“Rob, you can’t tell anybody. It wouldn’t be fair to Eleanor.”
“Not to mention Barclay and Tricia.”
“Well, okay. Tricia, at any rate.” I tried to explain my theory that Eleanor’s box was the target of the burglary in my garage. “The trouble is,” I told him, “now that I know it can’t be evidence of Barclay’s fraud against Eleanor that someone’s after, I don’t know what it is. I’ve been through everything else in there and I can’t make heads or tails of the legal and financial documents, so I have no way of knowing if this is real or all in my head. Like the governess in The Turn of the Screw.”
He pushed a piece of invisible dust off the tip of his impeccably shined loafer, ignoring the reference. “I’m curious to know what it is you plan to do with this information—or this theory, at least—and what it has to do with me.”
“I was hoping you would go through the papers with me and see if you could find a motive for blackmail or something that makes Barclay look really bad, since you know so much more about business matters than I do,” I told him. “I’d ask a lawyer, but Eleanor already tried that, and she couldn’t find anyone who’d be willing to use the information against Barclay. Besides, I can’t think of any lawyer I’d trust with the knowledge that I’m investigating this.” I didn’t tell him my old friend Gene Stewart had shrunk in horror from the prospect. “So, will you help me?”
“Caroline, let Uncle Rob give you some advice,” he said, in a tone that was far more serious than his words. “Drop the whole thing. It’s ridiculous. It’s not important. Find some other adventure to embark on.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure I can just leave it alone. I thought I could, but I sort of feel like I owe Eleanor something. Even if I don’t do anything about it, I’d like to know what really happened. I just can’t stand the idea that her death lets him off the hook. Maybe she was vindictive and a harpy and all the things you’ve said, but there’s something about losing your husband, your friends, your income, and your place in life that might make you a little obsessed. If she was paranoid, Barclay did his best to make her that way.”
“That is unadulterated bullshit,” he said, smiling a little. “But I’ll accept it, if you’ll accept that I want absolutely nothing to do with any of this. And I’d appreciate it if you left Kenny out of it, too.”
“Don’t you feel even the slightest commitment to finding out the truth?”
“Jesus, Caroline, I’m in real estate, for Christ’s sake. If you have some fixation on Eleanor Hampton, for reasons that appear to me to be largely unhealthy, it’s none of my business.”
“Okay, I get the message,” I told him.
“Fine.” He uncrossed his ankles. “So what will you do next?”
“I thought you wanted to be left out of it.”
“I do. Right after this conversation.”
“I don’t know,” I told him truthfully. “I guess I’ll have to find someone else discreet to look over the papers.”
He raised an eyebrow. “If a lot of them have to do with business, you might consider someone who smells out financial rats for a living.”
I frowned until I realized whom he meant, and then I blushed. “Oh, Rob, I couldn’t ask him. Not after the way I acted last time.”
“Oh, Rob,” he mimicked. “I thought you were serious about this. You can’t be a shrinking violet if you want to pin something nasty on one of the most prominent lawyers in town. David Sanchez is an obvious choice to review your materials, if you can get him to agree to it.”
“But what could I say to him? I hinted around about it, and he said he doesn’t do that sort of thing. And then I practically insulted him to his face.”
He shrugged. “Are you charming?”
“Not very.”
“Attractive?”
“In certain lights, if you don’t use a magnifying glass.”
He made a face. “How about smart, then?”
“Probably,” I conceded. “But only about some things.”
“Then think of something. What good does it do you to know what happens in Tristram Shandy if you can’t do what you want in life?”
“Nothing happens in Tristram Shandy,” I told him.
“I know,” he said. “I read the Cliffs Notes once. How could you write fifty pages of summary and analysis of a book where nothing happens?” He looked genuinely puzzled, so I knew he couldn’t have been an English major. “Anyway,” he said with a shrug, “I rest my case. Call him tonight.”
“I can’t tonight. I have to go to Much Ado About Nothing.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I am going to exercise a great deal of restraint and let the opportunity to remark on that pass. But don’t push me too far.”
I laughed. “Okay. Anyway, it’s my debut as a single woman still in command of her wits. I have to go just to show the crowd at Eastman, Bartels that I’m not crazy.”
He shook his head. “First thing in the morning, then.” He stood up, signaling, if not the end of the interview, at least a change of direction. “Sure I can’t get you something?” he asked.
“How about passion fruit iced tea?”
“I’ll check the refrigerator,” he said.
10
The Old Globe, like the La Jolla Playhouse, offers a variety of plays from the obvious Shakespeare to the avant garde. The theater scene is generally considered superior to other artistic endeavors about town, and plays are often performed as dry runs before moving on to Broadway. The Old Globe, in addition, has the advantage of a superb location in Balboa Park, which makes it a favorite site for corporate outings. The Eastman, Bartels, and Steed pretheater dinner would take place in the adjacent Sculpture Garden, under the stars.
I had decided to follow Signor Eduardo’s advice and dress with a bit more flair than caution habitually dictated. I was trying to hold the essentials of the makeover together, but it was like attempting to stop entropy with your hands. Still, I was not wholly displeased with my efforts. A green silk shell under a suede jacket combined with a floral, broomstick-pleated skirt seemed youthful and exotic. For good measure, I added Navajo silver earrings inlaid with coral and opal.
“You look nice, Mom,” Megan said, looking up from her book with a smile.
“Thanks,” I told her gratefully. “I’ll be home late, so don’t wait up. I gave Jason money for some pizza.”
She sat up, visibly annoyed. “You should have given it to me,” she protested. “Jason always wants anchovies. Gross!”
“Well, get two of them. Put the extras in the refrigerator, and we’ll have the rest tomorrow night.”
“Okay.” She hesitated. “Will Dad be there?”
“I imagine so.”
She smiled again. “Good. Have a good time then.”
There were place cards at the Sculpture Garden café, so I fussed around looking for my table in order to get over the awkwardness of arriving alone. It was less easy than I had imagined. A number of people smiled and waved at me, but nobody came over to talk. After a few moments, heads turned toward me and then quickly swiveled away again, so I knew that Steve had arrived. I looked down with ferocious determination to find my name, and fast. I just hoped that whatever secretary had arranged the seating had placed me with a congenial group.
She hadn’t. My place card was across the table from Jonathan and Meredith White. Jonathan was a partner in trusts and estates, a dull, fairly pompous man with silvering hair and an expanding chin. Meredith, on the other hand, was third-world thin and so perfectly preserved she seemed to be coated in Lucite. She had the habit of making apparently affable remarks that were really digs of a minor or major nature, depending on the accuracy of her intuition. Despite this unfortunate tendency, she was rather popular. It seemed prudent to invite her to social events, as long as you made sure you didn’t leave the party first.
To my left was Jeff Grayson, who passed, for lack of a better candidate, for firm Lothario. He was handsome in a dissipated, Kennedyesqu
e sort of way and had been divorced twice. He did a lot of the work on the Naturcare account, and he had bragged to Steve that just one weekend’s worth of billables had bought him a second Rolex. He was wearing it now.
To my right were Tricia and Barclay Hampton.
It wasn’t quite the dinner party from Hell, but it was hot and uncomfortable nonetheless. Meredith gave me a little wave full of malevolent good cheer which I interpreted, correctly, as glee at having found such a perfect target. Jonathan smiled politely and looked profoundly uninterested. Barclay looked up with the unwelcoming astonishment one usually associates with discovery of the monster in a horror movie, so I knew someone had been talking about my involvement, such as it was, with Eleanor. Tricia, to do her justice, make a kind attempt at civility, but since she wasn’t very adept at small talk and I was by then thoroughly embarrassed, we didn’t get very far.
Worst of all was my acute consciousness that anything stupid I did or said would be bandied about the firm, and maybe used against me. I might have been determined to show the world that I was not an Eleanor wannabe, but the deck was already stacked. I even wondered about myself. I liked Barclay no better than before, but as I looked around, I could see why my suspicions seemed so ludicrous to Patrick Dunn. It was a real stretch to think of Barclay, resplendent in his Armani suit, rooting around amid the rubble of my garage.
The only person who acted natural was Jeff Grayson, who might have been a practiced seducer but at least managed not to behave as if I were the carrier of a particularly loathsome but unmentionable disease. I felt like Fergie dining with the Queen, but the difference was that I was blameless—no toe-sucking orgies or flagrant infidelities—and everyone had still blatantly sided with Steve. I hadn’t even known sides were necessary, but there it was.
“What are you doing with yourself these days?” Meredith asked me, her shrimp poised in midair on its little fork.
Studying nuclear physics by correspondence. Submitting designs to REBUILD LA. What did she think? I shrugged. “Oh, the usual,” I told her. “Reading. Writing some articles. Going to Megan’s soccer games. Things like that.”
The article part was a lie. Why did I always feel like I had to sound like the chairman of 20th Century-Fox in front of a bunch of women who hadn’t worked for pay since their first child was born, on the average of fifteen years before? The really intimidating ones, the female lawyers, were seated at other tables.
Meredith didn’t exactly coo “How nice for you,” but I wasn’t bathed in a wellspring of warm acceptance, either. I felt prickly with sweat, which owed more to my anxious state than to the warm fall night. Worse, I could see Steve out of the corner of my eye sitting next to Linda Williams. Linda was a very bright associate in the firm whose manner toward the male partners had always included laughing immoderately at their witticisms and resting her lovely blond head on their shoulders. All in jest, of course. Ha ha. Steve always said I overreacted to her flirtatiousness. I loathed her. Still, it didn’t look like a date. And it could have been worse.
I decided to try Tricia. “How are the kids doing?” I asked her. A safe topic. Barclay looked away and began a conversation with Jonathan and Jeff about finding a name for a client’s mail-sorting business that wouldn’t infringe on someone else’s copyright in all fifty states. When I was forced to listen to conversations like that—and I’d heard a lot of them over the years—I put aside any latent regrets I might have had about not having attended law school and gone for the big bucks.
The Hampton children did not seem to be Tricia’s favorite topic. She lowered her sable lashes sadly. “Well, Jennifer is at school, of course, and she seems to be okay. But the boys…well, they are having a lot of trouble adjusting to their mother’s death. Eleanor spoiled them, and…” She glanced uncertainly at Barclay, who by this time was so enthralled with his topic that if the table had levitated, he would have pushed it down and talked on. “Barclay’s never home,” she hissed, with a vehemence that surprised me. “He doesn’t come home till late, and he brings work with him. He worries all the time. He doesn’t sleep.”
I nodded sympathetically. “They do that,” I agreed.
“But he leaves everything to me,” she protested. “The boys, their discipline, the house, everything.” She shook her head. “It’s too much. I can’t cope with everything by myself.”
Poor Tricia. I wondered how long it had been since she had unburdened herself, since I was, to say the least, an unlikely target for confidences. I sighed. “I know what you mean. Steve was the same way.”
She looked alarmed, as well she might. She looked over to where my husband was playing “life of the party” and frowned. “But Steve—” She broke off and blushed.
I knew what she was going to say. Steve wasn’t working himself to death these days. He looked tanned, prosperous, and sleek, like a man who is getting plenty in the sack. As a matter of fact, his offensive good looks in the face of our separation were like a slap in the face.
“Have you tried talking to Barclay about it?” I whispered.
“Of course. He promised me he would try to cut back. We wanted to start a family—”
I noticed that past tense. “Wanted?”
“Now he’s putting it off,” she said, digging her nails into her palm.
“What about the judgeship?” I asked her, sotto voce.
She bit her bottom lip, which would have looked adorable if she hadn’t been so agitated. “I don’t know,” she said, and I was amazed at her frankness. In all our married life, I would never have owned up to ignorance of a matter of such importance to Steve. “He won’t talk to me. But something’s bothering him. I just can’t get him to tell me what it is.” She lowered her voice even below the whisper she was already using. “I think it may have something to do with her.”
I started to ask “who?” though of course I knew who she meant, but just then I looked up to see Barclay glaring at us. Too late, I realized that the best way to attract attention to yourself is by lowering your voice. Barclay definitely did not like the idea of his wife exchanging confidences with someone who might be harboring sympathy for the late, unlamented Eleanor.
“Tricia,” Barclay said, in his plummiest accent, “Meredith was asking what we think of the dyslexia program at Harold Greer. Her nephew might be interested in going there.” Harold Greer was an exclusive private school currently charged with the unenviable task of educating the Hampton twins. Our children were in public school, because in a fit of antielitism I had countermanded Steve’s decision to take them out in the fourth grade after some classmate had threatened to punch Jason’s lights out over an argument at the drinking fountain, which Steve attributed both to the socioeconomic mix of the student body and the school’s Lack of Control. It wasn’t that I had anything against Harold Greer, but I didn’t have anything to contribute to the conversation, so I sat there, excluded, until Jeff, who had apparently solved Jonathan’s name problem, rescued me.
“Having fun?” he asked, with a wink.
“Sure,” I told him.
“Right,” he said. “For the record, I think it was brave of you to come.”
I shrugged, displaying an insouciance I was far from feeling. “I didn’t think so, until I got here.”
“It’s rough. I know. I’ve been through it twice.”
He sounded earnest—sincere, even—but it was hardly the same. Besides, from what I’d heard, both his divorces had been his idea.
“Thanks,” I told him.
“Do you have any plans?”
Christ, not again. I wondered if Steve had planted him to ask me, to find out if I was secretly studying to become a neurosurgeon in order to figure it into his calculations with Jay Thompson. Or maybe he figured he had asked me too many times himself, and thought if I heard it from someone else I might get my ass in gear.
I sighed. “Well, I want to keep on writing, of course, and—”
He laughed and waved his hand dismissively. “No, I
meant after the play. Would you like to have a drink with me?”
I looked over toward Steve’s table. Linda’s aquiline nose was about a fourth of an inch from his sleeve. He looked like he was loving it. “Sure,” I said, “if it’s not too late. My kids are home alone.” I hoped I sounded as casual as the invitation, and not as if I expected handholding in the dark and furtive glances across the table.
“Good,” he said. “I’ll talk to you after the play.”
Another thing I learned in the course of that awful evening is that the fix you’re in, whatever it may be, reorders the universe. I even had a new take on Much Ado about Nothing, which I had hitherto regarded as a rather snotty but delightful comedy about the war between the sexes. But with Steve sitting next to me (he was not, after all, able to do anything about fixing the ticket), his arm pulled so far into his lap, away from his armrest, that another person (albeit a pretty thin one) might have squeezed in between us, I was suddenly sensitive to the play’s darker side. It was all about lies and deception. I certainly had never felt like crying when I had watched or read it before, but when Friar Francis told Hero, “Die to live,” and said:
…what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost,
Why, then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours…
I was very close to tears.
That might have been the lowest point in my whole life. My favorite play was ruined, at least temporarily, but that was only a symbol. I didn’t have a life. All I had were some relicts—like my “friends” at the firm, and the house Steve was threatening to sell—of the life I had lived till my husband left me. I didn’t have a job or new friends or anything to look forward to except (hopefully not too soon) grandchildren. How did I let myself get into a fix like that? I was smart! I knew Shakespeare! I couldn’t even reach into my purse for a tissue because then Steve would have seen me, despite his resolute concentration on the stage. That would only have confirmed his view that I was hysterical or menopausal or crazy or all three, and I didn’t want to hand him that ammunition on a plate. All I could think of was, has it really come to this?
Making Waves Page 13