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Excerpt
On an unseasonably warm Halloween night, while I was reading a snappy treatise on Wendell
Willkie's support of FDR's war policies and handing out the occasional bag of
M&M's to a trick-or-treater, the fair-haired and dimpled Courtney Logan, age
thirty-four, magna cum laude graduate of Princeton, erstwhile investment banker at
Patton Giddings, wife of darkly handsome Greg, mother of five-year-old Morgan and
eighteen-month-old Travis, canner of peach salsa, collector of vintage petit point, and
ex-president of Citizens for a More Beautiful Shorehaven vanished from Long Island into
thin air.
Odd. Upper-middle-class suburban women with Rolexes and biweekly lip-waxing appointments
tend not to disappear. Though I had never met her, Courtney sounded especially solid. Less
than a year before, there had been a page one feature in the local paper about her new
business. StarBaby produced videos of baby's first year. "I thought it would
succeed because I knew in my heart of hearts there were thousands just like me!"
Courtney was quoted as saying. "It all started when Greg and I were watching a video
we'd made of Morgan, our oldest. Fifteen minutes of Morgan staring at the mobile in
her crib! A beautiful, intelligent stare, but still... After that, another fifteen of her
sucking her thumb! Not much else. Suddenly it hit me that we'd never taken out the
videocam for Travis, our second, until he was six months old!" (I've never been
able to understand this generation's infatuation for using last names as first names.
Admittedly it's a certain kind of name: you don't see little Greenberg Johnsons
gadding about in sailor suits.) Anyhow, Courtney went on: "I was so sad. And guilty!
Look what we'd missed! That's when I thought, it would be so great if a
professional filmmaker could have shown up once a month and made a movie starring my
son!"
Though not unmindful of the Shorehaven Beacon's aggressively perky style, I
sensed Courtney Bryce Logan was responsible for at least half those exclamation points.
Clearly, she was one of those incorrigibly upbeat women I have never been able to
comprehend, much less be. She'd left a thrilling, high-powered job in Manhattan.
She'd traded in her brainy and hip investment-banking colleagues for two tiny people
bent on exploring the wonders inside their nostrils. And? Did even a single tear of regret
slide down her cheek as she watched her children watching Sesame Street? Was there
the slightest lump in her throat as the 8:11, packed with her Dana Buchman-suited
contemporaries, chugged off to the city? Nope. Apparently, for can-do dames like Courtney,
being a full-time mom was full-time bliss. Ambivalence? Please! Retirement was merely a
segue into a new career, motherhood, another chance to strut their stuff.
However, what I liked about her was that she spoke about Shorehaven not just with
affection but with appreciation, with familiarity with its history. Well, all right, with
its myths. She mentioned to the reporter that one of the scenic backgrounds StarBaby used
was our town dock. She said: "Walt Whitman actually wrote his two-line poem "To
You' right there!" In truth, Courtney was just perpetuating a particularly dopey
local folktale, but I felt grateful to her for having considered our town (and our
Island-born poet) important.
I think I even said to myself, Gee, I should get to know her. Well, I'm a historian.
I have inordinate warmth for anyone who invokes the past in public. My working hours are
spent at St. Elizabeth's College, mostly squandered in history department
shriek-fests. I am an adjunct professor at this alleged institution of higher learning, a
formerly all-female, formerly nun-run, formerly first-rate school across the county border
in the New York City borough of Queens. Anyhow, for two and a half seconds I considered
giving Courtney a call and saying hi. Or even Hi! My name is Judith Singer and let's
have lunch. But like most of those assertive notions, it was gone by the end of the next
heartbeat.
Speaking of heartbeats ... Before I get into Courtney Logan's stunning disappearance
and the criminal doings surrounding it, I suppose a few words about my situation
wouldn't hurt. I am what the French call une femme d'un certain âge. In
my case, the âge is fifty-four, a fact that usually fills me with disbelief, to
say nothing of outrage. Nonetheless, although I still have the smooth olive skin, dark
hair, and almond-shaped eyes of a mature extra in a Fellini movie, my dewy days are over.
My children are in their twenties. Kate is a lawyer, an associate in the corporate
department of Johnson, Bonadies and Eagle, a Wall Street firm whose founding partners
drafted the boilerplate of the restrictive covenants designed to keep my grandparents out
of their neighborhoods. Joey works in the kitchen of an upscale Italian deli in Greenwich
Village making overpriced mozzarella cheese; he is also film critic for a surprisingly
intelligent, near-insolvent Web 'zine called night.
As for me, I have been a widow for two years. My husband, Bob, the king of crudités, flat
of belly and firm of thigh, a man given to barely suppressed sighs of disappointment
whenever he saw me accepting a dessert menu from a waiter (which, okay, I admit I never
declined), died at age fifty-five, one-half day after triumphantly finishing the New York
Marathon in four hours and twelve minutes. One minute he was squeezing my hand in the
emergency room, a reassuring pressure, but I could see the fear in his eyes. As I squeezed
back, he slipped away. Just like that. Gone, before I could say, Don't worry, Bob,
you'll be fine. Or, I love you, Bob.
Except when the love of your life actually isn't the love of your life, the loss
still winds up being devastating. Golden memories? No, only vague recollections of
passionate graduate-school discussions and newlywed lovemaking fierce enough to pull the
fitted sheet off the bed. Except those times had blurred in direct proportion to the
length of the marriage, and after more than a quarter century together, Bob and I had
wound up with sporadic pleasant chats and twice-a-month sex that fit neatly between the
weather forecast and the opening credits of Nightline....
Excerpted from LONG TIME NO SEE © Copyright 2001 by Susan Isaacs. Reprinted with permission from HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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