I returned to the window to stare at the street. I felt a surge of gratitude toward Libby for telling me about her and Sonny. It helped me know him better. I realized I had come here to find my faith again, and Libby, as she always did, had restored a little bit of it for me. It made the idea of losing her even more painful. It made the city feel even emptier. However, I didn’t feel quite as alone as I did an hour ago.
Unfortunately, as I watched the sea of people pushing past each other on Park Avenue, I realized that Captain Absolute was not simply about me and Sonny. There was more at stake. Lives had been destroyed. Millions had been stolen. Those are big things. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t let it go, because some secrets cannot be kept. I was in the middle of something now, like it or not. So was Sonny.
You see, I saw a woman at a bus stop across the street from Libby’s apartment, but she was not waiting for a bus. She was looking up at the window. She was looking at me. I recognized her.
It was the same woman who had been wandering in my footsteps in the meatpacking district as I left the Gansevoort. The woman in the brown pants suit. No doubt about it. This was the same person, some hundred blocks from where I’d seen her last. She was still wearing a brown pants suit like it was a uniform.
She saw me watching her, and she turned away and was gone.
Of course, this is New York, right? You’re always bumping into people you know. Ha ha ha. No, if I had that kind of luck in a city of 8 million people, I should be snapping up lottery tickets.
This was no accident.
Much as I hated to admit it, Nick Duggan was right. I was being followed.
22
I didn’t know what to tell Garrett about our date.
I slunk into his office in the afternoon like I was doing the walk of shame, and we hadn’t even had sex. I’d been avoiding West 57 – and him – all day.
He sat behind his desk among the stacks of manuscripts. I’d kept him up half the night, but he looked none the worse for wear. He always looks great. I knew I should be honest and tell him about Thad. “Can you believe it? A date arranged by my mother. How about a rain check for tomorrow?”
Unfortunately, I was scared of being honest. For lots of reasons.
“Hey,” I said.
Garrett put down the page he was reading. “Hey,” he said.
“I’m embarrassed,” I said.
There was no need to enumerate the reasons for my embarrassment, which would have filled a phone book.
“Don’t be,” he said.
“Thanks for the rescue.”
“Sure.”
It would have been better not to mention the whole have-sex-with-me thing, followed by the whole why-not-are-you-gay thing. I had an excuse. I was drunk. I could fake total amnesia, and we would both be fine. Instead, I felt a peculiar need to re-live my humiliation. “About my behavior,” I said.
“Julie.”
“I’m not Bree. I don’t make a particularly good slut.”
Garrett held up his hand before I made it worse. “Julie, stop. You don’t have to say anything. I don’t want you to say anything. Okay?”
I didn’t need to thank him. He knew I was relieved to be let off the hook.
“Listen, about tonight,” I went on.
I’d decided what I was going to say. I was going to go for it. Lay it on the line. How does this sound?
Listen, about tonight. I’m sorry, I can’t make it. I wish I could, but I already scheduled another date. Believe me, it’s weird enough for me to have one, but two? I’m seeing Thad Keller. I’ve told you about him. We used to be engaged a long time ago. I could lie and tell you it’s nothing, but I don’t know if it’s nothing. He says he wants to be back in my life. He’s got me off balance. The thing is, it would really help if I knew whether there was a chance of anything happening between you and me. I’m not saying you have to be in love with me. I just want to know what we’re doing and whether it could ever turn into anything.
I cleared my throat.
“About tonight,” I repeated.
“Yes, about tonight, I’m really sorry, Julie,” Garrett said before I could launch into my speech. “I totally forgot I have another engagement, and I can’t get out of it.”
I blinked. “What?”
“We’ll have dinner another time, okay? I know you’re preoccupied with the book anyway.”
That popping sound was my ego deflating.
“Yes, sure, fine,” I said.
“I hope you forgive me.”
“No problem,” I said. “Actually, my mother is in town. She surprised me today. She wants to take me to dinner.”
When in doubt, fall back on a lie.
“So it works out well,” he said.
“Perfect.”
I stood up. He was smiling at me, and I was smiling back. I realized, however, that I wanted to slap the smile off his face. I wanted to kick him and hurt him for what he had just done to me. I was crushed, destroyed, furious, and bitter. It wasn’t that he had beaten me to the punch by canceling our date before I cancelled our date. It was that he so obviously saw it as no big deal. We were work pals. Colleagues going out for happy hour. Catch ya next time, bro.
I could handle being rejected. I couldn’t handle being nothing.
I tried to hold myself together, because I didn’t want him to see the body blow he had delivered. This was worse than begging him for pity sex. This was worse than laying out my chest to him for open-heart surgery. This took my breath away.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
“No King today?” he asked. “No Bree?”
“They’ve got interviews all day. Tomorrow’s the big bookstore event on Fifth Avenue.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
I just wanted to leave. This conversation had already lasted six months.
“Do you want me with you at the store tomorrow?” he asked.
“No,” I said, too sharply. “No, I’ve got it covered.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” I said.
He stared at me. “You all right?”
“Fine.”
“About dinner, I’m sorry again.”
“Could you please stop shoving that ice pick into me?”
No, I didn’t say that.
“No problem,” I said again.
“Have fun with your mother.”
“I will. You have fun with – whatever it is you’re doing.”
“Thanks.”
He didn’t tell me what it was. Another woman. A Yankees game. It could be anything, as long as it wasn’t with me.
I finally left like a prisoner released from jail. I hurried back to my office, closed the door gently when I wanted to slam it, and proceeded to put my hands in front of my face and hyperventilate. I did not cry again, because this was beyond crying. If you feel nothing, you can’t be hurt. I obviously felt something.
“Do you mind if I point out the obvious, darling girl?”
I opened my eyes.
Sonny was back. He was sitting in his old chair, feet up, arms cocked behind his head. Cigarette smoke floated over his head like a halo. I hadn’t driven him away. Or maybe, thanks to Libby, I’d invited him back.
“I can spot the obvious for myself, Sonny.”
“Okay, tell me,” he said.
“Garrett doesn’t have the slightest romantic interest in me. Never did. Never will.”
“Hmm.” He chewed on this thought as he sucked on his cigarette.
“What, hmm?”
“Oh, I was just thinking that if a man believes a woman he really cares about is going to reject him, he’ll usually save his ego by rejecting her first.”
“Is that what you would do?”
“Very few women have ever rejected me, darling girl,” he boasted with a grin.
“What about Libby?”
My father’s grin evaporated.
“Mother rejected you, too,” I said.
“Yes, I wonder what I learned from that,” I said.
“Apparently the wrong lesson.”
I shook my head. “I’m done with games, Sonny. If a man wants me, he can tell me he wants me. I was with Thad for an hour, and he made a pass at me. I didn’t have to get drunk and strip down only to be rejected. Thad knows what he wants, and he’s not shy about it. I like that in a man.”
“Really? I wasn’t shy about asking you to join West 57. That didn’t seem to sway you, darling girl.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
I stood in front of the desk. Sonny hadn’t moved at all. “You’re in my chair,” I told him.
“Your chair?”
“My chair,” I repeated.
He looked proud of my impertinence. He got up, and I sat down, and I was a little sad because the chair wasn’t at all warm. No one had been sitting there. He was already gone, but I talked to him anyway.
“I have a lot of work to do, Sonny,” I said. “Then I have a date tonight. So find another ghost to hang out with this evening, okay?”
After all, if you’re thinking of having sex with someone, you really don’t want your dead father showing up in the bedroom.
23
A limo. That was a good start. Thad sent a limo to pick me up. Not too many limos stop in front of my apartment building. I’d gone home early to get ready for our date, and I went for the killer look. Red is my color, so I wore red, but not much of it. I think my hair was longer than my dress. Spaghetti straps, zipper in the back, push-up bra to push up what God gave me, and my sexiest pair of barely-there panties.
I fidgeted in the limo and calmed myself with champagne. The back seat refrigerator was well stocked. Expensive stuff. I drank two glasses in the time it took to reach Thad’s hotel. We were having dinner in his suite, an Asian feast catered by Morimoto’s. For privacy, he said.
For convenient access to my vagina, I thought.
Not that I was complaining, because we both had a pretty good idea where this night was going. I am not easy. I am not Bree. Even so, it has been a long time for me, and I’m a realist, and I know how my body reacted to Thad’s presence when I saw him after the play. If Bree hadn’t interrupted us with her phone call, we would have been naked soon enough and probably would have stayed that way most of the night. I had vivid memories of sex with Thad. I’m pretty conservative in bed, but let’s just say that Thad pushed me out of my comfort zones and into some happy places.
The limo pulled into the hotel ramp and stopped near a private elevator. One of Thad’s people met me. You know you’ve made it when you have people. I do not have people. This woman – girl, really, because if your name is “Mandi with an i,” you will always be a girl – was blond and perky, and she sized me up in the way that says: I know exactly why you’re here. I couldn’t help wondering if Thad had slept with her. My instincts said, of course he had. It was the first reminder in my head of what it had been like years earlier, when I dealt with those thoughts on a daily basis.
Mandi escorted me to Thad’s suite and then disappeared discreetly.
Thad answered the door. He wore a tux as if we were headed for a night at the opera. Nice look. Thad always liked to be formal, and nothing had changed. He wasn’t the kind of guy who dressed down. Garrett, by contrast, lived in his jeans; you couldn’t get him out of them. I know this, because last night I tried and failed.
That was a joke.
I found myself comparing my rivals, Thad and Garrett, in my head. Funny that I thought about them like that. The rivals. Garrett probably wouldn’t think of himself that way, because he had no interest in me. There was only one man chasing and seducing me, and that was Thad. Thad Keller, millionaire many times over, recognized on the street wherever he went, #84 on the Fortune 100 list of most influential celebs, one of People magazine’s most eligible bachelors in their Sexiest Man issue the last four years. It occurred to me that I knew way too much about Thad. I’d followed his career over the years with an unhealthy curiosity.
Maybe I’d never really gotten over him.
“Julie,” he said, caressing my name with that voice of his. He greeted me with a kiss. It was no peck on the cheek; it picked up right where we’d left off two nights earlier. It was erotic, long, and wet, and it said what we both knew: this date was about us getting into bed. Everything else was foreplay.
His suite was twice the size of King Royal’s, and it glittered because of the crystal and mirrors. I think my own apartment would have fit in the hot tub. There was a grand piano, too. Rich people like pianos in their suites, regardless of whether they play, because I guess you never know when Michael Feinstein will show up at your party. You wouldn’t recognize the name of the hotel itself, because I’m not sure it has a name. It’s one of those private hotels in New York you have to know about, because they have no web site or signage. They specialize in people like Thad. People with endless money and a need for security and privacy wherever they go. People with a taste for perfection and the means to acquire it.
I could hear my mother talking to me in my head. “You could live like this, Julie.”
Yes, I could adjust to this lifestyle.
Thad opened more champagne, even better and more expensive stuff than in the limo. He led us out on the balcony, thirty stories up, breathtaking view of the Chrysler building. The New York weather was cooperating this evening with a mild, refreshing breeze. It was as if all the stars had aligned according to some master plan. Of course, the architect of this plan was my mother, not God.
We clinked glasses.
“To you,” Thad said.
Yes, to me. Tonight is for me. I sipped. Those little bubbles really do make me feel fine.
“Cherie’s in town,” I said.
“I know. I saw her.” He added with a grin, “She’s not invited to dinner. What happens here stays here.”
“Don’t be so sure. I’d check the room for a web cam.”
Thad laughed. So did I. We stood beside each other, watching the view, and he slid an arm around me. It was comfortable, as if no time had passed. I felt at ease with him. I was a little dizzy, but it wasn’t just the height or the alcohol. I’d finally pushed the world and the future out of my head, and I was living in the moment, which was a really, really nice moment.
“New York is beautiful up here,” Thad said.
“It sure is. I get energy from it when it’s not driving me crazy.” That’s how most New Yorkers feel. We love the city until we hate it.
“I can take a few weeks here with the insane pace, but then I need the ocean again,” Thad told me.
“I suppose you have a beautiful beachfront Malibu estate.”
“I do.”
“Sunshine, surfers, all those amazing bodies.”
“Yes.” He added, “You should see it sometime. You’d love it. The sunsets are magical.”
“Isn’t paradise overrated?” I asked.
“No.”
“How about earthquakes? I hear there are earthquakes in California.”
“You used to like it when the earth moved,” he said.
He tried to keep a straight face, but that was so lame that we both smiled.
“You always were a master of the pick-up line,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“How about the L.A. fires? Can you do anything with the wildfires out there?”
“Too easy,” he said, shaking his head. “Something about you being hotter than any fire. Or maybe about how I’d love to make you melt.”
“Nice. Do you still practice pick-up lines?”
“I like to stay in shape.”
“Just for my own e
ducation, what line works best with women?” I asked.
He smiled. “The truth?”
“Sure.”
“Hi, I’m Thad Keller.”
He said it matter-of-factly. Twenty years ago, his voice would have dripped with ego, but not now. It was what it was. I think he was trying to flatter me, so that I’d think: He could have any woman he wants, and he wants me. I hated to admit it, but it was working. I was flattered.
“You know what line works best for me?” I asked.
“What?”
“Let’s have sex.”
He nodded. “That probably works with a lot of men.”
A lot of men, yes, but sadly, not Garrett.
“It’s an astonishing power I have,” I said, “which is why I use it so sparingly.”
“Like Wonder Woman.”
“That’s me.”
It seemed like the right moment to kiss him again, so that’s what I did. For a tall, strong man, he held me with the delicacy of china. By the time our lips parted, I didn’t care about dinner. I didn’t want to wait or pretend. If he had reached for my zipper, I would have let him strip me there on the balcony, with thousands of people watching us through their binoculars.
Instead, in my purse, my phone chirped for my attention. I was beginning to think my pheromones set the damn thing off.
“If that’s Bree, I will shoot her,” I said.
“Maybe it’s your mother.”
Fortunately, it wasn’t Bree, and it wasn’t Cherie. I checked the phone, and the caller ID said N. Duggan. That was an easy choice right now. I could think of few people I’d rather talk to less at this moment than slimy Nick Duggan. I pressed the Ignore button and let the call go to my voice mail.
“Anybody interesting?” Thad asked.
“Absolutely nobody interesting.”
I thought about kissing him again, but the perfect moment had fled for now. We went back inside with our champagne glasses empty. I could smell ginger and an alluring, subtle aroma of fish. I love Morimoto. He’s the one chef where I wouldn’t even bother looking at a menu. Just bring out anything, Mr. Iron Chef, because I know it will be divine. If I’d taken off my clothes, we would have skipped dinner, but Thad had gone to a lot of trouble to cater my seduction. I might as well make him work for it.
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