by Tia Williams
“Obviously, this gala is not the place,” he said, smiling.
“If you don’t mind my asking, are you from Montana? Wisconsin? You sort of look like a cowboy, which begs the question—what’s a cowboy doing in fashion?”
“To answer your first question, South Dakota. The Sunshine State.”
The Sunshine State?
“And to answer your second, my mom was the most successful seamstress in our town.” He shrugged. “I loved what she did. The fabrics intrigued me. The design, the construction. At Parsons, I discovered that I was fascinated by the social history of fashion. And it stuck.”
“Yes, it’s hard to shake fashion-love,” she said, scanning the room for Elodie, James’ future wife.
“Impossible,” he said. “So yes, let’s continue this conversation.
You have my information, correct?”
“Correct.” Jenna stuck out her hand. “Good to meet you Mr. Diaz.”
“James. Until we speak again.”
He walked away and Jenna began nibbling on a nail. This might be the thing. James Diaz would be her out. She would leave StyleZine and maybe everything else with Eric would fall into place. Her eight-month contract was almost up, and she’d more than exceeded Darcy’s expectations. When Billie first brought him up, it was too early for her to leave her new job with any kind of grace. But now, she’d put in enough time.
She had to tell Eric. Jenna leaned against the mirrored surface of the bar and pulled her phone out of her clutch.
Jenna Jones
iMessages
April 25, 2013, 9:30 PM
Jenna: Call me. Please. Just call me.
She held her phone to her heart, willing him to call her. But, when he didn’t after five minutes, she lost hope. So she dropped the phone back in her bag. In an attempt to rid herself of the persistent nausea she’d had since Eric walked away from her on that pier, she searched around in there for her roll of Tums.
That’s when a hand reached from behind Jenna and slipped something down on the bar in front of her. Astonished, she dropped the Tums to the floor. Jenna knew who was behind her; she’d recognize that hand anywhere. It was what he placed on the bar that shook her to her core.
As of October 12, 1991, Brian Benjamin Stein wants: To be a great architect. Better than Frank Lloyd Wright.
To be a millionaire before I’m thirty.
To have homes in three countries.
To build my mom a townhouse on Park Avenue.
To have a wife and kids.
You. I want you.
The napkin from that night at The Tombs had yellowed and was frayed on one side. The original ink had faded, too, but there was new ink. The bottom two bullets were circled in bright red. Speechless, Jenna picked up the napkin and turned around. There was Brian, in a gorgeous tux, his face flushed, naked with more emotion than she ever remembered seeing from him.
“Brian?”
“She’s dead.”
“Lily?”
“No, my mother. Anna. She just died.” He grabbed her hand.
“Come with me.”
As Brian hurriedly led Jenna through the party, the gossipy social set shimmered with delight at this very public display of Grand Gesturedom—they’d always wondered what went wrong with that couple, anyway. Elodie, who was flirting with a mysterious cowboy named James Diaz, almost fell into her martini.
Jenna was too shattered by the news to pull away. Or to protest. Or to hear her phone ringing from inside her clutch.
Far across the room, the usually eagle-eyed Darcy Vale had missed the scene with Brian and Jenna. She was busy. With pitch-perfect sadness, she was revealing to Les James, the editor-in-chief of New York, that Andrea Granger—the reporter who’d betrayed and diminished her with that StyleZine article—was selling valuable insider tips and story ideas to Vanity Fair. Of course, she’d already wrangled a VF writer to corroborate the story. On Monday morning, Andrea would be fired in complete disgrace.
Just then, Suki Delgado stumbled over to her. She threw an arm over Darcy’s shoulder.
“’Member me?” the model slurred in her ear. Darcy glanced up.
“Of course, I know who you are,” she said, offering up her cheek to the bombed bombshell. “Surely you want to discuss The Perfect Find. Sorry, I’m a fan, but we’re careful not to shoot too many models. It’s more about fashionable real girls, personalities.”
“Oh I already talked to Eric about that, and he turned me down. No ‘member me? I took your son to my senior prom.”
“Eric went to the prom?”
“So sad,” continued Suki, who was too sloshed to pick up on social cues, “that I missed out on being your daughter-in-law. But whatevs. I respect Jenna Jones so much I don’t care that she won.”
“What did Jenna win?”
“Eric! I saw them out ages ago, and…”
The terrifying look on Darcy’s face made Suki clamp her mouth shut. The two editors in mid-conversation with her picked up on the tension, too. Suddenly finding themselves needing to socialize elsewhere, they disappeared into the crowd.
“You know,” started Suki, slowly backing away, “I th-think I see Usher over there by Julianne Moore, and he’s on my bucket list, sooo…”
The tiny woman—glamorous as ever in a black-and-white striped Elie Saab column gown—grabbed the supermodel’s arm, digging her fuschia nails into her skin.
“Suki. Follow. Me. Now.”
CHAPTER 27
Jenna was sitting in the back of a parked town car with Brian, her ex-everything, who she hadn’t seen in years. And now her beloved Anna was dead. It didn’t seem real.
It was definitely real, though. Because Brian was a wreck. Well, his version of a wreck. He sat next to her, his face red and with shaking hands. Jenna had never seen him like this. He was always completely, frustratingly unflappable. But now he was falling apart. “Brian,” she started, her voice strangled, “Tell me. What happened?”
“The cancer. It came back fast and aggressive, and it killed her yesterday.”
“I’m so sorry. I wish I…”
“I knew how bad it was, the doctors told me it had metastasized everywhere, but I couldn’t face it. So I put her in the most elite urgent care facility, hired her a nutritionist and four around-the-clock nurses and a water therapist and a therapist-therapist and arranged for her hairstylist and manicurist to come twice a week. That manicurist saw her more than I did. I couldn’t go. I didn’t want to remember her bald, seventy-five pounds, and hooked up to fifty IV’s. The last time I saw her, she didn’t know who I was. I never went back.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Brian. No one knows how to react when loved ones get sick. There’s no manual. You did the best you could.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, staring into nothing, like he was going over it all in his head. “I wasn’t there when she died. I’m never there.”
I wasn’t there for her, either. She told me she was dying and I didn’t believe her.
Jenna pulled Brian into her arms. He resisted, his body stiff—he didn’t know how to take it. Brian was never the one who needed soothing (and was definitely not huggy). But right now, it didn’t matter. She held him, rocking him like a baby, forcing him to accept her comfort. Finally, he relaxed, slipping his arms around her.
“It’ll be okay. It’ll be fine,” she whispered nonsensically, the way one does with small children. Truthfully, she was trying to calm them both. She refused to cry, this was his moment to grieve. “Anna never would’ve wanted you to torture yourself this way,” she said. “She would’ve wanted you to drop some LSD in her honor, throw a cocktail party and invite every love of her life.”
“I think she did that on her last birthday.”
“She was so magical, so Sixties,” said Jenna. “Did you know she had an affair with Bob Dylan.”
“Why do you know that?”
“’Cause that’s a story you pass onto your daughter. I was her de facto daughter,�
�� said Jenna. “It was from her candle-making days in the Village, before she followed your dad to Philly. She met him at a Jimi Hendrix show at The Bitter End. Apparently, Jimi and Dylan both wanted her, but Dylan won—because he wrote a song about her. ‘Burning the Wick.’ He scribbled the lyrics on rolling papers.”
“Dylan, huh? Where was he when we were living in a shack so poorly insulated that I slept in a bed filled with puddles when it rained?” Still cocooned in Jenna’s arms, he slumped a little. “I never liked Dylan.”
After minutes sitting in silence, he drew away from her and leaned back against the seat with a heavy, broken sigh.
“Come home,” he said.
“It’s not my home anymore.”
“It’s more yours than mine.”
“I can’t.”
“Please, JJ,” said Brian, running a hand through his hair, which was a tousled, rumpled mess. Always so pristine, it was like the stress of the guilt and loss was disassembling him.
Jenna rubbed her temple, a stress-gesture that was classically Eric. It was that phenomenon that happens with lovers, best friends, and siblings—when you’re so close, that you start picking up each other’s traits through osmosis. She’d absorbed Eric thoroughly.
“Just for an hour,” said Brian.
And because she wanted to, Jenna said yes. She was gutted by Anna’s death, too. She needed to be around the only person who understood how she was feeling. Even if that person was Brian. For tonight, she could look beyond all the anger, the resentment, the questions.
The first sign that Jenna was in for a surreal night was when they walked up to the door of the gorgeous brownstone on Jane Street, and she reached in her clutch for her house keys.
“Sorry,” she said, awkwardly, as Brian opened the door. “This is weird, okay?”
When she walked in, she gasped. Everything was exactly where she left it. Jenna was seized with an urge to touch everything, to walk through all the rooms, to smell them, feel them. So she did, with Brian trailing behind her. She ran her fingers over the turquoise living room wall, over the display of vintage photography and pop art. She caressed the armoire she decoupaged herself, sank into the orange tufted sofa, and bent down in her evening gown to stroke the bright Turkish rugs decorating the white-painted floors. She sat in her office, gazing at the floor-to-ceiling piles of art books—and her former prized possession: a display case of vintage Old Hollywood shoes that Brian had won for her at a Christie’s auction. And upstairs, in their old warm, plush bedroom—which was conceived so that every surface had a different, lovely texture—she grazed her fingertips along everything, from the overstuffed velvet armchairs to the shiny, mirrored Art Deco bedside tables.
“Open the drawer,” said Brian, gesturing to the table on her side of the bed.
She did, and saw that her three sets of nighttime reading glasses were still nestled inside.
“Why are these still here?” she asked. He shrugged. “That’s where they go.”
She gathered up the skirt of her gown with one hand, and sat on the side of fluffy, white king sized bed. Her life had happened in these rooms. Brian had made love to her in all of them. The living room couch was where Brian would wait with a gin and tonic before they went out, while she got ready upstairs. The rooftop is where she spent her 31st birthday, which coincided with the scorching East Coast blackout of 2003 (the entire block stopped by with all the food in their fridges, and they’d barbequed until dawn).
Her office was Jenna’s safe haven, where she’d go in the middle of the night to obsess over where Brian had been for two days. And their Moroccan-tiled bathroom, the size of her studio, was where she sat with Elodie in the empty bathtub and, over tears and a bottle of Merlot, decided to leave New York.
The good memories were hazy, faded and sweet. But the bad ones—the ones that left wounds that had just healed—those were sharper.
Brian slipped off his jacket and draped it on the back of a chair. Then, he sat next to Jenna. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m marveling at how familiar everything is. And yet I don’t feel connected to it anymore.”
It’s my stuff, but my energy’s been drained from it. I can feel all the other women that have been in these rooms.
“You could’ve taken your stuff.”
“Didn’t want it,” she said. “Had to go. Fast.”
“I understand why you left. I know what I did to you. I made it so it was impossible for you to stay. I didn’t realize it then, because… well, I was entangled in some extenuating circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“This is going to be hard for you to digest, so I just want you to promise to hear me out.”
“What happened?”
“I did something unconscionable.” He stopped, and undid the top two buttons of his shirt. “I feel like I need a Montecristo cigar to get through this.”
“So, who was she?” She took a deep breath and hiked up her dress, scooting back on the bed until she was leaning against the pillows. She folded her legs, steeling herself to finally hear the truth.
“There was no she.”
“Of course there was. You were never home. You weren’t sleeping with me, so there had to have been someone else.”
Brian ran his hand through his hair again, his Malachite green eyes glazed with guilt.
“It’s worse than a she.”
Jenna grabbed a pillow and cradled it to her chest. “Start talking.”
He did. He told her that, by the time he hit his mid-thirties, something switched in him. His moral code started changing. To be a real estate developer with his level of success, you had to be a gangster. A gambler. And no real gambler gets a win, and then walks out of the casino, treats his wife to unlimited breadsticks at Olive Garden, and saves his earnings for retirement. No, he needed more. He hired thuggy scouts who used…intimidating business practices to land him the sexiest lots. His was aware that his assistant spent half the day hopping into town cars with Wall Street players, trading coke for stock tips. At an Amfar gala, Brian once listened as a close colleague spilled info on a Sacramento development he was closing on—and then, in under twenty-four hours, he stole it out from under him. It was so easy. The cash was flowing in; it seemed bottomless.
When you get it easy, you lose it easy.
Everything fell apart. The economy crashed, and most of Brian’s properties went into foreclosure. By June of 2007, his net worth had fallen from fifty to twenty million. By December of 2008, he only had five million—most of which wasn’t liquid. He only had five million because he’d poured their savings into Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund.
With this fatal mistake, his gambler’s lust had officially blinded him; making him ignore his ‘this is too good to be true’ instincts.
He minored in auditing, for Christ’s sake, and never bothered to look at the receipts. Men he respected, captains of industry, were investing with Madoff—and that was all the vetting he needed. All the cool kids were doing it.
Brian told Jenna that they were living check to check for years. He told her about the bank seizing the brownstone he built for Anna (back then, he’d said that his mom moved because she wanted to downsize). He came clean about borrowing against credit cards to pay bankruptcy attorneys, about being eight months behind on their mortgage, about the nights he’d spend in hotels, pretending to be traveling for work, too humiliated to come home and face her.
He told her that he’d felt like he was a walking dead man. And how can a dead man love someone properly? He didn’t want to sleep with Jenna, that was true. But it wasn’t because he was cheating. It was because his manhood had evaporated. He felt like a goddamned eunuch.
Jenna didn’t speak until she was certain he was finished.
“Bernie. Madoff.”
“Every thought you’re having I’ve already tortured myself with.”
“Bernie fucking Madoff was the she?”
Brian’s shoulders slumped.
“I also had a vague coke problem. Bernie Madoff, coke, and millions blown in the recession. I’m officially a New York City cliché.”
“So our entire world was falling apart, but instead of telling the truth, you let me believe that you stopped caring about me? That I was unlovable, unfuckable? Did you ever wonder what that did to me? While you were drowning in self-loathing, did you ever think about how I felt?”
“No,” he admitted. “All I cared about was that you were taken care of.”
“In the manner to which I’d been accustomed.”
“Yes,” he said. “I told you it was a lot to digest. But you deserve the truth.”
“Years later,” she said, her mouth dry.
“I’m sorry I ruined you. Ruined us. It haunts me every day.”
Jenna looked at him. The story was so outrageous, so not what she’d expected, that she barely knew how to react. It was like a salacious expose out of Vanity Fair magazine (Biracial It-Couple’s Financed Felled by the Sketchiest Financial Villain of the Century! Keeping Up With the Stein-Joneses, on Page 67). She should’ve hated him. If she’d heard this a year ago, she would’ve taken to her bed for months. But today, she felt the opposite.
Looking at Brian, besieged with shame—and sinking under the devastation of losing Anna—she was reminded that he was just a person. He made massive mistakes, he felt things, he was sorry, and he was trying to find his way, like everyone else. The tragedy was that, if he’d given Jenna the opportunity, she could’ve convinced him that he was more than what he owned; proved to him that she’d stay, no matter what.
Jenna was angry, but in a surface way that she knew would pass. More than anything, she was relieved to know the truth. But part of her calm was also knowing that those abysmal final years of their relationship could never happen to the person she was now. There’s no way she could let a man make her feel so unseen for so long.
Now, she knew what it was like to be seen.
“Brian,” she said, pushing the pillow aside and sitting next to him on the edge of the bed. “You didn’t ruin me. I ruined me.”