Isabel&39s Bed [Paperback]

When Harriet Mahoney first sees it, Isabel Krug's bed is covered with sheared sheep and littered with celebrity biographies. Unpublished, fortyish, and recently jilted, Harriet has fled Manhattan for Isabel's loudly elegant Cape Cod retreat, where she will ghostwriteThe Isabel Krug Story,based on the sexy blond's scandalous tabloid past. Unusually talented in the man department ( I give lessons ), Isabel revamps and inspires Harriet as they gear up to tell all, including the tangled history Isabel shares with her odd lodger, Costas. Life according to Isabel is a nonstop soap opera extravaganza, an experience to be swallowed whole -- and the attitude is catching....Elinor Lipmanis the author of the novelsThe Way Men ActandThen She Found Me, and a collection of short storiesInto Love and Out Again.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, she lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and son.From Chapter 1

WINTER BEFORE LAST, a tea-leaf reader at a psychic fair looked into my cup and said she saw me living in a house with many beds and a big-mouth blonde. At the time it meant nothing to me. I was sharing a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan with a balding, malcontent boyfriend of twelve years, who said we'd get married if I conceived his child or when he felt like it. Since I was looking for literary prophecies -- that I'd write a best-seller or at least find an agent -- and because my tea-leaf reader wore, in a room full of gauzy peasantwear, a knock-off Chanel suit, I moved on to another booth.

Six weeks later, Kenny took me out to dinner at an expensive chef-owned restaurant and told me he was ambivalent about us. I said what I'd been saving for such an occasion -- that we were commonlaw spouses by now and he'd better get over his ambivalence.

I met someone, he replied.

There went twelve years: my youth. In three months, he was married.

So at forty-one, feeling like eighty, I was lookilG