by Heidi Pitlor
“You are the first girl I’ve ever seen order anything but salad for lunch,” one said approvingly.
Being “one of the guys” was a kind of safe harbor. After all, they would not critique my fuckability if I was sitting right there with them. And to be frank, I liked having access to these secret conversations. A few women nearby glanced over at me. I became a different person in that moment, a woman who had something that other women desired. I was not used to this sensation, and over time, I admit that I may have milked it too much. When they began to flirt openly with me, I brushed them off, but always gently and with ambiguity. They nicknamed me Little Tiger because of my preference for a shot of sloe gin with a similar name. In less than a month, I was offered a raise and moved from my cubicle to a small office, and even got to handle correspondence and some research for one of the managing directors. Life was pretty good for the moment.
At dawn on the Tuesday that I would drive to meet Nick in Albany, I carried my sleeping son across our front yard. The ranch house that I had been renting, going on six years now, was situated on a cut-through that led to the Mass Pike, and cars and trucks were audible at all times, even from inside. I tripped over a tree root and my neighbor’s dog broke into a bark and I whispered to Cass, “Please don’t wake up, please don’t wake up,” because if he did, he would detonate. He was no good with separation.
Bertie met me at her screen door. “I’ve got him,” she said quietly, her dentures not yet in, and reached for Cass. But she was too frail to carry him, so I gestured for her to hold the door as I went inside and set him on her couch.
I hated to leave my son while he slept. He had no father who might watch him today. His Tigger sweatshirt was too small. Bertie’s house smelled of incontinence and there was a long gash in her screen door, not that my house was in much better shape. My front steps were crumbling, an accident waiting to happen, and the roof leaked when it rained. Jimmy Pryor, my landlord and neighbor, was frustratingly slow to repair such things. Thanks to Nick’s book, though, I had started looking for a nicer place.
I kissed my forefinger and grazed it past Cass’s cheek. “Bertie, you’re a lifesaver,” I said.
Back home, I pulled my hair into the neatest bun I could manage and changed into the professional ensemble that my friend Maggie had helped me find the other day at Ann Taylor. The first pair of gray pants that I had tried on had lining that moved like cream against my skin. The buttonhole was thick and reinforced, and the zipper slid right up, bringing to mind the pricier clothing I had worn back in New York. I thought once again how I should have kept those outfits instead of donating them to Goodwill when I started working at home. At the time, I had been so glad to part with those stiff, constricting business suits and toe-pinching heels, those trappings of a person who had come to seem less and less like me.
It took me about an hour to reach Albany, and I found Nick in a private booth toward the back of Wellington’s, a swank restaurant in the hotel where he was staying. A brawny guy about Nick’s age sat next to him and both tapped at their iPhones. A Lakers cap on his head, Nick appeared younger in person than in the pictures I’d seen, his face the shape of a plate. Blonde stubble dotted his chin. He looked up at me with his glinty blue eyes and said, “You’re Allie?”
I nodded. “Hi, Nick.”
“Sit, sit!”
The other guy kept his eyes on his phone but coughed into one fist.
“Nice place,” I said and lowered myself into a weird metal bowl of a chair across from them.
He squinted over at me. “Dude, you are way hotter than I thought you’d be.”
“Oh, thanks.” I may have chuckled and picked at my nails. “You have a good flight? When did you get in?”
“Like an hour ago. I slept through most of it.” Nick kept his eyes on me. “It’s so weird—I pictured you as kind of frumpy. Bigger and kind of, you know, softer. Maybe it was just that first time I read your stuff, when you sounded all lame. I guess first impressions stick.” He shook his head.
I blinked over at him and forced a smile. I did not want to come across as uptight.
“No offense, though.”
“None taken. Maybe we should write a book together,” I tried to joke.
Our banter halted when a statuesque twenty-something with a red bob and jade green eyes appeared at the table to take my order.
“Just a cup of coffee, please,” I said.
“You’re Shannon?” Nick said, his eyes on the name tag pinned just north of her right breast. His friend looked up at her and slid his phone into his back pocket. “Shannon, can you fill me up?” Nick said. He raised his coffee mug to his mouth and gave the rim an almost imperceptible lick.
“I think I can do that.” She flashed a smile, her face pink, and she turned to take another table’s order.
The friend muttered something like “Tasty.”
Nick looked back at me. “So Allie, I read the chapters you sent. It was wild. It’s like I got cloned and my clone wrote this incredible book about me. It turned me on how much you got into my head. I got a boner just thinking about it.”
“Great!” I said, my eyes on the table as I reached for my notebook.
He made a few minor suggestions: he wanted me to cut the bit about his bully neighbor when he was a kid, as well as his pet rabbit, Buttercup. He did not think I needed to use the name of the bougie town outside Chicago where he had grown up. “No one wants to hear about all that boring shit.”
I took notes as he spoke.
We got to talking about the next season of Ranch, his python, his sister’s new twins. The day before, I had started writing a scene between him and his mother. She had struggled a lot since being laid off, and Nick was about to tell her that he was going to buy her a condo.
“How’s your mom’s lupus?” I asked.
“She had a flare-up last week and sacked out on my couch for a couple of days. I hired my massage therapist for her. Maurice does all the older ladies on set. He’s my birthday gift to them.” Then he asked me about Cass’s separation anxiety and whether I had yet tried avocado toast with cilantro and fried egg.
His friend said, “Felly, I’ve got to split. I’ll be at the booth with Jim and Jim.” They fist-pumped and a moment later, Nick and I were alone.
He explained that Curtis and the two Jims were here to promote Honor Code: Execution Time, the sixth installment in the series. “I do so little for my game these days,” Nick said with the regret of a divorced father toward his child. “Life gets mad busy. Hey, I brought you something.” He opened a leather folder on the table. “I got Fufu Muhammad’s autograph for Cass. She’s the actor who does the voice of Doc McStuffins.” He handed me a slip of paper on which she had handwritten, “Dear Cass, Don’t forget to stretch and flex! Your friend, Doc.”
“Oh my God.”
“It’s no big thing.”
My son ingested on average three episodes of Doc McStuffins every day. He sang the theme song constantly. Cass saw few characters on TV who looked anything like him, although I suspected the stuffed animals had a lot to do with his love for the show, too. “Nick! He. Will. Die. You have no idea.”
Nick shrugged.
“This is fucking dope,” I said.
“You sound like me again!” He beamed.
“I’m kind of a sponge, I guess. It’s my job.”
Two months after I went to Albany, I stood watching Cass ride his new balance bike around an empty school parking lot. We had just come from visiting a renovated two-bedroom, two-bath bungalow for rent in Stockbridge. It had a screened-in front porch, an attic that could be used as a playroom or an office, and was located just a block away from Beartown State Forest. It even had a sweet little pergola on the side that was frizzy with clematis. “I’m in love,” I told the real estate agent, and she said she would go get started on the lease.
“You got this! Don’t keep leaning to the side!” Kurt called out to Cass, and took my hand. Kurt and I had been
together-ish for about four months. He had his faults—ambition and money were not currently his things—but he was great with Cass, a kid who liked to draw and listen to music rather than wrestle with friends or play catch. Kurt was also easy on the eyes and, to be frank, gifted in bed, all reasons I had agreed to let him move into my basement. At the moment, Kurt worked part-time at his friend Pete’s hardware store and was trying his hand as a sculptor.
“Not so fast!” I hollered, just as Cass tipped over onto a bike rack.
We rushed to help him, and then my cell phone rang. It was Colin’s number, so I answered, and Kurt gestured for me to take the call, that he would tend to Cass.
“You might want to sit down,” Colin told me in a funny voice. “I’ve got some news.”
“Okay.” I glanced around, but there was nowhere to sit.
“Nick Felles is in a bit of trouble.”
Kayla Hokin was a lead on Ranch, but I did not recognize the other names. There were multiple charges of sexual assault, as well as three other anonymous allegations of attempted sexual assault.
“Wait,” I said. My heartbeat zoomed. “Rape?”
Colin went on to tell me that Nick’s book had been canceled. Production on Ranch had halted, and a press conference with the prosecuting attorneys was taking place as we spoke.
As if by instinct, I wondered if the police had the right person. Of course they did. I had been writing for Nick, as Nick, for nearly six months now, and inside my chest, alongside my shock was a fast-wilting flower of sympathy or empathy or something.
“You do not want to see the cover of the New York Post tomorrow,” Colin said.
I made a pained grunt. An image came to me of Kayla, who played Mai, the eldest daughter of Ahiga, one of the two shapeshifters. A very pretty girl with spirals of black hair and yellow-green eyes, Kayla could not have been older than twenty-three. I thought of Shannon, the waitress in Albany and Nick’s boner at my ability to channel him. Every cell in me wished for the obvious not to be true.
There was a stone by my foot. I hurled it with everything I had across the parking lot. It seemed like some piece of this was my fault, although at the moment, I could not define exactly how. “Is Kayla all right?” I said slowly. “And the others? What about them?”
“No clue. I think it all happened like a year or two ago.”
“Oh, well, I’m sure they’re doing terrific by now.”
“Hey you, don’t blame the messenger,” Colin said. His less-than-grave tone chafed at me.
I was not naïve—I had never thought Nick blameless or puritanical. What percentage of men in show business were? In any business, really? Even eighty-six-year-old Clyde Elliott had interrupted his monologue over the phone describing his first circumlunar flight to tell me I had a voice like Lauren Bacall and that he’d wager I had her figure, too. Men pushed limits. But Nick had raped someone? Multiple women? Everything inside me shifted and then plummeted.
Colin went on. “You’ll get paid for what you already did, Al.”
“I was almost done with his book.”
“Oh, okay. Well, you’ll get paid for half. I didn’t know you were so far along. Still, that’s not bad, right? This was the lead title on Assembly’s spring list. They are taking a bath on it. Let’s be grateful they’re paying you at all, right?”
“ ‘Grateful’? Assembly can absorb the loss,” I said. I, however, would have to say goodbye to our Stockbridge rental. The week before, I had enrolled Cass in a preschool that would start soon, and had finally gotten us a decent health insurance plan. I had even booked a trip to Disney World for Cass and me, assuming that these expenses would be easily covered by the payment headed my way. We were scheduled to fly to Orlando in only a few days. “I feel almost homicidal,” I said.
“Yeah,” Colin said. “Chin up. I just got a line on a new book for you. It’s early stages—I can’t tell you anything else right now, but if it comes through, it’ll make you feel way better about this whole mess. And I’m not just talking about the money.”
“I can’t think about writing another book right now.”
“Well, get over it,” he said, half-joking.
“Your compassion is touching. Really. Your compassion for me, and also for Kayla and the others.”
“I should let you go digest this news.”
“Yeah.” I cursed myself for snapping at the one person who brought in the majority of my income. “Thanks for, or sorry for, you know. Please do call me when you hear about that new job.”
I stuffed my phone in my back pocket. With a shudder, I remembered a scene from Skinwalker Ranch when Kayla, in the form of a human, had been made to bare almost everything for an orgy with the witches and man-wolves atop a mesa. The eye of the camera inched up Kayla’s body, stopping at the dip of her waist and the upward curve of her breast. It slid up her neck to her young face, pinched in a combination of fear and ecstasy as a man-wolf and a gorgeous white-haired witch dressed in a see-through caftan had their way with her. The eye veered to Kayla’s hand, her fingers clenching the hand of her mother, Ahiga, then to the small of the witch’s back, the soft flat of someone’s stomach, and back to Kayla, or Mai maybe, and Ahiga as they both shapeshifted into snarling foxes.
I thought of all that I had written for Nick about the beauty of the nude woman’s body, about Picasso and Bukowski and Planet of the Apes, the inherent relationship between sex and violence (had I really written that?), all that garbage he had wanted me to write about his net worth and model girlfriend and Axel, his spoiled snake. All the garbage that I had willingly written.
“Everything okay?” Kurt asked. “You look weird.”
“Yeah.” I wanted to tell him what had just happened, but I had learned to abide by my nondisclosure agreements long ago. Plus it seemed preferable for Kurt not to know of my writing for—and as—a guy like Nick. “I just lost a really lucrative job.”
Around Cass went, making vroom vroom noises and squeezing the horn on the handlebars. I would have to tell him that the new house and Disney World were off the table. He had already planned where every one of his stuffed animals would live in his new bedroom. We had made a paper chain, each link representing a day before we would fly to Orlando. It might have been easier to tell him that I contracted a flesh-eating disease.
Kurt said, “You’ll figure it out, Hon.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Maybe I could write Kayla a letter and apologize, an idea that made no sense, of course. “I need to figure out if I can still afford that new health insurance.”
“It can’t be that bad,” he said. “How about if I cook tonight? I’ll make you guys homemade pizza or something.”
Later, after I put Cass to bed and Kurt had gone out for a drink with Pete, I paced the kitchen, ate three-eighths of a leftover pizza and two ice cream sandwiches, regretted it, ate my son’s last Fla-Vor-Ice, saw myself as if from above, and grew disgusted. I would give up sugar, get a real job and stop freelancing, exercise, take Cass to a museum or two, force him to eat more vegetables, eat more vegetables myself, read more. I considered how long it had been since I had read a great book, something that made me feel substantial. Likely the amount of time that my son had been in my life. I selected my old favorite Virginia Woolf novel, To the Lighthouse: “ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.’ ” But my thoughts immediately veered to Nick and Kayla Hokin, and that scene on the mesa. I vowed to set fire to that Gucci bag. Better yet, I would donate the bag and the sword to some charity that helped women, domestic violence victims or a similar population. But I’d already had the Doc McStuffins autograph framed for Cass and it had clearly amplified my value in his eyes. Maybe I would just leave that one be.
The next morning, I checked with the airline and hotel and learned that the last-minute cancellation penalties for our trip were so steep that it made no sense not to go. I looked through my finances: there was littl
e I could do about my truck, which I used for the landscaping work I did. The money coming for Nick’s book would hardly net enough to cover my debt payments, along with basic expenses and Cass’s new preschool over the next few months. And who knew when Colin would actually come through with that other project?
Nick’s book had made it easier to digest Kurt’s limited contributions. And Kurt made up for this in other ways, not the least of which were being a calming presence in our house and a second pair of eyes on Cass. I thought back to that morning I had first seen Kurt, sleeping on a wooden bench not far from the bus stop in Great Barrington. I had assumed this leggy man in a pinstripe suit and silk burgundy tie was either a salesman or a meth dealer. He opened one eye and I said, “You’re pretty dressed up for that bench.” He had perfect teeth and impish blue eyes. He admitted that he had just been let go from his job as a financial adviser in New York. He and his wife had worked at the same firm for over ten years, but while Birgitte had been promoted to director of global market strategies in the midtown office, he had been handed a lateral move to the Newark satellite. His clients had called his cell at all hours, moaning about every downturn in the market. His combative, perfectionist manager began to downgrade Kurt’s incentives. And then he lost a big client the same day he learned that Birgitte had been sleeping with the global chief investment officer for six months. Poor Kurt melted down. He called his manager a “cheap, greedy tyrant bastard” and was ushered out of the building. That same day, he left behind his Murray Hill Condo, his Siamese cat, 99 percent of his belongings, and finally Birgitte. He boarded the next Greyhound scheduled to leave the Port Authority, disembarked at the last stop, Great Barrington, and began to walk in the dark, aimless. He would give nearly all of his money to Birgitte. “I don’t want any ties to Wall Street and its toxic greed and addiction to wealth. I want no more part in the rise of conspicuous consumption that is killing our country. This is the most cleansing thing I can do right now,” he told me as he sat on the bench, and I nodded, and congratulated him on his escape.