“Charles Simpkins?” I said, reading the name off the card.
Jack Riggs picked up his cigar and puffed on it. Its tip glowed. “That’s him. The guy’s a fixer. He fixes problems. He curtails the damages from my floozy problems. The girl wanted seven million,” Jack Riggs said, gesturing to the photograph. “Simpkins talked her down to four. He also secured a copy of your transcript for me, by the way. If you have a problem, any problem, go to him.”
I pictured Charles Simpkins as a shadowy silver-haired éminence grise, like Clark Clifford or Vernon Jordan, someone a guy like Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton would turn to, to solve an affair of the heart entanglement or a sticky business proposition. Jack Riggs was a wealthy man of the world. Was he warning me not to interfere with his affairs? A man who’d boast about the millions he tossed around to smooth over his indiscretions could surely ruin me if I ever upset him. In revealing his need for a professional fixer, he confessed to being a morally flawed man. I took the business card and buried it in my wallet, vowing to be better than him. Never would I put myself in a position where I needed a professional fixer.
Chapter Six
JIM
Seven hours after wobbling home drunk, I wake in bed, alone, and shut my eyes in reaction to the light filtering through the gauzy bedroom curtains. My tongue is a dehydrated strip of parched shoe leather, and there’s an überache in my head. I remember being irrationally happy about Anne Elise’s birth. I remember a conversation with a commodities insider about an investment opportunity, how for just the $250,000 buy-in on a livestock futures contract, I’d rake in millions of dollars almost overnight. But where am I to get a quarter million dollars? I remember Trish guiding me upstairs and the plop of my head as I passed out on the bed pillows.
Now, I hear Trish walk upstairs trilling a la-da-da breakfast melody. She opens the bedroom door and, with a smile on her face, says, “James, mornings like this just do not become you.”
Trish’s right: mornings aren’t my strong suit, yet it’s not in my nature to utter the stressed and hangover-blighted thoughts roiling through my head. As my mother, a single mom who put me through college on the strength of her alimony checks, used to say, “This world’s got no stomach for whiners, hon.”
“You’re lucky you have such a caring wife,” Trish says, setting down a Lucite tray containing my favorite hangover remedies: glasses of Gatorade and V8 juice, a mug of chamomile tea, a bottle of ibuprofen, Visine, aspirin, vitamin pills, a toasted poppy seed bagel slathered with cream cheese and lox, and two hard-boiled eggs that sit in antique soft-paste porcelain egg cups. “I bet Laurel wouldn’t tolerate you on mornings like this.”
I pour a glass of V8 juice down my throat. Hangover mornings are all about rehydration and replenishing the fluids and electrolytes alcohol has dried out of me. Medical experts should devise an easy-to-operate IV hookup to allow drinkers to plug into saline solutions overnight so they wake the following morning fully rehydrated, but for now, the next best thing is power chugging Gatorade and V8 juice. The more liquids I drink, the better I feel, and while this reemerging sense of well-being might only be psychosomatic, one must, in the immortal lyrics of Johnny Mercer, “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive.”
“Thanks, darling. I feel better already,” I say, almost believing it.
The only thing on the tray I don’t drink is the cup of chamomile tea—a favorite of Trish’s but something I can’t stand.
“Come on, James. Chamomile is natural. It’s an herb. It’s totally safe and harmless.”
I bring the teacup to my nose and sniff it.
“It’s funny. Yesterday. Seeing her. I couldn’t believe how much she looks like me,” Trish says.
I do a double take. Trish is a petite yet imposing adult woman dressed in supertight designer jeans and a snug-fitting seamless camisole the color of crushed raspberries. With her black hair and wide forehead, she doesn’t look anything like my blonde Laurel. Not even her manners or how she tilts her head when admonishing me are similar.
“Don’t tell me you couldn’t see the similarities,” Trish says. “Just like me, she’s got the bluest eyes.”
“Far be it from me to be the contrarian, honey, but Laurel’s eyes aren’t blue. They’re more like gray.”
“Not Laurel. Anne Elise! That’s who I’m talking about. Don’t tell me you didn’t see from our eyes how similar we must be.”
“Oh.”
“So. Tell me. When you first held Anne Elise and looked into her eyes, did you feel an instant special connection to her?” Trish’s eyes mist up. She holds her hands together, starving for my response. “Let me live vicariously through your experiences. Did you love her immediately? How soon does love set in?”
Seismic sensations had poured through me at the moment of Anne Elise’s birth. Time slowed down, becoming elastic. A nurse snipped Anne Elise’s umbilical cord. Laurel was flat on her back, getting sutured. I held the baby to Laurel’s face. We kissed her on either cheek. Our three noses touched together. In the expansiveness of the moment, my good cheer verging toward giddiness, Anne Elise’s presence overwhelmed me.
I pop open the ibuprofen bottle, shake out a tablet. Guilt surges through me—not only because of my affair but from creating a baby who doesn’t belong to the woman I’ve loved for the last fifteen years. Though my love for Anne Elise was instantaneous, saying so would only compound Trish’s pain, hurting her more than I already have. She doesn’t need me to tell her the joy she’s missing out on by being childless. I run my hand through my unkempt hair, swallow the ibuprofen, and shrug. “I guess it was okay.”
Trish’s mouth drops open. “Only okay?”
Though I’ve said and done a lot of stupid things over the years, Trish has never been so surprised. She sits down at the corner of the bed, takes a small breath. For twelve years, for better or worse, we shared every experience of our lives, but I’m now experiencing things in which she can play no role. She crosses her legs. Her lips tighten as if she’s bracing herself for a shock. “James? I need you to do something for me.”
“What’s that, honey?”
“You need to stop seeing that woman. She’s a dalliance, James. That’s all she is to you. You know this. Deep down, I know you know this. Get her out of your life. Do you understand? Get rid of her.”
The way she says it—get rid of her—I think she expects me to kill Laurel, which I’d almost understand if she ever finds out how much money I’ve blown on Laurel. Three weeks ago, I received my annual six-figure performance bonus. Rather than paying off my credit cards, I used the money to move Laurel into a stunning three-bedroom riverfront apartment. On the night I told Trish I was at work preparing a client presentation, I painted the walls of one room goldenrod yellow. The room was going to be our child’s nursery. I had discussed so little with Laurel about how we were to proceed once the baby was born. Perhaps Laurel assumes I, too, will move into the apartment. Perhaps she envisions nights on the balcony sipping wine together while the baby sleeps. Nor, beyond pleading for a divorce yesterday, have I talked with Trish about my living arrangements. Everyone in our presumptuous little triangle is just assuming things will work out to their liking.
I rise out of bed. Still hungover, I’m prepared to feel the room spin beneath my feet, but after I take a wobbly first step, the urge to vomit subsides. I walk to my closet and pull a winter-weight blue pinstriped suit off a heavy wood hanger.