Then Came You

“You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“Your secret is safe with me.”

I laughed, low and throaty. My wrap dress was cut short enough to show off my legs, waxed just a few days before. My hair was freshly colored, and I was wearing one of my client’s pieces, a heart-shaped chunk of amber on a lacy gold chain. I felt good, my muscles warm and loose after my morning run, a six-mile loop through Central Park. It was a day full of promise, one of those perfect New York mornings where the city looked like it had been power-washed, the sky a rich blue, the trees thick with glossy green leaves, a gentle breeze blowing. The taxicabs honking their way up Sixth Avenue glowed golden. The people on the sidewalk were fit and scrubbed and full of purpose. And here I was, alongside the kind of man I’d moved to New York City to meet, my reward after all the pain and expense I’d endured. The apple was hanging from the tree, warm and ripe in my hand. All I had to do was pluck it.

Marcus had taken my elbow as we had crossed the street. Later, I would learn that he had a car and driver, which he’d left at the corner, waiting, and that the only reason he’d been in the Starbucks in the first place, puzzling over the difference between a grande and a venti, was because one of his assistants was in the backseat on the phone to a broker in Tokyo, and the other had been sent ahead to Teterboro, making sure the catering company had arrived to provision his private jet.

“Here’s my stop,” I said when we’d reached the hotel’s revolving glass door. I pulled his coffee out of the carrier and handed it to him, noticing how small the paper cup looked in his big hand.

“Would you like to have dinner sometime?” he asked.

“I could be convinced.” I gave him my business card. He rubbed it between his fingers, reading out loud: “India Bishop, President, Bishop PR.”

I nodded demurely. “That’s me.” I loved the name India. My mother had named me Samantha, but I was a long way from the place I’d been raised, from the girl I’d been. I’d taken the name from a book I’d read, Mrs. Bridge, about a married, settled midwestern lady with a name that was the most exotic thing about her. India suited me better, and so India was what I’d become.

“India,” said Marcus Croft. “I’ll be in touch.”

Upstairs in the ballroom, waiting for the banquet manager to go over the menu one last time, I flipped open my laptop, slipped off my shoes, and typed “Marcus Croft” into my search engine. The computer spat out eleven thousand hits — the Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Businessweek, the Robb Report. It didn’t take me long to learn that the man who’d been so nonplussed by the Starbucks offerings was the real deal, an arbitrageur who’d launched one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, a man who owned pieces of everything from sports teams to fast-food chains to clothing factories in China. Married once, to his college sweetheart, the former Arlene Sandusky; divorced for five years, three children, almost grown. He was fifty-five. That was older than I thought, but I could work with it. I figured that, barring an early and lucrative divorce, we could be man and wife for twenty years, and if he was considerate and didn’t linger, I’d have plenty of years to be a very merry widow.

But that was getting ahead of myself.

I dug deeper, refining my search, typing in his name along with the name of his wife. It didn’t take me long to learn that the ex — Mrs. Croft had taken a lover — her yoga instructor, which was not terribly original — and taken off for an ashram in New Mexico. All the better to replace you with, my dear, I’d thought, clicking the link for pictures, which revealed a generic society-woman-of-a-certain-age, in an updo and a satin gown at the Met’s costume ball. I was prettier than she was; thinner, younger, bigger boobs, a higher ass; the winner by technical knockout in the only categories that mattered.

My telephone rang. PRIVATE NUMBER, read the display. I put my finger on the button, readying myself, a backup quarterback who’d just been called into the big game. In that moment, I remembered going on the one vacation my grandparents and I ever took, to a cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire that one of their friends had won at a church auction and had, for some reason, been unable to use. One morning my opa had woken me up before the sun had risen, and we’d slipped out of the cabin, leaving my grandmother still snoozing in the saggymattressed bed. Sitting in a wooden rowboat, one foot trailing in the shockingly cold water, holding the fishing rod my opa had brought up from the basement the night before we’d left, I felt at first a gentle tug, then a sharper one. The tip of my rod bent until it was almost touching the surface of the lake. I jerked back on it as hard as I could, until my opa stopped me. Easy, he said, his arms against my shoulders. Remember. He’s a fish. You’re a big girl. Play him in easy, and remember: you’re smarter than he is.

You’re smarter than he is, I thought, and arranged my face into a pleasant smile, crossed my legs, shook out my hair, and lifted the receiver to my ear.

JULES

I was in ninth grade when my dad had his accident. Miss Carasick, the guidance counselor, who was known, inevitably, as Miss Carsick, pulled me out of French class and hustled me down the hall into her office, which was decorated with posters from different colleges. “Your father’s in the hospital,” she said.

I’d been slouching in the seat across from her desk — cringing, actually. I was afraid she’d found out that Tricia Barnes and I had been hiding out in the girls’ room after we’d pled menstrual cramps to get out of gym class. I hadn’t seen my parents that morning, but that wasn’t unusual: most days, my father left for school before I even got out of bed and my mom stayed asleep until after I was gone. “What? Why? What happened?”

Miss Carasick sat back. Her glasses shone in the glare from the fluorescent lights overhead, and I could see a sprinkling of white flakes — dandruff, or dried mousse — at her hairline. “All I know is that there’s been an accident.”

“What…” My mouth felt frozen. I wished she had caught me and Tricia; that would have been a million times better than this. “What happened?”

I remembered the way she rolled her lips over each other, her lipstick making a faint smacking sound. Later, I’d found out that my father’d had his midterm performance review the previous afternoon and gone to a bar directly after. How, at closing time, the bartender had tried to take his keys away and my father had refused. How he’d driven his little VW Rabbit through a stop sign and hit a car with a young woman behind the wheel and her three- year-old in the backseat. How both of them, mother and child, were in the hospital, both of them expected to make a full recovery, although the toddler had been touch-and-go at first. How my father had been drunk at the time of the accident, with a blood alcohol level almost double the legal limit, and how he was in the hospital and under arrest. The police, I learned later, had come by the house first thing in the morning; they’d brought my mother to see him and she’d left without leaving a note.

I thought a lot about it later: why Mrs. Carasick hadn’t been kinder; whether I’d misremembered; or if she’d actually been gloating when she’d given me the news. Years later, I’d imagine looking up her address, knocking on her door, and standing there with my hair loose over my shoulders and telling her what a bitch she’d been, that I was a fourteen-year-old, a girl who had no idea that her father had had a drinking problem.

Afterward, I could see the signs — the way he’d always had a beer as soon as he walked through the door after school, the wine with dinner, the tumbler full of whiskey and ice by his hand when he’d grade papers; the way he’d go out to play poker Friday nights and, how on Saturday mornings, my mother would make me and Greg talk in whispers and walk barefoot. Shh, my mother would tell us, shooing us into the kitchen, away from the closed bedroom door. Your dad’s had a hard week.

The weekend after I’d met Jared Baker of the Princeton Fertility Clinic, I made my monthly trip home. I left at four, after my last class on Friday, stopping at the Wawa, the convenience store at the edge of campus where students could buy cheap hot dogs and hoagies after a night of drinking. I filled my thermos with hot coffee and bought a ticket for the Dinky, the little train that ran from campus to Princeton Junction. At Princeton Junction I’d catch a New Jersey Transit train to Philadelphia. In Philly, I’d walk from Suburban Station to the bus terminal and buy a bottle of water and a roast pork sandwich at the Reading Terminal Market, standing in line with rough-handed construction workers and puffy-faced nurses on their way to work, and catch the Greyhound home.