Best Enemies

by Jane Heller

  I wouldn’t. Not a chance. I had no interest in Tony Stiles other than to produce him at Tara’s doorstep. Showing up with him would shut her up and put her in her place and give me enormous satisfaction, after which he and I could go back to hating each other, for all I cared.

  “I’d love to have dinner,” I said simply.

  “Great. I’ll make a reservation someplace, and I promise it’ll have a wine list worthy of your sophisticated palate. You can regale me with more of your favorite moments in Rangers history and tell me what you think of the ‘79 Ferrari that was also on the showroom floor today. It was the five twelve BB in fly yellow with a black interior. You’ve seen the one, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thought so. I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll firm up dinner. Night.” He hung up.

  I hung up, too, then sank back onto the sofa like a deadweight. Who knew that lying would turn out to be so exhausting?

  12

  I had expected Tony to choose one of the ultrahip, ultratrendy restaurants in his SoHo neighborhood—a place with sleek decor and dismissive young waiters and pulsating techno music in the background. Instead, he picked a traditional steak joint with exposed brick, crusty old waiters who’d worked there forever, and Frank Sinatra music in the background.

  “This place is my home away from home,” he said when he greeted me at the table, which was clearly the best one in the house, because it was cozy and private and tucked away in a corner. Since Tony was a regular as well as a celebrity, he was obviously given preferential treatment. He looked as if he’d given himself preferential treatment, too. His usually wayward waves of hair were neatly combed off his forehead. He was freshly shaved, as opposed to sporting the scruffy shadow he’d sported at my apartment. And he was dressed not in his customary blue jeans, but in a pair of nicely pressed khakis. The fact that he’d cleaned up for me, that he’d wanted to make himself appealing to me, caused me to flush with ambivalence. I was oddly flattered that he was eager to please me, but I had no intention of letting myself feel anything in return, since that certainly wasn’t the point of the exercise.

  “I took the liberty of ordering us something to drink,” he added, nodding at the two glasses of wine that had already been delivered to our table. “It’s a 1985 Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon. I thought its velvety character would highlight the richness of the beef we’ll be having.”

  “Right you are,” I said, lifting my glass, swirling the wine around so vigorously that I almost spilled it, then sniffing the Cabernet and pronouncing its bouquet “delightfully impertinent.”

  He smiled, shaking his head.

  “What?” I said, hoping I hadn’t given away my ignorance. Perhaps red wine wasn’t supposed to be called “delightfully” anything, least of all “impertinent.”

  “Just this. Us. Sitting here together on a Saturday night. A week ago, I couldn’t have imagined it. But now? Well, I have to confess, I’ve been looking forward to it all day.”

  “Me, too.” I had been looking forward to it. The sooner I got Tony to say he’d go with me to Tara’s as my fiancé, the sooner I could move on with my life.

  “You seem so much more open than you do in the office,” he went on. “So much more approachable.”

  “I’ve always been approachable, Tony. You’ve always been the one with the attitude. Toward me and my job anyway.”

  “Maybe so, but you do understand why I’ve had the attitude, don’t you?”

  “Not really. If I were an author, I’d want my publisher to do everything humanly possible to gain exposure for my books.”

  “I do want that—except for the self-promotion. Some of us aren’t salesmen. Some of us would rather leave the selling part to someone else. I, for one, don’t feel comfortable showing up on morning television and shoving my latest book down people’s throats. It makes me feel like I’m going door-to-door selling vacuum cleaners.”

  “But you’re not selling vacuum cleaners. You’re selling something that gives people pleasure. Your mysteries are terrific entertainment. They’re very suspenseful, but they’re also funny and fast-moving and full of smart observations about society and popular culture.” I wasn’t being insincere when it came to his books. They really were a joy to read, as well as to publicize. He was the one who’d always made the job a torturous experience.

  “I appreciate the pep talk, but writers are insecure creatures. We never think anything we do is good.”

  “Come on, Tony. I’ve never figured you for the modest type.”

  “I’m not modest when it comes to anything else but my work. Look, let me try to explain what it’s like to be in my shoes. You write a novel. You labor over it day in and day out. It’s your baby. You care about it as if it has a life of its own. And then at some point, no matter how many times you’ve gone over the manuscript, no matter how many times you’ve made revisions, no matter how many times you wish you could chuck it and start over again, you let it go. You take it to Kinko’s and have it copied, then send it off to your publisher. And then, months later, it’s shipped to bookstores all over the country. Everyone expects you to get out there and promote it, to tell the world how amazing it is, but you’re conflicted, because deep down you think the book might be total crap. That’s the problem, Amy. You’re supposed to sell it, but you think it’s crap, or you’re not sure if it’s crap, or you’re sure it’s crap but you don’t want anyone else to find out it’s crap.”

  My, my. I was seeing a new side to Tony. I’d always attributed his reluctance to promote his books to his belief that he was better than other authors, less desperate for a sale than the rest, too high-and-mighty to promote them. “So this feeling that you might be perpetrating fraud on the consumer—that you’re forcing them to buy books that might be crap—hasn’t gone away, even though every installment in the Joe West series has made national best-seller lists?”

  “Nope. With each new book, the imposter syndrome kicks right back in. All I have to do is read a bad review and I want to crawl in a hole and stay there.”

  I suddenly remembered another of Connie’s tidbits about Tony: He was extremely sensitive to negative reviews of his books. “If the reviews bother you so much, then don’t read them,” I said. “I can tell Scott not to send you the ones we get from our clipping service.”

  He shook his head. “I have to read them. It’s a compulsion. What really riles me is that they pick me apart and yet they treat Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard and Robert Parker like gods.”

  Boy, he really was fragile on the subject. “They treat you like a god, too. If memory serves, you haven’t had a bad review in the three years we’ve published you.”

  “Oh yeah? On the last book, Publishers Weekly creamed me.”

  “Creamed you? I don’t think so.”

  “They did, I swear. Here’s what they said: ‘Another well-crafted whodunit with a truckload of engaging characters, Stiles’s latest is bound for best-seller lists. Joe West embarks on a new escapade both zesty and riveting. Only his relationship with his ever-patient wife, Lucy, remains woefully underdeveloped.’”

  I smiled, amused that he recalled portions of the year-old review word for word. “That’s not a bad review, Tony. That’s a great review with one tiny quibble.”

  “Well, the New York Times had the same quibble. ‘Rollicking,’ they called the book, then slammed my Lucy character as being ‘one-dimensional, almost cartoonish.’ Even People magazine beat me up about poor Lucy, saying her scenes with Joe ‘fail to dazzle, given the flat, uninspired dialogue between them.’”

  “The books sell like crazy,” I said. “What do you care what some cranky reviewers write?”

  “I care. I know I shouldn’t, but I do.”

  “Okay, so you don’t like to promote your books on television. And you don’t like to read reviews, although you can’t help yourself. Is there any aspect of the process that you do like?” I said.

  “The promotion process?”

&nb
sp; “No. The writing process.”

  “I love the writing process. Being a novelist is the hardest job I’ve ever had, but I love coming up with and then solving the mysteries, love revisiting and developing Joe West, love stringing a few decent sentences together. And I love dealing one-on-one with readers once the books are published. It’s pretty miraculous to hear I’ve given them a good ride.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “I see the light now.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I used to think you were too full of yourself to get out there and do publicity. Now I realize that you’re not full enough of yourself to get out there and do publicity.”

  He laughed. “So I’m off the hook for the Today show when the next one is published?”

  “No. You’re doing the show, Tony, just like you always do. The only difference is that now I’ll understand why you won’t be happy about it.”

  We sipped our wine, munched on the sourdough bread the waiter brought to the table, and listened to the day’s specials, which were steak, steak, and more steak.

  “I think I’ll have the steak,” I said when it was time to order. “The filet. Medium.”

  Tony ordered the same. We continued to chat amiably and, I might add, more intimately, sharing information about our parents, our paths to our current careers, our favorite movies—all the things people talk about when they’re getting to know each other.

  “And who are your friends?” he asked once our food had been served and he had just told me about the week he’d spent with an old college pal.

  “My friends?” God, this is fantastic, I thought. He’s just given me the perfect opening for asking him to help me out with Tara.

  “Yeah. Do you have a best friend? Someone you’ll call as soon as you get home tonight? Someone who knows every single one of your secrets?”

  His tone was lighthearted, teasing, and why not? He had no idea how loaded the subject was for me, how fraught with raw emotions.

  “I had a best friend,” I said. “When she and I were teenagers, we used to call each other the very instant we got home from a date, even if we went on the date together, as a foursome, and had only just left each other. Of course, she did most of the talking and I did most of the listening, but it seemed to me then as if there couldn’t be two closer girlfriends in this world.”

  “I can’t picture you as the passive one,” he said. “You sure as hell aren’t passive anymore.”

  “No. But back then, I would sit in my bedroom with the phone nestled in my neck and the cord wound around my finger, and hang on her every word. She would come up with clever nicknames for boys and create drama where I saw none and describe in fabulous detail what so-and-so said about this and that. Her take on whatever we did was always so different from mine, so much more interesting than mine, because her vantage point was that of the most popular girl in school.”

  He smiled. “Now I’m supposed to believe you were a wallflower? I can’t picture that, either.”

  “Not a wallflower, no. But she was definitely the queen bee and I was the one who smoothed things over whenever she’d sting somebody.”

  “So whatever happened to her?” asked Tony. “You referred to her in the past tense.”

  “Whatever happened to her? She stung me,” I said. “And there was nobody to smooth it over.”

  “Ouch. Sounds like there’s a story lurking. Want to tell me?”

  Yes, I want to tell you and I’m going to tell you, I pledged. I’m going to tell you not only because I planned the whole evening around telling you but also because you’re not the prima donna author I always thought you were. You’re actually pretty damn appealing and not a bad listener—and who would have guessed it?

  I was enjoying myself, I realized as I sat there looking at Tony, at the impossibly blue eyes and the full head of wavy dark hair and the nose that did a little zigzag and rescued him from being too pretty. Not that I was about to let this new positive opinion of him distract me from my mission. It would just make spending time with him at Tara’s less onerous, I figured.

  “While you decide whether you’re going to unburden yourself about your former best friend, let me tell you the story of a boy I grew up with,” he said, and went on to share the tale of a kid who’d been his best friend until they were on opposing teams in Little League. It was a charming anecdote and he recounted it well, being the professional spinner of tales that he was, and I found myself thoroughly caught up in it. I also had a thought, unoriginal and hardly earth-shaking though it was: This is what people are—the sum total of our stories, our little histories, our life experiences, which pile up and shape us. There was something about this idea—that I, for example, wouldn’t be the person I was without having had Tara in my past, for better or worse—that touched me, made me soften toward her, if only for a split second.

  “So, back to you and your friend,” said Tony. “What went wrong between you two, and how did you resolve it?”

  I put down my knife and fork. I was poised to explain about Tara and me, then slide right into my pitch. I felt fairly certain that after he heard my sorry saga, he would agree to pose as my fiancé for one night, even though he hated to be put on display, as he’d told me over and over. He would do it because we’d made a connection. He would see my dilemma, excuse my lie, and help me out. Yes.

  “What happened between my friend and me was that I was supposed to get married four years ago and she was supposed to be my maid of honor at the wedding, but then—”

  Before I could even get to the part where I walked in on Tara and Stuart playing rodeo in our bedroom, the waiter rushed up to the table, leaned into Tony, and said in a hoarse whisper that was loud enough for me to eavesdrop, “Sorry to butt in, but she’s here lookin’ for you, Mr. Stiles.”

  Tony seemed—what?—alarmed by the interruption? Not exactly. Irritated? Yes. “Where is she?” he said to the waiter.

  “Outside. I spotted her trying to come in and I stopped her. I said you were busy with another lady.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Cried. Carried on. Eventually, she beat it. You’re okay, Mr. Stiles. She’s gone now. I took care of everything.”

  Tony reached into his pocket and handed the waiter some money. “Thanks, Bruno. I appreciate your trouble.”

  “No problem, Mr. Stiles.”

  When we were alone again, I quickly asked what all the intrigue was about.

  “You don’t want to know, trust me,” he said with a weary sigh.

  “Of course I want to know,” I said, taking a bite of my steak. “I’m dying of curiosity.”

  “Okay, but remember: You asked.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “Well, there’s a woman I used to go out with.”

  “Aha. And you broke her heart, right?”

  “If she has a heart.”

  “Sounds like the split was ugly. How long were you together?”

  “Not long. Three months maybe.”

  “Three months. Is that your usual cutoff?” According to Marianne, men who shied away from commitment rarely made it past the three-month mark.

  “I don’t have a cutoff,” he said. “But I did tell this woman we were over, and she hasn’t been willing to face it. She’s been hanging around, waiting for me at all my haunts, trying to worm her way back into my life, and it’s driving me nuts. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, so I don’t know how to handle it.”

  “You mean that all your casualties don’t hound you after you dump them?” I said wryly.

  “Hey. Be nice. The bottom line is that she wasn’t the right woman for me, any more than I was the right man for her, and I tried to point that out to her in the gentlest terms,” he said. “It’s not my fault that she refuses to move on.”

  “Are we talking about an actual stalker here?”

  “No. We’re talking about a pest. She knows we never had a future together. She’s ju
st used to having her way.”

  “Oh, a spoiled one?”

  “Not spoiled. But definitely bossy.”

  “Was it her bossiness that prompted the breakup?”

  He shook his head. “It was her lying.”

  A piece of steak suddenly got stuck in my throat. Or maybe it only felt that way. “Her lying?” I said after swallowing hard.

  “Yeah. She played me. Not only did she lie about a very key aspect of her life but she actually asked me to participate in her lie, to compound it by lying right along with her. Can you believe that?”

  Well, duh, I could believe it. I’d been on the verge of doing it before that waiter appeared out of nowhere and ruined everything.

  My God, I thought as Tony continued to rail against the woman. If she hadn’t shown up at the restaurant, I would have asked him to participate in my own lie, and he would have been as furious at me as he was at her, not to mention highly unsympathetic to my situation. So now what was I supposed to do? How could I possibly follow through with my plan? I couldn’t.

  “I’m the last person to apply for sainthood,” he went on, clearly fired up, “but she was bad news. For her to lie to me—and I’m talking about a whopper here—and then beg me to help her keep the lie going still pisses me off.”

  “I can see that,” I said.

  Well, I lost my appetite then. My resolve, too. For the rest of the meal, I sort of sat there in a daze, wishing I could be the Elizabeth Montgomery character on the old TV sitcom Bewitched, just twitch my nose and make Tara and all the problems she was causing disappear. I was totally distracted until Tony took hold of my hand. The affectionate nature of the gesture caught me off guard and nearly made me jump.

  “You okay?” he asked. “I think I lost you during my rant.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, wondering when he’d let go. Not that I minded him holding my hand, exactly. In fact, my stomach started doing little flips as his fingers wedged between mine.