With Friends Like These: A Novel by Sally Koslow

would have radar for another. I’d lived through a whole childhood of being ordered to smile. Usually I was terrified, not least by Mother. If she hadn’t drummed into me that rule number one of proper manners is showing an interest in others, I wouldn’t have a friend in the world. Jamyang might be shy—or judging me. “All I know is I can’t leave Dash with her quite yet. I’m so sorry I’m hanging you up.”
    “You mean ‘hanging me up longer’?” Talia asked, though she sounded more amused than angry, one of many reasons why I love her, my most instinctively thoughtful friend.
    “You’re amazing,” I told her. “I’ll make it up to you.”
    One peace offering was waiting, gift-wrapped. The sweater I’d chosen—sumptuous, ruby red three-ply cashmere—was don’t-ask-don’t-tell expensive, nothing Talia would buy for herself, but shopping for friends gives me infinite pleasure. I had something for the others, too. When we got together for dinner the next week, Jules would receive a novel set in Rome—if we didn’t visit, she could at least read about it—and for Quincy I’d found a vintage photograph of Central Park, because she’d seen an apartment near there that she’d loved.
    “Just get your tush back as soon as you can,” Talia said.
    “Messages?” I asked, since we function as each other’s answering service.
    I heard her rustling around on her desk. “Not much,” she said. I jotted down information on two calls—one about the meeting of a women’s shelter where I sit on the board, and the other from a consultant who guided parents through the lunacy of school applications. Xander had gone to prep school and college on scholarship, and the position for which that education had prepared him now allowed him to provide a private-school education for Dash. He wanted us to pick the best school, a topic he’d been raising every day.
    “Should I get you up to speed about this morning’s meeting?” As Talia started a play-by-play, I thought about how little such details interested me. I was surprised no one else had commented on my lack of enthusiasm, no one but Xander. He, for whom it took a month to register that I’d chopped off six inches from my hair and gone two shades blonder, had said, more than once, “You’re bored with that job—why stay there? We don’t need your salary.” He stopped just short of modifying
salary
with
measly
. By week three of my recent frenzied nanny search, he’d started saying, “This is ridiculous. Quit working.” But if I didn’t work, I’d expect myself to be permanently attached to Dash, poor child. Soon he’d require daily psychoanalysis, not preschool.
    “If I quit,” I asked Xander, “what do you suggest I do, be some sort of dilettante?” We refer to his boss’s wife as Charlene the Chatelaine, tied down as she is with dressage, the Met’s Costume Institute gala committee, and controlling the purse strings at her husband’s charitable foundation.
    “How about more volunteering? We’re writing checks to enough organizations.”
    “Maybe you’d like me to find an internship in Zimbabwe?”
    “Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Chloe. I’d back you in either a foundation or a business. You know, like that lady who started eBay.”
    That was when I suspected that what my short, towheaded husband—my twin, some people have thought—wanted was bragging rights. If I were to go on a steady diet of philanthropy, he wouldn’t be satisfied until I became a benefit chair. If I started a business—baking blueberrymuffins, let’s say—in five years he’d expect me to take those muffins public. Xander is a smart guy, but he overlooks a key fact: I am not a leader. I’m not even a woman who would skim a self-help book on leadership.
    I like my job’s predictable grid of assignments and deadlines and—in small doses—its conversation, which doesn’t revolve, like a never-stopping carousel, around children. I also appreciate the