Killing Monica (15 page)

Jonny pointed out that he’d never said
he
would never talk to PP again. He’d said Pandy didn’t have to if
she
didn’t want to. And there she went, being all emotional about business again. Which was the very reason he hadn’t told her about the one or two occasions when PP had been in New York and he and Jonny had gotten together.

While it disturbed her that her husband was having secret meetings with the head of the studio that produced Monica, she couldn’t exactly object. Especially when Jonny reminded her that she was the one who had introduced Jonny to PP in the first place.

On another night, a couple of weeks later, when they were again enjoying their enormous new kitchen, she once again tried to explain. “It’s just that…” She faltered, trying to find a way to express her feelings of dismay. “I guess I’m a little hurt. I thought we were a team. I thought we were supposed to be doing things together.”

“But we are!” Jonny beamed. He swung a stool around and motioned for her to sit. He took her hand. “I
want
you as my partner,” he exclaimed, as if they’d discussed this before.

“Your partner?” Pandy was confused.

“In the restaurant!” Jonny crowed proudly. “You’ve been a great partner in marriage, so I want to make you a partner in the business as well.”

“Really?” Pandy sat back, knowing Jonny expected her to be excited, but unable to push down a slight feeling of dread. “What does that even mean? What would I have to
do
?” At that point, she was up against her Monica deadline and desperately needed to finish. She didn’t have time to get involved in some restaurant in Vegas.

“That’s the beauty of it,” Jonny said, smiling. “You don’t have to do anything. All you have to do is write a check.”

“But—”

“You and I will be fifty-fifty partners. Together, we’ll own thirty percent. I have four other investors lined up for the other seventy percent; guys in Vegas that the LA guy hooked me up with. But you and I will be the majority. We’ll each get fifteen percent of the profits. Look,” he said, scribbling numbers on a piece of paper.

Pandy put her hand over his to stop him.

“It’s okay. I understand the numbers,” she said.

For days, she was horribly uneasy. She’d always had an anxious relationship with money. She loved beautiful things, but felt guilty every time she splurged, so she didn’t splurge often. When she was growing up in Wallis, money wasn’t mentioned, except in the negative and oft-repeated phrase, “We can’t afford it.” And the reality was, they couldn’t. So when money did happen to come along, it was supposed to be saved for the proverbial rainy day.

She wished she could have talked to Henry about her dilemma, but she already knew what he would say: Don’t do it.

But if she
didn’t
do it, what would Jonny do? Would he leave her?

She decided to put off her decision until she’d at least gone with Jonny to Vegas to look at the space.

And so, despite her Monica deadline, and without telling Henry, she snuck off with Jonny to Vegas three days later. The potential restaurant space was located in a major casino, where she and Jonny stayed in the Joker Suite, which contained a fountain that could be turned into a Jacuzzi. They met up with a couple of pasty-faced men in gray suits, one of whom had known Jonny for years.

This man revealed to Pandy that before he’d gotten married, Jonny had been known as a bit of a gambler.

Please, no
, Pandy thought. Gambling made her want to cry.

She wanted to cry when she saw the same sad, chain-smoking women at the slot machines at midnight and then again at eight the next morning. The glitz and glamour and the celebrities were great, but it was on the backs of women like these that Vegas wealth was built. It was all those little dollars from those little old ladies who should have known better. And while Pandy would remind herself that every vice, including gambling, was considered a choice, it still somehow didn’t seem fair.

And it would turn out that, like those little old ladies at the slot machines, she, too, “should have known better.”

Instead, she wrote out a check for two hundred thousand dollars. Nevertheless, before she handed it to Jonny, she did scold him about how, at this rate, her advance would be gone before she’d even finished the third Monica book. This was a one-time thing, she insisted, and she wouldn’t be able to do it again. After all, she had only been paid a quarter of her advance so far, and wouldn’t get another quarter until she completed the book.

Jonny laughed this off, but pointedly tiptoed around her for the next three weeks so she could finish the manuscript.

Which she did. Receiving the check two weeks later.

And once again, Jonny was the loving, affectionate, caring man she thought she’d married, surprising her with a pair of one-carat diamond earrings to celebrate, along with a piece of astounding news:
Architectural Digest
wanted to photograph their loft. They wanted to do a ten-page spread, featuring Pandy and Jonny as the perfect example of a modern New York couple. The issue would come out on Valentine’s Day.

It was all so very Monica again, especially as the other Monica—SondraBeth Schnowzer—and the so-called love of her life, Doug Stone, had managed to become first engaged and then disengaged in the past nine months.

Pandy had barely noticed.

The shoot took two days. The photographer got playful photos of her and Jonny feeding each other in the kitchen, and even an adorable shot of the two of them in bed, peeking over the covers at each other. “When I first heard about you guys getting married, I didn’t believe it was real,” the photographer remarked. “But now that I’ve seen you together, it’s obvious you really
are
in love.”

“Yes,” Jonny said. And turning to Pandy, he gave her that special look.

“We’re lucky,” Pandy said with a confident sigh.

But she didn’t feel so lucky a few days later when her editor called with the corrections on
Monica
. Her editor suggested that since Pandy was married, maybe it was time for Monica to get married as well.

Pandy lost it.

“No. I will not allow Monica to get married!” she told her editor over the phone. “It makes Monica seem weak. Like she has to do what every other woman does. Like she
has
to give in to convention.”

Undeterred, her editor pointed out that
she
was now married.

“Yes, I suppose I am,” Pandy grumbled. “But Monica doesn’t have to do everything I do.
Monica is not me.
She’s a beacon of singlehood for all the women out there who will always be single, and who have fought honorably for their single lives. Meaning they have the right to be accepted and left alone, instead of being constantly hunted down and tortured with all this marriage crap.” She hung up in disgust to find Jonny standing behind her.

He was beaming.

“Well?” she demanded, so riled that she wanted to tell him to wipe that silly grin off his face.

“That was my idea, babe. Monica. Getting married. I told PP that since you and I were married, maybe Monica ought to get married, too. And he agreed.”

Pandy’s knees buckled. Overcome with a case of the dry heaves, she had to run into the bathroom.

When she came out, she tore into him like a madwoman.

Why was he doing this? Why was he messing with her career? Did he think she didn’t know what she was doing? Her tantrum ended with her screaming red-faced at the top of her lungs, “Keep your dirty mitts off Monica!”

The last thing she remembered before he walked out was the look on his face. It was blank, as if he no longer wished to know her.

He said: “No one ever speaks to me like that and gets away with it.”

Pandy called Henry in tears.

“I don’t understand what you’re so upset about,” Henry said sarcastically. “Just agree that Monica might get married in the next book. And when the next book comes along, you’ll see.
You
might not even be married by then. And then Monica can get divorced!”

She knew that Henry was only trying to make her feel better by making her laugh, but she was too angry to see the humor. “Actually, I don’t need to worry about it. Because there isn’t going to be another Monica book. This is the last one. When this one is finished, I’m going to write that literary novel I’ve always been talking about.”

She managed to spend another hour alone before she called Jonny twelve times on his cell phone. He finally answered, revealing that he was with one of his “buddies.” Pandy convinced him to come home and apologized profusely.

It took him three days to defrost. But he finally did, when she showed up at his restaurant with a peace offering: an ornate antique silver bottle stopper. He held it up briefly before returning it to its box, although not before catching the eye of the waitress who was passing by, and Pandy realized that she had miscalculated again. The silver stopper was the kind of thing she loved, but he had no use for. And even as she was buying it, she had recalled how he’d told her he hated old things; how antiques reminded him of the decrepit old people who’d surrounded him in the building he’d grown up in with his mother and grandmother—but she’d dismissed this and bought it anyway. It seemed to be some kind of metaphor for their relationship: In giving him the antique
objet
, she was trying to get him to accept a piece of her true self.

Or maybe the part of her he just didn’t seem to want to see.

And all of a sudden, that revolving top of fear was back, spinning in her head and keeping her awake at night. Her thoughts were a tsunami of
what-if
s: What if Jonny had only married her for her money? What if Jonny kept asking for money? What if Jonny lost all their money, and they had to sell the loft? What if Jonny took all her money and left her for another woman?

She’d be ruined. Emotionally and financially. And there wouldn’t be a damn thing she could do about it, because she hadn’t made him sign a prenup. Not only had she
not
insisted on his signing this now very valuable-seeming piece of paper—she was too ashamed of her stupidity to tell anyone.

So she continued to tell herself that somehow, it would all be okay.

And for the next year, it was. On the surface, anyway. They still did the same things and saw the same people, but they seemed to see each other less and less. She didn’t wait up for him to come home anymore, and there would be days when they only saw each other for half an hour in the morning.

Jonny began spending more time in Vegas.

He came back for the holidays, though, and for some reason, he was in a terrific mood. He was convinced that the restaurant would be open soon. Pandy didn’t dare ask too many questions, not wanting to destroy what had now become a tenuous happiness that, like the old mirrored skating pond under her childhood Christmas tree, felt like it could fracture at any moment.

New Year’s passed. Pandy’s accountant called, mystified by how she’d been running through her money. She wasn’t exactly broke—after all, she still had her apartment—but she certainly didn’t have enough to take a chance on writing a literary book that might not sell.

She finished the edits on her third Monica book, and agreed to write a fourth. In a daze, she even agreed that Monica would get married in it.

“Well? Aren’t you happy?” Jonny demanded. “You’ve got another contract. And for even more money this time.” When she could only shrug sadly, he began scolding her: “You were certainly happy the last time. What is wrong with you?” And then he suggested she give him a blow job, reminding her that they hadn’t had sex for a while.

This was true. She discovered that now when he touched her, she froze. She could feel her vagina shut up tight, like the door of a safe slamming closed.

Jonny had finally managed to render her impotent over her own life. And being involved with Jonny meant that she had no control over her future.

The restaurant still hadn’t opened four months later, when Jonny began to be gone for two weeks at a time. To Vegas, he said. When Pandy found a plane ticket that showed he’d actually gone to LA instead, he laughed it off. “What’s the difference? I go to LA for meetings, and then I take a private plane to Vegas.”

“Whose plane?” Pandy asked, unable to believe that while he was jetting back and forth, she was stuck in the loft, trying to crank out a book in which she had absolutely no belief. To her, Monica’s getting married was a lie—just like her own marriage was a lie. And one to which she couldn’t seem to admit. When friends asked how things were going with Jonny, Pandy still told them they were going “great.”

Jonny asked for another hundred thousand dollars to finish construction.

Pandy told him that she couldn’t even think about it until she finished the fourth Monica book.

And then they had a terrible fight that ended with Jonny shouting, “The difference between you and me, babe, is that I’m a man. I don’t need anyone to hold
my
hand!” He stormed out to stay with another one of his seemingly endless string of “buddies”—who Pandy now suspected were other women.

It wasn’t until the week before Pandy’s birthday, when Jonny carelessly informed her that he’d be in Vegas, that she finally broke down and called Suzette.

Suzette told Pandy to get Jonny to a marriage counselor ASAP, and gave her a number.

Pandy agreed to give the shrink a try, but she had to admit she was terrified. She hated confrontation, especially when it meant she might be told a truth she wasn’t going to like. She was pretty sure if she asked Jonny to go to a counselor, he would ask for a divorce.

The thought made her feel sick. It was like the mirror under the Christmas tree had finally broken. And now it was in her stomach, the shards stabbing her insides like tiny butcher knives.

Jonny came home two days later from another trip to Vegas. Pandy tried to pretend that everything was the same: greeting him with enthusiasm, opening a bottle of wine and pouring out glasses. She tried not to react when, as usual, Jonny kissed her absentmindedly on the forehead. Mumbling something about work, he sat down in front of the TV with his laptop on his thighs. It wasn’t long before he got the inevitable phone call, the one that he always took in the bathroom because it was “business.”