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       5

       That Woman Again

      I maneuvered around the crush of people, placing small glass bowls of cashews and wasabi peas on every little table and windowsill to give the illusion that food was abundant. When I came back from checking on the latest batch of Trader Joe’s party treats, I almost tripped over Delsie Arceneaux’s gorgeous, cappuccino gams outstretched in the alcove corner. She nodded a lame attempt at hello to me, the woman who worked so hard to make her words clear and precise in every speech she’d given for the past two years.

      I hovered around the cocktail bar and dropped some ice into a small glass while studying Delsie’s pounce technique with the still very horny seventy-two-year-old Max Rowland, freshly sprung from nine months in the white-collar division of Allenwood prison. He was one of our highest-paying (and highest-maintenance) clients. Murray had him invested in our film festival to diminish Max’s image as a tax-evading, greedy corporate criminal—one of those twofer conflicts of interest that Murray lived for.

      “Tell me, Max,” Delsie purred, as she smoothed out her sky-blue Chanel knit suit with a short tight jacket and miniskirt. “How did you fare in there? Everyone was so damned worried about you and I kept telling them, ‘Puhleese. It’s Max. He’s what my daddy would call a high-stepper. He’s built an empire of parking lots with his own hands. He’s going to whip that prison population into …’”

      Max, a heavyset Texan who started out in New York City at age twenty-one to make his equally outsized fortune, sank into the soft white corduroy couch. He placed his feet on one of the zebra-skinned Ralph Lauren ottomans that Wade had swiped from one of his photo shoots. “You’re rahhht,” he chuckled. “The food was crap, but the prison guys weren’t so dahmn bad. Have to admit, they kinda hung on my evereh word.”

      “As we all do, Max.” Delsie’s librarian glasses only heightened the sexual potency that emanated from her every raspy, semi-out-of-breath word. She was positioned as if she were about to screw this old man’s brains out, hips arched back, chest thrust heavenward: her way of trying to score the first postprison interview. He hadn’t talked to the press since his release, and this was another win-win in the making if Murray could get him to talk to Delsie, since they were both clients.

      The party was bursting with exclusivity, even though our apartment was situated on a busy block in the commercial West Twenties and not in a pricey location. We’d knocked out the wall between the dining alcove and living room, making a larger space that could accommodate a squished-up crowd. There was also a corner window off the green alcove that featured a giant beige couch and Wade’s home office desk, where the kinds of people who like to be cliquish tended to congregate.

      Wade cared far more about the “stage” than I ever did, and he’d go to great lengths to get it just right on our tight budget: the exact shade of the red anemones, the black lacquer party trays he’d coveted enough to trek down to Chinatown to buy, the outfits the student servers wore (black shirts, black jackets, never ties, to exude the same Chelsea hipness as their host), the hors d’oeuvres (never crab cakes or smoked salmon—Mrs. Vincent Astor once told him a decade ago they gave the guests bad breath), and even the cocktail napkins (always in the same synergistic color as the cover subject’s dress, in this case a supermodel named simply “Angel”). High-gloss posters of the latest cover and photo spread hung like art on a blank white wall in our front entry. Angel’s dress was fuchsia, so was the Meter logo on the cover, as was the bold cover line YOU WANT ACTION?. And so were our cocktail napkins.

      As I put ice-cold vodka to my lips, a shot of green in Wade’s general vicinity caught my eye, and I nearly dropped my glass. It was the gorgeous girl who had helped me at the Tudor Room bar the day before, all done up in a tight olive dress. She was talking in a highly animated fashion to a wealthy hedge funder sporting the facial expression of someone getting a lap dance. As I stared at her, she noticed, but then looked at Wade—whose back was to me—and nodded in the direction of the kitchen. She drifted down the hall. I found this strange. A woman I didn’t know was signaling to me in no uncertain terms that she was headed to my back kitchen … and what was she referring to about Wade exactly?

      “It’s all okay, right, my love?” Wade shouted over the din, relishing that he controlled every last detail of the party turf and I didn’t care to. Even more guests had poured in and filled the loft space in what felt like seconds. “I checked on Blake. He’s fine, like he forgot all about Jeremy being mean. The party—going well so far, right?”

      Yes, I mouthed without sound as I bit into a miniquiche that was warm to the touch, but cold on the inside. I took a deep breath and looked for the nineteen-year-old stoned-out server across the room so I could remind him to leave the next batch in the oven a bit longer.

      “You sure?” Wade’s eyes searched the room. They moved toward the girl in green.

      “Positive.” In that instant, with that one glance in her direction, I knew my instincts over that past year were correct and that I had to stop glossing over problems; while on the surface we were status quo, something beneath had changed for Wade. Warm on the outside, cold on the inside.

      There had been a discreet but seismic shift in his smallest gestures: he used to let his eyes linger on mine, but tonight he broke the stare so he could steal a glance at this woman. I found his telling me I was so hot all the time inauthentic because he wasn’t acting on it. He used to want to make out in our elevator, even after the kids were born, last year even. Now his compliments were more frequent, but his kisses more like bird pecks.

      “I’m going to check on the food. We seem to be running low.” Wade gave me another one of those hard-lip kisses, spun on his heel, and buzzed off after the impossibly hot woman, not even noticing me noticing him.