by Mara White
“You’re his mistress, you probably don’t need to give notice. You get to slosh a drink in his face and storm out of there all telenovela. That’s how it’s done.”
“I don’t want to fuck Akhil over. He’s been really good to me.”
“I’d just get the hell out of there if I were you. Take all of your files, or at least as much as you can on your own personal computer.”
“Why?” I ask, taking a sip of green jasmine tea. “I don’t care what they do at Montclair. If Danny’s money is dirty, it’s none of my business.”
“From what you tell me, they’re bound to get audited, maybe even seized and assets frozen.”
“That’s the least of my worries. The IRS won’t show up jealous at my door with a gun. Danny, on the other hand, is a little more volatile. I was smart to go so far away the first time. If I stay in the city, I’m going to have to lie low and maybe even change my name or something to keep him at bay. Should we go out for ice cream after we finish up here?”
Wade sets his chopsticks down and smiles. I feel a tiny pull in my gut. There is a certain draw to him.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking!”
Ice cream then turned into a bar and a beer.
We get off the elevator laughing and talking. We stumbled upon an Irish pub after our frozen yogurts and decided to give it a try—which became four pints and us singing songs along with the vintage jukebox. I don’t care at all because I’m quitting tomorrow. Wade has his arm thrown around my shoulder and we’re singing “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell because we just heard it at the bar.
Wade clears his throat and drops his arm suddenly. Danny is standing in front of my door, arms crossed, a grim look spread across his face.
“Is this your new boyfriend, Sunshine?”
“No!” Wade and I reply in unison.
“It would look that way to anyone watching.”
“I’m gonna leave you two to talk, but call if you need me. Don’t hesitate to call,” Wade says quietly, dipping his mouth to my ear.
“Okay.” I nod back. This isn’t how I wanted to confront him. I shouldn’t care if it looks like I’m cheating on him. He cheated on me first, for six years, so what’s the big deal? But I feel like I’ve been caught in the act of doing something awful—like this is betrayal and I’m the bad person.
“It’s not what it looks like. Wade is my neighbor and we’ve gotten really friendly—but we’re not lovers or anything like that. I haven’t been with anyone else. I don’t want you to think that.”
“Just unlock the door and we’ll discuss it inside,” he says, gesturing to the apartment.
“Don’t you have keys?”
“Just open it,” he says, and I feel suspicious.
I open the door and the living room is filled with silver balloons—there are red roses on every table-top and petals on the floor. It looks like a tornado of roses buzzed through and then stopped, landing all of the crimson petals gracefully around the apartment. The effect is stunning. With my dark green and white decorating, the living room looks like a frenzied rose forest.
“Surprise,” Danny says flatly.
“Are you trying to apologize?” I ask him. The gesture really does surprise me. It melts my heart just a little bit—reminds me of the old Danny—but roses don’t pay the bills, do they? I can’t use rose petals to patch up a broken and mistreated heart.
We make love slow and sweet, just like old times, on top of silky, fallen rose petals. Danny is doting and gentle and whispers, “I’m sorry.”
I want to love him again, I really do. I wish we could go back to the beginning and start all over again. Before I knew he was a liar. Before I knew he could get violent when he felt vindictive—even with me. Back to a time when I was just a small-town girl and Danny was an incredible fantasy.
“What are you thinking about?”
“About how it was before. Everything was new to me, and you were so slow and gentle. I thought maybe I’d be scared in NYC, but being with you made me stronger.”
“Do you remember the glass floor?”
“I’ll never forget that.”
Danny takes my mouth and rewards me with a kiss that says he likes my memories. I look into his eyes and see how handsome he is with his olive skin and smoky brown eyes. I do remember loving him.
Maybe I can do it again.
God, when the wind picked up her curls, it picked up my heart along with them, and I swear I felt young again. Like she could give me a new start in life—like I could be a better man just by having her around me.
“Aimee,” I said, “you are so beautiful. I don’t think you know that. Hasn’t anyone ever told you?”
She cast her eyes down and I lifted up her chin. Her soft pink lips killed me, her hot pink little tongue. She looked like a living doll, a sweet, innocent thing to corrupt. She had no idea what I did or who I was. She was a little trusting kitten. She didn’t know that I was a wolf. A raptor. A bloodsucker. I was the bad guy, the one she should fear and run far, far away from.
Once I tasted her mouth it was over. I took her out to dinner the next night and fucked her in the hotel again. I couldn’t take her back to Queens, let her live in some apartment. She was too precious to me. I had to get her a decent place to live and a job where I could keep tabs on her. No one else was getting their hands on Aimee, of that I was certain. There isn’t too much purity in this world, so when you find some, you’ve got to hang onto it like a life preserver in treacherous water.
At first it was way too much. I was used to struggling, not people buying me things. Danny paid for everything. He took care of me; he cared whether I was full or not after a meal. Not even my parents ever seemed to care that much.
He wanted me to get an education so that I would have long-term stability. My mom should have wanted that for me, but it was Danny who followed through with it, Danny who supported me.
He bought me sensible furniture and clothes for work, a warm winter jacket and wool socks for my boots. It wasn’t like he was taking me to La Perla and throwing down cash on garters. Danny invested in me like he loved me and not just as an ornament or an object.
I’m not saying I don’t like roses or diamonds—I do. Danny doted on me and occasionally he bought me those kinds of things too. If it were only lavish gifts, I would have been worried. I would have maybe felt like a mistress and like he was trying to buy me. But Danny was never the kind of man that gave the impression he was trying. Our relationship was natural—never forced or too showy. Sure, he showed me off, at least enough to convince me he wasn’t hiding. I wasn’t even suspicious.
He didn’t care if I showed up to a get-together with his friends wearing jeans and a ponytail, my backpack full of textbooks. He still kissed me like I was worth a million bucks. I never felt less than some of those other men’s women, the rich wives club or the young models they sometimes ran with. My butt jiggled, I had a gut, I rarely wore make-up. His friends spent hundreds of thousands keeping their women happy. Danny could kiss my nose, buy me a juicy steak and somehow it would make me feel like I was just as good—just as cherished as those long-legged, doe-eyed, designer women they all paraded around. I even witnessed other women try to hit on him. He dismissed them with a casual wave of his hand. He’d state clearly, with conviction: “Aimee is my girlfriend.”
Danny took me under his wing like some kind of protégée. He was constantly giving me lessons, turning every moment we spent together into an opportunity to impart his wisdom on me.
Waking up one morning at the Sofitel in Paris, rue de Faubourg, Danny caressed my cheek and looked at me with so much sincerity. I was distracted by the softest sheets I’d ever felt, by the extent of the luxury to which Danny was introducing me. People really live like this? This is what they do? Eat, touch and buy beautiful things, sleep late and make love after every meal?
“I want the best for you, Sunshine. I want you to thrive.”
I snuggled in closer and inhale
d his musky scent on the pillows. “You already do too much for me,” I said.
“You are so vulnerable, and I feel like it’s up to me to toughen you up.”
“I’m a big girl, Danny,” I said, looking deeply into his eyes.
“There are two kinds of people in this world, Sunshine. Those who take and those who give. You always need to be aware of who you’re dealing with.”
“Which one are you?”
“I take,” he said, his eyes flashing mysteriously dark for a second.
“But you give, too.”
“Only to you,” he said and grazed his teeth along the lobe of my ear. “I want you to be extraordinary, Sunshine, be unexpected. Take and give at random and I swear to you, no one will ever see you coming.”
“‘Above all things to thine own self be true?’ Hamlet, right?” I asked him.
“Above all things, surprise them, Sunshine. Be the anomaly no one ever suspected.”
We fucked again on top of the down comforter, drapes thrown open to the world, sunshine blazing down on top of us.
“Aimee, you want to get lunch today?” my co-worker Kim asks me as I pass her desk. Kim is one of the two people in the whole of Montclair who is consistently nice to me.
I have donuts in a paper bag and an obscenely large iced coffee with half and half. I’m eating my problems.
“Oh, sure! I’d love to. Where would you like to go and what time are you leaving?”
“One-ish. Want to try that new little Indian joint that has the lunch buffet?”
“Yes!” I say a little too eagerly. “Bagel,” I say, lifting my paper bag, “carb city.” Only that’s a lie because really they’re glazed donuts. But sometimes you’ve got to hide your pain when you’re dating the boss. I hope that’s not what she wants to talk about. Kim is one of the girls that threw me the going away party—the first time I ran the hell away from Montclair and everyone associated with it.
Akhil has a pile of data he wants me to re-enter. It’s stuff we’ve already done so I have no idea why he’s re-calculating figures. He did once tell me that it was the beauty of accounting, “that we make the answers—not the numbers themselves.” But I don’t really buy it. I think that’s just what Akhil tells himself in order not to feel sleazy about this job. He’s got a beautiful wife and three kids and I believe he supports his in-laws. Akhil’s real job is to give back the numbers that Montclair wants. There’s very little reflection of the truth in our job, but I for one, try not to sweat it. I do what I want here and they always accept my answers. When you’ve got tons of money, numbers become superfluous. I enter the new data while I lick donut glaze off of my fingers.
Kim has a new bag and it matches her coat. A light drizzle is falling so we’re rushing to get a table. Lunch hour in midtown is no joke—you need Navy Seal tactics for securing a table, unless you’re Danny, of course. He hasn’t called or emailed all day and I’m feeling relieved.
We get a table right by the kitchen exit when we were trying for a booth. The cloth table covering has grease spots, but I’m not intimidated—that’s one of the advantages of growing up poor, you have a much higher tolerance for things that rich people wouldn’t even dream of putting up with. Thanks to Danny I’m comfortable in both one star and five. I can eat lunch next to a homeless person on a park bench or a prince from Dubai.
“How’s Danny?” Kim asks as she dips a fried samosa into cilantro-mint sauce.
“A prick. As usual,” I say as I bite through the flaky pastry. The sign said “one per customer,” but Kim and I each grabbed three.
“If we get caught I’m telling them that I’m storing up fat cells for Armageddon.”
“Just tell them you can’t read. Then they’ll feel sorry for you. ‘No English’—then sad eyes. Always works for me.”
“Anyway, one samosa by definition doesn’t equal all I can eat. So, a prick, huh? Tell me everything. Are you regretting you came back?”
“Sometimes. Not all the way, but Danny has changed.” I know this is getting into dangerous territory. I shouldn’t ever discuss any of my love life with someone who works anywhere near Montclair, but Kim is my friend and I feel like I can tell her what’s going on without fear of it getting back to Danny.
“I was really lonely. It’s hard to just pick up and try to start over again. Six years is a long time. He was my first everything. I just didn’t feel right out there. It’s kind of like there are two truths going on, two parallel stories—so he’s married and he has a family and he goes home to them, but we were together, we loved each other honestly and there’s also truth in that. It’s almost easier to say that cheating is wrong and never look back, but life isn’t that cut and dry. There was me and Danny, but I know now there is also Danny and his family.”
“I don’t envy your position. It is really tough to say what’s right, and I know how much you loved him.”
“I still love him.”
“Do you want to housesit on Long Island for the whole month of July? You could do August too if you wanted to.”
“What? That came out of left field. Where?”
“That was my real reason for asking you out for lunch. I took this housesitting gig for one of my mom’s best friends in Montauk. Turns out my boyfriend Alex is like, ‘no fucking way.’ He doesn’t want to make the trip and he’s already commuting to Connecticut since he switched banks.”
I take a huge bite of aloo gobi and a swig of my Pepsi.
“How long does it take to get there?”
“You’re looking at almost two hours. I knew it was a long shot, but I noticed you were kind of moping. I figured there might be trouble in paradise and maybe you needed an escape.”
Oh, lord! Everyone at the office can tell that Danny and I are fighting.
“It pays two thousand for the month and the place is a palace. There’s a huge black lab named Tobey that you gotta walk, but other than that it’ll be like a luxury vacation.”
“I’m in,” I say without even mulling it over. Holy crap, I need a break and this sounds like it would be perfect. “July first, it starts?”
“It starts mid-month and then goes all the way through the end of August. The house is on the beach so you’ll definitely get some beach time in and the weather will be great.”
“I’m quitting the job.” It’s the perfect chance for me to find my bearings and decide where I go from here. Either stay with Danny or set out on my own, and I know I can’t stay with Danny forever. Things are coming to a head.
“Great, I’m going to email you her contact info. She might want you to go out and get the lay of the land before the actual date. She might also just want to check you out and make sure you won’t break the windows or take off with the silverware.”
“Kim, you just saved my life! I needed an out and this is the universe answering my dilemma!”
“Alex is going to be psyched you agreed to it.”
This is it, the break I need to move on. Today, I’ll break up with Danny and then promptly quit my job. I grit my teeth in determination. Goodbye, Sunshine. Like Creedence Clearwater said, there’s a bad moon on the rise.
It wasn’t warranted; she was smart and she really was quite beautiful. Her insecurities came from growing up without culture. She was classic white trash, raised in a trailer park. Parents uneducated, older brothers got into trouble with the law. How was she supposed to turn out? Nothing easy in her young life—she was sheltered. She was helpless—poor thing didn’t even know what she was missing. She did pretty well considering the circumstances.
My Sunshine picked up the ways of the city fast. She was a pro on the subway, better than me, in fact. She knew where the good parks were and always had ideas for fun places to go. She made the city feel new to me when I’d already been hitting these streets for almost a half a century.
Aimee was a brave eater too—she’d drag me to crazy restaurants all over the city. I fed her her first lobster and she fed me my first dim sum.
The sex only got better the longer we were together. Aimee’s innocent body became more and more demanding. She liked fucking, no doubt. Probably the sickest part of our relationship, the part that I’m the most reluctant to admit, was that I married Antonia when we were already one whole year into our relationship.
Aimee knew that I’d been married before, that I had two kids from my first wife, but they both lived with her. What she didn’t know, and I’m ashamed to say it, is that I was engaged to Antonia when I met Aimee that day in the shipyard. It was way too late for me to break off the engagement. The invitations had been mailed, we’d ordered the cake. So I told Aimee that I had business in India. That I would be gone for two whole weeks with limited access to either phones or computers.
I flew to Rome, had a lavish wedding and then a romantic honeymoon. I texted Aimee once, to tell her how much I loved her.
She was all smiles when I got back, not moody and withdrawn like a lot of women would play it. I was dragging a shitload of guilt and Aimee was like an eager puppy that’s been returned to its owner. She wanted to hear about India, get dinner and spend the night making love. Poor, sweet thing didn’t have a clue. She believed every word I ever fucking said to her. She told me how much she missed me and about her progress in school. I made love to her warm, pillowy body all night. I remember thinking, why didn’t I marry this woman—this innocent, sunny peach who’s obviously in love with me?
Instead I got Antonia who works out and tans until she’s gristle and sinew. Her ass is a walnut and her gigantic tits are fake, two worthlessly expensive bags of silicone. She shops like the world is going to run out of stuff. Her Brooklyn accent is tough and she can do absolutely nothing to cover it up. Antonia has culture—she traveled all over as a kid—and she’s educated, although it might take some digging to believe it. Her parents spoiled the hell out of her. Pony when she was five, all the trips to Disney World and skiing and cheerleading camp, concerts—you name it, she had it. She’d always gotten her way and she wasn’t shy about asking for it. The woman knew how to get what she wanted. At some point that became me.