Femme Fatale and other stories

lifetime, too. Plus, all her husbands, even the ones she didn’t count, had benefited from the final set of repetitions, a series of pelvic thrusts done in concert with vigorous yogic breathing.
    One late fall day, lying on her back, thrusting her pelvis in counterpoint to her in-and-out breaths, it occurred to Mona that her life would not be much different in the posh, downtown hotel condo she had so coveted. It’s not as if she would go to the theaters or museums; she had only pretended interest in those things because other people seemed to expect it. Museums bored her and theater baffled her—all those people talking so loudly, in such artificial sentences. Better restaurants wouldn’t make her like eating out alone, and room service was never as hot as it should be. Her surroundings would be a considerable improvement, with truly top-of-the-line fixtures, but all that would have meant is that she would be lying on a better-quality carpet right now. Mona was not meant to be alone and if she had known that Hal was going to die only fifteen years in, she might have chosen differently. Finding a husband at the age of sixty-eight, even when one claimed to be sixty-one, had to be harder than finding a job at that age. With Hal, Mona had consciously settled. She wondered if he knew that. She wondered if he had died just to spite her.
    There was a Starbucks in LeisureWorld plaza and she sometimes ended her afternoon walks there, curious to see what the fuss was about. She found the chairs abominable—had anyone over fifty ever tried to rise from these low-slung traps?—but she liked what a younger person might call the vibe. (Mona didn’t actually know any young people and had been secretly glad that Hal’s children loathed her so, as it gave her an excuse to have nothing to do with them or the grandchildren.) She treated herself to sweet drinks, chocolate drinks, drinks with whipped cream. Mona had been on a perpetual diet since she was thirty-five, and while the discipline, along with her exercises, had kept her body hard, it had made her face harder still. The coffee drinks and pastries added weight, but no more than five or six pounds, and it was better than Botox, plumping and smoothing Mona’s cheeks. She sipped her drink, stared into space, and listened to the curious non-music on the sound system. It wasn’t odd to be alone in Starbucks, quite the opposite. When parties of two or three came in, full of conversation and private jokes, they were the ones who seemed out of place. The regulars all relaxed a little when those interlopers finally left.
    “I hate to intrude, but I just had to say—ma’am? Ma’am?”
    The man who stood next to her was young, no more than forty-five. At first glance, he appeared handsome, well put together. At second, the details betrayed him. There was a stain on his trench coat, flakes of dandruff on his shoulders and down the front of his black turtleneck sweater.
    Still, he was a man and he was talking to her.
    “Yes?”
    “You’re … someone, aren’t you? I’m bad with names, but I don’t forget faces and you—well, you were a model, right? One of the new-wave ones in the sixties, when they started going for that coltish look.”
    “No, you must think—”
    “My apologies,” he said. “Because you were better known for the movies, those avant-garde ones you did before you chucked it all and married that guy, although you could have been as big as any of them. Julie Christie. She was your only serious competition.”
    It took Mona a second to remember who Julie Christie was, her brain first detouring through memories of June Christie but then landing on an image of the actress. She couldn’t help being pleased, if he was confusing her with someone who was serious competition for Julie Christie. Whoever he thought she was must have been gorgeous. Mona felt herself preening, even as she tried to deny the compliment. He thought she was even younger than she pretended to be.
    “I’m not—”
    “But you are,” he said. “More beautiful than ever. Our culture is so confused about its … aesthetic values. I’m not talking about the veneration of age as wisdom, or the importance of experience, although those things are to the good. You are, objectively, more beautiful now than you were back then.”
    “Perhaps I am,” she said lightly. “But I’m not whoever you think I was, so it’s hard to know.”
    “Oh. Gosh. My apologies. I’m such an