The Idea of Him

by Holly Peterson

  The Guard Saw All

  Jackie lifted the confidential envelope off the driveway pebbles, wiped some dirt away, and deftly slid it into her saddlebag.

  “Not so fast, Jackie. Drop it.” I held her arm tightly and surprised myself by digging my nails into her smooth skin, all the while watching Murray try to waddle across his sprawling lawn to get a fly ball that he of course missed by ten yards. “Give it back before I cause a scene.”

  Jackie stared me down. “I’m protecting you. I’m going to get into the car, scan what’s in here, and slip it right back to you. My mother will take twenty minutes to get her stuff settled inside; she arranges some wildflowers in his—”

  “How much crack have you been smoking exactly?” I asked her. “I don’t care if your mother relandscapes the entire estate while we’re waiting. You are NOT taking this envelope. Give it back to me or I’ll call him over here and—”

  “Mom. It’s soooo hot.” Lucy draped her limp body across my bent back and wrapped her arms tightly around my neck.

  I tried to loosen Lucy’s grasp even as I held tightly to Jackie. “Lucy. Please get off me, sweetie. I’m sorry it’s so hot. Go wait in the car where the AC is blasting and I’ll see if they have some lemonade.”

  The horn in my car honked for three full seconds. Blake. I looked toward the car, behind the garage and out of view of the Wiffle ball game.

  “Blake! Stop that right now!”

  “Mooooommmmm. C’moooooooon.” He stuck his head out of the window of the car with his tongue hanging out, panting like a dog.

  I held on to Jackie, fearing she would run with the company package. “Do you know Murray?”

  “I can’t answer that question right now.” This was all she was going to give me.

  Lucy started crying and tried to pull me by the waist into a standing position.

  “Lucy. Please, it’s way too hot for you to lie on top of me and pull me like that. Mommy’s working.” I pried her sticky body away. “I promise we will get ice cream after we’re done here.”

  “You promise?” Lucy sniffed in her tears and finally retreated to the car.

  I nodded and turned back to Jackie. “Okay, well, then answer this: Is Wade involved in this envelope somehow?”

  “I’m sure he is. That, among other things, is why I need to look it over. It’s for the next scheme they’re planning, and there might be some key information about it. That’s all I need. I know the flash drive has the account numbers that will nail them for sure and the account names, but you said you can’t find it anywhere, so what is in this envelope might be very fruitful.”

  “Allie!” bellowed Murray. “Come back over here! What the hell are your kids doing here? We might as well make them useful while you’re getting your work together. Get them to teach my kids how to throw a damn ball. Hell, we can all play, family against family for ten minutes. What do you say, kids? Winner gets the new Mercedes GT3!” Of course, more gut-bouncing laughter at his idiotic joke. Lucy and Blake, freed from their isolation chamber, ran happily over to join the game.

  “Let go of my arm.” Jackie spoke sternly through her teeth and pulled me behind a very Hamptons, indigo-blue hydrangea bush. “Let me look at the papers before he realizes we know each other. Leave your bag in your car. Help with the Wiffle ball game. I’ll look like I’m helping Mom. Then I’ll slip it back in your bag.”

  “It’s sealed.”

  She opened her bag. “And the pièce de résistance.” She pulled open an inside pocket holding a roll of the exact same red tape marked CONFIDENTIAL that had sealed the envelope.

  I looked into her elusive eyes. “How do you know all this, Jackie? How do you know all this about these guys?”

  “Because I used to fuck your husband.”

  I blinked hard.

  Jackie continued, “Sorry to say it like that, but it’s the correct answer to your question. And I know where he hides his information. And the guy at the coat check at the Tudor Room lets me go through his briefcase. I’ve been through Murray’s bags and files too. You’ve got to listen to me on festival business; I can help you turn it around. The indies used to count on a robust DVD market, but now they don’t have that. Your business plan is so outdated—the Fulton film channel. I’m telling you. Get Max to pay for that and you’ll be rich on your own and you won’t need these guys’ nonsense.”

  “How come I didn’t see any of their nonsense myself if you’re so sure . . .”

  “How can you not know, Allie? It’s all right in front of you, if you’ll only get those blinders off and look around a little. I’m telling you, this group is planning another big splash soon; mark my words and watch for it. You are playing the fool. You’re telling the press on the day of your screening that Max isn’t orchestrating a takeover of a hot new company on the horizon, Luxor, but, in reality, he already owns a ton of it. Not exactly a sin on your part, but if you’re not careful, you could get snagged in all this.” Jackie stamped her sneakered foot so that the charms attached to the laces jingled.

  “Stop being so damn loyal to the men around you and open your eyes. Get a grip. Stop avoiding the truth. Or at the very least, figure out the truth and then act on it.”

  When she swung the garage screen door shut, dust flew like sparkles in the late-afternoon sun.

  MURRAY YELLED, “ALLIE, pick up your crap and get your ass over here. Your kids are waiting!”

  Minutes later, I was rounding third base, gunning for the Mercedes convertible, far sweatier than this kiddie game or even the heat warranted, when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. After I made it to home base, I checked the screen.

  The caller ID read: Guard Station. Lorenzo. I broke into a second layer of fresh sweat.

  “I’ll be right there, everyone,” I said in an overly cheerful way, pretending as if I really cared about this stupid Wiffle ball game. “Blake is up. Go team!”

  “Mrs. Crawford, it’s Lorenzo.”

  “Yes?” My face was locked into a huge fake smile. “Go, Team Crawford!”

  “I just took my coffee break.”

  “Yes?”

  “C’mon, Mom!” Lucy yelled. “Blake’s out. We’re in the field.”

  “Well, seeing as you’re all nice all the time, I—”

  “Please, Lorenzo,” I said calmly, like a cop speaking to someone about to leap out a forty-story window. “Just give me the news.”

  “Well, there’s no security screens at my desk, they’re all in the back room so I had to leave to see . . .”

  “Yes?” My entire bra was soaked at this point.

  “Hey, Allie.” Murray was now next to me, yelling in my other ear. “Get your ass on the pitcher’s mound.” I tried to keep up my smile, even as Murray started poking me in the arm like a child.

  I held up a finger, and Murray huffed toward home plate. “Now!”

  “Well, from the look of the security tape,” Lorenzo continued in his painfully meticulous manner, “the man who brought your kids to the building, I don’t know if that’s Mr. Crawford, but he got out of the driver’s seat with the kids and took them to you.”

  “Yes. My husband. What about him? Did you see a black SUV?”

  “Allie. Off that fuckin’ phone!!!” I knew that tone, and I knew his limits. Murray was seriously pissed off.

  “Well, yes, an SUV was behind both men, but neither got out of it. But it’s all clear on the tape: your husband was with the kids, and then he was the one who gave that envelope to the man who went upstairs to see you. He even smacked him hard on the back after he whispered some joke in his ear.”

  25

  Texan Rage

  “Yes or no?” Wade yelled at me down the hallway outside our apartment. I was sending Lucy and Blake with the sitter, Stacey, into the elevator with their little backpacks and sleeping bags. They were headed for a sleepover with their aunt Alice, Wade’s unmarried, overworked half sister. We hardly ever saw her, but she adored taking our children for special nights.r />
  “Give me two minutes, Wade.” I kissed each of the children’s foreheads hard as I cradled their heads in my hands. “Good-bye, honeys. I hate having you away, even for a night when you have no school tomorrow.” I winked at them. “I’m sure you’re going to consume zero candy and no milkshakes tonight.” This made them giggle as the door slid closed.

  “Yes or no what?” I yelled back to Wade and let our front door slam hard behind me. I walked back into our bedroom and watched him prepare for his Meter cocktail party that night to honor Svetlana Gudinskaya. The party aimed to celebrate her Belle de Jour II, The Temptations Continue. She graced the next week’s cover of Meter magazine in a sunny yellow dress with her blond ponytail pulled tight back from her porcelain complexion in a shot meant to mimic Catherine Deneuve’s Chanel No. 5 ads of the ’70s. I wondered which came first in Wade’s head: the sunny yellow napkins working in his home or the cover dress working on the girl.

  His movements were so much like my father’s just then, especially the way he continued to arrange his just-showered wet hair. Where our marriage stood was irrelevant to him: something that possessed me almost every moment of every day was apparently something that he could just ignore and float around.

  While intently cuffing his dark jeans so the bright splash of his magenta socks could be seen, Wade asked again, “It’s a simple yes or no question. Did you look at the guest list of Svetlana’s people or not?”

  I threw my shoe on the floor in disgust. “I actually have a simple yes or no question that I’d actually like answered first, Wade. Are you a serial liar? I need to know that because over the past few weeks I’m not quite sure who I married.”

  He untied his tie and started over again, evening out the ends with great concentration, obviously trying hard to craft an appropriate response.

  “Well, I’m not. You know that,” he said to his reflection in the mirror, and not to me.

  “Wade, you can’t even look at me when you say that? I don’t even feel like you are my friend anymore, let alone my partner. What the hell?” How was I to cajole him into coming clean?

  He put his head down and ripped his tie out of his collar in defeat. He then walked over to me and wrapped the tie around my back and pulled me toward his body. I didn’t know if this was going to be one of the last times we hugged or whether we could somehow dig ourselves out of the thick, horrible slog we were now in. “Life gets messy, Allie. I’m sorry. I’m feeling very uncentered in this new world we live in. I’m feeling like I’m about to lose everything . . . my livelihood, my magazine that just doesn’t translate well online; my whole industry is changing in a way I don’t see I can survive. It’s affecting me at home. I know, it’s rubbing off on us and the way I treat you. But I’ve got a gas tank at zero tonight. I can barely get it up for about a hundred people, many of them advertising clients about to cancel their ads in the magazine. So if we are going to make a living and pay for the children and the home, I think our main priority now is covering our bills and our asses in this economy, not focusing on an unimportant, meaningless . . .”

  “Meaningless to you, Wade!”

  He said softly, “I didn’t mean to you, I meant to me. Absolutely meaningless.”

  “Wade, first of all, what does an ad recession have to do with other women? I can’t trust you if you are sleeping around and doing shit at work I don’t understand and . . .”

  “I . . . can’t do this right now. Allie, I just can’t. I’m sorry if I’m not being a good friend or lover or husband, but I’m cracking on the job front and I need you by my side, and you need to be by my side tonight for the kids’ sake.”

  He may have been doing a master manipulation job on me just then, but he was also desperate in a way I’d never seen since I met the great Sun King. I closed my eyes, relented, and prepared to do what my husband needed that night. So thrilled to be a member of the sisterhood branch that carries the softy disease. It’s the way most caretaking women are, even though they deserve better.

  “Come stand with me and help me focus on the clients and ad execs about to barge through our doors. You have no idea of the tension I’m dealing with on that front.” He threw the tie on the ground and smudged a nick off his vintage Gucci loafers he’d just bought off eBay and headed out of the room into the party he’d organized for Svetlana, his favorite Russian supermodel with zero talent.

  Before I acted the happy hostess, I sat on the bed and contemplated my options. Should I try to get him to fess up to everything and work on our marriage? Was this the absolute worst rough spot and would we get through it for the sake of Blake and Lucy? I didn’t honestly feel I could. I didn’t see how I could live with a man I didn’t believe.

  Regardless of whether I was possibly maybe leaving him, I wanted to come up with a version of Wade’s actions that I could stomach. (I had willingly married the guy without a gun to my head as I remember.) So I told myself this rather far-fetched story line: maybe the clueless Wade was so used to drawing people toward him like bugs to a porch light that he didn’t understand the one time he was being played.

  Wade had gotten in over his head with Murray and Max as a way to compensate for his impotency in the Internet age. It couldn’t have been easy this past decade to be dethroned by a bunch of Silicon Valley youngsters who turned his glossy pages into yesterday’s news. Maybe the tips Wade gave reporters were valid somehow, or maybe Murray and Max didn’t clue him in entirely, and maybe Wade didn’t fully understand they were all profiting from false media rumors he was actively planting.

  Yes, he had had a “thing” with Jackie, but perhaps there was a chance I could look at it as a onetime middle-age crisis and not a long-term coping mechanism he would surely repeat. (Only problem with that pathetic rationalization was that this was the second time, at the least the second time I knew about.)

  Wade walked back down the hall to get his speech out of his bag as if everything was just normal between us. “And you remember the Meter people I have coming, from the book and magazine division?”

  “I can’t remember every face. I try,” I answered as I yanked the small buckle closed on my high-heeled sandal with more than a hint of anger. “But they change jobs often, especially with the advertising recession, and of course they’re all sucking up to the boss’s wife, so they know me, and . . .” I couldn’t shake this feeling of dread.

  “Regardless of our issues, please remember Svet’s people. It’s all I ask.”

  I sighed and walked down the hall three strides behind Wade, mashing earring posts into holes that I couldn’t somehow locate. “Okay, I’ll go over her list,” I promised. “It’s her producer, PR lady . . .”

  “Yes, all them. But Max is the most crucial guest we have.” Wade looked unusually stressed, like all this posturing and posing wasn’t at all easy for him anymore. I flashed back to how Wade had sucked up to Max Rowland at the Sudan premiere and remembered that he had ditched his own children to play golf with him. “Max’s happiness here is most important, I assure you.”

  I leveled my gaze. “Yeah. I know Max. He’s the criminal who just got out of prison who may be on his way back in.”

  “Yes. Yes. Of course,” Wade said distractedly, not hearing me, as he sped toward the front door to welcome the first arrivals with a breathy, “Oh, thank God you’re here and the festivities can begin.”

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, young Internet entrepreneurs in sweatshirt hoodies and bohemian indie movie executives littered my living room. Instead of diving into the party, I sipped a vodka tonic and studied the tactics of the next generation from the windowsill: beautiful and self-important women and men hoping to cozy up to one of the great accomplishers in the room.

  There was Delsie Arceneaux with her sexy news anchor glasses, chatting up Wade at the bar. As I watched, she went up on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. I studied the look that passed between them. Was it a “we’re in cahoots” look? A “we’re fucking too” look? I couldn’t quite tell. Maybe there’s
no difference when the wife is left out. My humiliation was boiling again. I closed my eyes and willed myself to cast aside that why me? feeling stewing inside.

  In the corner, on the zebra ottoman, a Somali artist named Maleki, another one of those women without a last name, was sitting with her benefactor, Murray, who had cornered the market in her work by buying up every piece he could. Wade had feted her the previous month with a six-page profile, coining her as the art world’s new “It” girl. I watched Murray talking to the very dramatic Maleki, both of them clearly using each other for their own gain: she needed his cash flow, and he needed her black cool. I studied her exotic look: her stretched-out dancer’s neck, Cleopatra-esque eyes heavily lined, and her thick mane slicked back halfway along the top of her head, then fanning out fabulous and wild behind her gold-beaded headband. Murray kept inching closer to her, gazing into her eyes, almost in her lap now like a child bewitched by Santa.

  Thing is, women often read their office husbands better than they read their own. As I observed Maleki looking at her benefactor like she was preparing to screw him from here to kingdom come, I saw the dots suddenly connect. That wasn’t Murray’s please blow me on my plane happy face, it was Murray’s I’m getting cash out of this happy face. After ten years watching him interact with thousands of females, I knew the difference.

  I thought about that: she the artist, he the PR wizard spinning her story all over Manhattan while he secretly owned most of her work and had gotten it at cut-rate prices. The man who’d gotten rich people to buy over two-dozen of her confounding paintings when she was a virtual nobody. Maleki’s paintings in turn sold at Art Basel Miami Beach the next year for close to a million dollars apiece. At least. Wealthy art ignoramuses put her bold, graffiti-filled canvases in their living rooms alongside their emerald-green Scalamandre silk curtains to pretend how edgy they are underneath all that pomp.

  In a global economic downturn and magazine recession, my husband had spent thousands of Meter dollars to send a reporter and photographic team to Somalia for her fashion spread that appeared inside the magazine—rarely did he ever spend that on a cover. Was that Somalia shoot being used to boost Maleki’s public profile for Murray’s financial benefit?