There was still enough residual light for her to see the profile of mountains, standing against the sky like sentries.
Not that Mack flaunted his affairs or was indiscreet; he was so discreet that she had virtually nothing to confront him with. Still, there were too many signs to ignore: his guilty gifts to her; his evasive behavior when he returned from a trip; the way he disappeared in his plane every Sunday of the increasingly rare weekends when he was home; and most tellingly, her inability to reach him, though he knew it made her anxious when he turned off his phone. Her various hypotheses had narrowed down to one: Maja Stern, Terry’s ex, according to Mack a notorious seducer, whose name came up too oddly and too often to be innocent. Mack’s jabbering on about her whenever he returned from L.A. was a giveaway that he was sleeping with her—though it could also be viewed as evidence that he was not. Well, if not Maja, then someone else.
She did not know what to do about it. She should probably have gone back to work after Chloe was born, instead of giving in to Mack’s pressure to move to the mansion he built for her (picking up two architectural awards in passing) and having another child. She couldn’t disagree with Mack that hiring someone to replace her full-time at home while she became another commuter slogging through the major traffic arteries was wasteful and absurd, particularly at the price of missing the chance to watch her children develop. But the alternative was becoming increasingly clear: as Mack’s power expanded, hers decreased. Given his nature, she should have vetoed the move, dream house or no. Unfortunately, his nature wasn’t revealed to her until it was too late.
The owl hooted again. This time Heather responded. On they went exchanging hoots back and forth for a few exhilarating moments before the owl fell silent or flew away. But not even the thrill of engaging in call-and-response with a wild bird, as she had learned to do at summer camp, could dispel Heather’s ambivalence. She wasn’t sorry to be done with the frantic deadlines and the steady jockeying for position at the architectural journal where she had been an assistant editor. But she did miss the office camaraderie and the mild glory of writing a monthly column on the Ecology of Everyday Life, which at least sported her byline and made her feel useful.
Mack had promised her greater usefulness to come, dangling before her ever more seductive concessions to her green ideals. He offered to rescue a pristine mountaintop from rumored development as an industrial park by a rival consortium. He embraced Heather’s alternative energy schemes, designing their house as a model of efficiency, with every appliance but the restaurant stove run by solar energy, and every usable drop of household waste recyclable. The sun would keep their motors turning, heat their rooms and water, light up their nights, and after serving all their own needs provide enough extra energy to sell as a backup source to the nearby village. Surely, he argued, she would find it worth leaving the city in order to make her vision real.
Her vision was one thing, her ambition another. It was the opportunity to indulge her ambition and test her talent for writing stirring stories that finally convinced her to move. A room of one’s own and five hundred pounds a year (adjusted for inflation) was a rare privilege, one that other women at her stage of life could only fantasize about. But she also knew it was a gamble with her future. That her stories had been admired by her professors and published in college journals was no guarantee of success in the world. What if her ambition outstripped her talent and she failed to produce anything worthwhile? Then she would have sacrificed what she’d had for a mere fantasy, however alluring, and wind up with a life as limited as those her generation of women believed they had escaped. If she eventually returned to the world of publishing, she’d be years behind those who had not dropped out to have children, and if the widely reported research was correct, she would never catch up. If she didn’t return, then for all her classy education she might wind up living like the mothers and grandmothers so pitied or scorned by their ambitious, successful progeny.
After she and Mack left New York, the excitement of their collaboration did seem to fulfill Mack’s predictions. Working on the house with him, Heather was no less engaged than she’d been on the magazine, happier in the country than she’d thought possible. But once their “project” was completed, the rooms furnished, the kinks straightened out, their second child born, the architectural awards reaped, and Mack had moved on to other, bigger projects, Heather gradually began to feel bereft. The leisure and beauty she inhabited, for which civility dictated that she be grateful, sometimes, paradoxically, left her feeling like someone under house arrest, however magnificent the house.
The owl returned. They spoke again. Heather slipped inside and grabbed the night vision binoculars Mack had given her, then perched on the deck railing and aimed them toward a certain tall oak tree where a week ago at dusk she had briefly seen her interlocutor. No luck this time, not even with the night vision promised by the infrared illuminator could she find him (or her).
Absorbed by the demands of house and family, she had been surprised to find that with Mack away two weeks out of every three, and no one else to talk to, she had become increasingly (without pronouncing the shameful word) lonely. Françoise, who helped with the children, though interestingly European, was barely eighteen, hardly out of childhood. Carmela, the thrice-weekly cleaner, was embarrassed to speak English. Heather would rather sew up her lips than upset her mother in Topeka by revealing her discontent, nor could she confide in her sister, with whom she’d once been close but who had grown distant after Heather had moved away. As for her best friend from work, Barbara Rabin, Heather suspected that Barbara disapproved of her stay-at-home life or perhaps simply envied Heather’s freedom. Whatever caused the tension, Heather feared that if she confessed her rage at Mack and her fears for her marriage, Barbara would become smug or, worse, defensive about her own. Heather’s few single friends were either innocents about marriage or opposed to it; why should she confirm their preconceptions?
Perhaps if she’d been able to write her stories she would not have resented Mack’s absences. But with her children at home, and even during the brief morning hours that they were in preschool, she found herself unable to summon the necessary concentration or will to work. Later, she promised herself, when she had larger blocks of time.
After a few more exchanges the owl went silent again. Heather drew another deep draft of nature into her lungs and returned to the house. When the real estate market collapsed under an avalanche of foreclosures and frozen credit, she thought it would slow Mack down, forcing him to spend more time at home. But somehow the economic catastrophe had an opposite effect. As Mack explained it to her, projects on which he’d reaped profits before the crash gave him sufficient capital to enable him to buy up newly distressed properties at a small percentage of their original market value. While his undercapitalized and overextended rivals retreated into bankruptcy, he found himself staring into the opportunity of a lifetime. Far from diminishing, his ambitions soared. He had only to hold on until the market rebounded to become a wealthy man. Meanwhile, every day presented him with new bargains to investigate or acquire.
Heather’s own ambitions, which had gone underground but hardly vanished when they moved, also received a vitalizing jolt. Just about the time Jamie was finally in morning preschool, a former colleague, who had launched a new general-interest online journal, invited her to write a column on ecology. Although it did nothing to bring Mack home, and it was biweekly and barely paid, it did reconnect her to the world, if only the virtual one. With an editor awaiting her words, her discipline returned, and after that, for the few hours when the children were either at school or out in the garden speaking French with Françoise, she holed up in her study, a small, windowed room overlooking the woods, which she found the most charming and peaceful in the house. There, in her brief mornings, she researched and wrote her columns and put on hold the amazing stories she hoped to write once both children were in school full-time.
4 “ZOLTAN BARBU?” SAID
MACK, skipping the formality of introductions.
Zoltan took a reflexive step backward to stave off possible intrusive intimacy before giving a clipped tentative nod.
“If it’s any comfort to you,” said Mack, “the last couple of times I was with Maja she couldn’t stop talking about you.”
Zoltan studied the stranger’s face before asking, “And you are …?”
“Allerton McKay, a friend of Maja’s.” He handed Zoltan an engraved business card.
Zoltan did not look at it but instead gripped Mack’s eyes with his. “What did she say?”
“She said you have too much integrity for Hollywood, maybe even for her.” Mack let the flattery take effect before pressing his conclusion: “So if she didn’t blame you, why should you blame yourself?”
Zoltan relaxed a bit. “Good try, thank you, but I’m afraid her opinion no longer counts. Besides, my profession requires that I understand all persons’ predicaments. Evidently, I did not understand Maja’s. I dismissed her threats as manipulative … Your connection to her?”
Now that Maja was in no position to contradict him, Mack was tempted to use the traditional male prerogative of claiming the sexual victory that had so far eluded him but that he’d hoped to perhaps secure that very night. On the other hand, there was undoubtedly a certain moral benefit attached to proclaiming fidelity to one’s wife. He didn’t know which response was more likely to win Zoltan’s admiration and confidence. Which was more appropriate to the circumstances? Mack whipped out his handkerchief and coughed into it for the full thirty seconds it took to weigh the pros and cons of each response before saying, “Just friends.”
Unconvinced, Zoltan folded his arms and raised a skeptical eyebrow at Mack, who thus reaped the benefit of both answers.
“I knew her through Terry Josephs,” Mack said reassuringly. “We were roommates at college. I used to see the two of them whenever I came to L.A. on business. I suppose you know she tried to kill herself before, after Terry told her he was moving to Australia. Luckily, she failed. So before he left, Terry asked me to stay in touch with her. In fact, I was supposed to have dinner with her tonight. Made the date a week ago. But when I called earlier today to confirm, someone answered her phone and told me the terrible news.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t believe it. I had meetings scheduled for the rest of the day. But I canceled them all and drove straight here.”
“Everyone has a story: ‘Where I was when I heard.’ You only had dinner with her? That’s all?”
“That’s it. I’m married, and Terry’s my friend.” Mack was pleased that Zoltan thought Maja might have been sleeping with him when in fact, despite her ceaseless flirtation, which was as much a part of her style as her low-cut dresses, she treated him more like a girlfriend than a possible boyfriend, confiding the story of her life after a single glass of wine. Part of a generation whose artistic aspiration was to make films rather than poems, she knew early on that to pursue her dream she would have to emigrate. She worked in kitchens and mastered English in order to hurry to Hollywood. Arriving at twenty-two, she began climbing the ladder from production assistant to assistant producer until she landed a plum job in casting—less glamorous, perhaps, but more powerful. Hungry starlets befriended her and ambitious men pursued her; but her own desires, she confessed to Mack, tended toward oddball artistes and Indie filmmakers. When she met Zoltan she felt an instant bond. That he belonged to her parents’ generation only enhanced his appeal.
Mack wondered: Could he have had her? Though he had the money for her, he probably lacked the panache. And if he had succeeded, without her other men to discuss, what would they have found to talk about? Unlike his usual women—the flight attendants and receptionists for whom his money was attraction enough, or the cyber dates with whom he shared some naughty pictures and sexual kicks—Maja had other intentions.
Zoltan studied Mack’s card. “What exactly are Allerton Enterprises?”
“Commercial properties mainly, some mixed use, some public buildings, the occasional fantasy home. Mostly back east, but now I’m looking into a couple of interesting projects here. One’s a biggie. If I can pull it off—let’s just say I have high hopes for it.”
“You own, you design, or you just build them?”
“Depends on the financing.”
“I see. Isn’t that difficult now?”
“You’re right, Zoltan, shrewd observation. But in every financial crisis, there are losers and winners. This time I’m one of the lucky ones.”
“How is that?”
“I’ve been able to acquire some exceptional properties at a fraction of their value.” He couldn’t help gloating.
“And you are the man she stood up tonight?” asked Zoltan, looking down at the card. “ ‘Allerton McKay, President and CEO.’ ” He stared at Mack. “President? CEO?”
Mack’s gaze hit the floor in affected humility and his voice dropped half an octave. “I founded the company, so I get to be prez. You want to be VP? I’ll put you in business.”
“Careful there, Allerton—”
“Mack.”
Zoltan took a harder look. So this was the mighty Mack: Maja had said that he was loaded, but not that he was short. “Careful, Mack, I could accept. Whole new life is what I need, as far from here as possible.”
A mustached man with shoulder-length, probably dyed hair and bad skin bowed before Zoltan and mumbled, “Terrible, terrible, terrible.”
Zoltan lowered his great arc of a nose in a dignified nod.
“We all loved her, but the pity is she didn’t know it,” said the man. “Which is probably why she did it. And now it’s too late to tell her. Wouldn’t she have enjoyed this though, all this attention?”
Zoltan closed his eyes until the man was gone.
“An ex-boyfriend?” asked Mack.
Zoltan tossed back his forelock and said contemptuously, “Within one week every man here will promote himself to ex-lover. What’s to prevent it? See already how they enjoy themselves at her expense?”
Mack was glad he had not claimed to be her lover, though he could hardly deny that he too was enjoying himself at her expense. “Not me,” he reasserted. “As I told you, we’d only have dinner together now and then. For Terry’s sake, really.”
Seeing another long scrutinizing stare begin to inhabit Zoltan’s eyes, Mack said, “Let’s get out of here, get something to eat, okay? I still have my reservation at La Mer.”
“La Mer? I’m afraid La Mer is out of my range.”
“No problem. My treat. And if you don’t mind my saying so,” he confided, draping an arm around Zoltan’s back and leading him toward the exit, “you look like you could use a decent meal.”
5 AT THE FIRST RING of the phone Heather leaped up, overturning her tea. She glanced at her watch: late. Emergency? An official announcement of Mack’s sudden death? She hoped that she didn’t hope so, but wouldn’t bet on it. She let the tea sink into the Moroccan rug, which, unlike her, seemed able to absorb everything without showing it.
His death would certainly shake things up, lift the doubt that had settled over her like mist in the valley, allowing her to see ahead to some decisive act. If he suddenly died she’d sell the house, buy a condo in the city, find a good school for the kids and enroll in the best MFA program she could get into. Or take a live-in lover and stay on here to write. If their father died in an accident, the children couldn’t blame her—how often did they see him anyway?—though part of her believed there are no accidents.
She reached for the phone. Forget the insurance. Bite your tongue. Where would they be without Mack? She picked up before voicemail kicked in and heard the familiar “Hi, babe.”
Only Mack, calling with lies. She moved to the floor and squatted on her haunches, back flat against the wall, and took a deep breath, marshaling her wits. “Oh, hi. Finally!”
“Believe it or not, this is the first free minute I’ve had all day. You weren’t asleep, were you?”
&n
bsp; “No, but you missed the kids, they’ve been asleep for hours.” She hadn’t wanted to accuse him; it just popped out. She pressed each vertebra against the wall, then slowly rose and squatted again.
“I know. But I need to talk to you, babe.”
“I need to talk to you too. In fact, I’ve been trying and trying to reach you, but your phone was off. I tried your hotel, but you aren’t there. Where are you, Mack?”
“In a restaurant. About to have dinner.”
“With—?”
“Actually, a very interesting man. A writer. You’ve probably heard of him. Zoltan Barbu? If that’s how you pronounce it.”
“Yes, of course I’ve heard of him,” snapped Heather, unable to suppress a flash of envy. She, not Mack, was the book lover. On a sudden hunch, she blurted out, “What’s his connection to Maja?”
“Heather, you’re psychic! Get this. Zoltan has been in a relationship with her for nearly a year now. But, uh, he’s not anymore.”
Was Mack boasting? Had he won Maja away from Zoltan Barbu?
“So …?”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. Which is why I’m calling now. I’ve had to change my flight. I’ll be staying here an extra day. I still have a lot of work to do. And lots to tell you when I get back.”
He sounded too excited. Her stomach tightened. “Tell me now. Please.” Loneliness was a weakness she could handle, but not the unpredictable demon of jealousy that lay sprawled behind her consciousness like a napping child ready to cry out at the slightest disturbance, more demanding and exhausting than a three-year-old.
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