She sighed, fished a cigarette out of her purse and then signaled with her eyebrows for me to continue. Quoting the building’s No Smoking policy would’ve gone over as well as pointing out that her roots were emerging under that chestnut dye-job. I decided to let that battle go and picked another.
“Baby,” Cameron murmured, “what the hell? What are you doin’?”
“Nothing,” she hissed, blowing smoke in his face. “That’s what I’m doin’.”
“Do you believe this?” Cameron looked to Jonathan for some male bonding over female irrationality.
“Oh, so my smoking bothers you?” She sat upright, mocking him. “Tell ya what. Maybe you’ll get lucky and your new hot-tub girlfriend won’t feel the need to smoke after sex. Oh, wait a minute, what am I talkin’ about maybe? You already know whether or not she smokes after sex because you already had sex with her!”
“I didn’t sleep with her!” He slammed a fist down on the table beside his chair, causing me to glare a little.
“And I’m not smoking!” she fired back, breathing more smoke in his face.
“Hey, guys, clearly there’s a lot of hurt and confusion in this room. But let’s remember why we’re here. We want to be productive and try to make sense of the situation together. You’ve taken the first step by coming to us, so now let us try to help you, okay?” I asked.
Cameron nodded like a schoolboy who’d just admitted to putting glue in another child’s hair during nap time. Lydia didn’t acknowledge me.
“Cameron,” I tried, “why don’t you tell Lydia how you felt about her reaction to the story. Remember—don’t place blame, and don’t attack her actions. How did her leaving suddenly make you feel?”
Lydia rose to look out the floor-to-ceiling windows of our skyscraper. The city lay prostrate before her, and the mountains waited patiently in the distance as her husband beseeched her.
“Lydia, when you took that trash rag’s word for it, without even talkin’ to your man first, without even hearin’ his side of the story, I felt like you weren’t on my side anymore. We used to be on each other’s side. Always. I always knew you had my back.”
“And?” I led him along.
“And, I felt…abandoned.” He blinked his eyes hard and sniffed.
“Don’t do that, Cam,” she warned him, twisting around to reveal the dragon tattoo climbing up her right shoulder. “Don’t even think about it. I am not your mother. You can’t blame me for her splittin’ on you and your pops.”
“It’s not about that,” he told his hands.
She straightened before asking, “Why can’t you look me in the eye when you say it?”
“Baby, I—”
“No! Don’t give me that!” she yelled and gestured with the lit end of the cigarette. “I see the way your dumb teammates look at me. They’re laughing at me, and I don’t know why! You have the balls to say that I’m not on your side? What about you bein’ on my side for once? What about not letting them laugh at me! I’m your wife, damn it. Not some stripper you guys called up to the room in Vegas and think the wives won’t find out about it!”
“Look, it’s like I told you,” Cameron attempted to get a word in.
“Like you told me? What did you tell me, Cam? Huh? I can’t remember the last time I got a straight answer from you. Are you tellin’ me now that you were never in that hot tub with her?”
He hung his head.
“Answer me!”
“Not…” he started, his voice rising about twenty octaves “…not exactly.”
Lydia froze, and I saw a vein in her temple go live. She took a step forward, slammed down her palms, leaned forward on the conference table and dared him to finish his thought.
Cameron wouldn’t look up, and Lydia’s knuckles were turning white as she dug her lengthy, bejeweled fingernails into the taut black leather of the conference table, so I took the next step for them.
“Cameron, could you clarify that for us?”
“Okay, like…here’s what it was. I mean, I was with her in that hot tub.” He reached out for his wife. “But it was before you and me even got engaged! You were on tour and it was like…two months since I even seen you. But those pictures from that magazine…they weren’t me. That party was at the same place, but it was during the playoffs, and that was waaaaaay after we already got married. It was the same girl with a different guy. I didn’t break my marriage vows with her, boo, I swear!”
Lydia was stoic, her unflinching glare burning a hole into Cameron.
After what seemed like forever, Cameron turned to me. “Monica, you said to tell her the truth.”
two
MOMENTS AFTER OUR MORNING ASSOCIATES’ MEETING I COULD feel Cassie, our team’s assistant, struggling to catch up to me. She would have been a lot more aerodynamic if she didn’t insist on wearing those five-inch heels to work every day. Besides, compared to my shrimpy five feet four inches, she was practically a giraffe in the first place. Leaping up from her desk just outside the conference room, she tailed me right into my office and kicked the door shut behind me.
“Can I help you?” I smiled conspiratorially, rounding my desk.
“God, she is such a witch!” She popped her gum aggressively for affect.
“Who?” I feigned ignorance, slipping my jacket off of my shoulders and over the back of my chair.
“Oh, shut up.” She leaned over my desk as I settled into my seat. “By the way, nice suit. Tahari?”
I nodded, logging back on to my computer. The only daughter of a Greek-American missionary and a woman from Northern India (a Peace-Corps baby, as she had originally described herself to me), Cassie had immediately adopted me as the older Indian sister she never had. Her gratefulness for any connection to the subcontinent sparked my maternal instincts toward her, ever since the first time I noticed the pride with which she ordered everything extra spicy (I’m Indian, she routinely informed any waiter within earshot.)
“Great cut.” She nodded her approval at my ensemble, which was quite the compliment considering that prior to Steel, she had been in the women’s apparel department at Nordstrom’s. “Anyway, that’s not the point. I can see everything that goes on in that meeting through the double glass doors. Stefanie was staring at you so hard that I had one hand on the fire extinguisher the whole time, in case you actually burst into flames.”
“Well, good lookin’ out?” I tried.
“I got your back.”
“It’s not that bad.” I slipped on my glasses and grabbed a stack of snail mail out of my actual in-box.
It wasn’t like I was unaware of the situation; it was more that I felt like it was my responsibility, as one of the few professional females at the firm, to maintain a certain level of decorum.
“Yes it is, Monica.” She began watering the potted ficus in the corner, and then paused as if she just realized something. “You know what it is? Baskania! It’s baskania! In Greek, you know? Evil eye? I knew I felt something horrible radiating out of her!”
I shook my head, tossed a letter from the Young Friends of the Getty Museum into the trash and reached for another envelope.
“Come on,” she said. “I know you know what I’m talking about. What do we call it in Hindi?”
Cassie’s mother had all but denied her that half of her heritage while she was growing up, as a protest against having been disowned by her family for running off with the American missionary