The Things We Do to Our Friends(45)
“Think about it,” Tabitha said. “These women we deal with, they do everything, organize everything—every part of their family’s life. They’re thinking, like, ten steps ahead, and their husbands are tragically prone to underestimating them.”
She shook her head as if she was, in fact, sad about the whole unfortunate, unavoidable thing.
“It’s beyond catastrophizing, isn’t it?” I said to Tabitha as she brushed my hair and curled it neatly, so it looked just like hers. “Plotting and planning and actually orchestrating something, setting their husbands up to fail, really. Don’t you think it’s a little paranoid?”
She pursed her lips. “But they need to protect themselves. This is how we help them do that.”
“So you think that all men cheat?” I asked. How brave I’d become!
She put the hairbrush down at the side of the bed.
“No, of course not.” One of her hands was on my face, edging in closer so that I could see open pores and the hint of a spot. I was static, waiting for her to come even closer. Just as I was wondering what that would be like, if she’d taste sweet like watermelon, or of something tarter, she pulled back.
She picked up the hairbrush again, sweeping it through the curls. “But I do think people should be tested, because it’s transactional, essentially, isn’t it? The whole idea of marriage. I know the vows say ‘in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer.’ But when, say, a man with a decent chunk of money marries a woman who is beautiful and thin and biddable…It’s an implicit agreement taking place. It’s business!”
“I guess,” I said.
“What we’re doing is right. We’re helping people.”
And in that moment, I nearly said something to her, nearly brought up Périgueux, and she waited, sensing that I was about to speak. But in the end I didn’t, and she continued to pull at my hair so hard that I wanted to jerk away.
36
There were many times it didn’t work. Times where they looked at us in horror partway into the whole setup.
We still got paid, as far as I knew, and secretly I wasn’t too concerned when it happened, at least at first. So much of the fun of our scheme was in the getting ready. Blasting music, playing cards, trying on so many different items of clothing and analyzing each look forensically to see that it gave the right impression.
I remember an evening with the CEO of a technology company. We went down to London to approach him. He spent almost all his time in the office, but I cornered him at a restaurant bar late at night, somewhere he would go for a solitary drink after a long day. He seemed nice and very lonely. He wore wire-framed glasses and he took them on and off again while he spoke. When he noticed he was doing it, he was embarrassed and forced his hands down onto the top of the bar, thumbing the wood. We talked about nothing in particular. I bought him a drink, and he asked me why I was there. He had a backpack, and when he opened it to take out his wallet, I could see a transparent pencil case filled with sharpened pencils. They were all the same length and there was a white eraser that was worn down uniformly on every side, as if he used it one way, then the other, working round to make sure it never lost its neat, angular shape.
When I leaned into him, he pulled away, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry. I think we’ve got our wires crossed,” he said simply. It wasn’t cruel at all, just direct, and he stood up and walked away. Tabitha was surprised when I reported back.
“How interesting!” she said.
“It is…affirming,” I replied.
“Well, I don’t think that’s quite the right attitude.”
The same flash of disappointment that I’d seen at Servants’ Christmas. I wanted to kick myself for my choice of wording, but I also experienced a flurry of understanding. She didn’t want to go back to the client with news of innocence. She wanted the men to be guilty, and she wanted the wives to leave them.
More occasional letdowns. A man pulled away, color flooding his face. He stumbled from me, almost running. It happened, of course it did. Our targets probably thought we were very persistent escorts.
“Well, you kind of are,” Imogen had said, her tone smarmy and low. She wasn’t brave enough to say it so that Tabitha could hear. It was directed at me; only I heard it, and it didn’t affect me in the slightest.
Tabitha never actually told me much about her jobs, and I suspected her success rate must have been similar to my own. I knew she slept with them if she felt it was necessary—she mentioned it with ease, joking about flustered interactions, performance issues.
When it didn’t work, she was incredulous each time.
She interrogated me one afternoon as we lay across a bench in the private gardens next to her flat. She’d pulled out a huge, almost ornamental-looking key, and unlocked it for us.
“Ta-da!” she announced. “I can’t bear how busy it is up at Princes Street Gardens at the moment. This is much better. Anyway, back to what happened. You talked to him about Napoleon for three hours?!”
The thought of Tabitha doing anything for three hours without losing interest was unimaginable. Even then I could tell she was poised to get up, her eyes flitting around the gardens at who was there, who we might speak to or use or know. Kicking a shoe off, her foot veined and pointed like a ballerina’s.