“Is that a threat?” I ask.
“More like frenemy…ish…ly advice,” she says. “As to what might be best.”
I can’t believe the way she’s pushing back. It’s been years since anybody has thought to push back against me, particularly when I hold all the cards. “Best for whom?”
“Best for you,” she says.
I breathe in her jasmine scent and whisper, “This is not a game you want to play with me.”
Something dangerous gleams in her eyes. She turns to the waiter. “Do you serve cheese fondue here, by any chance? I don’t get out much, and that’s the food that I’m accustomed to eating. Swiss cheese, ideally.”
Our dining companions go still.
I gaze at her, stunned, as the waiter assures her that they do not serve cheese fondue.
“There’s no fondue!” She turns to me. “You said there would be fondue, honey.”
Behind her, Aaron’s looking stressed, blinking too much, or maybe he’s squeezing out Morse code messages like a desperate hostage.
And I can’t help it—I just start laughing.
Suddenly Juliana’s laughing. “Swiss cheese fondue! I get it! Oh my goodness,” she exclaims. “Priceless! You two had me going!”
Her colleague Juan says something in Portuguese. She replies, also in Portuguese and Juan claps, saying something that I’m thinking is Portuguese swear words. He turns to the Texans. “A joke.”
All the Protech people are laughing now.
“We all kept hearing this bit about the Swiss chalet,” Gary says. “And here you come waltzing’ in here dressed like that! You could’ve knocked us over with a feather!”
I smile. “Well, that rumor is just so ridiculous. And really, why a chalet?” I beam triumphantly at Francine. “Keeping her in a chalet? Why would I?” I slide my arm around her shoulders. “I wouldn’t want my beautiful wife anywhere else but by my side.”
“Except when I’m on tour, of course,” she says.
“Of course,” I say.
“I can’t tell you how relieved I am,” Juliana says. “I’ll confess that we had reservations about your being too serious and somber to fit with our engineering group. We didn’t think you had any sense of humor whatsoever!”
“Benny has an amazing sense of humor when you get to know him,” Francine says. “He loves practical jokes.”
I growl softly, tightening my hold on her.
She looks up at me. “And puns. If he’s in a crabby mood, a pun will always lift his spirits.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I say.
“You’ll see,” she says, grinning at everybody. “The more stormy he acts, the more he’s enjoying the pun. You’ll see.”
“The team loves jokes,” Juliana says. “I’m sure you’ll fit right in.”
The team loves jokes. Grrrrreat.
“Coulda knocked me over with a feather,” the Texan says again.
“I can’t take credit,” I say. “It was Francine’s idea. My wife is one in a million. Truly.”
She searches my eyes. What is she thinking?
“We’ve heard that you dance, Francine,” Juliana says.
“Yes, that’s how we met,” she says. “When I was early in my career as a dancer, I did a summer at Beau Cirque Fantastique, one of those huge Las Vegas extravaganzas, and Benny was doing lights and sound.”
Juliana’s excited. She was in Vegas a few years ago and she saw Beau Cirque Fantastique. She’s excited that Francine was in it once. Francine tells her that her part was akin to being a tree in a play.
“She’s underselling herself,” I say. “The part was not like being a tree in a play.”
She looks at me, surprised. “It was a little.”
“She had a small part, part of the background dance corps, but she stole the show every time she was on stage. I guarantee you, a full eighty-seven percent of that audience was mesmerized by her and her alone.”
Everybody’s beaming at me, enjoying my husbandly devotion. Even Francine is watching me intently.
“Benny is extremely supportive of my career,” she says. “I’m going on a European tour with my ballet company soon and he’s so excited for me.”
“Do you have an interest in ballet and acrobatics, Benny?” Juliana asks. “Is that why you got a job there?”
“Applying with Beau Cirque was more about the tech, I’m afraid,” I say. “It was an interesting challenge for me. There are a lot of moving parts to a live light and sound show. A lot of robotic moving parts, actually, in terms of the lighting and some of the props.”
“It was an entire stage show built around the Lady Gaga song ‘Alejandro,’” Francine says. “You know that song?”
It turns out that everybody knows that song. People all over the world know Lady Gaga. The group is discussing the song now.
I’m focusing on Francine’s hair, elaborate twists coiling around like a map of my current state of mind. I imagine tracing one with a finger, around and around.
She didn’t even know we were married. Ten fucking years.
Who does that?
Francine, of course. She’s an artist with zero detail orientation whatsoever, unless it has to do with ballet. Anything having to do with ballet, she’s as serious as a general conducting a mission behind enemy lines. I can’t even begin to contemplate the tax trouble she might be in. Will she have to redo her taxes for the last ten years? Probably. Eventually I should probably inform her of this.
“This I need to hear,” one of the Texan women says to me. “Come on, do the song, Benny!”
I straighten up. “What? What are we talking about?”
“Francine says you can sing a funny rendition of ‘Alejandro.’”
I turn to her, surprised. She remembers my singing that, but not our marrying. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
I can’t believe I sang that song. One second I’m having the end-of-the-production-run punch and the next thing I know, I’m singing that ridiculous song—not just singing it, but singing a mocking version I only ever did in my head. Her intense delight at my singing was like the best drug in the world, blazing through my veins, and I wanted more of that. More, more, more. So I kept on with it.
“I wouldn’t even know the words, now,” I grumble.
“Oh, do the song, Benny! You have to!” she begs. “And don’t pretend you don’t remember it.” She turns to the group. “You have no idea, it was so funny, the way he can sing it. You’ll die. Literally.”
“I don’t know about literally,” I say.
She grins. “They literally will!”
It’s here I realize that she’s using it on purpose, to annoy me, another arrow in the quiver of ways to make me sorry I’m forcing her to go around as my wife.
“He completely remembers every single word and every single intonation,” she continues. “We only heard the song a million times. Nothing gets more embossed in your memory than a song you do a show to. Juliana, you should totally make the purchase of this company contingent on him singing it to you at some point. He would love to sing it, but you’ll have to press him.”
Barbara the Texan claps her hands together. “This I need to hear.” Everybody’s enjoying themselves a great deal at this little dinner of ours—except Aaron, of course. Aaron is not a fan.
They’re all waiting.
“Somebody is engaging in some extremely fanciful thinking,” I say.
Francine hums the first few notes. Hm-hmmmm-hm-hmm.
I shake my head. Drop it, that’s what the headshake says.
“You know you have to now,” she says.
I give her a hard look.
She hums onward, unperturbed.
My heart pounds.
As the tune swells, she raises up her hands.
Our dining companions are laughing. They’re getting quite the opposite-world idea about me at this point.
She’s humming, raising her arms up, orchestra-conductor-style.
&n
bsp; I grab her hands. Her skin is soft and warm, pulsing with life.
Her eyes widen and she stops humming.
I’m gripping her hands, suspended between us.
Our dinner companions are still laughing merrily, but my ears have stopped working thanks to the connection of us, skin on skin. That’s how much she’s fucking annoying me.
I raise her left hand to my lips, holding her gaze. Is she running this show? No. I press my lips to one knuckle, brushing my lips over her knucklebone.
Her nostrils flare, eyes wide with shock.
“Aww,” somebody says.
I pull back with a cool smile, ignoring the rush of sensation, keeping hold of her hands. If she thinks she’s the one in the driver’s seat here, she’s sadly mistaken.
This close I can see the sooty lashes that rim her deep brown eyes, see the places where they’re just a little bit clumped together thanks to the eyelash glue that dancers use as part of their stage makeup. It was a major dancer complaint back in the Beau Cirque days, getting eyelash glue off the eyelashes.
Her eyes begin again to sparkle and I know she’s going to do it—that’s how fucking predictable she is.
She hums a few more notes—Hmm-hmmmm. Because that’s Francine. She just never quits. Hmm-hmm-hm-hmmmm.
I kiss her next knuckle. People are laughing. We look like quite the comedy team.
She keeps on humming, but she’s going to have to work a hell of a lot harder to make this into a problem for me. So far, in fact, it’s working out brilliantly. A tax break and now this expert image resuscitation. I really might become a proponent of marriage after all.
“Consider this a rain check,” says Juliana, laughing. “A rain check that I plan on cashing.”
I realize here that I’m still holding Francine’s hands. I let her go. What were we even talking about before?
Francine turns to Juliana. “Hold him to it. Because he totally thinks he just got out of it.”
Right, the song.
Talk at the table turns to business. Juliana has questions about some of the files we sent. Tablets and phones come out. Drinks and appetizers come and go.
Aaron is answering questions, looking distinctly unhappy. It didn’t help that she made that comment about my hatred of working for others, which is…entirely accurate. Or was at one time.
But then, he’s been uncomfortable with this whole thing all along, ever since Francine appeared at Ventoux asking for the divorce.
I’d texted Aaron after she left, and he came directly across to the restaurant. Aaron had been worried she’d appear someday, he’d been warning me that we needed to prepare a robust legal offensive for her return. There were times over the years that he’d suggested we become proactive about it, by which he meant digging up some dirt on Francine, working up some kind of shady leverage to force her to agree to a no-strings divorce. Or locating her and paying her off. He wanted to hire somebody to locate her.
I always strictly forbade it. I knew she was in the New York dance world and that I could find her if I wanted to. But why would I want to?
True, I was pretty heavily focused on the idea of her turning up that first year out from Vegas. The year the minature robotics stuff really blew up for us. The year of money falling from the sky. I really thought she’d show, and I’d be ready, but then…nothing. I figured out exactly where she was and went to school on her social media and discovered that she was just…living her life. As if none of it had ever happened. I stopped focusing on her, put more effort into the business, put her out of my mind. If she wanted to pretend it wasn’t real, that was her business.
James always took my side on leaving the Francine thing alone. It’s still shocking that he’s gone. His death was so sudden, it feels unreal, somehow.
I was braced for the Protech gang to say something about him, or ask if I think the driver who ran him down on his bike will ever be caught. I was relieved that they didn’t, but it also feels wrong not to invoke him. The company was half his baby.
I stare at the small bowl of olives, remembering James’s easy smile with a sharp twist of grief. The way he’d clap me on the shoulder.
He was a big, rugged guy who wore man buns and hiking clothes, as out of place in corporate leadership as I was. It was against his better judgment to let the Francine thing hang out there, but we were friends, and we always had each other’s backs, especially against Aaron, whom we trusted less and less as the years wore on.
Aaron got a chunk of shares when James died, but I got more. I make the decisions alone now.
Still, Aaron thought I’d lost my mind, not signing her quickie divorce papers.
“All this time I’ve been pressing you to do something about your Vegas marriage and this is what you decide?” he’d demanded. “To refuse this immense gift that she’s offering you? Do I have to tell you again what she could do to us?”
I’d sat back and crossed my legs, still buzzing from the surprise of her turning up after all these years. “She won’t try to do anything. Francine’s not like that,” I’d assured him.
“What about the people around her? She could get some crafty advice. Maybe her folks out in Podunk North Dakota fall on hard times and press her for a payday.”
“Then you’ll handle it, won’t you?” But I knew it wouldn’t come to that. It’s not in Francine’s nature.
“This is bordering on criminal mismanagement.” He’d said it lightly, presenting it as a joke, but there’s always a hint of threat with Aaron.
But this little gambit with Francine playing my wife has turned out to be a stroke of genius. Especially considering the revelation that the Arcana Protech people were worried about my sense of humor. How did we not know about this potential objection of theirs?
Well, now it’s been addressed.
Business talk has been tabled, with Juliana insisting that this is a social dinner, not a working dinner. They’re talking about Brazilian politics and Brazilian dance. Eventually—and unsurprisingly—the center of gravity moves back to Francine; people want to know about her upcoming ballet tour, which leads to her talking about that Roman theater of hers. She tells them that it’s an archaeological wonder constructed in 16 BC, and that she’s always dreamed of dancing there surrounded by tiers of ancient marble steps and statues. “Now it’s really happening,” she says.
So the tour is going there. One of the reasons it’s so important to her.
Her phone comes out. She’s got pictures, probably the same ones she’d pass around in Vegas. The Beau Cirque people were big on all-company meals and hangout spaces—some shit about dancers, musicians, and us AV people forming a cohesive unit. Even so, I was never included in the circle when phones got passed around. I was usually happy to be free from the obligation to react appropriately with others watching, but I looked it all up online later.
“It looks like a film set of ancient Greece!” Juliana exclaims.
“Right?” Francine looks over at me. “Benny’s probably sick of hearing me describe it.”
“Not at all. It’s going to be amazing. And not only will she dance there but she’ll be one of the main soloists,” I say, demonstrating my knowledge of her life, not that they’d question us being married at this point.
She beams at me, and something strange flows through my chest. I suppose because at one time, this was my naive dream. This whole scenario.
She tells them about the dance, the fast flow of movements, the constant injuries.
“These dancers will dance with broken bones sticking out of their ankles if you let them,” I say.
“Well, that might be a little extreme,” she says, “but we do push through the pain a lot. I have a knee injury that’s threatening right now but I’ve been icing it like a demon.”
She has a knee injury? She was battling a knee problem ten years ago in Vegas.
People make concerned noises and she assures them that it’s nothing. She proceeds to launch into the rest of the fantasy—th
ey stay at a specific hotel that’s a restored 15th-century building. She walks around the Old Town early in the morning all by herself. She stops at a specific piazza coffee shop, orders a café au lait, and reads the Spanish paper. She has photos of all of it.
She tells our dining companions how, as a little girl in rural North Dakota, she had those pictures on her bedroom wall—that specific town, that specific coffee shop, that specific theater.
I take this moment to give Aaron a pleased look. Surely he sees the wisdom of the plan now.
But he’s frowning. Even his mustache seems to turn down at the edges. Aaron is a lot more invested in nailing down this Protech deal than I am. I’ll have other paydays, but it’s unlikely that he’ll have other paydays anywhere near to this level.
Not that I don’t want the deal. This company was built to be led by two friends with complementary skills and now it’s just me; Aaron’s only legal support. We gave him a chunk of the company early on when we were too poor to pay him, a decision we definitely regretted over the years.
I look at her ridiculous traditional Swiss dress or whatever it is that she has on. Where did she even get it? She’s lucky it worked out, that’s all I can say.
I twist up a bite of linguine, remembering things I hadn’t thought of for years. Those late-night cast dinners, post-performance, the giant group of us at a long table. She’d flit from cast member to cast member, laughing, irreverent, dark hair cascading over her shoulders, having deep conversations here, telling a silly story there.
The cast at Beau Cirque viewed putting up the show as a punishing and exhausting endeavor, but to Francine, it was a walk in the park, and she’d be running around after every show, trying to get people to go out dancing or exploring. She never asked me to go out, except once as a confusing joke.
She’s poking me. “Benny, Benny! Tell them.”
“What?”
She’s grinning. “He does this. Lost in thought. Cogitating,” she says, eyeing me, maybe wondering if I remember.
Of course I do—she once accused me of daydreaming, and I’d felt embarrassed and informed her that no, I wasn’t daydreaming, I was cogitating. There was no end to how pathetic I was in those days. I’d use stupidly big words. I didn’t know better.
Just Not That Into Billionaires Page 7