What Nora Knew Read online

  Praise for

  WHAT NORA KNEW

  “Linda Yellin’s feisty heroine Molly Hallberg is sassy, cynical, irreverent, and hysterically funny. With a wounded heart and gimlet eye, Molly delivers razor-sharp observations on love and fear that have us completely identifying with her, and crackling, witty dialogue that’s so damn entertaining I wish Yellin would start writing screenplays.”

  —Claire Fontaine, author of Come Back

  “Linda Yellin has given us a tart, funny, totally lovable heroine whose path to true love is hilarious and heartwarming. Nora Ephron would have loved this book.”

  —Jenny Allen, essayist, The New Yorker’s Disquiet, Please!

  “Could someone please apologize to my husband and children for ignoring them all weekend as I gobbled up this delicious book? I loved every minute of it.”

  —Karen Bergreen, author of Perfect Is Overrated

  “Linda’s lively story sparkles and dances off the page.”

  —Tracey Jackson, author of Between a Rock and a Hot Place

  “Linda Yellin has written an irresistibly funny, authentic novel about the two-steps-forward-one-step-back pursuit of life, love, and career in New York City. She writes for all of us with Molly Hallberg’s laugh-out-loud, poignant inability to accept she’s met her equal, while everyone around her takes the plunge. Yellin is a Nora Ephron–inspired humorist with a voice of her own.”

  —Kathryn Leigh Scott, author of Down and Out in Beverly Heels

  “I laughed my way through Linda Yellin’s What Nora Knew—when I wasn’t nodding in recognition. Witty, wise, insightful, and altogether charming.”

  —Emily Listfield, author of Best Intentions

  “Linda Yellin’s novel is by turns touching and funny, and her heroine has charm and chutzpah to spare.”

  —Christina Haag, author of Come to the Edge: A Love Story

  Praise for

  THE LAST BLIND DATE

  “The Last Blind Date is a laugh-out-loud funny, nakedly revealing, kooky look at romance told with sweetness and soul. From the minute our hero Randy picks up our heroine Linda at the airport with his fly accidentally unzipped, and takes her to his friend’s son’s bar mitzvah, where he mistakenly calls her by the name of his ex-wife, it’s impossible not to root for their love.”

  —Susan Shapiro, author of Five Men Who Broke My Heart

  “The Last Blind Date is a valentine for optimism, risk-taking, and love itself. With self-deprecating charm, Yellin takes her reader on a journey from Chicago to Manhattan, eviscerating New York City folkways with gentle yet biting wit.”

  —Sally Koslow, author of The Widow Waltz

  “Yellin’s story is not only a delight to read but an inspiring example of the good that can come from taking risks.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The Last Blind Date is a candid and charmingly funny account of love. Linda Yellin’s sympathy, wit, and nerve make her determined forging of a family a success, and this book about it completely winning.”

  —Hilma Wolitzer, author of An Available Man

  “Filled with lots of girl-talk, this memoir will appeal to readers who just can’t get enough of the beginning, middle, and sweet endings of love stories.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Linda Yellin’s modern love story will leave you laughing ’til it hurts.”

  —Sam Apple, author of American Parent

  “I keep on trying to think who I can compare this to, but you really can’t. I can say Erma Bombeck but younger, Chelsea Handler but kinder, but that doesn’t do the book justice. It’s a voice that is unique and compelling.”

  —Amazon Review by Total Stranger

  Praise for

  SUCH A LOVELY COUPLE

  “Yellin has a gift for moving the plot along and imbuing a familiar tale with freshness and humor. A good read from a writer with the wit and verve of Susan Isaacs.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Such a rare, ringing clarity of tone and vision. The emotions, the dialogue, the scenery are just dead on.”

  —Susan Kenney, author of In Another Country

  “Warm and funny and honest.”

  —Ann Hood, author of The Obituary Writer

  Thank you for downloading this Gallery Books eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  For Randy Arthur—

  I love you so much it’s ridiculous.

  There’s no one who’s more romantic than a cynic.

  —Nora Ephron, Rolling Stone magazine

  Prologue

  Ten minutes after saying “I do” at the Garden City Hotel in Long Island, I was already having my doubts. But how do you say “I don’t” to a man who’s considered quite the catch. Everyone was constantly telling me—even strangers—that Evan Naboshek, of the firm Naboshek, Halla, and Weiss, was a fabulous hell of a prize.

  In answer to the question, should anyone ask, “So how’d you two lovebirds meet?”—it started when lovebird #1 stepped out of a cab into a puddle. I was trying to open my umbrella at the same time I was juggling my grocery bags, spilling tomatoes, peppers, onions, three frozen-lemonade cans, and a dozen eggs onto the sidewalk. A dashing stranger went dashing after my produce, holding his umbrella aloft like Don Quixote.

  That’s all it took. I fell in love.

  Evan has all the tall, dark, and gorgeous attributes that add up to trouble. The deep-set eyes. The Roman nose. The square jaw that I later wanted to slug. Despite the rain, his custom-made suit looked perfectly pressed, and when he handed over a runaway onion, I noticed his French cuffs with the gold links and that he wasn’t wearing a wedding band. Not that a bare finger’s any indication of a man’s availability, but at least you’ve got a fifty-fifty shot.

  Balancing his umbrella over both our heads, Evan helped me restuff my plastic grocery bags and escorted me to the corner garbage can, where I ceremoniously dumped the sticky egg carton. The tomatoes, peppers, and onions also met their maker. The dented lemonade cans survived, but my dignity was a goner. Rain will wash away the mess, my knight in shiny tailoring assured me, his words sounding like a song lyric. I pictured droplets dancing around Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard; rain cascading over Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell. I wanted to sing: The sun will come out tomorrow!

  Back then, I was still capable of dreams.

  “Next on your agenda?” my rescuer asked, his smile revealing the best set of veneers this side of a TV anchorman.

  I opened my umbrella. “Home,” I said, nodding at my apartment building, your basic white-brick Upper East Side building. “I splurged on a cab so I wouldn’t get my groceries wet.”

  “Well, that didn’t go well.” He laughed. But not an at-me laugh, more of an at-the-situation laugh.

  Beneath our now-adjoining umbrellas, he told me he was a partner in a law firm and would be happy to help me sue Mother Nature should my grocery debacle result in whiplash, adding, though, that he didn’t usually specialize in curbside accidents. His expertise was divorce.

  If only I’d listened.

  I thanked him for pursuing my salad ingredients and said I could probably manage the last twenty steps without requiring legal aid. He invited me for coffee to help me de-chill from the rain.

  “You aren’t a married divorce lawyer, are you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’m a happily divorced divorce lawyer.”

  Like I said, trouble, trouble, trouble.

  He waited in my lobby while I hurried upstairs, jam
med my lemonade cans into my freezer, googled him, changed out of my wet shoes and shirt, spent three minutes blow-drying my hair into a semblance of presentable, and returned downstairs.

  Evan was talking into his cell phone and held up two fingers to indicate he’d only be two minutes. Except he was still on the phone fifteen minutes later, so maybe what he was really doing was making a peace sign. While I sat in the chair opposite his, I waved hello to my neighbor, Mrs. McBriarty, who was passing by on her walker. I went and checked my mailbox, then came back and sat down again across from my future husband.

  On the phone Evan sounded like a real hardnose, demanding this, outraged at that, saying things like This matter is not closed! If you want to go to court, my client’s happy to go to court! He insisted on the house in the Berkshires and the condo in Aspen, and that the lease be paid off on the Lexus immediately. But when he did look up at me, he had this warm smile on his face. He mouthed, Just one second, then went back to being Mr. Kick-Ass Tough Guy. In the early stages of our courtship, his ability to switch personalities on a dime seemed powerful and sexy, a masterful manipulation of mood and emotions, the key to his success in a courtroom. I later found myself bemoaning that nobody warned me I’d be married to Dr. Jekyll.

  Warnings? Warnings? There were a million warnings, all of which I chose to ignore. I preferred to focus on the late-night dinners at Del Posto, Evan’s car-service Lincolns versus my subway MetroCard, his three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment (so much nicer than my crowded studio apartment), the barrage of red roses, and the juicy gossip about his clients’ nasty divorces. We’d call it lawyer-girlfriend privilege when he’d tell me off-the-record stories.

  “Promise you’ll pretend I never told you this?” he’d say.

  “Scout’s honor,” I’d say.

  My Girl Scout leader Mrs. Tuke would have been ashamed of me.

  Evan liked blabbing scuttlebutt as much as I liked hearing it. The man couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Or his zipper. That little tidbit he did keep quiet.

  I loved his smooth life. He loved my curvy butt. I loved the way he looked at me. He loved that I looked up to him. I didn’t question when Mr. Spill the Beans excused himself to take calls in private. I didn’t question his nonstop honeyed words. I allowed myself to believe that I was so clever, so witty, that I was his one-woman sideshow.

  And, oh, how he won over my family! He admired my mother’s arts and crafts, heaped flattery on my youngest sister Lisa’s punch recipe, complimented my sister Jocelyn’s insightful observations about the ailing euro, and volunteered to play Ping-Pong with my father. Twenty minutes after meeting the guy, my parents were wanting to book the caterers. I was almost thirty-one years old; it was time, they said, and I suppose I felt so, too.

  When it came to track records for romance, I wasn’t what you’d call a gold medalist. My ability to find relationships hurtling nowhere was worthy of a Hubble telescope. Sophomore year at SUNY Albany, I fell head over boots (there’s lots of snow in Albany) for Glenn-with-two-n’s Crosse-with-an-e when we got into a debate in our Great American Writers class on the subject of Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf and geniuses committing suicide. Glenn argued on the side of genius leads to suicide. I argued on the side of that’s ridiculous. We dated for two years, most of it spent arguing. Last I heard, Glenn was a magician living in Colorado and selling hallucinogenic mushrooms.

  After moving to Manhattan postcollege, I often suggested to my first New York City boyfriend, Clive the Actuary, that we buy tickets for a Broadway show, hear some tunes, see some stars, although his idea of great theater was the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. To be fair, he tried. We turned down a Memorial Day–weekend invitation to Fire Island so I could see The Producers. (“The beach!” he said. “Nathan Lane!” I said.) As soon as I opened the program, twenty little sheets of white paper fluttered out, each saying that for that night’s performance, understudy so-and-so would be substituting for regular so-and-so. Clive shook his head. “Even Matthew Broderick would rather be out of town.”

  Three weeks later we split up. Clive got custody of the Knicks. I got custody of Times Square.

  I dated Vince, then Bobby, then Sean. I broke up with Vince, then Bobby, then Sean. I seemed to be on a six-month plan with each guy. We’d be moving along fine, and right about that six-month point I’d ask, “So, how do you think things are going with us?” and that would lead to a discussion and the discussion would lead to a realization and that’d be that. Just to be safe, I didn’t ask my next boyfriend, Brett the Paramedic, how things were going after six months. He asked me. And that was that.

  I had no idea how other women did it, how’d they know what they were getting and love what they were getting. I just kept stumbling my way from one romance to the next. Of course, the relationships started out well. I wasn’t a masochist. But before long the initial fascination would wear off; the guy with the six-pack abs was never around because he was always at the gym; the man who made me feel needed was too needy; the guy who taught me the difference between Syrah and Shiraz was a closet alcoholic. By the time Evan showed up I didn’t trust myself to know what I was supposed to want. And what with everyone I ever met in my entire life, including me, in awe of his charm and seduced by his magnetism, and saying I’d be out of my freaking mind if I let this one get away, well—suddenly I was registering at Bloomingdale’s.

  Oh. And we were fabulous in the sack together. The dynamic duo. Scarlett and Rhett. Antony and Cleopatra. Tarzan and Jane. I’m sure I wasn’t the first woman to find herself wearing lace and tulle and standing with an armful of white lilies because of sex. Love may be blind, but great sex is the ultimate blindfold. I wanted Evan to be perfect, so I assumed he was. He gave me excuses; I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. He was my fiend with benefits.

  After everything unraveled, I’d rerun the Evan and Molly Show in my head, searching for the missed signals. With the genius of hindsight I’d write lists filled with signals galore.

  Five things about Evan Naboshek under the heading “I Should Have Known Better”:

  1. Just because a man buys his socks at Barneys does not mean he won’t wear them twice.

  2. Cheap tipper when no one else is around. If he’s entertaining a client in a fancy-schmancy restaurant, he’ll be sure to lay on the 20 percent. But if some poor guy delivers spring rolls and moo shu pork on a freeze-your-ass-off night, Mr. Big Shot hands the guy a quarter.

  3. Baby talk. There are some women in this world who are not comfortable being called Poopsum or Daddy’s Little Girl. I am one of them. “How’d you like the appellate judges of New York State to hear you talking like that?” I’d say, not that it did Poopsum any good.

  4. Farts on cue. I suppose some people might consider this an admirable ability, people who are still in fraternities or under ten years old. “Pull my finger” is one of Evan’s favorite jokes. He can also wait an entire evening, getting through a cocktail party, dinner party, and after-dinner cocktails, saving all his best stuff until he gets home and lets her rip, often driving me out of our bedroom screaming into the night.

  5. Always asks for a better restaurant table. Always. We were seated at the head table at our wedding and I was waiting for Evan to request a better table.

  None of these are major enough reasons for breaking up, but all constitute possible lifetime annoyances.

  And then there’s number six:

  6. Left me for another woman.

  That last one is a good reason for splitting up.

  I found out about Evan’s messing around because he didn’t have the decency to shut down his home computer. E-mail messages with inappropriate subject headings from his legal secretary, Diane Forlenza—that was her name at the time, although now it’s Diane Forlenza Naboshek—were just sitting there right on the open screen where I couldn’t help but notice them while dusting. (I was a wife who actually cared enough to straighten out my husband’s desk and dust his keyboard and mouse. Can any woman ha
ve been a bigger fool? While I was dusting Evan’s pencil box, he was dusting Diane’s.) But she was always so nice to me when I called the office. So nice that Evan would come home from work and I’d be complimenting Diane: “You’re so lucky to have her.”

  Oh, Molly, Molly, Molly.

  To amp up the cheesy quotient, when I was emptying my dresser drawers and tossing shirts and skirts into my suitcase, bellowing, “Your secretary? Your secretary? What could be triter!”—he had the nerve to correct me and tell me she preferred to be called administrative assistant. Like the real problem was that I’d demoted her. Bags in tow, I grabbed a taxi to Penn Station and a train out to my parents’ house in Roslyn.

  At night I’d read suicidal poems by Anne Sexton. Suicidal poems by Sylvia Plath. And cynical poems by Dorothy Parker. I’d pity myself. I’d berate myself. I’d pity myself. Back and forth in my head like a crazy woman, and when I was done with that routine, I’d cry into my pillow on the convertible couch in my former childhood bedroom that was now my mother’s arts-and-crafts room, and then I’d get mad at myself for crying because crying gives you wrinkles and someday I might want to start dating again. Although not any day soon. Maybe never.

  How is it some people get their hearts trampled and they bounce right back and fall in love again, no questions asked. Is it because they don’t ask questions? I could no more easily figure out love than I could figure out the insides of a toaster. I longed to believe in romance and excitement and possibility. But deep-down love, deep-in-the-ventricles-of-your-heart love, was something that happened to other people, make-believe people in fairy tales and movies.

  I’d walk past the romance sections in bookstores gazing over all those covers of women faint with lust in the arms of bare-chested pirates and sweaty slave masters, their eyes gleaming with passion. Hey, ladies, have fun while you can.

  I imagined their six-month talks:

  DAMSEL: Well, Sinbad, you’ve been ripping my bodice for half a year now and I was wondering just where this relationship is heading.