Now You See Her by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online

attack when he was fifty-nine. My mother died of cancer at sixty-two, my first wife at fifty-three, also cancer. I just turned fifty-seven. I figure I might not have a whole lot of time left.”
    Marcy nodded, held up her empty glass. “In that case, do you think we could have another one of these?”
    “I think that could be arranged.” He signaled the waiter for another round. “And thank you.”
    “For what?”
    “Most people tell me I’m being foolish when I tell them my philosophy of life. Or death, as the case may be.”
    “Sounds quite logical to me.”
    “Sounds to me as if you also lost a loved one at too young an age.”
    “Actually my father was almost eighty when he died.”
    “And your mother?”
    Marcy extended her hand toward the approaching waiter, smiled when she felt the weight of the glass in her hand. “Forty-six.” She took a swallow. “You said your
first
wife. How many have there been?”
    Vic smiled. “Just two.”
    “What happened to the second?”
    “We divorced a year ago.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t be. It was a disaster from the word go.”
    Marcy took another sip of her drink and waited for him to continue.
    “I was married to my first wife for almost thirty-three years,” he said, obliging her. “She was my high school sweetheart. We got married right out of college. We were the quintessential all-American couple. And then we were the quintessential all-American family, with three sons, a house in Lake Forest with a four-car garage, and everything you could possibly ask for. And then one day Kathy said she was feeling kind of funny—those were her exact words, she was feeling ‘kind of funny’—and we went to the doctor, and he said she had pancreatic cancer, and three months later she was dead.”
    Marcy lowered her glass, stared at the table.
    “And I was just reeling. Worse than reeling. I was off the wall. I mean, Kathy was it for me, you know? I’d never even been with another woman. And suddenly there I was, all alone. Well, I had my sons, of course, but they had their own lives to deal with. David and Mark are married, with small children, and Tony is twenty-three and finishing up his master’s degree in music. They had enough on their plate. And I’m acting like a total lunatic. One minute I’m holed up in the house, refusing to go anywhere, and the next minute I’m out on the town, staying out all night, bedding anything that moves. I mean I’m suddenly the new guy in town, right? And I don’t have any unsightly warts and rashes, so I’ve got all these women basically throwing themselves at me.”
    “Floozies in Jacuzzis,” Marcy said, looking up, relieved when she saw Vic smile.
    “Tony called them ‘the Brisket Brigade.’ ”
    Marcy laughed.
    “Anyway, one day I decided it was time to sell the house. I mean, Kathy and I had been talking about it for years. The kidswere pretty much on their own, what did we need such a big house for, the usual discussions, right? And now that Kathy was dead, it was just me and seven empty bedrooms. It was time to move on.”
    “Don’t the experts usually advise not making any big moves for at least a year after the death of a spouse?”
    “If they don’t, they should. But it’s hard to listen to reason when you’re not being rational. And real estate agents aren’t exactly big on periods of reflection.”
    “So you sold your house?”
    “No. I married my realtor.”
    “What?”
    “Yup, you heard correctly. Good old reliable, once-sane Victor Sorvino up and marries a woman twenty-five years his junior, a woman he’s known for less than three months, barely six months after his beloved first wife passed away, and he flies off to Las Vegas and marries her without telling anyone, without even a prenup, and the marriage is a total fiasco from the moment he says ‘I do,’ and she basically says, ‘I don’t, at least not with you,’ and six months later, we agree to a divorce, and among other