The Idea of Him (18 page)

25

Texan Rage

“Yes or no?” Wade yelled at me down the hallway outside our apartment. I was sending Lucy and Blake with the sitter, Stacey, into the elevator with their little backpacks and sleeping bags. They were headed for a sleepover with their aunt Alice, Wade's unmarried, overworked half sister. We hardly ever saw her, but she adored taking our children for special nights.

“Give me two minutes, Wade.” I kissed each of the children's foreheads hard as I cradled their heads in my hands. “Good-bye, honeys. I hate having you away, even for a night when you have no school tomorrow.” I winked at them. “I'm sure you're going to consume zero candy and no milkshakes tonight.” This made them giggle as the door slid closed.

“Yes or no what?” I yelled back to Wade and let our front door slam hard behind me. I walked back into our bedroom and watched him prepare for his
Meter
cocktail party that night to honor Svetlana Gudinskaya. The party aimed to celebrate her
Belle de Jour II, The Temptations Continue.
She graced the next week's cover of
Meter
magazine in a sunny yellow dress with her blond ponytail pulled tight back from her porcelain complexion in a shot meant to mimic Catherine Deneuve's Chanel No. 5 ads of the '70s. I wondered which came first in Wade's head: the sunny yellow napkins working in his home or the cover dress working on the girl.

His movements were so much like my father's just then, especially the way he continued to arrange his just-showered wet hair. Where our marriage stood was irrelevant to him: something that possessed me almost every moment of every day was apparently something that he could just ignore and float around.

While intently cuffing his dark jeans so the bright splash of his magenta socks could be seen, Wade asked again, “It's a simple yes or no question. Did you look at the guest list of Svetlana's people or not?”

I threw my shoe on the floor in disgust. “I actually have a simple yes or no question that I'd actually like answered first, Wade. Are you a serial liar? I need to know that because over the past few weeks I'm not quite sure who I married.”

He untied his tie and started over again, evening out the ends with great concentration, obviously trying hard to craft an appropriate response.

“Well, I'm not. You know that,” he said to his reflection in the mirror, and not to me.

“Wade, you can't even look at me when you say that? I don't even feel like you are my friend anymore, let alone my partner. What the hell?” How was I to cajole him into coming clean?

He put his head down and ripped his tie out of his collar in defeat. He then walked over to me and wrapped the tie around my back and pulled me toward his body. I didn't know if this was going to be one of the last times we hugged or whether we could somehow dig ourselves out of the thick, horrible slog we were now in. “Life gets messy, Allie. I'm sorry. I'm feeling very uncentered in this new world we live in. I'm feeling like I'm about to lose everything . . . my livelihood, my magazine that just doesn't translate well online; my whole industry is changing in a way I don't see I can survive. It's affecting me at home. I know, it's rubbing off on us and the way I treat you. But I've got a gas tank at zero tonight. I can barely get it up for about a hundred people, many of them advertising clients about to cancel their ads in the magazine. So if we are going to make a living and pay for the children and the home, I think our main priority now is covering our bills and our asses in this economy, not focusing on an unimportant, meaningless . . .”

“Meaningless to you, Wade!”

He said softly, “I didn't mean to you, I meant to me. Absolutely meaningless.”

“Wade, first of all, what does an ad recession have to do with other women? I can't trust you if you are sleeping around and doing shit at work I don't understand and . . .”

“I . . . can't do this right now. Allie, I just can't. I'm sorry if I'm not being a good friend or lover or husband, but I'm cracking on the job front and I need you by my side, and you need to be by my side tonight for the kids' sake.”

He may have been doing a master manipulation job on me just then, but he was also desperate in a way I'd never seen since I met the great Sun King. I closed my eyes, relented, and prepared to do what my husband needed that night. So thrilled to be a member of the sisterhood branch that carries the softy disease. It's the way most caretaking women are, even though they deserve better.

“Come stand with me and help me focus on the clients and ad execs about to barge through our doors. You have no idea of the tension I'm dealing with on that front.” He threw the tie on the ground and smudged a nick off his vintage Gucci loafers he'd just bought off eBay and headed out of the room into the party he'd organized for Svetlana, his favorite Russian supermodel with zero talent.

Before I acted the happy hostess, I sat on the bed and contemplated my options. Should I try to get him to fess up to everything and work on our marriage? Was this the absolute worst rough spot and would we get through it for the sake of Blake and Lucy? I didn't honestly feel I could. I didn't see how I could live with a man I didn't believe.

Regardless of whether I was
possibly maybe
leaving him, I wanted to come up with a version of Wade's actions that I could stomach. (I had willingly married the guy without a gun to my head as I remember.) So I told myself this rather far-fetched story line: maybe the clueless Wade was so used to drawing people toward him like bugs to a porch light that he didn't understand the one time he was being played.

Wade had gotten in over his head with Murray and Max as a way to compensate for his impotency in the Internet age. It couldn't have been easy this past decade to be dethroned by a bunch of Silicon Valley youngsters who turned his glossy pages into yesterday's news. Maybe the tips Wade gave reporters were valid somehow, or maybe Murray and Max didn't clue him in entirely, and maybe Wade didn't fully understand they were all profiting from false media rumors he was actively planting.

Yes, he had had a “thing” with Jackie, but perhaps there was a chance I could look at it as a onetime middle-age crisis and not a long-term coping mechanism he would surely repeat. (Only problem with that pathetic rationalization was that this was the second time, at the least the second time I knew about.)

Wade walked back down the hall to get his speech out of his bag as if everything was just normal between us. “And you remember the
Meter
people I have coming, from the book and magazine division?”

“I can't remember every face. I try,” I answered as I yanked the small buckle closed on my high-heeled sandal with more than a hint of anger. “But they change jobs often, especially with the advertising recession, and of course they're all sucking up to the boss's wife, so they know me, and . . .” I couldn't shake this feeling of dread.

“Regardless of our issues, please remember Svet's people. It's all I ask.”

I sighed and walked down the hall three strides behind Wade, mashing earring posts into holes that I couldn't somehow locate. “Okay, I'll go over her list,” I promised. “It's her producer, PR lady . . .”

“Yes, all them. But Max is the most crucial guest we have.” Wade looked unusually stressed, like all this posturing and posing wasn't at all easy for him anymore. I flashed back to how Wade had sucked up to Max Rowland at the Sudan premiere and remembered that he had ditched his own children to play golf with him. “Max's happiness here is most important, I assure you.”

I leveled my gaze. “Yeah. I know Max. He's the criminal who just got out of prison who may be on his way back in.”

“Yes. Yes. Of course,” Wade said distractedly, not hearing me, as he sped toward the front door to welcome the first arrivals with a breathy, “Oh, thank
God
you're here and the festivities can begin.”

 

TWENTY MINUTES LATER,
young Internet entrepreneurs in sweatshirt hoodies and bohemian indie movie executives littered my living room. Instead of diving into the party, I sipped a vodka tonic and studied the tactics of the next generation from the windowsill: beautiful and self-important women and men hoping to cozy up to one of the great accomplishers in the room.

There was Delsie Arceneaux with her sexy news anchor glasses, chatting up Wade at the bar. As I watched, she went up on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. I studied the look that passed between them. Was it a “we're in cahoots” look? A “we're fucking too” look? I couldn't quite tell. Maybe there's no difference when the wife is left out. My humiliation was boiling again. I closed my eyes and willed myself to cast aside that
why me?
feeling stewing inside.

In the corner, on the zebra ottoman, a Somali artist named Maleki, another one of those women without a last name, was sitting with her benefactor, Murray, who had cornered the market in her work by buying up every piece he could. Wade had feted her the previous month with a six-page profile, coining her as the art world's new “It” girl. I watched Murray talking to the very dramatic Maleki, both of them clearly using each other for their own gain: she needed his cash flow, and he needed her black cool. I studied her exotic look: her stretched-out dancer's neck, Cleopatra-esque eyes heavily lined, and her thick mane slicked back halfway along the top of her head, then fanning out fabulous and wild behind her gold-beaded headband. Murray kept inching closer to her, gazing into her eyes, almost in her lap now like a child bewitched by Santa.

Thing is, women often read their office husbands better than they read their own. As I observed Maleki looking at her benefactor like she was preparing to screw him from here to kingdom come, I saw the dots suddenly connect. That wasn't Murray's
please blow me on my plane
happy face, it was Murray's
I'm getting cash out of this
happy face. After ten years watching him interact with thousands of females, I knew the difference.

I thought about that: she the artist, he the PR wizard spinning her story all over Manhattan while he secretly owned most of her work and had gotten it at cut-rate prices. The man who'd gotten rich people to buy over two-dozen of her confounding paintings when she was a virtual nobody. Maleki's paintings in turn sold at Art Basel Miami Beach the next year for close to a million dollars apiece. At least. Wealthy art ignoramuses put her bold, graffiti-filled canvases in their living rooms alongside their emerald-green Scalamandre silk curtains to pretend how edgy they are underneath all that pomp.

In a global economic downturn and magazine recession, my husband had spent thousands of
Meter
dollars to send a reporter and photographic team to Somalia for her fashion spread that appeared inside the magazine—rarely did he ever spend that on a cover. Was that Somalia shoot being used to boost Maleki's public profile for Murray's financial benefit?

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.