“Honey, I can’t toss Laurel aside and stand by while you snatch away her baby. Ethically, I can’t do that.” It pains me to say that word—“ethically”—for it makes me feel like such a hypocrite to brandish this word after stupidly doing something as unethical and immoral as having an affair. Yet I’m responsible for Anne Elise. Which means I’m responsible for Laurel. Trish slumps her head down, her dainty chin resting on the white fur shawl she’s wrapped around her shoulders. I feel her sorrow. I wouldn’t be surprised if she orders me to vacate the premises, and yet I wonder if I’d be truly better off if she tosses me out.
“Honey, I’ll do the right thing. Trust me. Trust me. But I need time. You’ve got to trust me on this. You’ve known me for fifteen, sixteen years. Have I ever let you down?”
I expect my words will reassure Trish, but something has dulled her emotions. She stares off into the distance. She reaches into her Prada handbag for an amber plastic prescription bottle, pops open its childproof safety lid, and flings a pill into her mouth. Even deep into a Scotch buzz, I understand there’s a connection between the amber pill bottle, Trish’s doped-up sounding voice, and her wild suggestions. Following my gaze to the pill bottle, she blushes and then hurriedly tucks the bottle back into her handbag.
I take a sip of wine. A wise drinker knows never to mix Scotch and red wine, but I’ve screwed up so much recently that wisdom surely has no finger on me. “What’s that, honey? In the bottle? In your purse?”
“Nothing.”
“How many have you taken?”
“It’s just Valium. To keep me calm while I sit waiting for you to do the right thing, like you just said you would.”
“How many did you take?”
“My doctor said to take them as needed. Tonight, I’ve needed them a lot.”
“Trish. Honey.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to take too many. It’s not like I’m going to overdose or anything.”
“You can overdose on them?” I say, alarmed. “How many would you need to take?”
“Beats me. But don’t worry. It’s not like I’m going to kill myself or anything. I’ve just been worrying a lot. It’s not just you and Laurel and Anne Elise. I’m also worried about my father.”
“Jack?” I haven’t seen Trish’s father, Jack Riggs, since he broached the subject of surrogacy on us. I presumed he was living in comfort and good health. I envied his Cayman Island paradise, where he sits under the shade of palm trees, listens to the ocean surf, and dines on a heart-healthy diet of broiled lobsters, sea bass, and tropical fruits.
“I can’t reach him. Today, I found out he put his house off MacArthur Boulevard up for sale. He said he’d never sell it so he’d have a place to stay when he visited us once we have grandchildren for him. Don’t you think it’s strange he’d put it on the market without telling us?”
In the 1990s, Jack Riggs sold his shares in the family bank but insisted on maintaining a seat on the corporate board so he’d continue to exert real control over the institution. At its peak, it was, by far, the largest bank in town. Presidents deposited their federal paychecks with Riggs Bank. It was a bank unlike any other in the nation, its finances intricately entwined with the federal government. Jack initiated a campaign to make the bank become the financial institution of choice among the foreign embassies and diplomats stationed in town. The bank sought to maximize profits. Foreign embassies sought to minimize oversight on their accounts. Jack’s a smart man. He put two and two together. Repeatedly, he turned a blind eye to foreign money laundering. Money used to finance the 9/11 terror attacks was funneled through the bank, leading one influential senator to suggest 9/11 never would have happened had it not been so ridiculously easy for foreigners to launder money through the bank. Jack, beleaguered and aging, was ousted from the board, disgraced by the scandal. The bank that had borne the Riggs family name since 1840 sold its assets to a rival banking firm in 2005. Its former branches now fly under the PNC Financial banner. His house off MacArthur Boulevard might fetch a couple of million dollars in today’s market, chicken scratch compared to the wealth he presumably still has tied up in various offshore accounts.
“He’s not returning my phone calls or my emails.”
“He isn’t?” Jack has never been anything but punctual and responsive. We still talk from time to time about the joint investments we might one day make. Whenever I’ve tried to reach him, he never fails to return my calls. I can’t see him dodging Trish’s calls, but strung out on Valium like she is, she doesn’t need me to alarm her any further. “Don’t worry. He’s probably out enjoying himself. He’ll get back to you soon enough.”
“Argh.” Despair falls upon Trish. She reaches across the table for a rosewood-handled steak knife, hacks off a diamond-shaped chunk of lamb from the cold roast, and stuffs it in her mouth. She chews the meat, and in her breath I smell the garlic from its crust and the perky red wine that she washes the lamb down with. When she catches me watching her, she sets down her cloth napkin and says, “I’ve been wanting to do that for hours.”
“Are you sure you should be doing that? Drinking wine while taking Valium?”
“Pah! You’re one to talk about drinking!”
She’s right. I have no moral authority to stand on when it comes to the subject of alcoholic abstinence, and for a moment I feel I’ve let her down. And then I feel doubly bad, remembering that it’s not my alcoholism that’s let her down but my infidelity.
Trish offers me her steak knife so I, too, can hack off some lamb, but the sight of the cold lamb repulses me. Meat that’s been cooked so rare shouldn’t be left out in the open for too long. I tell her about food-borne contamination, how consuming bloodred rare meat that has sat on a table for four or five hours will make her sick, but she doesn’t listen. She slices off a couple of lamb chops and piles them onto a plate. Even mellowed out on Valium, she must have been in a private hell, staring for hours at this elegant meal but not wanting to lay a fork into it so that I would appreciate the trouble she’d gone through preparing it for my sake.
An hour later, we’re in the kitchen together cleaning up. We had cleared off the table and transferred the leftovers into Tupperware containers. My alcoholic buzz has dissipated, much to my chagrin. Washing dishes used to be one of my favorite parts of the evening, both of us standing shoulder to shoulder amid Palmolive and running tap water, one of us running a soapy sponge over the dishes while the other dries them off with a dish towel. Hard to believe we were once a functional couple. Washing dishes will be one of the things I’ll miss should the time come for me to move out of Savory Mew.
Upstairs, as I change into my flannel pajamas, Trish saunters up beside me in an alabaster silk chemise, engulfing me in her tender smile. Her lustrous black hair swept to one side, she’s as fetching on the eyes as ever. Shalimar, the perfume she dabs behind her ears for special occasions, scents the air around her. “Do you want to see what else the doctor prescribed me?”
“Sure. What?”
Trish opens her hand and offers me a trapezoidal blue Viagra tablet.
“Your doctor prescribed this? For you?”
“I don’t want you to be confused about us. Let’s work out our problems,” Trish says. She wraps her arms around me, displaying more physical affection than at any time since I started seeing Laurel. Something about her is wrong. An hour ago, she’d dug her sharp fingernails into my shoulders. Now, she’s outright seductive. She purrs into my ear. “James, we can still try to make a baby of our own. Just because we’ve failed before doesn’t mean we’ll fail again.”
Chapter Sixteen