The Infidelity Pact

by Carrie Karasyov

  “There’s just too much competition out there, and they’re all younger and have better metabolisms,” said Eliza.

  “And breast implants,” said Leelee.

  “And brains the size of peanuts,” said Victoria.

  “What are you talking about? None of us look half bad,” said Helen.

  “It doesn’t matter. Youth is wasted on the young, or whatever that phrase is,” sighed Eliza, sipping her margarita.

  “So you want someone to want you?” asked Victoria, clarifying.

  “Yes, Victoria. I want someone to want me,” answered Eliza, resigned. “I mean, I’d just like one look, a sort of glance my way. Sometimes I imagine it. Like when I walk out of the nail salon, wearing those weird rubber sandals they give you so you don’t mess up your pedicure, and I’m like in my sweats, my hair is back in an elastic because I didn’t blow dry it straight, and I look like a mess. And I want a hot guy to walk by and say hey, or just give me a look like, Hey. But the thing is, it’s not only a sexual look. It’s like I’d love it if he could see through to my mind and recognize that I am a unique and interesting person, someone special, and not just some mom who has to pick up her dry cleaning and lose ten pounds.” Eliza stopped, worried that she had said more than she wanted to. But it was all true. And they all felt it.

  “You don’t need to lose ten pounds,” said Helen. “Would you stop with the weight thing? It’s getting annoying!”

  “You should see the bread belt…” Eliza protested.

  “I don’t believe you, so shut up,” said Helen.

  “So get a trainer,” snapped Victoria. It bothered her when people would complain about things that they were too lazy to fix.

  “I know, I should, and talking about weight is so boring. So what about you, Victoria?” asked Eliza.

  Victoria leaned back. “I miss the chase. You know, going after a guy, and getting him. I liked figuring out what he liked and didn’t like, and orchestrating the whole affair, but letting him think he had the upper hand. That was all the fun.”

  Everyone knew that Victoria had done everything she could to get Justin—even breaking up his first marriage. They both lost interest in each other soon after.

  “Well, the grass is always greener,” lamented Eliza.

  The conversation moved on. There was a half hour discussion of what had caused the recent breakup of a celebrity couple, done with as much analysis as an episode of Crossfire. There was some gossiping about the people who had bought that ugly monstrosity on Embury Street, and a complete analysis of the new bitchy blonde on the tennis team. Everyone talked about their children and what activities they were doing this summer. Some had outgrown their “Mommy and Me” classes at Happy Child, others were ready for soccer. It was the usual banter for one of these evenings.

  And yet. In the car on the way home from dinner (which was only a four-minute ride—it took longer to walk to the parking lot than to drive home), Victoria was seized by a thought. Things could be different. They could all get their wishes. There was no time to waste. The next morning she called the girls and arranged for another Girls’ Night Out. Helen was busy with her yoga classes, Leelee blabbed about some committee meetings she had for a cancer benefit, and Eliza mentioned some dinner she had planned at the Brentwood. Victoria hadn’t really wanted a rundown of her friends’ social calendars, just to set a date for the next girls’ night. She ultimately learned that the closest date they were all available was the next Friday. Victoria hated to wait—she was running out of time herself—but it would have to do. It was probably a good thing to have a one-week waiting period before you encouraged others to change the course of their lives.

  •• 4 ••

  The following evening, as Victoria sat in the passenger’s seat of her husband’s idiotic sports car, mapping out her plan in her mind was all that could keep her from going insane. If she had been emotionally invested in the conversation that she was having with her husband, she would have been alternatively enraged and disgusted. Now that she had a scheme as to how to extricate herself from her situation, nothing really mattered. Not even Justin’s petty admonishments.

  “You should have worn that light blue dress, the one with the halter top. That looks much better on you,” he said, giving her a sideways appraisal.

  “Right,” Victoria said, barely opening her lips to annunciate. Eliza would be the hard nut to crack, she decided. Helen was pretty open-minded, and Leelee always succumbed to pressure, but Eliza would be the holdout. One holdout mattered; she needed them all on board or it wouldn’t work. They were all so dependent on one another that if one was doing it and the other wasn’t, they’d all get panicky.

  “I think it’s by Ralph Lauren? Yeah, the one Gwyneth Paltrow wore to the premiere of her last movie,” he said, making a right onto Sunset and heading toward Bel Air.

  “It’s so gay that you know that,” said Victoria.

  “What, you’re offended? Don’t you want to look good?” said Justin, his voice rising and warming up for a fight. “It’s my client’s party. I need you to look the part. Didn’t you sign up for this?”

  “Whatever,” said Victoria. She knew she sounded like a sullen teenager, but she didn’t care.

  “Oh, so it’s going to be that tonight. That’s great, just great, Victoria,” he said with irritation.

  “I don’t know what ‘that’ is, but if you’re trying to pick a fight, don’t bother.”

  “Why can’t you just be normal, for once? Why do I have to beg you to put on a happy face when we go out? The other wives are there, smiling, chitchatting, and you just stand there tensely chugging your white wine and letting everyone know that you’re having a miserable time. Couldn’t you just be supportive for once?” he hissed.

  Victoria thought he looked like a yappy dog when he got mad. His small mouth and almost invisible lips seemed to snap up and down the way some irritating rat-dog’s would.

  “I am supportive. I go, don’t I?” she seethed. “Unlike you, I may add. You never showed up at my work events, and now you never show up at any events for the school or the boys or anything. Unless of course there’s some VIP there that you need to dazzle.” She said the last word with utter contempt.

  I like to dazzle my clients. That was Justin’s selling point when he was trying to lure a young actor or actress into his fold. Let me dazzle you. He had said that to Victoria when he proposed to her. Dazzle was Justin’s way of closing the deal.

  Justin looked over at Victoria and glared, then pressed down harder on the accelerator. She could be such a bitch sometimes. Most of the time. Like she was on the rag every day of the goddamn week. He didn’t need that crap. She should kiss his ass. He’d thought she was a classy broad when he married her, but now he wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t someone with manners and class attempt to be polite at parties?

  “You can be so charming, Victoria, when you want to be. Couldn’t you try to do that tonight?” he asked finally.

  “We’ll see,” she answered.

  “You know what? Don’t talk to me all night. Just stay away from me,” he said.

  “With pleasure,” she said, a small smile finally coming to her finely glossed lips. That was an order she could obey.

  The house was a sprawling Mediterranean that took up every inch of the less-than-one-acre property it sat on, except for a small strip of yard that had a patio. Valets ran up to their car and helped them out as briskly as firemen escorting victims from a burning building. Justin, seeing people that he knew pull up in a Mercedes behind them, held out his hand for Victoria and put on a big smile as he led her up the stairs to the front door. Appearances, must keep up appearances.

  The door, as was customary at these events, was opened not by the host but by a caterer, who offered mineral water or white wine and then sent them on their merry way into the living room to fend for themselves. There was little formality at these parties; sometimes guests didn’t even see the man or woman of the house the en
tire evening. Most people came in with an agenda and already knew who they wanted to talk to, how long they wanted to stay, and who they wanted to walk with to the door, and left little margin for surprises. Justin, who was more adept at scanning a room than a Secret Service agent, immediately located the reason he was there—Hadley Whitaker, a twenty-three-year-old blonde who had just unexpectedly won the female lead in George Clooney’s next movie and who was currently between agents— and set off to introduce himself, leaving Victoria alone without so much as a word. It didn’t matter; she was used to this, and actually she preferred to maneuver through these parties by herself.

  It never intimidated her to be left alone, and it amused her how some of the other wives and women she knew panicked when that happened. They looked like fools. Victoria knew that her confidence prevented anyone from regarding her with pity. People in L.A. were so lame that she was often glad not to have to interact with them, and it was fun for her to analyze everyone from afar. It was amusing to her that she and Justin could be at the same place and if they were to discuss it later, he would have noticed only what stars or movers and shakers were there, whereas Victoria would be able to give a complete description of the main rooms of the house and inform her husband who was now sleeping with whom, based on the subtle body language and eye contact that she had been witness to. It was to her benefit that Justin didn’t ever pick up on any of those sorts of signals. He was so self-involved that if he was at a dinner talking to someone he wanted to impress, a couple could be copulating next to him and he wouldn’t notice.

  Victoria sighed as she walked along the west side of the room, toward the windows, taking in the decor as she strode. The owners of the house were clearly enamored of the Gothic style, probably Tim Burton fans, she surmised, and had spared little expense putting together every piece of Gothic furniture that they could get their hands on. The side chairs scattered around the room were heavy mahogany pieces with intricate undulating curved designs, and the large sofa was an incised oak piece covered in a very pretentious cabernet silk damask. All of the furniture was that dark, heavy wood that should feel sturdy and yet somehow managed to appear completely uncomfortable. But like set designers, the owners had committed themselves to the time period. There were few lamps, and instead candles flickered in a plethora of bronze candelabras mounted in the wall, spliced between the four large mahogany mirrors that captured their dancing reflections. Victoria could never live there, and yet she wondered if she would be happy anywhere.

  Her life was not going the way she wanted it to. Well, that wasn’t completely true; she did have her boys. And she loved her boys; first and foremost, she loved the fact that she had boys. She could never have dealt with girls. They were too moody, too whiny, too clingy, and if that wasn’t enough, one day you’d have to tie their legs together so you wouldn’t become a grandmother at forty-five. No, girls were not for her. In fact, she’d always been a boys’ girl, never going in for that Hello Kitty crap. Everyone said that boys were more difficult to raise when they were young because they were so active, but then they were much easier when they were older because they didn’t hate you. But Victoria felt as though her boys were easy now. Austin was a natural athlete who at age two could throw a ball better than most six-year-olds. She already had talked his way into Peewee Hoopsters even though the age requirement was three, and he was excelling. And Hunter had started to read. Yes. No one believed her, but he had. She’d known he was brilliant when, at seven months, he picked up a book that was upside down and turned it around to look at it. That’s advanced. Some mothers don’t know that, but they don’t read up on that stuff the way Victoria did. As soon as she’d found out she was pregnant she ordered every well-regarded baby handbook on Amazon and pored over them all as if they were chemistry textbooks. If she was going to be a mother, she was going to be the best mother, just like she had been the best junior executive at Fox. Her encyclopedic knowledge of motherhood had enabled her to identify every benchmark that her sons breezed past way ahead of schedule. But she couldn’t really brag about that to anyone—all those mothers were so sensitive. They were raising pussies. They were so worried that little Jack would get a bruise that they didn’t teach him how to put his fists together and fight back. There would be no wimps on Victoria’s watch. No sirree.

  But Hunter and Austin aside, the rest of Victoria’s life was like a wild mushroom wilting and shriveling in the sun. In fact, it was getting messy and dangerous, and she was nervous—and nervousness was not something Victoria was used to experiencing. She never ruminated about the choices she had made, because she was not impulsive or emotional by nature. And if the outcome wasn’t what she had planned, she never questioned the reasons that she had made the choices that led her there. Victoria was decisive and did what she wanted. If she realized later that she hated her job or the man in her life was a jerk, she didn’t make herself miserable by wallowing in “Why me?” self-pity. She did something about it.

  But now, as she walked along the long wall of glass doors at the back of the living room and looked out at the view of the hills dappled with lit-up mansions, she was worried. It was perhaps the first time that she began to question her decision. Why had she let this man into her life? He was making her miserable, threatening to ruin everything she had built, and, worst of all, made her doubt herself and her taste. She had been increasingly despondent over the past few months and was on the verge of asking her friends for help. And for Victoria, whose greatest pride was her self-sufficiency, this concept was anathema. She was a grown woman! She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her, or to see any cracks in her armor. Yes, Eliza, Helen, and Leelee were her friends, but could you ever really trust your friends? And even if she did, would she want them to pity her? It made her shudder. But the other night, just when she was about to break down, a brilliant idea came to Victoria, and now she realized that she didn’t really have to tell her friends anything. She would enlist them, and they would all plunge forward as a team on equal footing.

  •• 5 ••

  While Victoria was whiling her time away at a party in Bel Air, Helen was sweating out a day’s worth of yogurt and granola at a Bikram yoga class. As she twisted from pose to pose in the ninety-five-degree room, she felt the toxins in her body stream out of her and evaporate into the air. It was a nice way to cleanse herself, and to expunge any negativity that she had subsumed during the day. After class was over, Helen remained on her mat for an extra ten minutes, not yet willing to give up her relaxation pose. This was the state in which she was most content. If she could always be half asleep in a deep meditation, life would be so much easier.

  “You okay?” asked Lisa, her teacher. She was a young blond woman with a boy’s body who was prone to deep, penetrating looks.

  Helen opened her eyes. “Yes.”

  “I hate to interrupt you, but we’ve got to lock up now. I think you fell asleep there.”

  “Really?” asked Helen, sitting up. The room was empty, and Lisa had already blown out her candles and extinguished the incense.

  “Yeah, class ended about twenty minutes ago, but I could tell you were really in a space so I didn’t want to disturb you,” said Lisa.

  “Sorry about that,” said Helen, rising and rolling up her mat.

  “No prob. I love it when people really feel the energy. I could tell you were totally vibing tonight.”

  “Yeah, I guess I was.”

  Helen put on her sweatshirt and hooked her mat under her arm, then walked over to open up the door. Lisa followed and turned out the lights behind them. They walked outside and said good-bye, and Helen felt the warm July air caress her body. Yoga made her feel so much more in touch with everything around her. And yet…it also made her feel as if she was so far apart from everything that was really close to her.

  Helen turned her Lincoln Navigator onto Sunset and confidently guided it toward her house, which was located on one of the prime streets in the poshest section of the Palisad
es, known as The Riviera. When she had met Wesley, Helen was living in a small, run-down Hacienda apartment in Hollywood and could never have imagined that one day she’d reside in an enormous, modern white structure with walls of glass that showcased stunning 360-degree views of the city and the ocean. The onetime apprentice of an exceedingly famous architect, who unlike his mentor never achieved fame, had designed the house. Perhaps because of his inability to master scale, the public rooms were enormous but the sleeping rooms were as small as jewelry boxes. And the house itself, like most Los Angeles residences, took up the majority of the property, aggressively cannibalizing the lawn with purely decorative white walls that abruptly dead-ended. On the east side there was a sliver of space just big enough for a small lap pool that neither Helen nor Wesley ever set foot in, and a Japanese garden replete with a koi pond and a statue of Buddha that was meticulously maintained by three Guatemalan gardeners.

  When Helen pulled into her driveway she saw a Jeep Wrangler parked next to her husband’s car and knew that Andy was over. Andy was a recent friend of Wesley’s, someone Wesley had met and quickly bonded with on a hiking trail. Hiking was Wesley’s obsession, one that had progressed from a once-a-month activity into a daily adventure. The first few times Helen had gone with Wesley but had quickly grown tired of it. Sure, it was nice to look around at the beautiful scenery and digest nature, but it felt ultimately pointless to Helen. You go up, then you come down. There was something futile about that. But Wesley was a totally committed enthusiast—in part, Helen believed, to avoid dealing with his career. But then again, he had so much money, he didn’t really have to. Maybe that was the problem.

  When Helen entered her Asian-meets-Palm-Springs-in-the-1950s-inspired living room, she was confronted by a powerful smell of what are sometimes called “funny-smelling cigarettes.” Wesley was seated on the shag rug, leaning against the slate gray Dunbar sofa. Helen glanced down from the back of his bald head and saw that he was wearing an untucked button-down shirt, khakis that were shredded at the bottom, and no shoes. Andy sat across from him, also on the floor. Even though it was a warm night, the fire was going.