Catch 26: A Novel
What if you could live your life all over again?There’s just one catch…Frannie Turner is a plain, middle-aged housewife married to Stanley, a self-absorbed retired dentist who hasn’t slept in her bed in years. No children to love and be loved by. No exciting career to look back on. Just loneliness and lost dreams. So when the mysterious new hairdresser in town offers her the chance to get everything she’s ever wanted, Frannie figures she has nothing to lose -except her soul. And surely, as a stunning twenty-six-year-old singleton in New York, finding true love within the stipulated year should be a piece of cake, not to mention a hell of a lot of fun!But New York City is no place for the naïve, and Frannie will soon learn just how dangerous a deal with the devil can be…‘Catch-26 marries confection with thriller to create a tale that's at once compelling and comic, delightful and deep, classic yet modern, just like its older-but-younger heroine and theme. I read it straight through yet its memory lingers, the signs of a wonderful novel.’Pamela Redmond Satran, author of Younger‘In her tantalizing novel, Catch 26, Carol Prisant serves up a thoroughly modern woman's Faust. This irresistible story comes wrapped around a devilish question: If you could have it all—sex, love, beauty, money and eternal life—would you sign on the dotted line?’Dylan Landis, author of Rainey Royal
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HarperImpulse an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2016
Copyright © Carol Prisant 2016
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Cover design by Holly Macdonald
Carol Prisant asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008185367
Version 2016-08-11
FOR DAPHNE
and
FOR CAROLAN
Table of Contents
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety.”
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2 Scene 2
“Burn with me!
The only music is time,
The only dance is love.”
King of the River, Stanley Kunitz
Standing at her closet, still naked from her shower and wondering what to wear to lunch, Frannie heard Stanley’s key scratch at the front door lock. A draught of biting winter air sliced through their bedroom. Frannie hurried to close the door.
“It’s pretty cold,” she thought she heard him say. “May snow.”
But he managed to catch the bedroom door before it fully closed and he caught her standing there. Oh, God. She tried to cover herself with her hands and arms. He shouldn’t see her like this.
Her husband barely glanced at her as he pushed past to retrieve his glasses from the top of the chest of drawers.
“Why bother?” he said mildly, dropping the glasses into his breast pocket and closing the door behind him.
Moving away from the chill left in the air, Frannie moved slowly towards the bathroom’s full-length mirror. Arms at her sides, she stood. And looked. To see what Stanley had seen.
Her mottled, freckled chest, he’d seen. But they hadn’t known about sun back then, so it was something of a surprise, although she’d never expected these pancaked breasts, either, nor the small mushroom farms growing beneath their awkward, sloppy, weight. And what about the puffy hill of her pale, defenseless stomach that ended in a scraggly patch of pubic hair – some of which was gray, she saw now. How had she not known that pubic hair turns gray? In fact, when Arlene had mentioned it the other morning, she’d been stunned. Although it made a certain sense, she thought. The hair on her head was mostly gray (beneath the dye). Her eyebrows – what was left of them – were gray. She touched them up, but they were gray. Yet how, at sixty-six, could there still have been something so basic she didn’t know? Age was supposed to bring wisdom.
She ran damp palms down her thickened body. No waist, wide hips, fat thighs. When she got to those lumpy thighs, she folded her hands into fists, and her reluctant gaze slid past hairless shins to her sad, bunioned feet with their overlong second toes.
It couldn’t have been many years ago when she’d been slim and supple as a whippet, her hipbones like paired knives and a stomach, not just flat, but absurdly concave. Her skin had been satin back then; her breasts … alright, they’d been unexceptional. Not perky not plush, just a nothing-to-brag-about B cup. But these days – these leftover days – she was into – and even a little out of – a DD. But at twenty, there’d been none of these flesh-colored moles, had there? No veinous freeways, no pinkly larval skin tags. (Who thought up words like “skin-tags” anyway?) With an involuntary groan, Frannie turned toward the window and the late-winter treeline beyond.
Why had she looked?
She sat heavily on the bed and reached for the remote, but it wasn’t there. She felt around the floor, and finding it under one of Stanley’s socks, pushed herself up to one elbow and clicked.
Elizabeth Taylor. There she was.
Frannie leaned gratefully back on the pillows. They smelled of his hair.
Oh yes, there was Elizabeth. Elizabeth, with her perfect, provocative, perfect and large, perfect and movie-star breasts. Elizabeth in
