Lessons in Heartbreak

He looked at her thoughtfully.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Cheerio,’ she said, getting out as the driver opened the door. Cheerio? What’s wrong with you, Izzie? First the weird question about his wife and then ‘cheerio’.

He phoned the next day.

‘Would you like to go on another date?’ he asked.

Date? It had been a date, after all. Izzie hugged herself with delight.

‘Yes,’ she said and squashed the feeling that she’d just fallen down the slippery slope.

From the comfort of her bathtub, sipping her spritzer, Izzie thought about those first days when she felt like the luckiest person on the planet.

Joe was in her head all the time, edging more mundane matters out of the way, like a problem with a model sinking into depression because she’d been dropped from a beauty campaign or a big screw-up which saw five models miss a plane to Milan because they’d been out late partying.

It was a fabulous secret that she hugged to herself. Izzie found herself behaving as if her life was a movie and Joe would be watching her every move.

She wore her best clothes every day, so she’d look fabulous on the off chance that he’d phone. The spike-heeled boots she moaned about were hauled out of her wardrobe to go with the swishy 1940s-inspired skirt that hugged her rear end and made construction workers’ mouths drop open.

They had lunch and dinner twice a week, holding hands under the table, and kissing in the car on the way back to her office or to her apartment. They talked and talked, sitting until their coffees went cold.

But she’d never brought him to her home, had never done more than kiss him in the back of the car. Something held her back.

That something was her feeling that Joe and his life was more complicated than he’d told her. Why else were they having this low-key relationship, she asked herself? It only made sense if Joe wasn’t being entirely truthful about everything and she couldn’t believe that. He was so straight, so direct. She didn’t want to nag him like a dog with a bone. She said nothing and just hoped.

They’d had a month of courtship – only such an old-fashioned word could describe it: walking in the park at lunchtime and sharing deli lunch from Dean & DeLuca’s.

And then, on a sunny Thursday, they’d visited another artist in a giant loft apartment in TriBeCa and Izzie had wandered round looking at huge canvases while Joe, the artist and the artist’s manager discussed business. Izzie felt a thrill that was nothing to do with admiring the artist’s work: the fact that Joe had brought her here showed that she wasn’t a dirty little secret in his life. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have brought her along, would he?

Silvio Cruz’s giant abstract paintings had prompted some critics to compare him to the great Pollock. Even Izzie, who knew zip about art, could see the power and beauty of his canvases, and she loved listening to Joe talk about them.

Joe hadn’t grown up with art on the walls, he’d told her: food on the table in his Bronx home was as good as it got. So she loved hearing him talk passionately about a world he’d come into late thanks to his sheer brilliance.

Finally, she, Joe and Duarte, the manager, took the creaking industrial elevator down to street level.

‘The Marshall benefit for AIDS is on tomorrow night,’ Duarte said to Joe. ‘You and Elizabeth going?’

Izzie froze.

‘Yeah, probably,’ murmured Joe.

‘I hear Danny Henderson’s donating a De Kooning. I mean, Jeez, that’s serious dough. Danny’s been here too, but he just doesn’t get Silvio’s vision,’ Duarte went on, oblivious to the sudden temperature shift in the elevator.

Elizabeth was probably going with him? What happened to the separate lives thing?

On the street, Izzie looked around for Joe’s inevitable big black limo and then realised she couldn’t possibly sit in it with him. She wasn’t sure what was worse: the feeling that Joe had wanted to shut Duarte up and not talk about the party, or Duarte’s assumption that she, Izzie, wouldn’t be going.

If Joe Hansen was officially unattached, then why would anyone assume he’d take his wife to a benefit? And why would he say ‘yeah, probably’ when asked?

There was only one answer and it made Izzie feel sick.

Without saying a word, she turned and walked briskly away from the two men and the limo which had slid noiselessly into place.

‘Izzie!’ yelled Joe, but she kept walking.

He caught up with her, hurt her arm as he grabbed her roughly and turned her to face him.

‘Don’t go,’ he begged.

‘Why not?’ she demanded. ‘You’ve been lying to me. It’s not over with your wife. You lied to me.’

‘It’s over with me and Elizabeth,’ he insisted.

‘Fuck you and your lies!’ Izzie threw back at him.

‘They’re not lies.’ He let go of her and his hands dropped limply to his sides. ‘It’s deader than any dodo, Izzie, it’s just hard to end it all. Elizabeth’s different to me, she finds it difficult to let go. I’ve told her she can have the house here, the place in the Hamptons, whatever she wants. It was over long before you, that wasn’t a lie. But she’s trying to get her head round the fact that I want to leave.’

‘So you’re leaving now? First, you were all staying together for the kids,’ Izzie said, trying not to cry.

‘We did try but it didn’t work. Elizabeth kept getting upset about it, she wants all or nothing, and now it’s a matter of her accepting it and us telling the boys. I promise, Izzie. Don’t go, please.’

Izzie stared at him. She was a good judge of character, damnit, and he wasn’t a liar, for all he pretended to be a shark in business.

‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth straight up?’ she demanded.

‘You wouldn’t have gone out to lunch with me,’ he said, with a small smile that recalled the Joe she knew and loved.

Loved. She loved him, Lord help her, she loved him. Without meaning to, she’d got tangled up in this mess and now she couldn’t just walk out. Still, she needed time to think.

‘I’ve got to go back to work, Joe,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you later.’

‘Let me drop you,’ he said.

‘No, I’ll get a taxi.’

As if sent by an angel, a taxi with a lit sign appeared in front of her and Izzie stuck out her arm. She waved at Joe as she sat in the back and the driver sped off.

‘What’s up with you?’ snapped Carla at work that afternoon. ‘You don’t listen, you don’t talk, you stare into space like a moony high schooler. What gives?’

Izzie hesitated. She and Carla had sat up nights talking men, dissing men and generally deciding that no man at all was better than changing who you were in order to capture one.

‘Surrendered wife, my butt! Why pretend to be Pollyanna to get him, so you can go back to being Mama Alien once he’s married you? Who needs a man that much?’

They knew each other. But something had stopped Izzie from telling Carla about Joe. Perhaps it was a sixth sense or else it was her feeling that this was all too good to be true.

She’d had a feeling that explaining Joe’s complicated family set-up would trigger Carla’s internal Men Are Assholes alarm and there would be no stopping her. Carla wouldn’t understand the nuances of it all.