“Oh. Revenge sex.”
“Well, not quite. I got him alone one night and kissed him, and I thought I was prepared to go through with it. But when he kissed me back, I wasn’t, so I didn’t. I said, ‘I’m sorry, David, but I just realized why I was doing this, and it’s not a good reason, or a good idea.’ He was very nice and understanding about it. But then, he didn’t keep his mouth shut. That was part of the claustrophobic atmosphere around there, too: Everybody was always telling each other secrets, leaving out no intimate details. He had a confessional relationship with Olivia’s best friend, Kit, so he told her.”
“Kit as in Katherine?”
“Maybe. Or Kathleen, or Katerina, or a hundred other names. She was just called Kit.”
“Was she one of the other waitresses?”
“She waited sometimes. Primarily she was Olivia’s friend. When Olivia had been with us for a few months, Kit just showed up. She was very striking, with bright red hair that was helped along only a little bit by the stylist’s dye, to tone it darker and make it shinier, and big green eyes. She had freckles, but she was really good with makeup, so her skin looked clear and white, except for a blush under the cheekbones. She would come in and sit at the bar, sometimes with another girl or two, just drinking and waiting for Olivia. When she was with a man, she might have dinner. At some point, she started acting as Olivia’s substitute. Olivia came to me and asked if I could arrange it when she had to go home to Ohio for some family thing. I was a little skeptical the first time, but after that I wasn’t. She clearly had worked in a formal restaurant before, and learned to be professional. She was fast and hardworking and knowledgeable. She knew the Banque menu by heart and could discuss it with customers. Then Olivia would come back from wherever she had been this time, and Kit would go back to being a bar ornament. When she wasn’t filling in for Olivia, she acted like a rich girl who could barely bring herself to work hard enough to get drunk. And maybe she was. The arrangement was that we would pay Olivia for the time. I don’t know what arrangement they made about Kit’s tips, but at Banque those were bigger than salaries.” Wendy glanced at Jack Till, and he could tell she was trying to see whether he knew.
He said, “She’s the one?”
“She’s the one.”
“You’re sure she never made it onto your payroll?”
“Positive.”
“Too bad. A Social Security number would have given us a leg up. Even a full name.” He needed to coax her, but he didn’t want to distract her from her recollections. He had to keep her talking. “So Kit told her best friend Olivia that you had flirted with David.”
“More than that. I was emotional about the whole situation right then. When I was with David, I was crying and saying far too much. I told him that Eric was fooling around with Olivia, and that it was making me crazy, and that was why I had made a fool of myself with him.”
“And he told Kit, and Kit told Olivia.”
“Kit told Olivia that I knew she was sleeping with my fiancé, that I was going mad with jealousy, and that I had slept with her boyfriend David.”
“Really?”
“Yes. She had decided to give me a little revenge that I hadn’t actually earned.”
“Did it make you angry?”
“Not exactly. It was funny, really, because only David and I knew for sure what had gone on. I was denying everything, which people assumed I would do no matter what. He was denying it, too, but of course, Olivia would never believe him.” She looked happy, wistful, but only for a second. “Kit and I became friends after that.” She seemed to remember something and corrected herself. “Sort of. She was still primarily Olivia’s friend, and so was I, but we had a secret that Olivia didn’t know.”
“Wait. You were still friends with Olivia?”
“Not right away. I still hated her then. The first thing was that Olivia told Eric that I knew all about it. I left the restaurant as usual one night and found Eric had followed me home. I had seen him getting ready to leave, but I had assumed he was going to Olivia’s. Instead he pulled into the driveway right after I did. We sat in the living room of our new house that we had bought and furnished together, and talked about why we shouldn’t marry each other, and what we should do about our predicament.”
“Was it a fight, or were you both too sad for that?” He couldn’t help remembering the breakup with his wife, Rose, when he had simply come home and found the note telling him that she was going away for a while, and which friend had agreed to watch Holly until he got home from work.
“We talked for a long time, and we both cried and held each other, then opened a bottle of really good cognac that we were saving for some big occasion, and got drunk and cried and hugged some more. I don’t think we made any decisions except to announce to each other that we weren’t in love. We still had Banque. Either of us could have walked away from the restaurant if it had been a failure, but it was a roaring, screaming success. We had named it Banque because it was in an old bank building, but after four years, it might as well have been a real bank. The place had become so valuable that neither of us could have bought the other out, and everything was leveraged. We had bought the building, so it had a mortgage. We had bought our new house, and that had a mortgage. There wasn’t a way that Eric could leave, because he was the big attraction. We had never separated our interests in any legal way, just agreed that everything was ours together. So everything had changed, but nothing looked different.”
“You mean because you stayed in the house and the restaurant.” She was getting close to the part she had kept secret, so Till only prompted her.
“Yes. Eric moved into the second big bedroom. And half the time he didn’t come home anyway, or came home when it was just about morning and I was ready to get up. We still worked at the restaurant, of course, but not together. A lot of the work I did was daytime stuff—taking deliveries, balancing the books, doing bills, payroll and taxes, and supervising the daytime crew. When Eric came in, he went straight to the kitchen. Sometimes he even entered through the delivery door in back near the pantry. It’s possible we were even better workers than we had been—I was, certainly, because I had nothing else anymore. Then the drama kind of seeped away. It’s amazing what you can get used to if you’re busy enough to keep your mind turned outward all the time. The restaurant kept thriving, the money came in, and the days went by. Before long, Eric and I grew close again. We were still business partners and best friends.”
“Eric had Olivia to occupy him. What was your social life like?”
“I went out after work with Kit, and after Olivia and Eric broke up, we took Olivia back, too. We went to late-night clubs, danced, drank, had fun. I had a few dates with men I shouldn’t have, but most of the time I went out with the girls. I told you what the two of them looked like. It was great to be out with them. We walked into a club, and men just began to move toward them, as though they couldn’t help it. Every night was New Year’s Eve for about five months. And I was the one who didn’t want to go home, the one who would slip the DJ a couple hundred bucks to keep the music going a little longer. Then Kit met a man and stopped hanging out with us.”
“Did that stop you?”
“No. I went out, sometimes with Olivia, and sometimes with other women we knew. I went to parties. The whole period is kind of a blur, partly because I was drinking a lot for the first time in my life, and partly because I was moving fast, trying to jump back a few years and live the time that I had wasted on Eric. I wanted to be where the loud music was.”
“Did you have some kind of plan for the future? What were you thinking at that time?”