I Will Never Leave You Page 5

  “Sit down,” Jack said.

  I sat on the living room sofa, a priceless antique, and eyed the ancient windup Victrola in the corner of the room. During a previous visit, he’d commandeered my attention by bringing out rare Billie Holiday 78s on the Okeh label, but entertainment wasn’t to be had on this particular afternoon.

  “You’re not a very smart man,” Jack Riggs said.

  I sucked in a breath.

  Jack Riggs produced a folder containing my college transcript. I had majored in business but had been on academic probation for several semesters. Having just barely graduated six years earlier, I hoped my poor college performance could no longer be used against me. Previously, Jack Riggs had laughed amiably at my jokes, stroked his chin while considering my more thought-provoking comments. I thought he liked me. I thought he was glad I was dating his daughter.

  “And your professional prospects are, shall we say, underwhelming.”

  “I’m circulating my résumé around town again, sir. Something will pop up. I’m sure of it.”

  Jack Riggs smirked. “Should I make a few calls? See what I can rustle up for you?”

  My eyes widened. I hadn’t considered asking Jack Riggs, as big a player in the Washington business scene as I was likely to meet, to help in my job search—an oversight that, I suppose, lent credence to his contention that I wasn’t very smart. “I’d love to work at your bank, sir. I promise to work hard. Even if you started me off in an entry-level position, I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

  “You? At my bank?” Jack Riggs glanced at my transcript and frowned. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t be wise.”

  My shoulders sagged.

  “But I’ll do what I can. Trust me on this. And now I need to trust you on something.” Jack Riggs pushed a photograph across the mahogany coffee table. The photo was of a beautiful woman with short blonde hair and ample cleavage barely contained by her red lace lingerie halter top. She looked to be about thirty, a tad older than Trish and me. “What do you think?”

  Unsure how to respond, I sipped from my port glass.

  “Tell me.” Jack Riggs looked at the photo again and grinned. “You think she’s attractive?”

  Suddenly, I understood what he was getting at. Or so I thought. His wife, Trish’s mother, had died five years earlier after a protracted bout of lymphatic cancer, and from the bashful way he grinned, I gathered he’d brought me here for a man-to-man conversation not about my professional problems but to seek advice on his own affairs of the heart. I took another sip of port. “You’ve got excellent taste, sir.”

  “Damn right I do. She cost me four million dollars too.”

  The figure flabbergasted me. I let go of the photo. It fell from my fingers and fluttered to the table.

  “Four million. Easy. Between what I paid to keep this quiet from her husband, extract a pledge that she won’t press charges against me, and the trust fund to take care of the baby’s upbringing and eventual college costs. Hell, the agreement she signed requires that she says nice things about me if anyone asks. But take it from me: floozies are expensive.” His term—“floozies”—was distasteful, harkening back to the Kennedy administration if not earlier, but though he expressed regret, his tone conveyed bad-boy bravado. He was an old goat, a grizzled player. His cheeks bloomed with pride. “Everything’s got a cost. Especially if you make as many bad choices as I have.”

  In the years that followed, I’ve thought often of this conversation. He laid his cards on the table. We both understood each other’s faults. My own father had abandoned my mother and me when I was thirteen. I’d already begun to look at Jack Riggs as a substitute father figure, but his crudeness appalled me. He talked of groping secretaries, grabbing women by their pussies, and planting kisses on the female associates who came to him for business or career advice. He told me about the harassment suits, the out-of-court settlements, and the cost of maintaining silence about his shenanigans through NDAs.

  “Take my advice: don’t follow my example.” Jack Riggs lifted a cigar from the Spanish cedar humidor at the corner of the table. Tobacco products had never interested me, yet the process by which he went about lighting that cigar fascinated me. He struck a long wooden match against the striking strip of its matchbox, and then, after the sulfurous smell dissipated, he held the cut tip of the cigar at an angle to the match, rotating it in his hands so that the tip burned evenly. “You sure you don’t want one of these? Arturo Fuente God of Fire. About the smoothest smoke you’ll find anywhere in the world.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I’m good.”

  Jack Riggs put the cigar to his mouth and, still holding the match to its tip, drew in a few breaths. He released his breath. A small flame flared from the tip of the cigar. He took another puff until the flame extinguished itself. Setting the cigar down on a ceramic ashtray, he let out a puff of smoke. To this day, though it’s been years since he last smoked a cigar at Savory Mew, I sometimes sit down on the same sofa and smell the nauseating aroma of that cigar and feel again the nervousness of that afternoon.

  “Take my word: less expensive ways exist to get yourself in trouble. Stay clear of floozies, because you don’t have the jack to deal with that.”

  “Jack?”

  “Money. You don’t have jack. At your level, one extra woman will exhaust your entire net worth.”

  “And you?”

  “Let’s just say all the extra women in the world haven’t made a dent in my net worth.” He produced a business card with the name of a private investigating firm printed upon it.

  “Charles Simpkins?” I said, reading the name off the card.

  Jack Riggs picked up his cigar and puffed on it. Its tip glowed. “That’s him. The guy’s a fixer. He fixes problems. He curtails the damages from my floozy problems. The girl wanted seven million,” Jack Riggs said, gesturing to the photograph. “Simpkins talked her down to four. He also secured a copy of your transcript for me, by the way. If you have a problem, any problem, go to him.”

  I pictured Charles Simpkins as a shadowy silver-haired éminence grise, like Clark Clifford or Vernon Jordan, someone a guy like Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton would turn to, to solve an affair of the heart entanglement or a sticky business proposition. Jack Riggs was a wealthy man of the world. Was he warning me not to interfere with his affairs? A man who’d boast about the millions he tossed around to smooth over his indiscretions could surely ruin me if I ever upset him. In revealing his need for a professional fixer, he confessed to being a morally flawed man. I took the business card and buried it in my wallet, vowing to be better than him. Never would I put myself in a position where I needed a professional fixer.

  Chapter Six

  JIM

  Seven hours after wobbling home drunk, I wake in bed, alone, and shut my eyes in reaction to the light filtering through the gauzy bedroom curtains. My tongue is a dehydrated strip of parched shoe leather, and there’s an überache in my head. I remember being irrationally happy about Anne Elise’s birth. I remember a conversation with a commodities insider about an investment opportunity, how for just the $250,000 buy-in on a livestock futures contract, I’d rake in millions of dollars almost overnight. But where am I to get a quarter million dollars? I remember Trish guiding me upstairs and the plop of my head as I passed out on the bed pillows.

  Now, I hear Trish walk upstairs trilling a la-da-da breakfast melody. She opens the bedroom door and, with a smile on her face, says, “James, mornings like this just do not become you.”

  Trish’s right: mornings aren’t my strong suit, yet it’s not in my nature to utter the stressed and hangover-blighted thoughts roiling through my head. As my mother, a single mom who put me through college on the strength of her alimony checks, used to say, “This world’s got no stomach for whiners, hon.”

  “You’re lucky you have such a caring wife,” Trish says, setting down a Lucite tray containing my favorite hangover remedies: glasses of Gatorade and V8 juice, a mug of chamomile tea
, a bottle of ibuprofen, Visine, aspirin, vitamin pills, a toasted poppy seed bagel slathered with cream cheese and lox, and two hard-boiled eggs that sit in antique soft-paste porcelain egg cups. “I bet Laurel wouldn’t tolerate you on mornings like this.”

  I pour a glass of V8 juice down my throat. Hangover mornings are all about rehydration and replenishing the fluids and electrolytes alcohol has dried out of me. Medical experts should devise an easy-to-operate IV hookup to allow drinkers to plug into saline solutions overnight so they wake the following morning fully rehydrated, but for now, the next best thing is power chugging Gatorade and V8 juice. The more liquids I drink, the better I feel, and while this reemerging sense of well-being might only be psychosomatic, one must, in the immortal lyrics of Johnny Mercer, “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive.”

  “Thanks, darling. I feel better already,” I say, almost believing it.

  The only thing on the tray I don’t drink is the cup of chamomile tea—a favorite of Trish’s but something I can’t stand.

  “Come on, James. Chamomile is natural. It’s an herb. It’s totally safe and harmless.”

  I bring the teacup to my nose and sniff it.

  “It’s funny. Yesterday. Seeing her. I couldn’t believe how much she looks like me,” Trish says.

  I do a double take. Trish is a petite yet imposing adult woman dressed in supertight designer jeans and a snug-fitting seamless camisole the color of crushed raspberries. With her black hair and wide forehead, she doesn’t look anything like my blonde Laurel. Not even her manners or how she tilts her head when admonishing me are similar.

  “Don’t tell me you couldn’t see the similarities,” Trish says. “Just like me, she’s got the bluest eyes.”

  “Far be it from me to be the contrarian, honey, but Laurel’s eyes aren’t blue. They’re more like gray.”

  “Not Laurel. Anne Elise! That’s who I’m talking about. Don’t tell me you didn’t see from our eyes how similar we must be.”

  “Oh.”

  “So. Tell me. When you first held Anne Elise and looked into her eyes, did you feel an instant special connection to her?” Trish’s eyes mist up. She holds her hands together, starving for my response. “Let me live vicariously through your experiences. Did you love her immediately? How soon does love set in?”

  Seismic sensations had poured through me at the moment of Anne Elise’s birth. Time slowed down, becoming elastic. A nurse snipped Anne Elise’s umbilical cord. Laurel was flat on her back, getting sutured. I held the baby to Laurel’s face. We kissed her on either cheek. Our three noses touched together. In the expansiveness of the moment, my good cheer verging toward giddiness, Anne Elise’s presence overwhelmed me.

  I pop open the ibuprofen bottle, shake out a tablet. Guilt surges through me—not only because of my affair but from creating a baby who doesn’t belong to the woman I’ve loved for the last fifteen years. Though my love for Anne Elise was instantaneous, saying so would only compound Trish’s pain, hurting her more than I already have. She doesn’t need me to tell her the joy she’s missing out on by being childless. I run my hand through my unkempt hair, swallow the ibuprofen, and shrug. “I guess it was okay.”

  Trish’s mouth drops open. “Only okay?”

  Though I’ve said and done a lot of stupid things over the years, Trish has never been so surprised. She sits down at the corner of the bed, takes a small breath. For twelve years, for better or worse, we shared every experience of our lives, but I’m now experiencing things in which she can play no role. She crosses her legs. Her lips tighten as if she’s bracing herself for a shock. “James? I need you to do something for me.”

  “What’s that, honey?”

  “You need to stop seeing that woman. She’s a dalliance, James. That’s all she is to you. You know this. Deep down, I know you know this. Get her out of your life. Do you understand? Get rid of her.”

  The way she says it—get rid of her—I think she expects me to kill Laurel, which I’d almost understand if she ever finds out how much money I’ve blown on Laurel. Three weeks ago, I received my annual six-figure performance bonus. Rather than paying off my credit cards, I used the money to move Laurel into a stunning three-bedroom riverfront apartment. On the night I told Trish I was at work preparing a client presentation, I painted the walls of one room goldenrod yellow. The room was going to be our child’s nursery. I had discussed so little with Laurel about how we were to proceed once the baby was born. Perhaps Laurel assumes I, too, will move into the apartment. Perhaps she envisions nights on the balcony sipping wine together while the baby sleeps. Nor, beyond pleading for a divorce yesterday, have I talked with Trish about my living arrangements. Everyone in our presumptuous little triangle is just assuming things will work out to their liking.

  I rise out of bed. Still hungover, I’m prepared to feel the room spin beneath my feet, but after I take a wobbly first step, the urge to vomit subsides. I walk to my closet and pull a winter-weight blue pinstriped suit off a heavy wood hanger.

  Trish crosses her arms, taps the toe of her open-toed flats against the floor. The color of her shoes matches her crushed-raspberry camisole. “You married me, James. You vowed to love, honor, and cherish me. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember the sacred vows you made to me?”

  I kiss her on the forehead and touch her chin. “I’ll always love, honor, and cherish you, darling. Why do you think I come home to you each night? Even if, you know, you no longer want me living here with you, I’ll always cherish you. Why do you think I wrap my arms around you and kiss you as often as I can?”

  Trish’s cheeks redden until they match the color of her camisole and flats. She starts to cry. I haven’t seen her cry since the time two years ago when an eminent doctor sat us down in an office decorated with potted ferns and advised us that, after two unsuccessful rounds of in vitro procedures, “you ought to embrace your childless future.”

  “I love you,” Trish says.

  “I love you too. You’re right, honey. Maybe I ought to stop seeing Laurel,” I say, testing the idea out aloud. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to do something. Not that I’m in a position to do something immediately.

  Trish looks up at me, startled.

  “I need to be smart about this. As you might imagine, I’m in an exposed position. Give me time. I need to figure how to get myself out of this.”

  Trish takes in this information, a needy sponge gladly absorbing a raindrop of hope. She brightens, and for a moment, I fear she’ll press me for details, commitments, a precise schedule for when I intend to tell Laurel I’m dropping her. Behind every plan A is a top-notch plan B, but for now my plan B is to wrangle more time for myself so I can devise an even better plan C. Thankfully, one of my cell phones goes off. It’s almost eight o’clock, the hour at which clients seek out my insights about European and Asian overnight trading activity, a topic that today, I’m ill prepared to answer. But when I grab my phone, I discover it’s not one of my clients calling. Instead, it’s my credit card company asking for payment for the amount I’ve overdrawn my account. It’s the third such call this month. All my available cash went into the rent for Laurel’s apartment.

  “What’s wrong?” Trish asks after I put down my phone.

  “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong. What could possibly be wrong when I’m at home with such a beautiful, lovely wife?”

  No smile materializes on Trish’s lips; no joy lights her face. It’s as if, because of the heartbreak I’ve put her through over the past day, my compliments no longer have an effect on her. She looks glum faced and tired. “James? Why don’t you call in sick today? We could go back to bed for a little bit, and then, after you’re feeling better, we could bundle up and drive out to Rock Creek Park for a walk.”

  Rock Creek Park. This is her improbable peace offering to me. It’s our favorite place in the city, a forested two-thousand-acre park in Northwest DC where people flock in the summertime for Shakespeare performances and tennis tournaments. We walked t
here often, roaming the grounds under cotton-clouded skies, the forest’s layer of dried leaves crunching beneath our feet, our lungs filled with the woodsy air. In the dead of winter, meandering off and beyond the hiking trails, one feels totally alone on the isolated leaf-strewn woody slopes. In this city of marble monuments, obstructionism, and brutal egos, it’s the one place you can feel kidlike, alone with nature. In 2002, the park came to national attention when the skeletal remains of a young woman thought to have been the mistress of an influential congressman were found on a remote bluff under heavy foliage. The body had gone undiscovered for more than a year, which didn’t surprise me, since there are so many desolate and isolated pockets within the park.

  “So what do you say? Do we have a date for Rock Creek Park?”

  “Er . . . emmm,” I say, sneaking a peek at my watch. Although I’m open to the temptation to shirk business and work responsibilities, running off with Trish on a nature hike doesn’t feel right. The smile that had been on Trish’s face wanes as I hesitate. I shake my head, tell her I shouldn’t traipse off and have fun when I have obligations at my office—“Responsibilities are responsibilities, you know”—but we both know the real reason I can’t go with her.

  To my surprise though, Trish reaches over and kisses me again, her lips lingering on mine for precious moments. Although I’d never admit it to Laurel, Trish is a far better kisser. She takes my hand, cups it in both of her hands, and looks up at me. “James. I’m not prepared to give up on you.”