The One Who Got Away (13 page)

‘Yes, we'll get to that,' I said, ‘but how did you feel, reading Loren's journal?'

‘Well, it was surreal, because I was there for many of the events she described, so I guess it was like looking at my life through a different set of eyes. The first time we met, the first time we broke up …'

I raised my hand slightly off my lap, a signal I use when I want the talent to stop for a moment, usually so we can adjust the lighting or the sound, although mainly so I can interrupt.

‘Yes, let's talk about that,' I said, ‘let's talk about the first time you met. You are thirty-two and Loren is twenty-three, and the two of you have just begun working at Book-IT …'

‘No,' said David. ‘I was already there. I had been there more than a year. Loren had just arrived. She was one of the new graduates.'

I smiled, and we started again. ‘Okay, the two of you have just met. Loren has just arrived in New York City. She's landed a good job but she's not earning much money. You're a big shot. You've got the penthouse …'

‘It wasn't a penthouse.'

‘Okay, it's not a penthouse, but to cut to the chase, you're a big deal, and Loren falls head-over-heels in love with you …'

‘Which I knew nothing about.'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘That's the problem with this journal,' said David, leaning forward with his hands together and his fingers pointed in my direction. ‘It's only one side of the story. And there are two sides to every story. Loren says that she fell madly in love and I dropped her and hurt her, but that's only one side of the story.'

‘Alright,' I said, smiling. ‘Okay. So what's your side of that story?'

At this point in the interview, we intended to show some photographs of Loren as she was at age twenty-three from David's collection, including one in which she was crouched beside a small snowman in Central Park. It wasn't a great shot – the pixels on those old digital cameras weren't great back in those days, and the snowman was pretty lame, with bent sticks for arms and a piece of fir tree on its head – but that was the point.

Loren, when she met David, was still young enough to be making snowmen in Central Park, and she was so pretty. In the shot, she wears a woollen beanie, jeans and snow boots, and she's got iPod buds in her ears. You can see the cords in her long, straw-coloured hair. She's got a radiant smile and soft-pink lips.

‘Loren was gorgeous,' David said, ‘but I don't mean just physically. She was also unlike anyone I'd previously met in New York.'

‘How so?'

‘She was shy. Shy like a deer, I used to think, like she was scared that the world wanted to hurt her, or something. I couldn't
understand why. To me, she was beautiful and talented and it seemed obvious that she had the world at her feet. It wasn't until she told me about her parents' divorce – how her father ran out on her to live with another woman who had a daughter about the same age – that I began to understand. Maybe your viewers already know this, but Loren's family – her father, and her stepsister, Molly – have put themselves forward as the people who have Loren's best interests at heart. In truth, Loren was betrayed by her father at a vulnerable age. He left his marriage to live with Molly's mother, and Loren's confusion about that – why was he living with another little girl and not me? – was something she carried right through to adulthood. She was extremely wary of getting involved with anyone, very wary of being hurt, and the manifestation of that was, she tended to play her cards close to her chest. So I had no idea that Loren had fallen for me until we broke up and she started to cry. She says in her journal that I was embarrassed by her tears, but in fact I was shocked. She'd never let on as to how she felt, or not to me, anyway. The idea that I was “The One” – you could have knocked me over with a feather.'

I had been sitting slightly forward in my armchair, but now I sat back, with my hands folded over the clipboard on my lap.

‘Well, then,' I said, ‘how did you feel when she told you? Because she makes it very plain in her journal that she was distressed.'

‘Well, it's complicated,' said David, to which I could just imagine our audience rolling their eyes. ‘On one hand, I was surprised. On the other hand, I was moving on.'

‘From Loren?'

‘No, from Book-IT, and from New York City. Loren suggests in her journal that something untoward happened at Book-IT,
that I was marched from the building or something, and that may have been the impression left by others, but the truth is – and I did tell Loren this – the partners did not want me to leave. And you can check that with them.'

I made a note on my notepad, as if to remind myself to do just that. ‘Go on,' I said.

‘The guys who founded that company – two guys I met in college – had led me to believe that I was part of the ownership structure. Then I discovered that they were on track to make a fortune, but I was not part of it, because I didn't have a stake in the company. I was an employee. I asked them to rectify that, and they declined. So I decided to move on. And they weren't happy. And I realise that some people are going to think I'm heartless when I say that Loren was a casualty of my decision to cut my losses in New York City, but I had no idea about the depths of Loren's feelings for me. Loren was gorgeous. We were having a great time, but if I'm being honest, I probably wasn't ready to settle down at that point, and I mean, Loren was young, so it didn't occur to me that she was thinking of settling down, either. And yes, there were some … scenes afterwards, but I wasn't too concerned. I thought, Loren will find somebody else in the blink of an eye and she'll probably never think about me again.'

* * *

‘I have zero interest in concrete.'

We had taken a break from filming. One of David's minders had disappeared down the corridor in search of the ice machine. Another was in a corner with her hand over her cell phone. David and I were standing in front of the refreshment table
(white tablecloth, percolated coffee, a selection of teabags in a timber case). I had opted to stay in the interview room during our break, which was unusual for me. My practice is normally to leave the room, lest I get caught up in small talk. On this occasion, I'd instructed one of the cameramen to keep his tapes rolling – covertly – so as we might catch a little of David off-guard. If that sounds somewhat sneaky, remember that he'd come with minders. I was determined to get under the layers of polish.

‘I'm sorry, you said … concrete?'

‘I figured that you were about to ask me why I went back to Bienveneda,' David said, dipping his tea bag over and over, ‘and I'm going to tell you that I had no interest in running my father's concrete company.'

‘Oh, I see,' I said, nodding.

We already knew all about David's decision not to work for his father. We have teams of researchers at Fox9 whose job is to dig into people's backgrounds. David wasn't trying to fill me in. He was trying to bond with me and, again, there is no denying that there is definitely something charming about him. I renewed my pact with myself to keep my guard up.

‘Actually, David, when everyone gets back, I think we'll start by talking about how Loren followed you to Bienveneda,' I said, taking my teabag out of the cup and placing it on a saucer, ‘because people will want to know: why did she follow you? And when did you fall in love with your wife, David? That's a good question for this next session, too. In fact, why don't you try to come up with an answer for that.'

I turned with my cup too quickly, because I sloshed some tea over my saucer, although thankfully not on the cream jacket. An assistant zoomed forward to take the cup from me and check
my clothes, but it was fine, and thank God. Sloshing your jacket in the middle of an interview is a disaster. You have to film the whole first session all over again, because otherwise, the viewer will wonder why you suddenly got changed.

We resumed our positions. The makeup girl stepped forward to apply a light dusting of powder to David's face.

‘You've got a tough job trying to make me look handsome,' he said.

She grinned at him. ‘You look just fine.'

‘We're rolling,' said the cameraman, with his eye up tight to the viewfinder.

I had an opening statement ready: ‘You weren't in love with your wife.' Our producer had written it for me, knowing it would be a good line for the promos. I thought it might also catch David off-guard, but it didn't.

‘I was madly in love with her,' he said.

‘But not when you first met?'

‘Well, okay,' said David, ‘what happened was this. I left Book-IT and came home to Bienveneda. My family is quite small. I have a sister, Janet, and then my parents, and we are close. My mother had some health concerns, and I agreed to come home to Bienveneda to help out and I suppose my father hoped that I would take over his business, but I had an idea for a business of my own.'

‘Capital Shrine?'

‘Right. There's no big secret to what I was doing. I was taking money and investing it, and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. And for a long time, I was winning. I'm still very proud of what I was able to achieve, especially in those early days, creating wealth for people who don't seem to have the time of day for me now.'

The collapse of David's business – which was no more than a Ponzi scheme – was a well-known part of his story, chronicled in some detail by the
New York Times
, among others. I needed to steer the conversation back to Loren, so I asked David: ‘At what point did Loren re-enter your life?'

‘Well, it's interesting,' he said, ‘because, as everyone knows from her journal, what basically happened was, I ran into Loren on Park Avenue in New York during a business trip, and I was a little nervous because, who knew: was she still cross with me? But Loren seemed to me to have moved on. She was doing well at work. She had a new apartment. She looked great and we had a pleasant exchange, after which I got on with the rest of my schedule for that day, whereas Loren seemed to have decided that the meeting was fate, which is something I knew absolutely nothing about until very recently. The way I understood things, I just happened to run into Loren again, this time in Bienveneda when she came to town for her father's birthday weekend. The fact she had engineered that meeting – planned it over many months – was a secret that Loren kept from me.'

‘And that's when you had the now famous lunch at the Jetty?'

‘Right,' said David, flushing. ‘We decided to have lunch at the Jetty and it was a, ah, very pleasant afternoon. Loren was in excellent form. Very different from the shy girl she'd been when we first met. But the plotting and scheming behind that encounter … well, again, I had absolutely no idea about any of that. I had no idea about Loren's ongoing obsession with me. You would think, after we became engaged, got married, had two children, that it would be something that we joked about, something that became part of our story, but she never, ever mentioned it. Never. So of course it was disturbing to read all about it in Loren's journal.'

By David's account, it was during the lunch at the Jetty that he realised that he was still attracted to Loren.

‘She had grown into a woman who was sexy and fun,' he said. ‘I definitely tried to convince her to come home with me that day. She knocked my socks off. She turned me down, and I remember watching her drive off, with her ponytail swinging. There wasn't a guy in the street who didn't notice her.'

‘And you were intrigued?'

‘Right, but like most men, I believe it's a mistake to appear too keen. My feeling has always been that women don't want the men that want them. Women want the men they have to catch. So I waited a couple of days before I called her … but yes, from there, the relationship very quickly became serious. And Loren was not wrong: I had decided that I wanted to get married, and Loren seemed to be the perfect candidate.'

I tilted my head. ‘The perfect candidate?'

‘Don't take it the wrong way,' said David, ‘but yes, she seemed perfect, and to be honest, my big worry was that she might say no. Loren was still under thirty. I remember talking to her about children, and she said: “Oh God, not for years.” Plus, if we got married she would have to move back home to her home town. She used to joke about how she'd “escaped” from Bienveneda. It had been hell for her, growing up here, feeling rejected by her own father. So to my mind, there was a real risk that she might turn down my proposal.'

‘But she didn't,' I said.

‘No, she didn't,' said David, eyes filling with tears, ‘she said yes, and I was absolutely, one hundred per cent over the moon.'

* * *

THE WEDDING OF THE CENTURY
!

I knew from Loren's journal that those words had appeared somewhere in the
Bienveneda Bugle
in the lead-up to Loren's big day, so we mocked them up in a newspaper-style headline to flash across the screen.

‘And how does it feel when you see those words?' I asked. We were by now well into the second hour of the interview and I still had no great ‘gotcha' moment, but that was fine. These things take time.

‘I'd forgotten that headline,' said David when the camera came back to him, ‘and it's obviously crazy when you think of the kind of weddings some people have. Kim and Kanye! But look, it was an incredibly fun night and huge for Bienveneda. People flew in from New York and drove in from LA, and Loren loved it. Being a princess. She laughed about the thrones, but she absolutely loved it. And after the wedding, we had the most amazing honeymoon. A cruise around Cabo that was just …'

David paused, and began rubbing his brow, as if stressed.

‘Well, the memories I have of that honeymoon, they're all … I mean, Loren loved cruise ships. She loved the idea of them. The romance. Not having to pack and re-pack at every stop. She loved dining with the captain. The old-style glamour. And, you know, she was so happy on our honeymoon … look, can we take a break?'