Then she stiffened. “That fucking Arthur. What the fuck could he be on about?”
Josh felt shame wash over him again. “I'm so sorry, Rachel, I'm so sorry about that...you know...”
She paused, looking skyward. Then she bit her lip. “Don't get mad,” she said, “but it's not that big of a deal to me. I kind of liked...I don't know, let me explain to you how the whole thing happened. But...after that, we think of some way out of this. Some way that screws Arthur, because he's a right bastard. And then...there's Xavier, too.”
“He's pissed?”
Rachel still had to calculate what “pissed” meant for a nanosecond, in spite of how long she'd been in America. “Very. Very...pissed.” She looked at Josh. “So we'll have to sort that out, too.”
They looked at each other.
“Good thing you've got your best mind on it,” Josh offered playfully.
Rachel laughed, and shook her head.
“So tell me the story,” Josh prompted.
“Are we okay?” Rachel said, changing the subject suddenly.
Josh kissed her, and it was the kind of kiss they hadn't had in many years. Something stirred inside of him, something from long before any of this happened. Rachel must have felt it, too, because she lingered on his lips. It was almost like a first kiss. Pregnant with possibility, fraught with the potential for disaster. The man, still uncertain whether or not he would ever get laid...
They were okay.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too.”
They smiled.
“Now tell me the story.”
C ONFESSIONS
It's said that confession is good for the soul, and Rachel wasn't a big believer in souls, but confession had certainly been good fro whatever had been inside of her. The expression “to feel as though a weight has been lifted” never had more meaning. That was, in fact, how she felt.
She had told Josh everything, every last detail. Once she got started telling him about what had happened with Arthur, it all spilled out of her: her obsessions, the way she felt out of control.
Instead of reacting the way she feared – and this was a fear she never really voiced to herself before that moment – and finding her behavior outrageous, Josh seemed to understand it.
Josh. What an idiot, with his crazy plans. That was probably why he could understand how reckless she had been.
She should have been angrier at him, but to tell the truth there wasn't anything else he could have done to turn her own mind and her heart around more, as crazy as it seemed. The gesture was so reckless, so ridiculous, so...dumb...that it reeked of a deep love and a pure sincerity that Rachel had forgotten about. Love and sincerity that had lain dormant in their relationship for so long that she had forgotten they were there. Now they were calling her back to what was important. It was making everything much more clear.
But Xavier was a problem. She could see that he wasn't going to let the video go. He wasn't going to stop looking until he found out who it was, and who knew what he would do then? He wasn't going to let Rachel just pay her blackmail money, either. He was like a dog with a bone, and the only way out was for him to get what he wanted: the satisfaction of confrontation, of winning.
Rachel also knew that she didn't want to tell him the truth. What Josh had done was kind of...well, private. Too silly too be understood by anyone but the two of them.
So what, then?
Josh thought on it all night. She could tell by the way his body was still but never really stopped moving.
But when they woke up in the morning, after making love – which really was like making love, like their old personalities and old bodies had come to life inside of them – it was Rachel who had come up with the seed of the idea.
“Whenever you've done something...well, stupid...it's best to have a scapegoat. We need a scapegoat, right?” she said. “But we already have one.”
Josh stood still with the milk in his hand. His quick mind didn't take long to follow her thoughts.
“Arthur,” he said. “But if Xavier confronts him, he'll end up telling him the truth. He's a chickenshit, you said.”
“And he doesn't have the video,” Rachel reminded herself. It was easy to get confused. “Damn.” She took the milk from Josh and poured it over her cereal.
Josh was staring at the wall again. She paused to watch him. He was getting an idea.
He sat down on a stool and pressed his lips together. “What if Arthur had the video? Or...looked like he had it? What if Xavier did something to actively get it back from him?”
“I'm listening,” Rachel said, but her voice was incredulous. Arthur, of course, didn't actually have the video, and he would surely make that clear if Xavier came after him for it.
Josh held up his hands, but didn't look at her, as he often did when he was explaining and thinking at the same time.
“What if everything were the same as you thought it was last night? What would you have done?”
Rachel chewed a mouthful of cereal. “I guess...I guess I would have slept with him.” She didn't feel bashful saying this. In the long confessions and reconciliation of the night before, she felt like each of them had made their peace with everything that had happened.
Josh, too, seemed to have a neutral feeling about this admission of hers. He was on to solving the new problem, ever the analyst. “And what would you have told Xavier?”
It was a good question. She didn't have the answer. “I guess I would have...”
“You said he's not letting it go, right?”
She nodded.
“So eventually, he would have been talking about it, and you would have told him, right?”
Rachel shrugged, but affirmatively.
“So would you have told him before or after?”
She didn't know. What would she have done? In her strange state, she had no idea if she would have told Xavier or not.
Josh already knew where he wanted the conversation to go. He was impatient, but he hid it well. “What do you think he would do if you told him everything you told me last night?”
“Punch him in the face,” Rachel offered, without hesitation.
“So he wants revenge, you think?” Josh continued, ignoring the obvious hyperbole.
Rachel considered it. Xavier – or at least Xavier lately - seemed like that kind of guy. But not the kind of guy to fly off the handle.
“He seemed like he'd want something...served cold, though, you know? Except what are we talking about, because Xavier doesn't have anything to actually be mad at Arthur about. You're the one who's offended him the most-”
“Stay with me, Rachel,” Josh said. He was rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “We can find a way, surely, to make Xavier think he's gotten his revenge, and screw Arthur a little, too.”
Rachel dipped her spoon into her cereal. “I hope your plan is better than the last one,” she said, jokingly, even though, in truth, she had confidence in Josh's plan in spite of this fiasco. He was clear-headed now, she could sense it.
He leaned on the counter.
“I'm going to need your investigative skills again, though,” Josh said.
Rachel turned the spoon in her mouth and smiled.
Even though it seemed utterly ridiculous, and it was likely going to end in disaster, it seemed like they might have some fun along the way. And now, it felt like an adventure they were on together.
“What's a man like Arthur most afraid of?” Josh wondered aloud.
That's what they had to find out.
R OGUE ELEMENT
It ended up being remarkably easy to find out what Arthur Frost was afraid of.
Rachel jogged easily around the clay-red indoor running track of the Aspen Club (no “the,” but no one in town was asshole enough to call it just “Aspen Club”). It was the ultra-expensive, ultra-snobbish athletic club to which all of the super-wealthy and celebrity-status people of the city aspired to become a member. Ke
eping in mind that this was not exactly New York, there was still plenty of nouveau riche money lying around. Rachel had avoided Aspen Club like the plague, in spite of her celebrity status, partly because of its almost heart-stopping membership fees, and partly out of principle. She hated this kind of dick-measuring.
The club wasn't worth the price (she was praying silently that she could somehow get out of the membership she had just purchased), but it was a class above any “gym” Rachel had ever set foot in. She also had to admit that it had been a little bit of an ego boost when the man at the membership desk fell all over himself with excitement that she was “finally” joining their club.
Everything in Aspen Club was a flawless white, except for the track or the manicured indoor lawns for golf and tennis. They seemed to purify the air the moment it came off someone's body. It smelled like cedar or citrus everywhere, and Rachel was now circling the tennis courts on a raised track and had almost forgotten why she was here in her enjoyment of the clean, crisp richness of it all.
Then she spotted her. Moving like a gazelle on the tennis courts below.
Charlotte Heller Frost. Her long, thoroughbred legs moved over the grass with the unhurried ease of someone who is good at tennis not because of a desire to be athletic, but because it is the way that rich people spend their martinis before having a martini in a private club. She bounced an easy volley with a sexy, languid stroke, and her little white skirt flipped up to reveal her small, rounded ass in the white underwear of the skirt. Her midriff was bare and her stomach was tightened into the same, expensive, personally-trained shape as the rest of her body: tight but only just tight enough. Her skin was toasted by real sun to a fashionable, crispy almond color. The two spherical breasts that barely bounced with her walk were far too large for her frame to be believable. Her face was blandly beautiful, her expression permanently a little sour. Her hair was a carefully crafted platinum: it looked real but it was, like the rest of her, entirely too perfect to be so.
She was the quintessential trophy wife.
Rachel circled on the track, and kept an eye on Charlotte's game as it appeared to be winding down. Charlotte was taking instructions from the man she was playing with, so perhaps he was her instructor.
When Charlotte crossed to the net to shake his hand, Rachel veered off to the stairs down from the track. She jogged down to the first landing and then slowed to a casual walk, her eyes seeking out Charlotte's figure.
At the Aspen Club, though, platinum hair and sexy figures abounded. Rachel walked in a half-panic past a juice bar and toward the locker rooms, when she caught Charlotte, a towel around her neck, chatting coquettishly with another man. Then Charlotte turned, thankfully, and headed toward the juice bar.
Rachel went around the divider, looked into the pool, and then walked back, and was pleased to find that Charlotte was there, seated, looking boredly into her phone. An empty seat was next to her.
She had no idea, no idea at all, what to expect from Charlotte Frost. It was a long shot, but it was where she had decided to begin her hurried investigation into “what would blackmail Arthur Frost.”
Josh hadn't really explained to her how a piece of information like that was going to help them, since Arthur was not actually in possession of anything they wanted, but Rachel trusted him for having a plan. In spite of of his poor track record thus far.
Rachel sucked in her breath and headed toward Charlotte in the juice bar. There was no point not trying. She had gone this far, and this was quite far: the membership, the digging into Arthur's personal life.
Also, it was sort of fun.
She hopped onto the stool next to her and ordered a smoothie the color of Vegemite. For kicks, she let go of her American accent. People seemed to like Australian accents all over the world, and half the time that was all she needed to do to get a conversation started, or at least warm people up.
In this case, it was absolutely the right move. The juice bar man appeared stunned for a moment. When he handed her her smoothie, he said, as though in confidence, “You know you look exactly like Rachel Elliot from Channel 7?”
And from Rachel's left, a bored voice murmured, “She is Rachel Elliot, Tom, you idiot.” Rachel was as surprised by Charlotte's voice as Tom was by her own: Charlotte's voice was dripping with a near-extinct, wealthy New Englander accent.
Charlotte didn't look up from her phone to say this. Tom, as his name apparently was, let his mouth hang open. “You're English?” he said to Rachel, dumbfounded.
“Aussie,” Rachel said, smiling through the inevitable annoyance that this sort of question generated. Her mind was whirling around, trying to get a read on Charlotte, who was, to say the least, unexpected.
“No. Fucking. Way,” Tom said.
“Tom, do you know what Australians call Americans?” Charlotte drolled, still not looking up from her phone, which she was managing to type on very rapidly in spite of carrying on with this conversation. She looked up to check his face, and seeing that he didn't, she pursed her lips and began typing again. “Seppos.”
Rachel's mouth twitched at the corner. This was certainly going much differently - and more amusingly – than she had anticipated.
Tom, who Rachel was actually feeling fairly sorry for, leaned on the counter with his arms spread and, with a bit more challenge in his voice than Rachel would have expected, he jerked his head at Charlotte. “Oh yeah? Seppo. What's that supposed to mean?”
Charlotte raised her eyes to look at Rachel, and Rachel shook her head slightly.
Charlotte set her phone down. She leaned on her elbows and crossed her arms over each other, and it was suddenly evident that she and Tom had had this kind of volley before. Charlotte's snottiness seemed suddenly to be an act which amused them both.
“It's short for septic tank. Seppo. Septic tank, yank. It works on two levels,” she said, flipping her long bangs from her eyes and making her pony-tail bob delightfully, “because Americans are so full of shit.”
Tom, who not only seemed to have been rounds with Charlotte before, but with plenty of people like her, shrugged. “Still a sexy accent,” and he winked at Rachel. He then disappeared into the back, and his half-whispers echoed over the tiles. “Dude. You will not believe this. Rachel Elliot, you know hottie from the news? She's fucking Australian. She's out there right now.”
Charlotte leaned on her elbow and turned toward Rachel. “Don't get him fired, please. He's all I have to entertain myself between tennis and lunch.” Her eyes were twinkling with an odd mischief, one that seemed friendly. Rachel could see that her rich-girl act was one of those delicate balances between truth and sarcasm.
Rachel was almost knocked speechless. She had expected Charlotte to be a bimbo – a real, true bimbo. Instead, she was....what? A bitchy rich girl? Not really. She was that, but she was also somehow likeable.
Rachel opened her mouth and closed it, her mind trying desperately to think of the best course of action. Her original plan was shredded now, in tatters because of Charlotte's forwardness. Rachel had planned on approaching her, getting a sort of upper hand. Rachel had planned on slowly teasing what information she could out of her. Look for an insight into their personal life that could bring Arthur down. Find out how angry his wife might be if he was having an affair.
Now the whole plan had spun off the rails.
“I am surprised you're Australian. Arthur never mentioned it,” Charlotte said smartly.
Rachel tried to read her face for a trace of bitchiness as she said this, and found none. Charlotte evidently didn't care that her husband talked about Rachel Elliot.
Too bad.
“Arthur?” Rachel managed to say, remembering that she was supposed to be just innocently sitting down next to someone she didn't know.
“Arthur Frost. Your boss. Black hair, asshole? He's my husband.” Her eyes, blue, blackened a little, as if hate had filled them up them like oil in a well. She shrugged. “Does he even know? You're Aussie? You know he practi
cally stalks you.”
Rachel was grateful that she actually didn't know what to say. It seemed Charlotte was going to lead this discussion wherever she wanted it to go.
“Oh don't worry about it,” Charlotte continued. “This isn't the start of a cat fight. I can't fucking stand him.”
Tom had returned to the bar, with a disbelieving friend trailing shyly behind him. Rachel smiled for him.
“Say something,” Tom cued Rachel.
“She's not a fucking parrot,” Charlotte snapped, flapping her hand at Tom. “Go away.”
“Put another shrimp on the barbie,” Rachel drolled, scrunching her nose up for extra effect.
The two men, boys really, smiled in appreciation.
“She's going to have you fired, you simpletons,” Charlotte proclaimed. She turned to Rachel, rolling her eyes. “Let's go to the bar.”
Charlotte, who had a way about her that made people do what she said, was evidently unconcerned about whether or not Rachel could or would join her at the bar, and so she slid off the stool at the juice bar and began walking away without turning around. Rachel followed her through the spotless white athletic club and up some stairs to a room that looked for all the world like it had been imported from an episode of Downton Abbey.
“We're not up to dress code,” Charlotte said, plopping into a low, rich leather chair by a small cocktail table. “But I always like to see if anyone has the balls to ask me to leave, don't you?” Then, as an afterthought, and as though it disappointed her immensely, she added, “They won't.”
Rachel sat down next to her.
A waiter appeared immediately, and Charlotte looked at him expectantly, When he said nothing about her skimpy outfit, Charlotte looked at Rachel as if to say, “You see?”
“I'm having a martini,” she told Rachel, and then to the waiter: “Vodka, extra dry, no olives.”
Human Interest 2: A Wife-Sharing Exposé Page 11
