“Yeah I’m relieved,” sighed Rush, and I could see by the way he slumped back in his chair that this was more than an ordinary phone call.
“She kept me waiting deliberately.”
“I know you don’t like me to say it, but she’s a bitch Rush and it’s way past time you were done with her,” said Arch.
“I’m done with her now. I’m truly done with her now,” Rush gave Arch a hug and left the room.
“Arch, it’s none of my business, but you just called an eight year old a bitch.”
“Ah no, I just called Harriet a bitch,” Arch corrected.
“Harriet, the ex?”
“Oh yeah of the prize variety.” He paused, then said, “You know this is your business. It’s time you knew the whole story and if Rush isn’t going to tell you, I sure as hell will,” he sat down at the table. “Ready?”
“Reluctantly.”
“Here goes. Harriet and Rush went to Julliard together and they were best pals with another student, Josh Freedland.”
“The scriptwriter?” Freedland was famous too.
“Yep, that’s him,” Arch continued. “He wanted to be an actor then. So the three of them go to class together and rehearse together and room together and both the guys are in love with Harriet. Everyone is in love with Harriet. But they compete and one day she favours Rush and the next day she favours Josh and she keeps them both on a string.
“Of the three of them, Rush is the one with talent and money. Everyone thinks he had family money, but he didn’t, he had a job, a couple of them, he parked cars, he bussed tables, he poured drinks. He paid the rent while Harriet and Josh went to auditions. Anyway, so he gets a break, a role in that hospital soap and next thing you know he gives up parking cars and has a regular salary and the three of them move out of the dive they’re living in to a decent apartment.
“Not long after that Harriet is in Rush’s bed and Josh has moved out. So everything is going well. Rush gets Harriet a part on the same soap, then he gets a part in a Broadway play and then a movie offer and they marry, become America’s favourite couple, and before you know it, Harriet is pregnant and they have Anissa.”
“Arch, how is any of this my business? Anyway most of this is public information?”
“Ok, I’m getting to it. Fast forward five years. Rush is building a serious career and Harriet is starting to make progress but it’s patchy, then he figures out she’s had an affair with a producer. He confronts her, she gets angry, tells him it’s his fault that she can’t get out from under his shadow. He forgives her. But if you ask me, she killed a little bit of him then.
“Shane says he got sort of manic, took on more and more projects, never stopped working. Publically they were Newman and Woodward, but behind the scenes it was more Taylor and Burton. Harriet kept having affairs and eventually Rush couldn’t forgive her anymore but he wouldn’t leave her either because of Anissa. He loves that little girl. She is the image of her mother with none of the bitch bits.
“So the last couple of years they live apart, but they keep it quiet. Rush because of Anissa, and Harriet because it’s better for her public image. Now Harriet’s career is in overdrive and she’s everyone’s sweetheart. Rush just works and when he’s not working he’s with Anissa or working on our Foundation projects.”
Arch paused, sighed and continued. “Just before Christmas, Harriet tells Rush she wants a divorce. He’s not surprised about that, but then she really knocks him out for the count. She tells him she’s been having an affair with Josh Freedland for the whole time she and Rush were married. The whole ten years. And when he’s on the canvas, she says she’s going to marry Josh. Bitch!”
“Oh. That must have hurt.” This was so unlike the Harriet that you read about, the Harriet who visited orphanages and supported social causes.
“It gets worse. Then the hellcat delivers the truly lethal blow. Anissa isn’t Rush’s daughter, she’s Josh’s.”
“Oh my God!”
“There’s more,” Arch took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “Harriet tells Rush that she will stop him having any contact with Anissa and that shared custody is out of the question unless he divorces her and makes it look like she’s the wronged party – publicly. She’s smart. She knows her reputation is more fragile than his, so she’s trying to protect her career. She needs him to look bad to make her look good. If he does what she wants, she’ll agree to share custody.”
I gasped, “That’s blackmail. But he could just fight her in court and....”
“He’s not Anissa’s father. Sure he could fight and he has the money to do it, but he can’t win unless he absolutely goes hard for Harriet and exposes all the secrets of their marriage, and even then there’s no guarantee he’d win. And what sort of legacy is that for Anissa?”
“Was he worried about his career?”
“Hell no! He couldn’t give two figs for his career and the irony of it is that his reputation is probably enhanced by an affair or two anyway,” Arch shrugged, was he aware of the double standard I wondered.
“You could say that,” I grimaced. The coverage had made Rush look bad, two-timing rat bad, but not, lock him up and throw away the key bad.
“Well yeah. I know it’s not fair,” Arch sighed. “So he figures the best thing, the easiest thing, is to give Harriet what she wants. But he’s not stupid so he gets lawyers involved and that’s the plan. Rush will set it up so it looks like he’s having an affair, giving Harriet the grounds to divorce him and winning shared custody of Anissa.
“His plan is to pick up a woman in a bar and make sure they’re photographed in a compromising situation and then make it easy for the woman to sell her story so the press call him a cheating bastard. Except, we wouldn’t let him do it that way.”
Now I was beginning to see where this was my business.
“He wasn’t thinking clearly. Hell, he was one-eyed with rage. He was going to hire a prostitute, or ten of them, if he thought it would get him Anissa. He just didn’t care if the press tore him to ribbons. He didn’t care if he never worked again. But we just couldn’t let him do that. We hatched this plan to get him out of the US, as far away from Harriet as possible, somewhere we could disappear, hide out, to give him time to clear his head.”
“Sydney,” I said, now it was making sense.
“You got it.”
“What’s she got?” called Shane, coming in from the kitchen juggling two golden ripe mangoes.
“She’s got the low down on you dude,” Arch shook off the seriousness of the last few minutes.
“Man you are so not cool,” said Shane, now in the dining room, still juggling.
Who’s not cool?” This from Rush from the direction of the bedrooms.
“Me, I’m not cool. I’m about to crack the whip and ask you all to get out of my office,” I said gesturing to the dining table.
“She so is cool,” said Shane teen surfer boy style to Arch tossing him a mango and heading back to the kitchen.
“She so is. She has a whip,” laughed Arch, following him.
“Yeah and she’s gonna use it on me later,” laughed Shane and he flashed me a look that was pure naughty as he disappeared.
“Do you want me gone too?” asked Rush earnestly.
I shook my head. I did want him gone, but somehow less so than before. Arch was right it did make a difference to know that what Rush did was for a better reason than the cold, ugly idea of hurting someone he’d once loved. I still didn’t understand how all this managed to end up with me being the other woman, but now it was my business and I had to find out.
Meanwhile I had work to do. I fired up my laptop. Rush sat opposite me, but instead of doing something productive, he put his elbows on the table, propped his chin in his hands and stared at me.
Well, perhaps he wasn’t staring at me. Maybe he was just gazing off into space thinking up a diabolical new plan. I tried to ignore him, but when he didn’t move, I started to feel like ants were crawling up my arms. Da
mn it, he was looking at me. Was my hair sticking up funny, did I have food on my face, had I tucked my skirt in my underwear?
“What?” I barked to cover the blush I could feel spreading over my chest.
“Ah. Nothing.”
“You were staring at me.” He was making me feel itchy and hot.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”
“Really. Isn’t that something you specialise in?”
He laughed, “I’ll try not to let that happen again shall I?”
“Making me uncomfortable?”
“Getting caught staring at you.”
Now I stared at him. My best ‘you are kidding’ stare, the one I used to show my disapproval to slack shop assistants, lost taxi drivers, and staff who conveniently forgot to do their client reports. He just laughed, rocked back in his chair, folded his arms behind his head and grinned at me.
“Is this you trying not to make me feel uncomfortable?” I accused.
“Yeah. Is it working?” It was making me feel like I might melt.
“Epic fail.” But it was hard to keep a giggle from smothering my expression of righteous indignation.
“Guess I need to try harder.”
“You could be more subtle. Anyway I don’t know why you’re looking at me?”
“You don’t?” Both of his eyebrows jumped.
“Have I grown horns or something?” I was certainly red faced I knew that much.
“Or something.”
“I need to work.”
“Am I stopping you?”
“Um....” Then my phone rang. Never had the expression, ‘saved by the ringtone’ felt more apt. The man was a complete distraction.
He behaved himself after that, or he got a whole lot better at not getting caught.
In a break that morning I had Shane in my sights. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Is Steven Spielberg ET’s dad?”
“I take it, that’s a yes, right?”
“Ask me anything, but if it’s vital statistics you want, I insist you measure me for an up to date viewpoint,” he said flexing a bicep.
I ignored said bicep. “Arch told me about why you came here, about wanting to get Rush out of the US and about his problem with Harriet and Anissa.”
“God that dude has a mouth on him,” Shane huffed.
“He thought I should know.”
He considered, “Yeah, he’s right. Rush should be telling you this, but he won’t, he has a screw lose in his fat head about what he did to you and how there’s no excuse good enough.”
“Maybe he’s right?” I said defiantly.
“Maybe. But Arch is right too, you should know what went down. You know I really didn’t mean to cause all that trouble with the studio, it just sort of got out of control. So what do you know already?”
“I know that Harriet was blackmailing Rush. That to have shared custody of Anissa he had to....”
“Pimp himself out,” finished Shane.
“Well, yeah.”
“That was the idea, but we wanted to give him time to think it through, so we jumped the jet. The plan was to lay low, keep quiet, just hang out, but I should’ve known that mole would keep digging the hole deeper. By the time we got to Sydney the bitch had added a deadline. The deal was only available till New Year’s Day.”
I think my eyes popped.
“With time we could have worked out a plan. Hired a model or an actress. It could have worked out fine, given Harriet what she wanted, given some willing chick a stab at the fame game and limited the reputation damage to Rush. Even kept the studio sweet, but we had no time to get control of it.
“That’s when Rush lost it. He figured Harriet was bluffing. She never was all that interested in Anissa, only saw the kid occasionally. He figured she didn’t really want full custody, so he decided not to play her game. That was the phone call you caught him on outside the bar.”
“Oh,” I said, remembering how awkward that moment had felt, the first of many awkward moments with Rush.
“Instead we decided we’d show her just how much we didn’t care by putting on a little show for the press for New Year’s Eve. That meant blowing off the studio, but hell it was worth it to stick it up that bitch.”
“So the photos with me, they were really a misunderstanding?”
“I told you he’d lost it. He was really fucked in the head that night. So first off we have to get you out of the way so you won’t cop the blame from the studio. We make good and behave ourselves, mostly,” he grinned, was he thinking of Oxford Street? “Then we dump you on the cab queue so you can’t stop us doing what we were gonna do.”
“You were all heart.”
“Our problem was that we really liked you.” He threw his arm around me and gave me a hug.
“You’d only just met me!” I said indignantly, but I left his arm around my shoulders.
“Yeah girl, but you had this broken foot and goddamn crutches and the old bloke in the slippers and the old folk’s bus. Priceless. And then we go to your own home, your own granny’s house, and your dog has a bucket on his head and there’s a damn talking bird in the bedroom,” he laughed and gave me a little shake.
“You were just so real. You have no idea how much plastic is in our lives, plastic people with plastic body parts and plastic emotions. And there you were, real and lovely,” he bumped me with his hip. “We all fell a little bit in love with you straight up. How could we not wanna make it right for you?” he shrugged and I felt colour rising in my cheeks.
“Then we go raise some hell, get some attention and like we’ve just got started and Rush says, ‘I can’t risk it, what if she’s not bluffing, what if I can’t beat her in court’, and he says he’ll do it, he’ll give Harriet her affair. So we have this heated exchange to try and talk him out of it and Arch nearly smacks him one, but he’s determined and he gets me to promise to find a photographer to shoot him and you.
“So I guess you were just the right girl in the right place at the right time and yeah Rush is right too,” he scratched his head, “There really was no excuse for what we did to you.”
22: Change of Heart
“Andi, want to see a picture of my daughter?”
Rush and I were in the dining room waiting for the council planner and the builder to arrive with new costings. Not your daughter I thought, not really. “Sure.”
He passed over his phone, set to a photo of a beautiful little honey haired pixie. “This is Anissa. She’s eight. She’s into the colour pink, things that sparkle, puppies and ballet shoes, probably in that order,” said Rush, and I could hear the pride in his voice.
In the photo, Anissa was laughing with her mouth wide and her hair wild, she had a wriggling puppy in her hands. Rush lent over me and swiped the screen to show another shot of Anissa in dance gear, her ballet shoes slung over her shoulder by their ribbons. Another swipe revealed Anissa with her arms around Rush’s neck. The two of them face to face, foreheads touching, totally absorbed in each other.
“You love her very much don’t you?” I winced, top marks for dumb question of the day. This was a man who had proven how much he would do for this little girl.
“She is the centre of my world,” he said with a big intake of breath. “Just having her in my life makes me want to be a better person, make the world a better place for her. This divorce, her mother, well I thought I was going to lose Anissa and it made me crazy.”
Was he going to tell me his story now? But he changed tack completely and hit me with a question I wasn’t expecting.
“Do you want kids?”
“I – ah.”
“Hell I’m sorry, that’s a God awful personal question, excuse me,” he shuffled papers on the table, looking genuinely embarrassed.
“Well since I am your love interest, perhaps it’s a question you should ask?” I said, regaining my balance.
“
You’re right, so?” he said with a sudden grin.
“I think being a parent is the hardest job you could possibly do, and no holidays or bonus schemes to go with it, but yes I’d like to be a mother one day.”
“Is there a prospective father on the scene, someone I should be expecting a swift upper cut from anytime soon?”
“I thought there was but I’m not sure now.” Oh shut up, you idiot. For what earthly reason was I telling him this? He faced me across the table, studying me, waiting to see if I’d say more, making me unaccountably nervous.
“Andi, what I did to you, it was ruthless. I completely violated your privacy. I took advantage of your position. I didn’t think about – ah it’s worse, I didn’t care about the impact on you. I have no excuse and I’m sorry. You were there, convenient and I used you. I know that’s utterly lame but I hope you can accept my apology?” he said.
What to say. He’d tried to apologise twice before and I’d brushed him off. Now I was in the mood to hear him but I wasn’t sure how to respond.
He jumped back into the silence. “I don’t expect it to change the way you feel about me. And you don’t have to say anything.”
But it did change the way I felt about him. Now just what was I going to do with that?
Right now at least, nothing, there was no time. Cathy and Helen arrived dragging Arch with them and spread the seating plan on the table. We had a fantastic problem - too much interest in the event.
“We could sell ten, maybe more tables, but we can’t physically fit them in the space,” said Cathy.
“With ten more tables of ten, that’s another hundred thousand dollars,” said Helen, brandishing a calculator.
“What if we ditch the dance floor?” said Arch, eyes down on the plan.
“But we sold the event as a dinner dance,” said Cathy.
“Trim it then?” I said, spinning the plan around so it was no longer upside down to me.
“Could maybe fit five tables in that way,” said Arch, leaning across the table.
“What if we shrink the table sizes themselves, you know reduce the elbow room, make it more cosy,” said Helen.
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