Men at Work: Through the Roof / Taking His Measure / Watching It Go Up
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He sighed wearily. “It’s all in the letter, querida. What else do you want me to say?”
She began to shake. “You can’t mean that stuff.”
He folded his arms across his naked torso and raised his stubborn chin. “I mean every word of that stuff, as you call it. I will not get married until I can take care of my wife. And right now I don’t have two cents to rub together.”
“Ben, this doesn’t make sense. We love each other. I have millions of dollars—you don’t need to have those two cents! I don’t need to be taken care of. What’s mine is yours, baby, you know that… I didn’t even ask you to sign a prenup. I wouldn’t!”
His voice emerged deadly calm and quiet. “I am not a parasite. I will not live off of my wife.”
“Ben, be reasonable. If our situations were reversed, I would take help from my fiancé when I needed it!”
He held up a hand. “No.”
“Marriage is about love, not finances. It’s about being there for each other—”
“Marina, this discussion is over. I will not take your money. I will not take your charity.”
“Then call it a loan, if you have to! Just don’t leave me, don’t hurt me like this, please, Ben. I love you…” She began to cry again, to her shame.
“Come here, mi corazón.” He pulled her up off the floor and gathered her into his arms. “Shh. Shh, Marina. Te amo, never doubt that. I love you. But I will not let you make me less of a man.”
“I’m not doing any such thing!”
“Not intentionally, mi vida.”
“Not at all! Please, don’t be so pigheaded, so stupid—”
He pushed her away but held her by the shoulders. His eyes went dark and cold and his tone hardened. “Don’t you ever call my integrity stupid. You’re lucky I’m not some vividor who will move in on you and wallow in your money, use you, rob you blind.”
She stared at him through still-streaming eyes. “Oh, I’m lucky, am I? Because I’ve had the good fortune to fall in love with a man who puts his pride ahead of everything else? A man who is such a coward that he leaves me in a letter—”
“Goddamn it, Marina! I couldn’t face you, and that’s the truth. I didn’t want to see you cry. Beg. Debase yourself—”
She gasped. Then she drew back her hand and slapped him, hard. Right across his arrogant, prideful, stubborn, macho cheek.
Ben stared at her.
“How dare you?” she asked, her voice shaking. “You call this debasement? Me, trying to talk sense into you and salvage what we have together? God doesn’t bless two people with our kind of love very often, Benjamin Delgado! And you—you want to throw it away because of money. Well, that’s sad. In fact, it’s tragic.”
“I told you that this discussion is over!” He roared the words this time, his eyes blazing.
She stamped her foot. “No, it’s not. It’s not over until I, at least, get one hell of an apology from you, Ben. You want to live a lonely life with your pride, then that’s your choice. But I deserved better than to be told you can’t afford me. I deserved a face-to-face conversation.”
Marina straightened the rest of her clothes while Ben turned away, apparently too angry to speak.
“The truth hurts, doesn’t it, you jerk? And how could you have slept with me just now when you knew you hadn’t changed your mind? You don’t think that debased me? Hell, I should charge you! What am I worth? Let’s call it five hundred bucks. I’ll take it in cash from you, right now.”
He swung around, face white, and took a step toward her. “Marina!”
She held out her hand, palm up. “C’mon. Give it to me,” she said in scathing tones.
“Stop it.”
“Oh, that’s right. How could I forget? You can’t afford me.”
She threw open the door and clattered down the trailer steps. Her face burned; her whole body burned. She ran to her car, threw open the door, fumbled her keys into the ignition and shot back down the dirt road.
In her rearview mirror, she could see Ben, still standing in the trailer’s doorway, looking stricken.
“OOOH-EEEEE, she’s one stacked little spitfire. You get some action, amigo?”
Ben stopped in his tracks and turned the full force of his glare on the pendejo lounging against a sawhorse on site. “Do not make the mistake of disrespecting my fiancée, chivo de mierda. Do you understand me?”
The guy dropped his cigarette butt in the dirt and stepped on it. “Okay, okay, man. Chill out.”
Ben stalked by him and swung himself back onto the big slab. As he approached the crew he was working with, silence fell, which told him he was the topic of their conversation, too. It didn’t improve his temper.
Why the hell had Marina come here? To torment him? To upset them both? To make a spectacle out of herself?
He thought he’d made his position crystal clear. He found nothing unreasonable about it. To marry her now would make him a gigolo. He was goddamned if he’d move into her fancy house, drive one of her spare luxury cars and be given an allowance like a ten-year-old. He’d sooner shoot himself.
It’s not a question of loving her, it’s a question of having balls. I’m a man, not a mistress! Why can’t she understand that?
Why did it make him a bad person that he had principles? That he refused to take advantage of her? Perhaps some people would consider his scruples ridiculous, but they weren’t to him.
It already bothered him greatly when she bought him clothes, and he’d refused to accept the Testarossa she’d unwisely had delivered for his last birthday. He hadn’t even opened the candy-apple-red door—he’d just called the dealer and made them pick it up again within the hour.
She’d been hurt. She hadn’t understood what it had cost him to do that. Did he appreciate the gesture? Of course. The Testarossa was his dream car. He’d drooled over the damn thing. He’d practically wanted to lick it. But he couldn’t accept it. He had his pride.
But his mindset was a lot more complex than simple pride, whatever she thought. He couldn’t explain it, not even to his own satisfaction.
When his father had lost all his money, he’d relinquished some part of himself as well as his wife and family. He’d become vulnerable and somehow…weak, which was unacceptable to Ben.
He didn’t want to be weak, suck on Marina’s money like a niño at the breast. He recoiled from the idea, even as her words came back to him. You want to live a lonely life with your pride, that’s your problem.
Ben picked up the nail gun he’d been using and tried to block out the look on her face, bitter and hurt, so hurt.
Why don’t you take up kicking puppies, man? Mugging little old ladies? Tripping kids on tricycles?
He began driving nails into wooden studs so savagely that the men around him exchanged glances and moved away.
The noise of a circular saw behind him would normally have grated on his nerves. But right now it came as a relief, drowning out the sound of Marina’s voice in his head.
Did he owe her an apology for breaking up with her in a letter? Could she be right—was he a coward? She didn’t mean physically. She meant emotionally.
But that didn’t matter—he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Delgados weren’t cowards of any sort.
Shit. Shit! Ben misfired with the nail gun, narrowly avoiding his own thumb. He drew back his booted foot and kicked a bag of concrete mix nearby.
He’d thought a letter would be simpler. Cleaner. More final. Right there in black-and-white.
It had never occurred to him that it might be cowardly. That it might upset Marina even more.
I deserved better than to be told you can’t afford me… I deserved a face-to-face conversation.
He realized now that he’d given her the equivalent of a pink slip, with no discussion. She had a right to be angry about it. Ben threw down the nail gun and stripped off his work gloves.
Oh, hell. He did owe her an apology.
4
MARINA ALTERNATED between sipping a glass of cabernet and booking various beauty treatments to make herself feel better. Ben Delgado is a pig. Ben Delgado is not worthy of me. Ben Delgado dumped me again, and this time while I was sprawled naked in a double-wide!
She switched from sipping to gulping the sixty-dollar-a-bottle wine. Grapes: They did a body good. Wine was full of antioxidants, it was great for the heart and it contained fewer calories and carbs than chocolate. Wine is a veritable health food. She knocked back another gulp.
Why was Ben being so unreasonable?
Perhaps he had seen signs of cellulite on her thighs? She hit a number on speed dial and arranged for three sessions of endermologie, beginning tomorrow. It was a new process involving a machine that somehow broke up fatty deposits under the skin—rather like steamrolling one’s butt back to an acceptable flatness.
Or maybe her lips weren’t plump enough. She dialed Dr. Davinsky’s office, stat, and arranged for a collagen injection, even though she’d never had one and didn’t at all like the thought of being injected with a big needle right on the kisser. But Angelina Jolie had enslaved another woman’s husband with her pucker. Surely, Marina could take a little pain so as to enslave her own husband to be?
She peered into her mirror in the bathroom and inspected the pale down on her upper lip. Her lighted, magnified looking glass made it appear that she had a mustache to rival Errol Flynn’s. What good were bodacious lips if you had fur above them?
She hit another button on speed dial and signed up for a laser treatment to remove the offending hairs. She wondered if she should take care of the hair under her arms with laser treatment, too. And what about her legs, or maybe her whole pubic area? Hmm.
She’d heard that it really hurt. And one day she might be in a nursing home and didn’t want the staff there to check out her permanent, gray Brazilian and assume she’d been a pole dancer in her youth… On the other hand, she’d never have to get a bikini wax again.
The phone rang as Marina tried to make up her mind. “Hello?”
Her best friend, Chloe’s, nasal New York accent boomed into her ear. “Hi, doll. How ya doin’?”
“Ugh,” said Marina. “That about sums it up.”
“Okay so what are you doin’?”
“Nothing. Drinking a glass of wine. Through a hot pink crazy-straw.”
“At two o’clock in the afternoon. Uh-oh. I take it things did not go well with Ben. Tell me you’re not scheduling forty weird-ass cosmetic procedures, or obsessing over whether one of your kneecaps is rounder than the other.”
“I—”
“Oh, God. You are. Listen to me, Marina—this is a psychotic condition of yours. You do this every time you get depressed. And you don’t need anything done!”
Marina gathered the shreds of her dignity around her—she’d left most of it back at the construction site with Ben. “I am not,” she stated, “mentally ill. And we can all use a little improvement here and there.”
“Uh-huh. How many appointments have you made this afternoon?”
Time for a subject change. “Did you see that there’s a sale at Saks?”
Chloe didn’t bite. “How many?”
Damn. Marina sighed. “Five.”
“Oh, my God!” Chloe bellowed into her ear. “No. I am coming over and we are going to cancel them.”
“Chloe, leave me alone—”
“I’m bringing ice cream. Normal women eat a quart of ice cream when they’re depressed. They don’t have their entire bodies resurfaced, like some kind of molting reptile. Are you going to dye your hair blond, too? Get a third breast?”
Marina jumped up from her mink-covered stool. “I can’t eat ice cream. Are you crazy? It will go straight to my hips and Ben will never look at me again.”
“Not only am I bringing ice cream—four different flavors—but you and I are going to have a serious talk about what Ben really loves about you, and it’s not your bony hips!” Chloe hung up on her, and Marina stared at the receiver.
“Jeez. No need to get hostile.”
Thirty minutes later, her friend was knocking on her door with an entire grocery sack full of pints of Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs. Marina squinted at her. “You’re the devil.”
“It’s great to see you, too. Now, either invite me in or get out of my way so I can barge in,” said Chloe. “By the way, Ben would love the way you look right now.”
Marina looked down in horror. She wore a ratty gray T-shirt of his with the arms ripped out and a pair of panties. That was it. “Are you high?”
Chloe shook her head, shoved past her and made her way to the granite-topped kitchen island, where she started unloading the ice cream and pulling off various lids. Then she got a fork for each one and stabbed it into the center of every container.
Marina shook her head. “Don’t you realize how demented it is to eat ice cream with a fork?”
“Not any more demented than drinking good wine through a crazy-straw. Besides, it’s practical. Ice cream is usually too hard to eat with a spoon. With a fork, you can jab into it and dig out the good stuff.”
Marina shook her head and tried to psych herself out of attacking the ice cream. “There is no good stuff. It’s just fat, sugar and liquid squeezed out of a cow, which is a disgusting, smelly, filthy animal with four stomachs and no brain power. Plus, there are so many preservatives in that container that your butt will look like a sea sponge after one spoonful.”
Chloe pulled one of the forks out and threatened her with it. “There is something really, really wrong with you, honey. And there are no preservatives in Ben & Jerry’s or Häagen-Dazs. They’re chemical free, unlike—” she scanned Marina’s body “—your hair, your face, your boobs and your nails.”
Marina gasped. “My boobs are natural!”
“Yeah, just like my tiny waist. Save it,” said Chloe, around a huge forkful of Marsha Marsha Marshmallow. “I’ve seen the scars under your arms, remember?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Marina sucked at least three ounces of cabernet through the pink straw.
“Ice cream,” said Chloe, “doesn’t make you drunk.”
But Marina was determined to think of the stuff in the grossest possible way so she wouldn’t want it and it would not go straight to her thighs. “Why not just crawl under a cow, suck on its hairy udder and then squirt chocolate syrup into your mouth?”
Chloe set down her pint and eyed her with distaste. “Just because you won’t eat any does not give you the right to ruin my enjoyment of Ben & Jerry’s forever. Now, be quiet.”
“Yes, ma’am. Wait—isn’t this my house? My kitchen? My cow-free domain?” She yelped as Chloe came at her with the fork.
“Be nice. Be a good hostess. You invited me over—”
“Actually, I didn’t.”
“So tell me what happened with Ben and we’ll figure out how to fix it.”
Marina hunched her shoulders and stuck out her lower lip. She twisted the hem of her ratty T-shirt as she walked into the living room, dominated by white leather furniture and a breathtaking view of Biscayne Bay. “Ben says he loves me, but he hates my money.”
Chloe nodded as Marina kicked an ottoman with her bare foot and set down her wine.
“After all the guys who have been thrilled to date a rich woman with her own jet, I have to fall for the one guy who is uncomfortable with my filthy lucre!”
Chloe curled up in a big armchair with her ice cream and fork. “I have the perfect solution—give it to me.” She grinned.
“I should. I’d be a happier person and I wouldn’t have to keep on firing employees who steal from me.”
“Not another one.”
Marina nodded. “But this one’s a single mom, and I just can’t make myself pull the trigger. I know her daughter since she’s in school with my cousin’s daughter.”
“Okay, one problem at a time. We cannot solve them all in a day. What happened with Ben?”
Marina crawled onto the couch. “I tracked him down at one of Mathew Tremaine’s construction sites and we, um, had a chat.”
“A chat,” Chloe repeated, in disbelieving tones.
“It was all very civilized—”
“Yeah, right.” Her friend smirked. “How many times did you hit him? What names did you call him?”
“But he won’t change his mind. And I don’t know what to do.” She looked sadly down at her engagement ring, which Ben must have saved for two years to buy. It was a two-carat, pearshaped diamond that she’d simply forgotten to throw at him earlier in the day. She’d have to remedy that, but the thought depressed her even more.
The wine had made her emotional, because when she looked up again at Chloe her eyes streamed. “What can I do, Chlo?”
Her friend jumped up, set down her ice cream and gathered her into her arms. “Oh, honey. Is it really the money that’s bothering him? Or is it…” She paused and, uncharacteristically, stepped delicately. “Is it maybe your lifestyle that intimidates him?”
“What do you mean? I’m just a normal person.”
Chloe took a deep breath. “No, Marina, you’re not. I hate to break it to you, but most women can’t afford three-hundreddollar monthly highlights, six-hundred-dollar shoes or cute little custom-painted jets that take them to Paris at a moment’s notice.”
“You think he’d change his mind if I flew coach? Went to Super Cuts? Shopped at Payless?” Marina sucked the last of her wine through the crazy-straw.
“Well, I’m not sure it’s that simple, but maybe. I think your money intimidates Ben. Makes him feel like he’ll never make enough to be able to compete.”
Marina threw up her hands. “I don’t want him to compete! I don’t need him to compete.”
“Honey, you’re not getting what I’m saying. I’ll be blunt. Your financial situation makes Ben feel like he has a small penis.”
Marina gaped at her. “Ben Delgado is hung like a horse!”
Chloe closed her eyes and stuck her fingers in her ears. “Too much information!”
“Hey, you’re the one who brought up the topic of penises.” Marina pinched at the flesh of her thigh. “Do you think I need liposuction?”
“No!” yelled Chloe. “You need brain suction. See, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.”
“What is?”
“Normal women do not just go have liposuction on a whim. They save up for it for months, or run up their credit cards and have to pay them off slowly. It’s a big deal, not a narcissistic whim!”
Marina’s mouth trembled. “You’re saying I’m narcissistic?”
“No, no, no. Wouldn’t dream of it, sweetie. All I’m saying is that maybe you’re a teeny, tiny bit, um, self-absorbed. Just with the whole beauty thing—not in other areas.”
“Self-absorbed,” Marina repeated. “Ouch. I think you’ve officially hurt my feelings, Chlo.”
“Stop. Be hurt later. Right now we have to discuss this, if you love Ben and you want to hang on to him. He is in crisis at the moment, and you’re talking about your thighs!”
“But maybe that’s why he dumped me—guys don’t dump women who look perfect.”
“Yes, they do! Ben loves the Marina Reston who reads to sick kids in the hospital and speaks to the state legislature about education and public after-school programs. He loves the woman who endows thirty charities and has trouble firing a single mom.
“Ben does not love the woman who won’t eat even a tablespoon of ice cream and inspects her butt with a hand mirror every night, checking for dimples!”
“Who told you that?”
Relentless, Chloe forged on. “Ben does not love the Marina Reston who is obsessed with her appearance to the point of ridicule and spends a hundred-thousand dollars a year maintaining it—”
“I do not spend anywhere near that amount!”
“Add up the receipts for the clothes, the jewelry, the massages, the hair, the nails, the facials, the treatments and the cosmetic surgeries. Seriously, Marina, add them up and then ask yourself why Ben might be intimidated at the thought of marriage to you.”
“But I don’t ask him to pay for any of it,” Marina wailed.
“That’s not the point. The point is that he couldn’t if he wanted to. Men like to know they can keep their women happy. And I think he’s afraid that if you lost all your money tomorrow on the stock exchange, he wouldn’t be able to keep you happy.”
“So what are you saying?”
Chloe shrugged. “What do you think I’m saying? Prove to him that you can live without any of it.”
Marina stared at her, appalled. Life without massages and facials and trips to Paris?
Then she thought about the alternative: life without Ben. That was much, much worse.
She got up and padded into the kitchen, where she stared at the other three melting pints of ice cream with forks in them. She pulled the fork out of the Coffee Heath Bar Crunch and licked it. Then she licked the other two and put them all in the sink.
Marina put the lids back on two of the pints and stuck them in the freezer. But the vanilla? That she poured into a mug, which she took back into the living room.
She stared at Chloe glumly. “Do you know how to have a garage sale?”
5
TWO DAYS LATER, Ben pulled his Chevy work truck into Marina’s circular driveway on Key Biscayne and stared. A massive yellow moving van blocked his way, and it did not appear that his darling had simply ordered five suites of new furniture. No, small herds of men were removing her things from her two-story Mediterranean and a four-by-six sign announced that the house was for rent. What the hell?
Ben drove the Chevy between two royal palms and onto a stretch of lawn, then put it in Park. He swung out and strode around the van, up the wide, shallow entrance stairs and through the door. “Marina?” he called.
She popped her gorgeous head out of the kitchen. “Ben? What are you doing here?”
She was clad in color-coordinated baby-blue and brown aerobics-wear, which did nothing to obscure her perfectly proportioned body. Her chestnut hair was held back with a brown tie and a baby-blue sweatband completed the outfit. Christ—the woman even wore couture to the gym.
His lips might have twitched—if he hadn’t been instantly fixated on the curve of her bottom and the complete lack of a panty-line anywhere on it. Dios mío. And she was prancing around like this in front of a platoon of moving guys?
He completely forgot that he was here to apologize to her. “Marina, what is the meaning of this?” He gestured toward the white leather couch disappearing out the door, the stacks of cardboard boxes in the dining room and the plastic sheeting protecting the floors from the men’s boots.
Her expression changed. She’d smiled involuntarily at first sight of him, but now she elevated her little gringa nose and leveled a glare at him. “I’m moving to a condo.”
He gaped at her. “A condo? You couldn’t even fit the contents of your closet into a condo, mi vida.”
“That was yesterday. Today is different.”
It is? “Marina, look around you. You have far too much. Rugs, art, furniture—where are you going to put everything?”
“In storage,” she said airily. “And some of it I’m giving away.”
“But why?”
She tilted her head, folded her tanned, sculpted arms and took a deep breath. “Because Chloe says that all of this makes you feel like you have a small penis.”
Ben stared at her. His jaw worked, but no sound emerged.
“So I’m getting rid of it, and I’m going to divert my private income to the foundation and be poor.”
He finally managed a choking noise.
“Yes, really!” She produced a brave smile, but then her nose wrinkled. “I’m going to try to buy my shoes at Payless from now on. I might not be able to do it, though, in which case I’ll have to wear last year’s Louboutins and Choos. Oh, and classic Chanels—they never go out of style.”