Nine Women, One Dress(17)
John was a professor of film at Columbia University. About five years into the marriage, when their daughter Chlo? was two, John’s parents died together in a horrible car accident on the Amalfi Coast. (If you’ve ever driven on that road, you have most likely pictured a similar fate befalling you.) When the dust settled, John, Caroline, and Chlo? moved into his parents’ Fifth Avenue apartment. From then on things quickly changed. The money had always been there, but they had never needed or spent it; now it infiltrated their lives. John’s parents’ staff waited like puppies at a pound to see if they were to keep their jobs. Of course they kept them; John and Caroline felt it was their duty. The moldings needed dusting and the twenty-four-seat dining room table screamed out to be set and sat at. “So,” Caroline said, “I rose to the occasion. At first it was a big adjustment for me to be that social. John is really the more social of the two of us. But I loved John, and I did my best to embrace my new role.”
Fast-forward through seven years of smiling while hosting cocktail parties for the parents of Chlo?’s classmates at Spence, faculty dinners for John’s Columbia colleagues, and luncheons for the Junior League, and Caroline seemed happy and settled in her inherited role. Until the day when a hard-bodied masseuse named Anna entered the picture and misaligned the stars.
I had to interrupt. “Hold on, Caroline—you’re telling me John is a professor at Columbia and you think he’s been faithful all this time? I mean, coeds and professors—it’s a cliché for a reason.”
She thought about it before responding. “That’s too obvious for John. He likes to come across as so good. He wouldn’t want anyone to think otherwise, especially at Columbia.”
“He sounds like a hypocrite,” I said.
She smiled. “Exactly.” She hugged me when she left and said warmly, “At first I thought I would just leave him—the money really doesn’t mean all that much to me. But then I thought, He should pay.”
We agreed that she would give me access to their apartment and his schedule and we would speak as soon as I had something. Luckily, she had just purchased new cell phones, with her name on all three contracts, so tracking them was her right. I was confident that with all those resources it wouldn’t take long for me to expose John for the degenerate that he was.
CHAPTER 9
Dinner at the Four Seasons
By Felicia (aka Arthur Winters’s Executive Assistant)
Age: 52
The Four Seasons is one of those celebrated restaurants in Manhattan that rises to the status of cultural icon. As revered as beloved New Yorkers like Walt Frazier and Fiorello La Guardia, and hailed alongside establishments from the Rainbow Room to the Carnegie Deli. Like the chicken and the egg, it’s hard to determine whether New York created these legends or these are the legends that created New York.
I had never stepped inside the Four Seasons before. Well, that’s not entirely true. Long ago I stepped into the coatroom, where a hatcheck girl assured me she would get a forgotten file to my boss, Mr. Winters, who was there having a power lunch. I believe the term power lunch was actually coined at the Four Seasons. Sadly, there’s talk that it may be closing, losing its lease. If that happens, I imagine Fortune 500 execs will be wandering the streets in search of the new place to see and be seen. Seems that someone should stand up and fight for such a legend.
Back then I still called him Mr. Winters. It wasn’t long after that power lunch before I started calling him Arthur. Not much longer than that before I had fallen in love with him. Tonight we would be dining at the Four Seasons together, I hoped in the famed Pool Room. But it didn’t really matter to me very much where we dined. I was going on a date with Arthur Winters, the man I had loved for seventeen years. I honestly never thought this day would come. I looked at my watch. I was five minutes early. That wouldn’t do. I headed inside to the ladies’ room to check my face in the mirror.
Though this was my first date with Arthur Winters, in truth I had been having an affair with him for seventeen years. Unlike other, more torrid affairs, when the wife has no clue, in this case the husband himself had no clue. I sometimes think that maybe Marilyn did know that I was in love with her husband. I was pretty sure half the office knew. But Arthur? Arthur had no idea. When it came to love, he had tunnel vision. His wife and daughters were everything to him. Marilyn was very confident about their bond and never treated me with anything but gratitude for looking after the man she loved from nine to five, Monday through Friday. Arthur simply loved his wife and didn’t have eyes for anyone else. It was one of the things I loved about him. In all the time that I’ve worked for him I’ve never made an inappropriate move.
I don’t want you to think I’m pathetic. I haven’t remained stagnant on the dating front. At times I’ve dated a lot, attending singles functions and putting it out there to friends that I would like to be fixed up. At other times I’ve become tired of it and been content just to hang out with girlfriends and join movie and theater clubs and whatnot. But I did try to find a man of my own. When your heart is already spoken for, though, it’s hard to give it to someone else. I would have had to be knocked over the head with a bat to see past Arthur, and truth be told, no one came out swinging.
Even on the handful of occasions that I had sex over the years, I pictured Arthur the entire time. When the man my cousin Stacey had fixed me up with came up to my apartment after a few too many margaritas at Rosa Mexicano, it was Arthur’s hand that gently unzipped my dress and caressed my back. It was Arthur who was the real object of every moment of desire I have had over the past seventeen years. Not once did I open my eyes to look at who I was actually with. Not once did I picture anyone else. At this point I think if I were ever to be alone with him, one real-life touch from him in the right place and I might just explode right there on the spot!