“You mean,” said Lucia, “that he is forty-five and not svelte by fifty
pounds. I’m glad of both those facts. I’ll be the Last Woman in his
life, with any luck at all. If I were a prize fighter, I’d want to have
a chance at the main bout of the evening, sometime—not spend my whole
career getting knocked around in the preliminaries. Besides, did you
ever hear of the fifteen gold pieces? It’s a philosophy.”
“Tell me.”
“Every attractive woman has fifteen gold pieces to spend, one for each
year between the time she is twenty and the time she is thirty-five. She
may squander the first ten or twelve if she likes, but she damn well
should invest the rest of them in something safe for her middle age.”
“Who told you about the gold pieces?”
“The woman who washes my hair. She used to be a model for magazine
covers.”
“You could marry plenty of younger and gayer people than Sam,” I said.
“I don’t want to. I tell you I want to be the Last Woman in someone’s
life.”
“Do you like listening to discourses on the new trade markets of the
world, and how much oil they expect to find in China in the next ten
years?”
Lucia beamed. “I love it. I am thirty years old, and I have spent five
years listening to discourses on new books and new plays and new clothes
. . . and wisecracks . . . I never want to hear another wisecrack until
I die. I adore hearing about the glamorous future of South America, and
how the rate of foreign exchange affects . . . I am not sure what it
affects, yet, but I shall find out. . . .”
“Good Lord, Lucia, you expect to be happy.”
“Of course, happy and settled and as protected as my grandmother. I plan
to make Sam happy, too. I would marry him if he were relatively poor.”
“How do you feel about sleeping with him?”
“I’d rather sleep with him the rest of my life, for the sake of having
his kindness and good humour and honesty around; than put up with the
selfishness and vanity and casual, heartbreaking infidelities of any
‘attractive’ man I know, for the sake of occasional golden moments in
bed.”
“Do you want to have children, Lucia?”
“I’ll have them if he wants them. Some women who’ve been self-supporting
do seem to acquire a permanent feeling that we should earn our way. Have
some more coffee, Pat.”
“Oh, dear,” I said, “I shall miss you like hell, and I do feel you
should marry someone you are crazy about.”
“You can come visit me on Long Island every week-end, darling . . . and
I did marry someone I was crazy about, once. . . . I’ll find you a nice
banker, younger and thinner than Sam, if you like.”
“I don’t like . . . I don’t want to marry again.”
“You’ll feel differently, after your divorce goes through next month,”
said Lucia. “Run along to work. I have an appointment outside the office
and I don’t have to start yet.”