I Take You Read online

  “I wish we had some right now,” Freddy says dreamily.

  I dial room service and demand two dozen fish sticks. Then I tell Freddy the tale of Donald and Mitzy’s forbidden passion.

  “And you’re supposed to keep them apart?” she says. “That’s bullshit.”

  “You think?”

  “Hell yes I think!” she cries. “Who are you to come between them? Who the hell are you?” She’s all up in my face. “Think about Donald’s heart, Lily. You think it doesn’t beat like yours? Because it does. Feel it. Feel your heart.”

  “I don’t need to—”

  “Put your hand up and feel it right now.”

  “I really—”

  “Feel it, goddammit!”

  Freddy gets like this on coke sometimes.

  I put my hand on my heart.

  “We’re not gods, Lillian. We can’t interfere in the course of true love. Do you think Donald is dead inside? Do you think he doesn’t feel a little thrill when the first breezes of spring waft through the windows of his penthouse? Making his thinning hair dance? Ruffling his piles of money? You know what Thoreau said about this.”

  I think about that for a minute.

  “‘Drink the drink, taste the fruit?’”

  “No.”

  “Yes, he did. I saw it on a poster at Starbucks.”

  “‘In the spring,’” Freddy recites, “‘a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.’”

  “Using Thoreau to sell shit.” I shake my head. “It’s like, hats off, capitalism. Who are you going to hijack next—Karl Marx?”

  Freddy starts jumping up and down on the sofa. “‘We looked at each other with a wild surmise! Silent, on a peak in Darien!’” She leaps off, landing on the floor with a thud.

  “Hey, workers of the world! Drop your chains and pick up our new Acai Caramel Salted Burrata Latte!”

  “Love über alles!” Freddy shouts, grabbing the seating chart. She puts Mitzy and Donald at one table, their spouses at another, far away. “Four down, two hundred and eighteen to go,” I say.

  “Let’s do more coke,” Freddy says.

  We do.

  “Let’s rearrange the furniture,” she says.

  We can only move the sofa and the end tables. The beds are bolted down. We pull the mattresses off the beds and make a fort. Inside, we look at the guest list again.

  “Time to focus,” I say.

  We put all the lawyers at the tables closest to the bandstand. We put Gran’s ex-con with the federal judge I clerked for after law school. We decide to seat all the left-handers to the right of right-handers.

  “How can we tell which is which?” Freddy says.

  I text Mattie.

  —pls send mass email inquirining re handedness of all guests fyi thx btw yolo tgif

  “I’m going to cannonball into the pool,” Freddy announces.

  “From the balcony?”

  “Where else?”

  “You’ll die.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will.”

  “I’m petite,” she says.

  “Your death will be small and final,” I say.

  I get a text from Mattie:

  —I think you’ve sent me two texts that were intended for someone else.

  —they were intendeded, my dear, for posteriyt

  —Sorry?

  There’s a knock on the door. “Fish sticks!” we yell, and burst out of our pillow fort.

  “I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you seduce the room service waiter,” I tell Freddy.

  “Done!” She whips off her dress and flings opens the door.

  Nicole is standing there.

  “I forgot my key,” she says. “Why are you in your underwear?”

  “Global warming,” Freddy says.

  Nicole looks around the room. “What happened to the furniture?”

  “Air raid,” I say.

  She rolls her eyes, finds her key and leaves.

  Freddy and I huddle over the seating chart again. We put all the bald men together. All the known redheads. All the young children at one table with Will’s mom. We finally get bored and fill in the rest of the names at random.

  “We’re done!” I throw down the pen.

  “I love wedding planning,” Freddy says. “Let’s do some molly and get started on your thank-you notes.”

  Tempting! Instead, I wander back to my room and flop on the bed. I pick up the binder for the Hoffman prep. I’m not actually going to work—surely there’s an ethical rule against billing under the influence. Although, wasn’t Sherlock Holmes all coked out when he solved his cases? Maybe I can crack this thing wide open! I open the binder and read the complaint again.

  Nope. As far as the environmental claims go, the plaintiffs have pretty much nailed it. EnerGreen employees doctored the maintenance logs on the oil rig in the months leading up to the explosion. They racked up dozens of safety violations and chose to pay the fines rather than correct the problems. When the rig blew, they lied to state officials about how much oil was gushing into the Gulf. They deserve to fry for what they did, and I really wish they’d suck it up and settle.

  I dial Lyle’s number. He answers. “What.”

  “I have a question.” I lean back against the headboard with the binder in my lap. “What’s stopping the plaintiffs from giving Hoffman’s e-mails to the DOJ right now?”

  “They can’t disclose them without violating a court order. The confidentiality stipulation states that the plaintiffs can’t show our documents to anyone who isn’t a party to the lawsuit.”

  I remember now. “Unless that document is used at a deposition or at trial.”

  “Right. If the plaintiffs properly offer the e-mails into evidence at Hoffman’s deposition, they effectively enter the public domain. Plaintiffs can then show them to the court, to the media, to the DOJ.”

  “How’s Philip going to stop them?”

  “He’s going to be Philip,” Lyle replies impatiently. “Daniel Kostova, plaintiffs’ lead counsel, is good, but Philip is better. He’ll fill the record with objections. He’ll ensure that Hoffman’s testimony is evasive and confusing, or that it repudiates the e-mails so clearly that if plaintiffs try to publicize them they’ll come off looking like misleading scumbags. And he’ll do it all with perfect courtesy and completely by the book, so the plaintiffs can’t cry foul.”

  “But—”

  “Why are you wasting my time?” Lyle demands. “You want to know what Philip’s going to do? Ask him yourself. Judging from what I overheard Saturday night, you know him a lot better than I do.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I went up to his office to discuss the brief I was working on,” Lyle continues. “You weren’t exactly being discreet in there.”

  I take a minute to think about that. I started sleeping with Philip a few months ago, when we were traveling together for a different case. It’s only happened a few times. It’s fun and exciting and meaningless—just the way I like it. Would I prefer that people at work not know about it? Of course. So this is unfortunate. But not a disaster. Lyle is my senior associate—he can make my life miserable, but he already does that. He can gossip, but so what? I haven’t broken any rules. God knows I’m not getting any preferential treatment from Philip—look at how I’m spending the week before my wedding.

  This is my business, not Lyle’s. And the best way to deal with someone who doesn’t know something is none of his business is to let it go. So I do.

  “I still don’t understand why we’re not settling,” I say. “Doesn’t EnerGreen know how bad this looks?”

  “Urs keeps urging his higher-ups to settle, but they won’t listen to him. They have a lot of faith in Philip.”

  “Can I ask you one more question?”

  “No,” Lyle says, and hangs up.

  9

  I spend a little more time skimming through my binder, eventually dozing off. I wake up when Will comes in. He str
etches out beside me on the bed and starts telling me about the friends he met up with. I hike up my skirt a little bit. Their names are Jason and Thomas. They were his roommates freshman year of college. I unbutton the top button of my blouse. He launches into some story about an archaeological dig in Crete one summer. I’m about to abandon the super-subtle moves and just jump him when he says, “I talked to my dad, too.”

  I sit up. “You saw him?”

  “He called,” he says. “Mom is really upset. I tried to explain how much stress you’re under, and Dad seemed understanding. He’s going to try to bring her around.”

  “Good!”

  He smiles at me. “Want to go out? Just the two of us?”

  We make it to Mallory Square in time for the sunset freak show. We watch a man walk across a tightrope juggling knives. A woman with a litter of trick kittens. An escape artist. A whole bunch of spray-painted people Standing Very Still. Fortune-tellers, bagpipers, drummers, dancers, acrobats. This scene was a whole lot dirtier and grittier when I was a kid—homeless people, panhandlers, drug dealers loitering at the outskirts of the crowd. The modern version has been sanitized for the cruise ships. But Will is getting a kick out of it.

  We find a place to eat just off Duval. A waitress leads us to a booth and starts telling us about the specials. She’s beautiful—tall and curvy, with blonde braids piled on top of her head. And she’s quite taken by my fiancé. She keeps glancing at him while she talks. He’s studying the menu, oblivious.

  “That was a special little smile you just got,” I tell him after she walks away.

  He looks up. “Really?”

  “Really.” I pause. “She must have noticed you checking her out when we walked in.”

  “I didn’t check her out!” he cries, blushing furiously.

  “I’m not blind, Wilberforce. And neither are you, apparently.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he insists. “And please don’t call me that.”

  “Admit it.”

  “No!” But he’s cracking a smile.

  “Liar!” I cry. “Admit it!”

  He hesitates. “Maybe a little.”

  “Aha!”

  “She reminds me of a famous statue,” he says. “The Athena Parthenos.”

  I crane my neck to look at her. “She also has a really nice ass.”

  He nods. “That too.”

  We pick up our menus again. I wonder if Will is going through some sort of sexual reawakening. First there was the business in bed this morning, and now he’s ogling the waitress right in front of me? Maybe he’s finally exploring the lusty side I glimpsed when we first met. Freeing himself from all those enlightened, egalitarian ideas about sex that make sleeping with educated, sensitive men like him such a snorefest most of the time.

  God, wouldn’t that be something?

  He looks up from his menu. “Lily?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How many guys have you been with?”

  “Three,” I say.

  “Ha ha,” he says. “Seriously, though.”

  So much for a sexual reawakening. I really hate this question. I find it reductive and judgmental. I also have no idea what the answer is.

  I put down my menu and take his hand across the table. “Let’s not talk about it. Who we were before we met, what we did—who cares?”

  “I think we should talk about it,” he says, drawing his hand away. He sets his menu on top of mine and squares them, aligning them with the edge of the table. “Not necessarily about that—that’s just one question that occurred to me. But there’s a sense in which we don’t know each other all that well.” He looks up at me. “I mean, I know you, but there are things about you that I don’t know. And things about me that you don’t know. Pasts. Experiences. We met, what, six months ago? A lot of people would say that we rushed into this.”

  “But Will, you’re the one who proposed to me.”

  “Absolutely,” he says quickly. “Because I wanted to. And you wanted me to. And it was exactly how it should have been. But I sometimes think—”

  The waitress returns and takes our order. She scoops up our menus and leaves. Will starts fidgeting with the napkin holder.

  “Are you having second thoughts?” I ask him. My heart thumps once, hard.

  “No!” He takes my hands across the table. “I’m asking because I’m not having second thoughts. Like I said, I know you. But I want to fill in the blanks.” He smiles. “I’m a scientist, after all. I need data. I don’t know anything about your childhood, for example. You must have been exposed to a lot of craziness, growing up down here. Drugs and sex and all that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say slowly. I’m trying to find my footing in this conversation. What is he driving at? Did I do something this morning that made him suspicious? Did my behavior at lunch make him afraid of what other surprises might be in store? “I guess I was never really aware of it as crazy. It was just … what adults did. Naked people running around, weirdos on drugs. Men dressed as women. People having sex outside. We were always stumbling on people going at it on the beach, or in the park.”

  Teddy and I loved to sneak up and steal their clothes. Once, we were chased down the street by a guy who—

  “We?” Will asks.

  “Me and my … my friends. But like I said, it didn’t really affect me. My life was school, and homework, and, you know, typical kid stuff. It might not seem like it, but Key West is a really small town. We’re one of the old families, and everybody knew us. And then there was Gran’s work. In fact, the weirdest part of growing up here was probably hanging around with her clients. Drug dealers and gangsters calling the house, showing up at all hours.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “It was time for me to go,” I say. “As I got older, everyone began feeling apprehensive about the influence of this place, especially on a girl. And the school system sucks.”

  All true. Totally incomplete, but true.

  Our food arrives. “Your turn!” I say. “I want to know everything about life in the ‘burbs with Anita and Harry, and science projects and skipping grades in school.”

  He smiles. “It wasn’t exactly like that, you know.”

  “Sure it wasn’t,” I laugh. “Come on. Give me the details. I can take it.”

  “Okay.” He takes a deep breath. “Okay. It’s just that I …”

  And he gives me this strange look. There’s something in his eyes that I can’t read. Indecision? Fear? Something else?

  “Will?”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Will, did … something bad happen to you?”

  “No! No, not at all.” He laughs. Then he tells me all about the suburban hell where he grew up.

  “I was so shy,” he says. “Painfully shy. And awkward. I even had a stammer.”

  “That’s so cute!”

  “You wouldn’t have thought so,” he replies. “The library was my only refuge. I loved to read. I loved to study. I was fascinated by archaeology and classical languages, and I spent most of my time lost in the ancient world. It was a lot more fun than junior high.”

  He proceeds to describe life with what sounds like the tiger mom from hell. “Anything that wasn’t academics was a waste of time, as far as she was concerned,” he says. “In one sense it was perfect—that was the direction I was heading in anyway, and she instilled a great work ethic in me. But anything else I wanted to pursue—hobbies, or sports, or … girls,” he glances shyly at me, “I basically had to keep secret from her.”

  “What a drag.”

  “I didn’t want to disappoint her. I should have been more honest. I still have a hard time communicating with her.” He pauses. “Maybe I should get plastered and meet them for breakfast tomorrow. Give them a taste of the real me.”

  I cringe. “I’m so sorry, Will.”

  He takes my hand across the table and kisses it. “I know.”

  After dinner we walk down to the docks. Wi
ll stops to examine a weedy patch of soil in front of a bar. He’s always doing something like that—scuffing through dirt with his shoe, absentmindedly gazing down at the trash in the subway tracks. Professional habit, I guess. Now he plucks out a few long blades of grass and tugs at them like he’s testing them for strength.

  “Did you run out of floss?” I tease him. “You can borrow some of mine.”

  He only smiles at me and slips them into his pocket.

  We share an ice cream cone on the way back to the hotel. Guilt is nagging me. He told me so much about his childhood. Shouldn’t I have told him the truth about what happened when I was fourteen? Why I really left?

  But it’s ancient history. He can’t know me from my past. As an archaeologist, he might quibble with that statement. But it’s true. Will knows the important stuff. Most of it, anyway. Or he will. After we’re married.

  Because we’re getting married.

  I’m done with the dithering and the indecisiveness. Symmetry, cohesion and continuity. That’s what I want.

  Okay, but the lying. The lying is bad. Still, I can change. I’ve been in an adjustment period, and now it’s over. No more cheating, no more lying. No more feeling bad about the cheating and the lying. It’s good-bye to the old me. Everything that came before, up to this very moment? It’s in the past.

  And the past doesn’t matter.

  We walk up the drive of the hotel. “What should we do now?” Will asks.

  I smile up at him. “You really have to ask?”

  He laughs and holds the door open for me. “This morning wasn’t enough for you?”

  Here we go—the perfect opportunity to try out my new approach! We walk into the lobby. “That’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Then I stop.

  There’s a man sitting on a sofa, a man in a suit. I can’t see his face—he’s half turned, as if something in another part of the room has caught his attention. He’s rubbing his head absently, his hand moving back and forth over his short hair.

  He looks nervous. He never used to look nervous.

  Now he turns toward the door and sees me. He stands up. My stomach drops. I have this overwhelming urge to turn and run toward the elevator, but somehow I resist.

  We’re watching each other. Waiting it out.