The Perfect Marriage Read online

  “He’s just a man of his time” was another of his mother’s efforts to justify her husband’s rage, as if every male born in the decade after World War II thought nothing of striking the woman he had sworn to love until death, or striking a child who had done nothing wrong but be born. “You’ll be different, though,” Wayne’s mother always said to him.

  Wayne’s entire life had been an effort to fulfill his mother’s wish and be nothing like Archibald Fiske. It was only recently that he had come to understand that by pursuing this quest with such single-mindedness, he had failed to devote the necessary time to being Wayne Fiske.

  The irony was not lost on him that, by making this mistake, he had inadvertently become hard himself. Sometimes he even drank too much. In fact, at his low points, Wayne believed that the only meaningful difference between him and his father might be that Wayne hid his demons better. Whereas his father would lose his temper over nothing at all, Wayne couldn’t remember the last time he’d not been in control.

  It was a skill he would need to call upon this evening. In fact, he could barely think of a more un–Archibald Fiske thing to do than smile and drink a toast to Jessica and James’s happiness.

  Owen’s mother had told him that he could invite a friend to the party. “A boy or a girl,” she’d said in that I’m-so-woke way that she sometimes tried on.

  Owen said he’d think about it, the phrase he used whenever he meant no but didn’t want to engage further on the topic. It was inconceivable that he would subject any of his friends to the spectacle taking place this evening. Instead, he would fly solo for an hour, smile at his parents’ friends, and then retreat into his room the moment his mother granted him such dispensation.

  He was mentally preparing for the evening by blasting Pop Smoke’s “War” through his headphones when a knock on his door interrupted the jam.

  “What is it?” he said.

  His mom stepped inside. “Just checking on you.” She looked him over approvingly. “My, my. You clean up nice, Owen.”

  In point of fact, Owen thought he looked ridiculous. The blazer his mother had bought for him to wear for the occasion was way too big across the shoulders and too short in the sleeves. On top of that, his hair didn’t go well with a sports-jacket-and-trousers look. It was now past his shoulders, long with tight curls, making him look like a seventeenth-century French monarch. In tonight’s outfit, the overall effect was like when people put hats on dogs: it just didn’t make any sense.

  “Nikes? Really?” she said when she noticed his feet.

  “The shoes I wore to Aunt Emma’s wedding were too small.”

  “James’s shoes will probably fit you,” she said. “He’ll give you a pair of loafers or something.”

  “Please, Mom,” he said, in the whiny voice that sometimes worked.

  She considered his plea for a moment, then smiled, settling the issue. “Okay. If wearing sneakers is going to make you happy, far be it from me to stand in your way.”

  He was tempted to tell her that his choice of footwear was not really going to make him any happier. He didn’t want to attend this party no matter what he wore. Instead, he said, “When do I have to be out there?”

  “By nine, please. And you don’t have to stay long. Just until after the toasts.”

  With that, his mother leaned over and kissed him on the top of his head.

  “Mom, I’m not six.”

  “I love you, Owen,” she whispered, as if he hadn’t said anything at all.

  Reid Warwick loved a good party—the feeling that the night ahead contained unlimited possibilities. That anything could happen.

  He did not expect James Sommers’s anniversary party to be a good party, though. James was one of the few truly respectable people Reid knew. Maybe the only one, come to think of it. To Reid, that meant that James and his new bride’s friends were also respectable people, and therefore the party would be a bunch of stiffs sipping chardonnay while they discussed their children’s school achievements or swapped home renovation stories.

  There were other places Reid could have gone if debauchery were his true objective for the evening. In fact, when he received the invite, Reid had assumed that he’d be at one of his usual haunts while James and Jessica celebrated their anniversary. But two weeks ago, Reid had the good fortune of being presented with a business opportunity that required James to consummate it.

  That meant that, as far as Reid was concerned, tonight was more akin to a business meeting, which was why he had decided to wear a suit, pairing it with a plain white shirt. A tie would be trying too hard. He did shave for the first time in several days, though.

  Tommy Murcer called for the second time that day while Reid was getting ready. Reid pressed decline on his phone. He’d fill Tommy in on James’s response once he knew it. The Pollock sketches were now firmly in Reid’s possession, so there was nothing Tommy could do to screw him over at this point.

  The last Jackson Pollock canvas to come to auction had fetched $40 million, and that was nearly a decade ago. The record for a sale of his work was approximately $200 million, made in a 2015 private sale.

  Unfortunately, Tommy didn’t have paintings. What he’d entrusted Reid to sell were preliminary sketches. Unsigned too. That meant the price per sketch would be below a million.

  On the bright side, Murcer had four of them. And Reid’s take was 35 percent.

  To make this payday happen—for himself as well as for Murcer—Reid needed James’s connections in the art world. It was a fairly small universe of people who could afford to shell out the price of a McMansion for a piece of paper with some paint splatter on it. Reid didn’t know even one, but James’s contact list was chock-full of such people.

  Even if he had to cut James in for half of his take (and he was hoping it wouldn’t come to that), Reid would still end up netting somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million bucks. And he’d do his best to keep James’s take below that. Either way, it wasn’t a bad day’s business, considering that he was doing little more than introducing a guy with access to some Jackson Pollocks to another guy who knew people who could afford them.

  Haley Sommers was already two glasses into the bottle of chardonnay she had opened as her evening’s plans. A Saturday night spent drinking and feeling sorry for herself had become almost the norm these days.

  Sometimes she wondered how she could have fallen so far, so quickly. Two years ago she was a married investment banker, and now she was . . . a cautionary tale. Closing in on thirty, divorced, no children, and unemployed. Not to mention bitter to the core.

  All too often, Haley felt the hate burn within her. A fire that could be extinguished only with alcohol, of all things. And then only temporarily.

  All of her and James’s friends had long ago chosen sides. Some took longer than others, pledging pious promises to keep loving them both, but it was only a matter of time before loyalties were tested and battle lines inalterably drawn.

  Even though lunch invitations and movie nights with James’s social set were now a thing of the past for Haley, his friends still cared enough about their friend and follower counts on Facebook and Instagram that they had not blocked Haley on social media.

  Mandy’s feed had been especially helpful. Tonight’s entry captured her in a full-length shot wearing a little black dress and posed to show that she barely had a rib cage. In the caption she wrote: Anniversary Party at James and Jessica Sommers’ Loft. #truelove.

  James and Jessica’s first anniversary had actually been last week. Haley had commemorated the occasion with a series of thinly veiled tweets about how certain people were destined to burn in hell. As the evening had worn on and her alcohol intake had increased, she’d upped the ante—calling James and hanging up, just so he knew she was thinking of him. Then, around midnight, when she was well past drunk, she left him a voice mail. In the morning she could no longer recall the exact words she’d used, but the gist of it had been that she was looking forward to
his death and sincerely hoped it was preceded by immense suffering.

  Her admittedly juvenile shenanigans violated the restraining order that prohibited Haley from engaging in any direct contact with James or Jessica. It also required that she stay fifty yards away from Owen. Haley knew the restraining order had been Jessica’s idea. And, sure, showing up at Jessica’s son’s school for the sole purpose of telling him that his mother was a gold-digging whore might have been over the line, but that didn’t make Haley’s comment any less true. Besides, she’d been drunk . . . though that excuse was running a bit thin at this point.

  The thing about restraining orders, Haley had learned, was that they really weren’t worth the paper they were written on. For James to complain about any violation, he’d have to file something in court. So far, he hadn’t. Nonetheless, Haley’s divorce lawyer had repeatedly warned her that if she kept flouting the injunction, James’s patience with her would end.

  Staring at the Instagram photo of Mandy’s bony arms, Haley poured herself another glass of wine and began to contemplate what offensive she could launch to ruin James and Jessica’s celebration of their love. Calling in a bomb threat required minimal effort, but James would know it was her, and her efforts would be for naught.

  That didn’t mean that she couldn’t report, anonymously of course, some other type of suspicious activity that the police would be required to investigate. Yes, Officer, I’m seeing some very shady-looking characters entering the building. I think one of them is carrying a gun.

  But even assuming that was enough to warrant a police drop-in, it still wouldn’t dampen the festivities. With Haley’s luck, it would only add to the merriment. She could imagine Jessica laughing in her Jessica way. We were having such an amazing time that the police thought something illegal was going down!

  Back to the drawing board, then . . .

  The more she thought about it, the more it seemed that this occasion required her personal intervention. James’s loft had a crap security system: a buzzer alerting the residents that their guests had arrived and enabling them to unlock the door remotely. Haley could wait behind some other invitee and follow them in. It would have to be someone who didn’t know her . . . but most of Jessica’s friends only knew of her—James’s batshit psycho of an ex-wife—and wouldn’t recognize her on sight.

  Once she got inside, Haley would be behind enemy lines, which meant that she needed backup for this mission. She mentally scrolled through a list of potential accomplices before realizing Malik would be perfect. He was ridiculously handsome, and big too: six three, with a basketball player’s biceps. Even an armed security guard would think twice about forcibly removing Malik from the premises.

  He’d come with her too, even though it was late notice. She’d make Malik an offer he couldn’t resist: hang there with her for fifteen minutes, after which they would go back to her place, and he could do whatever he wanted to her for as long as he desired.

  2

  James glanced at his watch. He was one of the last people he knew who still wore a timepiece rather than check their phone every thirty seconds. It was all part of the persona he’d meticulously cultivated. If you were in the business of selling people million-dollar pieces of art, you needed to establish that you were a person of impeccable taste. In this case, James did so with a Patek Philippe chronograph.

  That horological symbol of Swiss precision told him it was still nearly thirty minutes before the first guests were slated to arrive. He stepped out into the living room. The calm before the storm, as it were.

  Few of tonight’s attendees had ever been to his home before. Those who had were mainly Jessica’s friends. James’s contributions to the guest list were by and large work colleagues and clients. The loft would undoubtedly impress them, so different from the limestone town houses, Upper East Side classic sixes and sevens, and new-construction penthouses they called home.

  He still could not fathom what he’d been thinking back then, but he distinctly recalled that when he’d first set foot in this place, he’d known he’d live in it with Jessica someday. The fact that he was married to Haley at the time somehow hadn’t entered into the equation, even though it had been her idea for them to find a new place rather than continue to live in her bachelorette apartment, as she had called their home on Riverside Drive.

  By the time the renovation work on the loft was finished (new kitchen and new master bathroom), so was his marriage to Haley. She’d never lived here. Instead, Jessica moved in only a few months after James.

  Before beginning his affair with Jessica, James had never been unfaithful to a partner; he’d never even thought cheating was something he was capable of doing. Nor had he ever been “the other man,” always staying clear of married women, even when they offered him no-strings-attached sexual relationships in his single days.

  James was forty-two when Jessica came into his life, and by then he’d had more than his share of experiences with women. Much more than his share, all false modesty aside. But within minutes of being in Jessica’s company, he realized that he’d previously been completely ignorant about love. It was like how he’d thought he understood the Sistine Chapel because he’d studied it in school. But when he finally stepped into the Vatican and looked up at the ceiling, he realized he’d never comprehended it at all.

  He knew it was somewhat twisted logic, but James was convinced that everything had transpired exactly as he’d predicted from the outset because the universe’s imperative to bring Jessica to him could not be denied, just like nothing could have stopped the universe from taking his father in that accident. Of course, that did not mean he was blameless. Or that he wouldn’t someday pay a price for his sins.

  Tonight the loft looked even bigger than its three thousand square feet because nearly all their living room furniture had been put into storage, replaced by rented bistro tables and chairs. The fact that everything in the space was white—the chairs, the tablecloths, the tulips, and the vases in which they stood—gave the place an even more cavernous feel. Even the waitstaff charged with walking around and serving the hors d’oeuvres wore uniforms consistent with the alabaster theme.

  The decor didn’t seem the least bit monochromatic, however. That was because the perimeter of the space was adorned with more than thirty pieces of art, each bursting with color. The largest was roughly the size of a queen bed, the smallest hardly bigger than a postage stamp. James rotated the pieces from time to time, as one would in an art gallery. Regardless of which pieces were on display, the room provided something of a kaleidoscopic experience. At times, Jessica felt as if the art were actually swirling around her.

  She found Katerina, the caterer recommended by one of James’s clients, in the kitchen. Katerina was a sculptor when she wasn’t creating menus for parties, and she was beautiful—a common denominator of most, if not all, of the women in James’s orbit.

  “You’re an absolute vision, Jessica,” she said.

  “Thank you. How’s everything going?”

  “Like a well-oiled machine,” Katerina said. “No . . . no,” she told a woman placing unfilled champagne flutes on a tray. “The champagne’s always poured here.”

  “Anything I can do?” Jessica asked.

  “Just have the time of your life, my dear.”

  Not five minutes after Owen’s mother’s visit, James knocked on his door.

  His stepfather looked as if he’d been born in a suit and tie, wearing it with an ease that Owen was near certain he’d never achieve at any age. He took after his father, Wayne, in that regard, possessing a healthy bit of skepticism about the 1 percent.

  “Just checking on you, Owen,” James said.

  “I haven’t run away yet.”

  James smiled. “Yeah, I hear you. But tonight’s party is going to make your mother happy. That’s why we’re doing it.”

  This was a common refrain from James: “It’ll make your mother happy.” Owen tried to think of instances in which his father h
ad uttered the same sentiment, but his mind always came up blank. He knew that wasn’t the reason his parents had split, or why his mother was now with James, but he didn’t think it was necessarily not the reason either.

  “The jacket looks good on you,” James continued. “And I like pairing it with the Nikes. Very GQ of you.”

  “Thanks. I do it all for you, James.”

  This made his stepfather laugh. “I’m lucky to have you, Owen.”

  “Right back at you, James,” Owen said with a laugh of his own.

  Wayne’s plus-one for the evening was Stephanie Cunningham, a thirty-nine-year-old physician’s assistant he’d met online. She had never been married but was quick to point out that she was not a commitment-phobe, having lived with a man for much of her thirties.

  She and Wayne had been seeing each other for about four months—that in-between period of a relationship among people their age in which overnight stays were a given on those alternating weekends when Owen stayed with his mother, but it was still too soon to talk about the future.

  For the subway ride from Queens to Manhattan, Stephanie had her overcoat buttoned to the top. Beneath it was a dress she’d gotten from Rent the Runway, a burgundy velvet number held up by spaghetti straps with a nearly nonexistent back. It was sexier than anything Wayne had seen Stephanie wear before. He was smart enough not to make that observation audibly, of course. He knew why his plus-one was dressing as if this were some type of competition: because for Stephanie, it was.

  It was also a contest Stephanie could never win, no matter what she wore. Jessica would always look better because his ex-wife was movie-star beautiful, while, on her best day, Stephanie was merely pretty in a supporting-role way.

  Wayne felt justified in making that assertion because he knew full well that the same analysis applied to the comparison between James and him. All of which meant that, on first sight, Wayne’s ex-wife and her current husband made a much more obvious pair than Wayne and Jessica ever had.