Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  “I had the strangest thing happen this morning.” I pulled out my phone and played the message. “Have you ever heard of any-thing like that?”

  Mario appeared, reverently cradling a bottle, and commenced icing and opening and tasting and pouring and yes, Mrs. Martining. I didn’t drink at lunch, but well, where had that policy gotten me? I took a sip.

  Letitia stroked Bouvier. “Have you harassed her?”

  “If leaving two pleasant messages, one asking if I could get reimbursed for work expenses Rick never turned in, constitutes harassment, I guess so.”

  “It sounds like he has a vested interest in keeping you two apart. You don’t think—?” She let it hang, delicately, unsaid.

  “Paulette? Even if Rick did…that kind of thing, it would be a seriously unlikely pairing.”

  “What receipts were you asking about?”

  “I found a bunch in the study for plane tickets and hotels and restaurants that he must not have turned in. He always used to let them collect for a while and then turn in three or four months’ at a time, but I could really use the money. The strange thing is that he said he’d already turned them in, but they were still in the apartment.”

  Letitia nodded. “They don’t presumably give them back.”

  “Right. And since it’s all billable to clients, they don’t reimburse without receipts.”

  “Call the CFO.” Letitia sat back.

  I stared at her. “I have no idea who that even is.”

  “Call the switchboard and ask for the CFO’s office. That’s the way it’s been in every company I’ve ever dealt with.” Which was, um, zero? She gave me a half-amused look, like she knew what I was thinking. I really needed to get less transparent. “And there have been a lot. You do know that I run and administer a charitable foundation, Cassie?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I didn’t. You never said anything.”

  She smiled. “You never asked.”

  “Touché.” How many people had I not given a chance in my lifetime? Did everyone turn out to be surprising if you let yourself know them? Would my mother? Betsy Strauss?

  “Call,” Letitia said.

  I did and was put through to a nice enough guy named Patrick, who said it wasn’t standard procedure to reimburse spouses but to send the receipts to him and he’d see what he could do.

  “When are you seeing Humphrey?” Letitia asked when I’d hung up.

  “Next week. Thanks for that, Letitia.” The memory of his voice made me smile. “Does he look like Columbo?”

  “Cassie, do I look like a woman who would recommend a man who looked like Columbo?”

  I had to admit she didn’t.

  “How are you fixed for money?”

  The question took me so by surprise, I spluttered my champagne. “At this moment, OK, but going forward, something’s going to have to give.”

  She nodded. “I’m beginning to be concerned about the trust fund.”

  “I’m beginning to be concerned about everything—What trust fund?”

  Mario swooped down and topped our glasses up.

  “Rick’s.”

  I choked.

  “You didn’t know.”

  I shook my head, waving her to go on as the champagne burned up my nose.

  “He gets it when he turns forty. I set it up that way because I believed he’d be mature enough to handle it then. Apparently I was mistaken.”

  I was sure the champagne wasn’t responsible for my dizziness. “I’m not sure I’m understanding this.”

  She looked fidgety. “To be blunt? I’m worried he’s done this now so he can divorce you before he gets it so it won’t be community property.”

  “I’m not a divorce expert, but wouldn’t it come under the heading of future earnings or expectations or something?” I was still trying to process that for as long as I’d known him—even back when things had been good—hell, I’d thought perfect— Rick had withheld this information. Every day the hits just seemed to keep on coming.

  “Only if you know about it. And if he was counting on you staying nice and agreeable, he might have assumed you wouldn’t find out. I have to say, I know he and I aren’t close, but it’s painful to even have to think this about my own son.”

  I nodded. I could imagine.

  “So, anyway, I was thinking, I’d like to give you an equal amount as a gift.”

  “Letitia.” I put my glass down. “I can’t let you give me money.”

  She looked genuinely puzzled. “Why not?”

  I didn’t have any good answer except just because, so I said, “Because.”

  “Because what? I have so much else to do with it? I’m sixty-five years old, I have more money than I can spend. Look, Cassie”—she glanced at Bouvier, sitting next to her—“I’m sure it’s partly genetic that Rick turned out the way he did, but the rest, well, one has to assume it’s my fault. I believed the way to help Rick live a good life, an authentic life, was to take inherited money out of the equation until he was old enough to handle it. To expose him to it as little as possible until his character was formed. I’m sitting here today telling you I was wrong.”

  I was deeply grateful that I had, in the last ten minutes, officially become someone who drank at lunch. “You can’t make amends to Rick by giving it to me.”

  She smiled, “Maybe not, but I can make amends to you for giving you Rick.”

  “How can you say that?” It gave me a sick-to-my-stomach feeling to think of someone’s own mother not caring about them.

  She looked surprised. “Because it’s true. I love him dearly”— she kept talking as my mouth opened—“in my own way.” Leonard put down two microscopic ciabattas, like two inches by two inches each, on our bread plates. “Do you love who he turned out to be, Cassie?”

  I swallowed my ciabatta pretty much whole. “Who he really was or who I thought he was? In retrospect, I can see a million ways in which he wasn’t the man I fell in love with and a million little ways he changed over the years. But before he left, no, I didn’t see it. I kept him. So I guess the answer is, I don’t know.”

  “What’s standing between you and saying yes to something that could make your life a great deal easier?”

  Could I accept money from her? It wasn’t passing by unnoticed that she was offering me something my own parents hadn’t. I looked at her, really looked, beyond the clothes, the plastic surgery, the jewelry. And what I saw was an aging, lonely woman with too much money and not enough of anything else. And then I looked, really looked at me (although thankfully not literally), sitting across from her, Cassie Lorimer-Traske Martin, scrambling, as usual, to do her best to make sure that no one ever felt sorry for her again. My self-respect was on the line. But then, conversely, so maybe was home for my boys. Where did pride begin and end here? “I don’t know, Letitia. Can I think about this?”

  “Of course.”

  My phone rang. “Excuse me.” I didn’t take my eyes off Letitia as I bent down, reached into my bag, and answered it.

  26

  What am i Doin’ Here

  Betsy Strauss. “Listen, sorry to track you down on your cell like this, but there’s something going on you should know about. Katie Winston was in the school cafeteria this morning when the food delivery came in and she saw cases of those oven-ready French fries, if you can believe that! I mean, not even proper frites. Sue’s on the phone with Ken now but asked me to give you a call. They think the best thing would be if someone could nip over and take some digital pictures of the packaging—”

  “Betsy, I’m going to stop you. If by ‘someone’ you mean me, I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m in Manhattan. What about Ken?”

  Letitia raised her glass to me.

  “Oh.” Betsy sounded crestfallen. “I don’t think he can. Could you hold on a sec?” It sounded like she put her hand over the phone. Then she came back on. “Sue wants to know if you’re in lower Manhattan, because it only takes a few minutes—”

  “Actua
lly I’m way uptown. Look, Betsy, I’m sorry, but I really can’t do it.”

  “WHAT A SHAME.” Her voice was unnaturally loud suddenly. “BECAUSE SOMEONE REALLY NEEDS TO sorry”— her tone changed drastically—“I wanted to go in the other room because I don’t want Sue to overhear. Oh, Cassie, I’m so upset. I don’t know what to do. I think the mystery blogger might be Ailsa! She and Sue are so close, and you know how Sue blows the tiniest thing out of proportion, so I’m worried she’ll completely fall apart over this. But I’ve known for a while that Ailsa and Russ are in marriage counseling, and her housekeeper told my housekeeper that Ailsa just threw out every single pair of her Jockey for Her classic briefs and replaced them with Cosabella thongs, which, as we know, is just courting yeast infections, which she’s always said—ANYWAY, IT’S A SHAME YOU CAN’T DO IT. I’LL TRY TO FIND SOMEONE ELSE.”

  Sue must have come back within hearing distance. And before I’d gotten the scoop on Ailsa’s yeast infections. Hard to figure out why I didn’t want to expose the ins and outs of my personal life to this particular group. I said, “Randy might be able to do it. She’s a great photographer. She’ll make the fries look absolutely repulsive.”

  If nothing else, I figured getting this call might scare Randy right back to work. “Sorry,” I said to Letitia after hanging up.

  “How much do you know about me and my family, Cassie?”

  More than about Ailsa’s yeast issues, thankfully, but not a ton. And what I had been told could use some judicious conversational editing. “Um. A little.”

  “And what about Olivier’s?”

  “Not a lot.” I certainly knew the most pertinent fact; that he had died when Rick was a baby. I’d believed that growing up fatherless had given Rick a deeply held conviction that nothing mattered more than being there for his own children.

  Letitia looked sad. “We were all only children. Olivier, Rick, and I. I didn’t have the experience of being surrounded by the support of family—”

  “That might be overrated.” I spoke from the heart.

  “When Olivier cheated on me, I didn’t have anyone to turn to. I certainly didn’t have the kind of friendships and support you do.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “How could you have? I doubt Rick even knows, but I’m going to tell you.”

  Mario materialized to pour us more. “My paternal grand-parents were extremely wealthy, my mother’s parents were teachers. When I was fourteen, my father lost all his money. He wasn’t much of a businessman, made some awful decisions, expanded too fast, hadn’t invested wisely.” She gave me an amused look. “Rick did not inherit his business acumen from him.”

  I wondered what would happen if I took her bread.

  “We went from owning four homes to living in a two-bedroom ranch house on Long Island. I was brought home from boarding school and sent to the local high school. Where,” she said wryly, “I did not fit in.”

  I could see that. “This is amazing, like something from a novel,” I responded.

  “It sounds dramatic now, but at the time, while it was devastating, it was just life. Now it feels”—she looked wistful—“very long ago. Like another time, which I suppose it was.” She handed Bouvier’s now-empty dish to Leonard. “He’ll have a bowl of mineral water with three spring water ice cubes, and then if someone could be available to take him outside, Carmela will be waiting to take him for walkies.”

  She’d certainly managed to overcome the lean years. It was not for nothing that Rick had referred to her as the Princess of Park Avenue.

  “Anyway”—she put her hand on Bouvier’s head—“my father ended up commuting on the Long Island railroad and pushing papers for an insurance company at an age when he should have been retired. I finished high school, the girls I had been at boarding school with made their come-outs and got married or went on to Wellesley and Vassar. You know the drill.”

  I nodded. No come-out for my mother, but she’d gone to Smith.

  “My parents had managed to scrape together enough money so there was at least a plan for me. I was to have my come-out and then go to secretarial school. This was 1959,” she reminded my shocked expression. “The world was changing, but not that fast. Needless to say, my parents were hoping that I’d land a husband and secretarial school wouldn’t come to pass. My come-out was miserable. It truly wasn’t my world any more. But then neither was life in the ranch house.”

  I was still getting over the shock of hearing that Letitia had ever been in a ranch house, never mind lived in one.

  “I don’t think I had a single friend at that point. Then I met Olivier at a party. He was—” She held out her glass, and Mario appeared instantly to top it up. “You’ve seen pictures of him, of course.”

  I had. Skiing at Gstaad, standing by his car at Monte Carlo, holding a newborn Rick on the beach at LaJolla. He’d always struck me as a dashing, tragic figure. Equal parts doting new father and Daniel Craig as James Bond, killed way too young in a horrific car accident. Rick, though, had never fueled my romantic notions. “I don’t know what he was like,” he’d said once, “frankly, I suspect he was kind of a jerk.”

  “An utter asshole,” Letitia said equably when I told her this. “Pictures show you what he looked like, but they don’t give you any understanding of him. They can with some people, but not him. He was one of those men who’s so magnetic that their force of personality takes over. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  Leonard appeared with Bouvy’s water. Letitia checked the temperature with a finger. “One more ice cube, please.” He scurried away to take care of it.

  “In the early days, it was the charming side of him that was so strong. Sometimes I used to look at Rick, who was born staid, I think, and find myself amazed that he was Olivier’s son.” She took a long drink, then said, “But now it seems like the genetics got passed down after all.”

  “Shame it wasn’t the killer smile.” I was hoping to lighten the moment.

  But she didn’t laugh. “True, no killer smile, but on the flip side, no abusive and addictive genes either. I believe they skipped a generation.”

  Considering Rick and I had two children, I certainly hoped not.

  “Two,” she said to my horrified expression. “Two generations.”

  “I’m sorry, Letitia.”

  “It was a long time ago.” But she still looked sad. “I hope with all my heart, for everyone’s sake, that I’m right and Rick’s not going down the same road.”

  Hard to imagine, certainly, since it was Rick’s solidity that had attracted me to him in the first place. He’d seemed so obviously a man who would be steady and sure and there—no tantrums or revolving dental assistants. Now, looking backwards, I’d been so mistaken about that, it was hard to know what else I’d been wrong about.

  Leonard brought Bouvier’s fourth ice cube on a pristine plate. He lifted it into the bowl with silver tongs and a straight face.

  Bouvier started lapping. “Olivier was the life of every party,” Letitia continued. “And there were lots. It was before people from backgrounds like his were expected to do something more than enjoy their lives.” She sighed. “We were so different, I’m not sure I would have married him despite the initial magnetism had my life been different, but”—she shot me a look over her champagne glass—“he was handsome and magnetic and very wealthy. Marrying him or commuting to secretarial school, side by side with my depressed father. There wasn’t much contest.”

  “You married him for his money?”

  “His money made him who he was. If he’d been a man with a job or a purpose, he could never have ended up the way he did.”

  I wasn’t sure about that, but it was maybe not the time to debate theories of addiction.

  “He was the second man I knew whose life was ruined by money. My father’s by losing it and Olivier’s by having way too much of it.” She sighed. “Anyway, the sixties were revving up and things were prett
y wild—”

  I raised an eyebrow—her idea of wild was letting Bouvier out in just a sweater.

  “And Olivier…marijuana”—she pronounced it like a high school health teacher—“and all kinds of drugs. Drinking, dangerous cars, sex—”

  Bouvier made a weird, strangled noise. She stopped, midsentence, and looked down at him on the banquette next to her. He did it again. “Bouvy?” There was a note of panic in her voice. “Bouvier? Baby, what’s wrong?”

  There was something about her voice, her expression, that scared me. I leaned over the table, knocking my glass into her lap. He did look strange, his eyes staring glassily, even more bugged out than usual.

  “Oh, my God!” Her panic was clear now. “What’s wrong? Oh God! Something’s happening! I think he’s having a seizure. My baby’s having a seizure!”

  A waiter came running over. Everyone in the restaurant was staring.

  Letitia seemed paralyzed. I reached over and grabbed Bouvier by the collar, almost by instinct. He was so light it took almost no effort to haul him over the table. My sleeve knocked her salad into her lap, where it joined the champagne. His heart was beating and his eyes were wide open, panic-stricken. Eight years of motherhood, with all its terrors, made me understand what was happening—he was choking. I slammed him, hard, in his bony canine stomach.

  Letitia shrieked.

  I slammed him again.

  “Cassie!”

  I doggy-Heimliched him one more time. Hard. The ice cube projectiled out of him, hitting me in the neck and sliding down the front of my shirt, where it lodged, melting and covered in dog drool, in my bra. Icy yuck dripped down my stomach.

  It took Bouvier a second to retrieve his breath. He thanked me by yapping, then sinking his teeth into my hand.

  I shrieked in pain and surprise and dropped him on the table.

  Letitia was almost hyperventilating as she tried to scoop him up. He sidestepped neatly. “He was choking,” she sobbed. “Choking. He could have died! You saved his life, Cassie.”

  One of the hovering waiters handed me a napkin for my hand. I reached in with the other to remove the ice cube from my bra, but it slid in my fingers. The waiter gave me an odd look. I removed my hand.