That's What Frenemies Are For, page 31
“Those are gorgeous!” she said, taking the mums. “I hope I don’t kill them. Terry wants to put in an herb garden, but the last time we tried that, the mint took over our entire backyard in Cambridge.”
It was quiet in the house, the faint sounds of a television coming from the basement. “The kids are wiped out from the hike,” she said. “I put a movie on for them.”
The dining room had been cleaned, but pans and trays were stacked on the table.
“From the potluck,” Janet said. “I think most of our dishes at this point came from other people.”
She took me into the kitchen, which was enormous by city standards and cluttered in a homey way with shelves of cookbooks and a collection of ceramic pitchers and antique advertising signs sharing wall space with Willa’s drawings. On the refrigerator were Willa’s spelling finalist certificate and photos of the family going back to when Willa was swaddled on a much younger Terry’s chest. Janet poured us each a glass of wine and moved a pile of papers off the kitchen table, and we sat down.
“Terry always leaves his papers out,” she said. “He left for the airport a while ago, so at any moment I expect he’ll call in a panic because he forgot some piece of paper that he made notes on and I’ll have to find it in that mess. Hey, how does a German physicist drink beer?”
“Um…”
“In ein stein!”
I couldn’t help laughing, not at the dumb joke, but at the sheer joy she took from it. “What’s it like, being married to a genius?”
“What’s it like being married to a builder?” Janet said, smiling. “Don’t you think it depends on who specifically the genius and the builder are?”
“James is a good man,” I blurted.
“Aw, sweetie…I believe you. I figure most of us are good and most of us are assholes, depending on the day. I’m not going to judge. I mean, I judge all the time, but I kind of go with my gut, you know?”
I thought of Gina and Mark, breaking bread with the Eriksons’ arborist. I wanted to believe it could work, Janet’s happy vision of people getting along, that all you needed was good intentions and a positive attitude to insulate yourself from the judgment of the outside world.
“I have to ask you something,” I said. “Why were you always so nice to me? I didn’t…treat you very well.”
Janet shrugged. “Honestly? You weren’t afraid to be yourself. The first time we met, when you were new in the city, you told us this wild story about trying to buy some stranger’s purse and how you ended up trading her for it.”
“I’d forgotten about that. I still have it.” I had been sitting on the steps of the library eating a sandwich on my lunch break when a girl sat next to me, setting down a canvas tote painted with a brilliantly colored dragon, embroidered with beads and tiny mirrors. Along the bottom was stitched If the sky could dream, it would dream of dragons. “I traded the Burberry work bag my mom bought me when I got my job.”
“Yes, exactly!” Janet’s eyes sparkled with merriment. “And yeah, I was a little worried when that crew got you in their clutches, but I saw how you were with your kids—how you let Henry wear that wolf hat to school, how you always got down on the ground to kiss them goodbye. And James, whenever I saw him at school events, I could tell he was miserable, but he was there anyway. That says a lot.”
“Still.” I looked down. “I’ve been a bitch to a lot of people.”
“So don’t be a bitch anymore, if you can help it.” Janet grinned. “Besides, I doubt people really noticed. You’d have to do something really spectacular to make an impression on some of those women.”
“You make it sound so easy. To, you know, ignore what people think and just be yourself.”
Janet picked up her glass. “Sometimes it’s easy, and sometimes it’s not,” she admitted. “That’s why there’s wine.”
We drank and we ate potato chips and we made fun of the mean girls like we were in seventh grade, and we talked about our kids and our families. Janet opened a second bottle and we checked on the kids—Henry was fast asleep and Willa was teaching Paige origami—and then Janet gave me a tour of the house, which was decorated with a mixture of priceless antiques and castoffs, threadbare Persian rugs and family photos in plastic frames. Gorgeous millwork and inlaid floors were obscured by baskets of laundry and stacks of books and papers and a dusty treadmill in a spare bedroom, making it clear that no housekeeper darkened those doors. Then we returned to the kitchen table and continued where we’d left off.
Janet was telling a rambling story about how she and her sisters had snuck out one moonlit night at their grandparents’ summer house in the Berkshires when I interrupted her.
“My life is kind of fucked up right now,” I said, slurring my words a little.
Janet set down her glass and regarded me thoughtfully. “That sounds interesting,” she said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
It turned out that I did.
* * *
—
I slept in Janet’s guest room that night, Henry curled up next to me under a quilt Janet’s sister had made. Paige slept in Willa’s room. I had a bit of a hangover in the morning, but when I came downstairs, I could smell coffee already brewing.
Janet was at the counter, unrolling a tube of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. “Oh God, you caught me,” she said. “Willa loves these. Nothing but chemicals.”
“Janet…” I said.
She set down the tube and grabbed my hands. “If you’re about to tell me that you were drunk last night, that you said some things you shouldn’t have, don’t worry. I like you even more now that I know you’re as much of a mess as everyone else.”
“I’m not sure I remember everything I told you,” I admitted.
“You know what I think? You need a decent therapist.”
“Maybe when things settle down—”
“That’s the worst time to talk to a therapist,” Janet said, returning to her task. “I mean, shit. Strike while the iron’s hot and all that.”
“Did I, um…did I happen to mention the part where James is living in a plywood box and pissing in an alley?”
“Yup. But my favorite part was when you told Celeste Zapata to fuck off. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.”
“It’s just—I don’t know what I’ll do, you know? If James ends up in prison. I mean, I could take the kids and go live with my parents, I guess—”
“Screw that,” Janet said. “You’ll figure it out. I mean, I know it’s easy for me to say, when I won’t ever be able to spend all my money even if I live to be two hundred years old, but when I met Terry we lived on his grad school stipend and what I made teaching ESL, because I couldn’t touch my trust until I was twenty-five. And it wasn’t the end of the world.”
“But the schools…the kids. And I don’t have any marketable skills.”
“Now you’re whining,” Janet said. She’d gotten the container partway open and dough oozed grotesquely from the cardboard slits. “Here—make yourself useful and see if you can get these out while I find a pan.”
CHAPTER 41
Tuesday morning, I was dropping the kids off at school when my phone rang. I was getting used to the chill that greeted me every time I showed up at Graylon, the way conversations shifted and my old friends pretended not to see me, but when I saw it was James, I was happy for the distraction.
“James?”
“I’m coming home.”
* * *
—
All those papers I’d seen on his plywood desk? They weren’t financial documents at all—they were email printouts and copies of receipts and invoices and the notes James had begun pulling together, and taken as a whole they made a very convincing case for a story that James had never told me.
It was the tale of a young man who wanted to be a part of a magnificent city, to be able to show his children the work he’d done someday and say, “Daddy built that.” Who wanted his father—whose wallet still contained the union card he’d carried proudly for almost fifty years—to know that his son had made something of himself.
And it was the story of a successful man who never forgot where he came from, who took care of his employees and tried to treat people fairly. But also, of a man who fell in love with a girl from another world, one that required him to adapt and sacrifice. Who took a giant risk that, if it paid off, would give his wife everything she could ever want and his children all they would ever need.
James made mistakes. He trusted the wrong people and ignored warning signs, and he waded too far into too many gray areas. As financial pressures mounted, he tapped our own savings to service his debt. He got sloppy—he got desperate. He gave in to the strong-arm tactics of the city council and the community groups and started taking shortcuts to win their cooperation. It turned out that everyone had a price.
There was another villain in the story: the construction union, whose members he had employed for so many years, despite the fact that their labor cost as much as four times what could be had on the street. When James jobbed out a few contracts to nonunion crews, they showed their true colors. All those years of friendship evaporated. A man came to see him; it wasn’t a friendly meeting, but what could James do? Then another man came to see him, bringing photos of our children walking into Graylon and me coming out of Flame.
The morning after I’d gone to visit him at the building site, James had made a decision that went against everything he’d once believed about loyalty and honor. The world had changed since he set out on his own; the politics of the building game had metastasized. The feds had known exactly what to ask James when they first picked him up. They made it clear that he was small potatoes, that if he’d help them nab their real quarry, they would lose interest in prosecuting him.
That might seem like an easy choice, if you’re not James—if you didn’t cut your thumb and mingle your blood with that of your childhood friends as a symbol of everlasting brotherhood; if your best friends weren’t still guys from high school who painted houses and laid sewer lines for a living. If your mind didn’t still echo with the rule you learned as a child: Once a snitch, always a traitor.
James had to get there in his own time—but get there he did.
While I was cleaning our apartment on Monday morning, James had been attending a meeting at Federal Plaza, giving the feds everything they wanted and a bonus too. He offered up enough on Cora Rivera and Larry De Stasi that the investigators were able to connect it with what they already had in three separate unrelated complaints. With the pair indicted on charges of fraud, grand larceny, and falsifying business records, the city council was in for a shake-up. And it turned out the FBI had been closing in on a union racketeering case for months—but James gave them the final proof they needed.
This didn’t happen all at once, obviously. It took a few months, but the charges against James were dropped within days of his meeting with the feds. James gave a New York Times reporter an exclusive, earning a top-of-fold headline in the business section: PROSECUTORS MOVE TO DISMISS CHARGES IN MERCER HOUSE DEVELOPMENT DEAL.
Overnight, we were freed from social Siberia. Guilt over the way my friends and acquaintances had treated me had little to do with it—no one could resist the allure of a scandal, and James made an appealing hero. Milly Prasad called to invite us to their place in Jackson Hole over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. At the rescheduled meeting of the book club, Tatum kept looking at me nervously as she went on about the benefits of the Kegan Diet, and Grace drank too much and tearfully called me her best friend in a toast.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
After James’s public exoneration, he took a few days off. We didn’t do much, dropping the kids at school together and then wandering the city the way we’d done when we first met. We held hands and bought lunch from street carts and came home in time to make love before school let out—and sometimes we did it again when the kids were asleep.
A week after the Times story ran, I called both kids in sick to school, and the four of us took a tour of Mercer House, breathing the good clean smell of sawdust and stepping over two-by-fours. Forty-two apartments would soon house families, 20 percent of which were set aside for low- and moderate-income residents. We all wore hard hats, and James ordered lunch for the crew and gave Carl a gift certificate to take his wife out for a nice dinner.
Afterward, we walked to the subway station that James had agreed to refurbish as an expression of good faith to the interim councilwoman. Henry was out of his mind, since riding the subway was his favorite thing in the world. But James seemed almost as excited.
“They brought this tile all the way from Ohio a hundred years ago,” James told the kids, his voice a little husky as he ran his hand along the beautiful old mosaic. “Guys like your grandpa installed it by hand.”
As I watched my husband proudly show our children how our city was built, I couldn’t wait to get him alone. Turns out I have a thing for a bighearted man in a hard hat.
EPILOGUE
Almost nine months to the day after James was cleared, and one week before the first tenants will begin moving into Mercer House, Summers Properties is holding a reception for community leaders, city council members, and the press in the restored lobby of the building. Four hundred guests are coming, including a large contingent of our friends, for no other reason than that I’m the boss and I can invite anyone I want. (Okay, technically, James is the boss—but he’s more than happy to cede this sort of thing to me since he doesn’t have a lot of patience for projects that don’t involve power tools.)
Benilda is home with the kids. Surprised? A few days after James was exonerated, I texted her and asked her to meet. I drove all the way to Queens and took her to lunch at the nicest place I could find on Yelp. I asked her why she’d really left us, and though it took her a while to admit it, she finally made it clear that while her cousin lay dying, all I seemed to care about was dieting and going to Flame and partying with a bunch of magputas.
Also, she was really unhappy about having to clean up after Tatum. Worse than living with a pig, she said.
I asked for her forgiveness—and then I asked her if she’d come back for a 30 percent raise. To sweeten the pot I told her we were selling the Hamptons house, that she’d have paid time off to be with her family while we took the kids on a summer vacation to a ranch in Montana. (James’s idea, obviously.)
I’ve carefully curated tonight’s guest list to ensure positive coverage from friendly media and limited access to our detractors, of which there are still a vocal few. Despite James being cleared and the very public manner in which the scandals involving the city council and the union played out, as well as a statement of support from the mayor calling the project “a sterling example of mixed-income housing,” James still sometimes draws the ire of activists. I’ve decided they’re like sand flies—you’ll never escape them, but you can minimize the nuisance by covering your area of the beach with a big towel. In our case, that towel is my recent involvement in various programs working to ensure access to the city’s treasures for disadvantaged and marginalized youth. It’s amazing, the credibility one can build by giving one’s time and money to Arts for All or CityParks Play. (Deft use of social media certainly helps. I post a lot of pictures from community events these days. Hashtag GiveTilItHurts, anyone?)
For you cynics who think my philanthropic work is motivated only by the interests of James’s company—you’re wrong. There’s also the satisfaction of telling those bitches who turned on me during our difficult time that they can just run the book fair or the skating party or the winter coat drive all by themselves. I took great pleasure in turning in my resignation as class mom. My replacement certainly has her hands full.
James and I are bulletproof these days. I’m sure that in time the goodwill generated by publicly sticking it to some of the most hated institutions in town will fade. But for now, I’m very much enjoying not having to give a shit what people are saying about me.
Among our guests tonight are many Graylon parents, including those who once told me they’d never let their children play in our home again. That little incident seems to have vanished from everyone’s memory. Even Grace and Lindsay are coming, though I don’t really see much of them anymore outside school.
Oh—and Tatum and her fiancé are attending.
Believe me, I’d rather they didn’t. I avoid her whenever I can—I’m working out with a trainer at the gym in my building these days—but since she’s on many of the same guest lists as I am, it’s not always possible. They’ve been invited tonight because Augie Craft has a financial stake in James’s new project. (Surprise! But I bet you saw that coming.) James has taken on a partner who handles the finance side of things, allowing him to focus on managing the projects on the ground. When she sent me the investor list, I had no choice but to invite them all. Besides, I can’t afford to snub Tatum publicly. Her Instagram posts routinely get thousands of likes these days, and she has something like fifty thousand followers—yes, I admit I still check—and she’s managed to get herself on the board of Arts for All, for whom she has planned a fundraiser at Flame with a ticket price of a thousand dollars per rider. It sold out in an hour.
Since her recent engagement, the future second Mrs. Augie Craft has been flashing her huge diamond—and her tiny baby bump—all over town. I may have scratched out a successful second act for myself, but I don’t hold a candle to Tatum, who apparently has more lives—and more cunning—than an alley cat.
