Free Gossip by Beth Gutcheon

they wanted to go to school, and alimony until she remarried, with cost of living adjustments built in. And it can’t have occurred to Richard, fundamentally fair as he is, that she would stay so angry for so long that he’d be supporting her for life.

Chapter 6
    T hat was a difficult winter. My friend’s very imposing wife, Althea, had a health event and came home to be treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Surgery and chemo didn’t seem to slow her down. She turned up in Women’s Wear Daily every five minutes, wearing a series of turbans on her bald head that were so becoming to her it started a craze. For a while half the fashionable women of New York looked like escapees from the Kasbah.
    Naturally, I kept a low profile, avoided Althea’s haunts, and was on my own a great deal. I took piano lessons and conversational French. Suddenly without plans for the weekends, I took a ballet class with Dinah for exercise. Thanksgiving was a can of turkey hash in my apartment. I thought if I stayed home all day my friend might shake free for an hour or two, but he didn’t. I began to hate my silent answering machine.
    I did go to Dinah’s for Christmas and took too many presents for Nicky. Christmas night she and I went out to see The Buddy Holly Story so that Richard could spend time at the apartment with RJ and Nicky. When we got back both boys were in tears, and by the time he left, we all were, Richard included. Christmas is a cruel time for sad people.
    Nicky was a terror that winter. At a birthday party for an older child in the building, he came unglued because none of the shiny presents was for him. When the birthday girl wouldn’t give him a wooden puzzle he’d fastened onto, although she wasn’t playing with it herself, he ran at her and bit her hard on the arm. The child’s mother got to Nicky in a flash, pulled him off her daughter, and bit him back, yelling, “How do you like it?” as Nicky howled in disbelief. Then Dinah snatched Nicky, shouting, “Don’t you touch my child!” as the hostess yelled that it was the only way children would learn what it felt like. For years afterward the two families wouldn’t ride in the same elevator. And I’m sorry to report that Dinah began to dine out on the story, so Nicky quickly learned that the whole thing had been somehow funny.
    Mrs. Bachman retired in the spring, and though she’d recommended me, the store thought I was too young to head the department; they brought in a woman from Neiman Marcus named Marylin Coombs. We had a rocky start together and never entirely recovered. Different manners, different styles. She had a big sense of humor, and many of our out-of-town clients adored her.
    It was also that winter when I ran across Avis Binney again, after so many years, at the opera. January 1979, Luisa Miller ; I recently found the Playbill . I still remember the way the colors of the women’s costumes drew your eye to Luisa, who alone was wearing blue. A client had given me tickets at the last minute, two in the middle of the fifth row. The price of each one was about what I paid to rent my apartment for a month. Having failed to find an escort at such short notice, I’d put my coat on my empty seat and sat reading the program, waiting for the lights to dim. “I’m just alone because this was so last-minute, you see . . .” I explained in my head to no one. “My friend would have loved to come, but he . . .” and a couple arrived at the seats on the other side of my coat chair. I kept my eyes down but could see that the lady was turning a very expensive fur inside out and preparing to stuff it under her chair. “Please,” I said, “share my personal closet,” and I patted the spare seat.
    â€œAre you sure?” said the grateful couple, who were already piling their coats on top of mine. They were silver people, with gleaming gray hair