The Real Liddy James Read Online Free

manner. “I have to go. I’m making tuna surprise for dinner,” and, interview over, she offers to drop me off at a work event on her way home to her magnificent apartment in a landmark building in Tribeca.
    â€œWould you like to marry again?” I ask her as we sit in the back of the car.
    â€œWho would risk it?” she replies, laughing. “Anyway, it’s not on my radar at the moment. I am a single mother of two children, and the father of my younger son is not in our lives, so I don’t have a minute of spare time.
Literally
.” Before I can ask another question, she says firmly, “Cal was very wanted but not planned,” and I know better than to pursue the subject.
    The snow is falling heavily now and James opens her bag and pulls out a light-as-a-feather I Pezzi Dipinti shawl, which she wraps elegantly around her neck. “You must have read the interview with President Obama when he said he had to limit the number of decisions he had to make in one day, so his suits are all the same color. I share his philosophy. My capsule wardrobe is black and white—although every season I buy one key piece, like this dress, in a color—but the bottom line is, in my life I don’t want to think too much about anything I don’t have to.”
    I am struck by how rarely one meets a woman so
bien dans sa peau
, a woman at the top of her profession, who so successfully juggles a complicated domestic situation with the extraordinary demands of her career. As someone who struggles most mornings to run a brush through herhair before the school run, I wonder: What is the secret to her superproductive existence?
    â€œMy irreplaceable nanny, Lucia, no personal life, and working late at night!” She laughs before continuing. “I accept I can’t do everything and I don’t try. I won’t ever be one of those frazzled women in dirty sweatpants, making brownies at midnight for a bake sale. I like order, because I am a Virgo. And I guess I don’t do guilt.”

    Rose Donato had a secret that made her happier than other women: she was an atheist who knew miracles could happen. This unshakable belief was born from the formative experience of her childhood, when her older brother Michael had fallen headfirst off a rope ladder, and in the six seconds he lay crumpled and motionless on the playground tarmac, her mother had fallen to her knees for the brief moments before he blinked awake again. Afterward Rose, aged seven, turned to her mother and asked what she had been doing. “I prayed for a miracle,” her mother said, before running off to holler at Michael, who was now balancing one-legged on top of a slide.
    Rose was an unusually thoughtful and wise child, so once she knew that such things could happen, she decided to harness the power. She imagined that a person might be allotted only so many miracles in one lifetime, but in teenage desperation she squandered two in rapid succession; first, when she prayed that the lineof pimples that studded her forehead like red pushpins would disappear (which they did, by magic, two weeks later), and second, when she
had
to get two tickets to the Jacksons Victory Tour, and in the line for returns a kindly woman gave her the front-row seats her son was about to throw away. She would regret this when, aged thirty-two, at a time when she was not so secretly obsessing about rings and reproduction, Frank Pearson, who had been her room- and bedmate for ten years, casually left her for a woman he had met on the 6 train. The miracle of her rent-controlled apartment in the West Village and the senior lectureship she loved seemed like nothing after this, and when, three years later, she fell irrevocably in love at the first sight of Peter James, newly appointed professor of English and American literature, only to then meet his wife, the incomparable Liddy, she became convinced that she had used up her allocation.
    For five years