“First of all, I have always been right. That’s why I was in a position to do this, and second, they weren’t authorized trades.”
A seriously new gust of fear. “Rick, you could go to jail.”
“I know that.” He almost smiled. “I knew it. But again, it kept the demons at bay. But then I got caught. Internally. I was let go on the spot—I’m sorry, I tried to tell you I hadn’t been, I just didn’t know how to give you the truth. Cass, you can’t say a word about this, but Bowers & Flaum, let’s just say it’s in their interests to keep it quiet. I paid back some out of our money, but obviously I couldn’t touch the real amount. I set up a trust with the rest of our money to shield our assets from creditors if they come after me. That’s where the money’s gone.”
I was actually surprised by how little I cared about that right now. “How does Barry Manilow come into this?”
He got that strange light in his eyes again. “That was some kind of fate. I’d gotten myself into this awful position. I was lying awake, sweating at night. I was sleeping with two women other than my wife, I’d committed fraudulent trades and covered my own ass in a very unethical way. I was a disaster.”
I nodded. That certainly sounded true.
“And then one night I went to see this Barry Manilow show with Paulette in Atlantic City—she’s a big fan—and I was transfixed. I mean, I’m not a music guy, but this went straight to the heart. I don’t know why, but I felt so…calm and centered. I bought some CDs and played them on Bose Wave in my office, on the iPod, and I started to get almost obsessed. I started thinking about his trajectory from jingle writer to performer to cultural icon. Honestly, the rapport he has with his audience is incredible.”
“I’m sure that’s true, Rick, but I’m—”
“I tried to talk to Paulette about it, but she just didn’t get it. She loves musical theater, though. I had to see every single Broadway show with her—”
I don’t know why, but that surprised me almost as much as the revelations about affairs, sex clubs, and derivatives fraud.
“—and mostly I didn’t like them, but it occurred to me one night that it would be interesting to try the format with Barry’s music. I called up the guy who wrote the script for, remember that horrible musical comedy about the people who starved to death on the Russian steppes that Katya made us go see?”
I shuddered. “Unfortunately, I do.”
“Well the play was awful, but I thought he had some talent. And it turned out he knew this team who had done a similar thing for Wham! and they were really enthusiastic, so it started.”
“And?” I asked, “are you happy? Do you like it?”
He lifted his hand like he wanted to rub the bridge of his nose and dropped it when it came in contact with the bandage. “I am,” he sounded surprised. “I do.”
“Oh, Rick, why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Because you’re so damned perfect, Cassie. You always do things right, never need anything from anyone. How could I come home and tell you that I was completely off the rails?”
“Why does everyone say that?” It was seriously starting to piss me off. “I never feel that way, ever. I’m always one step short of a mess.”
“You don’t come off that way. And I lived with you. For a long time.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I meant it. “I didn’t mean to make anyone feel that way, ever.”
He nodded. “I know. The thing was that the further off the rails I got, the easier it was to just keep going. Slept with one other woman, sleep with another. Did one risky transaction. Why not do another? You have to keep upping the ante to get the same thrill.”
“So was it that easy to leave us?”
He gave me a long look. “Of course not. It was agonizing. You, the boys, having to act like an asshole—” He must have seen my mouth opening, because he put up a hand. “—an even bigger asshole than I really was. So I used this alibi service; I’d used them before when I was seeing Jordan. They can make you look like you’re in one place when you’re actually in another—”
“Yeah, unfortunately I’m familiar with their work now. It turns out that if you leave your wife a fake number but a real hotel, and she looks up the number, you can kind of get busted. So if they guarantee their services, you might want to see if you can collect a freebie. So is that what the orgy was, upping the ante?”
He nodded. “I know you won’t believe this, Cassie, but I’d never been before. Things weren’t going too well with Paulette, and I convinced her it would…spice things up a little.” He laughed. “I’m not sure she agreed. What were the odds of you being there?”
I laughed. “Slim, and yet I was. Rick, didn’t it occur to you that if you had two mistresses and you were needing to spice things up, you had a larger problem?”
“Nothing occurred to me, Cassie”—he looked very serious—“that’s the problem. If I’d thought at all, I wouldn’t have done any of this stuff, none of it. I missed you and the boys so much, it’s been like a constant physical pain. The affairs, honestly, I don’t know why. They weren’t even that great. I never stopped loving you or wanting you and our life. I just, once it got started, I didn’t know how to undo any of it. I know what I’ve done has been both unspeakable and unspeakably messed up, but what do you think, Cassie? If I get help and figure it out? Really do what I need to do?” He got up and went down on his knees in front of me. “Is there hope?”
I looked at him, the man I’d loved for so many years, on one knee, his nose bandaged, face battered, thought of the boys, how empty the apartment was suddenly without M.A., about the blog and Jamie and the past eight months, last night. “Define hope,” I said.
FROM PUBLISHERS LUNCH DELUXE
Sold
NYMetro writer and sometimes-blogger Cassie Martin’s first book, Carpool Confidential, the story of the first year following her move from Manhattan to suburban Connecticut in the wake of the surprise dissolution of her marriage (chronicled in the blog of the same name at NYMetro.com), to Megan McKeever at Downtown Press, in a pre-empt (reportedly for six figures), by Laura Langlie of the Laura Langlie Agency. The book takes on the similarities between New York private-school PTA moms and Connecticut public school PTA moms, finding new love, having difficulty giving up the old, helping her children through a traumatic year, the perils of inheriting a part-time teenager, having a soon-to-be-ex-mother-inlaw who is shacked up with a private investigator thirty years her junior, a mother who has just run away with the husband of a woman in her husband’s 12 Step Sexaholics Anonymous program, learning to garden, and getting a new puppy.
Carpool Confidential Page 37
