And then I noticed something else. Simon was dressed almost exactly the same—khakis, Weejun loafers without socks, college sweatshirt—only everything that Simon had was new. The pants were creased at awkward angles, the loafers were a brash raw oxblood, the new-from-the-college-store sweatshirt ungainly over Simon’s bony wrists and collarbones. I felt embarrassed for him—or maybe I felt embarrassed for myself. I wasn’t poor like Simon—far from it—but since coming to Brown I’d realized there was a difference between people like Caspar Osgood, whose families had come over on the Mayflower, and people like me, whose ancestors had come over in steerage from eastern Europe. Between the girls who wore cashmere sweaters and Liberty of London shirts inherited from a great-aunt and the girls who purchased theirs from Saks. Between the boys with gold signet rings worn so smooth the initials were unreadable because they didn’t have to be read—everyone knew what they meant—and girls like me who wore their names on chains bought at Tiffany’s.
I couldn’t blame Simon for wanting what I wanted, but his being so obvious about it made me feel . . . exposed.
And he had to try so hard. He worked three jobs to keep up. The funny thing was, he ended up having more spending money than Cass, whose trust fund didn’t kick in until he was thirty, and so Simon often paid the bill when we went out.
How he must have hated us.
And yet he was the one who found the apartment for him and Cass to share after college. Who got the internship at the Times first and then recommended Cass. Who always walked me downstairs and waited while I got a cab when I had to go back to Westchester at night. All that changed after Cass got promoted over him and Simon believed it was because Cass had accused him of plagiarism. They had a big fight and then it seemed Simon just dropped out of our lives. I remember I’d been hurt that he was able to just sever his ties with both of us over a work thing, but when I said that to Cass he told me I didn’t understand how ambitious Simon was.
He was always a trespasser, Cass said, like Neddy in “The Swimmer.” We were just the pools he had to swim through to get where he wanted to go.
How satisfied he must have been to find a way to get back at Cass. But I couldn’t help wondering whether I was part of his revenge scheme or if I had just been collateral damage. Maybe that’s what I really want to know even more than what happened at the Hi-Line Club.
I hear the ding of an incoming email, which at this time of night is less likely to be announcing a sale at Saks or an offer for low-cost prescription drugs (am I already in that demographic?). It’s Simon, replying only twenty-seven minutes after my email to him, saying he’d love to get together. When am I free?
I tell him the truth, that I have a lot of time on my hands these days. Then I suggest he come uptown to my new neighborhood and join me at my local pub for Tuesday trivia night.
WHEN I GET to the Black Rose I’m glad I decided to dress down. Simon is drinking a pint at the bar wearing jeans, an untucked Oxford shirt, and a rumpled tweed jacket looking like he might have just wandered out of the library at Brown. He certainly hasn’t aged since I last saw him, which was probably at the Met Gala six years ago. I’m in jeans, too, (a $300 pair I bought when I still had money) and a portrait-collar sweater that shows off my collarbones. Simon once told me I looked like Audrey Hepburn in Charade and I’m hoping my outfit will remind him of that night we saw it in the Student Union—the night he tried to kiss me.
The evening is crisp, everyone wearing sweaters and plaids, and there are crowds of boisterous young men streaming down from the Columbia playing fields up the street. It feels like college. When Simon turns and sees me it’s clear he’s thinking about those days too.
“Melissa,” he says, getting up and leaning down to kiss my cheek. “Look at you! You look like you just walked out of the library and are on your way to a frat party.”
I laugh, waving away the compliment. “I have kids in college now.”
“Nevertheless,” he says, stepping back to survey me, “you haven’t aged a day. I was afraid—”
“That being a widow had turned me into an old hag?” I ask.
He has the good grace to blush. “If I had known that Cass—”
“You wouldn’t have run the story?” I ask, smiling sweetly. “Let’s start out by being honest, Simon. Nothing would have kept you from running a story you believed in. And you couldn’t have known Cass would . . .” I allow my voice to wobble and I touch the back of my hand to my cheek. Simon is immediately all over me, arm around my shoulder, escorting me to a table, signaling the waiter for a drink. I allow myself to be cosseted and then apologize for making a fuss.
“I’m just happy you reached out to me, Mel. I wanted to—but I didn’t think you’d see me. I’ve been feeling lousy.”
I bite back the response that he damn well should feel lousy and say instead, “I just thought: I lost Cass; I don’t want to lose all my old friends—most of whom will have nothing to do with me anymore.”
“Is that true? That’s awful, Mel; it’s not your fault what Cass did.”
“Isn’t it?” I ask, leaning forward, hands clasped together on the sticky table. “Everyone thinks it is. I should have known, I should have stopped it. But here’s the thing, Simon, I thought I had. Three years ago I threw him out. I only took him back because . . . well, you probably heard about Whit. He needed the stability of an intact family. But my condition was that he never stray again. And I thought he was staying true to his word. He really seemed like a different man these last three years . . .” I do the voice wobble and eye wipe again and take a sip of my drink. Simon leans forward and touches my hand.
“You did the best you could, Melissa. If it’s any consolation I think he did change three years ago—no one’s come forward from the last three years.”
“Well, that’s something,” I say with a little shaky laugh. “But even that . . . I wonder . . .” I move my hand to his arm and grasp his wrist. “I thought he seemed different because he was ashamed of his behavior, but now I think that he was living under a cloud and I wonder if something else happened three years ago. Something he was afraid of.”
“Maybe,” Simon says levelly, “he was afraid that one of the women he had assaulted was going to call the police.”
I let go of his hand and lean back, but I don’t break eye contact. “Do you really believe that, Simon? Do you really think all those women were telling the truth? Don’t you remember college, how girls were always throwing themselves at Cass?”
“College was a long time ago, Mel.” He takes a sip of his beer and looks out the window. “And I don’t remember you throwing yourself at Cass. As I remember it, he pursued you pretty hard.”
“Did he?” I ask, flattered in spite of myself, but also a little suspicious. I remember that day in the library Simon looking up and catching my eye, seeing me watching Cass, the momentary recognition that we both wanted the same thing. But then, I’d been better at hiding it. “I suppose I didn’t want to make it easy for him. I think I realized he was the kind of man who didn’t want what was easy.”
“Are you sure that’s the only reason you hesitated? Are you sure it wasn’t because you saw something in him that scared you before he finally wore you down?”
I try to laugh, but it comes out shrill—I notice Mick looking over from the bar as if he’s worried about me. “You always were so dramatic, Simon. Weren’t you going to major in theatre before you met Cass? Maybe you should have stuck with that.”
It’s a little mean, but I’m wounded that he thinks I succumbed to Cass wearing me down as if I were some witless sorority girl he got drunk to lay. And it’s not true. I had set out to get Caspar Osgood that day in the library. Maybe, it occurs to me for the first time, it was seeing Simon wanting him that made me want Cass.
Nothing makes you want something more than knowing someone else wants it.
“Maybe we both would have been happier if we’d never met Cass,” Simon says. “I’ve always thought it was a shame how y
ou wasted your potential on him. You could have been a good reporter.”
“You make it sound as if I’m already over the hill. I can still be a reporter.”
“Can you, Mel?” he asks. “Reporting—good reporting—takes at least a passing acquaintance with the truth. When you’ve spent as long as you have living a lie you may find it hard to recognize the truth.”
I’m so stunned that I can’t say anything right away. “Well,” I finally say, trying to keep my voice from shaking for real now, “I certainly recognize when I’m not appreciated . . .” I start to get up and Simon gets up with me, tossing some bills on the table. He follows me out the door and catches up with me across the street on the edge of the park.
“What did you expect, Mel?” he demands angrily as if I were the one who had insulted him. “Did you think I was still carrying a torch for you?”
“I expected,” I say, rounding on him, “for you to tell me the truth, since it’s so important to you. You had something on Cass. You threatened him with revealing something that had happened at the Hi-Line Club. That’s why he didn’t fight back. That’s why he killed himself. What was it, Simon? If you want me to face the truth let’s start there.”
Simon’s face under the streetlamp looks suddenly pale and stricken. “Where did you hear that?” he asks in a low voice that rumbles in my stomach. I’m suddenly aware of how vulnerable I am—a lone woman standing next to the dark expanse of the park with a man. There aren’t so many people out now that it’s gotten cooler. But then I dismiss my fears. This is Simon. We went to college together.
“I read Cass’s emails,” I say, tilting my chin up defiantly. “After he died. So you see, I’m not the witless innocent you seem to think I am.”
“I never said you were witless—or innocent, Mel.” There’s still that warning rumble in his voice, but now there’s something else, too. He steps closer to me and I feel an electric charge between us that I’m not sure is fear or attraction. “But are you sure the email was really from me? You know it’s not impossible to make it look like you’re someone else on the Internet.”
“Are you saying you didn’t send an email to Cass saying you’d print the ‘Hi-Line Incident’ if he sued Manahatta?”
“I’m asking, Melissa, if you’re ready to face the truth,” he says with a sudden gentleness that leaves me speechless for a moment. Then I know what to say.
“You’re one to talk. You’re the one whose life has been a lie. Admit it, you wanted to be Cass since freshman year in college. Look at you”—I gesture at the tweed jacket and Oxford shirt—“you’re still the poor boy from a blue-collar mill town who wanted to look like he came from money. You even stole Cass’s work and that’s why he got promoted over you—”
Simon’s laugh is so sharp and full of anger that it startles me into silence. “Is that what Cass told you, Mel? He was the one stealing from me.” He slaps his chest so hard I jump. “He’d take a story right out of my printer and pass it off as his because he was running late on deadline. And why not? I wrote half his papers in college. I’m not proud of that. I admit I was desperate to have his approval and he always made it sound like he was doing me a favor—teaching me to become a better writer with the benefit of his expensive prep school education. He once told me that his old man used to say that the best thing you could do for people was to let them be of use to you.”
“He hated his father,” I said.
“Yes,” Simon agrees, “but that didn’t stop Cass from turning into him.”
There’s still hatred in his voice but I’m no longer sure if it’s all for Cass; some of it seems directed at himself. It makes me feel sick . . . and suddenly very tired. I turn and start walking up the hill. He follows me, but I pretend not to notice. The truth is I’m scared, scared that what Simon says is true—that it was Cass who stole Simon’s work all those years ago and Cass who had assaulted those women and lied to my face. That he had turned into his philandering father. And if Cass wasn’t who I thought he was, then what did that make me? My whole life has revolved around Cass, and without that center, what do I have left? As I reach the top of the hill I feel suddenly dizzy, as if I’ve been sent spinning out into space. I pause—and the footsteps behind me pause too.
I spin around, ready to confront Simon. “All right!” I shout. “Tell me the worst of it!”
But there’s no one there. The pavement, which had echoed with footsteps a moment ago, is empty. The park stretches out on either side, empty and vacant. Then I feel someone behind me.
I spin around and find Enda standing close behind me.
“Mrs. Osgood? Who are you talking to? Has someone frightened you?”
Yes! I want to scream. Simon frightened me!
“Someone was following me,” I say instead, struggling to get my voice under control. “But I lost him.” I look into the empty park. “What are you doing away from the building?”
“I thought I heard something. . . . Come on. I shouldn’t have left my post.”
I let myself be steered to the front door of the Refuge, but I can feel anger percolating up inside of me as my fear recedes. It must have been Simon following me and then he ran off when I turned around. He was trying to scare me to get me to back off. Poor silly Melissa, who was easy prey in college for charming Caspar Osgood. The dupe who gave up her own career. The blind wife who enabled her husband’s cheating.
I am not that woman.
I will not let Simon and his minion Joan Lurie turn me into that woman.
I say a chilly good night to Enda, refusing his offer to see me to my door. I need to think. Simon never came right out and said that he hadn’t sent the email to Cass, but he had managed to evade my question about what happened at the Hi-Line. I need to know what happened. I have to get Joan out of her apartment to install that spyware on her laptop.
And now I know how.
After I’ve poured myself a glass of wine I sit down at my desk and open my laptop and open Simon’s email to me. His private email address is Cassiopeia930—a reference from another Cheever story, that one about the brothers. What a pretentious twit! How dare he lecture me!
I make an email account Cassiopeia1930, banking on Joan’s distracted state to keep her from noticing the extra number. Then I send Joan an email from “Simon.”
“There’s something I need to talk to you about in private,” I write. “It’s about the Hi-Line incident. Meet me tomorrow night at the Black Rose at nine.”
Chapter Fifteen
Joan
ON THE FIFTH call I find the server who brought in a substitute. It’s the rock singer, Maya, who had been about to embark on her band’s South American tour. “Oh yeah,” she says when I ask her if she might have missed a shift around that time. “I’d been working back-to-back shifts for ten days to make extra money for the tour but I just kind of crashed. I got sick and I had to find someone to cover me for a few gigs.”
“Could one of those gigs have been the party at the Hi-Line Club?” I ask, biting back my frustration that she hadn’t mentioned this possibility earlier.
“Yeah, maybe? I mean, we’d catered a couple of gigs there that year—a lot of political stuff, so I thought I’d done the one you asked about but come to think of it . . . yeah, I think I remember it was really hard to find someone because there were a lot of weddings that month. Everyone thinks June’s the big wedding month but May is actually more popular—”
“Do you remember who you finally got to cover you?” I ask, cutting short her May-is-the-new-June spiel. It sounds like a story idea that I’d pitch to Sylvia.
“Yeah, it was this girl named MJ . . . or was it AJ? . . . who worked for a tea room downtown . . . yeah, I totally remember her now. She had a rose tattoo on her wrist.”
“Uh-huh, do you remember her last name?”
“Mmmmm . . .” Maya hums so long it sounds like she’s warming up for a song, but she ends with an abrupt and contradictory “Yeah, no, but I’m sure you cou
ld find her. She drew these really cool cartoons and had a webcomic with a logo that was some kind of bird and she worked in one of those tea rooms in the Village . . . or SoHo or Nolita.”
Sure, I think, that should be a snap. “Would Bread & Roses have a record of her?”
“No, it was easier just to have her fill in as if she were me. She took the tips and I paid her back when I got my check.”
“How?” I leap in. “How did you pay her back?”
“Um, on Venmo? I think? Did they have Venmo three years ago?”
“Yes,” I say, because I remember doing a story on it. “Would you have a record of that?”
“Uh . . . yeah . . . maybe . . . I can look . . . but I’ve got to go now. I have a gig in Williamsburg today.”
I can tell she’s impatient with my attempts to pin down a detail that feels unimportant to her. A girl named MJ or AJ who filled in for her, just another aspirational creative in a city of millions of them.
“Okay, but if you could look through your Venmo account . . . or if you remember anything else about MJ”—Like her last name!—“could you please call me back? It’s important. She may—” I hesitate, unsure how much I should share with Maya. But I can feel her focus shifting, and if I don’t do something to keep it, she’ll forget all about me and the phantom MJ/AJ as soon as she ends this call. “She may have witnessed something.”
“Oh my God!” Maya cries. “Like a crime? Could she be in danger? Wow,” she says in an awed tone. “I mean, it could have been me.”
I have Maya’s attention now, even if she has turned it back on herself, so I try to make the most of it. “Yes, I’m afraid that she could be in trouble for something she saw. So if you could please try to think if there’s anything else you remember . . .”
“Absolutely,” Maya says. “I promise, but I’ve gotta run. My train’s—”
The call dissolves in a screech of subway brakes. For a moment I am on the platform with her, hopping on a train for Brooklyn, something I’ve done a hundred times since I moved to New York but that now feels as farfetched as taking a rocket ship to the moon. It’s been months since I took a subway—a week since I went out last, and that was just to chase the hooded phantom down to the church.
The Stranger Behind You Page 17