The Idea of Him (23 page)

32

Fear of the Unknown

A few nights later, I'd come home early from work and played board games with the children for a few hours. Then I started to get ready for screenwriting class and the first post-
WE R DONE
Tommy sighting. Playing with Blake and Lucy felt curative. Maybe we were a unit that could survive happily on our own. I felt better, stronger. But when I got into the shower to get ready for my screenwriting class, I crashed.

I thought about facing Tommy that night in class, my only cute, fun hope for a lifeboat if I left my marriage, and I slithered back into the sad and lonely box. Jackie would chastise me for caring so much about Tommy's breakup text, for wanting to replace one man with another right away.

I couldn't help it.

Once the kids were settled into watching a television show, I figured that showering might help my decline: maybe I could physically scrub away my tears and fears. I let my head drop and the water pound on the back of my neck. Watching the soapy water gather around my toes, I went into a Tommy trance. Everything that popped into my head sounded ridiculously sophomoric:

I want you back.

I need you.

Wade is gone to me.

I can't write without you pushing me along with good advice.

And what if I just lied to him?

I'm fine without you.

I don't need it.

We can just be friends.

 

AT 8:05 P.M.,
I walked into class with damp hair. I could tell my shoulders were slumped.

I didn't even need to look up to see if Tommy was aware of my arrival; I felt him watching me. There were about fifteen chairs around the circle in the brightly lit classroom. I moved to the side farthest from the door, right next to the professor. Usually Tommy and I sat near the door, the cool kids who needed a quick getaway plan—but not tonight. Tonight I'd be sitting like a chaste little kiss-ass next to the professor to glean all the insights I could for my future as a screenwriter, a future I now had to bank on.

I think I felt better about myself when Nicky Chace broke up with me four months after my dad died and I had to walk past him and his Goth friends in the cafeteria. As I studiously avoided Tommy, I kept telling myself
: You're a grown woman, you have a flourishing career, a great screenplay in the works; you have beautiful, healthy children. Tommy is a blip on the radar. Hold your head high, woman.
Nice try, but none of that worked that night. I was in a newfound low.

As I sat down and stared at my bag, I spied Tommy's muscular legs and worn Nike sneakers about fifteen feet across the floor. I also saw that the seat next to his was empty. I could not look up; instead, I turned in the direction of the professor, placed my elbow on the little desk attached to my chair, and my hand across my forehead as if blocking sunlight from my eyes.

“Have you read Mr. O'Malley's scene, Ms. Braden?” How could I have forgotten that this was his big night? I could have sworn I'd never gotten a class e-mail with an attachment from Tommy. I glanced at Tommy, who met my look with one of real disappointment before he looked away. I desperately wanted to tell him that if I'd known it was his turn, I'd have devoured his screenplay. Not only had I been a cock tease, I'd been a really bad friend. No wonder he wasn't texting or sexting me.

“A lot is going on in Mr. O'Malley's scene, Ms. Braden, wouldn't you agree?”

“Oh, yes,” I lied.

Heller went on, “It's an interesting piece of social satire that I found amusing, if a bit far-fetched. Of course the protagonist needs a bit more rounding out.” He walked to the whiteboard and wrote out the following: “Is it the girl he wants? Or is he after the guy? Maybe you don't know. You know why? You've got to be present in your life!” Heller started slamming on desktops, on one of his rolls again. He positioned his face three inches from mine and I yanked my neck back. “Allie! How do you brush your teeth? Top or bottom row? Do you brush in little circles like you're supposed to?”

“I, uh, I'm not sure.”

“Well, that's a bullshit way to live, Allie!”
Excuse me? This guy was nuts.
“Pay attention to every detail! Be a reporter. See what you can dig up!” Heller was now acting out his words, brushing his teeth, arms in the air and beating his chest. “If you're writing the worst, most villainous baby-seal-killer of a character, find something of yourself in him. There's a beating heart somewhere in that chest, blood running through those veins. If you can't find the humanity in your characters, they're nothing but statues in a museum!”

While I struggled to understand what brushing my teeth had to do with the murdering of fuzzy, white seals, Tommy raised his hand and spoke to the class.

“Well, I've been working on the scene for the last forty-eight hours pretty much night and day.” He looked at me as if that provided an explanation for his radio silence, and I took it as a tiny olive branch. “It's a departure from my young crew script, just a scene that popped into my head, and I wanted to do exactly what you said, find myself in it, and write it down for practice. I was having trouble, but then I just decided to inject some truth into the situation.” He looked at me hard.

“Why wouldn't you inject truth into every line, Thomas?” asked the professor. “That's when you'll have your audience by the balls and have them captive: when they recognize what they know to be true. A play within a play. Is it just me, or is it kind of funny that Hamlet stages a play about regicide to catch his father's killer? Feed them the truth, Tommy.”

“I wasn't thinking about the actors; I was protecting people I know in real life, I guess,” Tommy told the class. “Just for fun, I took a break from the slog of my script to write about this restaurant I consult for. I wanted to write something that had just happened to me to get the juices churning. There's some pretty unbelievable stuff that goes on in this place, and at first I didn't want to ‘out' people, but then the scene went limp on me. So I took some time to tell it like it is, and write what I know. I broke through somehow.”

“You don't have to ‘out' people to get to the truth in fiction,” Heller interjected. “That's not what I'm talking about. But you do have to tell it as you think it really is. It's a subtle distinction, but I hope you understand the difference.”

“In this case, I had to tell it the way it went down. Out people or not, I don't give a shit.” Tommy stared me down. Other class members looked my way, and my face started to burn.

By now a sharp pain was pounding inside my head. What the hell was he saying? That he was writing about us in his screenplay? That one of the things that happened was based on our own dustup? I was starting to understand why Tommy hadn't sent me the script before the class: he didn't want me reading it.

Tommy went on, “Writers write what they know and that's the only way I could tell it. You know that line, ‘you can't make this stuff up.' ” Tommy's voice was getting higher; the way men's voices do when angry. “The real stuff was better than my sugarcoating it and protecting people.”

Tommy got up and slammed his scene down on my school desk.

INT. Restaurant—Lunchtime

WAYNE CRAWLEY, the editor of a society magazine called
The Grid,
sits at a side table designated to midlevel power players in the hot new Tudor Room. (Other tables go to men and women at the helm of more major corporations or investment banks.) He nods discreetly to a few “associates” around the room. He knows everyone in New York City, of course, but chooses to acknowledge only those who would be of use to him that week before he is served an expensive glass of red wine. He shakes his longish hair out of his face as he first sniffs and swirls the bouquet, then sips from his favorite wine, a 1996 Domaine Armand Rousseau Chambertin. As he smacks his lips with a sense of loving familiarity, he reaches into his pocket and winks at the MAÎTRE D'.

CRAWLEY pulls a $2,500 casino chip out of his pocket and slides it into the hand of the MAÎTRE D' as if he were passing him a gram of coke.

MAÎTRE D'

[placing chip discreetly in his pocket]

“The usual? Is that your preference today, sir?”

CRAWLEY

“Yes. Always. Genevieve. 4
P.M.
The Willingham Hotel. Room 1602.”

THE JUNIOR EDITOR at a nearby table

sees what is happening and tries to interrupt his boss, Mr. Crawley.

JUNIOR EDITOR

(whispering)

“Don't you see? She'll get your money and make it look as though it was your idea.”

CRAWLEY

“Nonsense, Tom. I know what I'm doing. She's safe.”

MAÎTRE D'

(ignoring the young associate's admonitions)

“You gave me an expensive chip; you looking for a real workout, sir?”

CRAWLEY

“Yeah, I want to fall in love,

if you know what I mean.”

MAÎTRE D'

“I shall make sure the lady

receives the message.”

They both look over to the bar, where GENEVIEVE McGREGOR, a stunning blond-streaked beauty dressed to the nines in the latest, sexiest fashion, peruses an econ textbook.

Suddenly the whole picture came into focus so fast that my entire neck hurt from whiplash. All the anguish on Tommy's face across the room suddenly made perfect sense. He was writing what he knew in every sense, and in the process he'd outed my husband and the game playing he'd seen at the Tudor Room. Not only were some of the guys breaking the law on the investing front, but Jackie Malone was in cahoots with them. And she was a goddamn whore.

33

Percolating Problems

The manager of the Moonstruck Diner on Eighteenth Street and Tenth Avenue barked “Scrambled, whiskey down, side a bacon!” at the short-order cooks. Metal spatulas slid against the griddle, and coffee brewed in giant silver urns. I walked past a sea of impatient New Yorkers, all anxious to get to work, waiting for their take-out bags, and found a quiet table in the back.

Four hours earlier, I'd rolled over to see 5:07
A.M.
illuminated on the bedside table and noticed this text from Wade:

I'm working so late on closing this issue, I'll be pushing straight through and sleeping at the office, if I'm lucky. Kiss the kids.

No way to know if he was telling the truth or not. 5:09
A.M.
Two full hours before a show of composure was required to prepare the little ones for their day. Two full hours of slumber might allow me to make it through my own day, wake up in the strong, happy box without a pounding headache. Two full hours before I'd have to ask Jackie what the hell was going on. I closed my eyes.

Then I opened them wide. One single line in Tommy's script echoed through my mind at this early hour:
Don't you see? She'll get your money and make it look as though it was your idea.
It was that raw time of the early morning when my anxieties tend to explode with possibility. Had I fallen for the oldest con in the world: empathize with the wife, then gaslight her into giving you all the banking information, so you can grab the spoils? I scrambled out of bed and into the den, grateful that I'd at least had the sense not to give her the flash drive. Jackie had enough information from the files she'd yanked from me in Murray's Southampton driveway to figure out who owned what anyway.

Then another harsh predawn reality hit me: I'd never paid too much attention to our larger investment accounts. I paid the bills online and carefully made sure we had enough going in and out properly, and Wade put money into checking at the first of the month to cover our expenses. He and Danny Jenson, a smart, slick money guy, would meet every quarter to go over our expenses, taxes, and investments. There wasn't much money to play around with, especially toward the end of the year, but we had some savings that we had both worked hard to accumulate. This was our kids' college fund, our nest egg, the untouchable money that we treated as sacrosanct. It wasn't something I would check often.

Searching Wade's desk for our accountant's annual review, I remembered that in April, Wade had met with Danny while I was traveling. He'd been meaning to tell me what Danny had said, how we'd managed to weather the latest downturn without the staggering losses many people had experienced.

We kept a Chase banking card with a fifteen-digit code on it in order to access the nest egg investment account online, and this was what I could not find in its usual place by 5:14
A.M.
Had Wade hidden it from me?

The doorbell rang. Maybe Wade lost his key? Now I could ask him.

I pulled on a robe and shuffled to the front door in my slippers. The superintendent of the building was standing there with a slightly dazed look in his eyes.

“Yes, Joe, what's up? Is everything okay?”

“Yes, Mrs. Crawford. I just have a note that she wanted hand delivered. Sorry to wake you, but she told me to send it right up.”

“She?” As if I didn't know.

“Yes. A young woman. She was downstairs, but she didn't want me to call up on the house phone. I didn't entirely understand, but she said it was very important that you get this note.”

“Thank you, Joe.” I stared at the heavens. What could Jackie possibly want from me now?

I ripped open the envelope.

Don't call or e-mail or text me about the shady dealings of these men. You and I need to stay clean about this right now. You can only send texts about other mundane topics. Why is Wade so freaked out? I hope you didn't tell him anything. Meet me at the Moonstruck Diner near your house at nine.

Hope I didn't tell him anything? What right did she have . . . why hadn't
she
told me she was a
hooker
?

Within seven seconds, my head was covered in a sea of cashmere blazers in Wade's overstuffed closet. After twenty sweaty minutes checking every single outside and inside pocket of every suit and jacket, and then, in case my memory was mistaken, every coat in the hall closet, I came up with no Chase bank card.

I made a cup of green tea and lay back in bed in my sweatpants. And then I looked in between the mattress and bed base for a mahogany box that held his Borgata casino chips that weren't in the back of his underwear drawer anymore.

My hunch was correct: lodged in between the mattress and box spring, I found three $2,500 chips and that Chase Manhattan bank card with the fifteen-digit code. We used the same password, Penny, the name of Wade's first dog when he was a child, on every single online account in our home: banks, Amazon, PayPal, Barnes and Noble, the lot. There was a second layer of online security in our bank account. First the “Penny” password, then there was the fifteen-digit number on the bank card.

Once, earlier this year, when I'd wanted to check the accounts, I couldn't find the Chase bank card and asked Wade, thinking nothing of the fact that it was missing. Wade's answer now echoed in my head with far more resonance:
Just let Danny handle all the investment stuff, Allie. These days it's all so volatile because of the ups and downs of the markets, it's going to make you upset. But over ten years it'll have gone up about 10 percent a year, or so they say. So just let him handle it. I've lost that Chase bank card. But I'll get another one. Soon.

Of course he never lost the bank card; he was only hiding the one we had. Despite my anger at Wade, I couldn't help but wonder if he'd been played, that his childish inability to focus had gotten him into a whole heap of trouble he hadn't even understood. I logged on and pulled up our investment account and put in the Penny password, only to be rejected. He must have changed it. I closed my eyes and tried typing our kids' names, my maiden name, Braden, and then, finally, Jackie. It worked. Motherfucker. Then I entered the code from the Chase bank card.

I stared at my new economic reality on the screen. Everything we worked for—gone. I felt my throat convulse and didn't quite make it to the toilet.