The Last Housewife (75)
JAMIE: And was old enough for his interest in you to be illegal.
SHAY: It was exactly what I craved. Upping the ante. What’s better than making a virtual stranger say he loves you? Winning your older boss, who’s engaged.
One day Zane and I were closing. He was behind the bar, cleaning up, and I said, “I’m going to a friend’s house after this.” It was Maddie McCrarry’s party—remember her? You were there, I think.
JAMIE: We went over to Maddie’s a lot. Her parents were never home. In hindsight, I think they were neglectful.
SHAY: Zane snapped it up. He said, “Want some company? I can bring booze.”
I said, “Are you sure you want to come to a high school party?”
And he said, “You’ll be there. So yes.”
That’s when I knew how the night would unfold. If I invited him, we would go to Maddie’s and get very, very drunk, and then he would kiss me. I had him in the palm of my hand. He was supposed to be getting married, but I was so beautiful, so magnetic, that he’d risk it for me.
And that’s exactly what happened. He waited the whole night, until everyone had gone home or passed out, and it was just us in Maddie’s backyard. She had those string lights, remember? Like a fairy tale. And I don’t remember how it happened, who said what, but suddenly Zane was kissing me and pulling me down to the grass, sitting me on his lap. I think we made out for half an hour, until I told him I had to go to sleep, and he should go home.
JAMIE: Did his fiancée find out?
SHAY: I have no idea. For all I know, they’re still in Heller, happily married. He tried to hang out with me the next week, but other than work, I barely spoke to him again. Same with Dizzy. I didn’t need them anymore.
JAMIE: Try out this story. A grown man, engaged, gets bored. Starts to feel tied down. He looks at the underage girl in his restaurant—the one he wouldn’t stand a chance with if she were his age—and sees an opportunity. He takes advantage of the fact that she’s young and not worldly. He gets her to take him to a high school party, where he feels older and wiser. It’s a huge ego boost. And he takes what he wants from her at the end of the night, and it’s consequence-free, because who’s she going to tell? Let her think she came out on top.
SHAY: Can’t it be true that we both used each other?
JAMIE: I thought you wanted to hear the objective version of your story.
SHAY: Listen. Every boy I kissed from that moment on was proof that I was valuable. It was all a test, a conversation I was having with myself through other people. I used to walk into rooms and feel out of place, instantly an outsider. But that year, I started walking in and taking stock. Grocery stores, house parties, the restaurant. Everywhere I went, I was hunting. The tables were turned.
JAMIE: You’re literally glowing right now.
SHAY: I think I’ve been chasing that high ever since.
Why are you looking at me like that?
(Silence.)
Jamie?
JAMIE: Why are you telling me this story?
SHAY: So you can put the pieces together. Men, love, sex—it’s always been about power. That’s what I thought Don was, at first.
JAMIE: Are you sure that’s the only reason?
SHAY: What are you—
JAMIE: You know what, this is a bad idea.
(Rustling.)
End of transcript.
***
I sat up, drawing the sheets with me. “What’s wrong?”
Jamie remained on his back, looking up at the ceiling. The city lights through the blinds cut stripes across his face. “Are you trying to tell me that’s what you’re doing with me? Because you’re married, and we were best friends. Those are quite some lines to cross.” He gestured between us. “Was this about seeing whether or not you could?”
“If I’m being honest,” I said, “maybe. It’s hard to tell. The power, the person. They’re so twisted together, I don’t know how to tell them apart anymore.” With Cal, it had been obvious: he was a conquest, a living, breathing shield against the world. With Jamie—well, maybe I didn’t want to look. I gathered the sheets tighter. “Does that make you want to stop?”
He was quiet a long time. Finally, he turned to me and bent his elbow, resting his head in his hand. “No,” he said quietly. “The truth is…I’ll take you any way I can get you.” The ghost of a smile. “Fuck me. At least no one can say you didn’t warn me.”
His words.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I stood in the sculpture garden, staring at the naked bodies. The women bent in the grass like they’d grown out of it. Remarkably real, mouths open in expressions of delight and surprise, young and beautiful forever. If it had been hard to tell I was at a Pater gathering when I’d first arrived at this sprawling estate, now, as I looked at these sculptures, it was unmistakable.
We were far north, deep in the country. If not for the dark mountains rising in the background, the scene could have been lifted from an Austen adaptation. The house was as grand as an English manor, white and columned, with a wide, stretching balcony and miles of grass around it, green despite the encroaching autumn. Jamie said it was registered to an art advocacy group, a C-4 named the Initiative for Truth and Beauty.
Paters and daughters walked the grounds. Violinists roamed among them, playing light, sweet music. Even with plenty to look at, what first caught my attention were the sculptures: towering monoliths, ten-foot metal cubes and massive spheres, standing in the grass like they’d been dropped there by God.