Read Online The Late, Lamented Molly Marx by Sally Koslow - Free Book Online

me the assignment was routine. In those days, I ran a magazine’s decorating department staffed by four slaves who bushwhacked ahead of me to set up. The magazine was photographing Mayfair district houses, each chicer than the next. It was the kind of job I could do in my sleep, assuming the owners didn’t freak about the photographer’s aides-de-camp dropping cigarette ashes on Mummy’s threadbare rugs. Oh, there’d be dogs to corral—the Brits always had dogs. But as long as I kept them happy with biscuits and picked up the nightly bar tab for the owners and our gang, I expected peace in the kingdom. We’d already made reservations at numerous restaurants deemed “bloody brilliant” by
Time Out London
.
    “I’m a fashion guy,” Luke said. “But I don’t think I can stand one more model tantrum. From now on I want to be all about inanimate objects.”
    “I don’t blame you. Anything I can do—” I started to say, but the loudspeaker interrupted to announce that our flight would be delayed—by how long the plummy voice didn’t say.
    After Luke returned to gather a second round of drinks, I reported in to Barry, as a wife is supposed to do, even when she’s begun to realize she’s in a continual state of low-grade anger iced with disappointment. I doubted he’d be home, but I planned to leave a message.
    He answered on the first ring. “Really, Molly?” Barry said, and seemed to listen attentively to my tale of transportation inconvenience. “How about I pick you up and take you to dinner?”
    Suddenly Barry was acting like an ideal husband while I was guzzling wine with a guy who was looking better by the sip, someone I’d be working with across an ocean for six days. Into what alternate reality had the airport limo deposited me? “You would do that?” I asked, incredulous.
    “Why not?” he said. “I’ll hop in the car—get there in, say, forty minutes? Tomorrow’s my day off. I can afford to get to bed late.”
    I felt like a horse’s ass. Who was this spouse so concerned for my well-being? I wondered as Luke returned with more wine. “Barry, I love you for offering, but they aren’t saying when my plane will leave. You could drive all the way out here and I’d take off before you even parked.”
    He waited a few seconds before responding. “Got it,” he said.
    “It just seems better this way,” I said. That sounded feeble. “But it would have been … fun.” Feebler still.
    “Well, good luck,” he said. “Love you.”
    “Love you, too.” I said it loudly, as much to remind myself I was married as to alert Luke in case he’d missed my rings.
    Eventually, the two of us boarded and were seated side by side. I debated whether to proceed with dabbing Neosporin in my ears and above my lip, my preferred retaliation against the germ warfare that is airplane air.
    The Neosporin stayed in the bag. Luke and I continued to chat, and somewhere above Greenland I discovered that he, too, was a twin, an identical twin. His brother, Micah, taught English at Dartmouth.
    “Maybe we should fix up your brother with my sister,” I said.
    “I think not,” he said. “My brother’s married. But why not me? That is,” he added, “if your sister’s anything like you.” The fourth glass of wine—or maybe it was the fifth—had erased the shy guy I thought I’d met earlier in the evening.
    It’s not as if the Virgin Mary appeared in my window to announce that this companion would ever be anyone important in my life, but at that moment I realized that even though I didn’t know what to do with Luke, I didn’t want to regift him, to my sister or to anyone else.
    “Why not, indeed?” I said. “I’ll get on it as soon as I’m back.”
    My first lie.
    Luke was dovetailing far too perfectly with my doubts. I needed to shut down, despite the fact that I would have happily jabbered all the way to England. “Better get some sleep,” I said. “Supposed to meet my staff tomorrow at eleven to