by Liza Bennett
“See you all for lunch,” Ethan said, as he climbed back into the jeep and wheeled it around toward the studio.
In the house, there were groceries to be put away, dishes to be done, laundry to be sorted. Brook wanted tdo show Meg her growing butterfly collection and Phoebe wanted to be everywhere Meg and Brook were. But at one point Meg was able to steal away to an upstairs bathroom for a few seconds where she read Ethan’s note. In his all-capitals, forward-slanting scrawl, he’d written:
PLEASE COME SEE MEAT THE STUDIO LATER. WE MUST TALK—ONE LAST TIME.
He was probably right that they should talk things through, Meg thought, as she flushed the note down the toilet. In some ways Meg was surprised that Lark hadn’t already noticed that something was seriously off between her sister and husband. If Meg was obviously uncomfortable around him, Ethan was downright uncivil to her. He hadn’t addressed a single comment to her since Friday night. He looked through her when they were in the same room. Meg saw clearly that the friction between her and Ethan had generated the unhappiness permeating the household. It was probably best that these problems were sorted out before the weekend was over. Eventually they would have to find a way to ease back into a normal relationship.
Clint and Janine came back to the house with Ethan for lunch, as they frequently did. And when Ethan returned to the studio after the meal and Clint drove down to Hudson on errands, Janine stayed at the house to do the lunch dishes and take care of Fern and the girls so that Lark could work on her book. It was easy enough then for Meg to slip out the kitchen backdoor, down the steps, around through the woods, and along the riverbank now slick with fallen leaves.
Ethan’s studio had been a grist mill once, built on the river, and while its barnlike interior and three-story arching roof remained basically intact, Ethan had lovingly refurbished the slatted wood walls and slabbed marble floor. The south side of the studio, which had once housed the stalls of unshucked corn and storerooms for barrels and shipping pallets, Ethan had converted into offices for Clint and Janine. The bulk of the mill, north-facing, was now the huge open area he had made over into the glassblowing studio, keeping the old mill stone in the center of the room for a tempering table. Seven-foot-high open wooden shelves ran along the south side of the studio, stacked with recently fired glassware, each piece etched on its base with the Red River Studio logo. Although most of Ethan’s art pieces were down at the Judson Gallery, what Meg assumed were two new sculptures sat on a separate raised platform next to the shelves. They were squat cubed masses of primary colors, composed of intricate, wildly convoluted glass tubing.
He was working on one of his glass sculptures that afternoon; sections of the piece, foot-long angry squirts of red and yellow, lay like salamanders in the sun on the iron hot plate on the worktable next to the annealing oven. Meg stood for a moment in the doorway watching Ethan as he rotated the long pontil in the blasting furnace and then blew on the rod with the gentleness of a father kissing a baby. He moved with the slow precision of one totally comfortable with a difficult medium—like a ballet dancer or a concert pianist—his mind and the body fused in intense concentration.
Over the roar of the furnaces and fans Ethan could not possibly have heard Meg enter and yet something made him turn as she started across the sun-filled room toward him. He was standing in front of an open furnace, rotating a pontil in the heart of the flaming gas jets. When he saw Meg, he slowly withdrew the rod, revealing the molten fist of glass on the end.
“So, you came.” He examined the tip of the pontil before returning it to the fire, rotating it the entire time. He was wearing tinted heat-protective glasses and a faded blue T-shirt soaked with sweat.
“Yes,” Meg said. “I think you’re right—we need to talk.” She thought he looked odd in the glasses, sinister almost, the light of the ovens casting a bright pinkish glow over his body.
“Damn you, Meg,” Ethan spat out the words as he whirled around to face her now, the blazing rod between them like a sword.
“Ethan!” Meg took a few steps back in alarm.
“Lark told me about your new boyfriend,” he said. “What the fuck is going on?” He turned back to the furnace and tossed the rod into it as if it were a piece of trash, sending sparks flying out of the hole. He tore off the glasses and threw them on the metal table; they skidded across the surface with a metallic twang.
“Please, just calm down,” Meg said. “What exactly did she tell you?”
“That you’re seeing someone new,” Ethan said, facing her. His hair, damp with sweat, curled in ringlets on his forehead. The heat from the ovens or his own outrage had flushed his face a dark red. “He’s married. No kids. What’s the point of this? Or do you enjoy torturing me?”
So, Lark had passed Meg’s cowardly lie on to Ethan; that was why he’d been so distant. He hadn’t given up on his fantasy about her—he’d just twisted it into an ugly new shape in his mind.
“Lark kept asking me what was going on,” Meg replied slowly, as she tried to size up Ethan’s state of mind. “I hadn’t been talking to her much these last few weeks—because I didn’t know what the hell to say. You kept promising me you’d tell her the truth. And you haven’t. You’ve lied to her, and you’ve been lying to me. What I did was cover for you, damn it.”
“You mean … it’s not true?” he asked, staring at her hungrily.
“Of course, not,” Meg said. “But what difference does that make? You’ve got to deal with this thing, Ethan. You’ve got to talk to Lark.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Ethan said, throwing up his hands. “I’ve been such a total fool. I’ve been utterly, absolutely insane with jealousy ever since Lark told me Friday night about this guy. And the whole time … he was me!” Ethan started to laugh as he took a step toward her.
“No, he’s not!” Meg cried. “Listen to me. I feel nothing for you. You have to face the fact that this whole thing—it’s unreal on your part. It’s delusional.”
“Meg, please, don’t be like this,” Ethan said, suddenly gripping her hands in his.
“Let me go, Ethan,” she said evenly, though she felt trapped. When he didn’t immediately release her, she struggled against him. The firestorm of the furnaces seemed suddenly louder. He stepped toward her, forcing her arms to his waist, her fists balled in impotent protest.
“It is me you love, Meg, me,” Ethan whispered, as Meg tried to wrench her arms free. Ethan tightened the pressure on her wrists to keep her from pulling away. “Why can’t you just admit it?”
“You’re hurting me,” she cried, twisting from him, the pain underscoring the awful reality of her situation: he wasn’t going to let her go. She no longer knew who he really was, let alone how to reason with him. Now, though she was inches from him, she would have been hard-pressed even to describe him. He seemed to loom above her, casting her in shadow. Meg felt her strength dissolve under the sudden rush of a sensation almost unknown to her. Fear.
Then Meg heard the noise in the front office—a door or window slamming. Ethan heard it, too, turning toward the sudden distraction.
“Let me go. Now,” Meg said, trying to keep her voice steady.
He looked down at her with the uncomprehending stare of someone emerging from a dream. Then he nodded, releasing his grip and stepping back from her.
“Oh, Meg.” He sighed, running his hands through his hair. “What am I going to do?”
“You’re going to tell Lark what you’re going through,” Meg said, the blood rushing back through her fingers. Her uncertainty hardened into resolve. Ethan was out of control, hell-bent on a path of self-destruction that threatened to take with him everyone Meg loved most in the world. The time for doubt and temporizing was over.
“I will,” Ethan said, turning to met her gaze. The anguish in his eyes did not touch her heart at all this time. Her pity for him was now overwhelmed by her fear for the rest of them. He had become such a powerful, dangerous force, and yet Meg was the only one who could see the threat he p
osed, the tornado spinning them into its devastating spiral.
“You’d better,” Meg said, as she walked away, leaving him standing alone in the middle of his self-made inferno. “Or, believe me, this time I will.”
10
“She’s hardly a kid anymore,” Meg said, trying again to reassure Lark that Lucinda would be all right. It was the Friday morning after the Columbus Day weekend and Lucinda had been missing since Monday night. Through Meg’s intervention, Lucinda had been allowed to attend the basketball game in Montville. She had not come home. Tom Huddleson, the police chief, had asked around town and discovered that Lucinda never attended the game. The household in Red River from Tuesday morning on had been in an uproar, overriding, for a time at least, all other concerns. Huddleson had put out an APB on the teenager, but there was very little anyone could to do besides that. Except wait. And worry.
“In some ways, yes,” Lark said. “But in others, I guess because she’s just so screwed up, she is a little kid, Meg. She’s so damned needy. Lord, I can see her hitchhiking and being picked up by some awful guy and—”
“Stop it,” Meg cut in. “She’s not an idiot. And remember, she probably acts very differently with you than she’s does with her friends.”
“Friends! Like she has any around here. I mean, they’ve all been perfectly polite to me, but it’s clear none of the Red River kids can stand her. And the Montville crowd? Tom and I have gone over there and tried to talk to the one or two who sometimes hang around with her—Tom knows who they are because they’re constantly in trouble—but they’re not nice and they claim they haven’t seen her since early October. Goddamnit—where is she? I haven’t got a thing done on the book all week worrying about her.”
“I know how you feel, believe me,” Meg replied, swamped by worries of her own. As far as she could tell, Ethan still hadn’t spoken to Lark and, under the circumstances, she didn’t quite know what to think. Was Ethan just waiting for Lucinda to be found—and that problem resolved—before confronting his wife with another crisis? Or was Ethan stalling again—seizing this as an excuse to spin out his fantasy even longer? “What does Ethan say?”
“Ethan’s been in one of his moods—well, you know what he’s like when he’s upset. He’s holed himself up in the studio. I’m just letting him be for now.”
“Oh, baby,” Meg said, hating the uncertain situation Ethan had left them in once again. “I wish there was something practical I could do to help.”
“Thanks, Meg, but you help just by being there. I always feel better just talking to you.”
After Lark hung up, Meg took a deep breath and tried to clear her mind. Now was not the time to think about Ethan. Or to wonder again if Lucinda had spied on Ethan and her that Monday afternoon in the studio and seen things that made her want to run away. Lark’s comment about Lucinda hitchhiking and being picked up by the wrong kind of man had only reinforced Meg’s own worst scenarios about what might have happened to the wayward teenager. Meg suspected that Lucinda, despite her tough exterior, was not nearly as experienced as she made herself out to be.
Meg took another deep breath and tried to put her personal problems out of her mind for the time being. She had enough worries to contend with at work. She began to mentally sort through everything she had to get done before the SportsTech presentation at three that afternoon. Between Lark’s call and a last-minute screwup with one of the ad designs, Meg felt seriously behind, and even as she was talking with Lark, she could hear the phones ringing out at reception almost nonstop. From her glassed-in corner office she could see just enough of the bull pen to know that all three of her art directors and their assistant had, miraculously enough, made it in before ten-thirty. But then, preparing a new business pitch was like getting ready for combat. Troops had to be ready, and battle plans reviewed.
Hardwick and Associates, with fifteen employees including Meg, was not a large agency. The offices themselves were not particularly chic. As Meg’s small enterprise had grown, she’d simply rented space adjoining her original closet-size office in a rather dilapidated turn-of-the-century building, and broken through walls to create one large, oddly contoured studio next to four smaller rooms: Meg’s office, a tiny conference and lunchroom, Oliver’s reception area, and the cubicle office of Eduardo de Marquez, the creative director. The bathrooms were, inconveniently, public and down a long hall. The elevators were temperamental. The cleaning service sporadic at best. But the reasonable monthly rent and the location—in the heart of the Fashion District—made it ideal.
It was a busy shop, the kind of place where people tended to stay put, not because it was particularly good for their careers, but because it was as freewheeling and noisy and slightly crazy as a large, loving family. It was a warm, welcoming place in the middle of a tough and competitive industry. Though Hardwick had a great reputation, fashion clients came and went as they did in all industries—each change of upper management prompted a housecleaning that often resulted in a switching of agencies, deserved or otherwise. Meg had been very lucky. Over the course of the eight years she’d been in business, she’d lost only one account to management changeover. Lately, though, she’d been facing another bane of Madison Avenue—bad debt.
Frieda Jarvis, Inc., a high-end, funky woman’s-wear line based in Los Angeles, had been, up to six months ago, one of Meg’s favorite accounts. Frieda herself was as wacky as her clothes—loud and flamboyant, a transplanted New Yorker who could talk her way onto the most reluctant buyer’s order form. Then Frieda, with the encouragement of a new husband, decided to take the small, growing company public. Donna had done it. Calvin as well. Why not Frieda? Meg, personally, had given her about sixteen reasons why it was a terrible idea, the foremost being that Frieda’s clothes were too special, too “nichey” to appeal to the kind of mass market the stock market expected. But Frieda seemed to have acquired, along with the new husband, a hankering for quick money and splashy stories in the business sections.
The initial stock offering had gone up to thirty by the end of its first two weeks and Frieda, flush with her new paper wealth, had Meg run the most expensive nationwide Frieda Jarvis campaign in the company’s history. The orders poured in. The factory in Mexico worked overtime. The fall Jarvis line was featured at the front of every major department store and in the windows of all the best boutiques. But the average working woman, alarmed by the jarring color combinations and unfamiliar cuts, didn’t even try the clothes on. By the end of August the stock had fallen to four, and Meg was unable to get Frieda’s comptroller on the phone to discuss the invoices that had been overdue since June.
With the recent ominous article about the Jarvis stock in the same business section that had touted the offering just six months before, Abe began pressuring Meg to sue for the overdue funds. But Frieda had been one of Meg’s first accounts. And a friend, besides. So despite the debt that had slowed Hardwick and Associates’ cash flow to a trickle, Meg had opted for tersely worded letters and threatening phone calls. What she needed instead, Meg had decided, was a new, healthy client, with a pristine D&B, and ready cash. So when SportsTech put their account into review, Meg had jumped on the prospective-agency bandwagon.
SportsTech wasn’t really Meg’s type of client. The hugely successful New Jersey-based company produced midpriced sports-and action-wear for the whole family. Eminently practical and decently made, but with an uninspired logo and ho-hum packaging, SportsTech had the brand awareness of tap water: it wasn’t anyone’s first choice but it was everywhere and always within reach. Initially, when Meg had asked to be considered in the review, the SportsTech marketing director had expressed surprise … and concern. Meg was known for flashy, trendsetting creative.
“I’m not sure we’re really your kind of product line,” Vincent Goldman had told her.
“Of course you’re not sure,” Meg had replied. “That’s why you’re looking at new agencies. But at some point you decided you wanted to try something different. Let me
just come out and show you what that might look like.”
“You mean pitch it? Right away?”
Usually, at the beginning of a review, competing advertising agencies presented their portfolios and credentials and only after the field was narrowed to the three or four top contenders did agencies prepare full-fledged creative pitches for the potential client.
“Yes. Because you’re right, Mr. Goldman—if I show my current portfolio to your management, they’ll have a collective coronary. But I’m interested in broadening my client base just as you’re looking for something a bit more innovative. I’d say we have enough in common to at least meet one another.”
It was a meeting that was now less than four hours away, including the forty-five-minute ride out to Paramus, so when Oliver buzzed Meg on the intercom, she told him:
“I can’t take any calls now. I’ll be with Eduardo going over the—”
“There’s someone here to see you,” Oliver interrupted her.
“I told you I can’t—”
“I think you’d better come out to reception right now.”
At eleven-fifteen in the morning, Lucinda, who stood leaning against the reception desk shakily smoking a cigarette, looked totally wasted. Her burgundy-dyed hair was matted and greasy. Her face appeared pale and blotchy without makeup. Her clothes—army jacket, blue jeans, oversized flannel work shirt—were rumpled and shiny and gave off an unpleasant aroma of overuse. Sometime over the past few days Lucinda had acquired a nose ring, and the skin around the left nostril where it had been pierced looked infected.
“Where the hell—?”
“Please don’t start with me.” Lucinda sniffled and Meg realized that she was trying to hold back her tears in front of Oliver.
“Okay, into my office,” Meg said, pointing down the hall. She said to Oliver as Lucinda began to follow her, “Tell Eduardo to go ahead and have the artwork mounted on foam core in the order we discussed. And you’d better reserve a car for two-fifteen.”
