‘Cool,’ said Jack, the curly-haired kid with the glasses. He had the shaggy amiability of someone who had done his part to support the Mexican economy by smoking a lot of pot. ‘A hundred million dollars. That’s a lot.’
‘You see?’ Tricia said to her friends. ‘Isn’t he the coolest boss? Out here drinking with us? On a school night? Awesome!’ She reached across and put her hand on Timothy’s thigh. She left it there. Timothy felt that old familiar stir: an erection. God, she was good looking, Timothy thought. Those blue eyes, the red lipstick, the tight shirt. Her hand crept up his thigh a bit. Now it was a few inches from his crotch. He dared not look down, to see her young fingers on his slacks. If he looked, he would be forced to admit what was happening. Until then, it could be a simple misunderstanding: Oh, was your hand on my penis? I hadn’t noticed.
‘I work with Timothy, too,’ the Kid said. Timothy thought: God, you’re hopeless. He made a mental note to take the Kid aside, give him some pointers about how to impress women. The Kid would need to lose this particular contest over Tricia, of course, but once this was over, Timothy could spare honest advice. The Kid would have money some day, Timothy thought, no doubt about it. He was bright, and a bit of a shark. As his mentor, Timothy owed him. He should help ease the Kid’s entry into his world, the world where money always let you win. But not tonight.
Timothy glanced around the room one more time. He peered into the darkness, tried to make out the faces at the bar, at the tables around him. Was there anyone familiar? Any friend of Katherine’s? Anyone from the club? Anyone from church? It was unlikely, since this was a young person’s place, and his friends were no longer young. But he had to be sure.
Satisfied, Timothy said, ‘I wonder where those drinks are.’ He stood from his chair, made a show of looking for the waitress. Then he sat back down, and, as he did, pulled his chair closer to Tricia, so that he sat nearly between her legs. She spread them wider, reached over, guided his chair closer. Now his knees rested on the inside of her thighs. Timothy took her hand within his. Her skin was soft and dry, her fingers cold. She intertwined her fingers in his. And then he knew that he would have her, that she was his, and that money always let you win.
Her friends left, one by one. First, the Kid, who skulked off muttering cursory goodbyes. The stoner, Jack, stood up five minutes later and said, ‘I gotta go.’ Tricia didn’t argue. Jack vacated the seat beside Tricia on the settee. Tricia pulled Timothy’s hand and guided him to sit down beside her. He fell backwards into the sofa. She pushed up against him, snuggled into his side. He felt her breast against his shirt.
Rachel looked uncomfortable. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I should head out.’
‘Okay,’ Tricia said.
Rachel leaned over, pressed her cheek to Tricia’s, kissed the air. ‘Good luck,’ she said. Then, to Timothy: ‘It was nice to meet you.’
‘And you.’ Timothy had his arm around Tricia’s shoulder. He could smell her shampoo, lemon and rosemary, and he felt her hair, like silk, under his chin.
When Rachel left, they sat together, still. The bar was full now, packed with kids blowing off steam after work, and getting louder. A bunch of beefy boys in baseball caps gathered around the snooker table, shouting.
‘Well, this is interesting,’ Timothy said.
But she was not the type to engage in self-reflection. ‘Come home with me,’ she said.
‘Okay.’ He stood up, opened his wallet, and threw a hundred dollar-bill on the table. They left the bar and walked out into the night.
They each drove their own car; he followed her yellow Celica.
He tailed her out of the BBC parking lot onto Ravenswood Drive, and then along Middlefield and Willow – until he was back on Highway 101. They traveled south for twenty minutes. Palo Alto was the zenith of real estate value on the Peninsula; it was – literally – downhill from there. Each mile south on 101 knocked another ten thousand dollars off the median home price and, as he drove, the houses along the highway changed, from red Spanish bungalows and sprawling ranches, to white clapboard houses, to concrete slab apartments built over open carports. Finally, she took Route 85, the corridor that carried the secretaries and personal assistants and firemen and police into and out of Palo Alto each morning and night – the renal artery of the Peninsula.
She pulled off the highway onto surface streets. He followed her down Stevens Creek Boulevard, where all evidence of a namesake creek had disappeared long ago beneath asphalt used car lots, balloons, and neon signs promising nought percent APR. Off Stevens Creek, she turned left and then right, until Timothy was sure he was lost and would never find his way home.
Finally, she pulled over to the side of a tree-lined street and stopped her car. He parked behind her and got out.
‘Here we are,’ she said, indicating an old yellow four-plex across the street. Two balconies had black charcoal grills; a third, a scrawny orange tree in a clay pot.
‘Cute,’ he said.
‘A little different than what you’re used to, I bet,’ she said.
‘Pretty much like where I started out,’ he lied.
She led him up two flights of concrete stairs. He followed close behind and stared at her ass as they climbed. The stairs stopped at her apartment door, which was marked with a cheap plastic letter D. The top nail holding the D in place was missing, so the letter had flipped upside down. She took her keys from her purse and jingled them until she found the right one. She turned the lock, giving the door a shove with her shoulder. It didn’t budge. ‘Always sticks,’ she said. After another shove, the door opened and they walked inside. She turned on the light.
It was much cleaner than the exterior had led him to expect. Plush medium-pile brown carpet, newly painted white stucco walls. An air conditioner in the window was going full blast, so the living room was icy. A sliding glass door led to a patio. Near the apartment entrance there was a small galley kitchen, with clean pots on the stove.
‘Nice,’ he said.
He saw her looking around the apartment. What was she looking for?
A thought occurred to him. ‘Do you live alone?’
‘Most of the time,’ she said vaguely. She seemed nervous. Perhaps she had not left the air conditioner on when she left in the morning. In which case, he wondered, who had?
‘Come into my bedroom,’ she said.
‘You sure?’
She took his hand and led him around the corner into the bedroom. The bed was made neatly, a blue denim duvet pulled snugly under the mattress. Why had she made the bed? Was she expecting him as early as this morning, when she left for work? Had she known even then that he would return with her?
She closed the bedroom door, turned the lock.
The bedroom was small, unremarkable. A beechwood table, probably from IKEA, was pushed against the far wall, with a computer on top. On the table, and on her bureaus, there were no photographs, no mementos.
‘How long have you lived here?’ he asked.
She pushed herself into his chest, pulled him down by the neck and kissed him. He felt her ochre lipstick rubbing off onto his lips.
‘Do you really care?’ she said, all breath and silky hair. Her mouth smelled like mint and Triple Sec. She kissed him again, pushing her tongue into his mouth. Her kiss was hard, violent. He felt her teeth under her lips. Her hand stroked his thigh and worked its way up his pants leg. She grabbed his penis. ‘I’ve been wanting to fuck you since the first day I met you.’
Her words shocked him. He had never been with a woman that used the word fuck. Even the few whores he had been with had more class.
‘I want your cock inside me,’ she whispered. She stuck her tongue in his ear and pushed him backward onto the bed. He fell across the mattress with his head halfway up the bed, his Cole Haan Carnegies still firmly on the floor. She climbed on top, straddled him, pushed her pubic bone into his penis. ‘You want to fuck me, Timothy?’
‘I do,’ he said. But felt like adding: ‘If you wou
ld only stop talking.’
She unzipped his pants. She moved her hand down his abdomen, and lifted the elastic band of his cotton briefs. Without thinking, Timothy grabbed her hand, hard, stopped it from moving.
‘Hey,’ she said. She looked surprised. ‘What’s wrong?’
He sat up on his elbows, pushed her gently off him. She climbed down from the bed and stood over him.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just …’ He didn’t know what to say, because he truly did not know what was wrong. But it was something. He didn’t want to continue. He had cheated before, and had never had difficulty doing so. But for some reason, tonight, he couldn’t go through with it. He said, for lack of anything better: ‘I’m married.’
‘It’ll be our secret,’ Tricia said. She wore a sly smile, the one she always tried when she spoke about his wife.
‘But …’ he said, and he waited for an explanation to form, so he could relay it to her. None came. He needed to tell her about Katherine: about how she could be a pain in the ass, but that he loved her; about how her mood swings often made marriage into hell, but that he had learned how to cope with them; about how sometimes they hated each other, but only for the briefest of moments; and about how, after every fight, he, improbable as it sounded, loved her even more.
Maybe it was the anniversary weekend just passed, in which he could feel her weakness, merely by touching her – the way a boy can hold a field mouse and feel its tiny bones and frantic breathing, and know that one hard touch can destroy it. Maybe he needed to drive to Tricia’s apartment that night, to come this close to betraying Katherine, to understand how fragile she was, and how much she meant to him, and how much he needed to protect her.
He wanted to tell Tricia all these things, but the thoughts remained jumbled, and by the time he could tease out the strands of an explanation, Tricia had already turned away from him.
He rose from the bed, pushed his shirt into his waist, re-zipped his pants. ‘You are an incredibly beautiful, sexy girl, Tricia. I would love to stay here and …’ He didn’t want to use the word fuck. ‘… keep going,’ he said. ‘But it’s not right.’
‘Then why did you come?’ She stuck out her chin, defiant. But he thought perhaps there were tears in her eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Because I’m attracted to you. But how would this work? What’s our plan?’ Timothy liked having a plan, and he couldn’t see one here. ‘I’m practically fifty years old.’
‘You’re not fifty,’ she said, as if the three years’ rounding error was what mattered.
‘I have a wife,’ he said. ‘I’m not a saint; I never have been. But she’s waiting for me at home, for Christ’s sake. I can’t do this to her.’ He walked to the mirror hanging over her bureau, wiped the lipstick from his face. He patted down his hair, adjusted his shirt collar. He turned to her. ‘Look, I will see you tomorrow morning in the office. Let’s pretend this never happened. You’re a great girl, and I don’t want to lose you.’ Then, to avoid any misunderstanding, he added: ‘As an assistant. Okay?’
She sat down on the bed and didn’t answer. He wondered: could this be the first time in her life that a man fled from her, even after she touched his penis? Perhaps this was a new experience for this young girl.
‘Okay?’ he asked again.
She didn’t answer, but he didn’t care, because he needed to get home. He left her in the bedroom, and ran from the apartment before he changed his mind.
10
He raced out of Cupertino as fast as traffic on 85 allowed. The clock in the BMW dash said 8.30 p.m. He reviewed the alibi he would offer Katherine. He would take the events of the afternoon, shift the timeline by two hours, make Tricia disappear. So: he had drinks with Pinky Dewer at the Circus Club at around six. When they were on their second vodka gimlet, Pinky used his cell phone to call his airline, at which point he learned his flight back to New York was canceled. Timothy would not give Katherine any details: neither the name of the airline, nor the cause of the canceled flight. Nothing for her to research, if the spirit moved her.
He continued building the story. So Pinky was trapped in the Bay Area. Timothy was upset, but he had no choice; Pinky was his largest investor, and he had to keep him entertained. So they left the Circus Club and traveled two miles down El Camino, from Atherton to Menlo Park, to the BBC. There they had a few more drinks. Finally, Pinky called his airline one more time and complained. Lo and behold, they found him a seat in first class. He raced out of the BBC and back to SFO to catch the flight.
It wasn’t Timothy’s best story, but it would do. There were a few weak spots, joists that didn’t hang together, mortises that didn’t fit. She would surely ask why Timothy didn’t call her before heading over to the BBC. He thought about it, and then decided that his cell phone battery had, unluckily, died. He removed his cell phone from his jacket pocket, and – one-handed – opened the back battery compartment. The lithium block dropped into his lap. He put it in the BMW glove compartment. There, he thought. No more juice.
When he got off 101 at University Avenue it was a quarter to nine. He sped through East Palo Alto, onto Waverly, and north into the Old Palo Alto neighborhood.
Five blocks later, he pulled into his driveway. Their yard was unkempt, with spiky brown ornamental grasses and wildflowers. Apricot trees stood on the left side of the house. It was an old 1930s Tudor, with high gables and thick half-timbers crisscrossing white stucco. The windows were tall and narrow, old-fashioned lead glass, beneath a steeply pitched roof.
Timothy raced up the slate garden path, through the grasses, and to the front door. The night was warm and dry. Crickets chirped in the yard. He rang the doorbell and started for his own keys. Moths fluttered around the entryway light. Timothy half expected Katherine to pull the door open even as he turned the key in the lock. But no one answered the door. Instead he pushed it open, and was greeted by an empty foyer.
He entered, closed the door. He flipped on the light switch. ‘Katherine?’
He listened for the sound of water running through the old pipes, a sign that maybe she was in the bedroom, showering. Nothing.
‘I’m home,’ he called out.
He walked into the foyer, his heels clicking on the ceramic tile. Before moving in, they had gutted the interior and redone it in a modern style she favored but which he found cold and unwelcoming. A black lacquered table sat at the side of the foyer, displaying the abstract white sculpture she had bought in Big Sur.
‘Oh, Katherine?’ he said, the first hint of worry creeping into his voice. This wasn’t what he expected. He was accustomed to her pouncing on him immediately when he entered, to fending her off with hurried, breathless explanations. But now he was greeted by silence and darkness. It threw him off balance, and he felt like a Marine, on point, sensing an ambush.
But the ambush didn’t come. He walked down the hall, turning on lights as he went. The only sounds were his own footsteps echoing off the plain white walls.
He climbed the carpeted stairs and walked into their bedroom. She wasn’t there. The big flat-screen television stood near the bed, mute and dark. Timothy peered into their master bathroom. Empty.
He wondered where she could have gone. He glanced at his watch. It was almost nine o’clock on a Monday night. She had said nothing about having plans. When they last spoke, she was lying in bed with a migraine. But now the bed was empty, neatly made.
He walked back downstairs into the kitchen and glanced at the refrigerator. Sometimes she left him a note there. But the refrigerator door was empty, a lone magnet (‘Think before you eat’) askew on the metal.
He paced across the kitchen and out the rear door, which led to the garage. He turned on the garage light and descended three steps onto the concrete floor. Katherine’s car, a two-year-old Lexus sedan, was gone.
He returned to the bedroom, called his cell phone voicemail, and then his office voicemail. The only message was from the Kid, who drunkenly explained
that the yen had fallen to sixty-eight, but then started moving back up. He probably left the message after slinking out of the BBC, to show that he was still a team player, and that there were no hard feelings.
Timothy sat down at the foot of the bed and loosened his tie. He tried to think what this could mean. Only one thing: that Katherine suspected he was cheating and, angry, had stormed out of the house.
Her car was gone, so she had driven somewhere. Perhaps through the neighborhood, blowing off steam. Or maybe she had stopped at a girlfriend’s house, where she was commiserating about how Timothy was a shit-head.
Timothy picked up the phone and called information, asked to be connected to Ann Beatty down the street. Ann was a forty-two-year-old divorcee who lived alone in the big house that used to belong to Apple Computer’s CEO, Steve Jobs. Her husband, who had earned the money to buy the house, had been effectively transferred by a California divorce court to a small one-bedroom condo in San Jose, where the closest he now came to Steve Jobs was passing the Apple billboard on Highway 101 during his one-hour commute to work.
‘Hello?’ Ann Beatty said.
‘Ann, this is Timothy Van Bender, from down the street.’
‘Oh hi, Timothy.’ Her voice could freeze water.
‘I’m sorry to call you so late. I’m looking for Katherine. I’m wondering if she’s there.’
‘Your wife?’ she said. He pictured her at the other end of the line, smiling bitterly. She had closely cropped graying hair and tiny eyes. She looked like a nun. He imagined the things that Katherine told her. Ann Beatty must hate me, he thought. He could hear contempt drip from her voice. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen her. In fact, I haven’t seen her since you went to Big Sur. I hope everything’s okay.’
The sing-song tone with which she hoped everything was okay indicated that she believed nothing was.
‘I’m sure everything is fine,’ Timothy said. ‘Probably just got our wires crossed, that’s all. Listen, if you see her, or if she calls, please tell her I’m at home waiting for her.’
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