Exit Strategies

by Catherine Todd

  Oh, dear. “You mean…”

  “Taylor Anderson. I came here to be with him this weekend, and now he tells me that after all the time we’ve been together since he left his wife, he’s not ready for a commitment. He denies it, but I think he must be seeing somebody else.”

  “I think we’d better go inside,” I told her.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “You’re shitting me,” Melissa said.

  “I’m afraid not,” I told her.

  “He really told you to forget about trying to remove the trustee and didn’t happen to mention that he was sleeping with her?”

  I nodded. “I’m really sorry, Melissa. This isn’t a nice way to find out about Carole. Not that there is a nice way.” I was sorry too. Despite her know-it-all demeanor, it was clear that she had a lot more invested in her relationship with Taylor than dreams and fantasies.

  “Don’t be. I might have been an idiot, but I’m not such an idiot that I’d rather not know. I asked him, and he flatly denied that he was seeing anybody. I didn’t believe him, but still. And now this. In a way it makes me feel better, since he dumped me, to know that he doesn’t have any character. You know?”

  I knew.

  “Not that he actually dumped me,” she said. “What he said was, I’d misunderstood. He wasn’t ready for an exclusive commitment. We should both see other people and test our feelings for each other.” She took a sip from her glass and looked at me. “That’s dumping, isn’t it?”

  I sighed. “I think so. It’s been a long time since I’ve navigated these waters, and Taylor and Carole both look like sharks to me. But the truth is, I can’t be objective about it. I’m sorry.” This was one of the weirdest conversations of my entire life. I mean, here I was swapping confidences with Missy Perfect Peters—the last person in the world I’d ever expected to lose her head over a man—over a bottle of scotch in the middle of the night. We could have been a couple of sorority sisters. Or mother and daughter. Or even colleagues.

  We were silent a few moments.

  “If it’s any consolation,” I offered after a while, “the worst punishment Taylor could possibly receive is to end up with Carole. They deserve each other.” I filled her in with a few of my best bits of Prattiana.

  She smiled grimly. “You’re a real dark horse, Becky. I had no idea any of this was going on. So what did you do about the trust?”

  I told her about the accounting statement and Carole’s letter. “I’ve been sort of mulling over what to do,” I told her. “I don’t exactly have a lot of resources to put into fighting her, so I have to be careful. And now I have to figure out what she’s up to with this latest move.”

  “Want me to have a look?” she asked.

  I wondered if it was the whisky talking. On the other hand, she did have a first-class legal mind, even if her judgment in men was even worse than mine. And in her place, I’d be trying to thrust a spoke into Carole’s wheel too. I could certainly use an ally in spoke thrusting. “I’d appreciate it,” I said. “It didn’t come till this morning, so I haven’t done more than glance at it myself. Now?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Why not?”

  I took the letter from its envelope and spread it on the table under the light. I held it by the edges, in case something noxious rubbed off on my fingers.

  We both read it through.

  We looked at each other.

  “Christ,” I said. “I should have read it more carefully. Is this as bad as I think it is?”

  She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Don’t panic,” she said. “You’re sure she does have the power under the trust to add beneficiaries?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll have to think,” she said.

  Melissa was up at the crack of dawn, propping her foot up on the back of the chair and bending forward over her leg to stretch out her hamstrings and calf muscles. Her spandex shorts left little to the imagination, so I could see, through eyes half open, that everything appeared to be working satisfactorily. I couldn’t believe, after the events of the night before, that she was vertical, much less active. Morning people always manage to rebuke you with their virtuous energy. My own horizontal posture suddenly seemed infinitely comfortable and desirable. I turned over and closed my eyes.

  “I’m going for a run,” she called from the door.

  “You were up half the night,” I protested.

  “I told you, it gives you an edge.”

  “Bye,” I murmured into the pillow.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” she said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  The first order of the day (after breakfast—papaya, toast, and herbal tea) was a session in the Bodygraph, a sort of benchmark Barcalounger that purported to measure your brain waves and muscle strength to determine where you belonged on the Crystol Aging Scale. A white-coated attendant read the results from the computer printout with professional cheerfulness. If my “biological age” made me a fit mate for Methuselah, she didn’t let on. “If you were a regular client, this would help us design the program perfect just for you,” she said. She carried each printout into the next office.

  “Ms. Weston,” the attendant called, beckoning me through the door.

  I followed her into another tiled sanctuary. A fountain outside the window made soothing water noises. “Come in,” Bobbie said.

  “This is beautiful,” I told her. “I was expecting something more clinical.”

  She smiled. “Surprise is part of the therapy,” she said. “I’m glad you like it.” She turned around and picked up a sheaf of papers. She set it down next to me. “Do you remember Barry Norton? From school?”

  I was relieved to see that her accusing tone from the night before had evaporated. “Not really,” I told her. “Why?”

  “You used to go out with him,” she said.

  “Did I? Oh, maybe so. But only once or twice.”

  She sighed. “You don’t even remember. Amazing. I had the most incredible crush on him.”

  “Did you?” I asked. “I didn’t know.”

  “No,” she said. “How could you?”

  She gestured toward the mound of papers.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Your schedule for this weekend, plus options,” she said. “I know you’re here in your professional capacity, but you might as well get something out of it too.”

  “Options?” I inquired.

  She smiled. “Some people take HGH—human growth hormone. I’m sure you know what that is.”

  I knew. I wondered if that was what was inspiring such enthusiasm among Bobbie’s followers, but I doubted it. “Is it safe?” I asked.

  “It’s FDA approved, though not for this application. I think it’s far more dangerous not to take it, frankly.”

  “Is it expensive?” I asked.

  “Not this weekend. It’s part of the program. If people want to continue, and almost everyone does, it costs about seven hundred dollars a month if you do the injections yourself.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s far cheaper than a long-term illness,” she said.

  “Is this what you meant by your supplement therapy?” I asked.

  “That’s part of it. The rest is vitamins and some other supplements,” she said.

  “One of the guests was talking about a big ‘energy boost’ last night.”

  She smiled. “We have all kinds of things to ‘youthen’ your metabolism. We like to start from the inside out. Want to change your mind and try some?”

  I shook my head. “No, thanks. But what’s—”

  “I didn’t think so,” she said. She consulted my printout and made some notes. “We can chat later, but I do want you to try the hydrotherapy tub to detoxify your body and improve your circulation. After that, lunch, and then I’ve scheduled you for a seaweed wrap. Following that is my class for everyone on using your mind to heal your body. Any objections to any of that?”

  I shook my head. “It’
s a very full schedule, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” she said seriously.

  Melissa caught up with me in hydrotherapy.

  “I didn’t want to miss this,” she said, climbing into the tub. “I do my best thinking in a hot tub. And this feels really great, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure,” I told her. Actually, I had a lot of trouble hearing her over the sound of fifty-four jets of water hitting my body simultaneously. I was afraid to ask, “Why fifty-four?” so I took it on faith. “It’s a little hot, isn’t it?”

  “That helps you sweat out the poisons in your body,” she said, intent on adjusting herself so that the spray hit her from all angles. “All the preservatives and fat and chemicals.” She was obviously a veteran. “Just relax and go with it. You’ll feel really good.”

  I had a little trouble relaxing against the spurts of water poking into all parts of my anatomy, but I had to admit that by the end of the session my skin was tingling and I did feel very loose of limb. In fact, it was an effort to stand up. My heart pounded a little with the exertion.

  “All right?” asked the attendant.

  I nodded. Melissa practically leaped out of the tub in a single bound.

  “Move slowly,” cautioned the attendant.

  “Time for lunch,” I said.

  “I’m not really hungry,” Melissa said. “I’m too nervous to eat. But if you want something, I’ll go with you. Then we could sit on the grass and talk. I’ve been thinking about your trust.”

  “You should eat something,” I told her, my maternal instincts coming to the fore unexpectedly. I remembered not being able to eat when Richard and I split up. I’d been making up for it ever since. Besides, I was actually touched that she was still interested in helping me, even after the whisky bonhomie had worn off.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said.

  With so many poisons exiting my body all at once, there seemed to be a lot more space opening up in my stomach. I did my best to fill it at lunch, and then Melissa and I took our fruit juice out on the lawn.

  “Well, back to business,” she said. “Can you get a copy of the original trust amendment adding the beneficiaries?”

  “Probably,” I said. “We must be entitled to it.”

  “I think you should.” She looked grim. “I’m sure you realized last night that Carole’s really screwed your children, right?”

  I nodded. “By amending the trust to say that the assets go to her grandchildren as additional beneficiaries, my children won’t see any of the principal till they’re in nursing homes, if then. The trust doesn’t terminate until the death of the last to die of Carole’s grandchildren. I probably won’t even be alive by that time. But look,” I told her, “the principal doesn’t concern me as much as the income. Now is when they need the money. They were always going to have to wait for Andrew—Carole’s son—to grow up before the assets were disbursed.”

  “That’s true,” she agreed. “But what you want is a lever to remove her, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, this might give you one,” she said.

  “How?”

  “There’s an argument that she’s just using her power to add beneficiaries to keep your children from ever effectively benefiting from the trust. That would violate your ex-husband’s intention in setting it up. The courts don’t like that sort of thing. They might be willing to reform it, and they’d probably remove her as trustee.”

  “Would that really work?” I asked, excited.

  She shrugged. “You’d most likely end up in court spending a lot of time arguing over what ‘equity’ should require and what the drafter’s intent was. It would take some time, and it would cost. But it might be worth a shot.”

  “Definitely worth a shot,” I told her.

  “Don’t get too excited. I’m not an expert in this area. But I do know someone who is. We could run it by him.”

  “Not someone in the firm,” I insisted. I wasn’t going down that road again.

  “Oh, no. This guy is brilliant, really. He knows tax law inside out, and he used to be a really big name in trusts and estates.”

  “Do I know him? Where does he practice?”

  She shook her head. “You don’t know him. Nobody knows him now. He got in a little hot water with the IRS and decided to take ‘early retirement.’ He keeps a lower profile these days.”

  “Oh,” I said, unsure if this was the sort of person I wanted to advise me. “Would he even want to talk to me, then?”

  She looked away. “He will if I ask him to. He’s my father.”

  After lunch, I reported for my seaweed wrap. I started the treatment stretched out on a table behind drawn curtains. The technician, a slender, attractive young woman with the intensity of a zealot, had told me that the seaweed and oils would probably ruin my underwear, but I could leave it on anyway if I preferred.

  I said I would live dangerously and take it off. Since it was physiologically impossible to hold in my stomach, thighs, and rear all at the same time, I didn’t make the effort for more than a minute and a half, and abandoned myself to her ministrations.

  Rosa, the technician, applied large blobs of cold seaweed from a bucket, slathering it on my body with gusto. In addition to the chill, which was considerable, and the color and texture, which were reminiscent of salad greens left far too long in the refrigerator, there was the smell, which might have been extremely alluring to sea otters and barnacles but did absolutely nothing felicitous for me.

  “Yuck,” I said. “Eau de kelp.”

  “It is very beneficial.” Her tone was disapproving. She slapped on another big glob with her gloved hand.

  I hoped so, because an entire forest of the stuff must have been sacrificed for the cause. There was even seaweed between my toes.

  “Now turn over,” she said, and started wrapping me in—I swear—Handiwrap. She twirled it round and round me until my briny body was totally encased in plastic. Then she put a large heated blanket over me. I felt like someone’s bagged lunch, or maybe a seaweed enchilada. The only nonvegetable-covered part, my face, extended out from the top of the blanket. She patted some “extract” on that too, for good measure.

  She set the timer and put it down on the table. “Forty minutes,” she said. “I’ll be back to help you into the shower and give you a rubdown with oils.” She looked at me. “It’s strange at first, but try to relax. All the impurities are being drawn out of your body. Think of something beautiful and perfect.”

  At first all I could think of was what if there was a fire while I was lying there doing my Mirabel Morgan Meets the Little Mermaid routine. I was practically paralyzed by the plastic wrap, but I rationalized that at least it would melt off as I was hopping away from the flames. After a while the forced immobility quieted my mind. Then thoughts of Carole and her plans to keep the trust money away from my children till I was moldering in my grave began to seep in unbidden. I tried to shake them off. I wondered what beautiful and perfect things I should think of instead. My daughter’s face on her first day of school. Hanalei Bay on Kauai. Franz Biebl’s “Ave Maria.” A perfectly ripe piece of Camembert on a water cracker. Chocolate éclairs…

  My stomach rumbled and I opened my eyes. I closed them quickly and opened them again.

  Taylor Anderson was still there, looking down at me. “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t sure it was you.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. The extract had hardened on my face like a mask and made my skin taut. The mask cracked when I moved my mouth. “This is the women’s side.”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, looking away. “Have you seen Melissa?”

  “Not recently,” I told him.

  “What? I can’t understand you.”

  “Not since lunch,” I enunciated. The mask broke up into shards. “Shit.”

  He scuttled backward. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll keep looking.”

  “Fine,” I said, pulling a sm
all dagger of hardened extract off my lower lip. It was a measure of how far I had come that I didn’t even care that Taylor had seen me green and slimy and smelling like an overripe fish tank.

  When he had gone, I tried to recover the chocolate éclair mood, but for some reason my mind kept drifting back to law school and—worse—the bar exam. A dreadful ordeal by anyone’s standards, an odd thing to think of from the forced idleness of a Handiwrap straitjacket. So much of all that elaborate preparation—the notes, the briefs, the classes, the bull sessions—was overkill. It was hard not to become a victim of your own excesses. I’ve heard lawyers twenty years out of school say their stomachs still turn over whenever they catch sight of one of those oversized bar review outlines.

  The ownership of Property is the first principle of Western societies…

  And for the last week before the exam, no untroubled sleep, no properly digested food, no time, no confidence.

  Rules regulating the ownership of Property are not easily altered without upsetting the entire social system.

  And on the big day, sitting down with a room full of bright young things, feeling absolutely sure you are somewhat less intelligent than everybody around you.

  And afterward, comparing notes with the other exam takers, finding out that you answered three questions with a discussion of the Rule Against Perpetuities, and nobody else thought it even applied to one.

  And then…

  Oh, yes! Thank you, Subconscious! The Rule Against Perpetuities! Maybe all that preparation wasn’t wasted after all. The meander down memory lane had triggered a real “aha” moment. Now I just had to find Melissa and check it out for sure. I pulled myself up to a sitting position like some mummy in a horror movie. “Hello?” I called. “I need to get out of this plastic wrap. I can’t move.”

  Rosa came in tsk-tsking. “It’s not time yet,” she said.

  I felt too squirrelly to wait. “If I lie here much longer, my seaweed coating’s going to harden into concrete,” I pointed out. “Besides, there’s something I need to do.”

  “You might ruin the entire detoxification process,” she insisted.