Boulud Bistro was on speed dial on the kitchen phone. Harris’s craving for a $150 burger was not a new thing. No matter how much money he raked in, he still had the tastes of an adolescent boy. After I phoned the order in, I pulled a crystal tumbler from a cabinet, marked it with a red lip print, and set it on the counter. There was no way that Meredith was going to miss the evidence of my latest visit to Harris’s apartment. If she wanted to keep any dignity at all, she’d have to leave.
As I strolled out the door, I stopped for one last, lingering gaze. In my head, I was already living there. It was going to be wonderful, even if it was with Harris.
Afterwards I walked down Fifth Avenue, along the edge of Central Park. My fantasy of living on the Upper East Side continued to play in my head. It was easy to picture myself jogging through the park in the morning, then having a massage or doing yoga. I’d have lunch at those fancy restaurants favored by the ladies of the neighborhood, places where they brought you a special footstool to hold your handbag. In the afternoon, I’d probably have a board meeting at an art museum. I wouldn’t be just another socialite taking up a seat at the table; I could help a museum, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its acquisitions. I’d been a fine-art major at Butler University, after all.
In fact, when I’d first come to New York, a starry-eyed grad, I’d worked in a series of quirky little galleries in Chelsea. Deep down, I’d always suspected that was where I’d meet my future husband. But the only men who walked in the door were either gay, taken, or bill collectors who were there to repossess the office furniture. After struggling for six years through that, I’d bailed and gone to work for an office-temp agency. That had improved the odds of meeting straight men... that, and the fact that my standards had sunk. I’d given up hope of finding a wealthy, handsome soul mate. I was thirty-two and not getting any younger, so I’d scratched every requirement off my list but one: money.
The fact that I was even seeing Harris showed how far my standards had dropped. Harris wasn’t any girl’s dream, of that much I was sure. He was of average height but above-average build. Most of the hair on his head had already waved bye-bye, at thirty-eight, though the carpet on his chest, back, arms, and legs grew thick and furry. He had sweaty palms, bad breath, and an overbite that should have been corrected years ago.
Still, he knew how to make money. So he had a certain charm. I had to give him that.
Harris ignored me when we were at work. I was on a contract, filling in for a receptionist who’d gotten knocked up by a married trader. That was one smart cookie, I thought. Still, the thought of carrying Harris’s spawn made bile surge up my throat. I waited for a couple of days, then shimmied into his office after the market closed for the day and closed the door behind me.
“I’ve missed you, darling,” I cooed.
“Busy,” Harris barked back, his eyes not leaving his computer screens. He had three monitors that told him what was going on in markets around the world. The room reeked of cigarette smoke. Of course, it was illegal to smoke in the office, but the higher-ups didn’t care what the hedge-fund managers did so long as they produced big returns. If you looked closely, there were traces of white powder on his desk.
“Do you want me to come over tonight?”
“No.”
If I’d cared about him, my feelings would have been hurt. You stupid jerk, I thought. I’d like to shove you out the window. I was tempted to call him Hedge Hog, but worried that would cross a line. “That’s too bad,” I said instead. “Want me to come over tomorrow?”
“No.”
It was frustrating that he wouldn’t even look at me. “Is your wife in town?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Does she have any trips planned soon?”
“She’s ditching me next week to watch polo in Barbados.” The hurt in his voice was clear. Poor Harris felt like he was being abandoned. This was my way in.
“How could she want to leave you?” I sat in Harris’s lap, not an easy thing to do given how much stomach surged over it. “She doesn’t appreciate what a good thing she’s got.”
We went at it for a little while. When we finished, he was sweaty and panting. I got up and made sure I looked decent. The last thing I wanted was for anyone else at the office to know about us. If there was a better prospect in these waters, I wanted to catch him and toss this one back.
“That was fun, Lacey,” Harris said, lighting a cigarette. “I’ll tell you when she’s gone so you can come over. We can have some more fun together.”
The fun was one-sided, but I kept that to myself. “That sounds wonderful, darling. I can’t wait.”
A smarter, less conceited man would have heard the sarcasm in my voice. But Harris just sat there, happy as the proverbial pig in mud.
“Hey, Lacey,” he said on my way out.
“What is it, darling?”
“Order me up some pizza, will you? Bacon, peppers, extra cheese, caviar.”
I smiled and closed the door.
The next time I went to Harris’s apartment, I was prepared. I brought perfume so that I could mark my territory, feminine hygiene products that were a different brand from what Meredith used, and a book of love poetry that I was going to leave under her bedside table. I had doubts about that last one. She’d been living with Harris long enough to know he wasn’t the love-poetry type. Still, the message would be loud and clear. You’re losing this battle, it proclaimed.
My ace was inside a pink box that came from a Lower East Side shop that most people wore sunglasses to go inside. It was an adult toy called the Flower Power, and it promised hours of solo pleasure. That was going inside Meredith’s bedside table. I was still mulling over writing a note to go with it. You must be lonely, I wanted to say, wondering if that was enough of a taunt.
And then I found her note. It was on a plain yellow Post-it note on her dresser, under a jar of Valmont skin cream that cost roughly the same as my monthly rent. Hands off Hedge Hog, it said. None of this belongs to you.
Was this woman nuts? Did she think that writing little notes to me was going to scare me away? There was something creepy about it, true, but it spoke volumes about her, the fact that she knew I was in her home, and that her only defense against me was through Post-its. She must be feeling threatened. She knew that I was there. She didn’t know my name, or any details about me, but she’d gotten the message. I was winning. Poor Meredith.
The only thing was, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted the prize that was within my grasp. True, I loved trying on Meredith’s designer clothes, but I wanted my own. I stole her lotions and potions; Meredith’s dressing table was like a candy store for women who’d had to give up edible treats to stay thin.
“You’d better not be getting vain like her,” Harris huffed one morning when he caught me staring into the dressing table’s mirror. I’d been examining the fine lines that had etched themselves into the delicate skin under my eyes. If they’d been obvious enough for Harris to see, he’d replace me in the time it took to get more black-truffle burgers delivered.
That was the thing about Harris: His life was all about what he wanted. While I stayed with him that week, I discovered how brutish he really was. It wasn’t that he was cruel; he just didn’t think that anyone else had needs. He’d order food for himself and forget about me. In bed, he acted like I was his slave. But I pretended to enjoy every moment, and that made him very happy. One night, after he pushed me off him and rolled over to snort down another line of cocaine, I asked him if he’d ever had this much fun with Meredith.