Free The Late, Lamented Molly Marx by Sally Koslow

disrupt her schedule. I want what’s best for our granddaughter.”
    “Barry!” Lucy bleats my husband’s name as if it’s profanity. She’s down to her silk long johns and the sports bra that compresses her DDs. My dad looks the other way. “What a wuss. Has his mommy call.”
    Lucy can’t get a rise out of my parents, who’ve seen it all before. My mother walks to her only living daughter and begins to stroke her matted hair. Lucy shakes off her hand. “I’m calling him myself,” she says.

Eleven

REARVIEW MIRROR
    n London, I loved that Luke was far more attentive than your usual photographer. He wasn’t afraid to ask my opinion, courtship more subtle and effective than roses or the occasional deep, meaningful gaze. “How do you want the shot set up?” “Here or there?” “Think we got it, or do we shoot another roll?” As he picked my brain he would casually touch my arm, the electric whisper of flesh brushing flesh ending almost before it began. He had to notice that I never pulled away.
    True to his word, Luke wasn’t a partier. Every night he bowed out early. Whether he took dinner in his room or got together with friends—or a woman—he’d never say, and only on the last night did Luke join our posse. “To Molly!” he toasted as the evening began. “Who allowed me to pass through this firing squad barely bruised.”
    “To Luke,” I said, raising my wineglass across the table and admiring his appeal, which was soft enough around the edges for me to believe that he was deep and sensitive. “And beautiful results.”
    They were. The next week, when my magazine’s editor scrutinized our pictures, her praise was like a bath full of bubbles. “I don’t know why this Luke Delaney’s been wasting his time shooting fashion,” she declared. “Put him under contract before someone else does.”
    By the end of the month she’d signed him. From then on, Luke and I weren’t just thrown together on shoots—we began speaking almost every day when we didn’t have an actual meeting. There was always a detail over which to obsess: South Beach or Belize? The fussy food stylist or the lazy one who plied us with charm and homemade pumpkin muffins? Brocade love seat or creamy Italian chaise?
    This happened just as Brie abandoned modeling—and me, temporarily—for Columbia Law School. While she chewed through contracts and torts, our daily calls dwindled and Luke began standing in as my best friend. At least that’s what I told myself. He gave excellent text message and the two of us could soon be mistaken for juniors exchanging gossip in trigonometry class.
    Through my rearview mirror, I see that as far as my marriage went, Barry and I were as close to bliss as we were ever going to come—if only I’d recognized it. He didn’t worship me, but then again, I didn’t see myself as worthy of adoration. He didn’t seek my opinions, and that offered a certain relief, since on many topics I’m not sure I would have been confident enough to voice any. He continued to point out flaws I never knew I had—my legs could have been longer from the knee to the ankle or my answers to people’s questions shorter. I usually could see his point. Barry and I settled into a routine that may have been a few hallelujahs short of ecstasy but riffed on movies, Sunday night Chinese at Kitty’s, and four-course dinners in the company of couples just like us, who owned ten place settings of barely used bone china and dreams to match. Only now do I realize that Barry and I spent virtually no time alone, face-to-face. Not counting bed.
    I didn’t think of myself as unhappy. I thought of myself as adjusting, and on that I scored an A for effort. If Barry called to say that something had come up, that he’d need to miss dinner, for instance, I wouldn’t settle in with a soup bowl full of Raisinets and a large box of tissues. Instead, I’d read an intelligent novel while I ate lean grilled protein, a leafy green