Danny took the salads from the refrigerator. Balancing one on his
arm, he said, “I told you before, he’s not thinking with what’s between his
ears, he’s thinking with—”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t make me throw up.”
He flashed her the infamous Fiore grin.
“And you!” she accused. “How could you deliberately drop that
drink on the carpet?”
“It worked, didn’t it? I had to do something. You were about to
start breathing fire.”
“Oh, Danny, what can he possibly see in her? She treats him like
he’s her pet poodle.”
“Do I really have to spell it out for you?”
Dinner was a disaster. Monique dominated the conversation with
stories about her leading men, pausing only long enough to fork food into her
mouth or issue orders to Rob. She spoke only to the men, pointedly ignoring
Casey, as though she were a servant, to be seen but not acknowledged. It was
during dessert that she delivered the
coup de grace
. “Perhaps,” she
said, “
Robert
would like to tell you our news.”
Danny stirred sugar into his coffee cup. “Pray tell,
Robert
,”
he said wryly, “what news might this be?”
Rob looked slightly embarrassed, then he grinned sheepishly. He
gazed at Monique with obvious adoration. And cleared his throat. “Monique and
I,” he said, “are getting married.”
Rob MacKenzie spent his wedding night drinking alone at the hotel
bar.
The flight to Palm Springs was smooth, and the flight attendants
fawned over Monique. As did the skycaps, the limo driver, and the hotel
staff. Everything was going along fine until Rob made the mistake of opening
his mouth as they crossed the hotel lobby. “The way everybody’s acting,” he
said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were some visiting dignitary.”
The rigid set of her chin told him the comment hadn’t gone over
well. Monique was what his mother had always called high-strung: brimming
with nervous energy, and ready to take offense at the slightest injustice.
Sometimes, he had to admit that he saw unbecoming signs of
pettiness in her. Her priorities were screwy because she’d been brought up as
the pampered only child of a French diplomat. It wasn’t her fault that she’d
grown up spoiled and pandered to, and had come to accept it as her due. It
wasn’t her fault that they fought more than most couples. Or that the fights
could get nasty. When she wasn’t on her high horse about some imagined slight,
Monique could be warm and cuddly as a kitten. And making up was heaven, for
Monique was nothing like his first wife. Nancy had been a frightened child,
but Monique was a woman, one who knew exactly what a man needed, and who
provided it with fervent expertise.
Her sour mood dissipated once they reached the honeymoon suite.
He tipped the bellboy a twenty before carrying his bride across the threshold
and locking the door behind them. On a heart-shaped bed in a room that was
costing him a thousand bucks a night, the kitten became a tigress as they
enthusiastically proceeded to consummate the marriage. He poured them both a
glass of Dom Perignon, and then, just in case for some reason the first time
didn’t count, they consummated the marriage a second time.
The trouble began when they went downstairs to dinner. They
ordered Oysters Rockefeller, spinach salad, and prime rib
au jus
. While
he sat there in abject mortification, his little love muffin complained to
everyone within hearing distance that the beef was overdone, the oysters were
tough, and the spinach was gritty. By the time she was done verbally shredding
the place, the manager himself had come out to grovel at the feet of America’s
Sweetheart. He refused to allow Rob to pay for the meal, and followed them all
the way to the door, red-faced and apologizing profusely.
It was in the elevator that he made mistake number two.
“Monique,” he said once the doors had closed behind them, “that behavior was
absolutely uncalled for.”
She froze in front of the mirror where she’d been primping. When
she turned those huge blue eyes on him, they were glistening with tears. “Tell
me the truth,
Robert.
You married me for my money,
non?
Because
if you loved me, you would never, ever speak to me that way.”
It wasn’t the first time she had pulled this routine on him.
If
you really loved me, you would.
It was her favorite tool for getting what
she wanted. He’d seen her use it on her father, the ambassador, and the aging
gentleman always melted the instant those huge blue eyes shed crocodile tears.
But Rob had no intention of letting her manipulate him that way.
His third mistake was telling her so.
He’d forgotten the cardinal rule governing baseball and
interpersonal relationships: three strikes and you’re out. The fight was
loud, violent, and embarrassingly public. In the corridor outside their suite,
in front of a horrified maid, Monique slapped him, hard. Then, wailing like a
pretty French air horn, she fled to the suite and locked him out with nothing
but his American Express card and the clothes on his back.
It was not an auspicious start to the marriage.
***
The Malibu house had been built three years earlier as a love nest
for film director Nikolai Vronsky and his bride, model Kelly Adams. During the
course of their brief but fiery union, it had been the site of numerous
battles, including one legendary occasion when Adams had thrown a $30,000
bronze statue through one of the enormous tinted plate glass windows. After a
lengthy and bitter courtroom battle, the house had been put on the market as
part of the divorce settlement. Vronsky was anxious to sell, and Danny got the
house for a fraction of its market value.
When Casey said it was a shame that their good fortune should be
bought with someone else’s bad fortune, Danny told her it was a wonderful house
and she was being ridiculous. And it was a wonderful house: a master bedroom
half the size of Rhode Island, three smaller bedrooms, a Jacuzzi in the master
bath. A sunken living room that boasted an enormous fieldstone fireplace
offset by one wall of tinted glass, and carpeting thick enough, in Rob’s words,
“to lose a Chihuahua in.” French doors off the formal dining room led to a
redwood deck that looked out over the beach, and the kitchen’s gleaming ebony
appliances were a gourmet’s dream.
They moved in the day after Christmas. Danny and Rob and a few
musician friends moved furniture while Casey, in bare feet and jeans and
Danny’s old B.U. sweatshirt, supervised. At noon, they broke for tacos and
warm beer. After lunch, the men went back to moving boxes, and Casey began the
enormous task of setting up housekeeping.
Three thousand miles from home, she’d found a piece of New England
to offset her homesickness: in a Rodeo Drive gallery she’d bought a framed
Andrew Wyeth print that would look perfect on the south wall of the living
room. She held it in both hands, admiring Wyeth’s delicate brush strokes, then
looked dubiously at the bare white wall that swept twelve feet upward to meet
the cathedral ceiling. “Danny,” she shouted, “come here a minute. I need
you.”
From somewhere in the house, Danny answered, his voice muffled.
“It’ll have to wait. I’m busy.”
Rob loped down the six carpeted stairs to the living room,
carrying a half-empty bottle of Heineken. “Last time I saw him,” he said, “he
was holding one end of your bedroom dresser over his head. Will I do?”
“You certainly will.” Handing him the hammer, she said, “Men do
occasionally have their uses.”
“Watch your tongue and hold my beer. Where are we hanging this
thing, Fiore?”
“It’s not a thing, MacKenzie, it’s a Wyeth. And it’s going on that
wall, high enough so it doesn’t look too lonely.”
They spent a few minutes arguing over where to hang the print,
then Rob hammered two nails into the wall. He hung the print, adjusted one
corner of the frame, then stood back to admire his handiwork. “Not bad,” he
said, reaching for his beer. “I should have been a carpenter.”
“Two nails doth not a carpenter make.”
He flashed her a grin before walking to the wall of windows and
looking out at the endless blue of sky and sea. “Some view,” he said.
She stood beside him. “At sunset, the whole room turns sky-blue
pink.”
Still looking out the window, he sipped his beer. “Danny tells me
you’re trying to have a baby.”
She folded her arms. Quietly, she said, “We decided it’s time.”
“You and Danny will make terrific parents.” He held out a hand,
and she gripped it hard with her own.
“Rob,” she said softly, “do you really think he’s ready?”
“He loves you, sweetheart. He’ll do fine.”
“I know he does. And I love him. I love him so much.”
“Hang onto it. You two are lucky. Your marriage is the eighth
wonder of the world.”
She dropped his hand. “If I didn’t know better,” she said
lightly, “I’d swear I detect a hint of jealousy. Don’t tell me there’s trouble
in paradise?”
“Don’t ask.”
Her humor fled instantly. “You and Monique aren’t getting along?”
“Out of bed? No.”
She patted his arm. “The first year is always the hardest. You
both have to make so many adjustments. It’ll get better.”
Rob shrugged and drained his beer. “We’ll see,” he said. “Got
any more pictures you want hung?”
That first night in the house, with the waterbed still too cold to
sleep on, she and Danny arranged pillows and blankets on the living room floor,
where they toasted marshmallows and drank a hundred-dollar bottle of champagne
bought especially for the occasion. As Robert Plant’s raspy tenor rhapsodized
about stairways to heaven, there beneath the eyes of God and the gulls who
swooped and soared above them, they relearned the fire and the tenderness that
had drawn them together so many years ago. Later, as they lay naked in the
darting shadows of the firelight, Casey pressed her cheek to the damp warmth of
Danny’s chest and thought about how it was all coming together at last, the
life they’d worked years to achieve. There was just one thing missing to
complete the picture: a baby.
“Danny?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Hmm?” His sounded drowsy, satisfied.
“Do you suppose it happened tonight?”
He didn’t have to ask what she meant. “Honey,” he said, “it may
take some time. Don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t happen right away.”
But she was impatient, ripe and ready for motherhood, and she’d
waited so long. She’d already begun decorating the nursery. Now all she
needed was a child to put in it. “Maybe we need to keep practicing until we
get it right,” she said.
“Christ, Casey, I’m dead. I moved furniture all day.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What happened to that hot-blooded stud I
married?”
“Old age.”
“You, old? Hah! You won’t be old when you’re ninety.”
“Shut up and go to sleep.” He folded her into his arms and turned
them both on their sides. “Tomorrow morning,” he promised. “Tomorrow morning,
baby doll, I’ll give you loving until you beg for mercy.”
***
Rob’s relationship with Monique ran on only two speeds: fast and
faster. When they weren’t fighting, they occupied themselves with far more
pleasurable pursuits. He’d thought himself quite knowledgeable regarding the
erotic arts, but Monique did things to him in bed that he’d never even dreamed
of. And then she taught him, with explicit and extensive instruction, exactly
how a woman wanted to be pleased. How to move slowly, when all his instincts
were rushing him toward the finish line. How to map out and pleasure a woman’s
erogenous zones until she became putty in his hands. When to use finesse, and
when to forgo it completely.
Monique was an exhibitionist. She had mirrors on the ceiling
above her bed, and she took great pleasure in making love in unusual,
semi-public locations, where the risk of getting caught intensified the
excitement. They made love in the swimming pool at noon, in the elevator at
the Ritz on a trip to New York, on the butcher-block table in the kitchen at
midnight, while the maid watched
The Tonight Show
in the next room.
She was insanely jealous if he so much as looked at another
woman. If he made the mistake of actually speaking to one, she would fly into
a jealous rage. Yet the arrangement was not reciprocal. When they went out in
public, she teased, cajoled, flirted, and made intimate eye contact with every
man between the ages of eight and eighty. And expected him to tolerate it.
For reasons he failed to understand, she detested Casey, muttering
insults in French every time Casey’s name came up in conversation. Rob’s
knowledge of the French language was limited, but he thought the words “stupid
cow” might have surfaced once or twice. At times, he walked around on
eggshells, because Monique’s rages were so unpleasant that avoiding them became
imperative.