Free The Not-So-Perfect Man by Valerie Frankel

hard. She carefully turned the soil, keeping it moist. Planting seeds.
    “You have two sisters, don’t you?” he asked.
    Ilene said, “Betty is the youngest.”
    “I met her once,” he said.
    Ilene didn’t remember that meeting. She said, “I don’t think Betty’s ever come to the office.”
    David said, “We ran into her on the street. We’d had a lunch at the Blue Water Grill and ran into her in Union Square afterwards. She was wearing a huge down coat. It looked like she’d wrapped a comforter around her body.” Ilene was drawing a complete blank. “Less than a year ago,” he prompted.
    “You have an amazing memory,” she said.
    “I never forget a coat,” he said.
    Ilene looked out David’s window, at his view of Minetta Lane. The block was curved. Most of the buildings were a 150 years old or more. If one could delete cars from the picture, the street would be straight out of an Edith Wharton novel.
    David opened one of his moving boxes and pulled out books. “Betty looks a lot like you,” he said.
    “She does not!” said Ilene.
    “She has your face.”
    “On a size fourteen body.”
    “I haven’t told you everything. About Georgia,” David said suddenly. “Let me get this off my chest right away: Georgia had an affair. With a teacher at Stephanie’s school. It’s over between them. I don’t know the full story, and I don’t want to know. Georgia denies it, but I bet she wants to move to Vermont just so she can take Stephanie out of that school and get away from him.”
    Ilene’s mouth went dry. This affair complicated matters significantly. His emotional recovery might take longer than the six months she’d planned for.
    “Forgive me if this is too personal,” started Ilene.
    “If it’s too personal, I won’t answer,” he said.
    “Has the affair destroyed your faith in women?”
    “I thought you were going to ask me how I feel,” he said.
    Ilene hated asking a man about his feelings. She preferred men kept their feelings to themselves. Nothing was quite as unappetizing as a quivering heart on a plate. The sight of a man crying? It could make a person sick.
    Ilene said, “You can keep your feelings to yourself.”
    David said, “I hate it when people ask me to open a vein and bleed all over them.”
    She nodded. “The context is always so negative.”
    “No one ever wants the update on your unbridled happiness,” David agreed. “Help me with these books.”
    Ilene walked toward him. He dumped a stack in her arms and pointed at the bookshelf against the wall. “I’m sure I’ll trust a woman again, but next time, I’ll be more careful,” he said.
    “How?” she asked.
    “I’ve made a mental list of qualities I’d like to find in a woman,” he said. “Emotional strength, some sign that a woman can handle obstacles and hardships. She has to be optimistic, too. No more always seeing the dark side, like Georgia. Someone with kids would be nice. And some experience with marriage so we’d both have a history to improve on.”
    Ilene smiled. Had he not just described Frieda exactly? Don’t push, she reminded herself. To keep her tongue silent, Ilene looked at her book pile and found a five-volume series on World War II. “Are you a Hitler freak?”
    “I was a history major,” said David. “Thesis on America’s point-of-entry in nineteenth-and twentieth-century wars. You should see the Civil War series. Thousands and thousands of pages. The war lasted five years. It took me six years to read the books.”
    “Now that’s commitment,” Ilene said, admiring his love of history.
    “Did Georgia read these, too?” she asked.
    He shook his head. “She read romance novels,” he said. “She liked hearts and loins, not arms.”
    “Funny,” said Ilene. “So the Civil War series took you six years. How long did you say your marriage lasted?”
    He laughed. “The marriage followed the path of the Revolutionary War series. Two years to get through, with a great