All You Could Ask For: A Novel (8 page)

Then the music started. Led Zeppelin.

Oh yeah.

I’ll tell you a little secret: I’m sort of a rocker chick. I know I don’t look it. And I know I don’t behave like it anymore. I’m a mother now, a tennis gal, a classroom mom and—hopefully—a hot suburban wife, but inside I’m also still a rocker chick. Aerosmith, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick, Pink Floyd, I love it all. And in that instant, when Robert Plant’s voice flooded my ears, the only way I can think of to describe the feeling is
orgasmic
.

I was rocking out and playing air guitar, and god bless Pamela, who came in banging her head around like we were at Woodstock, and I just don’t know that I’ve had that much fun in years.

“How about a drink?” I asked her loudly, above the music.

“What do you have in mind?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “White wine?”

“Hell no!” Pamela shouted. Her eyes were twinkling again. “I think I know just the thing.”

Then she was off to the kitchen and I was left to shred it in the living room. As Led Zeppelin rocked out I went right along with them, singing as loudly as I could, on my knees like Tom Cruise in
Risky Business
.

“Try this on for size!”

Pamela was carrying a silver tray, upon which there was a sliced lime, a shaker of salt, a shot glass, and a bottle of Patrón tequila.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“You better believe it!”

“At ten o’clock in the morning?”

“Listen to me, sweetheart,” she said, placing the tray down on the coffee table. “I assume you don’t want these pictures to look like ten o’clock in the morning. Am I right?”

“You are
so
right,” I said.

“Okay then,” Pamela said, and poured a shot of tequila into the glass. Then she took my right hand and licked the inside of my wrist. She poured some salt over the spot and raised the glass to me. “Here you go, babe. Let’s do this right!” Without hesitating, I licked the salt, took the glass, and shot the tequila, then took a slice of lime and sunk my teeth into it. The whole thing was fabulous, absolutely
fabulous
. I haven’t done tequila shots in years. The drink was tangy on my lips and warm in my chest. It tasted good and felt even better.

“Let me do one more,” I said, and I did, and it was even better the second time.

Then Pamela was holding her camera and staring me right in the eye.

“All right, sweetheart,” she said, more gently now, reassuringly, “are you ready to do this?”

“One more thing,” I said.

“Anything.”

“Do you have
Cheap Trick at Budokan
?”

She smiled and left the room again. I began to unbutton my coat. Underneath was a teddy I had picked up after I saw Scott not-so-subtly admire a similar one on Jessica Biel in a movie. Seemed like a good way to ease into this. I let the coat drop to the floor and stared at myself in a mirror decorated with Grateful Dead skulls.

“Not quite Jessica Biel,” I said aloud, “but not half-bad.”

Then I heard the screaming from the Japanese audience as the drums began to play the introduction to “I Want You to Want Me.”

And then Pamela was behind me in the mirror. “No time like the present,” she said.

I’ve never been so ready to do anything in my entire life.

SAMANTHA

“SO,” MY FATHER SAID, “are you ready to admit I was right?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I was just wondering if you had come to any conclusions about my views on this fellow you met and decided to marry fifteen minutes later.”

My first thought was that this couldn’t be happening. I don’t mean my father browbeating me, that has been happening all my life. But how could he know? I had yet to tell him anything.

“Dad, what’s going on?” I asked.

“I have a better idea,” he said. “Why don’t you tell
me
what’s going on.”

Every once in a while I get a glimpse of how my father came to be such a successful businessman. It is not just that he is ruthless (which I suspect he is) and brilliant (to which I can attest firsthand) but he is also very cunning, and this was the perfect illustration. Obviously he knew something, but I didn’t know what, nor did I know how he knew it.

“Listen, Dad,” I said, fighting desperately to keep all the positive energy from being sucked out of me, “as I said I’m having sort of a strange day. It’s pretty clear we both have something we want to say, and I can’t tell you how much it would help my state of mind if you would just go first.”

He chuckled on the other end of the line. There was something not so malicious in his chuckle, which is unusual for him. Normally, when you’re arguing with my father and he laughs, it sounds like Vincent Price in “Thriller.” But this was different. He was going to give me a break. I could tell.

“Sweetheart,” he said, “Robert called me.”

I have no idea why that should have come as a shock to me. There were only two people on the planet who were aware anything was going on. I was one and Robert was the other, so it only stood to reason that if my father was aware of a problem it was Robert who alerted him to it. But why? I’d only been gone a few hours.

“He told me what happened,” my father said.

That’s when it hit me. I never shut the laptop off, never logged out, never yanked the power cord out of the wall, nothing. I just left it on and open for him to find the nude photo of his campaign manager splashed across the screen. I felt a little smile cross my lips.
Good. No better way for him to find out.

“What did he say?” I asked. To my surprise, my voice cracked a bit. It sounded as though I might cry, which seemed odd at first but then suddenly I realized tears were streaming down my cheeks.

“To be honest, he was very forthright,” my father said. “I give him credit for that. For a lying sack of shit, he’s a pretty straightforward guy.”

I laughed a little.

“He said he had something he needed to tell me,” my father continued, “and that he wanted me to hear it from him first. He said he’s been carrying on with a woman from the campaign, I think it was that brunette with the huge tits that lectured me about smoking.”

“It was,” I said.

“He said that he had taken up with her months before he even met you and that he was confused, and he didn’t know what to do, but that he loves you and wants to make the marriage work. And that he planned to tell you about it at the appropriate time, but somehow you obviously discovered something today that sped up that process. Am I reading that correctly?”

“Yes, you are,” I said.

“He asked me to be open-minded about the situation and to please help him try to find you, as you’d disappeared without a trace. That was pretty much all he had to say.”

I took a deep breath. The air still smelled fresh and salty.

“What did you say to him?” I asked.

“Darling,” he said, “when I was in college there was a huge fellow who lived in the same house as I did. His name was Alvin. He was a mountain of a man, must have been six foot eight, and very muscular. He was a cretin, and also a thief. One day I discovered that a few hundred dollars—which was all the money I had at the time—was missing from my room. I was sure Alvin had stolen it. So do you know what I did?”

“You left it alone and let him keep the money?”

“No.”

“You confronted him?”

“No,” my father said. “Not exactly.”

“Dad, what did you do?”

“I put a note in his room that said I knew he took the money and that if he simply returned it I would leave it alone and never speak of it again.”

“And?” I asked.

“And what?”

“And so what happened with the money?”

“To be honest, darling, I don’t really remember.”

“Dad,” I said, “you are developing an alarming habit of telling stories that don’t apply in any way to the circumstances.”

He chuckled gently again.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I’m getting old. But now I’ll tell you what I said to Robert when he called me earlier today.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it, whatever it was. I closed my eyes.

“I told your husband that in my life I have been lucky in many things, but that the luckiest I have been is that I never ran up against you, Samantha, in a board room. You would have scared me to death, because you, darling, are the only person in my life tougher than I am.”

I couldn’t stop the tears now, and I didn’t bother to try.

“Why did you say that?” I asked.

“For the best reason anyone ever says anything,” my father said. “Because it’s the truth.”

“I want to get my marriage annulled, Dad,” I said. “Will you help me?”

“I think that is the best idea you’ve had in a very long time. Robert is an ambitious man, Samantha. I recognize that quality in him because I used to be an ambitious man myself. Maybe I still am one, to some degree. What he saw in you was the right wife for whatever it is he thinks he’s going to be someday, governor or president or wherever he hopes his ambition will lead him. You have the right background, the right family, the right looks. I don’t blame him for wanting to marry you.”

He paused for a moment.

“The problem, darling, is that Robert is an asshole. And that is an issue that was eventually going to be insurmountable. Your figuring it out quickly is probably the best thing that could have happened.”

I laughed a little. “Thanks, Dad,” I said. “I think I’m going to stay in Hawaii for a while.”

“Sounds nice,” he said. “It’s nighttime here, darling. First thing in the morning I’ll have lawyers on a plane, they’ll be there tomorrow to handle everything. They’ll make sure to get everything you left behind, and replace anything that may be missing.”

“I’m going to be fine, Dad,” I said. I meant it.

“I know that,” he said. “Call me tomorrow. And if Robert shows up looking for you, my advice is to kick him in the nuts as hard as you possibly can.”

“I love you, Dad,” I said.

“I love you, too.”

I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’ve never really felt close to my father. He is such a powerful man, and rather than admire that, as many little girls do, I resented it. My father never made me feel like I was the most important person in his life. He was always at a meeting or on the phone or coming home just before my bedtime, in time for me to put my arms around his enormous shoulders and give him a kiss and then scoot off to bed before I could bother him at the end of a long day. Maybe that’s what appealed to me about Robert. He’s another one who is always on the phone or at a meeting, and maybe he spent more time with me than my father did because I was of greater use to him than I was to my dad. Maybe I married him because he reminded me of my father.

None of that is too much fun to think about.

But here’s the good news. As of this moment, I am free. I am in paradise, and all I want to do is exercise and soak in the sun and the salt in the air. I don’t need a husband to do any of that, and I don’t need to be the little girl whose father didn’t want her either. Today, when I
really
needed him, my father was there. That counts. It doesn’t make up for everything, but it makes a difference.

And so, I waved to the manager to ask for a room and another plate of fruit. I felt wonderful. And I hadn’t stopped crying yet, but I was really sure that once I did everything was going to be all right.

KATHERINE