“Such big words from the stripper,” Rachel said. Who was this person? Who had she become? It was horrible. It was strangely delightful, too, like playing a villain in a play. She was channeling the fury she felt for Marc, for every woman who had been cheated on.
“I’m sorry if your mother has been improvident.” That word again. “I really am. But it’s not my fault. What’s mine is mine.”
“If only you had been so clear about ownership when you started sleeping with my father. He loved her, Miss Saxony. Her and his daughters. Not you, never you.”
She sensed this was her best weapon, the only way to hurt Julie Saxony. And if Julie Saxony wasn’t going to help her, then Rachel wanted to hurt her. Men couldn’t cheat without women’s cooperation. Sure, there were men who lied, who misled their partners into unwitting adultery. But not her father. And not Marc. Believe someone the first time they tell you who they are. Marc had been a player in high school. He had been famous, Rachel remembered in wretched hindsight, for breaking up with girls by starting new relationships, then waiting for his ex to confront him. Everyone knew what he did, and every girl assumed it would be different for her.
The difference now was that Marc wouldn’t admit his behavior. He called her every night, asking her to come back, but he wouldn’t confess to his indiscretions, Rachel realized now, because they were going to continue. Just more discreetly. Marc loved her, but he had no intention of changing. Instead, he said: Have a baby. Please have my baby. If we have a baby, everything will be okay. The thing was, he thought he was speaking theoretically, about a baby that did not yet exist.
“Rachel-”
“Don’t say my name.”
There was a spike of fury in Julie’s words now. “Don’t say your father’s name, don’t say your name-why are you so proprietary about names? What’s the big deal? Brewer probably wasn’t even your father’s family’s real name, back in Russia or wherever they came from. I’ll tell you this much-if your father had stayed, if he hadn’t been forced to leave, I’d have his name by now. He loved me. He wanted me.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Rachel said. “Tell yourself whatever lies you need to tell to get through.” She had an inspiration. “He knows you stole from us. He couldn’t do anything about it, where he is, but he knows. He never loved you, not really, and now he hates you. You destroyed the thing he loved most of all, his family.”
Finally, she had gotten a rise out of the woman. She was quite livid, almost in shock.
“He-he talks to her? To this day?”
“To this day.”
She left Julie’s inn with that feeble, hollow victory. The situation hadn’t changed, despite her triumph over Julie. Her mother needed money, now, or she was going to lose the house. And Rachel knew what she would have to do to get it. It took a little longer than she anticipated, almost a week, but when her mother returned from the beach, Rachel was able to present her with the money she needed.
“Where did you get this?” her mother demanded.
“Let’s just say that Julie Saxony made good on her debts,” Rachel said. It felt like a safe lie at the time. But Rachel was an inexperienced liar and did not know all the ways even a safe lie can go wrong. Maybe she should have asked Marc for some pointers as part of their settlement, a settlement brokered by her mother-in-law, who was very happy to void the prenup if it meant Rachel would grant the get that Mrs. Singer desired, then go away forever-and take the stain of the Brewer name with her.
5:30 P.M.
The minute she said July 4, Bert had demanded another conference. Bambi granted his wish out of courtesy, but her mind was made up.
“Bambi, I may have to withdraw as your counsel,” Bert said, “if you insist on going forward with this.”
Was that all he had? “Then withdraw. I’m ready to tell this story, with or without you. You can’t say what happened on July fourth, can you, Bert? So you’ll just have to listen.”
A tape recorder was set up. Both detectives made eye contact in their individual ways. Nancy Porter was bright and focused, the kind of grade grubber who sat front and center back at Forest Park High School. The sad-faced one looked as if he knew every unfortunate thing that had ever happened to Bambi. Lugubrious, Bambi thought. That is the only word for how he looks. She decided to look at neither detective as she spoke, focusing on a point between their heads. They probably thought she was trying not to cry. Well, she was trying not to cry.
“She came to my home on July fourth. She brought me money, quite a bit. I needed it to pay a balloon note on a mortgage. You see, I was very foolish and these one-year ARMs, they were quite new then. I didn’t understand how it worked. I just knew that if I took out this mortgage, I would get a very large lump sum. Enough to pay for Michelle’s bat mitzvah, repairs to the house. So I took out this loan. I didn’t realize that I had to pay it back in a year, that I had to find the cash equivalent in the form of another mortgage, and I had-well, I had bad credit, I thought it just converted. I… I froze. I didn’t know what to do. I felt so stupid. I owed on the mortgage, I had maxed out my credit cards. I needed money fast.”
“Jesus, Bambi,” Bert said. “You could have come to me.”
“But I was always coming to you. Always. There had been ten years of coming to you at that point. I tried my mom, my aunt Harriet-they couldn’t help me. But then I saw in the paper how that… that Julie Saxony was expanding her bed-and-breakfast into a proper inn with a restaurant, and I thought: She has money. She should give me the money I need. She came to my house that day to give me the money.”
Something changed, then, in the detectives’ faces. Sad-face scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it to the girl. She had a poker face. Bambi couldn’t discern anything from it. But maybe it was just that she was a woman and Bambi had spent so much of her life trying to understand men and what they wanted. The two got up and went outside.
“Stop lying, Bambi,” Bert said in a low tone. “They know you’re lying.”
“I’m not lying, though. Julie Saxony did provide the money. That’s true. You could probably look up the bank records, see when I paid off the note. In cash.”
“She didn’t come to your house on the fourth. You’re saying that because you know you were at the beach until the night of the third. We were all at the beach.”
“Yes. We were all at the beach on the third. Agreed. But I met Julie on the fourth. On the tenth anniversary.”
“You didn’t. Why are you lying about this? What are you trying to prove?”
“Bert, you’re fired. Please leave.”
“I can’t-”
“You will. You are. Go.”
He looked lost, confused, two expressions that Bambi had seldom seen pass across Bert’s face. Of course he was confused. Because she was lying, but what else could she do? She had run the numbers. Something, someone, had to be sacrificed. It was as if another onerous financial commitment had come due again. But this time she was going to take care of it. What a fool she had been, how inept. She had gone from her father’s house to her husband’s. She had lived in denial for years about what things cost. Thrown away her father’s money on a semester at Bryn Mawr. Let Felix throw money around, too, and never asked the price of anything.
About two weeks before he had left, Felix had sat down with her and their checkbook. “Going forward,” he said, “you need to write down everything, keep the balance. Because-well, you’re just going to have to keep track. Because once I go away, the money, it will come in at a different rate. There will still be money, but it will be different, okay? You’ve got to learn to budget, Bambi. Can you do that?”