Carnegie Hill, page 15
Now he was awake. “Christ,” he said, snatching his phone from the charging station on the counter and trying to gauge how lethal the truth—or a cleaned-up version that ended in the restaurant—would be. “She’s that crazy client I was telling you about. She’s really lonely—her husband died six months ago and left her ten million—but I’ve let it go too far. I’ll hand her off to a junior associate.” He texted, “What’s wrong?”
“Just tell me you didn’t sleep with her,” she said with a withering laugh.
“Of course not,” he said. Had she seen him with Molly? Had Birdie told her about their elevator run-in? It wasn’t likely; she probably hadn’t seen Birdie since they’d moved to the temporary apartment. Either way, he wasn’t lying: he hadn’t slept with Molly, by the grace of God or some mischievous deity named Dumb Luck. If the goal was to be 100 percent honest, and he was able to get 90 percent of the way there, that was pretty good, right? Especially when he’d never make this mistake again—Molly had cured him. “Why would you say that? It hurts my feelings that you’d even think that.” He kissed her, then stuffed a forkful of goat cheese omelet into his mouth and forced himself to swallow.
She examined him. “I was just kidding. But you must have done something that made her text you these things.”
“She got really attached to me, and I was enjoying the flattery, and I didn’t realize that she was mentally ill. But nothing happened. I mean, do you really think I’d cheat on you? Why are we getting married if you think I’m a scumbag?” He looked at her, feeling annoyed, and she looked at her magazine, at a big photograph of a woman in a wedding dress. Suddenly the whole idea of a wedding dress seemed insane. It looked nice and all, but what did the bride do if she had to take a shit?
His phone buzzed. It was Molly: “I’m at Grand Central. Meet me by the clock in fifteen minutes. I have something to tell you.” He had to admit, he still got excited to hear from her. But for the sake of his marriage, he had to stop this once and for all.
“Will you please turn that off?” Pepper asked without looking up.
“I’ll tell her not to contact me again.”
The phone buzzed again: “Don’t shut me out.” Then, “I’m going crazy here.” Then, “I don’t trust myself to be alone.”
“Turn off the fucking phone!” Pepper shrieked, slamming her hands on the table, sloshing her tea onto the magazine. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. But why are you being such an idiot?”
“It’s a phone, Pepper. It rings.” He held down the power button, frustrated at how long the phone took to respond. He wished he’d never replied to Molly that first night. He wished he could go back in time and convince himself to shut down his computer and go home to the woman he loved.
“My mother said she wasn’t going to watch her daughter marry a used-car salesman,” she muttered. “She said you couldn’t be trusted. Was she right?”
He wiped his face with a sixty-dollar napkin, a recent wedding gift, and he thought, Who would pay sixty dollars for a napkin? He’d known it would be risky to marry into a family of snobs, but he’d thought Pepper only acted that way as a joke. “I didn’t realize I was marrying your mother,” he said. He’d meant it as a bit of levity, but it sounded like a jab.
* * *
“Okay, what is it?” he asked Molly when he found her at Grand Central, amid weekend travelers beelining in all directions. She was wearing a deep V-neck T-shirt that showed, as one of his college friends had put it, ABN: All But Nipple. On anyone else, it would have been sexy.
“I miss you, Rick,” she said, taking his hand and running her fingers down his forearm. “Let’s go to Beacon and have a day together. There’s this little café by a waterfall that you’re going to fall in love with.”
He snatched his hand away. “Molly, we’re not going anywhere.”
“Oh, Rick, you don’t mean that.” She reached for him again, and he leaped back.
“Molly, listen to me.” He enunciated every syllable. “There is something grossly wrong with you. We are never going to speak again. Do you understand?” It was satisfying to force her to see her madness, to shame her for wanting him.
“You think I don’t know that something’s wrong with me? You think people haven’t been telling me my whole life? That doesn’t give you the right to be cruel.”
“If I’ve been cruel, it was in leading you on in the first place. It’s over.”
“Come on, Rick, let’s talk about this like adults.”
“I’m leaving now.” He decided against telling her he’d remember her fondly. It would have been a lie, anyway—and he was trying not to lie anymore. “I hope you find a way to be happy.”
He walked off into the throng of travelers. A recorded announcement over the loudspeaker that began “Don’t fall for it!” struck him like a personal reprimand. He opened Facebook on his phone to block her. It relieved him that he had never given her his phone number or email address. Maybe he wouldn’t hear from her again.
Pepper had texted him: “I feel awful about what I said. Will you come back so we can talk?”
“If you didn’t even like me, why did you try to sleep with me?” Molly called after him. “Cheater!” He could feel everyone around him turning to watch. She was probably basking in the attention.
* * *
If it wasn’t worth the half a million it ultimately cost, the wedding was still the happiest day of Rick and Pepper’s lives. Any lingering resentment from the Molly debacle was swaddled in the euphoria of the best party of their lives. Those two hundred pine trees looked majestic, Pepper was a goddess in ivory, and her father raised a glass and welcomed him into the family. He was relieved that Molly did not appear. It seemed that all her rage would burn itself out inside the fun house of her mind.
Although he and Pepper occasionally ventured outside their honeymoon stateroom and took in the splendors of the cities along the Rhine, they spent most of the trip in bed, a picked-over room-service tray languishing on the coffee table. Upon their return, they were consumed by writing thank-you notes, choosing photos, and moving back into their apartment—which, after eight long months, was finally renovated—and Rick barely thought of Molly. When he did, his mind traveled along the same track. First he wondered if he should have gone ahead and done it, because now that he was married, he’d never get to fool around again. Then he thought actual sex would have caused Molly to lose her mind. Then he wondered how she was faring, which of her second-degree Facebook friends she was terrorizing, and whether he had helped her come to terms with her madness. Then he thought about something else.
* * *
When they were filling the new built-ins with Pepper’s books, she noticed that all her Virginia Woolf novels were missing. “Did I lend them to someone?” she asked.
“Maybe they’ll turn up,” Rick said. But he already knew what had happened.
Lots of other things were missing, too: Pepper’s perfume, their Viking range owner’s manual, a copy of the wedding video, and a two-thousand-dollar bottle from Rick’s wine refrigerator. Then Pepper noticed that someone had eaten almost half of the overpriced wedding cake they were freezing for their first anniversary. “I think that’s all that was left over,” he said. They changed the locks.
One morning, the blond, stern Russian doorman, Sergei Avilov, handed him a note in a sealed envelope. “Your cousin dropped this off.”
“My cousin?”
“Lady who comes to water your plants?” Sergei asked. “She is not your cousin?”
“We don’t have plants,” Rick said, tearing open the envelope.
Dear Rick,
I hope this note finds you well. I honestly hope you are happy being married to Penelope now, and that you are no longer angry with me. I have been thinking and growing a lot since we last talked, and I think we should give each other another shot as friends. I have moved into my own place in Spanish Harlem; my phone number and the address are below. I hope you’ll come visit me someday, and we can start a new chapter in our friendship.
Love,
Molly
“I am truly, truly sorry,” Sergei said. “She had the key, so we just assumed…”
“If she comes back, don’t let her in,” he said, then went into the apartment and burned the note on the stove—though not before memorizing her street address. She’d moved less than a mile from the Chelmsford Arms.
He created a new email account and wrote her at the Radiance1987 address. “This is the last time I will contact you. If you break into my apartment again, I will have you arrested. If you ever try to contact me again, I will get a restraining order.” It pleased him to be blunt with her.
He checked the email account for a reply every day for a week, then every few days for a month. He was surprised to feel the slightest disappointment that she hadn’t written him again.
And then one morning in October, Rick received an envelope in the mail with no return address. No note was inside, just the key to their apartment. Molly had given it back.
At first he was relieved, as it seemed he would be finished with her forever. But the whole thing still felt unfinished. It irked him that Molly had stayed in their apartment and stolen their things, and now she was pretending to take the high road and washing her hands of the whole affair. He knew he should leave it alone. Nothing would be gained by telling Molly off again, and reopening that Pandora’s box could wreck things with Pepper for good. Yet he found himself repeating Molly’s address like a mantra. He accidentally typed it into a work email, and it echoed in his head when he woke up at night. He thought he might never be able to let it go if he didn’t get to say his piece and put an end to the whole crazy mess.
* * *
Molly lived on the fifth floor of a rickety walk-up above a Mexican sandwich joint. Rick pressed buttons on the buzzer panel until a neighbor let him in, then climbed to her apartment, his shoes clacking on the grimy, metal-edged stairs. He caught his breath, fixed his hair, and banged on the door.
She opened the door wearing duck-print pajamas and holding a remote control. Her hair had further grayed in the almost four months since he’d last seen her. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Maybe an apology? For breaking into my apartment?”
“I didn’t ‘break into your apartment.’ You gave me a key, and now you have it back.”
“I did not give you a key. You stole a key.”
She raised her eyebrows and shrugged as if to say, “Semantics.”
“Listen, Molly, you aren’t right in the head, and if I see you anywhere near my building, I’m calling the police.”
“I’m the crazy one? You’re the stalker who came rushing over here after I returned your dumb key. You’re right, I do start to lose it when guys play with my emotions. I told you that very clearly and you still tried to fuck me. But it’s over, Rick Hunter. I’m surprised you’re still chasing after me.”
Her revisionist history was so full of delusion, he didn’t know where to begin. “Molly. I am not ‘chasing after’ you. You can’t tell the difference between someone wanting to get close to you and someone wanting to get away from you.”
“From my end, it doesn’t look like you’re trying very hard to get away.”
“You knew what you were doing when you sent me that key.”
“You know,” she continued, as if he hadn’t said anything, “I used to be jealous of you and Penelope, for having zillions of dollars and living like royalty, but now I see that you’re just as horrible and miserable as everyone else.” She slammed the door.
“You’re a fucking lunatic!” Rick shouted. He kicked the door, then kicked it again for good measure. She’d probably planned the whole thing: get him riled up enough to knock on her door, then barrage him with all the things she’d been wanting to say since the beginning, before she sent that first Facebook message, things she’d wanted to say to all the shit boyfriends who had screwed her up in the first place. She couldn’t stand being told that she was mentally ill and had to throw it back in his face. Well, fine. Just because she had the last word didn’t mean she was right.
A small, tired Hispanic woman was pulling a baby stroller up the stairs toward him, jouncing it at each step. A little girl with a bow in her hair sat in the stroller, staring at him with wide, curious eyes.
“Let me help you with that,” he said.
Without looking up, the mother continued to muscle the stroller upward, one stair at a time. He hoped she didn’t understand English.
* * *
He kept expecting to pack up the madness with Molly and slot it into his memory, let it mellow into an anecdote he could tell at parties, maybe adjusting the chronology to exculpate himself, but the upset didn’t fold up neatly, and weeks later, he was still annoyed without quite knowing why. Part of him wished he had fucked her, not stirred her up and fled the scene with blue balls. He imagined returning to her apartment and getting it over with, but that seemed very rapey—not to mention that Pepper would have grounds for divorce.
While stuck at the office, writing reports that should have been done before the wedding, Rick googled Artie, his summer-camp bunkmate. From the guy’s wedding announcements and Facebook wall, Rick saw that he’d had four children from three failed marriages. It felt like a comeuppance for the extravagant bounty of his youth. Since summer camp, Artie’s face had flattened, his mischievous little nose now red and fleshy.
He submitted a friend request on Facebook; to his surprise, Artie accepted immediately.
Rick wrote, “Long time no talk!” Smiling emoji.
Artie wrote, “You grew up!”
“How’s everything going?”
“It was my daughter’s birthday today. So blessed that I got to spend it with her.” Angel emoji. “You?”
“I got married this summer. It was awesome.”
“Congratulations!” Smiley emoji with hearts in place of eyes. It was strange, but encouraging, to receive that emoji from a man.
“I still think a lot about our summer-camp days—we were so different then!”
“Yeah, totally,” Artie responded. “That place was the best.”
“U certainly had ur share of the girls.”
A ghostly ellipsis informed Rick that Artie was typing, but no message came. He clicked through Artie’s photos, mostly selfies taken with one or more of his kids, at a beach, at a bowling alley, at a baseball game. The guy looked at peace, though you couldn’t always tell that sort of thing from a photo. Sometimes Rick thought that if he had gotten to have sex with just one of Artie’s girls at summer camp, he wouldn’t still crave the approval of so many women. That just one teenage roll in the hay would have sealed up the crack inside him through which his sense of attractiveness still leaked out.
Finally Artie finished his response: “I think I had more fun than they did.”
“No way; you were a legend!” Then Rick took a deep breath and added, “Hey, I know this is going to sound weird, but I could really use your advice on something. I always felt like I missed out on an important rite of passage by never getting laid as a teenager. I’m happily married, but I still feel as unfuckable as I did way back then. Do you think sex as a teenager helped you feel more secure as an adult? Did I miss a developmental milestone, or am I making that up? Ease my mind here, bro.” He read it aloud twice before taking a deep breath and tapping SEND.
Artie wouldn’t mind answering that, Rick thought. He’d probably like reminiscing about when he was the alpha dog and pondering how it shaped him. If Artie would just tell him that he hadn’t been deprived of any fundamental life step, that it wasn’t too late to fix his baked-in sense of unattractiveness, maybe he could let go of his teenage loneliness and avoid the next Molly that came along.
Artie didn’t respond. Maybe he didn’t get what Rick was talking about; after all, as a former teenage stud, he’d never had to think about this. Rick tried to make it simpler. “Like, was banging Melinda or Brianna different from sex now?” He sent that. Then, to flatter Artie even more, he added, “I would have given my left nut to fuck even one of those girls.” He sent a winking emoji, then a devil emoji.
He busied himself with email for a few minutes. Artie didn’t reply. He tried to work on a report. Still nothing. And now Artie’s Facebook page was gone. Rick refreshed the page, wondering if the internet connection had gone wonky. Then he realized with a stab of humiliation that Artie had blocked him.
PART TWO
7
THE DIAGNOSIS
As the perishables in his grocery bags doubtless began to spoil, Francis trawled the aisles of the CVS in search of a card for Carol’s seventy-fifth birthday. The joke cards witlessly poked fun at aging, and the “poetic” cards made him ill. He settled on a jaunty illustration of a dog and a cat embracing, thinking it droll that animals from warring species might fall in love.
He was going to surprise her with the most extravagant gift he’d ever given: three weeks in London and Paris. Carol visited friends in London every few years, but Francis had never come along. He hated living out of a suitcase, getting lost in unknown neighborhoods, and—worst of all—dining in restaurants of questionable sanitation. But for a milestone birthday, he couldn’t think of a more generous gift.
Sandwiched between two women shouting into their phones on a crosstown bus whose air-conditioning left much to be desired, he scribbled a birthday greeting. London + Paris + me + you = your happiest dream come true. Yours forever—Francis. He smiled at his little rhyme.
His mood plummeted, however, when he set his groceries down in the kitchen, famished from the day, and the only food on the Formica countertop was a scattering of graham-cracker crumbs from Carol’s nibbling. It was her night to prepare dinner. Even after fifty-two years of marriage, she still couldn’t understand, and refused to indulge, his desolation upon coming home to an empty kitchen. It shouldn’t have been a mystery: his father had died of food poisoning from a restaurant when Francis was seven, and his mother was forced to work twelve-hour days, leaving Francis to cook for his younger brother. The ordeal had instilled in him a love of the kitchen (reinforced by the terror of eating outside the home) but also left him wretched when nothing was simmering on the stove.
