Riverside Park (9 page)

“Anytime during the day, really,” she said. “My parents gave me those bookcases.”

Charlie straightened up and turned toward her, rubbing his
face for several moments, as if to judge whether or not he needed a shave (which he did). Then he dropped his hand. “You're in the wrong line of work, Cindy.”

“Celia,” she corrected him.

“People spend thousands and thousands of dollars trying to learn what comes naturally to you.”

“I didn't know they had junk school.”

“I'm serious,” he said, sounding somewhat grave. “You shouldn't turn your back on this. You need to start doin' something with it. Make it the gift it was meant to be.”

The intercom buzzed in the front hall and Celia went out to answer it. When she came back she told him someone else needed to use the loading dock downstairs. “So you better get your refrigerator before they tow your truck.” She felt a spring in her step as she led him back to the kitchen. She wondered if maybe she really could do something with this. A general auction house sounded appealing. And eBay. She was going to have to sit down and do it. List something. Try the oldest doorknob. She needed to update her reference books, too, something she hadn't done since she had conned her parents into believing several volumes published by Antiques Collectors' Club were part of her required textbooks.

“Come to the warehouse Saturday,” Charlie said, starting to maneuver his dolly into place. “The address is on the card. Be there about noon. There's an auction at two but I can show you around a little first.”

“That'd be great,” Celia said, crossing the kitchen to mark it on the wall calendar. Then, while Charlie wrestled with the refrigerator, she went back to her bedroom to throw on some clothes. Since they didn't have a fridge Celia would have to go out to get something to eat. She went down in the freight elevator to the basement with Charlie to make sure his truck
was still there and then went back upstairs to exit through the lobby.

“Miss Cavanaugh,” the concierge said. “I have some flowers for you.” He disappeared into the holding room behind the desk and reemerged holding a gift bag and a cellophane sleeve of multiple flowers, the kind you got at the Korean markets.

“I guess I better put them in some water before I go out,” she said, signing for them and walking to the elevator.

“A present?” the elevator operator asked.

“So it would seem,” Celia said, waiting to get into the apartment before she looked in the bag. She cut the cellophane off the bouquet, snipped the ends off the flowers and stuck them in some water in a vase. She pulled open the gift bag, which was stapled, to find an iPod and an elaborate box of Godiva chocolates. There was also a square cardboard gift envelope which contained the new Norah Jones album. Utterly baffled, she tore open the card. There was a picture of a kitten and a puppy on the front. The inside of the card was blank, save for the inscription, “Love, Jason.”

Uh-oh,
Celia thought.

“THANK YOU FOR
coming,” Cassy said politely, shaking hands with the fourth set of producers shown into her office this morning. It was pitch day for DBS Sports, a time when freelance producers tried to convince corporate there was a sports program that broadcast television could not do without. It seemed to Cassy the program ideas this year had more to do with the entertainment division than sports. The head of the division complained the other networks had all the good sports coverage locked up. At DBS the idea had never been to do what everyone else was doing, but to offer some kind of quality program the others didn't. They had made money, for example, by covering key overseas professional soccer matches and had also done well with occasional forays into collegiate hockey, baseball and even tennis. They also had some modest success covering Formula One qualifiers. But the division head, Cassy realized, was looking for a big score, the sports programming that would make waves in the industry and generate advertising dollars.

The last pitch had been for a TV reality show about a collegiate football camp with special emphasis on fistfights and catching players in the bushes with their pants down.

The pitch being thrown now was for a weekly how-to show on sports betting. Cassy didn't presume to know the legality of such a show (and DBS legal was here for that reason), and while she understood that millions of gamblers across America might like such a show she doubted the Darenbrook family would. They were particularly sensitive about gambling since their father had begun the media dynasty by winning a newspaper in a poker game, after which the previous owner had killed himself.

This was a team doing the presentation, a man and a young woman. She was reeling off the statistics about sports betting in America while he supplied dramatic enthusiasm and video snippets on his laptop computer of what the show would be like. They were persuasive; Cassy could see a brouhaha on this one. Some were going to say, “It will make us a lot of money,” and others, “This is irresponsible,” while Cassy, ever negotiating the line, would observe that betting on sports was not a sport, so if such a show was truly viable for DBS it should be produced out of the news department as an educational series. (That should kill it.)

She felt a nudge at her elbow and looked over at her brother-in-law by marriage, Langley W. Peterson. He tapped his pencil on his legal pad.

Cassy covered her smile with her hand, cleared her throat, and then lowered her hand to look back at the presenters to reassure them they still had her attention (although they did not).

Few at Darenbrook Communications would believe that Langley Peterson, their Chief Operating Officer, ever made a joke, he was so straightlaced, but Cassy knew he had a fine sense of humor. It was just that Langley was so very, very shy. Jack considered Langley his best friend and Cassy counted him among her closest as well, which only underscored how bad she felt about deceiving him. Simply put, the reality of the Darenbrook marriage would shake all the faith Langley and his wife, Belinda, had in the world. They would be shocked and then outraged that Jack had not, as advertised, been reformed into a faithful husband. They would be shocked and disappointed the Darenbrooks had never made it to marriage counseling, and as far as Cassy carrying on with…

No. Langley would never understand.

 

Cassy first met Alexandra when Michael, Cassy's former husband, had hired her to anchor the New York news for WWKK. Alexandra had been intimidating to Cassy. She was twenty-eight, intellectually gifted, packaged in poise and beauty and possessed that ineffable aura of all-American class. Once Cassy knew for sure the young anchorwoman had not slept with her husband, Cassy relaxed a little, but then felt uncomfortable when Alexandra demonstrated some knowledge of the shambles Cassy's marriage was in. The situation became more uncomfortable when Alexandra confided in Cassy that she was bisexual. And then things became positively surreal when Cassy realized Alexandra was telling her about walking both sides of the street because she was hoping Cassy might cross over to see her.

After her initial surprise Cassy had been deeply flattered. She was forty-one at the time and at a very low ebb. Michael was bottoming out on his drinking and was almost a constant
source of embarrassment and humiliation. Then Michael was fired from WWKK. And then he ran away. And it was not long before Cassy found herself starting to fall under Alexandra's spell. Perhaps, she had rationalized at the time, because Alexandra was a woman it would not really be cheating.

Well, whatever she had rationalized at the time, the point was Cassy did cross that street to see Alexandra. And how. For part of the spring and all of that summer.

When Henry returned from a summer spent hiking in Colorado and Michael returned from Lord only knew where to be hospitalized, Cassy had brought the affair to an end. She felt she had to. For one, however deeply she may have felt about Alexandra (which would take her years to sort out), Cassy was too emotionally beaten up to suddenly start swimming against the tide of social approval that had governed her entire life. Second, Alexandra's love had been so all-consuming, so endlessly deep that Cassy had begun to feel as though she was losing herself all over again, much in the same way she had when she'd married Michael. And third (which she tried to convince herself at the time was first), to encourage that side of Alexandra's sexuality would do her a severe disservice. If Alexandra were to have any chance of fulfilling her dream, to become the first woman to have her own national nightly broadcast newscast, then she would have to meet at least four of the five unspoken mandatory qualifications:

• 1) Must be male.
  
• 2) Must be white.
  
• 3) Must be Christian.
  
• 4) Must be from anywhere except the East and West Coast.
  
• 5) Must be married and heterosexual.
  

The fact that Alexandra had graduated
summa cum laude
from Stanford had no bearing whatsoever on anything. It was
perfectly fine if the men got C's or had even dropped out of high school. No, what would count in Alexandra's favor was her race, her religion, where she was born and a husband.

When Alexandra left WWKK in New York to become a Congressional correspondent for one of the Big Three in Washington D.C., her old boyfriend moved in and Cassy was profoundly relieved. Michael by this time had gotten sober; the Cochrans stayed in touch with Alexandra and Cassy began to feel better about any wrong she may have imagined she had done her.

In his second year of sobriety Michael left Cassy for a much younger woman and asked for a divorce. That was right around when Alexandra and Jackson approached Cassy about coming on board the proposed DBS network as executive producer of the news division. When Alexandra and Gordon Strenn announced their engagement, Cassy accepted their offer and threw herself into building DBS News.

How had Cassy really felt about Alexandra at that point? She knew she loved her as a friend.Very much so. In fact, Cassy may have been somewhat wistful when she recalled certain things, but she had learned to simply shut that side of herself down in the same way she had shut down so many other feelings in her lifetime. Perhaps that was why Jackson's attentions made such an enormous impact on her. Falling in love with him—at least falling in love with the
idea
of falling in love with America's most dashing media tycoon—could and would solve so many problems.

Cassy was genuinely in love with Jackson by the time they got married and she considered herself heterosexual, with a mere blip on the screen otherwise, a time when she had been very down.

“Are you,” one of her therapists asked, “heterosexual?”

“Yes,” Cassy said.

“And you come to this conclusion how?”

“Because women have made passes at me before and I never responded. It was just that one time.”

“You've said that all of your life men have been making passes at you.”

Cassy nodded. That had also been part of why she had married Michael so young; she was sick of trying to deal with it on her own.

“Were you ever tempted by any one of those men?”

Cassy thought a moment. “Yes.”

“And did you act out with any of those men?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was married and respected my wedding vows. That was the way I was brought up.”

“But you had an affair with Alexandra.”

“That was different. Michael had just run out on me.”

“Okay. So what you're saying is, after Michael ran out on you, you felt you could break your marital vows.”

“I think it was because she was there.”

“There were no men you could have turned to?”

The question hung there for quite some time. “Yes,” she finally said, “but Alexandra was a woman so it didn't really count.”

“Yes, but you're heterosexual. You said.”

And so on it went for years in therapy until Cassy was sick of talking about it. About talking about everything. She didn't understand why she couldn't just get a fresh start and get on with her life. And Jackson Darenbrook was the opportunity to do just that.

For more than a year after learning about Jack's infidelities
Cassy had felt frozen inside. She could see now that it had been a period of grieving, mourning the death of what she had believed to be her new life. One night she stayed late with Langley to sit in the control room of Studio A to watch the nightly newscast. By this time Alexandra had long since broken off her engagement to Gordon and had been treading water it seemed, dating no one in particular for any length of time. That night Cassy watched Alexandra on the monitors, wondering if she could ever allow herself to think about Alexandra in that other way again. Or rather, when had she begun remembering so much of what had happened between them? The thrill and the joy, the pleasure and the comfort. She tried her best to also recall the fear, the guilt and the hurt, but it didn't seem to be happening.

After the newscast she had gone home to 162 Riverside, opened a bottle of wine and went next door to sit in the living room of her old apartment. She had sat there looking out at the night lights glimmering on the Hudson, much as she had done so many nights over the course of her marriage to Michael, wondering what was the matter with her, why she was not more grateful, as if the answer was out there somewhere, maybe on a passing barge or in one of the apartments on the Jersey side of the river.

It was an incredibly romantic view from this window in particular, one that had always stirred a longing so deep inside her Cassy wondered why she had so long subjected herself to the torture of it. It never mattered how much Cassy longed for anything, because in the end she always did what she had been brought up to do as a wife, a mother and a professional: be true to her marital vows, care and protect her child and supplement the family's income in an honorable way—which translated into keeping up pretenses for the child's sake and making sure
there was at least one paycheck that got to where it was supposed to go.

Only once had Cassy looked out this window with longings she had given in to. That had been six years ago, when she had given in to the longing to be loved by Alexandra.

Now she was back at that window, subtly horrified by the feelings that had been building. Circumstances were very different now, the consequences potentially even more disastrous on all fronts. Of all the people in the world was there no one else she could think about except Alexandra Waring?

The subject required more wine to contemplate.

The truth of the matter was, with the exception of Jackson, there had never been anyone else in her thoughts since Alexandra. The ferocity of those thoughts on that particular night were disturbing. The disturbance had finally given way to a quickening pulse in response to the impending danger of what she was about to do.

She called Alexandra. At half past one in the morning. And asked if she could come over. Alexandra had said yes, not asking a single question.

Cassy had taken a cab to The Roehampton on Central Park West. Alexandra's hair was wet when she arrived. She had wondered if Alexandra had simply come home from West End and taken a shower to wash off the studio makeup and hair spray, or if she had taken a shower after Cassy called. The first possibility made Cassy feel as though she had no right to be there, no right to interfere with Alexandra's life again, and the second made Cassy consider the possibility that Alexandra might be hoping she would interfere in her life again.

She asked Alexandra for a glass of wine, which Cassy was given, and when she was finally asked what was the matter, Cassy answered, “I'm here because I would like to make love with you.”

The shock on Alexandra's face had made Cassy feel ashamed. Alexandra had no way of knowing that her marriage to Jackson was anything other than idyllic. And Cassy also knew she should be able to tell Alexandra up front about what, if Cassy got her wish and was taken to bed, Alexandra could expect to happen afterward. But Cassy did not have a clue. All she knew was that after trying to lock Alexandra out for so long she desperately wanted her back in. It wasn't very honorable. It wasn't even sane.