He didn’t hear her leave. He righted the throne. He went back to Florence and played the forty-minute-long concert piece that had been his lifelong nemesis. It didn’t matter how badly he played, because the anger, sadness and jangle of depression in Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” couldn’t hurt him anymore.
Nothing would hurt this badly ever again.
NINETEEN
Selfish groupies gave good groupies a bad name. They took and took and took, crossed every line to invade their idol’s space, their lives. They were fame vampires, sucking on the high, appropriating proximity to celebrity for their own use. They were the ones who became stalkers, competitive with each other, unhinged from reality, dishonest, devious, entitled and dangerous.
Mena managed about three hours sleep on Sunday night. Alternating between wanting to cry and wanting to smash every lovely item in her apartment. She’d become the very thing she’d abhorred, a selfish groupie. She’d lied and grasped and manipulated, invaded Grip’s headspace and home and been deliberately deceitful.
Those grasping groupies got ostracized by friends, banned by management, sicced on by security. Arrested, charged, fined. They lost the person who’d been most valuable to them by abusing them.
Exactly like Mena had done and now she had to pay.
Her head was full of the way Grip played the piano as she’d fled, as if he wasn’t muscle and bone but fury, confusion and sadness.
She’d wanted to tell him, she’d tried to, but not near hard enough. She’d let him distract her. Too busy falling in love to consider that every moment spent in each other’s arms expanded her lie until it was a monstrous enough beast to crush them both.
She was meant to learn he’d changed, become hardened, jaded, find signs he wasn’t such a good guy anymore, that success had made him careless and cavalier. She was meant to learn she didn’t feel the same about him fifteen years later and that he’d drawn on the hips of hundreds of women, had a string of broken marriages and kids in therapy and only wanted what she’d wanted, to be wild again for a night or two before moving on.
This was not the time to learn that some people’s goodness was baked so hard into their being, a whole helix of their DNA, that they remained constant while everything around them changed.
That Grip thought she’d exploited their attraction to take advantage of his financial position was the nightmare she’d known all along could play out and she’d lust-walked her way into the very thick of it, only to be exposed by her greed for him.
The acid in her stomach threatened to burn through her organs. The day smelled of ash. She’d earned Grip’s dismissal, his uncomprehending disappointment. And she had no defense, no excuse. She’d been arrogant, careless, so carried away with the pull of her feelings for him, she’d lost all sense of perspective, more worried about preserving what she had than a future she could build.
Thought you were so clever. Thought you had it under control. Thought you could break the rules and still come out on top. When did that ever work for you?
The only thing she could do to retain even a shred of dignity now was to resign. Caroline would pick up the pieces, ensure Grip’s investment advice was sound and apologize in the only way that would matter to him, by letting him know Mena had been punished for abusing his trust.
Three hours sleep wasn’t enough to face having lost her chance with Grip and her job; being thrust into a less certain future, but there was no amount of sleep that was a good prescription for that.
She emailed Caroline her letter of resignation. She paced about her office, avoiding the other employees, and packed her personal items so she’d be ready to go when her email had been acknowledged: a cardigan, a spare pair of shoes, a coat, a favorite keep cup.
She drafted and deleted, rinsed and repeated an apology to Grip, knowing there was nothing she could say now that she couldn’t have said when he’d exposed her lie, nothing that he’d want to hear. As struck dumb now as she had been in his music room.
The last thing she expected was Caroline to appear in the doorway of her office, dressed casually, with the new baby, Amelia.
“What’s going on, Mena?” Caroline put Amelia’s carrier down and sat across from Mena, waving for her to sit as well. “We knew there was a chance you’d jump ship to another firm if we didn’t promote you fast enough, but that’s not why
you’re resigning, is it?”
Mena’s letter had been brief. One sentence tendering her resignation based on a lapse of professional judgement.
Caroline frowned. “What did you do? And before you answer that, if we discover embezzlement, we will prosecute you with everything we’ve got to save the reputation of the firm.”
Mena looked away from Caroline to Amelia’s little soft round sleeping face squished into the sheepskin of the carrier, bow lips pursed, one sock-clad foot twitching as if she was already learning how to dance through life.
“She’s wonderful when she’s sleeping,” Caroline said. “I’d like to get through this without waking her.”
Mena would like to get through this without waking too, that’d mean the fuzzy buzzing in her head, the twisting of her gut, the ache behind her gritty eyes was all part of a nightmare. “It’s nothing financial. It affects only one client. I made an error of judgement in my personal relationship with him.”
“We’re talking Mark Grippen.”
Mena nodded. She had to stop talking like she was a lawyer and tell the truth, she owed Caroline, who had always been a great boss and a friend, but Caroline saved her the trouble.
“You slept with Grip.”
“Yes.” Mena’s face burned. Embarrassing as it was, it was a relief to have it said.