Her

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Praise

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Acknowledgments

About the Author

ALSO BY LAURA ZIGMAN

Copyright Page

FOR BRENDAN

ACCLAIM FOR LAURA ZIGMAN’S

Her

“Laced with insight. It’s a bit like juicy gossip—you can’t wait to get the dirt.” —Boston Magazine

“Hilarious . . . thoughtful. . . . Zigman . . . has fun proving that sometimes the hard part in life isn’t finding Mr. Right—it’s hanging on to him that’s tough.” —Orlando Sentinel

“It’s impossible not to like Elise, the down-to-earth heroine of Her.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Laura Zigman conveys neurosis, misperception and desperation with a deft comic hand . . . edgy hilarity and snappy, cinematic dialogue.” —The Miami Herald

“Zigman’s latest contribution to the ‘single girl’ genre of fiction is filled with funny repartee among hip characters who know their way around designer clothing shops. Zigman’s fans will enjoy this entertaining, fast-paced book.” —Book

“Zigman’s sharp and funny prose makes us sympathize with Elise even as she goes off the deep end.” —Raleigh News & Observer

“Laura Zigman has knocked one out of the park with her third novel Her. With her signature straightforward style and casual prose, Zigman serves up another post feminism heroine.” —The Milford Daily News

“Zigman makes her heroine neurotic, jealous and believable. . . . Check Her out.” —People

Prologue

She was my fiancé’s ex-fiancée; the mother of all exes; my worst nightmare incarnate. Exceeder of all expectations; destroyer of trust; obliterator of reason, rationality, sanity, she was my nemesis, my tormentor, the one I could not get over.

Her name was Adrienne, and I knew she had come to cause trouble.

It didn’t take long.

Of French descent (France, not Canada); a graduate of Yale (master’s in art history); an avid rock and mountain climber (Kilimanjaro, 1995); horrifyingly gorgeous (more, much more, about that later); and recently single (Francesco, her Spanish painter-boyfriend, had, it seemed, once too often threatened suicide if she refused to marry him), she dropped back into Donald’s life, and thus into mine, right before our wedding.

I’ll cut to the chase:

I did not handle it well.

I behaved badly; became unhinged; undone, an addict in constant need of a fix.

Given the same set of circumstances, I doubt that many women would, or could, have acted much differently.

At least, that’s what I used to tell myself.

It happened quickly:

One minute I was taste-testing cakes, canapés, champagnes; sniffing stationery; fondling tulle (or was it toile?); the next, I was stalking Adrienne. This transition, or transformation, of mine, from bride-to-be to madwoman, was inexplicably seamless, raising all sorts of questions (namely: Had I always been latently insane?) which I was far too busy spying on Adrienne to answer. In almost no time at all, she had become the object of my obsession; the subject of endless speculation, conversation, jealous suspicion; my cross to bear.

Most of the time, when you hear about the other woman in a story like this, she is almost never as ravishing, compelling, beautiful, stunning, elegant, mysterious, sensuous, sinewy, alluring, breathtaking, captivating, insecurity-inducing as you imagine her to be. Most of the time, when you actually lay eyes upon the nemesis in the story (the boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend; the husband’s ex-wife; their assorted female colleagues, secretaries, upstairs neighbors), she is almost always anything but.

Not Adrienne.

Usually, in reality, in the cold hard light of day, the other woman in a story like this is almost always this: Mousy. Plain. Insignificant. Mildly attractive. Nothing special. No competition.

Upon closer inspection (and several more vodka tonics imbibed in a dark bar where you and your tortured jealous friend are drooling drunkenly over bad snapshots of this unfortunate woman) she will even prove to appear worse: Thick-necked. Thick-thighed. Thick-ankled. Over-nipped. Over-tucked. Over-plucked. Over-tweezed. Insipid. Insufferable. Inbred.

Again, not Adrienne. Imagine this:

Willowy. Exotic. Intoxicating. Dark-haired. Thick-lipped. Bigboobed.

I could go on. And on. And on. And later, I will.

(All this gleaned from a single photograph snatched from one of Donald’s albums: the two of them, years earlier, in the Hamptons one soft-lit late August afternoon.)

Get the picture? I did. Immediately. And it wasn’t good. And I hadn’t even seen her in person. (That’s a whole other story, the first time we met. A preview—think push-up bra, skintight T-shirt and jeans, gelatinous lip gloss—her, unfortunately, not me).

So I went a little crazy.

Can you blame me?

1

We were, as it happened, Donald and I, deciding that evening on how we would have our wedding invitations printed—Engraving? Thermography? Lithography?—when Adrienne, Donald’s exfiancée, called to share her good news: she was leaving New York to accept a job in Washington, where we lived, just after the first of the year.

It was late November.

We were planning an April wedding.

And until that instant when the phone rang and Donald ran to the Caller ID box by the desk and froze, I had been planning— perhaps naively, perhaps idiotically—on taking the high road when it came to Adrienne and her relentless pursuit of friendship with Donald. I had vowed, without any true understanding of just how deep-rooted and, well, virulent, my particular strain of jealousy was, I see now, to put an end to my obsession. My suspicion. My frenzied insecurity. I had vowed, as they say, at long last, to get a grip.

On my demons.

On my nemesis.

On her.

Clearly this was wishful thinking on my part; a momentary lapse of delusional optimism (quite common, I’d read, with most brides-to-be), for nothing of the sort—maturity, acceptance, suffering in silence—was in the cards.

Especially now that she—Adrienne—would be living, as it were, in our backyard.

We had been staring intently at three pieces of Crane’s Ecruwhite Kid Finish stationery stock that I’d managed to sneak out of Neiman Marcus’s sample book as “souvenirs”—the salesman, stout, balding, moist, had excused himself to take a phone call from an important customer: “And will this be a surprise celebration for the Chief Justice?” (This was, after all, Washington.) The three sample invitations were identical except for the method of printing (which is why I had lifted them: to better understand the hefty price differential) and the surely fictional inviters and betrotheds (Mr. and Mrs. Henry Stewart Evans request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Katherine Leigh to Mr. Brian Charles Jamison. . . . Mr. and Mrs. Wendell Fields, III, request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Tiffany Jane to Mr. Phinneas Welch. . . . Our joy will be more complete if you will share in the marriage of our daughter Blah blah blah to Mr. Blah blah blah.). Running our fingers slowly and carefully over the print on each card; holding them up to the light; sniffing them, even (my suggestion), yielded nothing. We were failures in the study and appreciation of fine printing techniques.

“Okay, I give up,” Donald said, throwing the invitation he was holding down onto the table and leaning back in his chair until its joints creaked ominously. “Which is which?”

“Beats me.” Neiman’s had, I explained, not been kind enough to reward my little theft by providing me the answers on the back of each like a set of helpful flash cards.

Donald brought his chair abruptly forward, sat upright, and yawned passionately. He stretched his arms across the table, pushing the sample invitations aside as he did, and reached for my hands.

“Honey?” he said languidly.

“What?” I said flatly.

“May I speak frankly?”

“Must you?”

Had he ever spoken any other way? Couldn’t we, just once, I wondered, get through some task (eating dinner, washing dishes, having sex) without his need to speak frankly?

“Fine. Speak,” I said, waving my hand, giving up. Relieved now to have license to speak his mind (a technicality: he spoke his mind quite freely without my permission, as you’ll see), he smiled broadly, then brought his shoulders up in a fake cringe, as if to indicate that he felt just terrible about what he was going to say— even though, I knew, he didn’t.

“I’m bored,” he said, finally, his confession a guilty pleasure (he was a true Catholic, through and through). “I have to be honest, I’m having a hard time caring”—broad smile, shoulders up, fake cringe—“about how the invitations get printed. I mean, why are we doing this?”

I couldn’t have been more bored myself, but I wouldn’t have admitted it for the world. Instead, I let my mouth sag slightly into a sad pout.

“Doing what?” I asked. “Getting married or discussing the invitations?”

The phone rang.

“Discussing the invitations, of course,” he said. He reached to give my hands a reassuring little squeeze but I withheld them for effect. “I want to get married.”

The phone rang again.

“Because.” I was about to explain how costly engraving was compared to the other options and how since we couldn’t tell the difference anyway, we could, with a completely clear conscience, opt for the cheapest method of the three—lithography—but I was too distracted by the third ring of the telephone. On the beginning of the fourth ring he rose from the dining room table where we’d been sitting, took three steps over to the desk, leaned across it, turned back to look at me, and cringed—this time for real.

“It’s Adrienne.”

2

Donald mentioned Adrienne the first time we met. Told me that they were still very good friends. The way realtors will tell you what comes with a house they are selling and what does not. The refrigerator conveys; the window treatments do not convey. What he was telling me that day was clear: Adrienne conveyed.

We were on the Delta Shuttle one bleak blustery March afternoon a year ago, coming back from New York, where, coincidentally, we both had once lived, and going to Washington, where, coincidentally, we both now lived.

Never having met anyone worth meeting on the shuttle or the Metroliner but forever wishing I would and forever feeling like a failure for having not (the stories of “women like me” meeting great eligible men while traveling the Northeast Corridor abounded and were legendary. They were also all complete hearsay: I knew no one directly who had achieved this goal. It was always someone who knew someone who knew someone who had met someone. . . .), I assumed the self-defeating posture and demeanor of aggressive disinterest upon boarding the aircraft: sunglasses, completely unnecessary, still on; short black wool peacoat still buttoned beneath Burberry scarf still wrapped; reading material (the New York Observer, the New York Times, the New York Post—having lived in Washington only a year I still, obviously, had separation and identification “issues” with the city I no longer officially called home) at the ready, up against my chest like a shield.

I was coming back from a meeting with my friend Anne, the managing editor of a big commercial book publisher who threw me as much freelance editing work as she could. I had just finished working on Self-Discovery Through Pain and was set to pick up A Gentle Plea for Me: How to Ask for What You Need (Say Please!). Needless to say, I felt entitled to a day trip to New York (a little lunch; a little shopping; a gigantic gossip fest with Anne) to offset the journey into self-discovery and self-hatred my excruciatingly painful work was forcing me to make.

As usual on weekday afternoons before five o’clock, the plane was only moderately crowded, so I still had my pick of seats. Fearing death from sitting too close to the front of the plane, too far back in the plane, anywhere near either of the wings, or anywhere in between, I placed half a Xanax on the back of my tongue and swallowed it down with a quick swig of bottled water as I passed behind the cockpit, never breaking stride as I moved down the aisle, waiting for the right seat to make itself known to me. We found each other, finally, my seat and I, some rows down, between the wing and the backmost part of the cabin: row twenty-eight; left; window. I wasn’t certain that in the event of an emergency it would be the seat which would save my life: all I knew was that it wasn’t exuding a positive death vibe.

In minutes after I had settled in (coat off, scarf draped across my lap, bag stowed beneath the middle seat in front of me, New York Observer unfolded, Xanax coursing nicely through my veins) the plane began to fill up. It was 2:45 p.m.—fifteen minutes before our scheduled departure—when an extremely tall man began making his way down the aisle. He ducked the cabin’s low ceiling as best he could but failed miserably—slouching, twisting himself this way and that—and as he did I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off of him: not for any lustful or lascivious reasons, but because he was making such a spectacle of himself and causing such a scene.

“Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me,” he said, a mantra which was neither, if truth be told, apologetic nor self-deprecating. On the contrary, he seemed to be rather amused: surely, this was not the first time he had trouble fitting his too-tall too-broad frame down the too-small aisle of a filling airplane, and he clearly derived some sort of comic pleasure out of the ungainly sight and sound of his limbs and briefcase and skull hitting plastic overhead compartments and armrests and seat backs as he moved. I turned back to my newspaper, but before I did, I thought I noticed him heading my way—or, rather, toward the empty aisle seat that was still available to my right.

God, he was cute.

“Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me,” I heard him mutter again, this time with a low chuckle as he made his way further down the aisle to the back of the cabin. And then, upon stopping at row twenty-eight, he said: “Excuse me, but is this seat taken?”

I looked up and feigned surprise as if I had not been watching his painful progress all along. “No.” I motioned graciously with my right hand as if it were my seat to give away, and tried to mask the faint twinge of dread that had crossed my face. Funny and interesting as he had looked coming down the aisle, and great-looking as he was with his dark wavy hair and rimless glasses and big easy smile, he looked like a talker. And while that was what you had to do in order to meet someone—a man—talk—I wasn’t so sure now that he was someone I wanted to meet.

“Sorry, I’m sorry. Sorry.” He was now maneuvering himself from storing his coat in the overhead bin to hurtling himself into his seat, causing himself to hit the head of the man in front of him and to graze the left cheek of the woman sitting across the aisle. Landing in his seat with a loud thud, storing his briefcase under the same middle seat where I had slid mine, then leaning as far back as possible into the unyielding cushion of the minimally reclining recliner, he closed his eyes and let out a long, low sigh of relief.

“I just had a vision,” he said, turning to me with his head still back against the pillow. “I do that again, struggling down the aisle, only this time I’m wearing a suit of armor. Chain mail. Wielding a sword. I slash and burn and pillage my way to my seat in the back of the plane as people cower in fear.”

I glanced toward him, smiled politely.

Why couldn’t I, just for once, sit next to someone who wasn’t a violent medievalist?

“No raping, of course,” he added, clarifying. “Just the slashing and burning and pillaging. Deep down, you see, I’m really a pacifist.”

Despite myself, I laughed out loud. So did he. The plane backed out of the gate slowly, then turned, nose first, toward the runway.