The Idea of Him

7

Wifely Conundrums

I was left drumming the wall behind me with my fingers while waiting for Ms. Reptile Shoes to exit my laundry room. Bile inched up in my throat as I tried to decide how to handle this. What was I supposed to do, march into our living room and ask Wade right then and there what it all meant? Was his telling me I was so hot all the time when we barely had sex anymore a clear sign that he loved someone else?

I got up the guts to walk back down to the laundry room door, but she opened it herself just as I arrived. There stood the Tudor Room woman with her hair perfectly coiffed, and her full lips smothered with gloss, lavishly but accurately, without the remotest hint that she’d been performing sexual tongue gymnastics minutes before. She returned my stare with simple, elegant composure.

Though fuming, I was also heartbroken by her beauty and what it must mean to my husband. “What the hell was going on in here?!”

She then did the unthinkable—she held out her hand. “Jackie Malone.”

“What the …” My eyes darted to the vacant scene behind her.

“Look, he’s all yours.” She stared straight at me. “It’s not what you think. You may not believe me now, but I was in there on your behalf. I was looking for something and he caught me.”

I studied her clothes for signs they’d just had mad groping sex. I had to admit that she did look completely unruffled. All I could see behind her was laundry neatly folded, and all I could smell was powder detergent—no scent of lust, no mess. “You’re telling me you were alone, locked in a room with my husband, and I’m supposed to believe nothing was going on in here?!!”

“Yes. Nothing. And more important …” She paused and held my arm. Then she said, “This is going to sound extremely improbable, but you are actually going to need to trust me.”

I yanked out of her grasp and whispered through clenched teeth. “Trust you? You just spent the last ten minutes locked in the laundry room with my husband who just walked out of here.”

“I told you. I was looking for something having to do with the men in your living room that you know nothing about. What they are doing is going to sap your finances, any stability you have, probably deplete everything you have saved. It’s not safe in any way. Nothing sexual was going on here. He came in and caught me looking for something in his jacket.” She pulled me into the laundry room.

“What were you looking for? And tell me about the casino chips you both seem to have,” I demanded, keeping one eye on the hall in case Wade returned.

“The casino chips mean nothing.” Jackie looked vulnerable for a moment and I took it as a sign that those chips were not an innocent prop in whatever game she was playing. “We’ve been to Atlantic City is all. Earlier, from the hall, I saw him take off his jacket back here, so I came back and I thought I might be able to find—”

“Allie?” I heard Caitlin before I saw her walking furiously in our direction, her miniskirt stretched to the gills over her tight little gymnast form, and her thick platforms loudly stomping on my floors. She was my close friend, but far too nosy to be invited into this scene. I walked farther into the kitchen and slammed the laundry room door behind Jackie so fast I wondered if I’d clipped her nose.

“Not now, Caitlin.”

She was inches from me. “All okay? Wade’s in the living room with all the men drooling over the hot fashionistas, and he looks pissed. Did you fight?”

“Can you go back to the party, please?”

Caitlin crossed her arms and planted her feet Mexican-standoff style. “I know you, and I know you’re not telling me something.” She looked at the closed door. “Did you find her?”

“I was mistaken,” I said, turning her around and pushing her in the direction of the party. “Go make sure Wade doesn’t have his palm on anyone’s ass, please.”

“Happy to,” Caitlin said, relishing the chance to catch my husband in another sticky situation.

With Caitlin gone, I opened the door and snuck inside to continue my line of questioning.

“Look, I need to know a few things besides the obvious question of why you were back here with Wade: Who are you? Why did you help me with Delsie? What was it you were looking for? What is Wade doing with which men that is going to take away our savings, as you supposedly contend?” Despite all my suspicions, in the far reaches of my anterior lobe, I did allow for the possibility that she was telling the truth.

“Not who. What. Documents and photos,” she answered tersely, still trying to size me up even as she scanned the floor. “Or a flash drive, that little stick that goes into the side of a computer.”

“I know what a flash drive is. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“I told you. I’m Jackie.”

I leaned against the dryer, holding my throbbing head with one hand. “Stop being cute. I catch you red-handed with my husband. All this ‘I’m trying to help you’ shit looks like your way of getting out of the room. But I admit, it’s creative.” I was amazed I said that without my voice cracking. Once I feel like I might cry, my toughness evaporates instantly.

Jackie began folding the clothes that had scattered on the floor. “I’m sorry, I know this is confusing and really hard to believe, but I swear on my life that I’m not lying to you one bit.” She suddenly looked five years younger.

I stopped her manic folding with a pat on her hand and looked her in the eye. “What kind of documents and photos?” I considered the very remote possibility that she and Wade weren’t doing anything “wrong”; her hair was too perfect, her blouse too unwrinkled, her lip gloss too polished.

“Meet me at the Tudor Room bar tomorrow around five,” she said calmly, but with a hard glint in her eye. “You’ve got to keep this quiet, but if you find anything at all new in his papers and folders that seems like it wouldn’t be …” She started scribbling down her cell-phone number and passed it to me on a gum wrapper from her purse.

I stuffed it into my pocket, glad to have some kind of way to reach her should I find proof she and Wade were together; I could use it to confront him somehow. “Wouldn’t be what?” I asked in a tough and angry tone. “He’s a journalist, an editor of a general interest magazine. He could have any kind of documents dealing with every story under the sun on his desk. Movie stars, legal wars, political corruption, how the hell am I supposed to know … what isn’t safe? I pay the bills; it’s all there …” I whispered. “What the hell do you mean? And if I found something, you wouldn’t be getting it, just so you know. He’s my husband. You’re a total stranger.”

She laid it on the line in a way I could not avoid any longer, no matter how hard I tried. “Listen carefully. This whole deal has been going on a lot longer than you know. And you’re never going to understand how without my help.”

Really?

And then the beauty added this:

“And just so you know, I didn’t just get screwed in there, you did.”

8

Pulled Toward the Edge

Jackie Malone knew way too much about Wade. My mind was racing. This, their relationship—whatever that may be—must have been going on awhile now. As she teetered back into the party showing her lean, racehorse calves and the flash of lacquered red on her high-heeled soles, I couldn’t help but stare, vanquished, at the most amazing piece of ass I’d ever seen.

She didn’t just get screwed in there, but somehow I did?

Wishing there was a pill to make my legs grow longer, I went to my bedroom to take a little break and figure out my next moves. After I poured enough Visine in my eyes and cold water on my flushed cheeks to return to the living room, half the guests were gone. Jackie was nowhere to be seen. Other revelers were collecting their jackets and starting to head out. Caitlin was in deep conversation with a tall stylist who was so thin she looked like a praying mantis.

When Wade finally noticed the look on my face, he excused himself from a Russian supermodel stunner named Svetlana and hurried over. “Hey, don’t think I don’t know how exasperating these parties are for the wife.”

I squinted at him. He actually believed I was upset over the quiche temperature. “Murray and Max Rowland want me to go to Atlantic City. I really don’t want to go, but”—he shrugged his handsome shoulders, a willing pawn—“I should.”

“Wade, I need to ask you something,” I said, voice just unsteady enough that he’d notice if he wanted to, which he didn’t.

“Wade! Get your butt in here!” Murray yelled impatiently, banging on the opening from inside the elevator.

Wade gestured to Murray that he was right there in a sec. He turned to me and said, “Hey, can we talk tomorrow? I gotta go. Murray has fifteen clients out in Atlantic City who are going to buy ad space, big buys, and I need …” He wasn’t even looking at me.

“Who was the woman? You tell me and then you go.”

“What woman?” Wade said like I’d asked about a purple giraffe in our home.

“Wade. THERE … WAS … A … WOMAN … IN … THE … LAUNDRY … ROOM. I saw her leave after you left.”

“Oh God. She’s just some woman who hangs around the Tudor Room. She had papers from some event she’s trying to deal with and I had them in my jacket and I don’t know, she wanted …”

“You were in there with the door closed.”

“Wade!” Murray bellowed, now angry.

“Honey, it looks weird, I know. I just thought it best to talk to her privately not to raise suspicions because I know you get upset about beautiful women sometimes around me, and I’m just so sorry, my tactic did the opposite. She just wanted advice on how to handle one of the clients out there and I … I gotta go. I love you.” He rushed to the door. I knew I wouldn’t get anything out of him this way.

Caitlin glanced back at me and then sprinted to my side as I gathered unused little fuchsia napkins into a neat pile around the bar, anything to busy myself. “You don’t mind if I go home, do you?” she asked, her eyes searching mine for yet one more clue to what had happened. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, even as I pictured Jackie Malone with her legs entwined around my husband in Max Rowland’s Borgata-bound Atlantic City helicopter. “False alarm.”

Four minutes later, as the elevator finally banged shut for the two stoned Columbia University waiters I practically pushed out the door, I laid my head against my front door, knowing my husband would deny all of it.

With tears obscuring my vision and judgment, I walked over to Wade’s work alcove and feverishly riffled through every single piece of paper my husband had ever come into contact with. I encountered nothing unusual, except this fresh ache in my heart signaling we were headed nowhere good fast.

A FULL HOUR later, I slumped onto my corner sofa, feeling defeated and sucker punched, with a wrinkled-up photo in my hand of Wade and me taken from the night we met. When I found it, I’d crumpled it into a ball and thrown it into the trash can across the room. I loved that photo. It was black and white and taken in the moments after a screening. We’d been talking only about ten minutes, but he was craning his neck toward me as if he were completely transfixed by my very presence. I had retrieved the photo from the trash, and now I flattened it out on a big book in my lap. Then I just stared at it, at us.

I then watched the light beams of a dozen flickering votives meld together on the windowsill and told myself this: at the ripe age of thirty-four I did have to grow up and start facing realities I didn’t want to accept. One thing would never change: I would charge Wade up and he would, in turn, charge out the door to conquer and seduce the world. Problem was this: he was just too damn good at that seduction and unable to resist its bounty.

The photo in my trembling hand had been taken the night Hillsinger Consulting was working pro bono to promote a project to benefit veterans’ causes; we were launching a gorgeous little gem of a World War Two documentary and book series that would win several awards the next winter. With all the press I’d convinced to show up, the buzz in the room was radioactive.

At some point during the afterglow, Murray introduced me to my future husband, then wandered off into the movie lobby to revel in the accolades for my hard work: I’d gotten every important person in New York to the event. Wade and I fell into a deep conversation until the guy trying to sweep away the complimentary popcorn nudged us out. In our now crumpled first photo, we were in midstep, heads focused on each other, walking the aisle like we were already a done deal.

Wade had moved with an awkward charm as he escorted me out of the screening room and into the sea of guests, demonstrating a tender shyness I would never again see in him. “You must be hungry after pulling off this great event?” he asked, and I nodded. “We can get a table next door at the Gotham. Unless you would prefer the bar.” I liked the way his arm felt on my back as he guided me through the room. He was a good height for me, and lanky—the complete opposite build of James, the lifelong soul mate I would leave for Wade, who at that point was on month eleven of inoculating children in East Asia.

Truth be told, I didn’t really like lanky, but I thought maybe I could fall for this Wade guy anyway. The shoulders were strong and confident, which helped. His blondish long hair hinted he might be cool like the guys on the docks I grew up with; but he was also urbane: everything rolled up into one neat package I’d left my small seaside hamlet for. The city and its sophisticated inhabitants were there to save me, and I was as willing as I’d ever be. I was also trying hard to be as single as I could with James off discovering the world instead of my body.

We had walked into the bright lights of Gotham restaurant, a place bubbling with that exact sharp, pulsing New York City energy I’d grown to love. A pack of mortals waited at the bar—hedge funders, models, fabulous gay fashion editors, all looking very worthy of commandeering any table at any restaurant in New York. Yet the hostess led us swiftly past all of them to a romantic little corner complete with a lone red candle and a tasteful bouquet of purple poppies. Three people tried to get Wade’s attention on the way to our seats.

“What do they want?” I asked, as if I didn’t understand why on earth they would even want to talk to him. His magazine was crackling with popularity back then and I saw no need to massage his ego.

Now I’d put him in a position where this Wade Crawford I’d heard so much about would have to brag. And this was a little test: either he was going to be discreet about his placement on the New York totem pole, or he was going to be one of those insecure douche bags Caitlin and I always laughed about—the ones who felt compelled to highlight their prowess in yellow marker.

“I guess they want to be in the magazine,” he said, pulling out my chair and handing me my napkin. “Maybe they think it’ll help their careers. Who knows?”

That passed muster. Honest enough without showing off.

Before we could get settled into our unplanned date, a slick-looking thirtysomething in a shiny Hugo Boss suit sidled up to the table and slapped Wade on the back too hard.

“Hey, man, did you get the book? We’re already shopping it in Hollywood; I’m telling you, it’s The Perfect Storm meets Friday Night Lights. A race around the world that—”

“Joe. I got it. And I get it.” Wade winked at Joe, a man I guessed to be an agent. “And you know what?” He tilted his head toward me. “I’m on it too, but I’m in the middle of something here.” He high-fived the guy and turned around before Joe could say anything else.

During our nonstop conversation that night, Wade listened to me intently, fixing his gorgeous hazel eyes on me, nailing me with a crazy look on his chiseled face like he was completely smitten. “So I just commissioned a story on this company down in Texas that has really screwed over a lot of people,” he said while attempting to loop an olive out of the bottom of his lowball. “They were manipulating energy prices all along California by—”

I placed my head on my hand in mock disgust. “Corruption for $400. And the answer is: What is Enron?”

“So you know about …”

My laugh was light and happy. “Wade, I’m thrilled to have dinner with you, but, really, you just laid your cards on the table big-time.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, flustered, which, though I barely knew him, I surmised was a new feeling.

“You’ve obviously been dating women who don’t understand what you do. You don’t need to be surprised I’ve heard of Enron. It’s been front page in the New York Times for a week now. And by the way, you’re a little late jumping on the story.”

“I was just trying to …”

“I know, you were being polite, but, like I said, you’re kinda busted. You’d have to be a Victoria’s Secret angel not to have heard of Enron.”

He laughed out loud and looked at me like he was going to propose right then and there. “You got me,” he said with a devilish half-curved smile. My smallish breasts and short legs weren’t exactly the angel material he’d apparently been accustomed to, but I pressed on.

Despite his reputation for being an inveterate mover and shaker, only twice during the meal did I notice Wade scan the room. And though this may have been a record in restraint for him, he got up only once, to say hello to a table filled with young Hollywood somethings.

“I’m sorry,” he said as he returned. “I didn’t think I had to do any work tonight, but I have to whore myself out sometimes. Just tried to convince a young Hollywood schmuck he’s gotta do my cover instead of People magazine.” Wade looked a little desperate, like he’d taken the shafting personally. It was clear this guy’s ego was completely wrapped up in whom he could secure for his magazine, like a hostess fretting over the RSVP list for her party.

“Did he bite?”

“Not sure. The ugly truth is I now have to kiss the asses of a bunch of idiots a fair amount of the time to get what I want out of them.”

“What were you doing before you were kissing idiots’ asses?”

He choked a little on that one. “You know, sadly enough, that’s exactly how I spend most of my day. But it wasn’t always like this. I started out in my twenties working for the Boston Globe, which was a much more scrappy kind of journalism, and something I thought I’d always stick with. You know, not to sound too righteous, but the great stuff for any reporter—exposing politicians and corporate criminals, that stuff we thrive on.”

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

“I started writing longer pieces for magazines, and then I landed my first job as an editor, and the chance to rise was too powerful to pass up.”

“And that makes you melancholy for the hard news?”

All of a sudden, he sat very rigidly, as if trying to make up for something he’d just done wrong. “You know the way life pulls you away from your goals, before you know it’s happening? I have a different kind of influence working at Meter, I guess I could say, but it isn’t the same real sense of breaking news. I get to pick important people to go after and we do significant hard news pieces sometimes, but there’s a lot more celebrity stuff I never thought I’d get involved with. Truth is, for those people, a Meter cover can make someone’s career. It’s a major statement. Period.”

He took a sip of his drink and looked at me strangely, like I may have been the first woman he’d dated in a while with whom he could talk. He liked me. I could read it all over his face. “I’m not saying it’s me, you know. It’s the magazine, to be alongside more substantive pieces about movies, blue-blood scandals, and literary sensations. It’s a huge opportunity for that kid across the room, pure and simple, and he’s making me work for it when it’s usually the other way around. Yes, I got in this business to root out the bad guys, but now that I’m the editor, the bottom line keeps my job afloat and I have to focus on what the magazine needs, which is celebrity cluster-fucks.” He shook his head.

“Do you mind the ‘whoring’?”

He held my gaze. “You wanna know the truth?”

“Sure.” I didn’t dare blink.

“Put it this way: I don’t like to lose.” He placed his forearms flat almost to my edge of the table. “And I like to think I’m more of a high-class courtesan than a two-bit hooker.”

We talked into the night and I was amazed at my ability to hold my own with an accomplished editor ten years older than me. Yes, I felt like the imposter, as I often do even today around new people I meet in the city, but I also sensed this man before me needed to be tamed. He liked my point of view, he liked me putting him in his place, and he even liked not acting like a pretentious ass for once. I tried to make my PR work for Murray sound more serious than event planning, which was most of what I did at the beginning. Wade was interested in my job, but not as interested as he was in explaining his.

While he was coming to quick terms with the idea that he’d finally found an attractive woman who cared about his world of nonstop news and gossip, right away, I knew that I too certainly liked the idea of this Wade Crawford man before me. He fit a need, like a square peg into a square hole. His enthusiasm for life and work would soften my losses: my father in a plane to the ravages of an untimely blizzard and James to a burning obsession to save every child on the other side of the world.

New York glimmered around us that night, the way it can when spontaneity falls perfectly into place. After dinner, Wade escorted me to two downtown parties filled with cigarette smoke and writers. Someday I hoped to be like his writer friends who wrote long magazine stories and books that they’d mined from their souls. It was clear from every angle that Wade’s nonstop joie de vivre was more than contagious. He was sheer fun, and full of the possibility of escape, of renewal even.

He dropped me at my stoop at dawn, kissing me tenderly on the lips and disappearing into the early morning glow. As I watched him bounce down the street, all I could think was that he had Daddy’s electricity and confidence. And that suited me just fine.

NOW I THREW the photo on the side table, my heart tightening. Next I did some more sifting through his desk to look for something a young girl could categorize as “unsafe” and a clue to his affections for this same girl. No jewelry receipts, no trips to swanky hotels in South Beach, no damaging Monkey Business photos. Was it possible my wifely hunch was off? Was Jackie honestly trying to help me at the bar? And in my own laundry room?

Around Wade’s work alcove, I only found celebrity snapshots amid journalistic projects I knew he was working on—cocaine dealers in Tijuana, photos of well-known American CEOs at an exclusive conference in the Rockies, and a draft piece about a society murder in Argentina linked to the grandson of an SS Nazi officer—but nothing seemed secret or nefarious. Or they all seemed secret and nefarious, but that was the nature of Wade’s work: find twisted stories that drew people in.