Free The View from Here by Deborah Mckinlay

to Patsy’s princess.
    â€œI’ll tell you one thing for sure,” she continued. “That marriage of hers isn’t the fortress she likes to think it is.”
    Suddenly she turned and winked like a little girl with a secret.
    I smiled back, caught, uncomprehending, in whatever amusement had diverted her.
    The men got back not long after us. I was pleased to see them, sunburned and bedraggled in their open-necked shirts. The room filled up again with deep, men’s laughter and squealing, teased children. The edgy flicker that had flared over lunch faded and seemed completely forgotten.

THREE
    I T HAD BEEN twenty-one months and almost as many days since Adam had smiled at me across the tanned thighs of another girl at an overheated party in Los Angeles. He had been heading east and I west. We were both voyagers, drifters really, like so many people were then, seeing the world. I followed Adam’s smile almost directly to bed and from there to San Francisco and from there to New Orleans. All together, with him and before, I had been traveling for more than three years and thought myself, in the wake of this slim history, rather sophisticated. But then the Severances had come along, with their gay friends and their grandly casual outlook on life, and I had begun to realize there was a great deal of the world that I did not know at all.
    â€œDear girl,” Patsy said, “they’re honeymooners.”
    I felt horribly naive. We were picnicking, all of us, on the beach and I had commented, watching Bee Bee and Ned at the water’s edge, on their apparent affection for each other. Now, in the distance, we saw Ned trip a playful hand over the curve at the base of Bee Bee’s spine.
    â€œThat marriage is barely broken in, honey,” Patsy went on. “It’s still chock-full of high-school freshness.”
    The laughter was general.
    Mason, rescuing me, explained, “Ned is Bee Bee’s third husband.”
    â€œShe got Lesley from the first one and a darling little fortune from the second one,” Patsy finished.
    Richard, his fair eyes straining against the sun, looked at Mason. “How’d that second guy make his money?”
    Mason shrugged. “Steel…stocks…dime stores. Fingers in a lot of pies, I gather.”
    â€œAnd a lot of cocktail waitresses,” Sally added blandly.
    I stared. Her appearance was so immaculate that any hint of crudeness from her was mildly shocking.
    She picked up a magazine. “The man was a philandering lowlife. Bee Bee earned every cent she wrung out of the bastard.” She plucked at a glossy page, pinching the corner grimly. “Where men are concerned, Frankie, always go straight for getting even. Getting mad isn’t worth the frown lines.”
    I was freed, luckily, from having to produce the kind of response for which I lacked the wit by Richard’s low, admiring whistle. “She sure got herself a sweet deal.”
    Sally ignored him. Her eyes, lifting from the magazine, took on the flinty look I had seen there before. “Divorce is bloody for women,” she said. Then, just as suddenly softening again, brushing off the thin fizz of attention the strenuousness of her remark had generated, she went on lightly, “Well…everybody blames the woman, don’t they? The man just dusts himself off and moves in with the new version, generally shinier, while the old has-been wifey is left to stew over her failings and save up her alimony for plastic surgery. And the social life, forget it. The husband and the floozy get all the invites, and the divorcée gets to opt for a quick, tradedown remarriage or a series of endless, inebriate lunches with other divorcées.” Patsy tittered at this, and Sally smiled at her, finesse fully recovered. “I swear half the restaurants in Manhattan make a living out of those dames, bitching over their noon martinis. They call all the waiters by