Killing Monica (16 page)

Pandy realized Suzette was right: She couldn’t go on like this. “Jonny?” she asked, knocking on the bathroom door, and then angrily trying the knob when she heard him laughing inside. The door was locked; she pounded on it until he blithely opened it, still wearing a smile for whoever it was on the other end of the phone. Then his eyes focused on her, and his face twisted into that old puppy-dog expression that now made her sick. As he closed the door again, Pandy heard him hiss, “I don’t have much time.”

She stood there for a second, feeling too insulted to knock again.

Instead, she went into the kitchen and opened one of Jonny’s most expensive bottles of white wine. She tipped the bottle and poured herself a big, tall glass. She planned to sip in style while she girded herself for the inevitable confrontation. For surely it was coming. Just like that big fat pink cupcake of a storm that had brought them together in the first place.

That was only four years ago. And it was all so perfect at the beginning. Why had Jonny ruined it?

She took a gulp of wine, and hearing Jonny’s footsteps in the hall, braced herself.

He came around the corner and gave her what was now his usual look, the one she hated—a tight grimace of annoyance and incomprehension. Pandy had a nearly uncontrollable urge to throw her glass of wine in his face. Only some ancient code of propriety prevented her.

“I’ve had it!” she shouted. Taking a threatening step toward him, she spat, “Listen, buddy. I’m giving you one last chance. You agree to go to a marriage counselor, or else.”

Jonny was so arrogant, he actually hadn’t been expecting this. It was as if he had no idea she’d ever been unhappy. This was the only way she could explain his stunned expression. Which went on for several seconds, as if he were seeing his life pass before his eyes. He was such a narcissist, Pandy thought.

And picking up her purse and slinging it over her shoulder, she realized she couldn’t even be bothered to hear his answer. Yanking open the door, she shouted angrily that she was going to go stay with one of
her
“buddies” while he thought about it.

She hadn’t gotten more than two blocks before Jonny called. And trying to laugh it all off, he convinced her to come home.

Where, sipping the wine she had poured him earlier, he contritely agreed to see a therapist. Pandy was so floored, she barely registered Jonny going back into the bathroom to make another call. Then she realized that she needed to make a call as well. Grateful that Jonny was in the bathroom, she went into the bedroom and, in hushed tones, explained every detail to Suzette.

“This is
amazing
,” Suzette shrieked. “Your marriage can
still be saved
.”

And once again, because there was still some stubborn piece of that stupid fairy tale hidden away inside her—like a gold crown secreted inside a piece of Mardi Gras king cake—Pandy convinced herself it was going to be all right.

And then the dam broke and relief flooded in when she realized that the fact that she and Jonny were seeing a marriage counselor gave her an excuse to tell her friends the truth about her marriage: It wasn’t perfect after all.

In fact, at times it wasn’t even that great. But the good news was that while she and Jonny had grown apart, they’d realized it just in time and were going to fix things. Once again, all her friends were thrilled for her. All except Henry.

“I don’t like it,” he’d said warningly.

“Well, everyone else does,” Pandy said, not having the patience for a naysayer at the moment.

“My guess is that he’s placating you.”

“Men hate shrinks. And if there’s anything Jonny is, it’s a man. I promise you, he really wants to make this marriage work.”

“I’m sure he does. After all, it’s worked very well for him so far, hasn’t it?” Henry drawled ominously. “He has everything
he
wants. Technically, he’s married, and yet he conducts his affairs like a single man.”

“That isn’t true,” Pandy snapped. Angered by Henry’s unhelpful perspective, she recalled what Jonny had said about Henry being like a character in an old black-and-white movie.

The shrink asked: “Why did you fall in love with Jonny?”

The question reminded Pandy of all those meetings with editors and studio executives when they talked about male characters. The biggest question in the room was always: “Why did she fall in love with him if he turns out to be so awful in the end?”

And despite hours spent debating the topic, there was only one answer: He wasn’t like that when she fell in love with him.

Or was he, and she just didn’t know it yet?

But she was there to save her marriage, not ruin it. So she told the truth: “I thought he was the love of my life.”

“And why was that?” the shrink asked.

“We seemed to understand each other. I mean, it was like all I had to do was
think
about him and he’d be there. Like one time, there was this snowstorm, and Jonny showed up. With a prosciutto—”

“So it was the prosciutto that did the trick?” the shrink asked, in an attempt at levity.

“It’s always the prosciutto, Doc,” Jonny quipped.

And right on cue, the shrink laughed.

And then Pandy laughed. And since Jonny was already laughing, for the first time in a very long time, they were laughing together.

They talked a little more, and then the shrink put forth his theory. Here were two people who were used to admiration and respect. They were used to being known. Neither one of them considered themselves ordinary, but this was nothing exceptional because
every
person considers himself extraordinary. They believed in the fate of their own good luck, and that they deserved good fortune.

But then, real life intervened. After a while, the excitement about the marriage calmed down. It no longer caused so much attention, and then she and Jonny went back to doing what they did best: their careers.

And this was the problem. For a lot of couples, ambition and love didn’t go together.

The shrink told them to go home and talk about it.

Unfortunately, that conversation never happened, because Jonny had squeezed in the shrink appointment right before his flight back to Vegas. Pandy told him she didn’t mind, and gave him a long kiss goodbye. As she went into the loft, she looked around at the beautiful furnishings, at the kitchen, at all the things they’d managed to create together. She was suddenly convinced that she wanted her marriage to work. She would do anything to make it happen.

And then, after she and Jonny had a couple of long chats on the phone, she felt that there was really nothing wrong with their relationship that a little communication couldn’t fix. Perhaps they didn’t even need the shrink after all.

When Jonny returned home, it was he who insisted they go back. In their new spirit of communication, he said, “See? This is the problem I have with you. You say you’re going to do something for our marriage, and then you don’t.”

Pandy looked at him with tempered surprise, determined to make an effort to keep her excessive emotions in check, as the shrink had also suggested. “
Everything
I do is for our marriage,” she said quietly. While Jonny’s comment naturally reminded her of all the money she’d given him, she managed to stay calm.

Jonny did too. “I don’t care either way.” He shrugged and gave her a deliberate smile. “I’m only going along to support you. I know you want to fix yourself, and you need me there.”

Pandy was startled by his incomprehension. During their second shrink appointment, she brought up the fact that Jonny thought
she
was the one who needed “fixing.”

The shrink turned to Jonny. “Do you agree that this is the essence of your problem?”

“Well,” Jonny said, sitting back on the couch and jokingly stroking his chin. “I do think I was cheated. I thought I was marrying Monica. But I got
her
instead.”

Once again, they laughed. And once again, Jonny went back to Vegas.

But this time, Pandy was crying on the inside. What she wanted to say was,
You thought you were marrying Monica. But instead, you married someone who ended up supporting your dream while losing her own.

Once again, she kept these thoughts to herself. She even reminded herself that if she wanted her marriage to survive, she was going to have to stop thinking about herself all the time.

Jonny returned to New York for a third session. This time, because they were doing so much better, the shrink gave them an exercise. They were to get to know each other better by exploring each other’s pasts. “You will go to each other’s hometowns. Like on
The Bachelor
,” the shrink explained.

Pandy and Jonny looked at each other. “New York City
is
his hometown,” she said.

“But what about Pandy’s hometown?” the shrink asked.

And suddenly, Pandy realized this was real.

And then she felt anxious.

Jonny would hate where she grew up. The house was filled with antiques. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Jonny would take one look at the place and assume she was rich. And then he’d ask for more money for his restaurant.

Which may have secretly been one of the reasons she’d avoided taking him there in the first place. In fact, during their marriage, she’d barely mentioned Wallis. It had come up a couple of times, but Pandy mentioned that there was no Wi-Fi or cell service. What Jonny didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, she’d thought.

“Well?” the shrink asked, looking at her expectantly.

“Sounds like a great idea, Doc,” Jonny said. He grabbed Pandy’s hand and gave it a good, hard squeeze, like the two of them were teammates.

And that was how they ended up in Wallis, on the trip that Henry would later dub “Helter-Skelter.” As in, “That Helter-Skelter weekend when you tried to kill Jonny.”

“I did not try to kill Jonny!” Pandy exploded.

But oh, how she would come to wish she had.

T
HE NIGHT
before the trip to Wallis, Jonny returned from Vegas in a bad mood.

He was still in a bad mood the next morning, complaining that his back hurt. During the two-hour drive, he kept shifting in his seat. When Pandy asked if he wanted her to drive instead, he snapped, “Do you want to take that over, too?”

She kept her mouth shut and prayed the weekend wouldn’t be a disaster. And it wasn’t just because of Jonny. It was nerve-racking for her to bring
anyone
to Wallis. As Henry always pointed out, “Wallis House makes people act strange.” Henry was her only frequent guest.

Wallis House was “complicated.”

Indeed, it wasn’t a house at all, but a mansion. A rare, once-famous Italianate Victorian built on the top of a two-hundred-acre mountain. It featured a clay tennis court, a stream-fed marble pool, a carriage house big enough to hold a basketball court, and—because Old Jay, the ancestor who had built the house, had also been eccentric—an actual Victorian theater where he and his New York friends had staged plays.

According to the photos, from 1882, when the mansion was completed, to 1929, when the stock market crashed, the house had been a real showplace. Unfortunately, it had gone steadily downhill from there. Passed from one generation to another, with each descendant wanting it less and less. It was what was known as a white elephant: too costly to maintain, too expensive to renovate; located in an area too remote and inconvenient to entice a buyer. When she and Hellenor were growing up, it had been an embarrassing wreck, with peeling paint, doors that barely opened, and missing floorboards. The plumbing clogged on a regular basis, the electricity was unreliable at best, and the house was filled with a million dusty family heirlooms.

When Pandy was living there people insisted the place was haunted, and the family who lived there was suspect. The two Wallis girls were teased and bullied mercilessly, partly due to the house and partly due to the fact that they were weird kids who didn’t fit in. Someone once took Hellenor’s clothes from her gym locker and tried to flush them down the toilet because they were “ugly.” Pandy’s moniker was “Devil Spawn.” Together, the two Wallis girls were known as “the Cootie Kids.” Unlike some of the other taunts, this was usually said to their faces.

“
‘Cootie
. A slang word of indeterminate origin believed to have originated with soldiers. Also, referring to lice,’” Hellenor had read from the dictionary.

When their parents had died, Pandy and Hellenor had inherited the house. Like generations of Wallises before her, Hellenor hadn’t wanted it, and she had run off to Amsterdam.

The mansion had continued to languish and decay, until Monica came along. And then, with Henry’s guidance—Henry having a deep love for storied historic homes—Pandy had begun to fix up the place. The result was a perfect rendition of what the house had been more than a hundred years ago—replete with the same lousy plumbing and electricity, and a million other inconveniences unimaginable to guests of today. Such as the fact that there was only enough hot water to fill one bathtub. Per
day
. And yet, from the outside, it appeared cosmetically perfect.

Sort of like Monica
, Pandy now thought. People looked at the house and assumed she was amazingly rich, when the reality was that when she had actually
lived
there, she’d been pathetically poor.

And so, while
she
remained the same, when people saw the house now, they reacted a heck of a lot differently than they had when she and Hellenor were kids.

It was just this sort of reaction that she was worried about with Jonny.

“You’re kidding me, right?” he asked, annoyed, when they finally reached the “town” of Wallis, Connecticut—consisting of a gas station, a general store, and three churches.

When he was forced to maneuver the car up the rutted dirt track known as Wallis Road, Pandy suspected he was on the verge of killing her.

But Jonny’s mood began to change as they proceeded up the mile-long driveway that ran under the linked branches of ancient maple trees. Seeing his eyes widen as they passed the old stables and the carriage house, Pandy felt that familiar sense of trepidation. She should have brought him here sooner. Or at least explained the situation to him. But she’d been so caught up in being married to him, she’d “forgotten” about her past.

It hadn’t seemed relevant. Or rather, it hadn’t seemed relevant because she was afraid that Jonny wouldn’t understand.

The driveway wound past the lovely filigreed boathouse perched on the edge of the lake—and there it was, rising up from the top of the green mountain like a white castle in a child’s picture book: Wallis House.

Jonny stomped the brake so hard, Pandy nearly hit the dashboard. He turned and stared at her accusingly, as if to say,
Why didn’t you tell me you were rich?

Pandy had seen it happen a million times. She cautioned him the same way she warned everyone who came to Wallis House: “It’s not what it seems.”

Pandy got out of the car and went into the house.

And then, momentarily forgetting about Jonny, Pandy did what she always did when she entered: She walked across the black-and-white checkerboard marble floor, passed underneath a crystal chandelier the size of a small planet, and strode between the flaring flanks of the grand staircase to the grandfather clock. She opened the cabinet and wound the key.

There was the faintest whirring as the mechanism went round and round. The middle doors opened, revealing a carousel of lords and ladies going up and down on their brightly colored hobbyhorses. Several went by, until the twelfth lady passed on her miniature steed. Then the top doors flew open, and out sprang the wooden bird himself, two mechanical wings unfolding as he called out that familiar refrain:
cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo
.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she heard Jonny swear behind her. “Did you really grow up here? It’s like a fucking museum.”

Pandy decided she’d better take him straight to the kitchen.

Inhaling deeply, as if he were literally absorbing the enormous bare space into his body, he then released a howl of agony. “How the
hell
am I supposed to
cook
”—he paused clownishly—“in
here
?”

“What do you mean?” Pandy asked nervously. She knew the counters were bare and the appliances dated. When she and Henry were there, they ate simply: fried eggs and bacon, or heated-up cream of mushroom soup. On the other hand, you could roller-skate across the linoleum floors, which was something Pandy and Hellenor had done as children.

“Where’s the garlic press? The meat grinder? The double waffle press?” Jonny demanded, determined to play out his charade. Taking in her expression, he swatted her on the butt. “Come on, babe, I’m just kidding.”

Pandy gasped out a laugh of relief. Of course he was kidding. For a moment, all she’d been able to think was that her worst fear was about to come true: Jonny was going to try to do the same thing to Wallis House that he’d done to her loft; turn it into Jonny House. But of course that was impossible. “Jonny,” she began.

But Jonny had moved on. He was circling the kitchen, holding his cell phone aloft as he searched for a signal.

“Oops,” Pandy said apologetically. “There’s no service here. Except by the boathouse. Sometimes you can get a bar or two there.”

Ugh. She hated having this conversation with guests. Some people couldn’t tolerate the lack of service and headed back to New York early, while others spent the entire weekend trooping back and forth to the boathouse. Pandy hoped that this weekend, possibly one of the most important of her life, wasn’t going to end up being one of
those
weekends.

“Come on, Jonny. You’re supposed to be seeing my history,” she said firmly. At the very least, she was determined to do what the shrink had suggested.

She led him past the smoking room, through the music room, and into her favorite place in the house: the library.

Pandy smiled proudly as she began the grand tour, pointing out the first editions, adding that the library also included signed books by Walt Whitman and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both of whom had been guests at the house.

With the flair of a teenage tour guide, she explained that the marble fireplace was made from local stone that had been sent to Italy, where special craftsmen had done the ornate carvings. And recalling again how the shrink had encouraged her to tell Jonny about the most important people in her life, she attempted to speak to Jonny about the woman who had been her inspiration growing up.

But Jonny was no longer with her. Jonny was by the bar cart in the opposite corner of the room, examining bottles.

“Yeah?” Jonny asked, looking up.

“There’s something I want to show you.”

“Sure.” With a reluctant glance back at the cart, Jonny ambled across the forty-foot Aubusson carpet to join her in front of a large oil painting. “This is a portrait by Gainsborough of Lady Wallis Wallis, painted in 1775, when she was sixteen.” Pandy gazed reverently up at the painting of a young woman dressed in a period riding costume. The cloth of her habit—a powdery grayish-blue—was cut in a military style. The girl’s skin was very white; on her cheeks were perfectly shaped pink circles. Her powdered hair, decorated with tiny flowers and silk butterflies, rose a foot and a half above her forehead.

“Weird hairstyle,” Jonny remarked.

“She was considered not only the most beautiful woman in the Colonies, but one of the best educated,” Pandy continued in a slightly schoolmarmish tone. “She was a spy for the Patriots during the American Revolution—”

“Seventeen seventy-six,” Jonny said by rote. He smirked.

Pandy suddenly felt foolish. “Well, she’s my great-great-great-something-grandmother. And she was supposedly a writer—maybe the first female novelist in the Colonies. When I was a kid…” On the verge of explaining how she used to stare up at this portrait of Lady Wallis Wallis, wishing she could magically be her instead of herself, she realized that Jonny was no longer by her side.

He was back at the drinks cart, uncorking one of the ancient bottles of alcohol.

Pandy stared in shock. No one had ever opened one of those bottles. She’d kept them for authenticity only; at close to a hundred years old, the contents must be suspect. Pandy took a step forward to stop him, but it was too late.

“Check this out,” Jonny said. He stuck his nose into the top of the bottle and took a deep sniff. His head drew back with a snap as if he’d inhaled something sharp and potent, then he cautiously took another sniff.

“It’s gin,” he said, with a sudden air of authority. At last, here was something he understood. “Possibly genuine bathtub gin.” He poured the liquid into a tumbler and took a sip, pressing his lips together to test the flavor. “Yep,” he said, with the confidence of an expert. “That’s pure 1920s bathtub gin. Maybe even made in one of the bathtubs in this place, huh?”

He took another sip and jerked his head at the painting. “Who did you say that was?”

“My inspiration. Lady Wallis Wallis.”

“Not her. The
painter
.”

“Gainsborough,” Pandy replied.

“What’s something like that worth?”

Pandy looked at him, sipping one ancestor’s gin while leering at another, and snapped, “I don’t know. What’s
your
inspiration worth?” as she walked out of the room.

Jonny caught up with her in the gallery that she and Hellenor had dubbed “the Hall of Ghouls,” due to the hundreds of portraits and photographs of the Wallis clan dating back to the early 1700s. “Pandy,” he said, coming to stand beside her. “I didn’t mean it, okay?”

“Sure,” Pandy said, accepting his apology, as the shrink had advised, while noting that Jonny had brought the tumbler of bathtub gin along with him. “Forget it. It’s not a big deal.”

“But it is. I said I’d do this for you, and I will. Just like the shrink said. So who are all these people?”

“Well,” she began, but Jonny wasn’t listening.

Leaning forward to peer at a photograph, he laughed like a frat boy and remarked cleverly, “Must be nice to have ancestors. I’ve only got assholes in my family.”

“Oh, Jonny.” She shook her head at his silliness. “Look,” she said, pointing to an ancient black-and-white photograph of two dozen people lined up in front of the house. “All those people. All those lives. And this is all that’s left of them.”

“So?” Jonny chortled, taking another swig.

“Henry says I should turn the place into a museum when I die.”

“Great,” Jonny exclaimed sarcastically. “Another one of Henry’s ‘brilliant’ ideas.”

Pandy did her best to ignore him as she considered what to show him next. The schoolroom with the window-seat nook where she had loved to read as a child? The conservatory, with its collection of rare butterflies?
Old Jay’s bedroom
, she thought suddenly; that always impressed men.

Indeed, you couldn’t get more manly than Old Jay’s bedroom. The entire suite—bathroom, dressing room, smoking room, and the bedroom itself—was paneled in dark mahogany. The enormous four-poster bed sat squarely in the middle of the room; Old Jay had apparently liked to sit in his bed in the mornings and watch the comings and goings from the French windows that faced out in three directions. Besides being somewhat of a busybody, Old Jay had also been a great traveler. His room was filled with astonishing souvenirs from his trips, like a Zulu spear and what was supposedly an actual shrunken head from a real, once-living human.

But Jonny wasn’t interested in any of that.

He strode into the room, took a spin around the bed, and then, as if he’d already decided to take possession of the space, went into the bathroom. He shut the door with a proprietary click; when it remained shut for several minutes, Pandy began to fret. That particular toilet hadn’t been flushed for years; it was highly likely to clog. No one, including Henry, had even
stayed
in Old Jay’s bedroom. No one slept in his bed, much less took advantage of the facilities.