Easy Prey

and nobody said anything until she was gone, and then Catrin said, “Way back when, after I left you, and you didn’t call--”
    “I called.”
    “Yeah. Twice. If you’d have called four times, I would’ve come back. The next time I saw you, you were walking around with some skinny blonde with a terrific ass and these little bell-bottoms, and you stopped on a street corner and she tried to stick her tongue down to your tonsils.”
    Now Lucas blushed. “I don’t even remember,” he said.
    She maneuvered a lettuce leaf into her mouth and crunched on it, watching him. He pushed his salad bowl away and waited. “Anyway,” she said, “About two days after I saw you with the blonde, I met Jack and we started dating and I liked him a lot and I liked his parents and they liked me, and my parents were delighted, he was one year away from his M.D. So we . . . just got married and he did his hitch in the Army and then we went down to Lake City and bought a house and had kids and dogs and sailboats and goddamnit”—testing the word, goddamnit —“here I am, twenty-five years later. What happened to me ? I thought I was gonna have a movie, but all I’ve ever been is the woman in the background of somebody else’s movie.”
    She thought about that, and poked her salad fork at Lucas and said, “That’s what we’re talking about. Metaphors. The other day when we met, I used that movie metaphor. It just jumped up and I said it. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. When’s my movie?”
    Lucas sat looking at her for a long moment, and Catrin said, “Say something,” and Lucas sighed and said, “If I could only figure out a way to run for the door without freakin’ out the restaurant.”
    She sat back and didn’t quite snarl at him, “You’d run for the door?”
    “Catrin . . . I know women who run businesses and make a zillion dollars a year and drive around in Mercedes-Benzes and every night they go home and wonder what the hell happened, how they could’ve forgotten to have kids. They’re forty-five years old and have everything but kids, and that’s all they think about: no kids. Then I meet people like you who have these great kids and they’re all messed up because they’re not running General Mills.”
    She’d wiped her mouth with a napkin, and now tossed the napkin into the middle of her unfinished salad. Her eyes were bright and a little too wide, and he started to remember her temper. He thought, Uh-oh, and she said, her voice rising a notch, “So all I’m going through is some kind of routine female bullshit that I’ll get over.”
    He shook his head. “No. You see women thinking along these lines, and about half the time it ends in disaster. They walk on their old man and their kids and they get their freedom and they wind up living in a crummy apartment and selling cupcakes in the local froufrou dessert bar. If you ask them if they’d go back, they think a long time and most of them say, ‘There’s no way to go back,’ but if they could, on some kind of negotiated terms, they would.”
    “What about the other half, the ones who don’t walk?”
    “Then, they come to some kind of accommodation, but . . . I’m not sure how happy they ever are, not having tried it.”
    “So you’re saying I’m fucked,” she said.
    “Well, you’ve got a problem. You’ve got to think about it a long time.”
    She looked away and said, “I’m thinking about moving out. I didn’t tell you that the other day. I wanted to impress you with how wonderful I was, after all these years.”
    “Does your husband know?” Lucas asked.
    “At some level, maybe—but he wouldn’t want to think about it. I mean, he seems happy enough. He’s got all the prestige and his patients like him and he’s delivered half the kids in town and we’ve got a sailing club and he’s got a hunting shack across the river in Wisconsin, and all his buddies.”
    “ You’ve got friends, too, don’t you?”
    “Housewives. Waiting for death. Three or four of them have actually taken off.”
    “What happened to them?”
    “They’re selling cupcakes in froufrou dessert bars,” she said, and grinned at him.
    “Not really.”
    “One sells real estate and not very well. One works in a decorating business and doesn’t make much. One went back to school and became a social worker and got a job in St. Paul, and she’s okay. One’s a waitress who’s trying to paint.”
    “And you’d take pictures.