Lipstick Jungle

She could have taken on the project herself, getting her assistant Josh to find someone to take over, but with Shane, she always held back. She didn’t want to make him feel as if he’d failed again, and she always made an effort not to rub her authority (so granted because she made all the money) in his face. And so, inconvenient as it was, the apartment had remained the same. She justified it by telling herself that it was okay; even better, this way she wouldn’t be undermining Shane with her obvious (and for him, unreachable) success. He could keep his illusion that her level of success was still within his own grasp—at the very least, if he did start to make money, it might allow him to think that he could actually afford their apartment.

Well, apparently none of her stratagems were clever enough to outsmart Shane Healy, she thought bitterly. Everyone always said there were plusses to change, but what? She supposed that now that Shane was gone, she would no longer have to kowtow to the petty grievances of his ego. She could let herself shine. The first thing she’d do was fix the apartment up properly. Build real walls; hire a decorator to do the place in her taste. Maybe she’d have an all-white bedroom. As a kid, she’d fantasized about living in a house that was white and clean with fluttering gauze drapes. She’d squelched that fantasy, knowing Shane wouldn’t like it.

But now, she thought cautiously, she was free. Her spirit rose a little, tentatively, like a newborn pup testing the air with its snout. Perhaps Shane’s exit wasn’t all bad. It could turn out to be an opportunity, a second chance to become all the things she’d set aside for the sake of being with Shane.

With new resolve, she picked up the screenplay written by the young woman named Shasta, prepared to give her a second chance. Wendy’s rule was that she didn’t reject a screenplay until she’d read twenty-five pages (some executives stopped at ten, but she figured if someone made the effort to write a complete screenplay, she could make a little more effort to discover its possible merits), and now was not the time to lower her standards, but to raise them. She opened the screenplay, prepared to read, and as she turned the page, her eye happened to spot a mound of envelopes that had been piled up under the script.

She sighed and put down the script. It was all mail, probably from the past month. She had put Shane in charge of the mail and of paying the bills, and now that he was gone, the maid had probably just dumped all the mail on the desk. She decided to sort through it quickly, separating the bills to be dealt with later.

There were several envelopes from American Express. At first she was confused. That couldn’t be right. She had only two American Express cards—one corporate black card account (under which Shane was a secondary cardholder for emergency situations), and a platinum personal account. There was one fat envelope and four flat ones. It was the flat ones that concerned her: They were the threatening type issued when your account was overdue. But that couldn’t be possible, she thought, and frowning, she ripped one of the envelopes open.

The bill was for her Centurion account, and skimming down to the amount owed, she suddenly felt dizzy. This had to be a mistake. The number read $214,087.53.

Her hand started shaking. This couldn’t be right. Some accountant must have made a mistake with the zeroes. She picked up the fat bill and tore it open, her mouth widening into a silent scream as she checked the bill.

There were charges for $14,087.53, which was normal. But on top of that was a line of credit for $200,000 charged to Shane’s account.

She stood up, dropping the bill onto the desk and pacing back and forth with her fingers pressed to the sides of her head as if attempting to prevent her brain from exploding. How could he do this? But technically, he could do it—he had his own card, and the only thing that kept him from racking up a huge bill every month was the fact that she trusted him not to. But she should have known better, and with a sinking feeling, she realized that she’d been expecting this. It was inevitable. Deep down, she’d always suspected that Shane would pull something like this on her someday.

It was the ultimate fuck you. The final nail in the coffin of their marriage. If she’d had any ideas of them getting back together, Shane had guaranteed that it could never happen.

And then everything turned black and rage took over. Two hundred thousand dollars was really $400,000 before taxes. Four hundred thousand hard-earned dollars. Did Shane have any idea how much effort it took to make that much money?

She was going to kill him. She would insist that he pay it back, every penny, even if it took him twenty years . . .

She picked up the phone and dialed his cell. She didn’t care how early it was—for once she was going to read him the riot act and she’d make sure he never forgot it. Naturally, it went to voice mail.

She hung up. She wouldn’t leave a message—she would go to his apartment and confront him. She would go right now, in her fuzzy old pajamas. Her fury carried her into the bedroom, where she jammed her bare feet into the pair of old Converse sneakers she wore around the house.

Then she stopped. She couldn’t leave. She had three children in the house.

A terrible thought occurred to her. They were sound asleep. She could run out, scream at Shane, and be back within thirty minutes. The children would never know.

She paused and looked down at her feet, the black canvas sneakers sticking out incongruously from the bottoms of her blue flannel pajamas. Shane was making her crazy. Leaving small children alone in the house was what poor people did. Poor people who felt they had no choice or were so beaten down by the ruthless pointlessness of life that they didn’t care. You read about them all the time in the New York Post. They left the children alone and something happened and the children died. It was usually the men who were responsible. The mothers were off working and the fathers decided they needed to get a beer with their buddies.

She checked her watch. It was nearly six o’clock. Mrs. Minniver would arrive in an hour. She could wait to confront Shane until then.

But a whole hour! She was consumed with rage again. She wasn’t going to be able to think about anything else. She didn’t need this. She had to work. She had to concentrate. Now, on top of it all, she was going to have to go to the bank at nine a.m. and take Shane’s name off of all their accounts.

And this was the man she had chosen to be the father of her children.

She stood up and marched into the bathroom. Shane would pay. If he was going to take her money, she would take his children away. She would hire a lawyer today, and she would spend whatever it took to make sure he was out of her life permanently. Let him see what it was like out there in the real world, the world of work. Let Shane understand what it was really like to be a man.

She stepped into the shower, and as the hot water hit her face, she suddenly remembered: It was Saturday. Mrs. Minniver wasn’t coming. And Shane had said that he was going away for the weekend and was “unreachable.”

There was no relief.

And then a cry burst out of her like an alien life force, a huge heave of emotion that felt as if her stomach was going to break in half, and caused her to grab on to the shower curtain for support. She lowered herself down into the tub, sitting cross-legged under the beating water, and rocking back and forth like a crazy person. One part of her was pure animal, sobbing and sobbing. But another part of her was detached, as if she were outside her body. So this was why they called it heartbreak, the detached part thought. Funny how clichéd emotional descriptions were so apt on the few occasions when you were actually experiencing them. Her heart was literally breaking. Everything her heart had believed in, counted on, and trusted, was being wrenched from her. Years of what she thought were irrefutable emotional truths were being snapped like spindly wooden twigs. She would never be able to go back to believing what she had before.

But what the hell was she supposed to believe in instead?

* * *

WENDY’S PHONE IN HER office at Parador Pictures had five lines, and currently, all five were lit up.

&nbs

p; It had been that way all morning. All week, in fact. Indeed, it was pretty much like that all the time.