AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But then Marie surprises me. She removes her reading glasses and tucks some stray hair behind her ear. I suddenly realize that she looks upset, drawn and tired, like Meryl in that one scene from The Devil Wears Prada.
“I hope you don’t think too poorly of me after coming here,” she says. “I understand this crowd was probably not what you expected.”
“Of course I don’t,” I lie.
She looks at me pointedly. I won’t be able to take the easy way out.
I twist my mouth. “I don’t really see what you have in common with them,” I admit.
“Money,” she says simply.
“But why invite them at all?” I ask.
She laughs wryly. “Come on, Liz. You know this game. Cherie is trying to get me to support her bid for a board seat. Tiff’s father asked me to humor her plans for a skincare line in exchange for a discount on our next advertising campaign. The Waltons need a loan.
“Once these parties were just a chance to relax with our friends. Our real friends. Over the years it’s slowly morphed into an exchange of favors.”
“So when do you get to see your real friends?” I ask.
Marie shakes her head. “God, I don’t even recall the last time I saw most of them. I’m afraid Bill and I don’t have much in common with them anymore.”
“They don’t share your penchant for sci-fi novels?” I try.
Marie snorts. “Ha. Actually that’s the kind of thing they’d love. But nobody knows I still have a passing interest with that trash. Bill doesn’t even know.”
“Why would you keep that from him?” I ask.
Marie shrugs. “He’d think it’s stupid. Immature. To tell you the truth, we used to be quite a couple of nerds.” She reaches into a box and digs for a moment, finally unearthing a battered photo album and offering it to me.
I flip through the pictures and can’t suppress my gleeful smile at the pictures of a startlingly young Bill and Marie. There they are with lightsabers outside a marquee advertising The Empire Strikes Back. In another, they’re at a convention, dressed like Superman and Lois Lane. In each photo they look young and in love, arms around each other, adoration in their eyes.
“What happened?” I ask softly.
Marie wipes at her eye and takes the album back, closing it without looking, like the photos cause her pain.
“We grew up,” she says. “Or, well, Bill did. I never was quite able to enjoy tennis.” She sighs. “But it was the expected thing. How we were supposed to fit in. It was gradual at first and then suddenly Bill and I were more parents to our business than partners who had anything in common. I guess I should have ended things years ago, but I stuck my head into my work, ignored our problems, and then one day I looked up and realized we’d become completely different people.”
My chest tightens. How the hell were Rhett and I going to make things last? We aren’t even that similar now.
“Surely there was some sign,” I say, a bit desperately. “An indication things were going to end up here?”
Marie frowns, and then she says, “You know what? I actually did just come across something from what I consider to be the beginning of the end.”
She goes to another box and digs about inside. Finally she comes up with a baggy blue women’s shirt.
“A shirt?” I ask.
“A costume,” she corrects. “You’ve seen Night of the Comet, right?”
“Is that a movie?” I ask. It sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t tell why.
She rolls her eyes. “Young people always miss the classics,” she says. “Yes, it’s a movie. From 1984. Catherine Mary Stewart? Kelli Maroney?” she tries.
I can only shrug.
“Well anyway, Bill and I had just made it. After ten years of effort, our software was flying off the shelves. We had more money than we knew what to do with and were suddenly running in circles that could instantly tell we had no idea how to handle it. I never cared about my clothes, but all of a sudden I was getting laughed at in restaurants. Bill didn’t golf and he made a fool of himself on the course with the head of our distributer. It was a nightmare.
“But little by little we were adjusting. Then Comic Con came around. We’d gone every year since our first date and I was so excited to finally be able to get some really high tech costumes. But Bill? He wanted to go as Hector and Regina from Night of the Comet.”
