Etiquette for the End of the World

chapter Seven





“How do you feel about kissing a man in an apron?”

Somehow, even with the frilly red apron tied around his waist, Peter looked incredibly sexy, in his crisp white oxford shirt and burgundy tie, and his flawless wavy dark hair. Like a celebrity chef, ready for his close-up. He was in the kitchenette, which was separated from the living room area by a sleek marble counter. There was Henry Mancini–type jazz playing from an unseen source. Tess thought the whole scene very Mad Men.

“I’ll let you know the next time I’m wearing one,” Tess quipped back at him, putting down her purse and taking off her coat, letting them drop onto a black leather sofa. Tess had let herself into the apartment with the key she found under the mat, as Peter had instructed when he’d called to tell her he was staying in one of the apartments that lined Gramercy Park. It was a large modern apartment, sparsely but tastefully decorated. The walls were almost entirely bare. The furniture was mostly dark leather. It looked either as if the owners had not lived there very long or that this was not their primary residence.

Whatever Peter was stirring in the pot smelled heavenly. “You know,” said Tess, “if you are trying to seduce me by making me dinner, let me save you some time. We’re already sleeping together.”

“I’m making mushroom risotto, so technically it’s the rice I’m seducing tonight.” He raised an eyebrow and gave her one of his “you and I share a wonderful secret” smiles. She was starting to think of this as his Svengali smile; he used it on almost everyone, and she had watched its melting effect on others with mixed feelings. And who cooks in a white dress shirt and a tie? She found herself sometimes missing Matt’s down-to-earth ways. Often on Saturday night she and Matt would just lie all schlumpy on the couch with their socked feet touching each other, reading back issues of The New Yorker and eating chips and salsa.

Peter stared into the pot as he tended the rice. He looked serious standing there cooking, with unusually intense concentration. Except when he was sleeping, she rarely saw his face in repose. Maybe it was the overhead kitchen light making shadows, but he looked older and a little tired.

He took the spoon out and put the lid on the pot, turning off the flame. “Tough day at the office, sweetheart?” he said gaily, in his customary playacting manner, and he was his debonair self again. He handed her a glass of red wine.

“Mmmm,” Tess murmured appreciatively, talking a sip. “So whose apartment is this, Peter?” It crossed her mind that she had never seen Peter in the same place twice.

“An acquaintance lent it to me. So I could cook for you.” Tess doubted very much that he had gotten this apartment for the sole purpose of cooking dinner for her, but it was a nice sentiment.

“Really? An acquaintance from where?”

Peter struck a pose, frowning with his mouth and eyebrows. “Ah … I’ve got a lawyer acquaintance downtown,” he intoned, in a spot-on Marlon Brando impersonation. Tess couldn’t help laughing, it was so good. Peter pulled off the apron and hung it on a closet doorknob, then came out from behind the counter. He put his arms around her and kissed her on the side of the neck, humming against her skin in a way that always weakened her knees. Peter certainly knew where all the buttons were. His usual clean soap smell was mixed with garlic. “The time has come for me to ask a service of you … something that will go a long way, toward setting things right with the family,” he said, still doing his Brando.

“What’s that?” Tess said, smiling up at him.

“Set the table?” In a flash Brando was gone. White teeth back, eyes twinkling.





She went to the round glass table to move his jacket from where it was draped over the back of a chair. His suits were so exquisite, always the nicest fabric. Running her hand over the shoulder, she stopped. Just below the lapel, the coat was mended with tiny stitches, just as she remembered from the one at the Waldorf … . But this was a different jacket from the one she had seen before. The other had been a tuxedo. How odd.

Peter’s mushroom risotto was perfectly cooked, and sank creamily into her taste buds. Tess was pleasantly surprised. She knew how much time it took to make perfect risotto; Peter did not seem the type to spend hours in the kitchen. Since she had been seeing him, she had learned that he had other clients besides WOOSH for whom he was fund-raising, which was why he was always busy, attending a seemingly continuous stream of social events. Tess loved hearing secondhand about the ones she did not go to—the people he met, the gossip he overheard. But recently she had begun to be bothered by his avoidance of any real conversation about his life beyond the superficial. They would go to a play and have an intricate discussion afterward about the relationship between the characters, but anytime they veered toward his own past, he would make a joke and change the subject. Since Tess did not really feel like talking about her own life these days, this staying on the surface suited her most of the time. But there was a tiny warning bell going off in the back of her head, a warning she could hear when she chose to pay attention. Her whole life was such a flail these days. Was Peter a part of this flail?

“Anything wrong?” Peter asked her, as he was clearing the plates off the table. “You got very quiet at the end of dinner, Tess. Was my risotto that good, or that bad?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s just … I don’t know, Peter, I was just thinking I don’t really know that much about you. I mean … we never really talk about anything real.” Now she sounded like a typical whiny girlfriend.

Peter set the dishes down and wiped his hands on a dish towel. “What do you want to talk about? What do you want to know?” He smiled brightly.

Tess felt awkward, like a teenager. What in fact did she want to know? “Well … Oh, I don’t know what I mean.” She laughed nervously and decided to change the subject. “I think I am just still weirded out by this thing that happened to me a few days ago.”

She told Peter about the Betty Phoenix and the missing book, and meeting Gregory Frankstein at the boat basin. When she got to the end, she waited for him to admonish her about putting herself in danger.

“That’s great!” he exclaimed, pulling her over to him and kissing the top of her head. “Wonderful, Tess. Just what I was hoping for. I can really use something like this. Can you get the documents? Oh, well, never mind … . Write it up anyway, and you can fake the science part. A computer-eating nano-bug? They will love this in L.A.!” He laughed. “I will let them know about this at the WOOSH dinner at ‘21’ on Wednesday. You, my darling, are nothing less than brilliant.”

“But, Peter …” Tess was not sure she wanted Peter to know that she herself half-believed the theory, that she was nervous about it. “I wonder if it’s such a good idea to … . I mean, they told me in confidence.”

Peter hugged her, staring delightedly into her face, his eyes sparkling with utter amusement. “Tess. Really? Some oddballs tell you about secret plans for a circuit-eating cockroach, and what— You think the NSA is going to use their secret decoder rings to track you all down and have you disappeared?”

Tess laughed sheepishly. Still, she felt disconcerted. It was one thing to make something up for Peter, it was another to use this. It almost seemed like … well, not quite betrayal—more like plagiarism, in a weird way. It was certainly disrespectful: no matter what else was true, Betty and Gregory believed what they had told her. At the end of her visit on the boat, they made her promise not to share the information with anyone unless it was someone who would use the information with the utmost discretion.

Tess could not really remember her walk back home through the icy park that day—she had been in such a daze—except that at the upper promenade in Riverside Park, Betty had gone one way and Tess had gone another. But when she got home her apartment had looked different to her, alien. The glass bookcases in the living room seemed slightly tilted. Had the parquet floor always had those speckled black spots in it? The steam pipes were making their usual loud banging noises, but it sounded to Tess like a submarine about to burst in two. The air in the apartment seemed alive with toxic dust. Even the cat seemed off, nervous. She sat down in the first chair she came to—in the dining room—without even removing her coat and hat.

Get a grip, Tess, she told herself. The whole idea is utterly ridiculous! Why was she listening to two people she didn’t even know? Obviously the pressure of her life had caused her to crack up. Losing her father, Matt, Stuart, her column … it had all been too much, it had backed up on her. And then she had watched all those end-of-the-world videos. Now she’d managed to actually find people outside of WOOSH who believed the world was on the brink of disaster, just so that she could escape dealing with her life. It made sense: no more debt, no more family issues, no more worrying about not having a husband or kids. Problems solved. In fact, maybe she was already in a rubber room somewhere. I mean, come on, secret government documents?

“Can you say schizophrenia?” Tess said aloud to Carmichael, who had jumped up on the table.

Finally, she had removed her coat and called Ginny, who she knew would be the reassuring voice of skepticism. Tess was not disappointed.

“Tess, you’re starting to sound the way you did when you were on that crazy diet,” Ginny scolded her. “Remember when you ate nothing except cucumber and cantaloupe for ten days and for about an hour you thought everyone was talking backwards?”

“I know, but … I just have a weird feeling about this. It felt real. You had to be there.”

“Sweetie, what’s with all the library research anyhow? I know you promised Peter that extra stuff, but how many pages of the actual book have you written? I swear, you will do anything to get out of writing. I’ve got authors who are master procrastinators, but you—you’ve invented a whole high-tech thriller to avoid writing.”

“But, Ginny, Betty Phoenix quit her job over this. And she really is the sweetest person—”

“You think just because she is a librarian with nice manners, she can’t also be a serial killer? It was bad enough you took this cult job; now you are wandering alone in the park with conspiracy theorists … and you went into their houseboat? Have you seen no scary movies? Did you not learn basic safety when you were eleven?”

Tess laughed. It made her feel more grounded to have Ginny lecturing her. But after she hung up the phone with Ginny she had a sudden impulse to call her brother, who besides being very logical was a biochemist. He would be someone who would really listen calmly and carefully to the whole computer bug concept and tell her if the science made any sense at all. Back in 2001, when she had been freaking out about the anthrax scare, her brother had not laughed at her; instead he had given her a patient look and told her, “You have more chance of dying in your bathtub than of anthrax, Tessie. Now, if you were a postal worker, or a senator, you might be justified in being a little nervous.” And with a single confident grin he had somehow made it all disappear—her anxiety, her insomnia, her paranoia about opening packages at work. But the mere thought of Stuart, especially now at Christmastime, opened up a well of sadness. She had purposely been avoiding her brother—at least until after the holidays. Her strategy this year was to go Scrooge and just ignore Christmas altogether. If she called Stuart, he might feel obligated to invite her down. And she knew that would be too much for her to deal with.

Tess turned her attention back to Peter and the risotto dishes. “You never know, I just might be disappeared,” she joked, loading the dishwasher, “For all I know, you could be a government agent!”

She felt an arm steal around her waist. “You got me,” said Peter. “I’m afraid now I’m going to have to interrogate you.”

Later that night Tess woke up with a headache. She had drunk too much red wine. She needed water and some Advil. But when she slid open the mirrored door of the bathroom medicine cabinet, she found there was nothing there. Not even a toothbrush or old razor, or a paper cup. Where were Peter’s things? It was like he was living here like a jewel thief, packed and ready to lam it at a moment’s notice.

She tiptoed back into the bedroom. He was still asleep. He always slept with his arms stretched far out to his sides, claiming the whole bed. Suddenly she remembered the stitches in his two jackets. Curious, she went to the bedroom closet and opened it.

From the streetlights outside the window she could make out his tuxedo and three other suits hung in a neat row. She pulled one of the suits out and held it up to her face in the dimness, examining it closely. It had been mended in more or less the same place as the other two, near the left shoulder. Teeny-tiny stitches, barely visible. What could it mean?

“If you’re looking for a robe, Tess, that isn’t one,” came Peter’s bemused voice from the bed. He switched the light on. She felt ridiculous, caught in mid-snoop like a jealous wife looking for lipstick stains. “Whatever in the world are you doing over there?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been noticing your suits are all stitched up, Peter, which I mean, is fine … I mean I’m not criticizing your … But they are all mended in the same place … . What, do you carry an ultra-sharp fountain pen in your pocket?” Peter blinked at her, and his mouth twitched. “Or, like, a Razr phone?” Tess’s sense of humor always got worse when she was embarrassed, or scared.

Peter pulled himself up and sat up against the headboard. He ran his hands back through his hair to wake himself up more fully. For the first time since she had known him, he looked nervous. He smiled, but it was stiff, unconvincing.

“There are some things I can’t tell you, my darlin’.”

“What things? Peter. Come on. This is weird.”

Peter rolled over and closed his eyes. “So you’re my tailor now? Okay, so hold the starch and come back to bed.”

Tess did not laugh. She waited until Peter sat up again.

“All right, fine. I was trying to avoid telling you about my last relationship, who turned out to be a spectacular mistake.” There was an edge to his voice. “I thought … well, after you knew about my contentious divorce, I thought if you found out about Marla, you might be … somewhat skittish, to say the least … . Tess, for god’s sake, put the damn suit back in the closet and come back to bed.”

He sounded pissed. Sheepish, but still curious, Tess hung the suit back up in the closet, went over, and sat cross-legged on the bed, facing Peter.

“So, what, you’re saying this Marla mended all your suits?”

Peter smiled in a rueful way. “Not exactly.”

“Well? What?”

“Marla murdered all my suits.”

Peter told her that when he first met Marla, who was an actress and a model (ouch, double whammy, thought Tess, involuntarily sucking in her stomach), she had seemed sweet and fun, if not particularly smart.

“What I did not know was that she was severely bipolar, as in totally nuts. One day I came home to our place in Malibu and she had taken a butcher knife to my jackets, and my overcoats too. She only stabbed them in one place, oddly enough. I guess she was going for the heart.” Here he smiled, but again it was more of an imitation of a smile.

Tess felt a cold prickle down her spine. “Yikes” she said, because she felt she had to say something. She could almost see the word floating above her head, surrounded by a balloon, like a comic book.

Peter put a tentative hand on her shoulder. “Tess, when I met you, and saw how smart and funny you are, I could not believe my luck. In California it’s all status houses and plastic surgery and film connections, you get sort of used to it, and you forget what’s important … .”

As Peter described Marla’s descent into an increasingly unstable mental state, Tess began to feel he was finally opening up emotionally about his past—even if he was opening up about a psycho ex with a butcher knife. She was also flattered he seemed so anxious about making sure things were okay between Peter and herself. Though there was a nagging dark part of her that thought, Maybe I’m just his next psycho girlfriend. But then he whispered in her ear, “I never met anyone like you before. Please tell me this hasn’t scared you away.”

“That depends,” she answered, giving him the kind of severe look she would give somebody over the top of her glasses, if she had been wearing any.

“On what?” His huge soft eyes were on her, searching her face (or were they trying to mesmerize her?).

“On where this Marla is, and whether she’s still allowed to handle sharp instruments.” Tess smiled sternly. She was only half kidding.

When he laughed he was his old self again. “Have no fear. She’s back in L.A., living happily and medicinally with her former shrink.” Then he cradled her in his arms. “Contessa, my Tessie … I would never let anything happen to you, don’t you know that?”

Tess closed her eyes and relaxed back against the silky warmth of him. He was like human cashmere. Except there seemed to be a lot of holes in this man, and not just in his suits. But she was almost forty, and who was she to expect Mr. Perfect? That kind of man you only get in the movies, and P.S., she had been looking for him for about twenty years. Peter was a fun playmate, and maybe he was even a good fit for her. After all, was she so very normal? And besides, anybody can have a crazy ex-girlfriend, she thought.

Suddenly she heard Ginny’s voice in her head: “Oh really? And a crazy ex-wife as well?”



***