Look Closer(6)

No. Vicky wasn’t at the club. Vicky wouldn’t be caught dead at a country club.

“She couldn’t make it,” I said. I think my face showed something, because yours did in reaction, like you realized you’d touched a nerve.

You weren’t as beautiful as you were nineteen years ago, Lauren; you were more beautiful. You looked experienced, tested, wiser. You weren’t the hot, blond twenty-year-old paralegal burning a path through my father’s law firm but someone who had ripened into a poised, confident woman, who had lived and learned, who knew where she was and who she was.

It bothered me that I didn’t tell you that I’d seen you back in May on Michigan Avenue, that the only reason I’d come to this stupid event at the Grace Country Club was that I’d looked up the membership roster and saw that you and your husband, Conrad, were members, and I thought I might run into you at this Fourth of July party. That my “surprise” at seeing you was not completely sincere. It bothered me that something that could be so real between us was starting under false pretenses.

So I told myself, okay, one white lie, but that’s it. I will never lie to you again, Lauren.

On my way home from the club, I stopped and bought this spiral notebook, just some ordinary notebook with a green cover. (Green for fresh and new, I suppose.) It’s been years, Lauren, years since I kept a journal. I’d given up writing my daily thoughts. Maybe because I no longer had anything interesting to say. I have a blog and law review articles and class to talk about the law, and the law has basically become my blood and oxygen and nourishment. What else is there to talk about? A wife who doesn’t love me A marriage that’s grown loveless and stale? My personal best time in some 10K?

So it’s back to a journal—hello, Green Journal—because now I have something to write about, Lauren. Or someone, that is.

Someone who agreed to meet me next week for coffee!

No harm in having some coffee, is there?





4

Simon

This is risky. Just parking here, up the street from Lauren’s house, a bit before eight in the morning, could bring trouble. These are the homes we used to call the “Lathrow mansions” running through the middle of Grace Village like a tourist attraction. Some of the pearl-clutching neighbors on Lathrow Avenue tend to call the police whenever they see someone who is “not from the neighborhood.” Usually that code stands for something very different than me, a middle-aged white guy in a respectable-looking SUV, but still . . . If I idle here for too long, I’m bound to draw someone’s attention, followed not long thereafter by a police cruiser swinging by for a quick inquiry. How’s your day going, sir? Can I ask what you’re doing? See some ID?

And it’s not as if I’d have a great answer. Making the most of my time in early July, when classes are out and my schedule is flexible, to spy on an old girlfriend and her husband, trying to learn more about her and him and them, trying to glean whatever morsels of information I can? That doesn’t sound so good.

That’s all I need—the cops show up and make a scene. Maybe even give me a ticket for some residential parking violation. Meanwhile, Lauren walks out of her house or looks out her window and sees ol’ Simon Dobias parked nearby for no apparent reason. Creepy!

I’m from around here but not really from around here. I’m from Grace Park, mostly middle-class and proudly progressive—just ask us. But when Mortimer Grace founded the Park in the 1800s, he broke off a three-square-mile chunk and incorporated it separately as Grace Village. Mortimer’s views on class and race and religion would not be considered enlightened by today’s standards. He wanted the Village to be a gated community of wealthy, white, Anglo-Saxon protestants like him.

The gates are gone, and the charter was amended to remove insensitive comments back in the 1940s, but some would argue that the Village hasn’t really changed all that much. More than anything, the wealth. Most of the kids don’t attend Grace Consolidated High School like I did; they go to private prep schools. And when they grow up, most return to the Village to raise families of their own. There are sixth-generation Villagers there.

Lauren’s not from here, either. She’s from Old Irving Park on the north side of Chicago and still lived there when I first met her (Lauren as a paralegal at my dad’s law firm, me as a college kid doing gofer work). But here she is now, living in a palatial home, married to Conrad Betancourt, a twice-divorced guy fifteen years her senior who runs one of the most successful hedge funds in the world.

I’ve probably exhausted my luck with my recon missions this week. And I’ve compiled enough information for now. I rip out the page from my green journal and review.

A town car picks up Conrad Betancourt every morning at six sharp and heads for the expressway downtown. He works out at the East Bank Club and then drives to his offices in the Civic Opera Building on Wacker Drive. He doesn’t return home at any predictable time—at least he hasn’t this week.

Lauren, from what I can tell, has no job. Every day this week, she has played tennis in the morning at the Grace Country Club. A round of golf afterward. Twice this week, she had dinner downtown, neither time with Conrad, always with a group of women. Each of those times, she spent the night in her condo on Michigan Avenue, not returning to the Village.

Every morning that she has awakened here in Grace Village, she has gone for a run. She runs through the town, usually about three or four miles in total, back by 8:30 a.m.