“I have that guy coming tomorrow to give me a massage— you know, Enrique?” said Anson.
“Right,” said Imelda, not really listening. She had no problem zoning out when Anson talked. He talked and talked, so it was actually quite a useful skill.
“He’s gay but he’s very good,” said Anson. “I just don’t want people to talk when they see a gay guy entering my house with a massage table.”
“Anson, you are the only one who would talk!” said Imelda, bursting into laughter.
“You’re terrible!” said Anson.
In the midst of his laughter, Anson noticed Victoria Rand enter and speak to the women at the front reception desk.
“Look who’s here,” said Anson, under his breath.
“Bitch,” whispered Imelda.
“Yoo-hoo! Victoria!” boomed Anson, waving across the salon. “How are you?”
Victoria took a deep breath. She hated Anson, so toxic and useless, one of those people you wished you had never been introduced to in the first place. But it was better not to snub him. She didn’t really care, but he was a neighbor, and Justin seemed to want to kiss his ass for some reason. So she sighed and made her way over to him and Imelda. Giant, oversize Anson squished into a tiny pedicure chair was, after all, an irresistible sight.
“Hello, Anson, Imelda,” said Victoria.
“We’re having our beauty day!” said Anson. “Are you joining us?”
“No, making an appointment for later.”
“Making sure your nails are spic and span? Justin told me that his biggest pet peeve is a woman with sloppy nails,” said Anson.
“He did?” asked Victoria, surprised. Justin probably said that, but it was bizarre that Anson would remember it. But then, Anson remembered everything, every little detail. That’s why he was dangerous.
“Yes. So where are you rushing off to?” asked Anson.
“I’ve got to pick up a dress at Elise Walker and then take the boys to karate,” said Victoria, wondering why she was telling him anything. Anson had a way of twisting any information into something sinister.
“Oh, what’s the dress for? A sexy date?” asked Anson, raising his eyebrows.
Victoria was caught off-guard. “Sexy date with Justin? Hardly. Just an industry party.”
“Too bad! I thought maybe you and your charmin’ hubby were going out dancing or something exciting like that,” said Anson.
It was odd that he said dancing, because she and Wayne had just agreed to go to a Spanish dance club in downtown L.A. But Anson would have no way of knowing that.
“No, nothing that exciting.”
“Dancing is a good workout,” added Imelda, in a non sequitur fashion.
“Well, I should dash,” said Victoria, not wanting to waste another minute.
Anson waited until the door closed after Victoria, then turned and whispered to Imelda.
“She’s a nasty girl,” he said.
“Bitch,” said Imelda.
“And up to no good,” said Anson knowingly.
Imelda knew that that was what Anson said when he had something on someone. “What do you mean?”
Anson looked around carefully to make sure no one else was listening. “Well, you know Victoria is my neighbor. And you know I have a baby monitor,” he said, raising his eyebrows up and down to make the implication.
“But you don’t have a baby,” said Imelda, confused.
Anson sighed. Imelda was definitely not the brightest bulb on the porch. It was often like dealing with a retarded child. “Honey-child, you don’t have to have a baby to have a baby monitor.”
“Why not?”
He was getting impatient. “Because you can use a monitor to listen to other things. There’s interference. Victoria’s house backs up to mine, and her monitor is literally only a few feet away. If she’s talking in the room that the monitor is in, I can pick up everything she says or does. She’s on my frequency. I can hear her having sex, I can hear her on the phone, and I can hear her and her friends discussing things they shouldn’t be doing.”
“Like what?”
“I will tell you in good time. Believe me, it’s not a good secret to harbor. But the best part is that I have a tape recorder plugged next to my monitor, so I am certainly getting it all down and recorded and will be putting it in a place where it’s safe. I plan to use it one day, when the time is right. And then those bitchy ladies will be at my mercy. They will beg to be my friend, they will know I have the upper hand, and they will be made to suffer.”
“You’re naughty, Anson,” said Imelda with a smirk. That’s what she loved about Anson, his wickedness. Her ex-husband told her she was the most evil person he had ever met, but he didn’t know Anson.
•• 20 ••
On her way to meet Tyler Trask on the set of his movie, Eliza decided to allow herself to be convinced that she was doing the right thing, engaging in this pact. But she was conflicted. She had a lot of experience with secrets being revealed and she knew it was hard for people to keep their mouths shut. She also knew that human nature could be tricky and that there was no predicting what people would do or say, least of all yourself.
As she drove her BMW SUV up Washington Boulevard, she thought about Tyler. She couldn’t believe she was going to see him again. Was she really going to cheat on Declan? She thought about Bridget and Donovan. They worshipped their father. He was everything to them, the giant teddy bear that they crawled all over, the guy who flipped pancakes for them every Saturday morning, the ghostbuster who cleared out all the demons that they believed lived in their closets. Would she really risk messing up their lives just for a hedonistic impulse? Every night her kids waited by the window at seven-thirty for when their dad pulled in the driveway, and there was euphoria when he walked through the door. Was a one-night stand really worth tearing them from that? Her parents had never cheated. They’d been married forty years. And Declan’s parents were also still married. She had to remember, after all, that this scheme had been concocted by Victoria, whose parents were divorced. People with divorced parents seemed to take marriage a little more cavalierly, she thought. It was a gross generalization, but she found it to be true. Every one of her friends who had “starter marriages”—those short one-year childless flings—had parents who had been divorced. People lead by example. And what kind of example would she be living if she slept with a movie star? So pathetic.
But then there was the other side. The half-dead side that wanted to rejoin life again. She wanted to feel pretty, to feel desirable, and she knew from experience that Tyler Trask was the only human being on earth who could make her feel that way. Maybe that’s why she’d spent more than an hour getting ready, discarding outfits as if they were rotten fruit until finally settling on a white oxford tucked into a sleek black skirt with a slit up the side. It was conservative, but when she left the top button of her blouse open and accessorized with black Manolo Blahniks and a turquoise Ralph Lauren necklace, she seemed more casual. After debating for twenty minutes whether or not to wear her hair in a sleek ponytail or down, she opted for the latter, spending an extra ten minutes with a hair iron. Who said being pretty wasn’t work?
“It’s been a long time,” said Tyler when he opened the door to his trailer.
“I know,” she said, blushing. She put her face down so he couldn’t tell and brushed by him to enter the trailer.
It was a deluxe mobile home, with comfortable leather seats, a plasma television, a fully equipped kitchen, and, from what she could see, a bed in the back. That made her blush even more. Eliza was still too nervous to look at him, so she glanced around the place several more times, noticing that everything was fairly neat and orderly except for the marble coffee table, which was strewn with scribbled on notepads, books on F.D.R. and the New Deal, the New York Times, and several venti-size Starbucks cups. Although there was some sunlight coming in through the slats on the shades, the lights were not on in the trailer.
“S
it down,” said Tyler, motioning toward the couch. She stole a glance at him out of the corner of her eye and saw that he was wearing a plaid shirt and cargo pants. So cool. Why couldn’t Declan dress like that? He was always so preppy.
Eliza walked over and sat down, and when Tyler sat across from her, she finally turned her eyes to look at him. She’d seen his face countless times in movies or on television interview shows that she had believed she wouldn’t be fazed by facing him again in the flesh. But she was wrong. Although he was hailed as one of the most expressive actors in history, celluloid had never been able to capture the depths of his eyes. There was something about them that sucked you in, made you want to search deeper and deeper into them, all the while knowing that you will never get inside. His entire countenance was so powerful, so masculine, that Eliza literally felt as if he were a magnet pulling her toward him. She felt almost queasy with desire until something caught her eye on the windowsill behind Tyler. Then her heart sank and she was snapped back to reality. It was a picture of Tyler’s girlfriend, Jane, holding their one-year-old son, Christian. She wanted to barf. But instead she stood up and took the picture in her hand and said in her sweetest voice, “Oh my God, is this your son? He’s so cute.”
She held up the picture to Tyler, but instead of replying, in one quick, smooth move, he swung her around and took her into his arms and sat her down on his lap.
“I knew you’d come back to me,” he said.
•• 21 ••
The phone calls were frightening.
“Now listen here, bitch, you get over here in half an hour or I’m calling your husband,” he’d hiss.
Or: “You fucking slut, I’m down the street. I’m coming inside unless you get out here.”
Victoria would feel her stomach drop and not know what to do. He’d phone when Justin would be lying next to her asleep, and she’d have no choice but to quickly get dressed and go outside to see him. She’d beg Wayne to stop calling, but when he persisted, she moved into a guest bedroom, claiming to Justin that she was suffering from insomnia and didn’t want to rouse him, but all the while fearing that the phone would ring and she would have to plead with Wayne in hushed tones to be sensible, kind, merciful. But so far he refused.
She had only herself to blame for getting into this situation. Sure, it was fun at first, thrilling. She loved the whole idea of screwing her husband’s enemy because it was evil. But then she learned that Wayne was evil. She thought he was playing along with her in the beginning, but she quickly learned she was playing along with him. And she didn’t have a choice. The sex got rougher—painful, even. He was a sadist and liked to slap her, make marks on her body. She tried to cut it off several times, but he’d call and call. Once she told him she had to go pick up her kids and he showed up outside their school! Another time he cornered her at a party where Justin was ten feet away and pressed his groin into her and made her promise to meet him. She knew that it wasn’t that she was so great but just that he adored controlling her, loved that he was socking it to his enemy. And then when one of his clients left him and switched to Justin, Wayne became a maniac. All of his rage was directed at Victoria, and he was a monster.
Last night she had tried to end it with him again, and he’d gone ballistic.
“You little slut, you can’t walk away from this,” he said, pinning her against the wall in his front hall. She could feel his fingers squeezing her wrist so hard that a dark red mark was already forming.
“It’s over, Wayne. Accept it,” she hissed.
“It’s not over until I say it’s over, you whore,” he said, twisting her arm tighter.
He was not used to getting dumped. He was an agent, after all—he wanted to control and own people and then discard them on his terms.
“Let’s just be two adults and get over this. It was fun, now it’s done,” she said, her last attempt to break it off neatly.
“No, I’m not ready for it to end,” he said.
“Why, Wayne? Is it ego? ’Cause I know I’m good, but I can’t believe I’m that good.”
Wayne let her go and started pacing around the house. His eyes were wild. She had thought initially that it was just one of those crazy looks that people in Hollywood get, but then after spending a few nights with Wayne she realized it was cocaine. The guy was majorly into the drug, and it was the cause of most of his insanity.
“You’re not going, you bitch! I have video of us together! I will tell Justin!”
He had threatened this before, and that’s what scared her. Was he telling the truth? What video? She had heard about some of those sick people who have their bedrooms set up with hidden video cameras just for this purpose, but was Wayne one of those? He had definitely shown his true colors.
Victoria had never anticipated how cruel and insane Wayne would be, and she knew it would be impossible for her to deal with him on her own. She wished she could tell Justin, but she knew his temper. He also had the capacity to be cruel and harsh. It would ruin everything. Not that their marriage was so wonderful, but it certainly would be over if she told Justin. She worried that she’d lose the kids. The divorce would be a mess. She hadn’t worked for a few years, so she needed to get everything she could out of him if they split, and her infidelity with Wayne would not work in her favor.
Victoria wasn’t the type of person to take this shit from someone. She wanted to be in control. But she needed help. That’s why she had to enlist her friends. She thought it was weak to rely on them, asking them for help, but the truth was, she was weak and did need their help. That also infuriated Victoria. She didn’t want to depend on anyone or appear feeble. So she was determined that her friends not be less innocent than she, and have some understanding of everything before she could let them in on her secret. Unless you walk in someone else’s shoes, you have no idea what they are going through, her father always told her. Maybe there was some truth to that.
When the time was right, a month and a half after the infidelity pact, Victoria called Helen and Eliza and asked to meet them for lunch. She didn’t call Leelee, because Leelee was annoying her and she wished that she hadn’t brought her into this whole agreement. On the one hand, it was working well for Leelee, and she was about to go off and meet Jack for a romantic weekend. That meant she was totally committed. But Victoria still suspected that Leelee was being immature and not entirely straightforward, so she preferred to unload her problems to Helen and Eliza, who were much more reasonable. Eliza had just had her tryst with Tyler, so she was fully on board the project, and Helen had just struck up an affair with Daniela Fox, the lipstick lesbian who was the one lady in town able to seduce straight women. Victoria couldn’t wait to hear the details.
On her way out the door, the phone rang. Victoria bit her lip. Should she get it? It was probably Wayne, and she didn’t want to deal with him. She ignored it.
“Oh my God, Victoria, that’s horrible,” said Eliza after Victoria had confided the entire awful situation to her and Helen.
“This guy is obviously disturbed,” said Helen. “What’s his sign?”
Victoria glared at Helen. “What?”
“Sorry, I just…” Helen trailed off. But if he was a Taurus or a Leo, Victoria was in for it.
“What can we do?” asked Eliza.
The waitress came and put down their entrées, grilled fish for Helen and Eliza and a hamburger for Victoria. They were at Houston’s near the promenade. It was noisy and open and mostly full of tourists at lunchtime.
“He said something about videos, and I need to find out if he has them. I need to get into his bedroom when he’s not around. The problem is that he has a state-of-the-art security system—this guy is paranoid, and he won’t leave me alone for a second when I’m there,” sighed Victoria.
“But knowing you, you have a plan,” said Eliza.
Victoria turned and smiled, the first time all day. “You know me. I always have a plan.”
“So what is it?” asked Eliza, waiting
.
“We’re going to steal the tape. You and I, Eliza, are going to Wayne’s house. We’re going to get it.”
“I don’t know…” began Eliza. She didn’t want to get into the middle of this sordid mess. Of course she wanted to help her friend, but stealing something? Sneaking into someone’s room? She was not a heroine in a detective novel. There was no way her nerves could handle that.
“What about me?” asked Helen, offended.
“Sorry, sweetie, but we all know how you panic under those stressful situations,” said Victoria with a knowing look.
“You’re right,” said Helen, knowing it was true. She’d be useless. “So what’s the plan?”
Victoria wiped away crumbs on the tablemat, took a deep breath, and detailed all of her plan to her friends. She had thought about it all morning and knew she was being thorough. Helen nodded and agreed that it was a sound plan, but of course she didn’t have to do anything. It was up to Eliza. After much cajoling, Eliza relented.
It wasn’t until they were walking to the parking garage that Victoria remembered to ask Eliza about her rendezvous with Tyler.
“It was…” began Eliza.
“Orgasmic?” asked Helen.
“How big is he?” asked Victoria. “I’ve always been curious.”
“Please!” said Eliza. “Okay, listen. I’m not ready to talk about it yet. Give me some time.”
Her friends were disappointed, but they knew it was hard to get information like that out of Eliza, so they had no choice but to wait.
“Okay, but you have to tell us soon. We’re dying,” said Victoria.
“I will tell you everything soon,” promised Eliza.
•• 22 ••
Listening in on Victoria and her friends had become an obsession for Anson. It was better than watching Desperate Housewives, better than eating Teuscher’s chocolate candies, and most certainly better than sex. It seemed as though every spare moment now he would plant himself in his comfy settee with his big mug of tea and listen to their innermost secrets, all their confessions, and the most graphic details of their sex life. The more he listened to their conversations on his baby monitor, as he dunked his tea bag in and out of the steaming liquid, the more he couldn’t believe what they were saying.
The Infidelity Pact Page 14
