“Hey, hold on there … what is this?—a staff meeting for women's lib?” He was an attractive man with brown hair and gentle brown eyes, and a philosophical way of looking at life. “Why such big plans?” She was the first woman he'd ever known who had admitted her ambitions to him, and he admitted to her that he found it frightening. He and his wife had just gotten divorced because she didn't think she wanted to be a “wife anymore.” and it had shaken him to the core. They had two little boys and a house in Darien, and now suddenly he was living alone on the West Side, and women were talking to him about “goals within corporate management.” He laughed softly as he looked at her. She was so beautiful and so young and so intense and yet there was something missing. “What's happened to women who want to have babies and live in the suburbs? Is that totally out of fashion?”
She smiled at him, aware that she might have overstated her case, but she so seldom went out with men. She forgot that one had to be quiet about things, and this one was nice. She liked working for him. “I guess that's out for some of us.” She didn't apologize for it. She knew where she wanted to go, and nothing would stop her until she got there. She was still running from the demons of the past after seventeen years and knew she probably would forever. She accepted that now, though she didn't explain it to him. She never told anyone anything. She lived alone, and she went to work, and other than that, she had no interest in anything. He sensed that now, and it frightened him, for her. He knew how much more there was to life. He was thirty-eight years old and he had married at twenty-three. And now he was discovering endless new horizons.
“Don't you want a husband and kids one day?”
She shook her head. He looked as though she could be honest with him. “That's not very important to me.” More than that, she didn't want anyone she could lose … least of all two little girls … two little children someone could take away from her…. She knew she would never let that happen to her. She wanted to be alone, and she was, and it only hurt occasionally, like now, as she looked at this man and wondered what it would be like to be close to him. Or was it only the champagne, she wondered.
“My children are the best thing in my life, Hilary. Don't cheat yourself of that.” She couldn't tell him that in a way, she had already had kids. She never told anyone that, and knew she never would. Ever.
“Why does everyone think you have to have kids to be complete?”
“These days they don't. Most women think like you, but they're wrong. Hilary, the women who don't have children now are going to panic in ten or fifteen years, mark my words, we're going to see a whole generation of women fighting their own biology before it's too late. But now they're all cool, they figure they've got years ahead of them. But it's a mistake to rule it out. You've never been married?” He looked into her eyes and he liked what he saw there, courage and honesty and integrity and intelligence. But he saw fear too. She was running from something and he couldn't figure out what it was that had hurt her. Maybe, maybe she'd had a bad experience with someone … not unlike his with Barb. He still couldn't believe she had left him and taken his children.
Hilary shook her head in answer to his question. “No, I've never been married.” And then she laughed. “I'm only twenty-five. What's the big rush?”
“These days none at all. I was just curious. I was twenty-three when I got married. My wife was twenty-one. It was real important to us. But that was fifteen years ago, things have changed a hell of a lot since then. This is 1974. We got married in '59.” And then he smiled at her over the last of their champagne. “What were you doing then? You were probably just a kid.”
Her eyes clouded over then, thinking back. 1959 … she'd been in Boston then, with Eileen and Jack … or were they in Jacksonville by then? … the thought of it almost made her feel ill. Axie and Megan were already gone. “Oh, nothing much. I was living with an aunt in Boston around then.” She tried to make it sound ordinary, almost fun.
“Where were your folks?”
“They died when I was eight … and nine …”
“Separately?” She nodded, anxious to change the subject back to work again. She didn't want to talk to him about this. Not to him or anyone. “How terrible. In accidents?” She nodded noncommittally and finished her champagne at one gulp. “Were you an only child?”
She looked him in the eye then with something cold and hard he didn't understand and nodded at him. “Yes, I was.”
“It doesn't sound like much fun.” He felt sorry for her and she hated that too. She didn't want pity from him or from anyone. She tried to smile at him to lighten the mood, but he was looking so intensely at her, it made her nervous.
“Maybe that's why I love my work so much. It's home to me.” That seemed pathetic to him, but he didn't say so.
“Where'd you go to school?”
“N.Y.U.” But she didn't tell him she'd gone at night, while she was working.
He nodded. “Barb and I went to U.C. Berkeley.”
“That must have been fun.” She smiled and he reached out to her, not anxious to talk about his ex-wife anymore, but only about her.
“I'm glad we went out to dinner tonight. I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time. You do a hell of a job at the network.”
“I should.” She grinned. “I've been around CBA for long enough. Seven years.” Years of pushing and shoving her way up, until she was a producer. She had a right to be proud of herself and she was. It was a long, long way from the Jacksonville juvenile home, or the foster homes she'd been in, or even her life with Jack and Eileen in Boston.
“Do you think you'll stay?” he asked, and she stared at him.
“At CBA? Why would I go anywhere?”
“Because in this business people move around a lot.” He certainly had, and he wasn't unusual in their field.
She shook her head at him, with a look of determination in her eyes that startled him. “I'm not going anywhere, my friend. I've got my eye on an office wayyyy upstairs.” And he sensed that she meant it more than she had meant anything else she'd said that night.
“Why?” That kind of ambition puzzled him. He was successful, and he liked his job, but he had never aspired to great heights, and he couldn't imagine wanting that, particularly not if you were a beautiful young girl.
“Because it's important to me.” She was being honest with him. “It means security. And accomplishment. And it's something tangible I can take home with me at night.”
But he knew better than that. “Until they fire you and hire someone else. Don't hang everything on your job, Hilary. You'll end up alone one day, and disappointed.”