“It could be an emergency,” I said as I answered. It was Reilly’s partner, who told me he needed to talk to Reilly right away. It was an emergency after all, but not the one I feared. Just a limited window of opportunity to complete a transaction they’d been working on for months.
“Prudence,” Reilly rushed. “I want to finish this conversation, but I’ve got to go take care of something right now. Can it wait till tonight?”
“Yes, yes of course.”
Reilly kissed me and thanked me repeatedly for understanding. “You’re the best,” he said as the door shut behind him.
“I am definitely
not
the best, Reilly,” I said softly.
You’re the best bitch,
Guilt chirped.
Best liar, cheater and adulterer. You’re a real favorite for the Sinolympics.
There was nothing I could do about falling in love with Matt. It just happened, and I couldn’t undo it if I was hypnotized by a team of cult-deprogramming experts. I could forgive myself for falling in love with another man. I could even get past the cheating. And hey, we all stretch the truth a bit to suit our needs. True, my lie was a bit more extreme, but in time I could still let myself off the hook for it. What I couldn’t bear was the thought of Reilly alone, rejected and hurt while Matt and I got the happily-ever-after ending.
* * *
I forgot about the time difference in California and woke Matt up with my call. “Good morning, love of my life,” I whispered, even though Reilly had left a good ten minutes earlier.
“Malone?” Matt said groggily. “It’s the middle of the night, is something wrong?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to hear your voice and thank you for the flowers. Should I call you back later?”
I could hear Matt stretching as he spoke. “Nah, I’m up now. I was having a dream about you, you know?”
“How would I?”
“Huh?”
“How would I know what you were dreaming about, Matt?”
He laughed a short “hmm.”
I walked into the kitchen, turned off Reilly’s coffee pot and tossed his paper into the recycling bin. “Was it a good dream?”
“You were in it, Malone. Of course it was a good dream.”
My eyes led me to Reilly’s closet, where half of his clothes were still wrapped in plastic from the dry cleaners. His belt was tossed on the floor in front of his shoes. I found a patch of Reilly-free space and focused my sights on it.
Compartmentalize, Prudence.
How I missed my Inner Male’s rare appearances.
Don’t be a wuss. Toughen up and do what you need to do. No one gets hurt if no one gets wise, got it?
Forget about Reilly for now.
“So, I got your e-mail about me setting up interviews out there,” I switched gears. “I’m not crazy about the idea of living in L.A.”
“No one is,” Matt said. “Give it a chance.”
“Maybe you should give New York a chance,” I said. “You know, more independent films are made in New York than L.A.”
“I know, but more Hollywood films are made in Hollywood,” he returned.
“You want to make major studio films?” I asked.
“Fuck yeah,” he said. “That’s where the money is, babe. You can say a lot of important shit and still make a buck, Malone. Nothing wrong with that, is there, Miss Deloitte & Touche?” I silently giggled, biting my lip.
Matt and I decided that he would spend a week in New York in December, and I’d come out for Valentine’s Day weekend. After we each had a chance to see how the other half lived, we would decide where to make our home together.
“We’ll work it out,” he assured me.
And then it hit me. Did he say he was coming to spend a week with me in New York next month? What am I going to do with Reilly? I panicked.
* * *
When I arrived at my office, I heard my assistant Lara telling someone on the phone that he had perfect timing. “Prudence, your father is holding on line four,” she said.
I let him wait for another few seconds, then picked up. “Father,” I said blandly. “What can I do for you?”
“Good morning, Prudence. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Father. Yourself?”
“I’m well, very well, thanks for asking.”
“What’s up?”
“I was hoping we could have lunch this afternoon. I’m going to be uptown for a meeting and I have some important news to share with you,” he said.
“I’ve got back-to-back meetings today. Sorry. Another time.”
“Prudence, your secretary told me you were free for lunch. I really do need to speak with you.”
“Fine. What’s your big news? Carla pregnant again?”
“Don’t be absurd, Prudence. You know Carla is forty-seven. We are past that stage in our lives.”
Well, good God, Father, it’s time to trade her in then! Good looking guy like you with a few bucks in his pocket should be able to land someone in her thirties.
“I’ll have lunch with you if you tell me what your big news is now,” I negotiated. “I don’t like surprises.”
“Okay,” he sighed. “Carla and I are retiring at the end of the year.”
Carla is retiring?! Carla is retiring?! That’s a laugh. Exactly what is Carla retiring from? Oh, the stress of shopping and Junior League must be overwhelming for the poor dear. How does she hold up under all the pressure?”
“Paige will be off to college in September and we’d like to spend a few months with her before we start traveling,” he explained. “Why don’t I pick you up at your office at noon and we’ll —”
“No,” I interrupted. “Don’t come to my office. I’ll meet you somewhere.”
“How ’bout that little outdoor café we had lunch at a few years ago?” he suggested.
“Father, it’s practically November and it’s freezing. No place is serving lunch outdoors. There’s a coffee shop in my lobby. Meet me there.”
My mother has long since forgiven Father for leaving us. She even danced with him at my wedding to Reilly. But I had vowed long ago to make him suffer a life sentence in exile with me. He did the crime, and I would make sure he did the time.
Father left us at the absolute worst time in my life. I was twelve years old with an oily face and one budding breast under my
Charlie’s Angels
t-shirt. He moved straight from our home into a love shack in the city with his girlfriend, Carla. As soon as my parents’ divorce was final, Carla put on a maternity wedding gown and the two married. Not that I was there or anything. Carla and Father decided it would be “awkward” to have the child from his first marriage at the second. The bride’s full belly was not embarrassing to them, but evidence of Father’s first marriage was. I remember the night of their wedding lying awake in my bed crying for hours, imagining the guests dancing and toasting the happy couple. I wondered what songs the band was playing, and what kind of dress my grandmother wore. She lobbied for my inclusion, but was nearly booted from the guest list herself after she and Carla had a fight. I had never cried so much before in my entire life, and I haven’t since. At about one that morning, I decided I could accept the fact that my father didn’t love me. I had no choice. I didn’t see him for three full years after he left my mother and me.
You’d think that when I finally let him participate in my life again, Father would be eager to repair the damage he had done. By that time, Ashley was nearly three years old and Whitney had just arrived.
Father even missed my college graduation because he and Ashley had some Indian Princess camping trip scheduled. Ashley was eleven years old at the time, and as he explained, “This is a very important age in a girl’s life.” The irony of that statement bounced right off his thick skull. When I graduated from Wharton, there was some other father-daughter thing for one of the girls. His youngest daughter, Paige, was toddling around, and Father was booked solid until the day he died.
“Do you know how many people get their MBA from Wharton?” I felt like shouting at him when he declined my invitation. “Fine,” I said instead. If he couldn’t see that he should have been proud, I was not going to waste my energy trying to convince him.
He was on time for our meeting at the coffee shop in my office building, wearing a smile as if we were the best of friends. As ugly a person as I thought he was, I could still see that he was a handsome man in his business suit and silver hair. He has a broad face and sparkling blue eyes. And Carla, for all of her flaws, sure could pick out a tie. Father looked as though he should be in an upscale restaurant with other old guys instead of ordering a grilled cheese at the counter of a lobby coffee shop.
“Would you like a sandwich?” he offered.
“No thank you. I’m on a tight schedule today. I’ll have a cup of coffee.”
“As I mentioned to you this morning, I am going to retire at the end of the year and I was hoping we would have a chance to reconnect,” he said.
I said nothing.
“I know you hate me, Prudence, but I am your father and I think it’s time we make amends.”
“I don’t hate you,” I said in a neutral tone. I knew exactly where my disengage button was and pressed it firmly every time I saw Father.
“I know I made mistakes when you were growing up. I know my divorce with your mother hurt you deeply, but we can work on it, can’t we? I’m not the same man I was when you were younger. I am willing to admit that I made mistakes, serious mistakes, but I want us to have a real relationship again. The way we were when you were a kid.”
When I was a kid, Trenton Malone was a hero to me. He always seemed to be doing something important. Flying off somewhere to make some big deal happen. I struggled to understand his accounts of hostile takeovers and more friendly mergers of companies he’d negotiated. I’d nod as though I comprehended everything because he seemed so genuinely impressed that a nine-year-old understood his rather complicated business dealings. I remember the first time he asked me if I knew what something meant, and I lied and told him of course I did. “You do?” he beamed. “That’s my girl.” And that’s all I needed to hear before I secretly started reading business magazines at the library. He started to think of me as a business-savvy little knockoff of himself, and took a keen interest in my math homework and lemonade stands. He told me that I’d sell a lot more of anything if I framed my pitch to address how my product met the customers’ needs instead of asking them to do me a favor by buying my lemonade or Girl Scout cookies or whatever. “If eating delicious cookies would help you empower young girls and improve your community, wouldn’t you want to do it?” I’d ask my neighbors. Typically they’d laugh. “When you buy Girl Scout cookies, you not only get yummy treats for your family, but you help your local troop earn much-needed funds for activities that help prepare us to be future leaders of America.” Then I’d pause strategically. “Where else do you get the chance to build the future of this great nation by eating cookies?” I could feel his pride radiating off of him as he practically mouthed our script.
He even praised my approach to trick or treating, which was a great way to get him to come along with us, I discovered. It may sound a bit cold, and perhaps it wasn’t the warm and fuzzy memories that most fathers and daughters share, but this bond of success, of the ability to make things happen, was ours. It was our privately held company. Daddy and Prudence, Inc.
Though I was recalling better days with Father, I stared blankly, then waved at a coworker passing by. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m thirty-six years old. I don’t really need a father at this point in my life.”
“I know you’ve got a lot of anger toward me. My therapist says I emotionally abandoned you and that you’ve got every right to be enraged with me. Maybe it would help if you told me how you felt.”
I was silent. I hated when people suggested that if we all bare our souls, spill our guts and reveal our feelings, then everything will be okay. Tell him how I felt? Please. There’s no way I was about to get into some feeling fest with him. There was no way I’d ever shed another tear over this imbecile my mother had the misfortune of being screwed by.
I laughed. “You needed a therapist to tell you that?” I began. “First, let’s just set the record straight, you didn’t just emotionally abandon me, you physically disappeared.”
“Prudence, that’s not fair. I called constantly, but you refused to speak to me.”
“Of course I refused to speak to you!” I shouted. “Of course I refused to speak to you,” I said softly this time. “What would I have said, ‘How’s the wife and kid?’ I was twelve years old, what was I supposed to say? Did it ever occur to you to get on the train and come out to see me? To bang on the door and demand that I talk to you? You just gave up.”
Too much. Shut up. This is exactly what he wants — Blubberfest.
“Good, this is good for you to share with me,” he encouraged.
“Fuck you. I don’t need your psychobabble bullshit. I told you I don’t need a father at this point in my life. What are you complaining about? It’s not like I never see you. We have our little blended-family get-togethers twice a year. It’s not like I’ve written you off, which believe me a stronger person would have.”
Recompose
. “You know what you can tell your therapist? Tell her that when I was fourteen years old I used to tell people that you were a CIA agent on a secret mission in Cuba, and that I had no idea when you’d be back because you were protecting their families from the Communists. And you know what else? Those were my proudest stories of you. Lying about you was the only way I could stand talking about you.” I got up to leave. “Listen, I’m sorry I don’t want to ‘reconnect’ with you. Maybe you could take up model trains or something in your retirement instead.”
I didn’t even feel like crying, which was invigorating. I felt nothing and it felt fabulous.
Chapter 9
I couldn’t believe how many letters Reilly’s personal ad generated in just two weeks. When I went to the post office, there was a note in my box alerting me that I had more mail than they could fit into the space I’d rented. A portly woman carried out a full plastic carrier of letters. “If you’re expecting this much mail you’re going to have to pay for a large box,” said the postal clerk. “You must have three hundred letters here. What are you selling?”