The Billionaire's Wife (28 page)

People raised their cameras and began taking snapshots. As per
our understanding, I'd taken Jake with me under the tarp, and he had been able
to scope out the best angles for taking his final photographs. I saw him at the
front of the crowd, crouching down, snapping his pictures.

The sculpture was big—the biggest I'd ever made—and the
plexiglass box glittered and shone from the right angles, obscuring the
contents. I knew, though, that when you got close to it you could see the thing
trapped inside. I had it memorized, and I closed my eyes and saw it in my mind.

It was a tiger made of water.

I was incredibly proud of it. When I'd first seen Anton, I'd
noted that he moved like a predator or like water, smooth and flowing, and I'd
tried to capture that essence in my creation. Bit by bit, a huge tiger had
taken shape under my pounding and pushing. It crouched in a puddle of clay, its
edges blurred and liquid as it emerged from the water. One paw, claws out,
reached over its head, raking at the glass box, too small to contain its huge
form. I'd painted it in pale gray and black, and its angry eyes glittered  gold
as it's snarling muzzle bared huge fangs as long as my fingers. It stared up at
the creature atop its box.

A rabbit. Small, lithe, and ridiculous in the face of those
fangs. And yet strong. It clung to the end of a sledgehammer I'd buried in the
plexiglass, gluing the bits and pieces of glass that I'd had to saw away to the
end of the hammer, suspending other bits from the top of the box with invisible
wire.

So there you have it. A tiny rabbit smashing the glass box
containing a snarling tiger. Words are pretty shit to describe it, honestly, so
just trust me. It lived.

“You're kind of simple,” Sadie said as she stood next to me.

I shrugged. “What use is art no one can understand?” I said. “I
think this is pretty powerful.”

I glanced at her. She was staring at the sculpture, a faraway
look in her eye. “So that's how you really feel, huh?”

I nodded.

Sadie licked her lips. “It's beautiful, Lis,” she said. “I'm not
going to pretend to really understand your relationship with Anton, but if it
makes you make art like that...” She trailed off and shook her head.

I looked back at my piece. Yeah, it still owned. “It's
definitely something,” I said. Off in the distance, sirens were blaring. Good
old NYPD. Always quick to pepperspray young women making a statement. I looked
forward to it. The pictures were taken. I couldn't very well have dumped the
sculpture on Anton's doorstep. That would just look desperate.

“You think he'll figure out that you like him?” Sadie asked me
as a cop car pulled up by the curb.

“I don't know,” I said. “He seems a little dumb in the mooshy
feelings department.” We watched as the cops got out of the car and began their
investigation—namely, asking who was responsible for this. Fingers pointed at
me.

“Maybe you should have made him a mix tape,” Sadie said.

“Maybe you should shut up,” I told her, and then I got arrested.

*

Okay, it didn't happen quite that quickly. First there were lots
of questions and lots of pictures snapped by gawking bystanders, but the bottom
line is that I ended up in cuffs when I refused to remove the 'illegal
installation,' mostly because I really didn't know what to do next and getting
arrested seemed like a good idea at the time.

Sadie promised to keep my sculpture safe for me.

“You better,” I told her as they shoved me in the back of the
car. “That's what I pay you for.”

She made a face at me as we pulled away.

I got processed and put in a holding cell. My bail was set at
five thousand dollars. I figured I was going to be there for a while and
settled in, staring at the crude yet incredibly creative graffiti on the walls
left behind by my fellow criminals. Some of them had been very good artists.

I was in the middle of scratching out my own contribution to the
communal artwork—a loving rendition of a butt in a cop hat—when an officer
opened my cell.

“You're free to go. You posted bail.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Really? The only person I
could think of who would come get me would be Sadie, or maybe my mom. My mom
really wouldn't like the idea of me sitting in jail. It would look bad. Worse
than marrying for money or your husband losing all your money. Like, you'd just
be formerly rich then. Not a filthy criminal. Having a daughter who was a
criminal? Well then you would be a
bad mother.

I got up and followed the officer out of the holding cell. They
gave me my shit—not much—and told me my court date, and then they escorted me
to the front desk.

Anton stood there.

I stopped and stared. I hadn't seen him in almost a month. We'd
been apart for longer than we'd known each other.

He was still beautiful. Still magnetic. But he looked tired. His
green eyes were lined, and his face drawn. His fluid dancer's stance was stiff,
as though he were in pain.

He watched me, and I watched him for a long moment.

“Felicia,” he said. Then he seemed to stop, as though he didn't
know what to say next.
I'm sorry,
or
come home,
or—anything. He
knew he should say
something.

Finally he opened his hands, as though to show me he had no
weapons. “Sadie told me you were in jail,” he said.

God, he was such a
dork
.

I ran forward and threw my arms around him, and it felt like
waking up.

Chapter Nine:

Bartered Surrender

We drove back home. To Anton's house. It was awkward, the way we
sat in silence the whole way there, staring out the windows, but deep inside it
was also a huge relief. Whatever happened, the stasis would be over. We could
move on.

Wherever that would be.

My palms began to sweat.

When we finally reached the house, I was a ball of nerves. I
didn't know if Anton had seen my work, or if Sadie had only told him I had been
arrested. Though now that I thought about it, she probably
had
made sure
he knew exactly why I'd been arrested. She's an artist, too. She understands
the fundamental
Look at me!
motivation that underpins all works of art.
So I could be ninety-nine percent certain he'd seen it. What he thought about
it was another matter entirely.

The moment the door of the foyer
closed behind us, we were alone in the house, and the atmosphere became oppressive.
I tried to play it off, reaching up and shaking my hair out of its ponytail. I
ignored Anton as he took his coat off and walked into the kitchen. I needed
coffee. And something more substantial than goddamn ramen noodles.

There was a jar of sweet pickles
in the fridge. I swiped it, popped it open, and began crunching away as I
busied myself with making coffee.

Anton followed me and installed
himself in the breakfast nook, leaning against the back door. He crossed his
arms and watched me as I bustled around. I didn't know what he was thinking,
but it didn't matter. I'd said what I needed to say. The ball was in his court
now.

Turning the coffee maker on, I
took my jar of pickles and sat down at the table. I met Anton's glittering
green eyes full on. For the first time, I felt like we were meeting as equals,
and I could see it made him uncomfortable. I tried to help him.

“Pickle?” I asked him,
proffering a gherkin.

He smiled, though it looked
pained. “Felicia...” he said.

I waited, the trick he'd taught
me. Waited for him to fill up the silence.

Finally he sat down at the table
and rubbed a hand over his forehead. I thought he'd rub his face right off, he
was so forceful. He was working up to something. Something he didn't do much.

“Felicia,” he said at last, “I
am so, so sorry.”

Those words were sweet, and
necessary. But not really what concerned me.

“I know you are,” I said. “I
understand.”

He looked at me in surprise.
“You do? I mean... I am not... not the best at conveying my feelings. You know
that.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I know that,”
I said. “I know that really well.”

“This is hard for me.”

I shrugged. “You gotta learn how
to do it some time, right?”

He took a deep breath and blew
it out in a long stream. “Yes,” he said finally. “You are right.”

Abruptly he stood up, the legs
of the chair he sat in scraping over the floor, and held a hand out to me.
“Please come with me, Felicia,” he said. “There's something I want to show
you.”

“Is it your cock?” I asked.
“Because I've already seen that.”

To my complete shock, his face
broke into a sheepish grin. A
grin.

Anton Waters knew how to grin.

Well, how about that?
I
thought.

I placed my hand in his.
Immediately that old familiar fire flared up, and I inhaled sharply. His hand
on mine was electric. The very nearness of him made me hum, as though we
vibrated along the same frequency. I wanted to fall into him, but getting
sidetracked by our mutual desire was what had made it so dangerous for us in
the first place. Firmly pushing my sudden breathlessness aside, I rose and we
walked hand and hand back into the foyer.

He stopped in front of the
basement door.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “Is this the
part where you show me the dismembered bodies of your other wives?”

He looked faintly offended.
“What are you talking about?”

I grinned at him. “Sadie and I
were wondering what was in the basement.”

“You told me you were wondering
if there was a sex dungeon down there.”

“Well, yeah, but that was only
one theory.”

He stared at me for a long
moment, clearly bemused, then shook his head. “No dead bodies,” he said,
pulling his keys from his pocket. “But something very important to me all the
same.”

He slid the key into the lock,
and the teeth grated over the pins. With a click, he opened the basement door
and turned the light on.

We descended.

I gasped.

It was an art gallery, white
walls and blond wooden floors and perfectly ambient temperature. And not just
any art gallery—a gallery of pieces I recognized, and not because they were
famous. They were from local artists living in New York. I knew some of them.
I'd certainly seen some of their work. There was something by Jillian—an
intricate sculpture of clock parts and dead wood washed up on the beach—and one
of Harry's minimalist paintings—from what we all jokingly called his Man Ass
period—and even one of Paulo's cascading rollercoaster pieces from when he was
working almost exclusively with roofing shingles. A huge canvas hung on the far
wall, glittering and undulating with layers upon layers of shimmering
jewel-toned paint and jagged pieces of aluminum cans. One of Sadie's works.

And on a pedestal—not in the
center, thank god—but there all the same, one of my creations lay, sprung from
clay I had manipulated myself. A ferret with human hands, covering its face, in
a posture of utter despair as it curled on its side beneath an interesting tree
branch I'd found in the park on a walk with Sadie. I'd called it
waking
for
some reason. I couldn't even remember now why I'd called it that. But Anton had
bought it.

“What... what is this?” I said.
“Did you know me before we met?”

His hand around mine squeezed
tighter. “I wouldn't say that,” he said. “But I had heard your name before.” He
wouldn't look at me, only stared at
waking
as though trying to connect
the woman next to him with the piece of art in his little private gallery.

A bench sat in the middle of the
basement, a huge soft cushion on it, and Anton led me to it. We sat, and I
stared around me in amazement. “Why didn't you tell me you liked art?”

“I don't know,” he said. “And
it's not... it's not really the
art
I like, per se. That's not why I
started collecting it, anyway.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

This was it. Here's where he
told me everything. Whatever it was that kept him from reaching out to me.

“When I was a baby, my parents
died in a car crash,” he said. I already knew that, but now that I knew him
better I could hear the little thread of sorrow in his voice, spun from an ache
in his chest. “I never knew them. They were young. Still in high school. It
fell to my other family to raise me.” He shook his head. “But they were pretty
dirt poor and the situation was not... stable.”

His mouth twisted. “Well, it was
chaos, actually. People coming and going, and my grandmother was angry with my
dead mother for dying, and for having a kid in the first place, and she took
that out on me. Sometimes she would dump me with one of my aunts or
uncles—great aunts and uncles, if we are going to be precise—and disappear for
a while. She was still young. None of them had a steady job. None of them had
been to college. Not that that means anything, but it was terrifying for a
little kid who didn't have anyone to count on. Drunks and drug addicts, most of
them. The ones who did work were so ground down supporting the rest of them
that it was always shouting matches and throwing things. I remember I got
slapped when I cried when I was a little kid. I couldn't have been more than
four. I bounced through foster homes sometimes, when no one could afford to
take care of me, or the cops were called one too many times. They always hated
it when CPS took me. They were too proud to lose me, but too selfish to keep
me.”

His hand was still in mine, and
I felt him stiffening. Afraid that he would pull away from me, I tightened my
grip.

His body hunched, and then I
truly did think he would pull away, but then he squeezed back, hard enough to
hurt. I didn't make a sound.