The Idea of Him

by Holly Peterson

  If I remembered correctly, Delsie Arceneaux had graced that cover, propped up on her elbows on an army tank in a Tweetie-Pie yellow jacket that made her dark skin glow like butter. I turned back to the artist, who was hand-feeding Murray a cheese puff. I’d thought Murray was a visionary for finding her, and it was lucky that my husband was promoting her. Now I’d call Maleki’s rise deliberate and purposeful and preplanned and well executed, and nothing to do with luck. They were manufacturing her rising star for their bottom lines—buying up her art, then manipulating the press to make her look like the next Damien Hirst. Perhaps they were having sex with her too, but at this point in the shit show that my life had become, that seemed secondary.

  And then I thought this: I’m an outright idiot. I didn’t need Jackie to sew these fragments together; they were lined up clear as day on my stolen-from-a-photo-shoot zebra ottoman. This was the kind of link Jackie meant. Wade puts stuff out there and Murray cashes in with his or Max’s funds, and then funnels money back to Wade. It was so simple. Wade was able to engineer the press in favor of this artist to economically benefit Murray.

  At least I’d found the game, independently and without Jackie’s help, and a link between them that made sense. I thought about Max, about the sudden introduction of his possible SUV henchmen into my life, and I started to worry that we were in actual danger. What kind of money were they taking from Max, if this game was all real? And if there was another big scheme on the way, as Jackie had warned when she studied the contents of that envelope, what kind of trouble were we all in?

  I spied Svetlana, standing next to a businessman who looked like he’d just cornered the world’s gold market. Determined to figure out her role in this high-stakes game, I pretended to check the booze levels while I eavesdropped. Call me paranoid, but suddenly everyone in the room was casting an ominous shadow over my life and future.

  “Tell me about your vork,” Svetlana asked Mr. Hedge Fund, obviously a pro at seducing rich men. I didn’t know his name, but I knew he was loaded, one of those “2 and 20” guys who took home 2 percent of his five-billion-dollar fund whether he performed or not, then 20 percent of the profits if he did.

  “Forget my job, let’s discuss you,” Mr. Hedge Fund said to Svetlana. “Let me give you some advice: Sundance. It’s much bigger than the Fulton Film Festival. You should really consider that next year.”

  Screw him and the amount of food and drink he was consuming from my home while insulting ten years of PR work I’d done to put the festival on the map!

  He continued, “You know, I’d be happy to take you and some girlfriends out to Utah next year on my plane; it’s very comfortable. The man who designed my apartment also did the interior of the plane, so it’s very cozy. I could definitely introduce you to the right people.” I saw him brush his elbow across her right breast as he reached for a handful of nuts. She chuckled and pushed him away, and he looked me over, discerning quickly that I wasn’t hot enough for him—as he asked the bartender for two more shots of tequila.

  While his back was turned, Svetlana made a beeline for the powder room. Mr. Hedge Funder turned with his drinks. “So, really, I’m serious, you should come to Sundance . . .” Only to find his Russian beauty was gone.

  Murray’s M-E-R-I-T-O-C-R-A-C-Y speech during our lunch at the Tudor Room—it’s not about the money in here—echoed through my head. This douche bag could be loaded to the gills, but he’d never get a table in the Tudor Room, because this guy wasn’t a player. Even Svetlana figured that out within five sentences and one cheap feel-up.

  The gathering quickly turned into a crowded party, and I pushed through several groupings to look for Max, nowhere to be found. Out the window, I saw that same black SUV idling outside, and I wondered if that was Max’s car, why wasn’t he up here yet?

  Someone from the Meter staff dropped a glass on the wooden floor next to the bar. As I knelt down to help pick up the pieces, I noticed the most outrageously sexy pair of shoes I’d ever seen: strappy green ostrich on the top and what looked like real feathers dipped in gold on the heels. I reached over to touch the heel to see if the feathers were actually fluffy or if it was somehow a design illusion. On my knees, with my bottom in the air, I then looked up to the most toned, moisturized racehorse legs in the history of womankind. Jackie smiled down at me and nodded.

  I whispered to her, “Did Wade invite you?”

  “Nope, I came with a hedge-fund asshole.”

  “I think I know the one.”

  “Yeah, well, I wanted to warn you in person,” she answered, “that something bad went down today with a stock called Novolon. Just found that out. And your husband’s in deep shit.” Then she slipped away into the crowd.

  Clink clink. “Svetlana, a toast for you.” That very husband was busy getting everyone together, oblivious.

  The bleached-out Svetlana strode up to Wade, parting the crowd as she did so, her stick-pin legs, bouncy little breasts, and straight ponytail pulled so painfully tight off her forehead that her eyebrows looked stretched back like a face-lift gone haywire. Her corn-silk hair brushed the top of her hips as she stepped like a giraffe up to my beyond-horny husband. He reached his arm around her impossibly small waist, cinched even tighter in her rose-petal-pink chiffon minidress: long sleeves, no cleavage, giving the illusion of conservative, but with a pornographically short skirt that barely dusted the bottom of her butt cheeks.

  “I’ve come up with a little top ten list of pitfalls for Svetlana to avoid as she roars up the path to Hollywood superstardom.” Wade snapped his fingers twice in the air. “Come here, beautiful.” Then, with a studied pause, he corrected himself, “Belle.”

  Oh God, spare me, was he doing her too? My imagination went straight to the most insane positions he could fold her into. I stared at her tight waist and cursed the muffin top pinching the back of my pants. Was it purely physical with these women? Or did he love them? Did he love them so much more than the proverbial “us”? This was not the “family” I had referred to when I thought I’d keep us together for Lucy and Blake’s sake. No one should make herself stay for this.

  Despite my dour mood, there was a festive, upbeat vibe in the room in part because Wade had invited lots of young Meter staffers to fill the place at the last minute, and a few less dreary Masters of the Universe like Mr. Hedge Fund.

  All that cheer dampened rather quickly when Max Rowland suddenly stormed in the front door like a raging bull with a freshly branded ass.

  Murray left his gorgeous Somali cash machine by the wayside and waddled up to the front hall and tried to stop the huge Texan, with his arms spread out front, grounding himself with his not insignificant weight, his heels digging divots into my wood floor.

  “Max. Please. You know we couldn’t have fuckin’ predicted . . .”

  Jackie parted the crowd and mouthed to me, I told you so.

  I said a silent prayer to myself in gratitude at this point that my children were chomping on their fourth package of Starbursts at Aunt Alice’s and not here to witness this madness.

  Two bodyguards in black suits chest-bumped Murray, who flew out of Max’s way like a huge airborne beanbag chair with legs, smashing the silver-leaf legs off the zebra ottoman into bits beneath him.

  Wade reached into his pocket for his toast, thinking he was the cleverest soul ever to stalk the planet, and started in on his Letterman Top Ten List. “Number Ten: How does a foreign ingénue with talent like this . . .”

  Wade had no idea that at this point in his toast, Max Rowland, on the other side of the ring, was on the warpath, and moving rapidly in his direction.

  “Number Nine: When a Catherine Deneuve look-alike . . .”

  “Wade! Stop!” I screamed.

  Wade then grabbed Svetlana’s bony hip even tighter.

  Finally, Max, taking a cue from dustups in the prison yard, made it to the front of the pack of Svetlana’s well-wishers and Wade’s pliant sycophants. As he breached the final row of revelers—cha
mpagne flutes and vodka tumblers in hand—Max stretched his arms out to part the crowd, some of whom tumbled back onto each other like drunken human dominoes.

  Wade threw his arms in the air, as if a dozen gangsters had rifles pointed at his chest. “Max! Wait! I can explain everything!”

  Max had no time or patience for East Coast, city-boy pansies. He grabbed Wade by the silken green paisley tie and through clenched teeth said, “How does one person fuhuhck everythin’ up at once?”

  Wade shook his head back and forth. “I, I had nothing to do with . . .”

  Before Wade could finish his sentence, Max threw a hard right hook across his left cheek, and two of my husband’s teeth went flying in a perfect ten-foot arch across our green lacquered alcove.

  26

  How to Keep It Clean Now?

  “If there is an element of surprise in your plot, a dramatic shift,” Professor Heller explained, “then you need to make sure you’re holding your audience’s hand properly. On the other hand, it’s exciting to peek into the dark unknown. Just make sure the unknown is a place you the writer understand. If you’re going to write, you have to love.”

  I shot Tommy a look and whispered, “This should be good.”

  “You have to fall on your face, swim against the tide, make terrible mistakes, and pay the price; you have to tune in, turn on, drop out, drop back in, fight, cry, lose, win.”

  I hit my head with the eraser end of my pencil and tried hard to focus on something other than the Texas craziness that had gone on in my living room.

  “Above all, don’t get too comfortable. Go out there and get your heart broken. You won’t be able to write until you do.” My script should sell for a million bucks in that case.

  I couldn’t begin to follow and absorb Heller’s dictums with all my worries colliding at once. To make matters worse, from under the little desk attached to my chair, Tommy started outlining the inner seam of my jeans with one of his goddamn ubiquitous Twizzlers. My nervous system was crackling with the wrong kind of energy, my skin was on fire, and I felt itchy all over. Having a real affair, with all the beautiful and the ugly elements, was just not something I could handle at this point, though another part of my body wanted it so badly I could scream.

  A voice inside calmly spoke to me: You don’t need to do this. Keep it clean, make things simple in your own head, come to some resolution of the problems with your husband before you do anything—including the frauds on the business front and the frauds on the home front—and stop getting distracted by Twizzlers of all things!

  I tried to take longer breaths, but the air only made it halfway. Tommy squeezed my thigh and chuckled. He was thinking he was turning me on so much I couldn’t inhale properly.

  “Let’s work first with Mr. Foster’s script,” Professor Heller said. “Then we will work on Allie Braden’s scene.” I scanned every line of his face for clues: My brilliant scene filled with tension and pathos? My jumbled mess of a scene?

  Rather than focus on Heller’s instructions, I kept trying to make sense of all the scenes going on at the cocktail party: Max’s brutality, Wade’s arm around Svetlana’s waist, Delsie’s sultry whisper a little too close to his ear, Jackie foretelling all of it, and Wade’s shattered side teeth.

  “Fuck, my dentist’s away, and he doesn’t leave a fucking replacement guy,” Wade had yelled at me as he wiped blood off his cheek in our bathroom after the guests fled the party. “Who the fuck do we know?” Wade wasn’t scared. He was furious, humiliation a foreign emotion to him.

  He kept barking orders at me. “Call Dr. Brownstein, ask him who the fuck dentist he knows who will go into his office at nine o’clock at night.”

  “I’m not making any calls until you tell me what is going on with Max Rowland, with everything,” I had answered calmly, my arms crossed, leaning against the doorway of our bathroom. “And I don’t mean your friend Svetlana.”

  He blinked wildly, but ignored my third mention this month of the women in his life. But at this point, fully into Act II, Svetlana seemed like a minor plot line compared to getting his teeth punched out by a Texan parking lot magnate with the anger of a diminishing fortune fueling him.

  “Wade,” I demanded, “why did he hit you?” Then I decided to throw another question into the conversation to see how he squirmed. “Why was Murray all over Maleki at the party? Why was everyone all over Max Rowland at the screening? Almost like you guys were in business with him.”

  Wade winced at the pain of talking and put a Ziploc bag full of ice tenderly against his cheek. “What are you talking about? I barely spoke to Max; it made me uncomfortable just to watch him with that former stewardess wife of his trying too hard to claim her stake back in society after the disgrace of prison. Pathetic.” He pushed past me into the bedroom, searching for a clean shirt.

  “I don’t know.” I followed him, helping to undo his tie so that he could keep the ice pack in place, and so that I could look him in the eye. “It just seemed to me at the screening that you, Max, and Murray had a lot of whispering going on.” I tried that out for size and stared at his every action and reaction, looking for blinking, twitches, stuttering, but Wade was a cool player unless it came to cheating and girls. Then he blinked. But now I wasn’t sure I could honestly read him at all.

  Wade looked at me, not sure if I was buying any of his bullshit. His eyes went slightly buggy. “I don’t even remember seeing Max at the screening, to be honest.”

  “You’re friends with Delsie, don’t deny that. You and the anchorwoman seemed awfully cozy. She was practically rubbing her breasts along your back as she whispered in your ear tonight.” I stomped after him.

  He turned to me. “So the fuck what.”

  “Well, I saw a Luxor report in your desk, odd I thought, that’s what the fuck what.”

  “You were in my desk?”

  “I needed the checkbook,” I answered. “Just seems weird is all.”

  “We don’t own any Luxor stock, Allie.” He was practically running out of the room as he said that.

  “You control information, that’s all I’m saying. And that control might be worth a lot to someone who, say, buys and sells stocks.”

  “I, I . . .” He looked at me, but his face was impossible to read.

  I pressed on. “What about the Somali art princess with no talent? Do we own any stock in her?”

  “Maleki’s got talent.” He blinked wildly. Jesus.

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  Wade pinched the bridge of his nose as though it were about to bleed. “You’re fucking nuts. You know that? Maleki was shown at the Guggenheim Museum before we got anywhere near her. Do you even know she was already in Art in America?”

  “Yes, I’m sure you did a very nice spread on her, but this was glam you could help a friend profit from. Murray bought up all her art just before your spread came out.”

  “Stop complaining about a job that pays the bills. You’re not exactly writing poetry these days yourself.” Did splitting up mean we launched into mutually assured destruction first?

  He went on, “Stop making absurd connections between things you don’t comprehend.” He yanked off his bloody shirt, threw it in the trash, and managed to get a T-shirt over his head without my help.

  “I understand more than you know, Wade.”

  “Then understand this, Allie: I need a fucking dentist. I have this doctor’s card somewhere who lives a block away and told me I could call him anytime. Maybe he knows a dentist nearby.”

  “Wade. You’re being immature to assume you don’t need to explain this. Max slugged you.” I followed him down the hall and watched as he searched his pile of business cards. “He assaulted you. You know this, right?” I asked. “Are you pressing charges? Didn’t that aggression violate his parole rules or something?”

  “Did you see the size of his bodyguards?”

  Stuck in my head through this argument: the image of Svetlana pleading with Max to stop before he delivered
that blow to Wade. I watched her clutch Wade’s arm as Max plowed past the guests toward him. The way she rubbed her chin up against my husband’s shoulder, the way he grabbed her hip told me everything.

  I asked calmly again, “You know, I’m awfully sorry to be pressing you with that ice pack up against your swollen cheek, but did you do something to offend him, maybe print some pieces somewhere he didn’t like?” I tried that out for size.

  “I don’t do business pieces, Allie. You’re so far off the mark, you . . .”

  “You could have someone do a business piece with one phone call with news that could help any of your friends.”

  Wade looked at me stone cold. I knew I had him. I also knew he would lie and lie and lie to wriggle out of this. He only offered this: “Max is a grisly bear with a big brow that could head butt itself through a brick wall. How the hell else do you think he commandeered half the country’s concrete plants?”

  “I know he’s a bully,” I answered. “Jesus, Wade, I know who he is, and unfortunately what he is capable of, but why did he hurt you? And are you in bed with that teenage blond actress Svetlana whose hip you were grabbing for dear life?”

  “What are you talking about?” He pulled his coat on his shoulders. “I am not touching that girl. And she’s not a teenager, she’s twenty-two and a half! It’s been a year and a half since she can drink in New York; she’s not a child! Don’t blow this girl thing out of proportion.” Wade came over to me, his nose an inch from mine, and said, “Please don’t ask again.”

  This was the moment I should have walked out the door.

  “No,” I countered. “I’m saying this. If you don’t clue me in to whatever the hell is going on with you and the Texan mobster . . .”

  “He’s a businessman. He’s not in the mob; for God’s sake, don’t you understand anything?”