The One Who Got Away

by Caroline Overington

  I had been sitting slightly forward in my armchair, but now I sat back, with my hands folded over the clipboard on my lap.

  ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘how did you feel when she told you? Because she makes it very plain in her journal that she was distressed.’

  ‘Well, it’s complicated,’ said David, to which I could just imagine our audience rolling their eyes. ‘On one hand, I was surprised. On the other hand, I was moving on.’

  ‘From Loren?’

  ‘No, from Book-IT, and from New York City. Loren suggests in her journal that something untoward happened at Book-IT, that I was marched from the building or something, and that may have been the impression left by others, but the truth is – and I did tell Loren this – the partners did not want me to leave. And you can check that with them.’

  I made a note on my notepad, as if to remind myself to do just that. ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘The guys who founded that company – two guys I met in college – had led me to believe that I was part of the ownership structure. Then I discovered that they were on track to make a fortune, but I was not part of it, because I didn’t have a stake in the company. I was an employee. I asked them to rectify that, and they declined. So I decided to move on. And they weren’t happy. And I realise that some people are going to think I’m heartless when I say that Loren was a casualty of my decision to cut my losses in New York City, but I had no idea about the depths of Loren’s feelings for me. Loren was gorgeous. We were having a great time, but if I’m being honest, I probably wasn’t ready to settle down at that point, and I mean, Loren was young, so it didn’t occur to me that she was thinking of settling down, either. And yes, there were some … scenes afterwards, but I wasn’t too concerned. I thought, Loren will find somebody else in the blink of an eye and she’ll probably never think about me again.’

  * * *

  ‘I have zero interest in concrete.’

  We had taken a break from filming. One of David’s minders had disappeared down the corridor in search of the ice machine. Another was in a corner with her hand over her cell phone. David and I were standing in front of the refreshment table (white tablecloth, percolated coffee, a selection of teabags in a timber case). I had opted to stay in the interview room during our break, which was unusual for me. My practice is normally to leave the room, lest I get caught up in small talk. On this occasion, I’d instructed one of the cameramen to keep his tapes rolling – covertly – so as we might catch a little of David off-guard. If that sounds somewhat sneaky, remember that he’d come with minders. I was determined to get under the layers of polish.

  ‘I’m sorry, you said … concrete?’

  ‘I figured that you were about to ask me why I went back to Bienveneda,’ David said, dipping his tea bag over and over, ‘and I’m going to tell you that I had no interest in running my father’s concrete company.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said, nodding.

  We already knew all about David’s decision not to work for his father. We have teams of researchers at Fox9 whose job is to dig into people’s backgrounds. David wasn’t trying to fill me in. He was trying to bond with me and, again, there is no denying that there is definitely something charming about him. I renewed my pact with myself to keep my guard up.

  ‘Actually, David, when everyone gets back, I think we’ll start by talking about how Loren followed you to Bienveneda,’ I said, taking my teabag out of the cup and placing it on a saucer, ‘because people will want to know: why did she follow you? And when did you fall in love with your wife, David? That’s a good question for this next session, too. In fact, why don’t you try to come up with an answer for that.’

  I turned with my cup too quickly, because I sloshed some tea over my saucer, although thankfully not on the cream jacket. An assistant zoomed forward to take the cup from me and check my clothes, but it was fine, and thank God. Sloshing your jacket in the middle of an interview is a disaster. You have to film the whole first session all over again, because otherwise, the viewer will wonder why you suddenly got changed.

  We resumed our positions. The makeup girl stepped forward to apply a light dusting of powder to David’s face.

  ‘You’ve got a tough job trying to make me look handsome,’ he said.

  She grinned at him. ‘You look just fine.’

  ‘We’re rolling,’ said the cameraman, with his eye up tight to the viewfinder.

  I had an opening statement ready: ‘You weren’t in love with your wife.’ Our producer had written it for me, knowing it would be a good line for the promos. I thought it might also catch David off-guard, but it didn’t.

  ‘I was madly in love with her,’ he said.

  ‘But not when you first met?’

  ‘Well, okay,’ said David, ‘what happened was this. I left Book-IT and came home to Bienveneda. My family is quite small. I have a sister, Janet, and then my parents, and we are close. My mother had some health concerns, and I agreed to come home to Bienveneda to help out and I suppose my father hoped that I would take over his business, but I had an idea for a business of my own.’

  ‘Capital Shrine?’

  ‘Right. There’s no big secret to what I was doing. I was taking money and investing it, and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. And for a long time, I was winning. I’m still very proud of what I was able to achieve, especially in those early days, creating wealth for people who don’t seem to have the time of day for me now.’

  The collapse of David’s business – which was no more than a Ponzi scheme – was a well-known part of his story, chronicled in some detail by the New York Times, among others. I needed to steer the conversation back to Loren, so I asked David: ‘At what point did Loren re-enter your life?’

  ‘Well, it’s interesting,’ he said, ‘because, as everyone knows from her journal, what basically happened was, I ran into Loren on Park Avenue in New York during a business trip, and I was a little nervous because, who knew: was she still cross with me? But Loren seemed to me to have moved on. She was doing well at work. She had a new apartment. She looked great and we had a pleasant exchange, after which I got on with the rest of my schedule for that day, whereas Loren seemed to have decided that the meeting was fate, which is something I knew absolutely nothing about until very recently. The way I understood things, I just happened to run into Loren again, this time in Bienveneda when she came to town for her father’s birthday weekend. The fact she had engineered that meeting – planned it over many months – was a secret that Loren kept from me.’

  ‘And that’s when you had the now famous lunch at the Jetty?’

  ‘Right,’ said David, flushing. ‘We decided to have lunch at the Jetty and it was a, ah, very pleasant afternoon. Loren was in excellent form. Very different from the shy girl she’d been when we first met. But the plotting and scheming behind that encounter … well, again, I had absolutely no idea about any of that. I had no idea about Loren’s ongoing obsession with me. You would think, after we became engaged, got married, had two children, that it would be something that we joked about, something that became part of our story, but she never, ever mentioned it. Never. So of course it was disturbing to read all about it in Loren’s journal.’

  By David’s account, it was during the lunch at the Jetty that he realised that he was still attracted to Loren.

  ‘She had grown into a woman who was sexy and fun,’ he said. ‘I definitely tried to convince her to come home with me that day. She knocked my socks off. She turned me down, and I remember watching her drive off, with her ponytail swinging. There wasn’t a guy in the street who didn’t notice her.’

  ‘And you were intrigued?’

  ‘Right, but like most men, I believe it’s a mistake to appear too keen. My feeling has always been that women don’t want the men that want them. Women want the men they have to catch. So I waited a couple of days before I called her … but yes, from there, the relationship very quickly became serious. And Loren was not wrong: I had decided that I
wanted to get married, and Loren seemed to be the perfect candidate.’

  I tilted my head. ‘The perfect candidate?’

  ‘Don’t take it the wrong way,’ said David, ‘but yes, she seemed perfect, and to be honest, my big worry was that she might say no. Loren was still under thirty. I remember talking to her about children, and she said: “Oh God, not for years.” Plus, if we got married she would have to move back home to her home town. She used to joke about how she’d “escaped” from Bienveneda. It had been hell for her, growing up here, feeling rejected by her own father. So to my mind, there was a real risk that she might turn down my proposal.’

  ‘But she didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ said David, eyes filling with tears, ‘she said yes, and I was absolutely, one hundred per cent over the moon.’

  * * *

  THE WEDDING OF THE CENTURY!

  I knew from Loren’s journal that those words had appeared somewhere in the Bienveneda Bugle in the lead-up to Loren’s big day, so we mocked them up in a newspaper-style headline to flash across the screen.

  ‘And how does it feel when you see those words?’ I asked. We were by now well into the second hour of the interview and I still had no great ‘gotcha’ moment, but that was fine. These things take time.

  ‘I’d forgotten that headline,’ said David when the camera came back to him, ‘and it’s obviously crazy when you think of the kind of weddings some people have. Kim and Kanye! But look, it was an incredibly fun night and huge for Bienveneda. People flew in from New York and drove in from LA, and Loren loved it. Being a princess. She laughed about the thrones, but she absolutely loved it. And after the wedding, we had the most amazing honeymoon. A cruise around Cabo that was just …’

  David paused, and began rubbing his brow, as if stressed.

  ‘Well, the memories I have of that honeymoon, they’re all … I mean, Loren loved cruise ships. She loved the idea of them. The romance. Not having to pack and re-pack at every stop. She loved dining with the captain. The old-style glamour. And, you know, she was so happy on our honeymoon … look, can we take a break?’

  The last thing we’d normally want to do while David was getting emotional was cut, but it was too late.

  ‘Sure, let’s all take a break,’ the cameraman said, then stepped back from his viewfinder.

  ‘Could we perhaps get David a glass of water?’ said the girl from Sally & Sons.

  ‘Of course,’ said the producer, and signalled to one of our assistants to bring a glass to David so he wouldn’t have to untangle himself from the lapel mic.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sipping.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said patiently.

  ‘Are we good?’ asked the producer.

  ‘All good,’ said David, placing the water glass down by his feet.

  The cameras rolled again.

  ‘So, we were talking about your honeymoon. How soon after the honeymoon did Loren fall pregnant? It was very soon, wasn’t it?’

  ‘We hadn’t planned on starting a family for several years,’ he said, tugging a little on his collar, ‘but God had other plans, obviously. And the girls were a gift. They are a gift. Although the pregnancy was difficult for Loren. And clearly, given what she’s written, I should have been much more supportive, but there didn’t seem to be all that much that I could do. I remember joking with some of my friends at the golf club: “My wife is pregnant and she can’t stand me.” They all sympathised. But they also warned me, “Get used to it. You’re not her number one anymore and you never will be again.”’

  ‘But hang on a minute,’ I said, tapping my pen against my clipboard, ‘this isn’t about you not being supportive. Loren found a receipt for a strip club in your wallet …’

  ‘No, no,’ said David.

  For a moment, I thought he was going to deny it, which would have been great because we had the receipts, but he didn’t deny it.

  ‘I did go to the strip club. I absolutely did, and it was absolutely wrong of me. But I’m not the first businessman to be dragged to one of those places by clients and I won’t be the last. Like it or not, strip clubs are part of life in corporate America, and we, as a nation, definitely need to have a conversation about why that is.’

  Oh please. Was David now trying to shift the blame for his own actions onto corporate America?

  ‘As for what happened later,’ said David, ‘I can’t be the first husband to have noticed that his wife’s priorities had changed after the babies arrived. And if the average husband has problems with one baby, I had double trouble.’ He grinned. ‘Our girls were – are – gorgeous, but they put huge demands on Loren’s time and energy. Not that she didn’t have plenty of help. I made sure that she had all the help she needed. At one point, it seemed like we had more staff than family in the house. And yes, I have seen what Loren wrote: that I stopped seeing her as Wife and started seeing her only as Mother. But that isn’t true. If anything, it was the opposite. Loren stopped being Loren and became Wife and Mother. The relationship we had before we got married – travelling, watching our favourite shows, having frequent sex – came to an abrupt end, as Loren’s attention shifted to our girls. Which is appropriate and natural, of course.’

  I smiled. ‘Of course, but David, forgive me. I don’t wish to sound like I doubt you, but what about what Loren has said about you being repulsed by the idea of having sex with her, before and after the babies arrived?’

  He rubbed his forehead with four fingers of one hand. We had been talking for some time; the producer had done what she always does and turned the air-conditioning down just a touch; David – predictably – was beginning to sweat under the lights.

  ‘That’s not true,’ he said. ‘Loren put on weight with the pregnancy, but she was far more concerned about it than I was. Loren was my wife. She had given me the greatest gift – two beautiful children – and I still found her very attractive, but she began to brush me off. The incident she mentions – when I put my arm around her waist and cupped her belly – was a joke. I was nibbling on her shoulder. I said something like: “What’s this, jelly-belly?”’

  My eyebrows shot up. David said ‘jelly-belly’ to a woman who had just given birth to his children?

  ‘I see your expression,’ he said, ‘and I get it. Guys can be such idiots. Obviously it’s not funny. I should’ve been more sensitive, but I thought she’d push back against me and laugh, and we’d end up making love. She didn’t. She froze. Yes, I should’ve known better, but the idea that I was mocking her, or taunting her – that is simply wrong. And look, even saying that, yes, we were having problems in that department. Sexually. And yes, I felt locked out. I was frustrated. Sexually frustrated. I know it sounds immature but it’s the way I felt. Locked out of my own life and locked out of my own wife.’

  For the first time in our interview, David’s voice was rising. I was interested to see where frustration might take him.

  ‘And did you resent that?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, because to resent that would be to resent the girls. And I would never resent them for anything. Never. But then, yes, I resented not having much sex in my relationship, because over time, our sex life dwindled to almost nothing. Maybe once or twice a month she might agree to sex, but I could tell she didn’t enjoy it. And I wanted sex. I wanted to have sex with someone who wanted to have sex with me. Can you imagine how it feels to have to admit that, here, today, publicly? It’s excruciating. But it’s true. I wanted sex. I needed sex. I’m a man! Maybe all men don’t need sex but I do. And I don’t think that makes me a bad person. It makes me human. But Loren was just not interested. She was paranoid about her weight, her body shape, the girls waking up, everything. Here was a woman who had once had a healthy libido, a woman who had loved having sex – who loved having sex with me – who completely changed on that front. Loren’s libido after the girls arrived was the elephant in our bedroom. Because it’s hard for a man not to take his wife’s lack of desire perso
nally, right? What was wrong with me? I was an excellent provider. Loren had everything she could possibly want or need, and yet …’

  David seemed genuinely distressed.

  ‘So you were putting in, but you weren’t getting out,’ I said gently.

  ‘Right,’ he said, looking relieved not to be judged, ‘and I was unprepared for that. I had always been attractive to women. I know how that sounds, but it’s true. I had never gone long periods without sex, not since, I don’t know, I was an adolescent. Sex has always been an important part of my life and there I was, shut out of intimacy in my own marriage.’

  ‘And what did you do to try to rekindle the flame?’ I asked sympathetically.

  ‘Everything,’ said David. ‘Everything. I bought Loren presents. Flowers. Never chocolates. I could get in big trouble for bringing home chocolates. I would try to coax her. I would move closer to Loren on the sofa, and say things like: “Let me try to turn you on.” That’s how I’d frame it, let me try to turn you on. Not, “I want to have sex with you now and you must agree.” Not, “I demand my conjugal rights.” Not, “Look, you can just lie there, and you don’t even have to pretend to enjoy it.”

  ‘I would coax and tempt and flirt and, I don’t know, just try. But she was not interested. And it was not a point I was willing to push because, a year or so after the girls arrived, Loren began suffering from terrible migraines. She would take to the sofa in a dark room and not get up. The nannies would tend to the girls. She would refuse to attend important events with me. I tried to reason with her. Not only for my sake. For her sake. I’d say: “Loren, you should get up. You have to come out. You know it’s important. I’ve purchased a table at this dinner. I’ve invited clients. We need to go.” She would move a hot water bottle to her abdomen, or apply a cold press on her forehead and she would say: “Can you please leave me alone, David? I don’t feel well.” I’d be saying: “I can’t go on my own. How does it look, me turning up alone to everything?” She would complain: “But all you ever talk about is business and golf. I hate business. I hate golf.” I’d say: “You can talk to the wives.” She would say: “The wives don’t like me. The wives judge me.” It was all in her head, of course, but that was still a problem, because when a businessman has a wife who doesn’t get on with other people’s wives, well, it was like driving a one-wheeled wagon.’