The Idea of Him (7 page)

He dusted his hands and heaved into a standing position, getting ready to dismiss me. “I don't give a shit if all your environmental writing success back then was genetic talent from your dad's love of the sea, or dumb luck on timing with the globe going green and the fuckin' terrorists controlling all the oil. Point is, you're gonna do what I ask and you're the best writer I got . . . and I'm very indebted to you, even though I don't say it enough.”

“Of course, Murray,” I said, my feelings for him warming back up as they invariably did.

“Look, kid,” he said. I turned at the tender sound in his voice. “Your dad would have been proud. Too bad the good die young and he never saw your work promoting a cause that championed the ocean he lived in.”

“Something like that.”

He put his arm around me, ushering me out. “I remember when I first heard you give a speech. I knew that instant you could coach all my clients and write all their speeches. You sounded like a senator: junior fucking Barbara Boxer or something. Just don't get all lesbo on me.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I mean, that short hair, all tough . . .”

“I don't think Barbara Boxer is known to be gay; I think she—”

“I don't give a fuck about whether she is or isn't. Just don't start takin' yourself too fuckin' seriously.” He grabbed his cordless phone, started punching numbers into it, and looked at it as though it were shouting obscenities in his ear. “Goddamn it, Selena, get in here and dial this thing.”

Selena scurried in, her Kardashian ass bouncing up and down like a beach ball, and took the phone while Murray finished lecturing me. “I want you to write more press releases on each film to create more press buzz for everything we do here. You know, groundbreaking shit lesbo senators pay attention to.”

Selena handed him the phone and waited to be sent back to her desk. She looked at me in solidarity. Murray wasn't finished.

“Get me every goddamn cable news screamer screaming about the high-gloss, high-fuckin'-quality festival.”

Now he was just being ridiculous. “Nobody on cable news cares about art and culture. They're too busy yelling at each other. We're on the right track, Murray. We're doing fine. We're getting good coverage already this week . . .”

“Max?” he said into the phone, swatting one hand at Selena and me. “That brunette looked like she could fit your balls
and
your dick in her mouth!

“After your behavior last night in A.C., you fucking owe me fifty grand and two whores, you old bastard.” Gales of laughter followed. I honestly had no idea if Murray was joking around or making a factual statement to the criminal client who seemed to be invading our lives more every day.

10

Necessary Reckoning

When I got back to my office, Caitlin was lounging on my couch reading a report she'd pulled out of the hot pink computer bag I'd given her for her twenty-ninth birthday last winter.

“What was so earth-shatteringly important?” she asked.

“Murray wants me to get more press for the whole film festival, since the pitch to Delsie went so well and because now he's got Max financially invested in it,” I said as I sat at my desk and clicked on my computer screen. I scrolled though what looked like a hundred e-mails that had come in since I'd left. “You know, just more buzz.”

“Murray always wants more attention,” she pointed out. “No amount will ever satisfy him, you know that.”

“Yes, I know that. That's why my job sucks.”

Caitlin sat up and threw the report onto the coffee table. “That's a piece of crap. Anyway, whatever you did or didn't do right, all that matters is that what you said seemed to work for him.”

I stopped what I was doing and looked at her. “Really, Caitlin, that's all that matters?” Caitlin and I spent so much time together all day long that we often went into sister mode. I felt like picking a fight with her just because she was in front of me.

She tilted her head. “That's not what I meant.” She lay back on the sofa. “You're good at what you do, but you should be concentrating your anxiety on your other talents. Maybe you'd get further, faster, and be able to leave this place.”

“Why?” I asked, sarcastically. “You angling for my job?”

“Jesus, Allie. Chill,” she said. “Why would you say that, when all I'm doing is showing my support for your writing?”

“Sorry. I was kind of joking, or trying to,” I said. It had been unfair of me; she was right.

She grinned, apology accepted. “I read your reports and speeches every day. They sing compared to everyone else's around here. You should be using your clout with Wade or Murray to move your own fiction writing career along and stop worrying about the little stuff that Murray is always going to take credit for anyway.” She settled in for a little lecture. “If I had access to Murray's connections like you do, or to Wade's, I'd be working them harder is all. If I was writing a script about a surrogate mom, like you are, I'd be asking Wade to show it to Sarah Jessica Parker, poster mom for surrogates.”

“Are you out of your mind? I'm not involving Wade in my writing career. I want to do it my way.”

“Fine. Do it all slow and appropriate. But just remember slow and appropriate usually gets beaten at the box office by swift and shrewd.” Caitlin started balancing a pillow on her feet. This woman could never sit still. “Max is meeting with the festival team and Murray again tomorrow. You could go and get Max to invest in your script.”

“That's not possible,” I said, meaning the Max meeting and not the immature notion that a script I hadn't even finished yet could be pitched. Murray didn't lie to me. That's one thing I could count on. “Murray isn't going to talk business with the festival people for a while. He wants me to handle it all.”

“Well, it said FF on his calendar for tomorrow. They're meeting at some hotel in the West Forties. I'm sure of it.”

I was shocked anew at her espionage. “How do you know FF is film festival?”

“Well, they are the initials for starters, and I asked Selena, because I'm really nosy and she told me yes, but that I shouldn't say anything.”

I let that sit. Caitlin was always on my side, but a little difficult to control. I just had to channel her energy into productive areas, like this revelation that my boss had lied about not getting involved in festival business. Her skill was often valuable, but it made Caitlin seem at times much more than five years younger than she was. “You've got a package waiting for you up front,” she said, bouncing toward my door. “You want me to go get it? Maybe it's Wade trying to get on your good side.”

“Oh my God, Caitlin! You talk like a cattle auctioneer! Yes, go get the package. Jesus!” I sat at my desk thinking that something with my boss wasn't sitting right. He told me he wasn't doing festival business with Max Rowland anymore, then he has a private meeting about it without telling me? Was every man in my life cheating on me in one way or another?

Click.

Caitlin sped out of the room and returned just as quickly, holding a box wrapped in dark brown paper, peppered with an absurd number of crooked postage stamps, and my address written in a familiar script. I ran a finger across the handsomely scrawled
Par Avion,
and I knew instantly the provenance. I opened it up. No card, but just as I expected: a pair of black silk long johns. I hadn't heard from James since the last pair.

Caitlin peeked over my computer again. “Who the hell sends long underwear in May?”

“It's nothing.”

“Oh. It's something. Just something you don't want to tell me.” She smiled, completely softening up. That, and knowing she was getting nowhere. “It's okay. I still adore you. Keep your secrets. But if you want an ear, I'm here for you.” She had the sense to close the door behind her and leave me alone, wry amusement written all over her face.

James again. Through the years, he would always try to make me feel protected by sending a pair of long johns like these with a note saying:
I will always keep you warm and safe
. Part of me would immediately begin to feel better just remembering his words.

James had started promising this warm and safe thing right after the accident in the horrible blizzard—that I'd never feel that fear again. He'd said it when he left for college in San Francisco. Again and again he'd send pairs of long johns every time he skipped town—like when he'd left repeatedly to work in East Asia in our twenties—or when he felt I needed some support.

Once after I received a pair, he told me he had news to deliver in the accompanying note. A sense of dread had begun to creep up my ankles and settled in my knees, immobilizing me with the realization that my first love was actually, finally, fully in love with someone else—a woman named Clementine in Paris, whom he'd met at UNESCO. I guess the long johns that time were his way of saying our deal still held, that he'd keep me safe, no matter what life brought or who he lived with, even if she was named after a piece of fruit.

And here again were the long johns from the guy who would not stop being that soul mate I couldn't ever call all mine. I still hadn't moved an inch five minutes later when Caitlin placed a cup of hot tea on my desk.

I closed my eyes and played with the black silkiness through my fingertips and decided to soften up my sister act to give her an inch. “James sends these because he worries about me, and it's always bizarre how spot-on his timing is.”

“He'll always know you best. You guys met at what, thirteen?” She perched on the edge of my desk and I settled back in my chair.

It's safe to say any connection with James in any form made me queasy with what-ifs. I looked at photos of my kids on my wall and thought,
There is beauty to this plan. James was never going to be. I had Blake and Lucy instead. I have them and I don't want it any other way. (Although my kids plus James wouldn't be the worst . . .)

“James doesn't seem to know his seasons very well,” she pointed out.

I laughed. “Yeah, well, if you really want some juice, these are a reminder of a particular moment in our tortured existence.” I fingered the buttery silk some more, wondering just what my life would be like if James and I had closed the deal after our brief, second-time-around affair in our twenties, rather than me and Wade. “Though the ones he peeled off me were heavy, wet wool.”

Caitlin leaned so close to me, she practically sat down in my lap. “What was
he
wearing?”

“Ski pants. His senior year in high school. We'd just spent the whole day on Loon Mountain. It was so freaking cold we were the only people in the parking lot by the time we made it, frozen, to his Jeep.”

“Tell me,” she asked in a demanding voice. “I never get enough about James out of you.”

“We're old friends with a complicated past. Simple as that. I don't like to dwell on the moments when things got weird between us. I told you that many times. It's too painful, and then I remember all the bad stuff of the plane crash. So stop.” I pushed her off my desk and pointed her small but powerful body toward the door. “Go find something to do.”

She backed away. “Only if you promise to tell me the whole dirty story later.”

I threw a pencil in her general direction. Once she'd left, I dialed James's number, but hung up before it rang. Then I repeated that action and reaction about five times until I told myself I had to get a grip. Would there ever be a point in my life when he would cease to be
the one who got away
?

I was embarrassed by my own high school girl behavior. One guy hurt me so I was running to another? Was that supposed to happen with grown women when the hurtful guy was their husband? Couldn't I find a way to just feel stronger about what I deserved or convince myself of something self-affirming rather than feeling like my husband's interests were elsewhere and I wouldn't hold up without James telling me I was okay and still pretty? Jesus!

I swiveled in my chair to look out at the sky, holding the silk of the long johns, wondering how many women in their thirties can't fully grow up. The longing memory of the cold Jeep, James's warm hands, and the heat blasting out of the vents still made me sleepy when I thought about it.

 

NO QUESTION HE'D
felt the pangs too. All I'd suddenly wanted was for him to run his hands up my goose-bumped thighs before he graduated and moved to the West Coast for college.
If not now, when?
kept chanting through my head. Then in the Jeep that late afternoon, out of the blue, he just reached across me and with his right hand popped my seat back flat. The gesture seemed so easy and natural for him; I had to restrain myself from thinking about how many times he'd done just this before for other girls. I'd already been with my share of other boys but that didn't deaden the thrill of fantasizing about my best friend so graphically. He suddenly pulled himself on top of me like it was the most normal thing to be doing.

First James gave me a bottomless kiss as he held on to my head with both hands. But, quickly, he reached down to open his pants, tear the snowsuit off my body, and pull my long johns down my freezing thighs. When he rolled on top of me, he was so solid and ready before I'd even touched him. Seconds later, as we moved together, the claustrophobic space of the Jeep opened up around us, and as the dark winter night settled in and flakes of snow began to swirl in the distant glow of the parking lot light, I panicked. The dive had been too high, and now I felt more like I was drowning rather than making love. He reached his hand down to me again. The power of our bodies together scared me so much that as he made me come, I burst into tears.

“It's okay, Allie,” he whispered as he finished, his voice crackly and kind as he kissed me between the words. “I'm not going anywhere. Nothing's changed.”

“I know,” I said too softly for him to hear. I pushed him back to his side of the Jeep and hastily pulled my ski pants on over bare legs. “We're going to be late.”

He shimmied into his pants, stared out at the snow for a long time, then just slammed the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “Why do you have to freak out over everything? You didn't seem like you didn't want that. It's not like you haven't been looking at me weird for a month now.”

“I have not. And I did want that. I just want to go is all. Now.” Truth be told, I was merely petrified I'd lose him with Dad gone and Mom drinking so much.

He pulled my face sideways so I had to look at him. “I thought this was what you wanted. We're still friends. Like always. This doesn't change anything.”

I curled into a ball in my seat, unable to look him in the eye the entire ride home. “I don't know how to feel and I don't want to talk about it.”

The pain was evident on his face as he drove us home in silence.

 

NOW I LOOKED
down at the ripped-up brown packing paper, silky long johns, and box and threw the whole mess into the corner of my office in a fit of muted, confused fury over what perhaps should have been. Maybe I would have been so much happier with James if I hadn't been so skittish and if bad timing and his do-gooder, twenty-something globe-trotting hadn't sidetracked our chances. How dare he suddenly pierce my carefully orchestrated life with another package, just as I was having bigger troubles with Wade than I could handle. My desk phone rang, and I snatched up the receiver, telepathy telling me for certain it was James.

“Very funny,” I said, a slight edge of whimsy in my hard-bitten voice.

Wade replied. “Is this a bad time?”

“Oh, it's you,” I answered.

“Allie, don't be like that. I'm sorry I had the weekly all-nighter close of the magazine at work and didn't get home in time to help with the kids this morning. How 'bout I make it up to you by taking them later and you can grab a drink with Caitlin or something?”

“You already have the kids tonight. Remember?” It killed me to keep the Jackie question bottled up inside. “I have my screenwriting class. You know?”

“Oh, right! Even better. I thought I'd take the kids to the premiere of the new IMAX movie on the deep sea. I got special tickets for them to go to the whale party at the museum afterward,” he said. Wade always showered them with the kinds of outings normal kids could only dream of, especially on a school night. Parenting is about knowing when to be the bad guy—something Wade the Narcissist never cared to consider.