Riverside Park

by Laura Van Wormer

“I almost had an affair in Connecticut.”

  It took a moment before Howard realized he was standing up.

  “I wasn’t aware that I was moving in that direction,” she continued. “I think, in the back of my mind, I didn’t want to be completely bereft when you finally told me. Because then I’d have somebody who wanted me.”

  He felt sick. “My God, Amanda, I do want you. I’ve always wanted you.” And then he felt the f lush of anger. “Who is he?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Howard, because it didn’t happen. Instead I’m sitting here.”

  He felt for the chair to sit down. An affair? Amanda? In Connecticut? Was she making this up?

  Howard looked at his wife and knew that she wasn’t. Of course she wasn’t. With all the rich married guys out there, who wouldn’t want to have an affair with Amanda? She was still a knockout, but it was her soaring spirit, that high passion and emotion that would have attracted him. A soccer game. That’s just the venue where they would see it, Amanda with her arms shooting up in the air with a cheer, and then her suddenly cringing at a downward turn in the game, sighing with such sorrow it always made people laugh fondly. The looks of the men always lingered on his wife after she had drawn their attention. Three kids later and she still had that body. She dressed differently to disguise the fact it wasn’t the same body, really, but the effect it had on men was still the same. They could imagine the bliss that lay there.

  “Shit,” he said out loud, taking his glasses off to hold his face in his hand a minute. He was sick at this point. And he just wanted to run. If things had gotten this bad—

  “I know you’re not in love with someone else,” Amanda said. “I would know that.”

  He put his glasses back on. “You think I’m having an affair?”

  “I think you have taken your needs somewhere.”

  “My needs,” he said sarcastically. He looked up at the ceiling a minute. “My needs are close to a million needs.” He brought his head down to look at her. “There is no one else, Amanda. I have not had sex with anyone else. I have not wanted to have an affair.” A fleeting memory of kissing Celia Cavanaugh came and went. “The only secret I’ve been hiding from you is the fact I am in debt up to my ears. To the tune of close to a million dollars.”

  It took her a few seconds to absorb his words. “But we still have income from the trust fund, don’t we?”

  We, she’d said we. But his mind was elsewhere. “Who was it, Amanda? Someone I know?”

  “I doubt it,” she said.

  She was lying. He knew whoever it was. It had to be one of the guys at the soccer games. If he had to guess, it was the investment banker. The guy had made millions and then retired at fifty with a second wife and a second set of kids. He’d break his friggin’ face in.

  “Who is it we owe?” Amanda asked.

  “You don’t owe anything, Amanda. It’s me. I’ve wrung every penny out of the Woodbury property and have credit card bills up the gazoo.” Her consternation made him angry. “I had to balance the books at the agency, pay some tax stuff I owed, and there simply wasn’t enough cash coming in to pay for the heat, the light, the horses, the orthodontist, the piano lessons, Madame Moliere, the handyman, the pool man, the cleaning lady, the cars, the clothes, the vacations—You know, all the crap you kept asking me if we could afford!” He slammed his hand down on his desk for lack of knowing what else to do. “I’ve never been so ashamed in my life,” he told her, his eyes down on his desk.

  “I could petition the trust to see if—”

  “No!” he shouted, slamming the desk again. “That’s your money. Keep it safe and sound. The way we’re going you’re going to need it in your new life.”

  A moment later he felt Amanda’s hand on his shoulder and he looked up. Her eyes were filled with tears but she was smiling. “I thought you didn’t love me anymore, Howard.”

  He didn’t know what to say and she sat down on the chair arm, took off his glasses and pulled his head to rest against her chest. After a moment he slid his arms around her waist.

  “Money I can handle,” she soothed, stroking his head. “Actually, I can handle anything as long as I have you and the children. I should hope you know that by now.”

  He was going to say, yeah, right, you were about to let another guy—He screwed his eyes shut, trying to get the image out of his head.

  “Explain to me what happened,” she said gently.

  And so he did. He kept his head right where it was and told her how at first he had thought the problems started when Gertrude Bristol died but had since come to realize it went all the way back to when he bought Hillings & Hillings. How he had prided himself on not letting anyone go, of keeping those same offices in the landmark building, of being able to offer better benefits. No, it had started when he went big-time. “I wasn’t thinking clearly when I bought the house,” he said.

  “None of us were thinking clearly after 9/11.”

  “But you and the kids were so excited when you saw it, what with the horse farm next door and the stable and everything.” She murmured that she knew. “It was eight hundred thousand, I had two hundred sitting in the reserves at the agency and I used that as the down payment.” He sighed. “Now I owe a million on it.”

  “But how were you to know Gertrude’s niece would nix the estate deal?”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “that was a part of it.”

  “And how were you supposed to know what’s-her-name—”

  He couldn’t help but smile. Whenever Amanda didn’t like how someone had behaved she refused to call them by name.

  “—was going to steal your clients?” she finished.

  “It wasn’t quite like that.” He sat up and pulled her down off the arm of the chair to sit in his lap. He brushed her hair back from her face. “Pride goeth before the fall. That’s what the accountant said to me. He wanted me to slash the overhead a long time ago, but I kept thinking things would turn around.”

  “You only got into difficulty because you wanted to do what was best for everyone. Your family, your employees, your clients. You’re a fabulous literary agent, Howard, everyone says so.”

  “So I used to think.” He sighed.

  “Surely this is a temporary state of affairs. It’s not as though you don’t make any money.”

  “The agency grossed almost seven million last year, bringing in nearly a million, and I made negative two hundred thirty-one thousand.”

  “Oh,” Amanda said.

  He looked at her. “Unless we take out a mortgage or home equity loan on this apartment, Amanda, we’re going to lose the house.”

  “Then I say lose it.”

  He looked at her.

  “I’m absolutely serious. Let’s sell it and be done with it.”

  “I owe more than it’s worth, though.”

  “The minute we don’t own it anymore is the minute the other bills stop. Yes?”

  He nodded. In all these months this idea had not occurred to him, to sell the house and get rid of that colossal ongoing expense. Of course he hadn’t known Amanda was about to have an affair with another man. Damn right they were going to sell that house!

  “And what about Henry’s grandson?” Amanda said. “Didn’t you say he might come in as a partner?”

  “The agency still needs to be restructured.”

  “So you’ll be the hatchet man.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s going to be difficult,” Amanda sighed. “But we’d help people find jobs, wouldn’t we?”

  We.

  “Yeah.”

  She ducked her head to see what expression was on his face. “What is it, Howard?”

  He tried to think how best to phrase it without sounding ungrateful. If he had to make all the changes in the agency the accountant said had to be made, he wasn’t going to feel the same about it. Because it wouldn’t be the same. A more gracious professional atmosphere would break down into the usual sweatshop atmosphere that so much of boo
k publishing had fallen into. And if he had to cut back on staff, it would meaning cutting down his time developing clients. Bestselling writers didn’t just walk in the door. Most often, at least at his agency, they were writers he worked with (like the editor he had once been), whose books were sold to publishers only after they had been edited at least once. And that was the part that had made him want to be a literary agent, to work with writers.

  “Don’t freak out because I’m not going to do anything rash,” he said, “but I’m beginning to wonder if this is how I want to spend the next twenty years.”

  “Being married or being an agent?” she said. She was smiling.

  “Convincing you to marry me has been my only really great success in life.”

  “That and your love and support in producing three such wonderful, healthy children.”

  Howard shut his eyes, pressing his forehead into her shoulder.

  “I know, darling,” she murmured, rubbing his back. “But we’re never living apart again.” A tear rolled down her cheek and she kissed the side of his head. “Ever. Ever, ever, ever.”

  36

  Cassy and Alexandra Have a Talk

  ALEXANDRA WAS SITTING on the windowsill of the master bedroom in Cassy’s old apartment, watching the storm. Jackson was stuck in Washington, and the only reason Alexandra had been able to get here after the newscast was because the man who plowed West End had given her a lift. She had showered; her hair was in a ponytail and she was naked beneath the terry-cloth robe. “I can’t believe Georgiana has no idea it’s you.”

  Cassy laughed softly into her pillow.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  Cassy drew herself up to sit, holding the sheet over her breasts. “Because, my darling, you are the only person on the face of the earth who would choose me over her.”

  “That’s not true,” Alexandra said, turning back to the window.

  “I appreciate the sentiment, but it is true,” Cassy said. “No doubt Georgiana thinks it’s some lovely young woman who will keep the home fires burning for you.”

  “I bet Georgiana didn’t say anything to you about how she would leave for a month at a time,” Alexandra said, “and then reappear when she felt like it, expecting me to drop everything.”

  “I don’t think Georgiana ever expected you to drop anything. It sounded to me as though she had been planning to stay home with the baby, at least for a while.”

  “Oh, come on, Cassy,” Alexandra said, sliding off the windowsill, “give me some credit, will you? Don’t you think I had a pretty good idea of what raising a child with Georgiana would have been like before I broke it off?” She walked over to stand at the foot of the bed. She had been eager to make love after her shower because of the storm, she said. There was something about storms that did it to her. But as soon as Cassy mentioned that she had seen Georgiana, Alexandra’s desire had vanished and agitation had set in.

  “Compared to Georgiana’s upbringing,” Alexandra said, “dragging a child and a nanny around the world with her would be, in Georgiana’s eyes, idyllic. Punctuated by visits to the farm to ride in a pony cart with the child’s other famous lesbian mother. Namely me.” She sighed heavily and dropped down on the bed, her back to Cassy. “We had to have major battles before having a child. And I had to win those battles before I would agree to it.”

  Cassy felt a twist of something cold in her stomach. Alexandra had wanted a baby. She had wanted to have a baby with Georgiana, and only when they couldn’t come to terms had she broken off the relationship.

  Alexandra hadn’t chosen her over Georgiana. She had broken it off with Georgiana over the child and then had come to Cassy.

  She was Alexandra’s second choice, not her first.

  “I wanted the child’s home base to be here, in the East,” Alexandra said. “Not here a month, in California a month and then flitting around the world, Scotland this week, on location the next.” She paused. “But Georgiana would have none of it, there was no way she was giving up California.”

  Alexandra headed into the bathroom. A short while later she came back out. She took one look at Cassy and hurried to sit next to her. “What’s wrong? You look sick or something.” She felt Cassy’s forehead. “What is it?”

  Cassy couldn’t lie to her. It simply wasn’t possible anymore. “I think I misunderstood why you broke up with Georgiana. I thought—Oh, it’s stupid, it doesn’t make any difference,” she muttered, looking away.

  Alexandra gently pulled her chin so Cassy had to look at her. “Tell me.”

  “I thought you left Georgiana because you couldn’t live without me.” She closed her eyes after tears sprang into them and offered a bitter laugh. “How could I be so stupid,” she said, bringing a hand up to cover her face.

  “What are you talking about?” Alexandra said, sounding irritated. When Cassy didn’t answer, she pulled her hand away. “But I did leave Georgiana because I don’t want to live without you. I never have.”

  “But that was only after you disagreed about—”

  “What is the matter with you?” Alexandra interrupted. She gave Cassy’s shoulders a little shake. “Look at me. I love you more than anything or anyone on the face of the earth. That is the truth. I tried to run away from it because I was so angry you wouldn’t leave Jackson. And looking back, thank God you didn’t leave him, because I think that would have been the end of DBS News.”

  Cassy’s heart was beginning to slow down a little.

  “I couldn’t make you leave him, and it took me a while to realize that having part of a life with you was better than a wholehearted commitment from Georgiana, or at least what she considered was wholehearted.” She had sadness in her eyes. “I spent twice as many nights with you, like this, than I ever did with Georgiana. And then to drag a child into it—” She held Cassy’s face in her hands. “I wanted to be with you. Any way I could be.” She kissed Cassy, but Cassy could tell her mind was elsewhere.

  “I think I understand,” Cassy said tentatively.

  “I don’t have a problem telling Georgiana about us,” she said, brushing Cassy’s hair back from her face. “But not yet.” Alexandra lowered her hand, thinking. “Move over a little, will you?”

  Alexandra always slept on the right side of the bed, but now she slipped under the sheets on the left and lay on her side to look at Cassy. “If you and I ever do get together, I mean really get together, you know there is going to be a lot to deal with.”

  Cassy had never truly been able to imagine living with Alexandra. And if she did some day, and word got around, it would take a long time before friends and family would come to believe it. Not because Alexandra was a woman, but because they wouldn’t believe Cassy could ever fly in the face of her conventional upbringing.

  “When and if we ever do make a life together,” Alexandra continued, “I will tell Georgiana before anyone else.”

  “I felt like the lowest form of life today,” Cassy said after a moment.

  “I can imagine,” Alexandra murmured.

  “I almost told her.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Cassy dropped her eyes and Alexandra reached for her hand.

  “I’m scared,” Cassy whispered.

  Alexandra’s grip tightened.

  “I’m so much older than you are,” Cassy said. “It’s hard to believe—”

  “Still beating that dead horse, are you?” Alexandra brought Cassy’s hand up to her mouth to kiss. “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Might you consider one day truly placing your trust in me? You did it with Michael. You did it with Jackson. Maybe you should try doing it with me.”

  Cassy closed her eyes, feeling the anxiety. “The thing is,” she said, opening them, “I didn’t trust them, Alexandra, not really. What I did was hand myself over to them and trusted that they would fix my life. Fix me.”

  Alexandra bit her lower lip.

  “I pray to God I’ve learned to trust myself. To
at least believe that I am the person who knows what’s best for me.” They looked at each for a minute and then Cassy smiled. “You are best for me.”

  FEBRUARY

  IV

  37

  Celia and Her Auctions

  “YOU ARE DIFFERENT,” Rachel told Celia. Rachel and her boyfriend were sitting at the breakfast bar and the smell of fresh coffee had lured Celia from her bedroom. “We were just talking about it.”

  “It’s not supposed to kick in for six weeks,” Celia mumbled, getting a mug. “It hasn’t even been a month.” She was still feeling very self-conscious about the antidepressant her mother’s doctor had persuaded her to try.

  “Well, I’m telling you, Ceil, you’re different.”

  “Okay,” Celia said, pouring her coffee, “like how?” She went to the refrigerator to get some milk.

  “Well, for one, you’re up and it’s nine o’clock in the morning,” her roommate said, nodding in the direction of the kitchen clock.

  “Two,” Rachel’s boyfriend piped up, “you haven’t gotten blasted out of your mind.”

  “Three,” Rachel continued, “you’re putting your dirty clothes in the hamper that I’ve never seen you use before. And your room’s not perfect, but it sure is a heck of a lot better than it was.”

  “And four,” the boyfriend said, nudging Rachel, “she cooks now.” He looked over at Celia. “I never knew you could cook. And be such a great cook. You’ve left us dinner like five times now.”

  Celia sipped her coffee, leaning back against the counter. She didn’t feel different, really. Maybe a little more energetic. And she didn’t seem to be so short-tempered. And impatient. And she felt, well, hopeful or something. Did antidepressants give somebody hope?

  “And you haven’t cried at a commercial for a while,” Rachel added. Her boyfriend gave her a kiss and whispered something in her ear that made Rachel beam. “And we think maybe your junk habit is a career or something. It makes you really happy.”

  Celia smiled. She had been selling a few things on eBay. She did as much research as she could about the objects to get an idea of what they should at least sell for, but the world on eBay still held many surprises. One of the glass doorknobs she had listed she figured might go for ten bucks to someone looking to replace one in their old house. But the bidding went crazy in the last five hours of her seven-day listing and the bids rocketed up to $172. When she e-mailed the guy who had won it, asking why he had wanted it, he wrote back to say he believed it was a kind of crystal doorknob that could only have come from one of the old Russian palaces. Someone, perhaps a refugee, he said, must have brought it with them to New York.