I got there first, and sat down on the bench in the front, watching customers go in and out, while staring at the brown, glazed Peking ducks that were hanging upside down near the kitchen. I vowed never to have another serving of duck. The poor pathetic creatures. What did they do to deserve that? As I was lost in thought, Chris came up to me, startling me by planting a kiss on my cheek.
“Hi,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”
I didn’t say anything. The hostess showed us to a table, and a moment later, we were staring at menus that listed what seemed like a hundred different dishes.
“So how are things?” I asked after the waitress had taken our orders. I felt awkward and uncomfortable, while retreating behind a protective cloak so that he couldn’t hurt me anymore. Would we ever again be able to laugh together and share things the way we used to? I pulled my sweater around my shoulders. Only then did I realize that it was the cashmere cardigan that he had gotten me for Christmas.
He looked at me intently, narrowing his eyes. “How are things? Terrible,” he said. I really didn’t want to hear the details of what was going wrong in his life, so I just sat there without encouraging him to explain.
“Look, Jen, I made a really big mistake,” he said. “I guess the idea of getting involved with this gorgeous model who liked me really blindsided me to who she was and what I was giving up.
“She’s like some fifteen-year-old princess who’s probably going to have a nervous breakdown in the next five years,” he said, shaking his head. “I had no idea what that whole world was like, but believe me, it’s not something that anybody with a brain would want to get into.”
“Well, I’m sorry things didn’t work out for you,” I said. He looked back at me, startled.
“Jen, I want to get back together,” Chris said, as if he had to make it clearer because I wasn’t getting the message. “I want to just forget about the last few weeks and pick up the life that we had. All I kept thinking about in Paris was that I had given up something real for a stupid fling.”
Was the word fling part of the popular lexicon now? I guess he had been talking to Moose, I thought as the waitress brought our meals.
“I don’t know,” I said finally. “I can’t just forget about what happened and get over it.”
“Look, I know,” Chris said. “But can we try to, maybe slowly, start things up again? If you want I’ll stay with one of the art directors in my office. A couple of them have big apartments. I know they’d put me up. We can date, see how thing go.”
I looked back at him, not sure what to say.
“Maybe,” I said, scratching the side of my face as though I had suddenly gotten an itchy hive. “Maybe.”
We sat through the rest of the meal sharing a strained silence, like two people on an awkward first date. I know that he wanted to tell me more about his trip, but I didn’t ask him. I didn’t want to know. There was no way to clear the air if you didn’t discuss what happened, but I didn’t have it in me to ask him, and he knew that I wasn’t ready to hear. I had gone over this scenario again and again in my head. Now it was a reality, but I wasn’t prepared.
We left the restaurant, and I realized that I had forgotten to tell Chris that I was in the process of buying a studio apartment. We hadn’t even gotten to that point. Now it was almost irrelevant.
Chapter Twenty
It came as no surprise that the grand jury indicted Jack Reilly on federal bribery charges. And it came as no surprise that three people in the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting were indicted along with him. Thanks to his money and connections, I had no doubt that Reilly’s ass would probably be saved. After all, he was being represented by a team of the country’s top criminal lawyers who had a cadre of eager law students with time and energy to help them unearth every smidgen of evidence they could find to show that Reilly was an upstanding member of the film world who brought riches to every city he filmed in and often entertained friends from different professions without any ulterior motives.
Marilyn had a few skeletons in her closet—she had been arrested for shoplifting twenty years earlier, I knew—and they would dig up anything that they could to malign her and her character. Reilly would claim to have no awareness that people in his office were putting together bogus bills. The staff would be disbanded, and he would distance himself from all of them.
I was sure that he would work out a deal with the government that would reduce, if not eliminate, the chances of him doing any prison time. What I wasn’t sure about was whether you could be put under house arrest if you’d recently switched your residence to St. Croix from Los Angeles. It was almost a joke to think of him being imprisoned in a Caribbean villa with a swimming pool and tennis courts and his own private beach, welcoming the girlfriend of the hour to console him until his sentence was served.
The indictment triggered Slaid to write a column about getting away with murder if you had enough money to buy the services of the best defense lawyers in the country. He named case after case where liars, cheats and murderers went free while those whose guilt was uncertain, at best, but had no means to hire decent lawyers, were doomed to long prison terms.
“Nice job,” I said.
“But?”
“But nothing.”
It was almost two weeks since I had seen Slaid. I knew that he had been waiting for me to call.
“I’m disappointed,” he said. “I was hoping to hear that fighting spirit again.”
“I feel like all our work is for nothing. They’re out of jail with a slap on the wrist, thinking of the next way to pull one over on honest jerks like us.”
“Well, we haven’t run out of bad guys,” he said. “Don’t act as though there’s no more dirt for you to sweep up.”
“Um, I suppose.”
“So what happened to your boyfriend?” he said, changing the subject.
No easy answer to that. Chris had come over a few nights after we had dinner. We rented a movie and ordered take-out Chinese food. I had my guard up, and was consumed with wondering whether I could ever trust him again and feel the closeness that we once had. I guess he sensed that because aside from sitting close to me on the couch, and at one point leaning over to kiss my neck, he didn’t ask to stay over and he left at eleven.
“We’re in transition,” I said to Slaid.
“Transition? Isn’t that some stage of childbirth, or something?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“But it doesn’t mean we can’t have dinner, right?”
I took a deep breath. “No, I guess not.”
“Okay then,” he said, “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at seven.”
We were going to head down to Soho to have dinner at the Mercer Kitchen. Slaid lived nearby, and told me that it was one of his favorite restaurants.
Then I got the call from Ellen.
“You won’t believe where I am,” she said, obviously upset.
“I give up.”
“At New York Hospital. I slipped on the ice on the way out of the studio and fractured my ankle.”
“What?”
“I work out every goddamn day of my life. I can’t believe this.”
It turned out that it was just a freak accident, but she’d be in an air cast that she had to wear for a month.
“I was supposed to go visit Moose this weekend. Now I’m stuck here for the duration.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Ellen said. “You know how much he hates the city….”
“Well, you have to let him know.”
“I will,” she said.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll take you home.”
I hung up and got into a cab. It was only then that I realized that I was supposed to meet Slaid in fifteen minutes. I phoned him and explained.
“I’ll meet you at the emergency room,” Slaid said. “After we take her home we can get some dinn
er nearby.” He joined me as I waited, over an hour, for Ellen. While we waited, Slaid took the crutches the nurse had brought for Ellen and hobbled around the room, like a kid who has to play with a new toy put in front of him.
“They’re about two feet too small for you,” I said, amused by his performance.
“To the untrained eye, yes,” he said. Then he lifted his knees as though he were doing an ab exercise, and used them to support him as he did a handstand. A nurse walked by and shook her head.
“This isn’t a circus,” she said snappishly. “Would you mind sitting down?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, flipping himself down on the bench. He turned to me and whispered, “They’re such a humorless bunch.”
“That tends to happen after you work around the clock and don’t sleep for two days.”
“You should know,” he said, obviously referring to the column I wrote on exhaustion in the E.R. after the son of a prominent politician died because his fever and pain were misdiagnosed by a sleep-deprived intern.
“And I remember your call. I couldn’t imagine why a columnist at the Trib whom I’d never met would call and tell me that I didn’t know the half of it.”
“I was dating a doctor, at the time. And I wanted to do the story, but she swore that if I did it would come back to haunt her. Everyone knew she was seeing me, so I held off. I figured I’d write it when her rotation changed, but you broke the back of it, so I figured I’d go on to something else.”
“So if I broke the back of it, why did you bother to call?”
He shrugged. “I kind of studied your picture…. You were cute.”
Once she got home, Ellen called Moose and told him what happened. He asked her how she felt, and aside from saying that she was depressed to be on crutches, she said she was fine. They hung up without discussing when they would see each other again. Eight hours later, when there was a knock on her door, and she hobbled to answer it, needless to say she was surprised to see Moose standing there along with Sadie.
“She’s great at retrieving things,” Moose said. “That’s why I brought her.” Never mind that every couch and chair would soon have a film of white dog hair, Ellen was thrilled to have their company.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Ellen told him.
“I know,” he said. Moose said he’d stay in town as long as she wanted company. He even offered to take her back with him so that he could take care of her up at his house.
“The scenery’s a lot prettier. Why don’t you come back with me?”
“I have to work,” Ellen said unconvincingly.
“You must get some kind of disability,” he tried.
She looked at him for a long minute. “Are you sure you want me?” He picked her up, and carried her to the door.
Ellen spent one week at Moose’s house and then another. She called often to give me updates. He was going to the store to buy food, but she did the cooking, hobbling around the kitchen in her boot, she said. She also spent time reading books, something she rarely had time to do when she was in the city. She called me one morning to tell me that she had been looking through his bookshelf and had found a poetry anthology. Inside the cover there was a folded piece of paper.
“He wrote a poem after his dog died,” she said. “It was so touching that I started to cry.”
I sat there at my desk, nodding. “I’d fall in love with a guy like that too.” I said, knowing what she was thinking.
“The funny thing is,” said Ellen, her voice breaking with emotion, “I looked over at Sadie. She got up and came right over and sat down next to me. We’ve become really good friends over the past two weeks. I know she understood.” When Moose came home, she asked him about the poem, she said.
“Moose said that he’d been pretty close to the dog and when it died he felt like he’d lost a member of his family.”
“He’s a lovely guy, Ellen,” I said, as if it was my mission to make her know that. She didn’t answer. Finally, I asked her when she was coming back.
“In a week.”
“Great,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
I was on my way out of the building on the way to work when the doorman stopped me.
“You got flowers,” he said, pointing to an arrangement of roses and greenery sitting in a glass vase. I walked over and opened the tiny envelope that was pinned to the stem of a rose:
Dinner tonight? Chris
I slid the note back in the envelope and told the doorman to hold them for me until I got home. I was still living in Chris’s apartment because I didn’t close on mine and he was staying with someone from his agency, as if he had been disenfranchised.
We’d lived together for an entire year, but why did I feel nervous now about seeing him again? Was his relationship with Bridget always going to sit in the room like an elephant that I couldn’t forget?
I got on a Limited bus, pushing my way to the back so that I could find a sliver of room where I could hold on. I thought about where we should have dinner. We always loved going down to the Meatpacking District to a steak restaurant called Frank’s, on Tenth Avenue and Fifteenth Street. The wide streets, once deserted after business hours, were now bustling with diners and shoppers who frequented boutiques with very uptown prices. When I got to my desk, I sent Chris an e-mail:
Pretty flowers. Thanks. There’s a pub party for our music critic’s new book on the rock mystique. Promised I’d go. It’s at the Hard Rock Café. Want to meet me there? Then dinner at Periyali’s? He messaged me back in minutes.
Cool, C
It wasn’t one of the days when I had to file. In fact, it was a slow day, when I was just putting together some ideas for future stories and making a string of phone calls. I got out of work earlier than expected, so I stopped at the apartment to change into something more interesting before heading to the Hard Rock on West Fifty-seventh Street. I exchanged my plain brown gabardine slacks for black leather pants. I added a black cashmere sweater, and was pretty happy with the look. Stylish, but not screaming for attention. It briefly crossed my mind that someone like Bridget might be there—it was a party, after all, but then no, I remembered that Ethan was more of a nerdy, intellectual reporter, not a flashy rock type, even though he wrote about the scene.
I got to the party a few minutes before I was supposed to meet Chris. It would give me time to talk to Ethan, congratulate him and spend the requisite amount of time before we could leave and go eat. As I expected, the music was loud and pounding, the perfect setting.
Book parties don’t sell books, still authors enjoy celebrating the birth of their books, and book parties are a way of marking the event. No surprise that everyone in the music scene showed up, ranging from rock performers to people from record labels, to those in production and publishing.
“Ethan,” I said when I saw him near the door. “Congratulations, I can’t wait to read it.”
“I hate the cover,” he whispered to me. “Can you believe how dull it is for a book on rock music?”
“It’s moody and evocative,” I said, reaching. “Your name alone will sell it whether it has a cover or not.” He smiled and patted me on the back and then was pulled away by one of the drama critics.
I headed for the bar and ordered a glass of white wine, when a voice over my shoulder whispered, “We have to stop meeting like this.”
I turned and was face-to-face with Slaid.
“Oh,” I said, startled. “How do you know Ethan?”
“Ethan who?”
I raised an eyebrow. “The author?”
“Oh, that Ethan. He’s my upstairs neighbor. I haven’t paid for a CD since I met him—great neighbor.” He paused and looked at me.
“So how are you doing?” he said, turning serious.
“Fine,” I said, looking back at him levelly.
“Got the boyfriend thing worked out?”
How did I answer that one? I shrugged.
“Well, why don’t we sa
y goodbye to Ethan and go get—”
“Jen, I was looking for you,” Chris said, suddenly behind me, putting his hands on my shoulders. He looked at Slaid with a trace of annoyance. “Ready to go?” he said, kissing the side of my face.
“Yes,” I said, stepping down from the bar stool. “I’ll see you,” I said to Slaid. He curled the tips of his fingertips and waved.
Chris didn’t ask about Slaid, or even mention him again, but I sensed that just seeing him made him feel more proprietary about me. He slipped his hand around my waist and held me close to him as we walked down Fifty-seventh Street looking for a cab to take us to Periyali, a Greek restaurant on West Twentieth Street. Periyali is a Greek word that means seashore, or coastline, and it was easy to transport myself into a taverna by the sea. The walls were white plaster with dark wooden beams across the ceiling, white cotton tenting between them that could make you feel as though you’re staring at the giant sail of a boat. Photographs of Patmos, with its white box-like houses bathed in the Aegean sun were on the walls, framed in dark, handsome wood that matched the ceiling beams and floorboards.
Patmos was the kind of place that I always thought about escaping to with Chris. We would hike, or ride donkeys to the monastery on the top and go swimming in the late afternoon before we sat at an outdoor taverna and had fish with tomato salad and feta cheese. But we never found the time to go. Or maybe we just never really wanted to, because the only places that we went were movies or plays, or weekend drives to the Hamptons and Connecticut or the Pennsylvania Dutch country, sending everyone postcards from Intercourse, PA.
We studied the menu and ordered salads, moussaka, grilled fish and a bottle of retsina. Even though I knew that he was still working on the account, Chris carefully avoided any talk of Model Thin or Bridget. Of course, I’d seen one print ad and a TV commercial. I must say, the ad looked convincing. They shot her walking along a beach in a bikini wearing a big straw hat. In her hand is a can of Model Thin. A smiling Bridget walks along the water, sipping happily, and finally turns to the camera and smiles.
What Men Want Page 19
