So we went to bed, and she was asleep within minutes. I stroked her arm, half hoping to wake her up, but she was dead to the world. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was up, but I finally rolled onto my back and tried to sleep.
After all, it would seem that way, wouldn’t it? Given the uncharted territory we were in?
And Tennile had promised: no more secrets, no more lies, no more omissions.
I had to trust her.
Tennile had to get to work early, so the morning was a hustle for her. She was out the door before I was fully awake, her hair up neatly and her attitude the usual, efficient attitude of Tennile in the morning.
At eleven I got a text from her, though. I was at a job site, and I only saw it because I happened to take my phone out to dial.
[Nila]: Can you meet for lunch?
The text was an hour old.
I typed.
[Me]: not really. On site
Her answer was immediate.
[Nila]: Please. Need to talk
I stared at the message. For a moment I thought she had maybe intended to write to Shane. The messages were cryptic and spy-like. My fingers hovered over the screen as I considered posing the question, but her next message appeared, adding further to the mystery but confirming it was me she intended to talk to.
[Nila]: Meet at Jiang’s at 12 I only have about thirty mins
Why don’t you just call me? I wondered. I started to type the question, and then the bad feeling crept up my spine.
No, I was being cinematic.
But then… why else would Tennile want to talk, in person, at Jiang’s of all places?
Jiang’s.
Unless… the thing she needed to tell me was the kind of thing – the kind of illegal, troublesome thing – she couldn’t commit to a text or even a phone conversation?
My stomach felt cold again.
Maybe this had something to do with why she was acting weird.
Okay, I typed.
And then I got to work making my excuses to leave.
Jiang’s is a take-out place because… well, you should really take your food out of there.
Tennile was already there, sitting at a black lacquer table with a distinctly Eastern-looking figurine of a cat, a kind of Chinese Hello-Kitty, an Elvis napkin dispenser, and a strange potted plant sharing space at the end of it. Above the tables, huge three-piece mirror sets framed by “marbled” lacquer frames with gold veins hung at slightly off angles. A Chinese woman, who appeared to be about 100 years old, was sleeping with a spoonful of soup halfway to her mouth in the corner.
Tennile was wearing sunglasses and a dour expression, frowning at the menu. She had a glass with beer in front of her.
When I came in she looked up, continued frowning, and let the menu fall forward onto the table with a plop.
A bit dramatic.
I slid into the chair. “What’s with the cloak and dagger?” I said, jokingly.
Tennile’s face did not change, and her impassivity chilled me to the bone.
I looked around Jiang’s in that moment, wondering if this was the day, and the place, where my wife told me that our marriage was broken. That sleeping with Ryan Maddock had been a mistake, that he had offered her the yacht-infused world and she was leaving it all behind.
Or worse yet: this had been her plan all along.
Tennile reached into her purse while I was musing. “I don’t have a ton of time,” she said. “I have to get back to the office.”
My heart plunged again. Isn’t that exactly the sort of thing your wife might say, if she wanted to break the news to you?
But… Jiang’s?
She placed her hand on the table and opened her fist; the sound of gravel on glass made me jump. The woman in the corner continued in suspended animation.
I looked down at what Tennile had set on the table.
Jesus.
My heart shot through my throat and my hands jumped to scoop up the “gravel” and hide my hands under the table.
“Tennile!” I hissed, looking around the restaurant again (It went on, unchanged). “You can’t just go flashing those around.”
“Barro,” Tennile said, as if she hadn’t heard me at all.
“Huh?”
“Barro. That’s what those are.”
I blinked, not understanding, the bad feeling creeping up around me again. Though I had to admit, I preferred this bad feeling to the bad feeling that Tennile was going to dump me for Mr. Yacht.
Tennile’s face was pinched, her mouth tight. She was no longer amused, no longer buoyant about her sunken treasure.
“You can buy bags of those,” she continued, in the same tight-lipped tone, “For about $1500. Big bags. All over the place.”
I stared at her. She was looking at me as if I should be saying something.
“I don’t understand,” I said finally.
Tennile lifted her sunglasses. “It’s a fucking scam.”
My stomach felt cold. “What is?” I said, though I was pretty sure I knew. “What do you mean?”
She set her sunglasses down. She gave the restaurant a quick look-around, as if she hadn’t already spilled the beans (or the emeralds), and then she turned back to me.
“The day we left the Keys,” she said. “Maddock asked Shane for a sample of the emeralds. So Shane was like, sure, no problem, and he takes us to this place where he’s keeping them. He tells Maddock to wait in the car, only Maddock doesn’t want to, he wants to come in. No problem. Shane takes him in, he shows him his lockers full of emeralds. Right?”
I nod, though I don’t really get where this is going entirely.
“Now, these are the emeralds we’ve been scooping up when we go down, and they look okay, right? Like they’re just rough-cut and stuff. And so I wouldn’t have keyed in on anything except I see Shane do this thing while he’s getting the sample for Maddock, where he starts to take it out of one bag and then he grabs this other stone. It’s this thing he does, you know, he’s sort of a street guy, probably used to do that card thing in front of the subway or something.”
She pauses. Using her sunglasses for emphasis, she says: “The thing is, the emeralds he gives to Maddock are different. One of them is polished, for one thing, and the other one is just… yeah, I don’t know, more emerald-y. And then he’s all weird, like redirecting everything, talking sort of gibberish, and he hands Maddock some gold, too. He says, test that.”
I’m nodding slowly, putting the pieces together.
Sort of.
Tennile puts her hands to her head. “And I’m thinking: Shane’s a fucking con artist. I’ve known that since the day I met him. Why didn’t I see this before?”
I look down at the emeralds in my hand. They look all right. They look like emeralds.
Now, though, viewed with suspicion, I start to see them as pretty shitty. They’re shot through with something as gray as cement, they’re milky and discolored.
“So… I don’t get it,” I say. I’m calculating as fast as I can. If there were lockers full of emeralds, then Shane had to spend a whack of cash to buy them, even if they were crappy. And surely he couldn’t sell them for any more money than they were worth.
“I didn’t right away, either. You’re thinking: Maddock isn’t going to just buy the emeralds off of him, right? He’d want them all valued. He’s no idiot. Well… he’s an idiot but not that big of an idiot.”
I was sort of thinking that, so I nod.
Tennile looked at her phone. “Shit. I have a meeting.” She leaned closer to me on the table. “So I get suspicious. I take some of the emeralds – these ones, the ones that we pulled off the ocean floor.”
“You took them?”
She nodded.
“Like, stole them?”
Again, the nod. “And I’ll just add,” she said. “It was a bad day to not be wearing any underwear or bra.”
I closed my eyes. “How did you…?”
When I opened them she
was waving that part of the conversation away.
I supposed I didn’t want to know.
“I took them to a jeweler, he only had to look at them for two seconds. It’s barro, he says. Not worth sweeping off the floor. He tells me where to buy them, how people like to pretend they found treasure, it’s a whole market.”
“So… I still don’t exactly get what Shane’s take is,” I said.
“It’s just a scam. He’s going to get Maddock to invest, and then he’s going to take his money and run. You get it? He’s planted all this crap down there, he pulls it up and we all look at it and it’s glittery and pretty and we’re on a boat and we went there blindfolded, and Shane says, yeah, there’s all this treasure and you’ll be rich. I just need about $100K to get the operation started, this is probably the Santa Teresa, blah blah blah. And here’s my lawyer making it all seem legit. Here’s a contract saying you get 75% of the treasure.”
I look down at the emeralds again.
“I know,” Tennile said. “I’m a fucking idiot. Now that I know this, they look like shit. But what am I going to do?” Tennile almost wailed.
Her phone buzzed and she swiped it impatiently away.
“Why couldn’t we just… why didn’t you just wait until -”
“How can I wait?!”
Tennile’s whisper-yell was so sharp the snoozing old woman snorted and her spoon glided down to her soup.
I gave Tennile a sharp look.
“This,” she said, pointing through the table at the emeralds in my hand. “This is just a scam. It’s the kind of thing, though, that the FBI is going to investigate sooner or later. Maddock’s not just going to get ripped off and go away.”
“How is this any different,” I said, “than stealing from a shipwreck? For you, I mean.”
Tennile looked at me incredulously. “Well, for one thing, Maddock wasn’t going to go running to the FBI if he was handed a million dollars worth of emeralds, was he?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know what the hell was going on anymore, to be honest. I could follow the plot of course, but the woman sitting across from me seemed like she was from another planet.
“Also, all that would happen with that, is we’d play stupid, and at most have to give the treasure back. There’s no real criminal court for something like that. And Shane said he had a fence. I believed him.”
“Listen to you,” I said, my breath shallow. “Fence.”
Tennile rolled her eyes and moved on like a steamroller. “But this, this is fraud, plain and simple, and I’m up to my eyeballs in it now.”
The fierce look on her face retreated, and she looked scared. “I don’t know what to do,” she said quietly.
I looked back down at the emeralds.
What the hell had gone on in my life that I was sitting at Jiang’s Chinese Take-Out and Lounge, with a handful of emeralds and a wife who was a former escort, grateful she wasn’t divorcing me for the man she slept with two days ago? With a big, big problem.
I guessed.
“So… the problem now is that…?”
“Maddock’s sending him the money,” Tennile said. “And so, I either come clean to Maddock and get out of jail time, or...”
“Ruin your career.” I put my head on my forehead.
“And, I slept with Maddock for nothing.”
Well…
Her phone vibrated raucously on the table for a full thirty seconds before she snapped it to her ear. “Yes,” she said, curtly. “I’m on my way.”
She stood up, and I looked at her, confused. “So..?”
“I have to go. I just… I need you to tell me what to do.”
Her shoulders slumped again, and the majestic Tennile looked like she was going to cry. She leaned over and kissed me. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “This is all my fault. I...” she sniffed. “I couldn’t sit there all day with this on my mind. I had to tell you. I want you to… you tell me what you want me to do. What’s best for you. You’re out of it, of course. But...”
She wiped a tear away.
“Tennile,” I began.
She shook her head. “See you tonight.” And she started out the door.
I shifted in my seat. “Tennile!”
But she was shaking her head, and crossing the parking lot already.
“Shit.” I said, and I looked at the emeralds.
12: T HE PLAN
The plan came to me almost at the same time as my order of Kung Pao chicken.
As I mentioned, the décor in Jiang’s leaves something to be desired, but it turned out there was a reason to eat inside, if you could stand the bobble-heads and snoring grandma. The portions were about three times larger and the food tasted better.
Or maybe it just seemed that way because, after staring at the hilarious misspellings on the menu (Malk $1.25, French Cat Fries, $4.50) with absolutely no sense of humor and no thoughts in my head for about ten minutes after ordering, the whole thing came to me. Like a slap in the face.
Sure, it was ridiculous. I watched the waitress, a small girl who seemed to be about eight, set my plate down. It was utterly ridiculous.
But then, so was all of this. I couldn’t come up with anything more ridiculous than what had already happened.
And even though Tennile’s greedy side was giving me the creeps, I loved the woman. I wanted to get back to where we were before any of this happened. Sure, I appreciated some aspects of this adventure, but I wanted to hit a reset button.
And there, like a mosaic in the peppers, peanuts, water cress and chicken, was the answer.
Crazy, but probably the only way out.
I ate three enormous forkfuls of Kung Pao chicken so fast my esophagus was on fire. I ate like an animal, I gulped down a lukewarm glass of water, I waved at the waitress and asked for a box.
Then I got impatient, and I ran out to the parking lot.
I was texting Tennile when the waitress ran out, waving a Styrofoam box in the air.
[Me]: gpt Ute
Which was supposed to be: Got it
Then I drove through a stop sign while I searched for camera equipment on my phone.
*
Tennile’s arms were folded over her chest, and I couldn’t read her thoughts. Her eyes were moving slightly from side to side, staring at nothing in particular on the surface of the coffee table. Her expression was one of concentration, but the emotions that ran beneath it were unknown to me.
Tennile liked to think things through like this.
And she rarely had to think someone else’s plan through. She was the conceiver of plans, especially – it would seem, of late – wild plans of danger and deceit.
My heart was flopping wildly inside of me, feeling squeezed and loose all at once. At last, her eyes looked up at me sharply. She chewed a little on her lip. The fingers of her left hand strummed once, thwap, thwap, thwap, thwap, on her right bicep.
“This could work,” she said. But she sounded hesitant.
“I mean,” I said slowly, “it’s crazy.” I waited a moment before adding, “But all of this is crazy. This situation is… crazy.”
Tennile nodded a little. Her eyes had gone back to the coffee table, glazed over slightly. She was troubled.
“What’s the hang-up?” I said, gently. “Is it Shane?”
Tennile’s eyes flashed up to mine.
“He’s pretty repulsive,” I agreed.
There was a pause while Tennile rubbed the outsides of her arms slightly, like she had caught a chill. “That’s not it,” she said at last.
I had a bad feeling again.
“What, then?”
Tennile looked back at me, and her eyes were desperate. She shook her head. “Oh… oh, man.”
She put her hands to her eyes again.
Fuck, I remember thinking. Fuck, don’t tell me there is another layer to this awful story, some bad thing that Tennile is up to.
My wife, the lawyer, the immaculately dressed, uptight lawyer, was turning out to be a s
lutty Bonnie to Shane’s Clyde.
“What, Tennile?” I said sharply. She just chewed on her lip.
“Tennile, if there’s something else I need to know about, you’d better fess up now.”
Tennile looked at me and leaned her head back. “Oh, God, okay...” she took a deep breath while shivers worked their way up and down my spine. And not the good kind.
The kind of shivers you get when you are actually starting to think your crazy wife might land you in prison. But you aren’t totally sure.
You know, that kind.
“I’m only saying this because… because… well, because I don’t want any more secrets. Or lies, or not lies, omissions, to be… you know, out there.”
Oh, here we go.
“This is a good plan,” Tennile said, meeting my eye. “But there’s a hitch.”
My stomach took to skydiving.
It was starting to get sort of fun, in a strange way. My heart racing, my blood pressure bouncing around, my cock getting hard, feeling like I was going to puke all the time.
No, really. So much fun.
I waited.
“I just want you to know about it.”
I lowered my chin, just a tiny bit. Go on.
Tennile’s eyes fell to the floor. “It’s… oh, I can’t even explain it either. Because you’re right, you’re right, he’s so… disgusting. But I have to tell you or I think it’d be… I don’t know. Bad.” Her eyes snapped up to mine and she held up a finger. “And I want to be clear about something, okay? I hate that fucking guy, and so it’s not anything like, romantic… but I… I don’t really find him, um… repulsive. You know….” Her eyes dove into the carpet again and her voice was very low. “Physically.”
The bad feeling made another abrupt dive inside of me, and buoyancy filled me again. I felt lust grab me by the balls.
“So you mean… you’re attracted to him,” I said evenly.
Tennile put her hand up to her face. “I don’t like admitting this, I just want you to know.”
Nila's Long Con: A Hotwife Adventure Page 15
