ONE

Val is not herself today.

It isn't like her to be so subdued. She doesn't call to me as I
make my way up the carved marble staircase, its edges worn smooth
by generations of arrivals and departures. She doesn't wave me over
once I reach the top of the stairs and wrestle through the crowd,
elbowing past Wednesday-afternoon revelers raising their glasses to
celebrate the end of another workday. She doesn't look up after I
get myself a beer and approach her table, or offer any comment as I
stand, dumbfounded, before the remarkable structure she has
created. Here, in the mezzanine bar at Grand Central, with only a
few square inches of table to work with, Val has erected a tower of
shopping bags representing nearly every one of New York's best B's
(Bendel's, Barneys, Bergdorf's…). I'm ashamed to say, in my
own state of mentally unstable not-quite-myselfness, this is the
only unusual thing I notice.

Shopping. There's something else I won't be doing for a
while.

I take a deep breath and put on the happiest happy-hour smile I can
muster. "Look at you!" I chirp, holding my beer glass in a
death grip, shoehorning myself into the three-inch gap between the
empty chair and the edge of her table, goggling at the bags while
using my free hand to push them out of my way. I poke a Burberry
back from the edge of the table, where it threatens to drop into my
lap, but that only makes the rest of the pile teeter precariously.
I clamp down on the Boyd's of Madison at the top and struggle to
shift my chair to one side without spilling beer on myself. Val
makes no effort to help.  "If you wouldn't mind," I say,
"could you help me move this stuff, just the tiniest --- oh my
goodness!"

Val is crying.

No. Not crying; sobbing. Tears skid down her flushed cheeks to her
jawbone and pause at the abyss a moment before splashing into her
untouched cocktail. She's got mascara running down her wrist onto
the sleeve of her pink cardigan; her demure, blond pageboy is all
mussed; and she's groping around in her pink, quilted Chanel chain
purse, perhaps for a tissue.

"What is it? You poor thing!" I'm no longer thinking about shopping
bags and am halfway to forgetting why I've been feeling so sorry
for myself. Until this moment, it hadn't occurred to me that Val
could get this upset about anything.  Her tears are as
unsettling as anything else I've dealt with over the past few days.
"What's wrong? What's the matter? This isn't about me, is it?
Because, really, I'll be all right."

She can't possibly be crying over me. Heaven knows I'm upset ---
rootless, loveless and unexpectedly jobless. But Val is distraught.
Trembling and pale, with a red, brimming gaze that, at last, she
turns on me.  "My husband is…" she clears her throat.
"He's…ahem."  She takes a bracing swig of her pink
parasol drink, sets it back down and folds her hands on the table.
"My husband is cheating," she says. "Again."

Her delivery --- calculated, with a pause for emphasis between each
word --- makes it seem as if she's accusing me. It might be that
she all at once looks more incensed than heartbroken, or the way
she's staring me dead in the eye. "Again," she repeats icily, and
it's as if I am the other woman, here to confess all and beg
forgiveness for coming between Val and her husband. That's when
something dawns on me. Several somethings. One, Val is a
vintage-clothing connoisseur who would no sooner patronize any of
these B-stores than she would cry like a baby in the middle of
Grand Central Terminal on an early-May afternoon. Two, Val only
wears black. Three, demure? Blond? Pageboy?

And there's one very last little something.

Val doesn't have a husband.

It's a joke. Val doesn't take anything seriously. It's a joke,
right? Val's here to buy me a consolation drink to distract me
during my time of crisis, and this is just another diversionary
tactic. It's typical Val behavior, but it's freaking me out.
"You're not acting like yourself and you're scaring me." I try to
say it jovially, as if in no way about to start crying
myself.

But instead of erupting into laughter and pointing to a hidden
camera, Val just covers her face and sobs some more.

Her commitment is impressive. Still, how long will the show go on?
I've got jangled-enough nerves already, having spent two hours in a
Midtown unemployment office at a mandatory New York State
Department of Labor group-orientation lecture: Job-Hunting Tools
for the Twenty-First Century. ("Does everyone here know what the
Internet is?") After that, I got all turned around coming over to
Grand Central, first walking four long blocks west, only to end up
on a desolate, trash-strewn stretch of Eleventh Avenue, leaving
only two thousand nine hundred ninety-nine and two-tenths of a mile
between me and former life in Los Angeles --- all right, the San
Fernando Valley --- before realizing I should have been heading
east the whole time.

All of this probably explains why she figures it out first.

"Oh, perfect. This is just great." She lifts her head, sniffles,
and dabs under each eye with her tissue. "Naturally. You want
Val."

Later I'll regret not having paid more attention to this
moment.

I won't have, though, and that's too bad. It might have been an
early clue that perhaps I'm unfit for the new career that's about
to fall into my lap. What was it they just said at the unemployment
office? Our experience is our toolbox, with our skills as the
tools? Well it seems I've locked my observational skills into my
toolbox and left it on a streetcorner somewhere. Since relocating
to New York five weeks ago for a fancy focus-group moderator
position at Hayes Heeley Market Research, and up until getting
"restructured" right out of that very same position two days ago, I
worked, went for coffee and had lunch with Valerie Benjamin nearly
every day. After this much concentrated time in her company I know
what she looks like down to the last eyelash. I know her taste in
men, clothing and cocktails; her life's philosophy and her family
background.

I know she has an identical twin.

Excerpted from IT'S ABOUT YOUR HUSBAND © Copyright 2011 by
Lauren Lipton. Reprinted with permission by 5 Spot, a division of
Hachette Book Group USA. All rights reserved.