“I don’t want my mother calling and driving me crazy. You have to warn me if you go to my father. It put me in a terrible position.”
“It won’t happen again. I’ve got this. Maybe I should have told you, but, Pheebs, this investment should have been a sure thing. It was a one-in-a-million mistake.”
“So why didn’t you tell me?”
He sank into the sling chair. “Haven’t you ever been embarrassed?”
Phoebe sat across from him. “But you could tell my father?” She rubbed the chrome and leather sofa arm, shaken, thinking of the cake hidden in the back of the refrigerator, the rattles ready to break her news. This man she thought capable of anything, the man about to be her baby’s daddy, it terrified her to think he could end up like his loser father.
“I needed to be sure I could fix things before we spoke.” He rose from the chair as though trying to escape.
Everything they’d bought resembled showroom furniture: modern and hopeful, Danish and sleek. Everything had to be perfect. Jake hated things out of place and insisted on a hand in everything. Even her perfume had to be Jake approved. Muguet des Bois, her scent since high school, had become tiresome, but she still smelled like seventeen and lilacs because Jake hadn’t yet sanctioned something new.
Wait until this place matched Deb’s, with baby mess everywhere. Charlotte wasn’t even crawling yet, but she’d overtaken every room in Deb and Ben’s apartment.
He paced the perimeter of the room until Phoebe stood in his way and placed her hand on his arm. “I don’t want you to trust my father more than me,” she said.
“It’s not trust, honey. Your father knows business; he understands how things can slip away if you don’t pull them right back.”
“My father’s not J. Paul Getty, he’s a dentist. Twenty thousand is hardly chicken feed. You know he tells my mother everything. She probably called me before you even closed the door at my parents’ house.”
“Enough.” Jake imprisoned her upper arms in his hands. “You’re married to me, not your mother. If I screw up, I’ll make it good. Red is my father-in-law, and if I want to ask him for money, I’ll do it. If you don’t trust me, we can’t be a team.”
He released her, traced the lines of her face, and then smoothed her hair. “Don’t worry. I know you trust me. You’ll never regret it. We’re going to end up the greatest team the world has ever seen. I’ll give you everything you’ve ever wanted, Pheebs.”
“What I want most is . . .” She stopped. What did she want most? “Honestly, all I need is for us to do three things in this world: take good care of our family, do good work we can be proud of, and concentrate on bringing out the best in each other.”
“Hold that thought.” Jake went to the hi-fi console they’d inherited from Phoebe’s parents and flipped through a stack of LPs. “Ah. Here it is.”
He held up The Genius of Ray Charles, the album with the song that played for their first wedding dance and the one that they always pulled out to mark the end of squabbles. He placed the disc on the turntable and set the needle on the track.
As the first bars of the old standard “It Had to Be You” spilled through the room, Jake bowed from the waist and held out his hand. Phoebe took his hand and joined him. She leaned against his chest, feeling under her cheek the still-starched front of the shirt she’d ironed that morning, taking in the big-band brass over Charles’s bluesy voice. She breathed in the very Jakeness of her husband: the warm, mossy smell of Aramis cologne, the lime tonic he used to control his thick hair, and the inky smell he brought home from the office. He brought her closer. She felt him hard and pressing against her.
“Is it still safe?” He nodded toward the bedroom.
“How did you know?” she asked.
He tipped up her face and kissed her with a new depth of love and gentleness. “Roses in your cheeks and rattles on the cake.”
“You peeked!”
“I hate secrets,” he said.
“Unless you’re keeping them.” She ran her hand down the muscle in his back. “And yes. It’s safe. It will be safe for a long time.”
“You’re sure?”
Memories of her miscarriage probably worried him. After all, they’d been making love when it happened. “I talked about it with the doctor,” she said. “He said there was no reason to think the two were connected. Losing the baby and . . . what we were doing.”
“Still and all. I’ll be gentle.” He spun Phoebe to the right and then gently dipped her. “Everything important is right here in my arms.”
CHAPTER 8
Jake
October 1968
“You believe this schmuck’s luck?” Jake stabbed at the New York Times that covered his desk. He moved over the wax paper from his thick pastrami sandwich to read more of the article.
“Fucking Onassis. More dough than God, and he gets Jackie Kennedy? The guy looks like a frog. Money makes you rich and handsome, huh? Listen to this, Gus: The thirty-nine-year-old widow of President Kennedy, two inches taller than her new husband, stood beside the sixty-two-year-old multimillionaire during a thirty-minute ceremony and gazed intently at the officiating Greek Orthodox prelate.”
Gus made a vague humming sound. The old guy wouldn’t stop working unless you stuck needles in his arm. His thick black glasses appeared welded to his pale face. Half the time, his hair pointed toward heaven, since he raked the grey with every stroke of his pen. Jake loved the guy, but he was a mess.
Of course Jackie gazed at the minister—anything to avoid seeing the shrunken old man she’d have to screw later. “He must be the luckiest asshole on earth.”
Gus concentrated on his oversized adding machine, punching numbers as the white tape spewed out paper coils marked with inky blue numbers.
Jake made a sound between spitting and a raspberry. “It just shows. Nothing matters except a huge bankroll. You can be a gnome, you can cheat your way to the top, but if you have the dough, the Times will cover your wedding as though you’re Prince Charming.”
“So, what’s the lesson?” Gus’s rabbinical expression reminded Jake of Hebrew school; that mix of Socrates and soul diving. Jake had hated Hebrew school.
“Money trumps all. Think I’ll make it the company logo.”
Gus took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I know you’re joking, but listen to me, kiddo. Here’s what’s more important than your bankbook: your reputation. Shortcuts always come back and bite you in the ass.”
“Doesn’t seem as though Onassis has been hurt.”
“Sometimes the hurt doesn’t show. It’s on the soul. In the end, you answer to God, and I imagine He charges a high price.”