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I pretended to waltz into my kitchen, no big deal, just checking on the food, and found the college server frantically filling black lacquer trays with hot-outside, frozen-inside hors d’oeuvres. No sign of Wade. “Jim. Have you seen my husband?”
“Sorry, I’m really too busy to …” Jim shook his head, clearly exasperated trying to feed sixty people with one small oven and too few goodies coming out of it and too much pregig marijuana slowing down his executive functioning.
The laundry room door was shut, but I could see the light under the crack. Couldn’t be. I nervously checked our back bedroom. No sign of two adults, just my two kids on our king bed, hypnotized by the television.
“Ten more minutes and you have to get into your own bunks. I love you both!”
My heart in pieces, I marched back to the front of the apartment to where Caitlin stood, arms on her hips, ready to help me in any way she could.
“Where are they?” She had urged me countless times to stop letting Wade go out late so often when he’d already strayed once. “And don’t tell me you were checking on the food. I am going to help you figure this out.” She seemed almost more determined to uncover his behavior than I did, which I thought a little bizarre.
“I think they are in the laundry room,” I said, squeezing my hands while tears pooled in my eyes. I blinked them away. “It’s the only room I haven’t checked.”
“No way.”
“He’s not at the party. He’s not in the kitchen. They didn’t jump out the window or tuck in the kids. It’s the only room that makes any sense—there’s a light on in there.”
“You sure she isn’t some writer?” Caitlin asked. “Maybe she’s helping him write a toast?”
“She’s definitely not from Meter. She’s hot enough to be on the cover. Besides, I already wrote his friggin’ toast.”
“When are you going to stop doing that, by the way; he’s a grown man with dozens of writers at his disposal …”
“In the laundry room, Caitlin. Where I wash his children’s clothes.”
“If I were you, I’d try to catch him in the act.” She forced the words out of her mouth with spit flying. “We should go back there and fling that door open.”
“Not we, me. You’re too rash; you’ll screw it up,” I said. She started to protest, but she knew what I meant. “Keep people from going into the back of the apartment. I need to sort this out myself.”
I walked down the hall and sat on a kitchen stool while my eyes burned with humiliation over something too crazy to be true. As the student waiter took out the latest batch of crumbly phyllo hors d’oeuvres, they went sliding onto the floor.
“The floor is clean,” I said. “Pick them up, place them on the lovely lacquer trays, and serve them to the guests, Jim.”
“Really, Mrs. Crawford? I would never …”
“Really. Do it.”
I was so tense I couldn’t breathe, so I waited down the hall in a hidden corner and stared at the light under the laundry room door. If my husband and the girl came out together, I couldn’t yell at him in front of her and all the guests. Or could I? I had to think of some approach that would give me the advantage and find an unflappable new personality inside me to fuel it. If I didn’t persevere, I would never be able to maintain that I “had the goods” on him. It would only be hearsay and innuendo that could be easily refuted. Then I wondered: Why should I be waffling if I’m catching him in the act? Easy answer: because I didn’t want it to be true.
Just when I’d decided (correctly) that nothing else would do but to knock, the knuckles on my tightly clenched hand mere inches from the laundry room door, a groggy Lucy appeared in the kitchen in the lint-balled, pink Disney princess nightgown she’d insisted, going on two years now, she could not fall asleep without. “Where’s Daddy?” she murmured while rubbing her left eye. “I’m ready for my story.”
“Honey, you need to get back in bed. If you walk around and get all excited, you’re going to get overtired and …” And witness me catching your father in flagrante.
Blake suddenly appeared behind his sister. This was getting dangerous. “Mom,” he said. “I tried to tell her to get into her bunk, but she wouldn’t listen. She had to find Dad.”
“It’s okay, Blake. Tell you what. If you read her the Angelina Ballerina, that will count as the rest of the reading you need to do.” I kissed the top of Lucy’s head, turned her around, and watched Blake shepherd her back to their room. If this laundry room situation was as bad as it looked, I worried, how would I mitigate the damage on them?
“Allie!” Murray yelled next, gesticulating with his muscular arms in huge circles around my kitchen. I noticed a gold watch the size of a hockey puck on his trunklike limb. I looked past him to give Caitlin the “WTF” for letting him back here, but she was nowhere to be found.
Murray’s thinning comb-over looked slightly askew as he stopped to catch his breath. “Allie,” he wheezed, picking up a cheese stick and pointing it at my heart before he mashed it down his throat with the center of his palm. “Where the fuck is your husband?”
I shrugged. Murray rested his elbow on the island counter, displaying sweat stains across the creases of his dark blue shirt. The Columbia server couldn’t place the last phyllo spinach pies or the new fried wontons on the tray in front of him fast enough to beat Murray’s rapid-fire arm movements from tray to mouth, tray to mouth, quicker than a real toad would catch a fly with his tongue.
Murray spat the following in my ear as he scarfed down a few more. “Delsie thinks you’re fantastic! Your pitch worked and she is so happy to have you handling her writing for the big media pitch we’d put—”
“Thanks, Murray, but I need to deal with the party.” At that I left and hid down the hall to witness how Wade would exit the room now.
Then the unimaginable happened. My boss eyed the laundry room door, saw the light on underneath, and strode over to the room where my husband was possibly shagging his mistress. He banged on the door with the back of his fist. Murray made my day, and my soft spot for him grew.
“Wade, you crazy schmuck! You in there?! You got me wanting to toast your fabulous ass.” He rattled the locked doorknob.
“Right out, Murray. Just gotta finish one, more, thing, here …” Wade yelled nonchalantly from the inside as if he wasn’t about to explode into a young woman’s voluptuous mouth.
A full, long twenty-two seconds later—I know, because I counted—Wade appeared with his nose high, as if he wasn’t ever going to be accountable to Murray, or his ball-and-chain, for his bizarre shenanigans. Only I detected a hint of anger in his posture. It couldn’t have thrilled him to find the irascible Murray on the other side of the door—or to have to rush his eruption in there.
“You good?” Murray then smacked his back even harder, leaving flecks of phyllo and finger grease stains on Wade’s shirt.
From twenty feet down the hall, I tried to peek around them into the laundry room, but Wade gingerly closed the door and steered Murray in the direction of the party.
Wade didn’t see me watching him. “Yeah, just a loose … I had to go get a … ah, doesn’t matter, what the hell’s going on with you, Murray?” He turned to the waiter a lot more aggressively than appropriate. “How does a guy get a drink around here?” I could see beads of sweat forming on his slightly receded hairline. He was definitely pissed off.
“Right on it, sir,” Jim answered, straightening the bottom hem of his rumpled black jacket. That’s what was missing: Wade’s jacket.
Without waiting for his drink, or witnessing my presence, Wade put his arm around Murray’s shoulder and started recounting one of his half-fictional exploits. Murray guffawed as Wade turned on his conversational charm amid the adjacent living room chatter, which had reached a thousand-decibel pitch.
7 (#ulink_ad0ac726-f5d7-5798-af50-8278ab77edad)
Wifely Conundrums (#ulink_ad0ac726-f5d7-5798-af50-8278ab77edad)
I was left drumming the wall behind me with my fingers while waiting for Ms. Reptile Shoes to exit my laundry room. Bile inched up in my throat as I tried to decide how to handle this. What was I supposed to do, march into our living room and ask Wade right then and there what it all meant? Was his telling me I was so hot all the time when we barely had sex anymore a clear sign that he loved someone else?
I got up the guts to walk back down to the laundry room door, but she opened it herself just as I arrived. There stood the Tudor Room woman with her hair perfectly coiffed, and her full lips smothered with gloss, lavishly but accurately, without the remotest hint that she’d been performing sexual tongue gymnastics minutes before. She returned my stare with simple, elegant composure.
Though fuming, I was also heartbroken by her beauty and what it must mean to my husband. “What the hell was going on in here?!”
She then did the unthinkable—she held out her hand. “Jackie Malone.”
“What the …” My eyes darted to the vacant scene behind her.
“Look, he’s all yours.” She stared straight at me. “It’s not what you think. You may not believe me now, but I was in there on your behalf. I was looking for something and he caught me.”
I studied her clothes for signs they’d just had mad groping sex. I had to admit that she did look completely unruffled. All I could see behind her was laundry neatly folded, and all I could smell was powder detergent—no scent of lust, no mess. “You’re telling me you were alone, locked in a room with my husband, and I’m supposed to believe nothing was going on in here?!!”
“Yes. Nothing. And more important …” She paused and held my arm. Then she said, “This is going to sound extremely improbable, but you are actually going to need to trust me.”
I yanked out of her grasp and whispered through clenched teeth. “Trust you? You just spent the last ten minutes locked in the laundry room with my husband who just walked out of here.”
“I told you. I was looking for something having to do with the men in your living room that you know nothing about. What they are doing is going to sap your finances, any stability you have, probably deplete everything you have saved. It’s not safe in any way. Nothing sexual was going on here. He came in and caught me looking for something in his jacket.” She pulled me into the laundry room.
“What were you looking for? And tell me about the casino chips you both seem to have,” I demanded, keeping one eye on the hall in case Wade returned.
“The casino chips mean nothing.” Jackie looked vulnerable for a moment and I took it as a sign that those chips were not an innocent prop in whatever game she was playing. “We’ve been to Atlantic City is all. Earlier, from the hall, I saw him take off his jacket back here, so I came back and I thought I might be able to find—”
“Allie?” I heard Caitlin before I saw her walking furiously in our direction, her miniskirt stretched to the gills over her tight little gymnast form, and her thick platforms loudly stomping on my floors. She was my close friend, but far too nosy to be invited into this scene. I walked farther into the kitchen and slammed the laundry room door behind Jackie so fast I wondered if I’d clipped her nose.
“Not now, Caitlin.”
She was inches from me. “All okay? Wade’s in the living room with all the men drooling over the hot fashionistas, and he looks pissed. Did you fight?”
“Can you go back to the party, please?”
Caitlin crossed her arms and planted her feet Mexican-standoff style. “I know you, and I know you’re not telling me something.” She looked at the closed door. “Did you find her?”
“I was mistaken,” I said, turning her around and pushing her in the direction of the party. “Go make sure Wade doesn’t have his palm on anyone’s ass, please.”
“Happy to,” Caitlin said, relishing the chance to catch my husband in another sticky situation.
With Caitlin gone, I opened the door and snuck inside to continue my line of questioning.
“Look, I need to know a few things besides the obvious question of why you were back here with Wade: Who are you? Why did you help me with Delsie? What was it you were looking for? What is Wade doing with which men that is going to take away our savings, as you supposedly contend?” Despite all my suspicions, in the far reaches of my anterior lobe, I did allow for the possibility that she was telling the truth.
“Not who. What. Documents and photos,” she answered tersely, still trying to size me up even as she scanned the floor. “Or a flash drive, that little stick that goes into the side of a computer.”
“I know what a flash drive is. Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“I told you. I’m Jackie.”
I leaned against the dryer, holding my throbbing head with one hand. “Stop being cute. I catch you red-handed with my husband. All this ‘I’m trying to help you’ shit looks like your way of getting out of the room. But I admit, it’s creative.” I was amazed I said that without my voice cracking. Once I feel like I might cry, my toughness evaporates instantly.
Jackie began folding the clothes that had scattered on the floor. “I’m sorry, I know this is confusing and really hard to believe, but I swear on my life that I’m not lying to you one bit.” She suddenly looked five years younger.
I stopped her manic folding with a pat on her hand and looked her in the eye. “What kind of documents and photos?” I considered the very remote possibility that she and Wade weren’t doing anything “wrong”; her hair was too perfect, her blouse too unwrinkled, her lip gloss too polished.
“Meet me at the Tudor Room bar tomorrow around five,” she said calmly, but with a hard glint in her eye. “You’ve got to keep this quiet, but if you find anything at all new in his papers and folders that seems like it wouldn’t be …” She started scribbling down her cell-phone number and passed it to me on a gum wrapper from her purse.
I stuffed it into my pocket, glad to have some kind of way to reach her should I find proof she and Wade were together; I could use it to confront him somehow. “Wouldn’t be what?” I asked in a tough and angry tone. “He’s a journalist, an editor of a general interest magazine. He could have any kind of documents dealing with every story under the sun on his desk. Movie stars, legal wars, political corruption, how the hell am I supposed to know … what isn’t safe? I pay the bills; it’s all there …” I whispered. “What the hell do you mean? And if I found something, you wouldn’t be getting it, just so you know. He’s my husband. You’re a total stranger.”
She laid it on the line in a way I could not avoid any longer, no matter how hard I tried. “Listen carefully. This whole deal has been going on a lot longer than you know. And you’re never going to understand how without my help.”
Really?
And then the beauty added this:
“And just so you know, I didn’t just get screwed in there, you did.”
8 (#ulink_3fe63d9d-5618-5a70-ace9-1fbfa924d3a4)
Pulled Toward the Edge (#ulink_3fe63d9d-5618-5a70-ace9-1fbfa924d3a4)
Jackie Malone knew way too much about Wade. My mind was racing. This, their relationship—whatever that may be—must have been going on awhile now. As she teetered back into the party showing her lean, racehorse calves and the flash of lacquered red on her high-heeled soles, I couldn’t help but stare, vanquished, at the most amazing piece of ass I’d ever seen.
She didn’t just get screwed in there, but somehow I did?
Wishing there was a pill to make my legs grow longer, I went to my bedroom to take a little break and figure out my next moves. After I poured enough Visine in my eyes and cold water on my flushed cheeks to return to the living room, half the guests were gone. Jackie was nowhere to be seen. Other revelers were collecting their jackets and starting to head out. Caitlin was in deep conversation with a tall stylist who was so thin she looked like a praying mantis.
When Wade finally noticed the look on my face, he excused himself from a Russian supermodel stunner named Svetlana and hurried over. “Hey, don’t think I don’t know how exasperating these parties are for the wife.”
I squinted at him. He actually believed I was upset over the quiche temperature. “Murray and Max Rowland want me to go to Atlantic City. I really don’t want to go, but”—he shrugged his handsome shoulders, a willing pawn—“I should.”
“Wade, I need to ask you something,” I said, voice just unsteady enough that he’d notice if he wanted to, which he didn’t.
“Wade! Get your butt in here!” Murray yelled impatiently, banging on the opening from inside the elevator.
Wade gestured to Murray that he was right there in a sec. He turned to me and said, “Hey, can we talk tomorrow? I gotta go. Murray has fifteen clients out in Atlantic City who are going to buy ad space, big buys, and I need …” He wasn’t even looking at me.
“Who was the woman? You tell me and then you go.”
“What woman?” Wade said like I’d asked about a purple giraffe in our home.
“Wade. THERE … WAS … A … WOMAN … IN … THE … LAUNDRY … ROOM. I saw her leave after you left.”
“Oh God. She’s just some woman who hangs around the Tudor Room. She had papers from some event she’s trying to deal with and I had them in my jacket and I don’t know, she wanted …”
“You were in there with the door closed.”
“Wade!” Murray bellowed, now angry.
“Honey, it looks weird, I know. I just thought it best to talk to her privately not to raise suspicions because I know you get upset about beautiful women sometimes around me, and I’m just so sorry, my tactic did the opposite. She just wanted advice on how to handle one of the clients out there and I … I gotta go. I love you.” He rushed to the door. I knew I wouldn’t get anything out of him this way.
Caitlin glanced back at me and then sprinted to my side as I gathered unused little fuchsia napkins into a neat pile around the bar, anything to busy myself. “You don’t mind if I go home, do you?” she asked, her eyes searching mine for yet one more clue to what had happened. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, even as I pictured Jackie Malone with her legs entwined around my husband in Max Rowland’s Borgata-bound Atlantic City helicopter. “False alarm.”
Four minutes later, as the elevator finally banged shut for the two stoned Columbia University waiters I practically pushed out the door, I laid my head against my front door, knowing my husband would deny all of it.
With tears obscuring my vision and judgment, I walked over to Wade’s work alcove and feverishly riffled through every single piece of paper my husband had ever come into contact with. I encountered nothing unusual, except this fresh ache in my heart signaling we were headed nowhere good fast.
A FULL HOUR later, I slumped onto my corner sofa, feeling defeated and sucker punched, with a wrinkled-up photo in my hand of Wade and me taken from the night we met. When I found it, I’d crumpled it into a ball and thrown it into the trash can across the room. I loved that photo. It was black and white and taken in the moments after a screening. We’d been talking only about ten minutes, but he was craning his neck toward me as if he were completely transfixed by my very presence. I had retrieved the photo from the trash, and now I flattened it out on a big book in my lap. Then I just stared at it, at us.
I then watched the light beams of a dozen flickering votives meld together on the windowsill and told myself this: at the ripe age of thirty-four I did have to grow up and start facing realities I didn’t want to accept. One thing would never change: I would charge Wade up and he would, in turn, charge out the door to conquer and seduce the world. Problem was this: he was just too damn good at that seduction and unable to resist its bounty.
The photo in my trembling hand had been taken the night Hillsinger Consulting was working pro bono to promote a project to benefit veterans’ causes; we were launching a gorgeous little gem of a World War Two documentary and book series that would win several awards the next winter. With all the press I’d convinced to show up, the buzz in the room was radioactive.
At some point during the afterglow, Murray introduced me to my future husband, then wandered off into the movie lobby to revel in the accolades for my hard work: I’d gotten every important person in New York to the event. Wade and I fell into a deep conversation until the guy trying to sweep away the complimentary popcorn nudged us out. In our now crumpled first photo, we were in midstep, heads focused on each other, walking the aisle like we were already a done deal.
Wade had moved with an awkward charm as he escorted me out of the screening room and into the sea of guests, demonstrating a tender shyness I would never again see in him. “You must be hungry after pulling off this great event?” he asked, and I nodded. “We can get a table next door at the Gotham. Unless you would prefer the bar.” I liked the way his arm felt on my back as he guided me through the room. He was a good height for me, and lanky—the complete opposite build of James, the lifelong soul mate I would leave for Wade, who at that point was on month eleven of inoculating children in East Asia.
Truth be told, I didn’t really like lanky, but I thought maybe I could fall for this Wade guy anyway. The shoulders were strong and confident, which helped. His blondish long hair hinted he might be cool like the guys on the docks I grew up with; but he was also urbane: everything rolled up into one neat package I’d left my small seaside hamlet for. The city and its sophisticated inhabitants were there to save me, and I was as willing as I’d ever be. I was also trying hard to be as single as I could with James off discovering the world instead of my body.
