Goodbye To All That by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online

glasses,” Luc said. Of course he was wearing sunglasses, but that was different. Sunglasses you could hide behind. They were optional. Regular glasses were just plain dorky.
    Melissa knew this from personal experience; she’d replaced her glasses with contacts when she was sixteen. She’d love to have the corrective surgery done on her own myopic eyes, but it was expensive and she had to save for a down payment on a co-op or condo. She’d once asked Doug if he’d Lasik her eyes, figuring he’d give her a huge discount or maybe even do the job for free, but he’d said smart doctors never operated on their loved ones and he’d be happy to pass along the names of a few colleagues whose success rates he could vouch for. His colleagues would have charged her the usual fee, so she’d let the subject drop and tried not to resent him.
    He ought to do her eyes for her, though. He wasn’t that smart.
    “Doug is married to Brooke, who’s the sort of woman you’d expect to be married to a brilliant, arrogant doctor who earns tons of money.”
    “What does that mean?” Luc asked.
    Melissa shrugged. “When you meet her, you’ll know. She’s just  . . . very polished. Polite and poised and kind of presumptuous. She takes things for granted.” Actually, she was probably like the majority of his clients at Nouvelle, the regulars who waltzed in every week and handed over hundreds of dollars to have him clip two or three wisps of hair when they were done with their facials and paraffin treatments.
    Fortunately, Luc didn’t subscribe to Doug’s theory about people not operating on their loved ones. Now that he and Melissa were a couple, he did her hair without charging her, although she had to pay for the coloring products and conditioners, which weren’t exactly cheap.
    “Doug and Brooke have twin daughters,” she went on. “Mackenzie and Madison. They’re six years old. No imminent bat mitzvahs for them, but let me tell you, once they reach the right age, nothing will be spared. Doug and Brooke’ll probably rent the entire Ritz-Carlton. Or maybe Symphony Hall. Or the U.S.S. Constitution. It will be an event, I promise you.”
    Luc nodded.
    “And then there are my parents. Ruth and Richard Bendel. They’re  . . . ” She hesitated. What could she say about her parents? They simply were . They loved her. They drove her crazy. They were strict. They were lenient. They could spend hours describing a ten-minute trip to the drug store. They thought rock and roll had peaked with the Beatles, or maybe Elton John, and had been on a long, sad decline since 1973.
    “They’re nice,” she finally said, then realized that was hardly adequate. “My father’s a cardiologist and my mother’s a housewife. They finish each other’s sentences. My mother knows when my dad wants her to pass him the salad dressing before he knows.”
    Luc said nothing. A couple of weeks ago, after they’d made loud, sweaty love at her apartment—they couldn’t do that at his apartment because Alan was there most of the time—she’d pestered him to tell her about his childhood. She’d figured she was entitled, after loud sweaty sex. Luc hadn’t been overly forthcoming, but he’d told her his parents had divorced when he was eight and his father had eventually moved to Las Vegas. Throughout his youth, Luc had visited his father every summer, and he’d seen shows featuring scantily clad dancers in rhinestone bras and feather headdresses and sneaked a few chips into the slot machines when the pit bosses weren’t watching. His mother had remarried and his step-father was “okay,” a word he’d said with a shrug, so Melissa wasn’t sure just how “okay” the guy was.
    In any case, Luc’s childhood clearly hadn’t fit the nuclear-family cliché like Melissa’s, with a nice house, a new car every few years and grandparents nearby. She and her siblings had all gone to the same high school, and all three of them had gone to college