All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,10

first morning of our honeymoon and found myself staring at a nude photo of a woman it took me a moment to recognize.

The woman was attractive but by no means perfect, nothing you would ever see in Playboy, or whatever online site men use for their porn these days. She wasn’t airbrushed or artificially tanned, she wasn’t waxed and enhanced in all the most important places, but she was pretty, and about twenty years older than me. Or nineteen years, actually, to the day, now that I think of it. When I first met her on the campaign, I recalled, we laughed when we figured out we shared a birthday. I remember she said: “Funny, I could have been your babysitter.” It didn’t seem so funny at the time, and even less funny now was the note she’d attached to the photo.

Something to remember me by while you’re in Hawaii with your daughter.

So now I was just running, as hard and as fast as I could. I didn’t know where I was going, but that really didn’t matter. Because when you’re running away from something rather than running toward it, it doesn’t make much difference which way you go.

KATHERINE

THEY SAY IT’S BETTER to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Well, how fucking stupid are they?

That expression, or the sentiment behind it, is one of those things we’ve made up to make ourselves feel better. Like when we say it’s good luck if it rains on your wedding day. Of course that isn’t good luck; it is, in fact, the very definition of bad luck. But we announce that it is good luck so we don’t have to feel bad about being wet at our own wedding. I remember when my friend Heidi was married, right here in Manhattan, she and her fiancé arranged for a double-decker bus with an open top to transport the guests from the church on the Upper West Side to a social club by Gramercy Park. The trouble was that it poured. I mean, poured. My lasting recollections are of Heidi with a garbage bag over her dress and a shower cap over her hair to keep the rain from spoiling all her photos, and all the guests crammed into the lower level of the double-decker bus. I ask you, was that good luck?

Of course it doesn’t mean the marriage is doomed. In fact, Heidi remains happily married and has three little boys whose names currently escape me, but the point remains there was nothing lucky about the rain on her wedding day, and neither is there anything better about loving and losing than never loving at all.

“Oh, fuck him,” I said.

“What’s that, Katherine?”

I had forgotten about Maurice. “Nothing.”

“You keep talking to yourself, I’m gonna need to take you somewhere other than that office,” he said cheerily. “You may need to see a doctor.”

I do love Maurice. He is a genuinely nice man, and in my experience those are not so easy to find. I think if there is such a thing as reincarnation—and if there is any justice in the universe—Maurice should come back as a supermodel, or a basketball star, or George Clooney. If Maurice were to be reincarnated as Heidi Klum, I would not for one second begrudge him the legs that never end or the perfect skin or the hair that always returns to the right place in the wind. It would make me happy, in fact, to know that the winners of the genetic lottery actually earned their good fortune through good deeds. Otherwise it’s all just random, luck of the draw, and some people get to be gorgeous and thin and the rest of us don’t, with no rhyme or reason.

If Phillip gets reincarnated, on the other hand, I want justice. And I have found just the perfect sentence, an appropriate comeuppance for a lifetime spent with looks and wealth and no appreciation whatsoever for his good fortune. I came across it just the other night, watching Dirty Jobs. (I love that show.) The episode began with scenic shots of what appeared to be a ranch, the sun rising on a picture-perfect morning, and then Mike Rowe came on and said something like “What a perfect day to collect some horse semen!” And that’s what he spent an hour doing. When the episode was over, I went online and read all about the collection of stallion semen, and it was fascinating. Turns out the most common