Mrs. Russakof was entitled, but she was also nervous. I could tell because she stood in the doorway of my office, the heel of one ballet flat raised like a deer poised to pivot and flee at the slightest sign of danger.
Pleasantries were exchanged. I filled two heavy crystal glasses with gourmet water. To little effect. I only keep one picture in my office—of Blair and our daughter, taken when Ann was ten; they’re walking hand in hand on a beach, love radiating from them in the golden late afternoon—and the absence of framed degrees or signed photos from grateful celebrities compounded Mrs. Russakof’s discomfort. I let her stew. She wanted Victoria, not me. All attempts to charm her would be unavailing.
She spoke first. “Did Victoria brief you?”
“Yes. The general idea was short-man syndrome.”
“He’s tall when he stands on his wallet.”
“Those weren’t her words, but—”
“They’re key. He’s not going to make this easy.”
“The spouse writing the checks rarely does.”
“Then Victoria didn’t really brief you.” She leaned forward, resentment streaming off her. “Billy started out as a bond trader for Milken and left before Boesky fooled the government into thinking Mike was Mr. Big. He took his loot, bought a company, flipped it, and became a player. He hit Eastern Europe just behind Soros, made the Forbes list, married me, and decided we should be the next power couple in women’s wear. See where I’m going, Mr. Greenfield? He’s always a step ahead. And widely hated for it.”
“Widely?”
“You don’t know the joke about him? You have Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, and Billy Russakof in a room. And you have a gun. But you only have two bullets. Who do you shoot?”
“No idea.”
“Billy Russakof—twice.”
“Oh. Why do you want to end the marriage now?”
“A few months ago, instead of working late or going out with his traders at night or screwing an assistant, Billy began coming home for dinner.”
“What did this suggest to you?”
“That I needed to go to the clue store. Really. I had no idea.”
“You might have taken that as a fresh commitment to the marriage. Why didn’t you?”
“Because all he talks about are his trades. The bid. The ask. The number of shares. His reasoning. Their reasoning. It was excruciating. I started drinking glass after glass of water just so I could leave the table and pee.”
“He’s trying to drive you crazy.”
“For starters, yes.”
“He knows you’re here?”
“Billy’s not above hiding a GPS in my bag.”
Another woman might have said it was a Birkin, which it was, selling for $20,000, at least. She didn’t go there. Points for her.
“Mrs. Russakof, are you having an affair?”
She ignored the question, produced a brown envelope, and set it on my desk. She knew her business—it was sealed and signed on the flap, with clear tape over the signature.
“Put this in your safe,” she said. “How soon can we start?”
I pushed an extension on the phone. “If you have a few minutes …”
This impressed her. “You have a forensic accountant on staff?”
“Not exactly an accountant. But definitely an expert. He’s been with Victoria for a long time. Before he comes in, two things you should know: He’s not a mute, just very silent, and he prefers not to use his name. You’ll know him as Reboot.”
“Reboot?”
“He’s a master of the art of getting—and forgetting. Swiss bank records, mistresses, whatever we need. All very discreet.”
She nodded. With the matrimonial business with me over, she took up some personal business.
“Just so we’re clear, Mr. Greenfield,” she said, “I don’t sleep with married men.”
“I don’t either,” I replied.
A soft, timely knock on the door. Reboot appeared. He was exactly as described: not memorable.
I made introductions. Reboot nodded. Nancy Russakof seemed slightly intimidated. And as she began to outline her husband’s enterprise, I dared to think maybe we’d hear no more of air miles.
Then I had other thoughts: tanned legs, gray eyes, and lavender perfume.
Chapter 6
When Jean Coin called to ask if we could meet—“It’s not urgent but as soon as possible, outside the office”—I took that to mean she wanted maximum privacy. Once I got over my surprise and set aside my curiosity, I knew where to have this conversation: the café at the model boat pond in Central Park, a cheery stage set where rich kids and their fathers sail small, radio-controlled boats. On weekends, it’s mobbed. On a school day in September, the tables would be empty.
My office was six blocks away. Jean Coin’s loft was in Tribeca. Of course she arrived first.
She was standing with her back to me, a foot on a chair, retying a shoelace. White shirt, faded jeans, sneakers. Her all-purpose uniform.
“Ms. Coin?”
She turned.
“Sorry to be late,” I said. “Weepy client.”
“If you’re not early, you’re late,” she said, but then I got a smile I didn’t expect and a quick, awkward kiss on the cheek I expected even less.
At the gallery, her gaze had been so powerful and our conversation so intense that I didn’t really notice much else. I did now. She had a look much prized in our city. Memorable cheekbones. Legs so thin it looked as if the bones could snap at any time. Breasts, and not small ones.
I felt … stirrings.
She claimed the chair with her back to the pond. Her view: a stone wall, the tops of buses, the trunks of trees, and, through the foliage, a sliver of limestone apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue, which is to say she had no view at all. I understood her choice when I took the chair that looked into the park—the better view. Jean was a picture waiting to be taken, the woman in the center of the frame with stripes of water and lawn behind her.
On the table sat two bottles of Evian and two sandwiches precisely wrapped in paper napkins.
“Ham and brie, with honey mustard,” she said. “Okay?”
“Salami and cheddar would have been fine. But thanks.”
Multitasking seemed unwise. I didn’t unwrap my sandwich.
“Hypothetically,” she said as she opened her bottle of water, “what makes a client weepy?”
“Hypothetically … he’s due in court next month, and he just fired his fourth lawyer. But even as he’s pleading poverty, he bought a ranch in”—professional discretion made me pause and go vague—“some Rocky Mountain state. With separate pilot’s quarters. Don’t you love that phrase?”
“I don’t understand. What are pilot’s quarters … hypothetically?”
Did Jean Coin giggle? No. But close.
“Hypothetically,” I began—now her laugh was full-throated, and I could almost see her knocking back shots of bourbon in a bar a half hour before closing—“pilot’s quarters means an apartment over the garage for the pilot of your private jet.”
“The pilot can’t stay in a motel?”
“Not the pilot of a CEO’s G5. Not in an unnamed mountain state resort.”
“Will the husband win?”
“Hypothetically … no. But my weeper and I will sweat to earn every dollar. And then we’ll have to wait for it. That’s how these guys operate.”
“If you had him for a client …”
“Men like that,” I said, “are why my partner and I prefer to represent the wives.”
“This is so much more interesting than photography,” Jean said. “If you can talk about it … what’s the best present a client has ever given you?”
“Gratitude. And tears. Good tears.”
“No ‘now that I’m not your client, maybe
we could …’?”
“Hypothetically, no. And, in fact, no. A better question would be: What’s the best present you ever got from a client’s ex-husband?”
“That happened?”
“Once. Two bottles of ’78 Petrus … with a card that said thank you.”
“He must have been very relieved to be rid of her.”
“No doubt. But I think he was sending me a message: ‘You missed the twenty million dollars I stashed offshore.’”
Jean’s reaction was pretty much nothing, and I began to suspect that she was more interested in running a line of questions than hearing the answers. I don’t mind sharing war stories—it’s one of the perks of the profession. Doing it at a party is one thing, but doing it for a woman who has summoned you from your office in midday? Enjoyable at first, just because it was Jean Coin, but getting old fast.
“Ms. Coin …”
“One more, okay?”
“One.”
“What was the meanest thing a husband ever did to his wife?”
“So many to choose from. But this is a classic. … She put him through med school. He became successful. Just before their anniversary, he told her, ‘Go to Bergdorf’s and try on fur coats.’ She did. Left him a note about the coat she liked and the woman who’d helped her. The anniversary came and went. Nothing. She mustered some courage and asked what had gone wrong. ‘Oh, trying on the coat—that was your present,’ he said. And yet she stayed married to him for five more years.”
She looked down at her sandwich, clearly uneasy. Seconds ticked by; minutes might follow. “What’s the most amazing thing a client ever told you?” This was blurted out. As if she were stalling. Why?
“That’s a second question.”
“Please.”
This took no effort. I think about this woman all the time.
“I represented a woman who would go, once a month, to a hotel, where three or four guys were waiting. She’d do them all, one after another. And then she’d go home to her husband. I asked her why she did it, why she liked it. ‘Because it’s just … filthy,’ she said, and the look on her face when she said that last word … it was rapture.”
“Rapture,” she said. “Is that not the most beautiful word in the English language?”
I could have suggested others: again and more. But that story about the client in the hotel room was the end of the pleasantries for me. I wanted Jean to state her business.
“Did you want to see me about a … matrimonial issue, Ms. Coin?”
“Oh, I’m not married, counselor,” she said. “This is … social.”
Again she descended into silence, jaw clenched. At last she said, “Promise me you won’t laugh.”
“Cross my heart.”
She took several calming breaths but was no calmer for them.
In a rush: “I’m leaving the city for six months at Thanksgiving, and I’d like to have a lover until then, and I’d like you …”
She couldn’t make it to the end. But she was looking right at me, and her eyes said it all.
“I could not possibly be more surprised,” I said.
“Surprised—and flattered?”
“I may get to flattered. Right now, I’m stuck on surprised.”
Not what she hoped to hear.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can do foreplay, but not at the beginning.”
“Funny, that’s when it’s usually done.”
I meant a light tone, but I missed. Why the sarcasm? Because although I’m a good man, I am, in the end, just a man. Monogamy-challenged. Eternally. I know this—early in my marriage, there was some nasty trouble on just this issue—so I walk the line. I don’t hide my wedding ring or maneuver conversations with married women in the direction of lies about my “open marriage” or initiate any strategy that could lead to a woman’s bed without that seeming to be my idea. Blair says I’m a flirt, but I don’t think women are confused—my idea of flirting is more like banter.
I’ve never directly propositioned anyone.
A woman bluntly propositioning me? It’s never happened. But here was Jean Coin, shoving temptation in my face. Many men would be thrilled. And maybe I would be, if I allowed myself to admit it.
So I admitted it.
Reality check—my defenses had been breached. I’d almost forgotten the signals, but here they were: dry mouth, pounding pulse, and a surge of blood. Another minute and I’d pull her to me and lock mouths.
“I need to be elsewhere,” I said.
An obvious lie but apparently obvious only to me.
“You’re shocked.”
“It’s more like … I feel that I should respond in … oh … French. Or Swedish.”
Such bullshit. And worse—cowardly. Sophisticated New York lawyer David Greenfield would do battle for a woman, but he’d do anything to avoid confronting her.
Jean missed my evasion. I’d rejected her; anything else was just noise. And the rejection grated.
“You really ought to get out more,” she said.
No mistaking her edge.
“Yeah? Where?” I asked, with edge of my own.
“Any bar. Any city. Any day of the week. It’s as American as the NRA—people hit on each other.”
“No, men hit on women.”
“Boy, you are weak on the facts.”
Nasty. Condescending. I went into my default: Play the lawyer, and grill the witness.
“The facts are subtext. I’m hung up on the main point, like why me?”
“In your business, when you meet someone, do you ever get a … feeling?”
“All the time,” I said, evenly. “But I never act on first impressions.”
Now Jean looked completely defeated. When she spoke, she mumbled.
“I sensed a restlessness … I felt a possibility … I hoped you’d find me attractive. I hoped—”
“Jean, I have a wife.”
“All the good men do.”
“Find another one. My marriage doesn’t work that way.”
“How does it work?”
My God, she was relentless. Somewhere this was a virtue.
“Actually, I don’t think you’re entitled to an answer.”
“You only regret what you say no to,” she said.
I could hear her hurt and see her disappointment, but there was no civil way to end this. I got up and walked away, not looking back.
Chapter 7
For eighteen years, we rarely went out on Saturday night. Friends might come over. Or Ann would have a sleepover, and we’d have half a dozen girls chattering in the next room till all hours. Or, in recent years, Ann and her boyfriend of the season would join us for dinner before they went out to wherever it is that kids go.
But with Ann off to college, we were starting fresh. We had to. Our married friends were our age, but they seemed a generation younger. They’d waited until thirty to marry, thirty-five to have kids; when we were taking Ann on the college tour, they were sweating acceptance to kindergarten.
And now, at forty-six, we were empty nesters. Impossible to accept. Just the two of us? For decades and decades? How crazy was that?
But okay. Change, the law of life. Saturday now meant sushi in the neighborhood followed by a movie.
Blair had gone to snag seats, so I was the one in the popcorn line. Just ahead of me was a woman in her early thirties. It was a warm night, and she was wearing a sleeveless blouse with no sweater, tight black jeans, and black boots.
Standing behind her, I couldn’t help but notice that her bra was too tight; in back of the armholes, it forced tabs of flesh into public view. Worse, it announced that there was no one in her life who saw her from behind before she went out.
The line was moving slowly. There were twenty people ahead of us. She wasn’t checking her phon
e. On weekends, I never do. So it was boredom or chat.
“This is like being in a bank line,” I said.
“I wouldn’t know. I’m unemployed.”
“Oh. Who did you used to be?”
“HR for an investment bank—the first to go. You?”
“Lawyer.”
“Wall Street?”
“Matrimonial. What are you seeing?”
“The vampire movie.”
“Aren’t you a little old for that?”
“My friends said that. So I’m here by myself.”
We were moving steadily along, almost at the front of the line.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the attraction of having a guy suck your blood?”
“It’s not the blood. It’s the neck.”
A clerk called out: “Next.”
“Women also like to have their necks licked,” she said, and she gave me a fifty-watt smile as she walked away.
How do you read an encounter like that?
As a New York moment: two people, a brisk exchange, happens all the time, on to the next.
Or—and the thought sent my pulse redlining—this unemployed woman who used to work in HR at an investment bank was alone and up for anything on a warm Saturday night in mid-September.
Chapter 8
I don’t remember his name, and I doubt his book outlived him, but I sometimes think of a man who’s been dead for more than a century. He was French. Titled. Rich in a time when that meant going out four nights a week. It took him only minutes to put on a dinner jacket; his wife required an hour to dress. Rather than seethe, he decided to write a novel while he waited for her to appear. In less than a year, he’d finished it.
My situation is just the reverse. After a night out, I’m waiting for my wife to undress. To wash the day away. And then put on an outfit only I’ll see.
I’m quick—I shower between the drops, Blair says—so I go first.
Then, while Blair disappears, I have tasks.
I have performed them two or three nights a week—for years.
They never get old.
Pour two shots of tequila or single malt and two glasses of water. Roll a thin joint. Light a candle. Choose music that can take us elsewhere.
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