Читать книгу Pretty Baby - Mary Kubica - Страница 11

CHRIS

We’re sitting in a hotel room: Henry, Tom, Cassidy and me. It’s my hotel room. There’s a half-eaten box of pepperoni pizza (meat!) on top of the TV, open cans of soda lying around the room. Henry’s in the bathroom, taking a deuce, I think, because he’s been in there so long. Tom is on the phone, in the corner, with a finger pressed in one ear so he can hear. There are pie charts and bar graphs spread across my bed, dirty paper plates everywhere, on the table, on the floor. Cassidy’s plate is on the end table, the one with the pepperoni plucked off and left in a neat pile beside her can of diet soda. I snag a piece of pepperoni and pop it in my mouth and when she looks at me, I shrug and ask, “What? Heidi’s gone meatless these days. I’m becoming protein deficient.”

“The New York Strip steak didn’t satisfy that craving?” she asks. She’s smiling. A frisky sort of smile. Cassidy Knudsen is somewhere in her twenties, late twenties, right off an MBA. She’s been working with us for about ten months. She’s a freaking genius, but not the awkward, nerdy type. The kind that can use words like fiduciary and hedging and actually sound cool. She’s built like a lamp post, tall and thin, with a sphere at the top that glows.

“If I wanted my wife here, I would have brought her.”

She’s sitting on the edge of my bed. She wears one of those pencil skirts with three-inch heels. A woman of Cassidy’s stature does not need three-inch heels, which makes it all the more risqué. She runs her hands through champagne hair, a sleek bob cut, and says to me, “Touché.”

Outside the window the San Francisco skyline lights up the night. The heavy, hotel curtains are open. From the right angle we can see the Transamerica Pyramid, 555 California Street, and San Francisco Bay. It’s after nine o’clock. In the room next to us, the TV is loud, the sound of preseason baseball drifting through the walls. I pluck another piece of pepperoni from Cassidy’s plate and listen: Giants are up 3 to 2.

Henry emerges from the bathroom and we try hard to ignore the stench that follows. “Chris,” he says, offering his cell phone in an outstretched hand. I wonder if he washed that hand. Wonder if he was on the phone the whole time he was in the bathroom. Henry isn’t the classiest guy in the world. In fact, as he walks from the bathroom I see that the fly of his trousers is down and I would tell him, except that he just stunk up my room. “Aaron Swindler wants to talk to you.” I take the phone from his hand and watch as he gropes for another slice of pizza and quickly lose my appetite.

It’s no coincidence the prospective client’s last name is Swindler. I put on my best salesman voice and saunter to my own corner of the cramped hotel room. “Mr. Swinder,” I say. “How about them Giants?” though from the catcalls in the adjoining room I bet the Giants are no longer winning this game.

I didn’t always want to be an investment banker. When I was six years old I had all sorts of lofty goals: an astronaut, a professional basketball player, a barber (it felt lofty at the time, kind of like a surgeon for hair). As I got older it wasn’t so much about the career itself, but how much it paid. I envisioned a penthouse on the Gold Coast, a fancy sports car, people looking up to me. My mind leaped to lawyers and doctors, pilots, but none of those interested me. By the time college rolled around, I had such a penchant for money that I majored in finance because it felt like the right thing to do. Sit in class with a bunch of other overindulged kids and talk about money. Money, money, money.

That, in retrospect, is probably what enticed me the most about Heidi when we first met. Heidi didn’t obsess with money like everyone else I knew. She obsessed with the lack of money, the have-nots verses the haves, where all I was concerned with was the haves. Who had the most money and how could I get my hands on some?

Aaron Swinder is going on and on about derivatives when I hear my own phone ring from across the room, where it lies on the striped comforter beside Cassidy and now Henry, who, forty and notably single, is staring not so subtly at the sheer pantyhose on her legs. I’m waiting for an important call, one I can’t miss, so I motion to her to answer it, and hear her chant, “Hi there, Heidi,” into the receiver.

I deflate, like a helium balloon after a party. Shit. I hold up a finger to Cassidy—hold on—but since Aaron Swinder won’t stop talking about damn derivatives I’m forced to listen to a protracted conversation between Cassidy and my wife, about the flight to San Francisco, dinner at an expensive steakhouse and the goddamn weather.

Heidi has met Cassidy exactly three times. I know because after each and every one of these meetings I’ve been bombarded with the silent treatment, as if I had anything to do with her recruitment to our team or her good looks for that matter. The first time they met was last summer at a work picnic at the botanical gardens. I’d never mentioned Cassidy to Heidi. She had only been working with us about six weeks. It didn’t feel like the necessary, or prudent, thing to do. But as Cassidy sauntered near us in a long, strapless summer dress—where we hid in the shade of a maple tree on a ninety degree day, sweating and feeling totally gross—I saw Heidi grope awkwardly at a jean skirt and blouse, which she was clearly sweating through. I saw all shreds of self-confidence dissolve.

“Who’s that?” Heidi asked later, after the phony smiles and “So nice to meet yous” were through, after Cassidy had walked away in search of another happy marriage she could muddle. “Your secretary?”

I never knew what Heidi meant by that, if it would have been better or worse if Cassidy Knudsen was my secretary.

Later, at home, I caught Heidi pulling negligible gray hairs from her head with a pair of tweezers. Soon after, beauty products besieged our vanity, those laden with antiwrinkle agents and age defying vows.

This is what I’m remembering as I thrust Henry’s cell phone back at him, making sure to say, “Here you go, Henry,” in a powerful tone so that Heidi, back home in Chicago, knows Cassidy and I are not alone, and flee into the hallway with my own phone. Heidi is a beautiful woman, don’t get me wrong. Gorgeous. A person would never guess an entire decade sat between Cassidy and my wife.

And yet, Heidi knew.

“Hey,” I say.

“What was that all about?” she asks. I envision her at home, in bed, pajamas on, red flannel or maybe the polka-dot nightgown Zoe picked out for her birthday. The bedroom TV is tuned in to the news, her laptop spread across her legs. Heidi’s hair is pulled into one of those messy updos—anything to keep it out of her eyes—while she searches online for information on the slums of Dharavi or maybe poverty statistics from around the world. I don’t know. Maybe, when I’m not home, she searches for porn. No. I change my mind. Not Heidi. Heidi is much too tasteful for porn. Maybe she’s looking up some practical use for vegetarian meat crumbles. Cat food? Cat litter?

“What?” I say dumbly. As if I hadn’t noticed. The hotel hallway is covered with the most awful wallpaper, some kind of geometric red design that makes my head hurt.

“Cassidy answering your phone.”

“Oh,” I say. “That.” I tell her about my phone call with Aaron Swindler and then change the subject as fast as I can, blurting out the first thing that comes to mind. “Still raining back home?” I ask. There can be nothing more mundane than talking about the weather.

It is. All day long.

“What are you doing up so late?” I ask. It’s after eleven o’clock back home.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

“Because you miss me,” I suggest, though of course we know it’s not the case. Chances are I’m not there more than I am there, as has been the case since we started dating. Heidi is used to me being gone. As they say: absence makes the heart grow fonder. That’s what she says anyway when I ask if she misses me. I think she secretly likes having the bed all to herself. She’s a stomach sleeper—and a blanket stealer—with a fondness for sleeping diagonally. For our marriage, me in a hotel room simply works.

“Sure,” she says. And then the expected: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Who said that anyway?” I ask.

“Not sure.” I can hear her fingers moving across the laptop. Click, click, click. “How’s everything going?”

“Fine,” I say and will her to leave it at that.

But she doesn’t. Not my Heidi. “Just fine?” she pries, and I’m forced to relay news of the delayed flight due to rain, followed by turbulence and a glass of spilled orange juice, lunch with a client at Fisherman’s Wharf, the reasons I don’t like Aaron Swindler.

But when I ask about her day, it’s Zoe she wants to talk about. “She’s being weird,” she says.

I chuckle. I slide down the red geometric wallpaper and have a seat on the floor. “She’s twelve, Heidi,” I say. “She’s supposed to be weird.”

“She was taking a nap.”

“So she was tired,” I say.

“She’s twelve, Chris. Twelve-year-olds don’t nap.”

“Maybe she’s getting sick. The flu, you know,” I say, “it’s going around.”

“Maybe,” she says, but then, “she didn’t look sick.”

“I don’t know, Heidi. I haven’t been twelve in a long time. And besides, I’m a guy. I don’t know. It’s probably a growth spurt, maybe some puberty thing. Maybe she just didn’t sleep well.”

I all but hear Heidi’s chin hit the floor. “You think Zoe’s going through puberty?” she asks. If Heidi had her way, Zoe would have remained in diapers and fleece footie pajamas for the rest of her life. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “No,” she says, deciding for herself. “Not yet. Zoe hasn’t even started menstruating.”

I cringe. I hate that word. Menstruating. Menstruation. Menstrual flow. The idea of my daughter wearing tampons—or me having to hear about it for that matter—fills me with dread.

“Ask Jennifer,” I suggest. “Ask Jennifer if Taylor is—” I grimace and force out the word “—menstruating.” I know how women are. A little camaraderie can fix anything. If Taylor’s going through puberty, too, and Heidi and Jennifer can call and text each other about emergent pubic hair and training bras, then all will be fine.

“I will,” she says decisively. “That’s a good idea. I’ll ask Jennifer.” Heidi’s voice quiets, the worried thoughts that consume her mind buttoned up for the time. I imagine her shutting down the laptop, setting it on my side of the bed: a snuggle buddy for the night. “Chris,” she says.

“What?”

But she reconsiders. “Never mind.”

“What is it?” I ask again. A couple walks down the hall, hand in hand. I pull my legs into me to let them pass. The woman, with a very grandiose tone says, “Pardon me, sir,” and I nod in reply. They must be sixty-five years old, still holding hands. I watch them, in their matching khaki pants and spring coats, and remember that Heidi and I rarely hold hands. We’re like the wheels of a car: in sync but also independent.

“It’s nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” she says. “We’ll talk about it when you get home,” and for the first time she decides that she’s tired. Her voice sounds tired. I see her drifting farther and farther under the covers, a stuffy duvet that makes me sweat even in the dead of winter. I envision the bedroom lights off, the TV off, Heidi’s glasses on the end table beside our bed, as is always the routine.

An image pops into my head, unsought and unwanted, and I force it out quickly, like a cannonball from a cannon. What does Cassidy Knudsen wear when she sleeps?

“Okay,” I say. From inside my hotel room, someone knocks on the door. I’m wanted. I rise to my feet and tell Heidi that I have to go and she says okay. We say our good-nights. I tell her I love her. She says “me, too,” as she always does, though we both know the verbiage is wrong. It’s just our thing.

As I return to the hotel room and spy Cassidy in her pencil skirt and three-inch heels, still perched on the edge of my bed, I can’t help but wonder: A satin slip? A ruffled babydoll?