Pretty Baby

“The best,” I agree, willing thoughts of Cassidy Knudsen in satin slips and ruffled babydolls from my mind.

 

I married Heidi when I was twenty-five years old. Heidi was twenty-three. I stare at a four-by-six photo of us on our wedding day, thumbtacked to a bulletin board on the wall. Classy, she said the last time she was in my office, running her fingers over the picture, and I shrugged and said, “The frame broke. I knocked it right off the desk in a last-minute rush,” and she nodded knowingly, understanding that the entirety of my career hinged on last-minute rushes.

 

But there was something telling about that photograph, I thought; our protective glass frame shattered and now here we were, punctured with microscopic holes that might one day tear. Those holes all had names: mortgage, adolescent child, lack of communication, retirement savings, cancer. I watch Cassidy’s manicured fingers—the long clear nails with the white tips—fondle a lamp on my desk, one of those antique banker’s lamps, vintage green; I watch her stroke the chain, watch her wrap it around a slim finger and pull—and think: infidelity?

 

No. Never. Not Heidi and me.

 

A soft yellow light fills the room. A nice contrast to the blinding white flourescent lights that line the ceiling.

 

We had dated for mere months when I asked Heidi to marry me. Being with Heidi was something I knew I needed: like air. Something I knew I wanted: sitting there at the top of my Christmas list to Santa that year. I was used to getting what I wanted. In my formative preteen years I lived with a mouth full of metal and headgear. I used to groan and gripe about those braces, the way they would puncture the gum and tear up the inside of my cheek. You’ll thank me one day, my mother used to say, having suffered her entire life with overlapping teeth she hated. And I did. Thank her, that is. After years of orthodontia, I was left with a smile that could sway most everyone in my direction. It worked wonders at fraternity parties, interviews, client dinners and, of course, with the ladies. Heidi used to tell me that that smile was what first caught her eye the night we met at some charity ball. It was December, I remember that much, and she was wearing red. I’d paid about two hundred bucks to go to the darn thing, at the encouragement of my firm. Giving back was our motto that year. It was supposed to look good that our firm had snagged two tables, sixteen or twenty seats, at two hundred bucks a pop, even though not a single one of us knew what cause we were supporting.

 

Not until I found myself on the dance floor with Heidi later that night, learning more about illiteracy in Chicago than I ever cared to know.

 

I was used to getting what I wanted. Before I married Heidi that is.

 

“So what seems to be the problem, Mr. Wood?” Cassidy asks. She leans back in her chair, runs those well-manicured nails through her hair. “You want to talk about it?”

 

But I say, “No. Better not,” thinking how the last time Heidi conceded to something I wanted it had to do with slipping on a pair of jeans before tracking that homeless girl down; the time before that, chunky peanut butter versus creamy. Things that were trivial.

 

When it mattered, I lost. Every time.

 

“C’est la vie?” Cassidy asks and I repeat, “C’est la vie.”

 

Such is life.

 

And then I watch her blue-gray eyes and call to mind the way I knocked an espresso down the front of my houndstooth shirt the first time she walked into our conference room, wearing a red suit with the tight, ankle-length pants that only Cassidy Knudsen could wear, a pair of black shoes with, of course, three-or four-inch heels, my boss—suddenly seeming short and impotent—introducing her as “the new gal in town” and staring at her ass as she found her way to an empty seat beside me. She reached for a stack of take-out napkins left behind from dinner the previous night and began to pat my shirt dry in a way only Cassidy Knudsen would do.

 

She’s like a femme fatale, isn’t she? Heidi had asked that day at the botanical gardens, the first time Heidi and Cassidy met, last summer at the work picnic, as she watched the other woman drift away, hips swaying back and forth like a tetherball, somehow unattached to the rest of her body.

 

What’s a femme fatale? Zoe had asked, and Heidi nodded her head to the woman in the strapless cherry dress and said simply, Her.