Free Arm Candy by Jill Kargman Page B

get tangled into a ball of indistinguishable links.
    “I’m . . . happy, I am.”
    “You don’t sound so convinced to me.”
    “No, no, I am . . . everything’s great.”
    “Careful there, Chasie. You keep telling yourself that and you might believe it.”
    Dr. Smith knocked as he opened the door.
    “Mrs. DuPree, good afternoon!” he bellowed as Chase rose from the bed to shake his hand.
    “Hello, Doctor,” Chase said, shaking his hand. “I should be getting back to work, Grandma. I’ll be back later, before dinner.”
    “All right, darling. See you later, sweetheart.”
    “Love you.”
    He closed the door gently behind him and got back to work just in time, as always.

14
    We know we’re getting old when the only thing we want for our birthday is not to be reminded of it.
    —Anonymous
     
     
     
    A s Eden stared down the barrel of thirty-nine, she began to look back on her life and her choices and consider her future needs. Fall was approaching, and soon Eden and Cole would order twelve moving boxes to pack him up for college. She cried as she left him at JFK to head off to Stanford, where he had been accepted early decision. The house seemed empty, like when she had first moved in. Except that back then, the massive home was filled with the bubbling energy of the pair’s joint excitement, both for their artistic endeavors and for each other.
    That was long gone. As Eden walked around the living room, picking up a sweatshirt Cole had left behind, she feared that she was falling slowly into an abyss of frustration and depression. Those Prozac ads with the little cartoon blobs with sad frowny faces started to speak to her.
    “Are you not enjoying the things you used to?” Check.
    “Are you feeling like an outsider?” Yup.
    “Are you dreading social engagements?” Hell, yes.
    “Is your partner making you feel underappreciated, invisible, and, oh by the way, is he fucking twenty-somethings behind your back?” Ding, ding, ding! Okay, that one wasn’t in the commercial, but it was starting to be difficult to ignore as fact. Little by little as the weeks passed and she took stock of Cole’s departure and her empty nest and empty chest, Eden weighed her fate. And then she weighed her options.
    But where would Eden go? What was she going to do? Leave this life? Start all over again like old times? Hell-to-the-No . She would do what everyone else did: Deal with the fact that you can’t always have everything. And how spoiled was she? She had it all!
    Here she was, at the height of fame and fortune, in a place where everyone would want to be. But like Sheila E. once crooned about the glamorous life, “Without love, it ain’t much.” Eden always thought love was for naïve Hallmark card buyers, a kick-in-the-pants cocktail of pheromones. But in the complete and total absence of romantic love, which she now realized her relationship was, she starting to have a feeling she never had known: longing. She didn’t know what that intangible lack was, what it was she yearned for, but she knew the growing emptiness inside her was getting worse as time quickly passed.
    Eden popped more happy pills, drank more wine, but they were only temporary fixes for what she would inevitably face in the morning: an even bigger pit in her gut, not to mention the bed she shared with Otto. She slept only on her left side, her back to him. And even if her every muscle wanted her to roll onto her right, she fought it. She couldn’t bear to face him, knowing full well he slept beside so many others. For years she truly didn’t care. But more and more lately she found herself getting suckered into romantic stories, movies about true love, and she would even find herself staring at older couples holding hands or dining together. Sometimes she went to films by herself to pass the time, watching the tilted heads of couples watching the screen, their hands touching the popcorn, or resting on each other’s thighs. She started to