You and Your Age-Inappropriate Fiancé

Ch. 11 of An Evening With God

On the day the girls of Dolores Huerta Middle School asked boys to the annual Sadie Hawkins Day dance, Gareth had no idea who his caller was until she told him that they had English together, and that she was named Pia, and sat two desks behind him, in the row to his right. “Oh,” he said uncertainly. “Frizzy hair and glasses? That one?”

He might not have been confused if she’d identified herself as Lymmi, which was what she’d called herself before her new stepmom Nicole decided that the last part of her name was sexier than the first part. No one could tell from hearing that Lymmi was spelled in the cool way it was, and Nicole thought Limmy sounded like the name of a black maid, not that she had anything against people of color. Over Christmas vacation she’d made good on her promises to do something about Pia’s hair, and to get her contact lenses, but Gareth might not have noticed.

Hearing there was going to be a Sadie Hawkins Day dance, Nicole had said she wouldn’t hear of Pia not asking someone. Pia had been only slightly less miserable than if Nicole had persuaded Daddy that they should move back to Wilton, where Lymmi had been bullied mercilessly. At her new middle school, Pia was perfectly content not to be noticed, and not to have made a single friend in her first seven weeks there.

“My new stepmom’s like a hairstylist,” she told Gareth. “She blow-dries my hair straight, and then puts this stuff in it to keep it that way. Maybe you haven’t noticed.” It wasn’t an accusation.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”

“And I got contacts during Christmas vacation.” He probably hadn’t noticed Pia’s glasseslessness either.

“Cool,” he said, for the lack of anything else to say. Pia had chosen him, among all her male classmates, because he seemed almost as shy as she herself was. He wasn’t hot, not at all, and didn’t seem to have any more friends than she did. He wasn’t likely to have been invited by anyone else. He wore braces — not the expensive, invisible kind — and raised his hand in class exactly as often as Pia did — never. He had complexion problems. Whether he dumbed down his writing assignments, as Pia did, for fear of being invited to read his writing to the class, Pia had no way of knowing.

There was a long silence. Pia wanted to break their connection more than she’d ever wanted anything in the world, but knew Nicole would get on her case. “They were weird at first,” she said. “The contacts. It’s like you’ve got something in your eye, but everything’s like even clearer than with the glasses.”

“Cool,” Gareth said again. “But I don’t think I can go.”

“Go?”

“To the dance, or whatever. I like had plans for that night.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Pia said, hoping at first that her tone didn’t betray her gigantic relief, and then not caring if it did. She hadn’t told him when the dance was, and couldn’t imagine his having noted the date.

“Maybe you can find somebody else to go with,” Gareth said.

“Oh, I’m sure I will,” Pia said.

“Well, see you in…what was it again? History?”

“English,” Pia said. “Cool. See you there.”

Lymmi, whose birth certificate said Olympia, hadn’t been much to look at until she was a great deal to look at. Mom died when she was 11, after which the household consisted of just her and Daddy, who was either too grief-stricken to notice much of anything, or too drunk. Lymmi wore glasses and had braces, and had frizzy hair and the shape of a nine-year-old boy, without a personality to offset those liabilities. What she wanted most was keep a smile on Daddy’s face.

Seeing that, he told her she was a wonderful, compassionate person, and that he loved her, and that he was doing his best. His best wasn’t terrific, though. He wandered through the first couple of years of Lymmi’s adolescence looking as though about to burst into tears at the slightest provocation, or no provocation at all.

Lymmi found consolation in books, but read too many, and needed thicker glasses. But then, when she was 14, Daddy finally remembered how to laugh, thanks to the new woman in his life. NIcole was big-hearted, and after she and Daddy got engaged, she began taking an interest in Lymmi, renaming her, styling her hair in an attractive way, teaching her to use makeup, and buying her some cool clothes with her own money, which she refused to allow Daddy to pay back. When boys began to notice Pia, she found it confusing, and then a little bit frightening.

Over the summer between seventh and eighth grade, Pia’s body transformed itself. There wasn’t a girl at her school whose physique less resembled a nine-year-old boy’s. The 13- and 14-year-old boys who were her classmates didn’t fail to notice. To Daddy’s considerable embarrassment, Nicole declared her “not just hot, but melt-the-thermometer hot.” Her male teachers couldn’t call on her enough.

The school’s popular girls, known to their classmates as the Queen Bees, or Queen Bitches, depending upon the speaker’s level of resentment, demanded that Pia eat her lunch with them at what the kids called the Mean Girls table in the school cafeteria. One. of the MGs demanded that Pia double-date with her and her boyfriend, who was in high school, in 11th grade, and his “homey”. Daddy said she couldn’t, but word quickly spread that a high school boy with his own car wanted to hook up with Pia, and her status went through the ceiling. Maybe Pia couldn’t actually go out with Dennis, her friend’s boyfriend’s homey, but she could let him drive her home, and drop her off out of Daddy’s sight.

She got to San Rod High school and was nearly elected Homecoming Queen as a 10th grader. The adults in the room where such decisions were made decided it wouldn’t be fair to the 12th grade girl, who’d actually received fewer than half as many votes, to allow a 10th grader to reign over the event. The captains of the school’s football and basketball teams competed for Pia. She confounded both, and earned a permanent place in the hearts of the student body’s misfits — both voluntary and otherwise — by opting instead for Driscoll, the unashamedly gay male lead in the senior play, co-captain of the school’s debate team.

The head Queen Bitch, LaToya, said that if Pia didn’t dump Driscoll for one of the jocks, she would have to eat lunch at another table. Pia said that was fine with her. Within two days, all but one of the beta QBs had deserted LaToya for Pia’s new table, and LaToya dropped out of school in embarrassment.

The first summer Pia was old enough to work legally, Daddy wanted her to work for his friend Rex Millar, but Nicole wouldn’t hear of it. “Beauty like Pia’s can’t be locked away in some stuffy little insurance office. She must be seen.” Daddy wasn’t comfortable with the idea of his daughter enjoying advantages unavailable to those unlikely to melt thermometers, but Nicole wasn’t to be budged. “It’s the way the world works,” she said. “Our pretending otherwise — our pretending that the gorgeous aren’t treated better than everybody else — isn’t going to make it so.”

Daddy agreed to allow Nicole to talk to a friend who’d invested in one of downtown LA’s most talked-about new restaurants. Maybe Pia could show lunchtime diners to their tables. It was a long drive from San Rodrigo, but

It turned out she could not, not until she’d turned 18. Rex Millar had hired another girl to work in his insurance office, but said he’d fire her in a heartbeat. Rex’s great enthusiasm made Daddy uncomfortable, and he got Pia a job with another friend, who owned a building supplies store in Lancaster.

Daddy’s friend reported that Pia’s coming to work for him coincided with a remarkable increase in demand for building supplies. She was asked out around four times a day, and told her prospective suitors that company policy forbade her to go out with customers. Several said they’d be perfectly happy to buy their supplies elsewhere if it made her happy, which made the business’s owner unhappy enough to inform Daddy he thought he’d better replace Pia. Nicole noted that being gorgeous was a double-edged sword.

Pia turned 18 and became a hostess at a restaurant that had become the place for the city’s entertainment movers and shakers to see and be seen at lunchtime. When it came to trying to hit on gorgeous young women, the city’s entertainment movers and shakers left their construction industry counterparts in Lancaster in the dust. Most days, no fewer than 10 prospective suitors — women as well as men, actors and writers as well as producers — gave Pia their business cards, sometimes wrapped in crisp $100 bills — and insisted she call them. She always said she would, and never did.

One guy, the lawyer Asher Horowitz, was by far the most charming, funny, and insistent of the lot. and his being among the least attractive was of no consequence to Pia. When they’d first met, she shown to their table him and the two friends he would turn out always to come in with. He’d given her a crisp one-hundred, with his card inside, but not tried to demand that she phone him. In subsequent visits, he’d given her more cards, each wrapped in a bill of a lower denomination. First a $50 bill — the first she’d ever seen — and then, in order, a twenty, a ten, a five, and a one. The first bill, the so-called Benjamin, had been hot off the printing press, but in subsequent visits, the notes had become increasingly bedraggled, almost to the point at which they could no longer be folded. Pia was amused.

One lunchtime, when the young lawyer’s two sidekicks were schmoozing their way around the dining room, Pia pretended to be offended not by the recent notes’ denomination, but by how dilapidated they were. “So you have noticed!” Mr. Horowitz said, delighted. “If you only knew the lengths I have to go to to get those!” He claimed that before coming into the restaurant, he’d find a homeless person with whom to trade a crisp new twenty for the sort of note in which he’d taken to slipping her his business card. “And still my phone doesn’t ring — not my office phone. Not my cell. Nothing!”

She was delighted, and said if he could spare another card, she might get a chance to ring him.

“I’ve given you probably a dozen to this point,” he said, feigning outrage.

“I recycle all the business cards I’m handed,” Pia said. “I think I keep the recycling centre in business.”

He waited for her shift to end. It was a beautiful day, and he suggested they drive out to Malibu. “In your extremely expensive Italian sports car?” Pia teased.

“Not if you’d prefer to take the bus,” he said, amusing her again. “And my understanding is that the MTA’s rule is that every bus contain at least one passenger who hasn’t been taking their meds, and will spend the whole time you’re aboard arguing with people they alone can see, or playing horrible music at a volume that will make the windows want to shatter.”

She really was enjoying his sense of humour by this time.

They drove out all the way to Zuma Beach with the top of his Lamborghini Huracan down, and shared relevant details. He was 35, and Jewish, but didn’t mind that she was not. He was a partner at the law firm that represented half of the biggest stars in American entertainment, but intended to become a producer. Like all men trying to seduce much younger women, he regarded age as Just a Number. She’d never been out with anyone over 28. “Neither,” he said, “have I.”

They walked north along the shore, with her nearer the sea. He offered his hand and she took it. He said maybe they ought to get a nice motel room with an ocean view. “You should have been on the inside,” she said. He didn’t understand what she was suggesting. “If I were holding your right hand, I might not have noticed your wedding ring.”

She hadn’t seen him look anything other than confidently exuberant to that point. “Oops,” he said, self-mockingly. “Most girls, when they’ve ridden in the Lambo, don’t let that bother them.”

“If you weren’t old enough to be my dad, at least biologically, and I’d decided to be interested in you,” Pia said, “which I haven’t yet, it would bother me big time.”

“Then you’ll be glad to know,” he said, wrestling the ring from his finger, “that I filed for divorce last Thursday afternoon.” He shook his head sadly as he examined the ring, and then flung it into the Pacific, making Pia gasp. “Maybe now you get some sense of how strongly attracted to you I feel.”

“How do I know you don’t have a drawerful of rings?” Pia recovered sufficiently to tease him. “How do I know for sure you don’t do this three or four times a month?”

“You don’t,” he said, grasping her head with his hand, pulling his mouth to his own, kissing her deeply forever, or at least until a pair of teenage boys, far enough away to be able to elude Asher if he were offended, hollered, “Get a fucking room, cradle-robber.”

Lying side by side afterward, Pia asked Asher to explain her great appeal to him. “Well,” he said, “you’re smart. You seem not only to get my jokes, but to enjoy them. But I’m not going to lie to you, not ever. Your looks are off the scale. In a city full of beautiful young women, you may be the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and I’m not really 35. I turned 39 in September.”

“So you’ve already lied to me!”

“Just about that,” he said.

She asked about his soon-to-be-ex wife. Was she not beautiful? “Extremely,” he said. He named the men’s magazines that had featured her on their covers, and in centerfolds. “I’d be willing to guess,” he said with pride — feigned, for comic effect, or genuine? — that there aren’t 10 women in Hollywood who’ve inspired more masturbation than Jina.”

“And you’re proud of that,” Pia marvelled.

“If I had a fleet of Lambos and a private jet, and a yacht, and my own island in the Caribbean, I wouldn’t be prouder.”

He wasn’t kidding. “My god,” Pia said. “You’re so shallow.”

“We’re all like this,” he chuckled, “all dudes. The difference is that I don’t pretend I’m anything I’m not. If you and Jina entered a party from opposite ends of the room, nobody would know that Jina had arrived at the party.” The boyishness of his self-delighted grin disarmed Pia. “If you’re going to be an asshole,” she pretended to scold him, “do you have to be such a charming one? Was Jina not smart? Did she not get your jokes?”

“She’s smart. She gets most of them, but she’s actually a year older than me. I guess I told you two lies. I think I said I’d never dated anybody older than 28. She’s going to be 40 on her next birthday. She was coming up on 32 when we started.”

“And that’s too old for a trophy wife, I suppose.”

That grin of his. There was no defense against it. “I don’t make the rules,” he said. “I just follow them. And I might not ask you to marry me. Nowadays, a trophy girlfriend is what you want to have.”

“I think I’ll pass,” Pia said. “In fact, I know I will.”

Asher couldn’t have looked less chastened or deflated, and Pia realized who he reminded her of. Calvin Perez, who’d been a year ahead of her in elementary school, the athletic, smart, good-looking, self-confident — and tough — alpha 5th grader all his male classmates wished they were. Noticing a couple of hateful little demons from Lymmi’s 4th grade class ridiculing her to the verge of tears at the end of lunch one day, Cal had excused himself from his small army of acolytes to come over and tell Lymmi’s tormenters that they had to a count of 10 not to have their jeans yanked down to their ankles in front of everyone on the playground if they didn’t leave Lymmi alone. He had winked at Lymmi exactly as Asher was winking at her now, much as Daddy used to wink at her before he became a widower and fell into the abyss. “You’re not going to be able to keep saying no for long,” he said. It wasn’t a dare so much as a benediction.

She chuckled in spite of herself. “You’re too old for me,” she said. “And too shallow. And stop smirking!”

“Not smirking,” he said, “grinning. Delightedly contemplating our future together.”

“I think maybe you’d better drive me home now,” she said, just barely suppressing another chuckle.

They headed home. Just south of Paradise Cove, they passed an MTA bus. Asher sped up. For a mile or two there, he was going over 80. Then he abruptly pulled to the side of the road and jumped out of the car. Pia realized they were at a bus stop. “Drive yourself home, toots,” Asher said. “I’ve got a bus to catch.”

She expected that he was going to inundate her with gifts. He did, and they weren’t the big ostentatious sort she’d dreaded. Five days passed without his contacting her or sending her anything after he jumped out of his car on Pacific Coast Highway, though someone from his office came over to retrieve it. Then, when Pia was pretty sure he’d thrown in the towel, he sent her a used, very dog-earred paperback edition of You and Your Age-Inappropriate Fiancee. The next he sent her a little plastic bagful of sand, with a note reading, “From our first walk on the beach together.” He sent her, on vinyl, Ellla Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook — during their time together, she’d identified Adele as her favorite singer, while he’d said his own was Ms. Fitzgerald. She’d never owned a conventional turntable, but the next day Asher’s gift was a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, with a note saying he’d probably find the time to help her plug everything in properly if she asked.

She asked. They made love to Ella’s singing. Horowitz didn’t tease her. He didn’t chuckle, “And here you thought you’d be able to keep resisting me.” He beamed, wordlessly, and touched her with greater gentleness than anyone had ever touched her. He said he wanted her to pick out something in which she’d be especially ravishing to wear to the Golden Globes. She was to be his date.

“Oh, fudge,” she said theatrically. “I have to wash my hair that night.”

“I haven’t told you what night it is,” he laughed.

She told Nicole about the invitation. Nicole said,”If you don’t go, and don’t take me shopping with you for something to wear before you go, we’re never speaking again.”

Asher was pleased with the Dolce & Gabbana gown they chose, and Pia found exhilarating the experience of being a rich, powerful, charming man’s date to a glamorous event. If only everyone had known who’d she’d been in elementary school. If only those two little creeps Calvin Perez had chased away that time could see her now. Would they not be as bug-eyed and dry-mouthed with lust as she seemed to make most of the straight men at the event?

At his law firm’s “after party”, Asher’s two best friends’ dates made Pia feel plain and clumsy in comparison. But both young women seemed immediately to perceive her as a peer. It was like being invited to sit at the MGs’ table at lunchtime, times a million.

Baruch’s Charisse and David’s Devora met for lunch twice a week after yoga, and insisted that Pia join them at their next get-together, to which they both turned up in designer spandex gymwear, with Dolce & Gabbana water bottles, from which both sipped as they crossed the parking lot. Nicole had predicted this. “Don’t be surprised if the conversation lags because they’re having a dip of San Pellegrino. Trophy wives and girlfriends are very avid believers in self-hydration.”

Pia felt duty-bound to admit that she was, after four and a half years, still getting used to the idea of being perceived as gorgeous. Devora said, “Join the club. The only reason I wasn’t voted Class Wallflower in 8th grade was my class didn’t elect one. No one would have known who to vote for.”

“Why not?” Charisse wondered airily, and Pia and Devora exchanged quick looks of amusement. “Because,” Devora said, “putting her hand atop Charisse’s, patting it encouragingly, “no one knew we were there, you see.”

Charisse confirmed that she did see, though it was clear she didn’t, and admitted she’d had boys chasing her since around 3rd grade.

Pia wondered how each had met her respective boyfriend. “I was going to be an actress,” Devora said, “until I got chased around one too many casting couches, just trying to get an agent. Finally a girlfriend told me about this gay agent she’d heard was really good. The guy didn’t get her any acting parts, but was a talent scout, so to speak, for the fastest-rising star at his agency, Baruch Glickman, who was always on the lookout for stunning young women.

“I guess I fit the bill,” Devora said. “Before we even met, he began sending me flowers. I was sharing a tiny one-bedroom. There was barely room for a little potted cactus, let alone one of these gigantic floral arrangements. I started giving them to my neighbors. They were thrilled at first, but they didn’t have much more room than I had.

“So one day Barry sends a single rose, with a note saying, “My guess is you’d enjoy having a more spacious pad, all to yourself.”

“‘Crib,’ I thought. ‘Yo, big boy, 1969 wants its slang back.’ But by this time me and my roommate couldn’t stand the sight of each other, so I sent him a text message.’Let’s see what’s available.’ He rented me a two-bed in Santa Monica with an ocean view before we’d even met. Or maybe he’d had a girl stashed there, and got her to move out.”

Charisse hooted with amusement. She’d met her fiancé David by way of David’s having surgically lifted her mother’s face — twice. She’d been one his first patients when he began his practice in the office of Jacob Cohen, at the time the most sought-after plastic surgeon man in Beverly Hills, the self-styled King of the Facelift. By the time she’d returned to him seven years later, he’d opened his own office with the celebrated Pakistan-born breast man Nasir (Freddy) Fareedi, and snatched Cohen’s crown away.

‘And what a job David did on Jo,” Devora said, apparently referring to Charisse’s mother. “You’d think he would have wanted to date her himself.”

“Except,” Charisse said, “that David won’t go anywhere near anybody whose boobs Freddy’s enlarged, or whose face he’s made prettier.”

Given Charisse’s proportions, Pia had certainly had her doubts. “All me, home girl,” Charisse said. “Can you say the same?”

“Do you think we might be able to change the subject?” Pia said, inspiring Charisse to smirk and say, ”I’ll take that as a no.” Pia was reminded so vividly of the meanest of the Mean Girls \that she had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

Pia had no ocean view, and no ocean breezes in the little one-bedroom in West Hollywood she paid for herself, but Asher sent no enormous floral arrangements, so it was adequate. Asher wanted her to leave her job at the restaurant, and promised to pay all her expenses. He wanted Pia to come stay with him at the house he’d rented in Malibu, a couple of miles south of where he’d caught the bus the afternoon he pretended to give her his car, but she said she’d wait until his divorce was finalized.

David, King of the Facelift, wondered via text message if she were available to meet for coffee. She texted back, “Flattered, but I’m seeing someone, one of your best friends. And what about Charisse?” He responded, “LOL. Just coffee, missy. Sheesh!” That amused her, and she texted back, “If you’re foraging for patients, Your Majesty, please be advised I’m reasonably happy with my punim.” She couldn’t say for sure how she knew the Yiddish word for face.

Once again he described himself as laughing out loud, this time with an exclamation point — indeed, with a succession of them. “LOL! Not just hot, but funny too! I insist on the coffee.” She acceded. “On the condition that you give the barista a $20 tip.” He refused. “I give them all $50 or you buy your own coffee.”

She phoned Charisse, who laughed at the idea that she might be upset about David and Pia meeting. “He’s had other girlfriends since Day 1,” she sighed. “He regards monogamy as a dirty word. Knock yourself out.”

“It’s just for coffee,” Pia protested.

“Of course it is, home girl. But coffee has a way of turning into tea.”

Pia wasn’t sure quite how to react to that. “All right,” Charisse said. “All right. That wasn’t funny. I’m not witty like you are.” She seemed to be teasing. Pia hoped so.

She and David met. He fairly drooled at the sight of her. She made a point of not looking at his crotch. He didn’t squander time on small talk. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “You’re hotter than Charisse. I mean, she’s amazing, but you’re more amazing, and in our little club — mine and Ash’s and Barry’s — I don’t want to have the second hottest girlfriend. It was bad enough when we were in school and he lorded over me and Barry because he was the athletic one.

“So what would it take for you to jump ship Asher-wise and be my girlfriend instead?”

Pia hoped he was kidding, and saw that he wasn’t. “Not possible,” she said. “For one thing, I couldn’t do that to Charisse,” she said.

His reaction — that of a spoiled five-year-old — took her by surprise. “Don’t give me that!” he snapped, loudly enough to make a few fellow caffeine enthusiast look over at them in alarm. “You saw her at the Globes, and then hung with her once, and now you’re best friends forever or something? Give me a break!”

The storm passed quickly. He went from livid to sheepish in a heartbeat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have anger issues. I’m sorry, OK?” He looked as though he might cry. “Listen,” he said. “We do this, the three of us. We swap behind each other’s backs, discreetly. Discretion’s non-negotiable — a given. I’m not suggesting that you and I be seen holding hands in the middle of Neiman Marcus on a Saturday afternoon. I go to a lot of medical conventions around the country — around the world, in fact. I’d fly you out to them.”

“And there are no photographers at these conventions?”

He smirked in amusement and tried to get hold of her hand, which she withdrew. “We’re talking conventions of cosmetic surgeons, babe. Of course there’s no media. There’s no more discreet a profession in the world.”

“I’ve got to consider Asher too, of course.”

“Like he considered me when he and my second-to-last fiancee Jemma had their thing? Do you honestly suppose he’s going to be faithful to you? Oh, babe. You’re so young, and so naive. I mean, it’s kind of endearing, but really. You’re among grownups now. And tell me, would it really be so awful if Asher found out about us and dumped you? I understand he’s not even paying your rent!”

“I’ve become fond of the big lug,” Pia said. “His paying my rent would taint our relationship. It would appear I’m being reimbursed for my services. I find that idea distasteful, if I’m honest. I see him because I find his company pleasurable.”

“How can you be sure you wouldn’t find mine much more pleasurable?”

“Well, I guess that expectation is based on how little I’m enjoying it now.”

Flabbergasted. What a wonderful word, and how perfect for the look on his face. Pia spared him having to choose between pretending not to care what she thought of him and trying to put her in her place. She patted his hand and said, “I’m kidding, David. Kidding! Charisse is lucky to have you.”

While he sipped his macchiato to buy a moment and get his patronizing smirk back on, she told him, “For the record, if Ash were to propose, and I were to accept — and we’re talking pure hypotheticals, you understand — I’d probably come to think of our assets as joint.”

David was back in full patronising mode, smirking indulgently. “I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a proposal if I were you, babe.”

Asher proposed. He told Pia that no one had ever made him feel as she did. His elder sister was married to a former might-have-been rock star who still wrote songs for his own pleasure. Asher had commissioned him to write a song for him to play for Pia. Its chorus went, “We trip the light fantastic/ My humour’s less sarcastic/ Elastic stretches more whenever Pia calls.” Pia loved it, and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more romantic line than the elastic one.” They were never more delighted with each other than at that moment.

They negotiated. He agreed not to see other women. “I hope you understand what a mega-major big deal that is for me,” he brooded. In return, he wanted her to agree that they wouldn’t set a date immediately, and that she would keep the wonderful news to herself. She agreed on not setting a date, but not on keeping their engagement secret. “Look at it this way,” she said. “Their knowing you’re engaged might make a lot of girls hesitant to sleep with you, which in turn will make it easier for you to keep the promise you just made to me.”

She told Charisse and Devora, who of course informed David and Baruch, who of course gave Asher a hard time. But he didn’t back out of the deal. “No way,” he said. “I know how much they envy me. I know for a fact that Baruch thinks of you as the most beautiful woman in Los Angeles.”

“And the smartest, and funniest, and kindest?”

“Oh, shut up,” he said, with deep affection, as he always did when asked to acknowledge that she was anything more than physically breathtaking. It wasn’t as though he’d never acknowledged the other stuff.

He bought what she thought must be the biggest house in Topanga Canyon for them to live in together. Their deal was that if she got her choice of which canyon to live in — Pia had chosen Topanga because it was the most bohemian — he got to choose the actual abode. The house — all 12,000 feet of it, all nine bathrooms, six bedrooms, stable, swimming pool, and tennis court — had previously been leased by the rock star Rogue Dunston. Asher didn’t like that a long and difficult drive separated the house from his office in Beverly Hills. Pia told him it was the price of having the smartest, funniest, and kindest fiancee in LA. They flew to the Azores to get married, very quietly.

Pia wanted to become a psychotherapist. Asher hated the idea of her enrolling at UCLA and being surrounded by handsome young men her own age. “Says the man,” she said,
“who hasn’t spent a lot of time at UCLA.” She assured him that, while, for all she knew, they were smart, funny, and kind, the male undergraduates she’d be surrounded by were generally pretty grubby and slovenly, whereas his impeccable grooming, even if it had (correctly!) suggested narcissism, was one of the things that had attracted her to Asher. “God knows it wasn’t your looks per se,” she said, and they both laughed.

It wasn’t Asher’s not being good-looking that caused a problem. It was her graduate advisor, Robert Cheng. stealing her heart. Well, not actually stealing it — knowing she was married, he didn’t make the first move — but winning it, embodying the sort of kindness and empathy Asher just wasn’t capable of, reminding her of her father in all the right ways, being patient and generous and encouraging. Asher had never been able to understand why Pia wanted to spend her days in classrooms and libraries, with a goal of listening to people bitch and moan when she finally got licensed.

When she told Asher that she was leaving him, he was furious, but not before incredulous. He’d been listed among the 20 highest earning attorneys in California a few months before. He’d said he was going to buy her a practice when she get her license. He’d scoffed at her intention to work for the county, treating the homeless and others who probably couldn’t afford the help they needed.

She hadn’t confided her dissatisfaction with Asher to Charisse and Devora. Charisse had surrendered her position on David’s arm first to Faith, who in turn had been replaced by Natasha, while Devora had yielded to Joy, Camille, and Rebeka, whom Joy had managed to supplant. Both Charisse and Devora had advised Pia by email that their palimony settlements precluded their discussing their relationships with David and Baruch.

“I don’t think you understand,” Asher said when he regained his composure after becoming scary with rage when first advised Pia was leaving. “Guys like me don’t get left. We do the leaving. Nobody in their right mind walks away from the quality of life someone like me can provide.” He was getting closer to deafening with every syllable. “If we split up,” he shrieked, “it’ll be because I dumped you. Is that fucking clear, Pia?”

She felt more sorry for him than intimidated. Her becoming neither furious nor terrified seemed to make him feel foolish, and he calmed down. “OK,” he said. “I get it. I’m 44. You wanted a younger dude. You’re leaving me for some hunk with abs. And maybe there’s a little antisemitism in there, huh, Pia? Maybe I’m a little bit too ethnic for you?”

“He’s 48, Ash. No abs. His dad’s from Hong Kong and his mom’s from Seoul. He’s pretty darned ethnic.”

She’d never seen him sneer as he was sneering now. If she had, she’d never have loved him. “A Chinaman, huh? Or is Chinaman one of those things you’re not supposed to say anymore? Like Oriental. We’re supposed to say Asian now instead, right?”

“I’m sorry to have hurt you, Ash,” she said, with all the gentleness in the world. “I really am. We’ve had some wonderful years together. If you allow me to, I’ll continue to love you. I’ll remain someone you can confide in, someone on your side.”

For a fraction of a moment, he looked nine, and as though he might burst into tears. But what would the others say if it were to get out that he’d gone soft at a moment like this? He got his sneer back on. “You might be interested to know, Lymmi, that I’ve been thinking of dumping you for months.” He’d never addressed her as Lymmi before, and she couldn’t remember having told him that had been her name in the time of her blossoming. “Too much sitting in classrooms and libraries, babe. You’re thickening around the middle. I’m not sure if I’d even give you a 9 anymore. Don’t be here when I get home.”

She was not.

Within 48 hours of Asher ordering her out of their house, Baruch had phoned her to insist that they meet. “I know how hard this must be for you,” he said. It emerged that he wanted to meet not to console her, but to persuade her to start dating him. “Ash might have been the athlete among the three of us,” he said, “but if you saw our tax returns, you’d see I could buy and sell. him.” Just to discombobulate him, Pia said she’d have jumped at the chance to become his arm candy if she hadn’t already resumed dating David.

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