Compliments of a Friend Read Online Free PDF

Truly. Vacuous? Definitely. Stupid? Indubitably. However, somehow her pea brain was optimally structured for the absorption and retention of every item of Shorehaven gossip that wafted through the atmosphere, no matter how vague.
    So I asked her: “How come Stan Giddings waited until Ryn was six months pregnant to marry her?”
    “It’s a looong story,” Mary Alice began.
    Awaiting the arrival of her personal trainer, she was decked out in cornflower blue Spandex shorts and tank top with a matching cornflower blue terry headband. Clearly, and of course irrationally, she was proud of her body. Her arms had the approximate diameter of the cardboard tube inside a roll of toilet paper. Her hip bones protruded farther than her breasts.
    “A very long story.”
    “I have to get going in ten minutes, Mary Alice. I have a class.”
    “My trainer is due then. Connor? You know him?”
    When I shook my head, she rolled her eyes to let me know how unhip I was.
    “I mean, he’s only the most well-known trainer on the North Shore. God, you’re an intellectual in an ivory tower! Vanessa used him, you know.”
    She sighed. Not a mere exhalation of air, but the drawn-out vocalization of a lousy actress reading [sighing] in a script.
    “What can I tell you? Vanessa knew Ryn was”—Mary Alice gazed ceiling-ward, searching for the right words—“avec child, like the French say.”
    Toujours.
    “She wanted to put the pressure on Stan.”
    “To get a good settlement?”
    “Well, of course,” she responded, a bit impatiently.
    Ours was not a natural friendship. Like cellmates, Mary Alice and I had come together while doing time—in our case, as class mothers two decades earlier.
    “Naturally,” she went on, “Vanessa signed a prenup.”
    Mary Alice, on her fourth marriage—this one to Lance Goldfarb, urologist to Long Island’s best and brightest—obviously knew about prenuptial agreements. She took the blue sweater that had been draped over a chair and arranged it artfully around her skeletal shoulders.
    “I mean, someone with Stan’s resources isn’t going to go into a marriage without protection, is he?”
    “He obviously went into Ryn without protection.”
    “Can you believe that? Well, I can, as a matter of fact. He’d had two kids with his first wife but they weren’t working out. Bulemic or dyslexic or something. And Vanessa couldn’t have any. Or wouldn’t. Whatever. Anyhow, Stan was absolutely dying for a family.”
    “Isn’t that a little risky? I mean, getting your girlfriend pregnant while you’re still married to someone else.”
    Mary Alice blew out an impatient gust of air.
    “Grow up, Judith.”
    “What am I being pathetically naive about?”
    “About that. Sooner or later, he’d get out of the marriage without fatal damage because he had an airtight prenup. And that if Ryn had the baby before they were married, big damn deal. She’s an artist. Do you think artists care about having a child in or out of marriage?”
    “You’ve got a point,” I conceded. “But Stan’s not an artist, so he would want the baby to be born in wedlock. Ergo, Vanessa would have figured time was on her side.”
    Mary Alice gave a weary nod that said: Finally, she’s getting it. It’s annoying to be patronized by a birdbrain.
    “Right,” she said. “Ryn didn’t need her lawyer to tell her it was time to put the squeeze on Stan. Trust me. Vanessa got the picture, too. And she wound up with the house and the pied-à-terre on Central Park West and enough cash to choke a horse, except she needed it because she was going to redecorate plus get the works: face lift, tummy tuck, tush tightening, and lipo, lipo, and more lipo. Maybe implants. Cheekbones, I think. Could have been boobs. I can’t remember which.”
    “Did she get all that done?” I asked.
    The last time I’d seen Vanessa, a couple of months before she died, she hadn’t looked as if she needed anything tightened or implanted, though for all I