On her way out the door she called Lane again.
“This will only take a minute.”
“No. Problem. Shoot.”
“Do you have any secrets from me?”
He sighed. “I’m not having sex with anyone else, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s okay; I’ve got my secrets too. I’m going to take the part in August Moon.”
“I see,” he said.
“You can assume things or you can keep an open mind.”
“Come on, Anna. It takes a lot more time. It’s a big commitment.”
“That part is true. But we can work around it.”
“We didn’t use to have secrets.”
“I know that.”
“So let’s get together.”
“We will. As soon as I can. Good-bye. I love you,” she said after a second. She winced, not because it was a lie, but because the “I love you” had become a thoughtless habit.
While she took a taxi over to Park Avenue she pondered how the evening might go with Josh. It would be important to be warm, but not so warm as to be confusing.
She had married Joshua a few months after Jimmy died. There was a whirlwind engagement, so short it was hardly worthy of the name, a marriage, and fourteen months later a divorce. Just like “his” and “hers” in the linen closet, there was “his” and “hers” when it came to impressions about the breakup.
As is often the case, there was a precipitating event triggering the breakup that had little to do with the substance of their growing disengagement. Joshua had become intoxicated and had gotten sexual with one of her friends. Before that, she was contemplating some attempt to stop the unraveling of her marriage. It had begun occurring to her that maybe there was something inside her that made long-term relationships difficult.
Joshua’s indiscretion killed the last of her waning desire to work on the marriage. Initially unaware that he had been caught in his infidelity, Joshua was dismissed from her heart before he figured out she had left, and he still suffered from having been beaten to the punch.
According to Joshua, their breakup was brought about by Anna always wanting control but never wanting intimacy. She wanted appearances and she wanted to be adored and she wanted passion; at home there was to be a festive environment, everybody happy all the time; no problems. She wanted to help the needy unless the needy included her husband. And finally, as a sort of crowning contradiction, she wanted constant emotional stimulation. When every single day could not be filled with breathless passion, she got bored and began withdrawing. And that, according to Josh, gave her the excuse she needed to dump him after a minor indiscretion.
She arrived late at Josh’s, but he was his usual forgiving self.
“You made good time.”
“That’s nice of you to say.” She kissed his cheek and came in.
They walked from the front door through the entry and living room in silence, Josh no doubt contemplating his game plan while she considered her own. She wore a simple Calvin Klein pantsuit, and from the corner of her eye she caught Josh looking her up and down.
“You have on your friendly-but-formal face.”
She smiled.
“Am I reading you right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The face does not come naturally to you.”
Joshua was tall and slender and charming. He had a large, friendly mouth with perfect teeth, not unlike Anna’s. He was nothing like Sam in the physique department, but he was nice-looking, even naked.
More pleasantries followed. He offered her wine, one of her current favorites, a 1996 Turley Zinfandel. Josh loved wine, was very thoughtful about it, and always knew what she was drinking. For dessert he would offer her a Sauterne Chateau d’Yquem 1990 and she would choose a beer.
He lived in a four-thousand-square-foot apartment and was one of the most successful pension fund managers in New York-the youngest and one of the richest partners in his Wall Street firm. He had picked all the right tech stocks, exited before the 2001 collapse, then gotten back in very judiciously. Josh was the quintessential “catch.”
They sat on the small sofa by the gas fireplace and near the window where they used to sit, she at her end, he at his. Immediately she curled her feet beneath her, which made her more difficult to approach. Over the wall- to-wall beige carpet lay a beautiful Persian, a wedding gift. The couch they had picked out together after they moved in.
They talked about her current movie, a tale about the desperate girl who is really a jewel, who starts out poor, ends up rich, becomes detached and even cold.
“And of course, as she draws from the hairy-chested man his buried humanity, they fall in love.” Anna concluded her summation.
“If you’re trying to make this your life story, can I be him?”
“Do you think I’m detached?”
At that Josh grinned.
Thirteen
High-Grade was one of the best auto parts stores in LA. It sold every imaginable accessory and part and also did custom fabrication. The building occupied a full fifty thousand square feet on a single floor. In front of the building a huge parking lot circumscribed nearly half of the structure and ended at a ten-foot-high stone wall. On the wall were signs, every five feet, warning of cut glass atop. Behind the wall and out of sight was a second Cyclone fence with razor wire. At night security patrolled the outer fences. The property was flanked by a large wholesale plumbing outlet and a retail lumberyard.
To the right side of the building was a break in the wall, a large iron gate, and a small guard shack. Trucks with parts came and went through the gate, as did Sam and his staff. Sam owned the building and kept his offices in the back-difficult to find if you weren’t one of the chosen few.
In order to gain access a person had to go through the gate in the stone wall, past the guard shack, and through a door on the side of the building constantly monitored by cameras. To get through the outer door one needed a plastic fob to unlock the computer-activated dead bolt After going through the first door, a room with comfortable chairs, magazines, artwork, and more cameras waited. If Sam’s staff liked what they saw of you on the closed-circuit TV, they opened a thick steel door embedded in a concrete wall. If there was some question, you never got in and they called the guard shack for an escort off the property.
The entire building was concrete block, but the portion housing Sam’s offices had an additional reinforced concrete wall inside the outer block wall, and lining the office interior under the Sheetrock was a layer of Kevlar. There were windows in Sam’s office, but the panes were manufactured from the type of glass used on the president’s limousine. The openings looked a little like tunnels because it was a full eighteen inches from the Sheetrock interior to the exterior of the concrete block.
The furnishings and finish of the place felt like a government office-practical, functional, not particularly expensive, and definitely not elegant except for the conference area, which was wood-paneled with built-in bookshelves that housed various collector’s items: a ship’s telescope from the early nineteenth century; a bread- loaf-sized Inuit polar bear statue carved two hundred years ago from the tusk of a woolly mammoth; a bronze sextant used by Sam’s mentor, Professor Alfred Channing, when he was a young officer in the merchant marine; a ceremonial Tilok headdress worn by his grandfather Stalking Bear; and an original Leonardo da Vinci drawing of a partially dissected cadaver that, Sam was always careful to explain, had been made before the pope forbade the artist to dissect bodies.
This was where Sam greeted visitors. There had been a number of visitors in the year before he’d quit to go
