Читать книгу The Woman Before You: An intense, addictive love story with an unexpected twist... - Carrie Blake - Страница 8

Sooner or later everyone wants a do-over. Sooner rather than later, everyone reaches a point when they say, Okay, guys, roll it back. Let’s try something else. Begin again. Give it another ending.

Especially if you are like me. If your life, like mine, took a turn for the worse early on, and nothing can get you back to that place you were before the bad thing happened.

I’d had money and comfort, high hopes. All the advantages, as they say. I’d grown up on the South shore, south of Boston. In a big house near the water—not right on the beach, but close enough so I could hear the ocean from my bedroom.

I’d made a mistake. I’d fallen. I wanted to climb back up. I longed for it like some people long for their childhood home.

My childhood home was comfortable. My dad was a bank executive and amateur photographer. He took lots of arty shots of my beautiful mother, who didn’t work, and who every so often had to be sent away for mysterious reasons. Only later (after both my parents died) did I figure out that Mother had a little problem with alcohol and pills and went, occasionally, into rehab.

The summer before I was supposed to go to college, my younger brother Ansel and I stole our neighbor’s car. Not just any car. A Mercedes convertible. Our neighbor didn’t deserve a car like that. Not just any neighbor. Doctor Graves. Graves was his actual name, I always said when I told this story. The Doc was a total dick. He’d called the cops on us, twice, when my brother and I accidentally drove over the edge of his lawn. What was his problem? We were kids, just learning to drive.

To get up the nerve, my brother and I got trashed on some candy-sweet alcohol drink concocted selectively from the back of our parents’ liquor cabinet. We cut holes in tube socks and put them over our heads and told Doctor Graves we had a gun. He knew we were the boys next door, but the papers were full of rich suburban psycho teens committing murders. He could see the headline about the killer prep school boys. How did he know we weren’t like that? He handed over the keys.

I won’t pretend it didn’t feel great, taking the car out on the highway. We knew the back roads better than the cops. We had a big head start. We parked near the beach. My brother leaned down and felt under the back of his seat and said, ‘Holy shit. Why does Doctor Graves have a gun? What does he need a hand gun for?’ Maybe the doctor thought he needed a hand gun to protect his Mercedes from punks like us.

Even drunk, I was the big brother. I grabbed the gun from Ansel. The gun went off. The bullet grazed my brother’s hand. A scratch. I freaked and called 911. Ambulances and cop cars came screaming up to where we were parked. It must have looked really bad, there was so much blood all over the front seat.

We both knew that it was an accident. Ansel made a complete recovery, with only some minor nerve damage in that hand.

But he hasn’t spoken to me in the fifteen years since the accident. Maybe he saw something in my eyes when the shooting happened. Maybe he knew that I always believed our parents loved him more.

Ansel has been the family success, the success I was supposed to be. Or maybe he was always the one who was supposed to be successful. Last I heard, he’s an architect, with an extremely profitable residential practice on Eastern Long Island. A cousin who gets in touch with me every couple of years (last time he was tracing some kind of genealogy thing) told me that Ansel had had a few serious relationships, but he’d never married. No wife, no kids. You had to wonder why what that was—maybe because Mom and Dad provided such an uninspiring example of marital bliss.

Anyhow, when we had our little … accident, I fell on my sword for my brother. My dad and mom had excellent lawyers who pleaded the grand larceny charge down to probation, a huge fine, and a class D felony on my permanent record. The college counselor at St. Andrews wasn’t thrilled about being bothered in the middle of summer vacation, just when he thought the whole college mess was sorted out. He called Dartmouth, where I was headed, to ask if a felony conviction would be a problem. Yes, in fact, it would be a problem. A gigantic problem.

That was the start of the slide. My friends went to college. Mom and Dad suggested community college, the only place that would take me, but I decided to move to New York and live on my own in the world’s most expensive city, which meant a counter job in a gourmet take-out fried chicken stand and a walk-up on a pre-gentrified block in Crown Heights. I would really have gone under if I hadn’t lucked into a series of brief affairs with generous older women.

A few years later, Ansel was the one who got to go to Dartmouth. Having a bad boy as an older brother wasn’t a stain on his permanent record.

My high school friends graduated from good schools, got jobs on Wall Street. Against all odds, we stayed friends.

One Friday night those same friends and I were drinking at a downtown dive bar we liked, despite the bar’s newly acquired hipster chic. Even though a few of the guys had girlfriends and were moving on in the direction of separate, grown-up lives, our partying had gotten more intense—more desperate, maybe—now that we sensed that our stay-out-all-night years might be drawing to a close.

That night we saw, at a table across the bar, Val Morton.

We looked and tried not to look, and we looked again. Was it or wasn’t it him? Those clean sharp features, that cool confidence, that authority, those looks—all pretty impressive in a man pushing sixty—were hard to mistake. But still… When we finally decided that it was him, and not someone else who looked like him, we felt that charge in the air, that fizzy vibe, the way that someone famous changes the atmosphere in a room.

It was Valentine Morton, the craggy movie star turned politician turned one-term Governor of New York, defeated in a run for re-election after the newspapers broke the story of how Val Morton and his wife were never in Albany. They stayed there at most four days a month.

At the table with Val and a few guys around my age was Val’s wife Heidi, a tall former supermodel who had spent her twenties watching her rock star boyfriends snort coke and destroy hotel rooms. Then she grew up, scaled back on the runway appearances, appeared in a couple of straight-to-video movies, married Val, and settled down. She’d traded the thrill of watching flat screens fly out of hotel windows for the comfort (and the thrill) of traveling the world in Val Morton’s private jet.

What did the Mortons do now? In the past few years, Val had become a high-profile Manhattan real estate developer. His name appeared quite often in the papers, mostly in connection with some battle that his real estate development company (named The Prairie Foundation, as if it were some public-interest group dedicated to helping Midwestern farmers) was waging with the city or the Landmarks Commission or the residents of the neighborhoods which his projects were about the destroy. For some time, he’d been fighting to develop a huge stretch of the waterfront in Long Island City, overlooking the Manhattan skyline. A lot of people hated Val Morton, a lot of people tried to stop him, but he always won. The Prairie Foundation had more than enough lawyers, time and money to beat the local block associations. And Val seemed to enjoy these fights; that is, he enjoyed winning.

When Val wasn’t too busy razing brownstones or throwing a block of mom and pop stores out of business, he and Heidi went to parties. They appeared in People and the other celebrity magazines. If you got your hair cut or went to the supermarket, you saw Val and Heidi hanging out with Hollywood stars and the Clintons. The Prairie Foundation did give to some worthy liberal causes: literacy, the public library, prisoners’ rights, rebuilding disaster sites. Val still acted in films every few years, mostly sequels to pictures he’d made when he was young. It didn’t matter if the films did well or not. He had lifetime celebrity status. Lifetime celebrity money.

The dive bar got warmer and brighter. Across the table from Val, who was playing to his entourage of young guys in suits, Heidi sat checking her phone and grabbing waiters who passed by, pulling them down to whisper drink orders in their ears.

Val was doing all the talking. His boys all laughed explosively at everything he said.

Meanwhile Val kept looking over at me, the way a girl would look at you in a bar. Was he gay? You heard that rumor about every actor, but I hadn’t heard it about him. I’d been cruised by guys before, but this didn’t feel like that.

My friend Simon said, ‘I think the governor likes you, Matthew.’

‘Ex-governor,’ I said.

One of our guys swung by Val’s table en route to the men’s room and came back and said, Yeah, definitely him.

Duh. No one else looked like him: the aging, handsome, slightly debauched Hollywood warrior. His eyes kept tracking to me.

Fine with me. I was straight. I’d had two serious girlfriends and lost count of the not-so-serious ones. I’d slept with all my female friends. They’d slept with each other’s boyfriends.

But hey, I’m a practical guy. Open-minded. Finding an aging sugar daddy before I got too old seemed better than taking orders at Fries and Thighs. I didn’t much want to get fucked in the ass, but we could work around that.

Val Morton was handsome and rich.

I went and stood by his table. He watched me walk across the room.

I said, ‘Mr Morton, I’m sorry to bother you, and I know how creepy it is to say I’m your number one fan, but…’ My voice trailed off.

I laughed. He didn’t. He’d heard it before. There was nothing to do but go on. He was listening.

‘I’m a huge fan. I’ve seen all your films. I voted for you for governor.’ That last part wasn’t true. I hadn’t voted in that election.

‘Guys, give us a minute.’ His posse rose obediently and left. He put one hand on Heidi’s arm, meaning stay. She was staying anyhow. She was poring over the cocktail menu. She didn’t even look at me.

He motioned for me to sit down but not get too comfortable.

He said, ‘Do you know that sorry was the fourth word out of your mouth? Don’t start off apologizing, okay? Not to me, not to anyone.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ I laughed. He didn’t. He’d heard that before too.

‘Valentine Morton.’ He put out his hand.

‘Walker Frazier,’ I said.

‘What kind of parents name their kid Walker?’

‘A photography fan and his bullied wife,’ I said. He watched me deciding not to ask what kind of parents name their son Valentine.

‘Guess what lovers’ holiday in February I was born on,’ Val said, answering my unspoken question for me. ‘So what do your friends call you? Walk?’

‘Matthew. My middle name. My friends call me Matthew,’ I said.

‘Ah, right,’ said Val. ‘The friends. I can see them from here. So let me describe your evening to you … Matthew. You’re going to drink quite a bit more than your friends, and when someone pays, or when they split the bill, you’re not going to be putting your credit card in with the rest. Am I correct? In the ballpark, maybe?’

‘More or less in the ballpark.’ Fuck you, I thought.

‘More,’ he said. ‘More than less. But that’s not a problem. For me. From my point of view, it’s the opposite of a problem. It’s actually an advantage. I’m looking for someone like you.’

‘To do what?’ Somehow I could tell that this was about business, not sex. If it was a sex thing, Heidi would at least have checked me out.

‘What do you think I want you to do?’ he said. ‘Blow me? Christ. Don’t flatter yourself. You think you’re hotter than Heidi?’

At the sound of her name, Heidi looked up, then went back to the cocktail menu.

‘To work for me. To do stuff.’

‘Stuff?’

‘A range of stuff,’ he said. ‘For which you’ll get paid in cash, if I may. No boring tedious social security and tax deductions. No problem. And no record of your having worked for me. At the end of the day, should we decide to part company, no fulsome recommendation letter. No bright spot on your CV. How does that sound?’

It sounded great, but I kept waiting for more … for some sense of the weird ‘stuff’ he would be paying me to do.

He said, ‘What I mean is, how does a hundred and fifty grand a year sound?’

‘Amazing,’ I said, taken aback. ‘But … why me? You’ve never met me before. You know nothing about me.’

‘I saw you and your friends. You’re the hungriest guy at that table.’

He motioned for his entourage to come back. He told me to give my contact information to a tall, gym-buffed guy in a pale gray suit who typed it, lightning fast, into his phone.

‘My office will contact you,’ Morton said. ‘Have a fun evening.’

I went back to my table.

The guys said, ‘What was that about?’

I said, ‘I was just telling him how much I liked his films.’

My interview with Val Morton was two days away. I spent them on the internet. I read the puff pieces about the good works that the Prairie Foundation was doing, and some shorter pieces, mostly from political sites that weighed the fact that Val Morton was helping to ruin New York City against the fact that he’d built houses in the 9^th ward after Hurricane Katrina.

I read about his fights with the Landmarks Commission and other city agencies regarding his plans to turn some of Manhattan’s oldest, most beautiful structures—the counting house off the Battery, a hall at Ellis Island—into condos. It was Val Morton’s position that he would preserve these places, which the cash-strapped city was letting decay.

Of course, I wondered why Val was hiring me. The way he’d said hungry scared me, partly because it was true. What had he meant by stuff? If the job wasn’t about sex, then what was it? To be his hired goon. To go to meetings and threaten the neighborhood associations. To make it clear that the sweet little old lady who said that her river view was being blocked by Val’s condo would come to wish she’d shut up and let Val do whatever he wanted.

I read the details of how his building on the waterfront in Brooklyn Heights had involved a battle. About how his co-op board was up in arms about Val’s plans to combine two Upper East Side apartments in order to double the size of the prewar Park Avenue palace in which he and Heidi lived. And about the ongoing war over his plans to take over Long Island City.

At the Prairie Foundation office, on the thirty-sixth floor of a high-rise in Tribeca, I had to run through a gauntlet of security guards, receptionists and secretaries before one of them finally gave me a form to fill out. There were several dozen questions, mostly having to do with my education, my health, my background, my previous employment.

It was just the kind of thing that made me conscious of how dismal my resume was. I worked in a fried chicken place! At the end, the form asked if I had a criminal record. I considered lying. Did one mistake I’d made as a teenager mean that I was supposed to spend my whole life asking, ‘Will that be light meat or dark?’ But something about my talk with Val Morton made me think this might be the rare case: a straight job for which a sketchy history would actually count in my favor.

Val didn’t bother seeing me. A secretary said, ‘Oh, Mr Walker, you’re hired.’

‘Matthew,’ I said. ‘Matthew Frazier.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You can start Monday.’

The job was never boring, though I didn’t always know what I was doing or why. I got paid enough to rent a nice one-bedroom apartment near Central Park, where I ran either before or after I went to work. I didn’t ask a lot of questions. I found out the answers later, if I found out at all. Sometimes I felt like a high level, well-paid errand boy. Once I hand-delivered a laptop to a lawyer’s office in Kansas City. It was assumed that I wouldn’t look at what was on it. I was sort of like Val’s personal assistant, though (at least I told myself) the work was a little more challenging and demanding than that. I never understood the black and white rules for being a ‘good guy.’ I liked working for Val because for Val—everything is grey.

I managed Val and Heidi’s apartments in Brooklyn Heights and on the Upper East Side, so he and Heidi could stay wherever was closer to where they were spending the evening. I worked with Val’s decorator, Charisse, to fix up the Brooklyn Heights condo.

Charisse and I trusted each other. When I told her that Val needed a new mattress, even though he already had one, she let me pick it out.

The real explanation was that I had found Isabel, and she was working in the mattress store.

But that was a secret between Val and me. Charisse didn’t have to know that.

One day, not long after I went to work for him, Val Morton called me up to his office. He always sat in front of a vast, explosion-proof picture window so that the Statue of Liberty seemed to float in the air behind him. He always gave everyone a moment to be wowed by the view. Then he got down to business.

‘I need you to do something that you may not understand, at least at first. But it has to be done. There’s something I need. You will need a partner. An accomplice, if you will. A woman. A young woman. Pretty but not too pretty. Sexy but not too sexy. Not ridiculous. A smart girl who isn’t crazy but who will do anything you say. The Bonnie to your Clyde. The Sissy Spacek character to the Charlie Sheen character. Dude, relax. I’m joking. I’m not asking you to rob banks or commit serial murders.’

I looked over his shoulder at a helicopter hovering over the Hudson.

‘Does this involve sex?’

‘Not with me,’ Val said. ‘I don’t even want to watch. I’ve got Heidi. Remember?’

As far as I knew, Val and Heidi were more or less happily married. A few days before, Val had taken me to lunch at Michael’s. He’d ordered the Cobb salad, as always.

He said, ‘I don’t know if you know this, Matthew, but I’ve been married three times. I must believe in the institution. I’ve got four kids, two from each previous marriage. Everybody gets along, loves everyone else. I’d say okay to one more kid, but that’s not on Heidi’s agenda. So at the moment we’re good.’ He knocked lightly on the table and gave me a version of the smile that had made him a movie star.

Now, in his office, Val said, ‘Don’t be an asshole, Matthew. This is not about the porn film of your dreams. Sex with this … accomplice would be your call. Sex, I need hardly point out, is one of the most reliable forms of mind control. Especially useful with young women.’

It was an odd thing for an older guy—my boss—-to say. Was he saying that Heidi was his personal mind control sex slave? I’d assumed their connection was about Morton’s money and power. If power was the greatest aphrodisiac, money and real estate were right up there along with it.

‘That’s not very feminist,’ I said. ‘Very retro.’

‘Mea culpa,’ said Morton ‘Please. Take it easy. This is supposed to be fun. You’re getting paid to seduce a pretty girl of your choice. Thank me. There’s no rush. Let’s give it to the end of the fall. Find the right girl. Get her ready. Maybe hold off on fucking her. Make her wait for it. Make her beg. Keep me posted. Let me know how it’s going. Tell me when she’s ready to do what we need. What I need. Then I’ll tell you what comes next.’

Actually, it was intriguing. What a cool assignment. All I had to do was find a girl who would do anything I said. I could have sex with her if I wanted to, but I didn’t have to. And it would be fun to make her wait. Val was right. I was getting paid for what most guys would pay to do. And somehow, in a funny way, that qualified me to do it. It was a job. Compared to the jobs that were out there, this was beyond sweet. I’d be nice to the girl, court her, tease her a little. She’d never have to be the wiser. And—at least as far as I knew—no one would get hurt.

I felt a little guilty, not telling a woman the truth, but, let’s face it, I’d done it before. It was something guys did all the time, even when they were married. Especially then.

I’d had several relationships. They always ended badly. Freud said, what do women want? I could have told him: Whatever they want, it’s more than you want to give.

Val Morton made it a challenge. An assignment. I began to look at women in a different way. A more … specialized way. More … practical.

Dating apps made it too easy. I went on Bumble—where sweet girls who want to feel empowered by doing all the work go to meet guys who supposedly want more than one fun night. Maybe for the first time ever, I knew what I was looking for. And now all I would have to do is swipe right and wait for her to make the first move. That was how I found her.

Isabel.

Later, too late, I asked myself: Why her? I never figured it out. I guess people just know things about each other. They pick things up on their radar. They know how far a person will go.

I don’t know how I knew about Isabel, but I did. Even when I thought her name was Riley.

That was an added twist—something that made her even more perfect, for some reason.

Right away I could feel it between us. The heat. When she walked into the coffee shop and told me about her little game. When she said yes to my own game. When I asked her to lie down on the overpriced mattress she was pretending to sell me. Well, good for her. It was pure inspiration. It was fun, and it was hot. By the time I left the mattress store, I knew I had found my accomplice, my partner in crime. My creature.

Who knows how far I would have gone if her creepy boss hadn’t shown up at the store? Or maybe we’d gone far enough. For the moment.

That night, alone in my bed, I thought about her and jerked off. I hoped she was doing the same. I would have liked to call her the very next day. But I knew better. I made her—and myself—wait.