The Idea of Him (8 page)

I exhaled, exasperated, knowing his best side was his worst side. “It's a school night, Wade.”

“Maybe for you! Come on, don't be a drag, Allie. They won't be little forever, and Blake could use a homework pass just this once.”

“Look, do what you want with the IMAX movie, just make sure Blake finishes his homework before you go.” I held myself back from suggesting he get his young girlfriend Jackie Malone to help him with Blake's work, her grade-school math skills being far more current than Wade's.

“Of course you're right.” His tone mellowed, turning from petulant to repentant. “We will get the homework done, I promise.”

“Before the movie?”

Wade laughed. “Okay, have it your way, Mom of the Year. We wouldn't survive without you.”

“Beyond true,” I said and hung up the phone, resolving to leave the question of his level of interest for Jackie Malone be until I could confirm more.

11

Crash Course

If I wanted to end this period of robotic encounters with Wade and bring things to a head, I had to reach out to Jackie. He would deny any involvement with her if I pushed him. He would even start calling me paranoid as he does when I ask about models or hot young interns who always surround him at events. Admittedly, I didn't ever catch any of them in a laundry room with him, but I knew he'd go nuts denying a dalliance with Jackie and somehow make me look stupid for even bringing it up again.

This new rationale developed: contacting Jackie might be an insane step on my part, but it might also chart my path. It could lead me to figure out why she supported me with Delsie and why she warned me about the men in my living room. At the very least, what did I have to lose? Either I'd somehow confirm proof of an affair or she'd be great material for a future screenplay.

Right then and there one afternoon in my office, I texted her.

ME:
It's Allie. I'm ready to talk to you.

JACKIE:
Good. You want to meet for a drink soon, even today? At the Tudor Room. It'll be empty this afternoon, and everyone we know will be gone.

ME:
Gimme two hours.

The time passed quickly once I'd started the motions on Murray's latest requests and finished another few pages of my script (both of which I completed in a daze). Soon enough, the time to meet Jackie had arrived, and I tore my coat off the back of my office door and raced out into the street to meet her.

 

I WALKED INTO
the inviting entry area of the Tudor Room, completely still at this precocktail hour, ten minutes early, time enough to go upstairs into the restaurant and order a drink at the bar and compose myself for this very peculiar meeting I'd thrust upon my day.

The gold art deco clock behind me clicked 4:00
P.M.
I stood on the landing of the staircase rising from the entrance floor, my eyes level with the main dining room, which was empty and silent. All the tables were set with low bouquets of hot pink peonies in sterling mint julep cups. Crystal cylinders with fresh candles circled the centerpieces, unlit for now. After a full two minutes, a waiter walked past quietly and purposefully. Then nothing. Stillness. The chieftains and priestesses of industry were long gone, keeping our meeting safe from rubbernecking. Georges the maître'd only presided over the power lunch and would surely be gone by now. Over to my right, in the red, book-lined bar, the bartender dried off the insides of champagne flutes with a crisp white napkin in preparation for the evening rush.

My mission was now clear: get Jackie's information and use it to properly confront Wade. He and I were the real players in this drama, and the secondary characters around us could no longer distract me. From the midstaircase landing, I could see Jackie's extraordinary legs wrapped around a barstool. She ordered a drink and combed her fingers through her streaked blond hair with her eyes shut. Letting out a huge breath, she looked annoyed, as if everyone and everything and every goddamn man clawing at her were one big nuisance.

I closed my eyes for a moment to gather my strength and walked over to the bar. Jackie actually smiled slightly when she saw me. She was luminous in a white Ralph Lauren sheath dress, as if Marlene Dietrich's crew had lit her perfectly. A suede tan Gucci bag with some kind of animal antler handle lay on the black marble bar counter. Where the hell did she get the cash to look so good? I sat down next to her.

The bartender walked over to us. “I'm sorry, miss, we aren't open for an hour, but I can—”

“She's with me, Robby,” Jackie said. “Give us a little break and get her a cup of tea or coffee. Or maybe even a shot of something strong. From the look on her face, she needs one.”

“A cup of tea, please, and also, a glass of chardonnay, thanks.” I figured I needed both an upper and a downer to deal with this confrontation.

Jackie looked at me intently. “We've got a lot of ground to cover, but before we do, you are going to have to at least attempt to trust that what I'm telling you is true,” she said, putting me immediately on the defensive.

“I trust only that you helped me once here with Delsie Arceneaux.” I looked at her young face, trying hard to read her. “Why did you do that? That could have been to get me conveniently on your side. What are you after?”

“I said that to Delsie because you're good at your job and you deserved it,” she answered, pulling her hair into a messy bun with a clip, her blond streaks almost white with the afternoon light shining in through the paned windows behind her. All at once I thoroughly hated her and found her completely beguiling.

I shouldn't have been nervous to say the following, but I was. “Let me get straight to the point:
Are you sleeping with my husband?
Usually it would mean something that he ran off to you in our laundry room in the middle of our party. Let's just put that on the table.” My voice cracked, hopefully not revealing too much about how anxious I felt inside.

“Don't forget I looked you in the eye across the room at the party and motioned to you that something would be going on in the back of the apartment and turned my head to communicate that you should go back there.”

She did do that. I nodded very slightly, not wanting to give her anything, but, yes, she did warn me she'd be headed back there. And she did insinuate that Wade would be going too, which he promptly did. I had to grant her that.

“Okay,” she continued. “So why would I signal to the wife if I was trying to bang her husband in the middle of her home?”

“Not sure. I do find the whole thing a little confusing, I admit. One reason you got me here.”

“Glad I got you here, because nothing happened that night in the laundry room except him catching me looking for something. And I'm telling you, you need to watch out; there are things going on with these men who lunch here every day that you don't understand.” Not a sign of weakness in her voice, not a quiver of her lip. I had to channel her, or copycat her at the very least.

“C'mon, Jackie.
What is going on really?
I'm not ready to say I'm going to believe that you and my husband never—”

She interrupted and threw a loose snake of hair over her shoulder. “All right then, let's cut to it: I'll never lie to you. Did you hear me just now?”

“I heard you. I'm not sure I believe you, but I heard you, yes.”

She looked down for a moment and tied her straw into a loop. “I repeat: I'll never lie to you. Your instincts are right. Something did happen between Wade and me.”

My entire chest cavity hurt.

She went on. “I'm not talking about the laundry room that night, I'm talking way way way before that. And while I take due responsibility for it, he was driving the train.”

She admitted to an affair just like that? To the wife? I pressed her. “You're admitting outright you slept with my husband?”

She nodded, her eyes showing kindness toward me; clearly she didn't enjoy having to confirm this news. I'm not ready to say I had anything but animosity toward this woman, but she did seem to be strangely in sisterhood with where I was just then.

“How did it happen?” I managed to say. The thought of Wade in bed with this beauty felt just as painful as Wade in bed with the photo assistant years earlier. I pursed my lips, blowing out air slowly as if it would extinguish the intense hurt inside.

“It just happened. And now meeting you, I'm honestly really sorry about it. I need to say that to you.” The last part she said very deliberately and slowly and I felt in that moment that I believed her.

“Are
you
in love with my husband?”

“No.”

“Is he in love with you?”

“Most unfortunately, he was at some point.”

I thought about his kissing the kids and me at night, acting the all chipper husband and daddy. Then I thought about him passing out before any chance of sex entered our bed. No wonder—he'd already had sex hours before. My chest tightened a notch further than I thought possible.

“And not anymore?”

“Nope.”

I had to know. My voice was weaker than I wanted when I asked, “Then how did it all begin with Wade?”

“It's complicated.” She placed her elbow on the edge of the bar and touched the bottom of her chin lightly with the tips of her fingers. I stared into her eyes and tried in vain to figure out where her extraordinary composure came from.

What was it that Wade saw when he looked at these same eyes and thought,
This, I can crack,
or, even
, This, I love
?

“You were having a love affair with my husband for a while?”

“I believe you need to have feelings to be having a love affair. No? Whatever happened with Wade, it's now over. You can be reassured of that at least.”

“You sure of that?” That notion of it being over between them softened the body blow I'd just received. I wasn't ready to leave him, and so I felt a false, momentary comfort knowing maybe my husband was back to being all mine.

“Whatever was going on didn't end with hurt feelings or rage, because, frankly, I didn't care that much, and he moved on.” She took a long, cool sip of her drink—by the smell of it, a gin and tonic—and set it down delicately. Jackie went on, changing the subject. “We both know that the country is in a financial mess because so many of the men and women in this very room running huge investment banks and huge multinational corporations think they can screw the country over for their own greedy gain.”

“What are you figuring out exactly?” I asked. “Murray's finances? Surely not Wade's.”

“Hello? Everyone's finances are off in these unstable times. The question is, What do you resort to when the finances are off?” she answered. “Do you pull up your bootstraps or do you skirt the law?” She placed a finger lightly on my arm. It was much hotter than I would have expected. “Did you find something on his desk? Did you look?” she asked.

“Quite a lot on his desk, as a matter of fact.” I wasn't about to give up the company report to a woman who just admitted to an affair with Wade.

“Like what?” Jackie asked.

“Actresses in rehab. Mobsters in Monaco. My husband is in the storytelling business. He reads research given to him as support material for articles he publishes. If he has Pablo Escobar's Interpol case file on his desk, that doesn't mean Wade was or is dealing cocaine.”

“That's it, huh?” She played with the lime on the edge of her drink.

“Not that I would give you anything anyway since he's my husband and I don't have any proof that you are for real. But, tell me, what the hell are you alluding to?”

She stopped me by placing her full hand on my arm. “I study a lot about how the people in this room interact.”

“How?” I asked.

“Do you have a business degree, Allie?”

“No, do you?” I scoffed condescendingly.

“Finishing my second year at Wharton at U. Penn, in Philadelphia, right now. As a matter of fact, I'll have the diploma by the end of the month. But I didn't grow up anything like the rich kids who were groomed for business. I grew up in a dump of a house with my mom, a single working mother, that's it, just us two. So don't go making assumptions about my life just because I'm in business school.”

“That's a very good program, but I'm not sure . . .”

She groaned and pulled out a small Louis Vuitton wallet and fished out a Wharton School of Business ID card. “Good enough? I'm happy to do anything to prove this to you, but I swear I will never lie to you.” Then she reached again into the depths of her bag. Out came a three-subject, big wire-bound notebook with the U Penn seal on the front.

“All right. So you're in school. Maybe you understand a spreadsheet.”

“Yes, I understand a spreadsheet, a capital asset pricing model, and can run a Monte Carlo simulation in my sleep.”

“Really?”

She laughed at me mocking her. “Hey, don't knock my degree. I'm minoring my degree on the entertainment industry and I'll tell you, the film business you are wading into is a broken business model—something I do understand, and, by the way, that's more proof I'm actually studying it. One thing's for sure: the studios are only banking on predictable action blockbusters and the indie market is just dead. You're never going to make money off a film festival; it's all about figuring out the distribution channels with VOD, PPV—”

“Excuse me, VOD? PPV?”

“Video on Demand. Pay-Per-View. Robert Redford made cash from the Sundance Channel, not the festival. Remember that as you make your festival plans and get all these big shots to invest in it.”

“Okaay,” I answered, slowly accepting the veracity of her business knowledge. “And now you're working . . .” I was still trying to figure out how she was always wearing shoes Carrie Bradshaw would weep over.

“On my business degree until I graduate this month. And some research projects. I work in investment banks in the summers and make a lot of money for someone my age.”

“And that salary explains all these spectacular clothes and shoes and Gucci bags you seem to have?”

“My college roommate became a stylist's assistant for fashion magazines, so she gives me used runway and photo shoot clothes from last season. I'm not as sinister as you think, Allie,” she said. “All these guys and their behavior is just as weird and foreign to me as it is to you. So don't let last season's clothes intimidate you or fool you.” She took another slow sip of her drink. “Look, I didn't grow up in Manhattan by a long shot and I use some strategies to fit in. Don't tell me you don't; it's a survival thing.”

I thought about how some people acclimatize to New York better and faster than others. After eleven years of living in New York, I never once felt I had an outfit really nailed head to toe. Though I hated to agree with anything she said, I did say, “Point taken.”