Riverside Park (26 page)

AFTER CASSY COCHRAN
left the Stewarts' apartment Amanda went into their bedroom to lie down. Howard cleaned up the tea cart and dishes, carefully wrapped the food and put it in the refrigerator. He walked back to their bedroom to check on Amanda and found her sleeping. He stood at the foot of the bed and leaned against the bedpost, watching her.

Amanda had always been perceived as the vulnerable one, and perhaps in the early years of their marriage that had been true. But at this point did Amanda even need him anymore? She could handle the children with or without Madame Moliere. She had her own money. She had this apartment. She had a career if she wanted it. He, on the other hand, was about to lose everything if Amanda didn't bail him out. He had been telling Amanda for years not to worry about money and now he had to tell her he was near bankruptcy.

It felt like a kind of death to have to tell Amanda how he'd failed her. She had never failed him. Ever.

He pushed off the bedpost and made his way through the apartment. While their room had not changed since they'd married, they had made two bedrooms out of the guest room for Emily and Teddy and then a second full bathroom and tiny guest room from the original third bedroom. When Grace arrived the tiny guest room became Madame Moliere's, with Grace shuffled between their room and Emily's.

Maybe they should just sell the apartment.

Howard went into the study he and Amanda shared and sat down at his desk. He opened the double drawer to remove the accordion file that held the papers outlining his disaster.

“You still haven't downsized the agency,” the accountant had said. “You won't move to smaller offices, you won't tell the employees they have to contribute more to their health care plan, nobody seems to keep track of the expenses your clients are racking up, and you went ahead and gave your employees Christmas bonuses when you can't cover their salaries because you're paying all these damn interest charges on all these debts. And you're asking me why I can't make the books look any better?”

“I will not watch our marriage die with Mrs. Goldblum,” Amanda's voice suddenly announced from behind Howard.

He turned around. Amanda was standing in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest.

He brought his left arm up to rest on the back of the chair. “What do you mean?”

“I want to move back to New York, Howard.”

He tried to think. “I thought you liked it out there. With the horses and everything.”

Amanda walked over to her desk and slowly sat down sideways in her chair to face him. “I don't like anywhere if you're not with us.”

He looked down at his lap. He had to tell her. All of it. He had to tell her now.

“Oh, Howard, don't you want me to live with you anymore?”

“Oh, my God, Amanda,” he said, startled. “Yes, yes, yes I do. The question is—the question is whether you will want to after what I have to tell you.”

Amanda took a sharp intake of breath and then slid her arms around to hold herself. She was preparing herself for a shock, he realized; good, she understood that what he had to tell her was bad. Her eyes moved up to the framed photograph of the five of them on the wall. It had been taken last summer by a neighbor, near the community garden in Riverside Park. Howard, Amanda, Teddy and Emily were standing arm in arm behind Grace's stroller. Ashette was sitting by the stroller, her tongue hanging out. It was a wonderful picture, filled with life and love and laughter. “I think I know already,” she said quietly, still looking at the photograph.

“I don't know how you could. I was pretty careful to hide it from you.”

She took another one of those short breaths and looked at him. “You've been avoiding me, Howard. Emotionally, mentally, physically. I know what that means.”

“I'm not sure that you do,” he said, starting to feel confused.

“I almost had an affair in Connecticut.”

It took a moment before Howard realized he was standing up.

“I wasn't aware that I was moving in that direction,” she continued. “I think, in the back of my mind, I didn't want to be completely bereft when you finally told me. Because then I'd have somebody who wanted me.”

He felt sick. “My God, Amanda, I do want you. I've always wanted you.” And then he felt the f lush of anger. “Who is he?”

“It doesn't matter, Howard, because it didn't happen. Instead I'm sitting here.”

He felt for the chair to sit down. An affair? Amanda? In Connecticut? Was she making this up?

Howard looked at his wife and knew that she wasn't. Of course she wasn't. With all the rich married guys out there, who wouldn't want to have an affair with Amanda? She was still a knockout, but it was her soaring spirit, that high passion and emotion that would have attracted him. A soccer game. That's just the venue where they would see it, Amanda with her arms shooting up in the air with a cheer, and then her suddenly cringing at a downward turn in the game, sighing with such sorrow it always made people laugh fondly. The looks of the men always lingered on his wife after she had drawn their attention. Three kids later and she still had that body. She dressed differently to disguise the fact it wasn't the same body, really, but the effect it had on men was still the same. They could imagine the bliss that lay there.

“Shit,” he said out loud, taking his glasses off to hold his face in his hand a minute. He was sick at this point. And he just wanted to run. If things had gotten this bad—

“I know you're not in love with someone else,” Amanda said. “I would know that.”

He put his glasses back on. “You think I'm having an
affair?
”

“I think you have taken your needs somewhere.”

“My needs,” he said sarcastically. He looked up at the ceiling a minute. “My needs are close to a million needs.” He brought his head down to look at her. “There is no one else, Amanda. I have not had sex with anyone else. I have not wanted to have an affair.” A fleeting memory of kissing Celia Cavanaugh came and went. “The only secret I've been hiding from you is the fact I am in debt up to my ears. To the tune of close to a million dollars.”

It took her a few seconds to absorb his words. “But we still have income from the trust fund, don't we?”

We
, she'd said
we
. But his mind was elsewhere. “Who was it, Amanda? Someone I know?”

“I doubt it,” she said.

She was lying. He knew whoever it was. It had to be one of the guys at the soccer games. If he had to guess, it was the investment banker. The guy had made millions and then retired at fifty with a second wife and a second set of kids. He'd break his friggin' face in.

“Who is it we owe?” Amanda asked.

“You don't owe anything, Amanda. It's me. I've wrung every penny out of the Woodbury property and have credit card bills up the gazoo.” Her consternation made him angry. “I had to balance the books at the agency, pay some tax stuff I owed, and there simply wasn't enough cash coming in to pay for the heat, the light, the horses, the orthodontist, the piano lessons, Madame Moliere, the handyman, the pool man, the cleaning lady, the cars, the clothes, the vacations—You know, all the crap you kept asking me if we could afford!” He slammed his hand down on his desk for lack of knowing what else to do. “I've never been so ashamed in my life,” he told her, his eyes down on his desk.

“I could petition the trust to see if—”

“No!” he shouted, slamming the desk again. “That's your money. Keep it safe and sound. The way we're going you're going to need it in your new life.”

A moment later he felt Amanda's hand on his shoulder and he looked up. Her eyes were filled with tears but she was smiling. “I thought you didn't love me anymore, Howard.”

He didn't know what to say and she sat down on the chair arm, took off his glasses and pulled his head to rest against her chest. After a moment he slid his arms around her waist.

“Money I can handle,” she soothed, stroking his head. “Actually, I can handle anything as long as I have you and the children. I should hope you know that by now.”

He was going to say, yeah, right, you were about to let another guy—He screwed his eyes shut, trying to get the image out of his head.

“Explain to me what happened,” she said gently.

And so he did. He kept his head right where it was and told her how at first he had thought the problems started when Gertrude Bristol died but had since come to realize it went all the way back to when he bought Hillings & Hillings. How he had prided himself on not letting anyone go, of keeping those same offices in the landmark building, of being able to offer better benefits. No, it had started when he went big-time. “I wasn't thinking clearly when I bought the house,” he said.

“None of us were thinking clearly after 9/11.”

“But you and the kids were so excited when you saw it, what with the horse farm next door and the stable and everything.” She murmured that she knew. “It was eight hundred thousand, I had two hundred sitting in the reserves at the agency and I used that as the down payment.” He sighed. “Now I owe a million on it.”

“But how were you to know Gertrude's niece would nix the estate deal?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, “that was a part of it.”

“And how were you supposed to know what's-her-name—”

He couldn't help but smile. Whenever Amanda didn't like how someone had behaved she refused to call them by name.

“—was going to steal your clients?” she finished.

“It wasn't quite like that.” He sat up and pulled her down off the arm of the chair to sit in his lap. He brushed her hair back from her face. “Pride goeth before the fall. That's what
the accountant said to me. He wanted me to slash the overhead a long time ago, but I kept thinking things would turn around.”

“You only got into difficulty because you wanted to do what was best for everyone. Your family, your employees, your clients. You're a fabulous literary agent, Howard, everyone says so.”

“So I used to think.” He sighed.

“Surely this is a temporary state of affairs. It's not as though you don't make any money.”

“The agency grossed almost seven million last year, bringing in nearly a million, and I made negative two hundred thirty-one thousand.”

“Oh,” Amanda said.

He looked at her. “Unless we take out a mortgage or home equity loan on this apartment, Amanda, we're going to lose the house.”

“Then I say lose it.”

He looked at her.

“I'm absolutely serious. Let's sell it and be done with it.”

“I owe more than it's worth, though.”

“The minute we don't own it anymore is the minute the other bills stop. Yes?”

He nodded. In all these months this idea had not occurred to him, to sell the house and get rid of that colossal ongoing expense. Of course he hadn't known Amanda was about to have an affair with another man. Damn right they were going to sell that house!

“And what about Henry's grandson?” Amanda said. “Didn't you say he might come in as a partner?”

“The agency still needs to be restructured.”

“So you'll be the hatchet man.”

He nodded.

“That's going to be difficult,” Amanda sighed. “But we'd help people find jobs, wouldn't we?”

We
.

“Yeah.”

She ducked her head to see what expression was on his face. “What is it, Howard?”

He tried to think how best to phrase it without sounding ungrateful. If he had to make all the changes in the agency the accountant said had to be made, he wasn't going to feel the same about it. Because it wouldn't be the same. A more gracious professional atmosphere would break down into the usual sweatshop atmosphere that so much of book publishing had fallen into. And if he had to cut back on staff, it would meaning cutting down his time developing clients. Bestselling writers didn't just walk in the door. Most often, at least at his agency, they were writers he worked with (like the editor he had once been), whose books were sold to publishers only after they had been edited at least once. And that was the part that had made him want to be a literary agent, to work with writers.

“Don't freak out because I'm not going to do anything rash,” he said, “but I'm beginning to wonder if this is how I want to spend the next twenty years.”

“Being married or being an agent?” she said. She was smiling.

“Convincing you to marry me has been my only really great success in life.”

“That and your love and support in producing three such wonderful, healthy children.”

Howard shut his eyes, pressing his forehead into her shoulder.

“I know, darling,” she murmured, rubbing his back. “But we're never living apart again.” A tear rolled down her cheek and she kissed the side of his head. “Ever. Ever, ever, ever.”