmetry to it. And it’s sort of full circle. Didn’t you have a thing for her in high school?”
“I guess.” There’s a part of me that wants to spill my guts and tell Ben everything. He knows me so intimately, in every sense of the word, and we’ve had fun over the long years of our entanglement, keeping each other up-to-date on our various sexual exploits. There’s no jealousy built into our relationship, just a mutual appreciation of pleasure and years of history. He’d understand how much I wanted to get close to Kim, and he knows me well enough that he might even understand the lengths I’ve gone to in the hopes of making it happen.
But Ben is also, unfortunately, a genuinely good person. He used to bring my mom flowers when she was pregnant with thetwins, drove down from school for Aiden’s high school graduation even though he was in the middle of finals, and talked me down over the phone when a longtime fuck buddy rejected me post-transition. I can imagine telling him the story I concocted for Kim, and the disappointed look on his face as he realized that not only had I lied to someone to get in their pants, but that I’d usedAidento do it. He knew how close we were, and while he cared about me deeply—maybe more deeply than I sometimes wanted to admit—he loved Aiden like a brother.
I wish, not for the first time and I’m sure not for the last, that I hadn’t lied to Kim.
A few minutes later, after some rushed cleanup in the bathroom, I’m on my way out the door.
Ben is used to abrupt exits after a decade of hookups, but he stops me with a hand—the one that was just down my jeans—on my arm.
“Is everything OK?” He knows me too well, he’s too perceptive, toogood. Far too good for me, just like Kim Cameron.
I kiss his cheek, feeling the downy fuzz of his facial hair. I wonder what it would be like to be a simpler girl who could live down here and let Ben Otsuka love me. We’d grocery shop at Trader Joe’s and meet Aiden and Rachel every weekend for bagels, which I’d always complain about because you can’t get good bagels outside of New York. We’d go to the movies and he’d remind me how much popcorn made my stomach hurt, but I’d eat it anyway and he’d rub my belly in bed, spooned up behind me when we got home. It sounded nice. It sounded boring.
“Everything’s great,” I tell him.
Every day atmy grandparents’ country club is like a bar mitzvah. This is only a slight exaggeration—my actual bar mitzvah was held here. From the complimentary valet parking to the ice sculpture swans taking flight above giant tureens of tuna salad, this is a place of luxury, comfort, and excess.
I’m not feeling very comfortableorluxurious, tapping my foot impatiently as a woman clutching a walker in one hand and a ladle in the other takes her sweet time with the chicken noodle soup.
I’d offer to help, as she looks about two days away from making everyone named in her willveryhappy, but I’m not having a good day.
The house was dark and quiet last night when I got home from Ben’s, though I saw lights flickering under the twins’ bedroom doors. Everyone but Randy was gone this morning when I woke up, and we made uncomfortable conversation (on my part, at least, as Randy can happily chat with anyone, anywhere,anytime) over coffee before I escaped back to my room to spend a few hours remotely coordinating furniture delivery and a light installation at a client’s Hamptons house. Mom picked me up for a girls’ lunch out and spent an hour offering unsolicited opinions on my hair, skin, and nails in between calls from various friends and family members. I’d dropped her off at work and taken her car for the rest of the day on the condition that I had to pick Brody and Brian up from school, which had quickly turned into me chauffeuring them and their creepy little friend Eugene to an abandoned Best Buy parking lot, where they presumably mutilated stray cats for the rest of the afternoon. By the time I picked Mom up from work, a migraine had started to throb at my temples, the pain ratcheting up another notch every time she asked me a question about my day or reminded me how excited I should be for the wedding.
I breathe in and out, willing the thunder rumbling in my head to quiet. I keep reminding myself that this week is a marathon, not a sprint, and I can’t burn out this early in the game.
Finally, the crone in front of me hobbles off with her soup and I ladle out a bowl, plopping in a gigantic matzoh ball and snagging a packet of oyster crackers. Back at the table, my grandpa is in the middle of a story I’ve heard roughly sixty times.
“So there I am, on top of the bar at the Hotel Biancamaria in Capri, pants around my ankles, while the accordion player starts playing ‘Moon River.’ ” Grandpa holds court with ease, even though most of the table isn’t paying attention. “I’m about to start singing when I notice someone climbing up onto the bar next to me. And do you know who it was?”
Everyone at the table knows their role in this tale. “Who was it?” we ask together.
“Audrey fucking Hepburn.” He holds a beat to let that sink in. “She says to me, ‘I think I know this one if you’d like to duet.’ And I turn to her, and do you know what I say?”
“What did you say?” I ask through a mouthful of matzoh ball. It’s too hot and burns my tongue.
“I said, ‘My dear, it’s rather loud in here, so don’tgo lightly.’ ” He looks expectantly at Brody and Brian, the two people at the table who have heard this story the least and are therefore most likely to react to it, but they probably think Truman Capote is either a dead U.S. president or a nonbinary YouTube vlogger and don’t look up from their phones.
My grandma rubs his hand reassuringly, her silver bracelets clacking. “It was very clever, dear.”
When I was growing up, my grandparents seemed shockingly young compared to those of my friends. They were always jetting off on European vacations and African safaris, hosting cocktail parties full of interesting people, and taking Aiden and me to Broadway shows when we visited them in New York. They were true snowbirds, spending summers in the Long Island home they’d lived in since before I was born and winters in Florida. Once they hit their seventies and my mom had the twins, they’d moved down here full time. Since then they’d suddenly been noticeablyold,finally looking like the grandparents I’d always expected to have, slow and brittle and occasionally cantankerous.
But they certainly put on a good show. My grandma is immaculate—she gets a blowout on the same day every week, and her hair is huge and stiff. Her nails are perfectly manicured and she’s wearing her signature Chanel lipstick. Two years ago I asked what shade it was and she’d shaken her head sadly. “Oh, darling, you’d never pull it off.”
Grandpa is still wearing a polo shirt from his afternoon golf game but has a cardigan draped over it. He gets cold so easily now, and the indoor temperature in Florida always hovers around frigid, even in early November. His smile is as wide and impish as ever under the huge nose carved sharply down his face. And his voice is still so loud, too loud, especially as he calls across the crowded restaurant. “Over here!” We all turn to look, and Aiden is waving at us from across the room.
