Love Her Madly (22 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Raj

Despite the strong, possibly Scotch-induced feelings of impending doom, the days that followed my all-too-rare date with Glo were fine. I was incredibly busy, running dress rehearsals with my company every night after my show. The late nights were tiring, but exhilarating. Our play was rock solid. I had press previews lined up and was hopeful to get the sterling reviews that I was certain the production merited. I envisioned a packed house and mad receipts. In my downtime on the train, I meditated on our bank books transforming from red to black.

Just in case positive visualization alone didn't get the job done, the ever-practical Tony had invited Oona Shaw, a young socialite with a great, old-money fortune and an interest in the arts, to preview our dress rehearsal. She was already familiar with my work as an actor, having seen me in an avant-garde production of
Metamorphoses
in which I was naked, except for a skirt of ostrich feathers, for the entire first act. I remember meeting her afterward at a cocktail gathering in the lobby. Her hot, damp hands had seized mine, holding on for far too long while she smiled at me with sparkling blue eyes, her bobbed hair dyed blond with black streaks, like Daisy Buchanan gone gutter punk. She stood too close to me and touched me too often. I hadn't known who she was then, and was luckily polite, answer
ing her flirtatious banter with my own until a natural lull in the conversation manifested and I could excuse myself. My wife was waiting, I'd said, and noted that the enthusiasm in her gaze had not dimmed in the slightest.

She had shown up for our rehearsal wearing a bright yellow dress more appropriate for a summer barbecue than a late-night underground performance. When she smiled, glitter sparkled from the edges of her eyelids. Her hair was cotton-candy pink, and her lips were coated with a pale glossy lacquer that made them appear to be made of hard candy.

“I know it doesn't look like it, but trust me, she's made of money,” Tony had murmured to me before bellowing her name and inviting her to sit with him, front and center. Oona and I shook hands, and I excused myself to the lighting booth. To cut costs, I was running the board for the rehearsals, which at least meant I wouldn't have to sit through the ninety-minute show with Oona's hot hand on my wrist.

The performance went really, really well. My three actors were deep in the moment, so much so that it left me a little frightened when our lead male, a tall, wiry actor playing a heroin addict, tossed the other lead onto the mattress and wrapped his hands around the guy's neck. It wasn't in the blocking, but it was genius. I scribbled a note to keep it. When the lead OD'd at the end and his estranged girlfriend broke down upon finding his body, I saw Oona wipe away a tear.

We celebrated upstairs at the Dragon. I had explained the Oona situation to Glo, and asked her to attend, even though it meant dragging her out after midnight on a work night. I wanted her to be there as a visual aid as to my state of matrimony lest Oona get any ideas. For all I knew, she was Grand Tsaress in her mind, raining money and favors upon the starving artists in her court in exchange for orgiastic delights. Frankly, I would be tempted to indulge her if the price was right, having
fielded another call from my manager trying to induce me to audition as lead terrorist in some shitty B movie. I asked him if the role called for someone of Arabic descent, and he told me, “Well, technically, yes, but with a beard, you're pretty close.” He's never seen me with a beard, incidentally, but I'm certain that despite my acting prowess, a little facial hair wouldn't magically transform my ethnicity, or make me able to speak Farsi. My Broadway show was scheduled to end in two months. It was possible our run would be extended, but I couldn't count on it. I needed a benefactor, fast.

Glo wasn't there when we arrived upstairs. I took a seat in the booth next to my lead actress, Shari, while Oona sat opposite me. We started with a round of shots, and Oona bought a bottle of champagne. The drinks played powerfully on my empty stomach, and by the time Glo appeared, I was feeling no pain.

Glo showed up looking magnificent. She was wearing a short skirt and tights and a blue scoop-neck sweater that made her eyes shine emerald green. She'd done her hair, and was wearing these boots with sharp heels that I found really sexy. I stood up and gave her a long kiss, and she took Shari's place in the booth next to me.

The next hour or so was blissful. Everyone was in a great mood. Oona could not stop gushing about how much she loved the play and how she would go home that night and contact her theater-critic friends. “I will drag them here by their BlackBerrys if I must,” she declared, her champagne glass swaying before her face like a loose pendulum.

“I hope you mean by their phones,” Glo quipped.

“I will drag them by whatever region is most sensitive. That is the only treatment those types respond to.”

Glo had giggled and raised her glass in a toast.

I looked around, feeling, for once, like everything might just work out. My actors were laughing, lubricated with free alcohol
and post-performance adrenaline. Tony was chatting up some friends, and the front of the bar was filled with drinkers. I was happy for the owner of the Dragon and happy for myself and Tony. I squeezed Glo's hand under the table and she squeezed it back. She got up to use the restroom, and Oona scooted in next to me.

We chatted. I was trying to guide the conversation toward our finances, the renovations we'd had to make to get the theater in shape and the outrageous price of advertising, but I kept getting knocked off track. Our group was loud and getting rowdier by the minute, with Tony and his friends playing darts in close proximity.

Just make a good impression
, I told myself.
You don't have
to seal it tonight.

I watched as Glo went to join Shari at the pinball machine, each woman working one set of flippers. Oona touched my face. Her fingers were surprisingly cold and clammy, like a corpse's. I couldn't understand what she was saying over the noise, but her eyes made it obvious that I had been asked a question, and an important one.

“I'm sorry, what?” I asked.

One of Tony's friends, a regular at the Dragon, leaned down into the booth, interrupting us.

“Looks like you've got a fan here tonight, Raj,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“What?” I asked, wondering if he meant Oona. This guy was a bit of a boor, but saying that in front of Oona would have been over-the-top, even for him.

“Some chicky. She's staring at you. Right over there.”

Oona craned her neck, frowning. “Who? Her?”

I raised my head, and for a split second, my eyes focused on a blond woman half obscured by a pillar. There was a sharp shock of recognition, like the jolt of a joy buzzer. It was the
Cyn doppelgänger. Through the crowd, all I could see was her head, disembodied and ominous. Her eyes were in shadow, but her expressive mouth was set in a line of displeasure. Someone stepped between us, and she disappeared.

“Who is that?” Oona asked.

“Excuse me,” I said. Oona was blocking my way out of the booth.

She smiled, being playful, and tapped me on the nose. “Not until you tell me who that is. I've met your wife. That's not her.”

“Please, Oona.” I attempted to stand up, but the table blocked me. I couldn't catch a glimpse of Cyn.

“No ‘
please Oona
.' I want names. Dates. Scurrilous Details.”

“Sorry,” I said. The path cleared, and the woman was no longer there. I pulled my knees up from beneath the table onto the bench and climbed atop the table. I hit my shoulder on a hanging lamp, sending it swinging. My head spun with alcohol-induced vertigo as I looked down toward Tony and his friends. I lifted my foot to take a step as carefully as I could, trying to dodge the swaying lamp, but my back heel slid on some spilled beer. I thought I could recover, but in the next second, I sent a half pint of Guinness crashing into Oona's lap, and fell forward onto the dart players like a deranged stage diver. Even though they were unprepared, they half caught me, and I landed on my knees, feeling shards of broken shot glass (also my doing) dig into my jeans. Oona shrieked from the booth behind me.

I pushed through the crowd, trying to make my way to where I had seen the look-alike. People were turning to stare as I lurched forward, bumping into everyone, unhinged. Perhaps it was because Oona was shouting after me like a scorned lover, but when I tried to move past the pool table, a couple of brawny dudes wouldn't let me pass. I shoved one of them and bobbed and whirled past his buddy. I made a quick surveillance of the
front of the bar. Many horrified women stared back at me, but not one of them was Cyn.

I locked eyes with Steve the bartender. His expression was half concern and half “what the fuck?” I rushed out the door and down the stairs.

I looked in both directions. There was no one resembling the woman I'd seen. I took off walking quickly toward Tenth Avenue. She might have slipped into another bar if she thought I would try to find her. I stalked up and down both sides of the block, but saw no trace of activity, just candlelit couples settling up their bills while waiters readied for closing. I doubled back toward the Dragon, peering into basement windows where busboys, disembodied from the waist down by the darkness, collected candles onto trays. A few looked up and saw me peering through the doors and shook their heads.
We're closed.

I ducked down some stairs to peer into a late-night tapas bar and felt a heavy hand land on my shoulder. I spun around and found Tony looking none too pleased.

“What the hell's gotten into you?” he asked.

“This girl—”

“I know. Oona said you were chasing after some woman. You nearly started a brawl with the Jersey contingent up front.”

“Is she upset?”

“Oona?” He chuckled and shoved his hands into his pockets, relaxing. “No. She loves drama. She's even more taken with you now. Your wife, on the other hand—”

Shit. I had totally forgotten about Glo. I turned to head back toward the Dragon. Tony grabbed my arm.

“You can't go back in there. Those guys want to kick your ass through the Lincoln Tunnel and back.” He handed me the messenger bag that contained my script notes and books.

“Glo,” I said.

“I'll send her out. Wait around the corner.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Glo

It's a special moment in any woman's life when her husband dives off a table to chase another woman out of a bar. As glass shattered in his wake, he dodged and feinted through the crowd with surprising athleticism and singular determination. It was the kind of display that might inspire a warm, beer commercial glow in the solar plexus, a solid
Go get 'em, kid
camaraderie.

That was not what I felt at all.

The instant he disappeared from view, everyone who knew him, which was most of the back bar, turned to stare at me. Their faces offered me a complex sampler of emotions: curiosity, amusement, wonder, pity, and the worst, a sympathetic embarrassment. My husband had chased another woman out of a bar. I took a moment to study the floor.

I guessed immediately what had happened. There was an explanation for Raj's behavior, but not one I was willing to accept. All I could do was pretend that it didn't matter, like I wasn't humiliated beyond belief, like this was just a crazy Raj thing. Problem is, I'm a terrible actress, and an even worse liar.

Shari said, “What the hell was that?”

I took a gulp of my beer and watched Oona climb from the booth, beer dripping from her yellow dress down into her suede boots. It hit me then, what he'd just sacrificed. He'd blown it
with this potential money goddess, all because he couldn't keep his shit together for five seconds. My suspicions were confirmed as I heard the word “blond” murmured among his friends. He was so blind drunk that he'd thought he'd seen Cyn.

Oona had locked her sights on me and was headed my way. She absently held a bar towel that she had been handed to dry herself, oblivious to the fact that her boots were getting ruined.

“Did you see that?” Oona asked, her eyes wide and amazed, as if Raj's drunken flailing had been a tremendous feat, appropriate for inclusion in the Cirque du Soleil.

“Everyone saw it,” Shari said evenly, leaving the
so what
unspoken but implied.

Oona missed it. “Who was that woman?” She blinked at me brightly, wonder undampened.

“I didn't see anyone.”

“She was blondish. She was standing under that Guinness sign, staring at Raj.”

I forced a shrug. “Could have been anyone,” I said, feeling icy fingers close around my insides as her words ricocheted in my head.
Staring at Raj.

Oona finally seemed to intuit that this was perhaps not an enjoyable conversation for me. I saw a glimmer of superiority twinkle across her features. She'd solved the mystery. Clearly, Raj and I weren't the happy, secure couple that we'd been making ourselves out to be.

“I just thought you'd know. It was such a strange reaction. Like he'd seen a ghost.” She laughed, flashing adorable child's teeth.

“Artist types. They do that,” Shari said, waving her wrist dismissively. “Always chasing wild ideas. Raj is on the team, for sure.”

“Yeah,” I said. I wanted to say something to build a case for this just being a “Raj Thing” but it wasn't. Shari knew it,
but she was helping me save face. “I'm really sorry about your dress.”

Oona laughed. “This? Don't worry.” She turned and looked toward the front of the bar. “Does he normally return after chasing strange women out of bars?”

“Excuse me,” I said, before the word
bitch
could escape my lips. Tony caught my eye, and I saw he was putting on his coat.

I went and stood in a stall in the bathroom, my ears ringing and my stomach roiling. I'd drunk too much, but not enough to be sick from it. Not yet. If I let it all settle in my gut, I would have a horrible, angry hangover, and I had to be at the office at eight a.m.

I stuck my finger down my throat, belatedly remembering I hadn't washed my hands since playing pinball. A double wave of disgust hit me and my gorge rose like a tsunami. When it was over, I felt better. My thoughts cleared, and where before there had been groggy confusion, now there was only humiliation and rage.

I picked up my purse from our booth and hugged Shari good-bye. Oona was otherwise occupied, so I was able to slip past without having to face her again. As I passed beneath the Guinness sign, I felt the hairs on my arms rise. I paused and turned to look back. I could see our booth clearly, and the pinball machine. We had been right there, available, in plain sight. The woman, whoever she was, could have pegged us with a Ping-Pong ball.

I pushed out into the cold night, looking for a cab. Raj could find his own fucking way home, or he could spend the night bloodhounding for a ghost. I didn't care.

“Glo!”

I turned and saw Tony and Raj advancing up the street behind me. Tony gave me a curt farewell nod and climbed the steps to the Dragon, leaving Raj and me on the empty street, alone.

“It was her again.” His eyes looked wounded, like he wanted
my sympathy, or consolation. I spun on my heel and stalked away from him.

“Hey, wait.”

“So the fuck what? So what if it was her? You embarrassed the shit out of me, and yourself!”

“I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking straight. I just saw her, and I reacted.”

“And that's okay? That's not okay! You're drinking so much lately that anyone might look like her to you. You need to get control of yourself!”

“I wasn't drunk! I mean, it
really
looked like her.” I watched him swallow, and then, lowering his voice, he said, “I think it was her, Glo.”

How fucking ridiculous. It was just like drunken Raj to double down on his bullshit instead of just admitting he'd been an idiot. “Of course it was her, Raj. You want it to be her.”

“What? What's that supposed to mean?”

“And if by some chance it was her, what would you do? Huh?”

“I don't know.”

“I think you do.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know, Raj, you tell me. Maybe you're not happy with our life. Maybe to you, her appearance seems like some fortuitous way out.”

He stared at me, mouth hanging open.

“No.”

My laugh sounded so bitter, I hardly recognized it as my own. “No? Just
no
? Because it sure looked that way to me, and to all of your friends.”

“I'm sorry I embarrassed you,” he said, sounding not very sorry at all. He stepped into the street, looking down the empty block for a cab.

“You want to know what is really pissing me off?” I de
manded. The booze that I hadn't managed to evict had me all fired up. I thought of Oona's smug little smile, and I couldn't rein myself in. “You want it to be real. You want her to be here, looking for you, and you don't even have the balls to admit it. Meanwhile, you totally piss off the chick with the money for your damn beloved theater. I don't make enough to support us both and a failing theater company!”

His shoulders tightened. I'd hit a nerve.

“If it's between it being real and me being crazy, yes I would prefer it were real. You can just go ahead and add that to my list of crimes.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

He turned to face me, showing me in that actorly way of his the pains he was taking to not play into my fury. “You can believe whatever you want in that loopy, jealous head of yours, but I don't want Cyn back. If you'd seen this woman, maybe you'd understand it, but both times she's shown up, she's had this look on her face, like, I don't know. I can't even describe it.”

“Try.”

He sighed and looked up in exasperation toward the darkened brownstones. “She looked like a lot of things, but mostly, she just seemed . . . severe. Like a skin puppet, made to look like her, but filled only with anger. I dunno. Maybe that's just because she was looking at me.”

Skin puppet
. I stared at him and felt goose bumps rise underneath my coat.

A cab appeared at the far end of the street.

“Can we please just go home, Glo? I'm exhausted. I'm sorry. I don't want to fight with you.”

I nodded. I was exhausted, too.

He lifted his arm and walked into the street.

When we got home, he said he wasn't ready to come to bed. He mumbled something about needing to drink some water and sober up. That was as much as we'd said to one another since getting into the cab.

I slid between the icy sheets and listened to the rain that had started pounding down as soon as we crossed the bridge toward home. The radiator in the corner hissed and clanked, but I didn't feel any warmer.

I thought of the woman Raj had described, out there strolling the streets, silent as a wraith, impervious to the freezing rain like some undead thing. I shook the image away, and willed my thoughts elsewhere.

As the radiator fizzed in irritable bursts, my mind drifted to the memory of a cricket that had gotten caught in the wall of my childhood bedroom. It had chirped all day long for days, starting up at unexpected intervals, and continuing for hours. I'd felt sorry for it at first, wondering how it had gotten lost in such a dark place, worrying about whether it had anything to eat deep inside the walls. But as the chirping grew more persistent, I found I couldn't concentrate. The futility of its song at first depressed me, then morphed into irritation and finally rage. I pounded on the wall, trying to scare it out or scare it to death. It would pause, but would resume seconds later, louder and more insistent than before. My dad told me that if it couldn't get out, it would die in another day or so. That wasn't soon enough. I abandoned my room for the guest room a door down, but no matter where I was in the house, I could still hear it. I lit a candle in the bathroom and wished for its imminent demise, like a mini voodoo priestess. What I had once pitied, I now wanted dead, dead, dead. I woke up one morning and the sound was gone, and though I thought myself a kindhearted person, I was gleeful.

I rolled over for the fiftieth time, unable to fall asleep. I
shouldn't have come down on Raj so hard about his visions. I knew he was stressed out, and anyway, I had been imagining her, too. I wanted to make up properly so that we could drift to sleep in the comfort of each other's arms, listening to the rain. It had been far too long since that had happened.

I slipped from the bed and wrapped myself in a thick robe, padding silently toward the door. Raj was in his study, the door half-open, and I saw the glow from his computer screen pouring into the hall. I moved to the doorway and paused there. Raj was typing into a distinctive white-and-blue website, unmistakably Craigslist. By some unholy spousal telepathy, I knew that he was on the “Missed Connections” page, throwing out bait, trolling for Cyn.

I recoiled, the breath to speak his name dying in my throat. He said he wasn't hoping to see her. He'd lied, right to my face, and I believed him. The floorboard creaked beneath me, and Raj instantly clicked off the page back to his e-mail, as if away from a particularly vile porn site. I quietly closed the bathroom door, knowing with sick certainty that Raj wasn't done chasing this vision.

I caught my reflection in the mirror and saw the bloodless face of what I'd become; a woman scared to the bone of losing her husband to a ghost.