In Love Again (12 page)

“Stop it!” Claire was laughing. “We’re supposed to be working!”

“Exactly. We work hard to keep our clients satisfied. You know that, Claire.” Roberta lost her Brooklyn accent and did a splendid impersonation of Boppy’s waspy, precise voice. “Boppy is 100 percent committed to client satisfaction.” Roberta took a sip of her coffee as if she were giving a lecture on proper corporate behavior.

Claire smiled and looked at the last sheet of paper she pulled out of the envelope. It was a piece of pale blue stationery folded in half. She opened it.

The blue ink looked like it was from an old-fashioned fountain pen. His quick strokes were beautiful across the page. Claire traced the tips of her fingers on the words and smiled.

Dear Claire,

Here are all the purchase orders we discussed on Saturday. It’s a pleasure working with you.

Your friend,

Ben

Oh, dear.
It was nothing
, Claire tried to chastise herself. A silly inserted memo that she would pass on to the lead designer on the project, and then it would be put into a file and stored and then archived and then destroyed in a few years. But.

“A love note from your new boyfriend?” Roberta asked from across the room.

“You’re a pest,” Claire said with mock sternness. She folded the letter and set it aside. “It was just a quick thanks for helping him get all that work done on Saturday.”

Roberta burst out laughing.

“Oh my lord, Roberta. You are an infant. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

Hilary walked in just then, two large tote bags over one shoulder and a large cup of coffee in one hand. “Someone’s mind is in the gutter? Yay!”

Claire rolled her eyes.

“Claire helped the dentist get all that
work done
over the weekend,” Roberta said.

Hilary spoke as she put down all of her project bags and settled into her desk. “You met the husband on Saturday?”

“Ex-husband,” Roberta corrected.

“Oooh, yes. Ex-husband. Isn’t he a dish?” Hilary asked.

Claire blushed again.

“Oh my god, you like him!” Hilary clasped her hands together. “How perfect.”

“You two are impossible. It turns out we knew each other briefly when we were teenagers. It was all very funny.”

The other two women stared at Claire for a few moments. Hilary spoke first, “How…charming. A long-lost reunion.”

“Please. He’s a client.”

Roberta rolled her eyes and gave Hilary a suggestive eyebrow raise. “Mm-hmm. Right. A client.”

Claire laughed. “Okay. So he’s attractive. I’m sure lots of Boppy’s clients are attractive. Anyone who can afford Boppy can probably afford an expensive haircut and a personal trainer.”

“So his hair looked good, huh?” Hilary asked.

“And his abs?” Roberta smirked.

“Enough!” Claire laughed. “I’m going to get all these purchase orders approved by Edwina and Boppy, then logged into the system. Some of us are here to work.” Claire picked up all the samples and paperwork Ben had put together, but left the blue notepaper on her desk.

Ben finished looking at the screen with the X ray of his patient’s impacted molar and wrote an email back to his assistant asking her to set up surgery as soon as possible. He clicked out of his email program and stared at his phone, then looked up at the industrial wall clock. It wasn’t even noon yet, and he wanted to call her. And it was only Monday.

He was a forty-year-old man. Wasn’t there some sort of papal dispensation for not having to wait to pretend that you didn’t really like someone in a weird stalkerish way but just felt like calling her in a normal hey-how-you-doing sort of way? The phone rang, and he had the crazy hope it was Claire. He cleared his throat and tried to make his voice sound warm and inviting.

“Ben Hayek.”

“Why do you sound so charming all of a sudden?”

Alice. Fuck.

“Hey, Alice. What’s up?” The smooth voice was history.

“That’s more like it. So why do I have to hear from Boppy Matthews’s office that you’ve signed off on a bunch of stuff that I haven’t even looked at for the house?”

“Jesus, Ali, this is so boring.”

“Just buy me out if it’s so boring.”

“Okay.”

“What?” She sounded like she might have spit her coffee across her enormous desk.

Ben looked out the window of his tiny, thirty-eighth-floor office to the oranges and reds of the autumn trees across Central Park South. What had he just said? He didn’t have half a million in cash lying around, and he certainly didn’t need to be the sole owner of a colonial-slash-Greek-Revival farmhouse in northwestern Connecticut.

“Let me think about it. It might just be easier,” he hedged.

“Well…okay,” Alice said with slow skepticism.

Ben almost laughed. It was so typical of Alice to be suspicious of someone giving her exactly what she’d always wanted. She saw pitfalls and hurdles at all times. It was her job, but it was also just
her
. He’d have to maintain the pretense that he was going to be saddled with the annoying prospect of traveling to Connecticut every weekend and finishing the project before he could put it on the market. Otherwise, she’d think he was trying to pull one over on her.

“Listen, neither one of us wants this to drag on like it has been, and we just don’t agree.”
What else is new?
Ben wanted to add, but he was trying to be a grown-up. “Let’s get a couple of real estate agents in there to give us a price, and I’ll give you half.”

“Now wait a minute. We bought it at the top of the market. There’s no reason I should take a hit just because you don’t have the patience to see it through.”

Ben knew this trick. No question asked. No reason to answer. Silence.

And more silence.

“Ben?”

“Yes?”

“Well?”

“Well, what? You didn’t ask me anything. You said,
Buy me out
, and I said,
okay
. Now you’re trying to twist it around like—” He caught himself before he slid down that rabbit hole for the nine millionth time, trying to show Alice how she might be a teensy tiny bit…litigious.

“Like what? What were you going to say?”

Here we go
, though Ben dismally. “You know what? Forget it. Just forget I offered to buy you out—”

“Wait, no—”

“Better yet,” Ben interrupted, “why don’t you just name any old amount you want. How about a million? Why not two million? Don’t forget to add in your sweat equity. I think you went to Kmart in Torrington that one time, didn’t you? To get towels? Don’t forget to add that to your list.”

Alice burst out laughing. “Oh, Ben. I love you.”

“What?”

“I mean, I don’t
love you
love you, obviously. I can’t stand you. But at least I remember why I loved you enough to marry you. You’re the only person who ever called me on my shit. Anyway, look, we bought it for one-point-four…and we’ve probably put in three, but with the slump I doubt we’d get more than a million.”

“That sounds about right,” Ben answered slowly. She was sounding much too reasonable.

“But when it’s totally done and the market recovers, you’ll be able to get way more than what’s in it.” That sounded more like Alice.

He sighed but didn’t say anything.

“What’s fair?” she asked, almost to herself. “You want to give me five-fifty and we’ll call it a day?”

She was being fair. Ben wasn’t used to it. He would have asked for that much if she’d offered to buy him out of his share. Half of what it was worth now.

“Let me see what I can get my hands on.”

“Oh, I don’t care when you get it to me. I’ll be happy to have it off my books. I’ll call the attorneys and tell them we worked out a settlement. They’ll be thrilled. Let’s say you’ve got five years to pay me off?” Alice laughed lightly. “I sound like a mafia wife!”

“You kind of do. So, what changed your mind?”

“What changed yours?”

He hated when she answered his questions with questions. “Never mind, Ali.”

“Oh, sorry, I forgot that you always hated that about me, the answering questions with questions thing. If you must know, I’ve met someone. And getting that call from Boppy Matthews’s office today just reminded me that, even if this guy turns out to be nothing special, I just want to be free, you know? In case? So”—Ben could practically see her shrugging across town—“I figured it was time to cut my losses. I mean…that sounds mean, calling you one of my losses, but you know what I mean, right?”

“I know what you mean,” Ben said over a laugh. “I’ll call my lawyer, and you call yours. They can draw up the paperwork. Five hundred and fifty thousand over five years shouldn’t be a problem. And then we’ll be done.” Ben thought about asking Alice about the new guy she was seeing and then realized he really didn’t want to know.

“Okay. I’ll wait to hear back from both attorneys, then I’ll call Boppy’s office and tell them they can go ahead with all your choices and take my name off the project.” Alice exhaled into the phone. “Wow. Done. Right. I’ll see you around, then. Bye, Ben.”

“Bye, Alice.” He put the receiver back in the cradle of the black desk phone and stared at it. His marriage was really over. There had been so many parts of the ending. The beginning of the end—the long silences, the skeptical looks. The middle of the end—wrangling with the lawyers and the physical dividing of objects, the moving out. Maybe it was all that Churchill nonsense, but that conversation really felt like the end of the end.

Ben got up and went to see the next patient waiting in room four. With any luck, he’d be able to put off calling Claire for another few days.

Friday afternoon, Boppy stormed into the group office on the main floor of the townhouse. “Claire, what did you do?” Her voice was full of disbelief.

All four women looked up from their desks. Claire felt the blood drain out of her face. She stood up at her desk. “I—I’m not sure. Whatever it is, I’ll try to fix it. Is it something terrible? I’m so sorry—”

Roberta, Hilary, and Erin quickly turned their attention—or at least their gazes—back toward their computer screens and pretended to be furiously interested in what they were working on.

Boppy shook a sheaf of work orders in her hand. “This is unbelievable. This project has been the thorn in the side of this organization for nearly two years. And you stroll in and—POOF!” Boppy snapped her fingers. “It’s all resolved.”

Claire still couldn’t tell if Boppy was angry or pleased.

“I—I’m sorry. I still don’t know—”

“The Pinckney project, you wonderful fabulous woman, you!” Boppy’s face bloomed into a picture of relieved happiness. “I was on the verge of telling that horrible woman that it was just not going to happen, and then I come back from one of the most frustrating meetings in Houston to find this on my desk. You are a miracle worker. I’ve made reservations for a table for you—and a friend, if you like—at The Spotted Pig for tonight. Go have fun. On me. Take Monday off. Hell, take the whole week off. Great work.” Boppy tossed the pile of approved work orders onto Claire’s desk and strolled out of the group office with a happy shake of her head.

After all four women listened to Boppy’s footsteps climb the stairs and once they were sure she was out of earshot, Roberta made a soft wolf whistle. “What the hell?”

Hilary jumped up. “What’d you do?”

Erin smiled and swiveled in her chair to face Claire. “Well?”

Claire looked down at the work orders she and Ben had gone over last weekend. All of them were stamped with Boppy’s approval and a printout of an email from Alice Pinckney to Boppy Matthews was clipped to the whole bundle:

Boppy,

Ben has offered to buy me out. For all future correspondence, he is the sole owner of Rockledge Farm. Legal docs to follow.

Best,

Alice

Hilary read over Claire’s shoulder. “Wow. Maybe you have a future in divorce arbitration.”

Claire laughed and tried to keep the seemingly ever-present blush from her cheeks. “I don’t think it had anything to do with me. Just lucky timing. Maybe Alice Pinckney finally had enough or something.” Claire continued to stare at all the work orders and reread the email in stunned silence. A call was coming in on the general line that all four of them shared. Roberta picked it up.

“Boppy Matthews Interiors. May I help you?”

Hilary returned to her desk and started straightening things up before leaving for the day. It was after five, and Claire thought she might convince Bronte to have the celebratory dinner with her before her sister-in-law headed back to London in a few days.

“Yes, Dr. Hayek. As a matter of fact, she’s sitting right here.” Roberta’s voice had the slightest hint of provocation.