My Father's Wives (8 page)

“It does.”

“That should not be complicated,” Cranston said. “Do you have photos of your wife on your phone?”

“Not . . . interesting ones.”

Cranston smiled. “I wouldn’t expect that,” he said. “I just mean regular pictures. It will make it easier for me to do this job if I know what she looks like.”

I felt color rushing to my cheeks.

“You needn’t be embarrassed,” Cranston said. “I know what you’re
going through. You’re thinking you are a successful, grounded family man. You have perfect credit, no police record, you’ve never been involved in anything like this in your life. Now you’re sitting in the office of a stranger, asking him to shadow your wife. It is crucial for you that I know this isn’t how you view yourself. And what I’m saying to you is that I understand. So, if you have any pictures let me see them and we’ll get on with this.”

I took another sip of the vodka and took my phone out of my breast pocket. “I don’t have any,” I said, “except this one.” I showed him the screensaver, the four of us in face paint at Disney World.

“Nice family,” he said sincerely. “If you provide me with your address and a few other details I can make do without the photo.”

I looked up at the ceiling. There was a fan oscillating slowly, not enough to create any noticeable breeze. That was how I felt, like I didn’t have enough energy to create a breeze.

“Phase one of this investigation should not take long,” Cranston said. “You will soon receive an e-mail from ‘Cranston and Associates.’ It will be addressed to your first and last name, as are most solicitations. It will describe a series of insurance options that my firm would be happy to go over with you anytime at your convenience. When you receive the e-mail you will hit
reply
and type in a single digit, to correspond to the hour of the afternoon you wish to come here and retrieve the information. Do not bother typing P or
P
.
M
.; we have established now that the time will be
P
.
M
. So if you type a three, we will meet at three
P
.
M
. One digit only, because that is most easily explained as an accidental slip. I will meet you here on the day you send the reply at the hour you have indicated. Does all of this make sense to you?”

I nodded.

“Okay. You will hear from me shortly. In the interim, do not tell anyone of our meeting, do not look for me or try to contact me in any way.”

“What if I want to call it off?”

Cranston looked at me sternly. “Then tell me that right now.”

Of course I wanted to call it off. But I needed to know.

“Mr. Sweetwater, take all the time you need. If you want to call this off just say the word and you will never hear my name again. But if you walk out of this office with our arrangement in place, be aware that you are setting in motion a series of events you will not be able to fully control. There are certain sights in life that, once they have been seen, can never be unseen. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I think so,” I said.

“I mean that once you know something you can do with it anything you wish, but you can never unknow it. And sometimes the things we do
not
know are better for us than those that we do.”

“I understand,” I said.

Though I didn’t, really.

BRUCE AND I PLAYED
basketball late in the afternoon. “My calf is seventy percent,” he told me, “which is enough to kick one hundred percent of your ass.”

As we headed to the gym I sent a note to Claire.
Bruce and I headed into the room now
. The words were truthful, even if they weren’t honest. But what did it matter? I had already lied to her in the morning; that is the sort of thing that matters a lot less the second time.

I don’t know that I’ve ever played worse than I did in that game. I was meek, subdued, lethargic, my heart beating so fast that within a few minutes I needed a break.

“You all right?” Bruce asked. He wasn’t even sweating yet.

I was doubled over, hands on my knees. “Fine,” I said. “It’s just been a long week.”

Bruce smiled. “I know just what you need.”

I stood straight up, poked the ball from his hands. “What I
need
is to run your old ass up and down this floor, that’s what I need.” We picked it up again and I played better, though not much.

After a shower we were in the back of Bruce’s limousine, and I felt like it was the first day of school: I was neatly scrubbed and combed, in my best clothes, going to a strange place to meet strange people. Bruce was fiddling with the channels on the television in the console, cursing the satellite service. “You pay four thousand bucks to have this installed and it
never
works.” He was speaking aloud but not to me, which was fine because I wasn’t really listening. “What’s way better is
this,
” Bruce said, pulling his iPad from his briefcase, “and it cost next to nothing. Slingbox. I watch whatever I want, wherever I want, so long as I get a signal.”

I found the static from the television soothing, like the constant roar of the ocean. I was just going through the motions anyway. What I wanted was to be home, having dinner with my family. I wanted Claire to pour me a glass of wine while the kids put on a sketch they had been practicing all day, and then have the four of us sit down and Claire and I drink wine and the kids drink milk, and we’d be having salmon with broccoli, which both kids drown in soy sauce, and then chocolate chip cookies only for those who finish their broccoli. Drew is very particular about that rule; he makes sure there is not a speck of green on anyone’s plate before they may have a cookie. His sister is the opposite: I’ve seen her fake the broccoli. If I wasn’t going to be
there
it didn’t much matter where I was. So the car seemed fine and the static on the television didn’t bother me, and whatever Bruce wanted to talk about was no more or less interesting than anything else.

Our first stop was Nobu, the legendary Japanese restaurant on Hudson Street, where Bruce was welcomed as a celebrity. The greeter at the door, the hostess behind the desk, the waiter who took our drink order, and the manager who stopped at our table all called him by his first name, like they were old friends from college despite the fact they were young enough to be his children. We ate yellowtail sashimi, Japanese eggplant, and broiled Alaskan cod, drank beer and a little bit of wine. The air was light and electric, with the whiff of gourmet cooking and expensive perfume mixed with sex.

I was intent on paying the bill but that wasn’t possible since no bill ever came. When we were finished, with a group of women hovering near enough to pounce, Bruce finished a final beer and turned to me, red in the face. “Ready to go?”

“We haven’t paid,” I said.

“Yes, we have.”

“I never saw anything.”

“That doesn’t mean we haven’t done anything,” Bruce said.

I looked him in the eye. “I was going to take care of dinner.”

Bruce smiled, his cheeks red with excitement, his eyes alternating between meeting my gaze and scanning the cluster eagerly encircling us. “Listen,” he said, “that’s a nice gesture, but what purpose could it serve?” He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re doing great. Everybody in this room would trade seats with you in a minute right now, except for me. And that’s the way it should be. So let me pay. And someday, when you’re sitting in
this
seat, you pay for whoever is lucky enough to be next to you.”

I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“Do you feel lucky?” he asked.

I looked around. “It’d be pretty hard to feel any other way.”

“Perfect,” Bruce said, “let’s go see how lucky we really are.”

WHEN WE GOT TO
the car four people were waiting. One of them was a man who appeared in every way out of place: notably older, probably seventy, with white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard, dressed impeccably in a tuxedo and bowler. His presence was curious, but the curiosity lasted only as long as it took for the three women to pile in behind him, dressed to kill, a dizzying array of hair and perfume. The older man did not say a word, but the women were all friendly; one of them goosed me as I slid around to an unoccupied seat. “Champagne?” She giggled, along with the other two.

Then we were rolling and drinking and Bruce was singing, at first
alone but soon everyone joined him, including me, singing even though I couldn’t hear the music. Eventually we pulled up in a darkened alley uptown and two cars pulled in behind us, headlights blaring; only then did I realize we had been leading a caravan. A dozen people spilled from the cars, looking exactly as we did, drunk and sensational, the women dripping with diamonds, teetering precariously on towering heels.

There was a sharp, intense popping sound right behind me, like someone had fired a very small gun, and I spun to find one of the younger and sexier women had popped the cork on a bottle of champagne with her teeth. The crowd cheered as she pulled back her lips and displayed the prize, holding aloft the bottle, a bit of the bubbly spilling onto her hand. I was the nearest to her, and she quickly jammed her face into mine as though she was going to kiss me, but instead forced the cork into my mouth. Then she took a swig directly out of the bottle and held it up again. “How do you like that, boy?!” she cried. Her eyes were crazy, wide and shining. With no warning, she snatched the cork from between my lips with her free hand, took another swig from the bottle, and then passed it to me. The rest of the group was still buzzing as I took a swig and passed it along, and when I turned back the woman was wiping her mouth with the palm of her hand and coming toward me again. Once more she jammed her lips into mine, only this time there was nothing between them but her tongue.

Then a door burst open right from the center of the bricks and a greasy fellow in a leather jacket and baseball cap came out. “You all with Bruce?” he asked.

Bruce emerged from the rear of our pack. “Eddie,” he said, and raised his hand.

The greasy fellow nodded and, without another word, started counting us.

“Fourteen,” Bruce said.

The guy nodded once more, then motioned for us to follow and went back inside.

THE ROOM WASN’T NOISY
at all. The rhythm of the music and thumping of the beat provided ambience but they didn’t drown out conversation; no one had to shout in order to be heard. That was the first thing I noticed. The next was the decor, surprisingly grown-up, like an old-time bar you’d find in an elegant hotel: wood, red leather, velvet, spacious booths in a ring around small wooden tables. All of the booths had been set aside for our group. Bruce slid into the first and motioned for me to slide beside him. “Not bad, huh?” he asked.

“Outstanding,” I said. I chose that word because it is one Claire uses often, and certainly how she would have described this. Claire detests having to shout to be heard. She’d have been even more delighted than I was to be carrying on this conversation in a normal tone of voice.

The music and thumping bass were coming from another room. I looked around but couldn’t find it. “Through that door,” Bruce said, pointing past the bar. “Dancing all night. In here, we just hang out.”

“Do we dance?”

“I have no idea what
you
do,” he said with a smile, “but I dance my ass off.”

Bruce motioned for our server, a stunning woman in a black blouse unbuttoned halfway, breasts bursting from within. “Table service?” she asked.

“Yes, Belvedere,” Bruce replied. “And champagne.”

The waitress then glanced at me, eyebrows raised. “Champagne and Belvedere for you as well, Mr. Sweetwater?” she asked.

“That sounds good,” I said, my voice deeper than usual in my ears.

She pursed her lips and blew a strand of hair away from her face, and I followed her with my eyes until she disappeared behind a door. Then there was a hand on my leg, and the blonde who had popped the champagne with her teeth was close enough that I could feel every part of her: bare leg against my knee, bare shoulder against my arm, hand firmly on my thigh. Claire often rested her hand on my thigh but gently, her fingers at rest, light enough that you could forget they were there. This woman you wouldn’t forget. I looked down
at the hand, so different from Claire’s: nails long, French manicure. Claire’s nails are short. These were like talons. I could feel them digging into my leg.

When I looked up her face was startlingly close. “Do you want any blow?” she asked. Her eyes were clear and blue and danced in the flashing lights; frankly she was gorgeous, more so than I had realized in the car. Her hair was pulled back off her face and perfectly straight, her makeup more subtle than I would have expected, a dash here and there, fresh and young, not at all tawdry. And her lips were a masterpiece. There is nothing sexier than a great pair of lips. These were the best I had ever seen.

“I’m sorry?” I asked.

“Some of the girls have blow. I didn’t know if you were into that.” Her voice wasn’t at all as I remembered it. Outside she had seemed wild, like an animal escaped from the zoo. Now her voice was more measured, the disaffected monotone of the teenage girls who babysit my kids on Saturday nights.

“Bolivian Marching Powder,” I said.

She blinked.

“You know,” I said, “from
Bright Lights, Big City
.”

“Right,” she said. It was clear we should just move on.

“Are you from New York?” I asked.

“New Orleans.”

“Great city.”

She smiled and squeezed my leg harder. “I’m a Southern girl. People tell me my accent sounds like I’m from Brooklyn.”

“How long have you been in New York?”

“Almost a year,” she said. “I don’t care for coke either, but I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss out before the girls go off.”

“I’m good.”

“Me too.”

We fixed ourselves drinks. It was then I realized Bruce had gotten up to dance; I hadn’t noticed his leaving.

“Do you like to dance?” she asked.

“Do you?”

“I
love
it!”