The Idea of Him. Holly Peterson
furrow her brow and then break into a giant smile once she got the joke. Wade released her, and she snuggled back up beside me as he pulled off his work shirt and tie in one big motion, throwing both into the hamper.
That’s when a very strange thing happened. A casino chip with Five Thousand Dollars written on it fell out of his shirt pocket. I wouldn’t necessarily have noticed had Wade not dove for the chip like a linebacker. I didn’t let on that I’d seen it or the more alarming amount; instead I made a mental note of his unusually athletic attempt to hide it. Something inside made my heart break for no concrete reason except that it felt suspicious.
Once he got up off the floor and surreptitiously stuffed the chip into his khaki pants, I looked at my husband like I didn’t even know him. He grabbed Lucy and carried her back to her room sack-of-potatoes style.
I stood in the doorway of the bedroom in our cramped New York apartment mulling over that chip. We didn’t have five thousand dollars to throw around or to keep in our pants’ pockets. Wade was the editor of a flashy newsmagazine, but that didn’t mean we had a comfortable amount of savings. New York is like that. Everyone here except the Wall Street, one-percenter crowd is living on a financial edge where close to nothing is left over. My PR firm salary combined with his editor salary didn’t pay for much beyond a small apartment and two private-school tuitions. Five thousand dollars really mattered to our bottom line.
And Wade wasn’t a gambler. He didn’t hide things from me. We were opposites, but we came together at a safe place in the middle where I harbored a notion that trust was key. When I first met Wade, he had six people glued onto him like a snake charmer and still had enough juice to lure me across a room and into his comforting spell. And despite the distraction of a persistent flame from my past, and to be honest, partially because of that flame, I leaped into a frenetic New York City life with Wade, covering my eyes and holding my breath.
I heard Lucy screaming from the bedroom, “Daddy, air lift!” I entered and saw Wade hoisting her skyward, missing the light fixture by mere inches.
“Wade. Please! You’re going to hurt her on the light! And make sure you give Blake some attention before bedtime; he’s upset over …”
“Who gets every joy of the earth?” he asked as he threw Lucy up again, giving me the eye.
“Lucy!” she shrieked, falling back into his strong hands.
“And who was the best caterpillar in the show?”
“Daddy, there’s only ONE caterpillar!”
“And what girl does Daddy love best in the world?”
“Lucy!” They collapsed onto the bed, and Wade tickled her until she yelled out for him to stop, happy tears streaming down her face. Wade cradled her in his arms for a few more moments, singing a little song he had made up when she was a baby, then turned to me and held my face in his hands, dispelling any residual wifely annoyance over the casino chip I preferred to ask him about later.
“Allie, I know all you do to make the kids happy—making her costume so intensely the night before and keeping all your work pressures out of the kids’ lives—and I love you for it.” He kissed my nose. “And don’t worry about Blake; I know you’re worrying about him too. I see that concern in your face.”
“Yes, I’m worried about him. They don’t include him in so many of the little things his group does all day. All because of one kid who loves the power to exclude. I want so badly to call Jeremy’s mom again and—”
“You cannot do that again. No way. She is going to tell the kid exactly what you said on the call even though she promises to handle it discreetly. And that’ll just make Jeremy ostracize Blake more, and then you get busted for interfering. Fourth grade is rough, but he’s got to learn to handle his friendships on his own.”
“Wade, I know you are right, but his circle is edging him out again, and I don’t know how a nine-year-old is supposed to figure that out. They went to get snacks at the vending machine again at recess and told him he couldn’t come.”
“Well, I’m going to help him man up a little, and then he’ll work this out for himself.”
Another thing I loved about Wade: he knew exactly what our kids needed when they were down. What woman doesn’t love a man for that? But that casino chip would pop up again and, in time, signal a transgression no wife could ignore.
The next morning, I rushed to see my boss for fifteen minutes before a client meeting at New York’s famed Tudor Room. It didn’t help my mood that I was meeting him at a restaurant that operated more like a private club for high-octane achievers than a pleasant place for lunch. Absolutely nothing in my makeup or past experiences prepared me to hold my own in the ring with the wealthy gladiators who lunched there regularly; I just happened to be employed by one of them. I walked into the restaurant lobby with a confident stride, wondering if the people watching my entrance pegged me as an imposter.
My boss, Murray Hillsinger, a toadlike man, had already positioned his large bottom smack in the middle of a coveted corner banquette, twisting his jowls left and right to survey the scene from his primo lily pad. He was very proud to have his square corner banquette (even though it wasn’t as prestigious as the center round tables—those went to higher rollers with huger titles, companies, and net worths). I took a deep breath and walked over, smoothing my hair as I did so, trying to exude professional acumen, the only attribute I could for sure hold on to.
“Allie, come here. Glad you came before my lunch partner shows up.” He patted the leather next to him. “You’re going to do fine, kid.”
Like so many guys named Murray, it seems, he grew up poor on the backstreets—in this case, Long Island City, Queens. His nose was crooked from one too many fistfights, and his large forehead was now crowned with an unfortunate shoe-polish comb-over. The expensive loafers he sported were not designed for feet that caused the leather to crack in a fault line next to his big fat pinkie toe.
I moved my way around the seat on Murray’s right. “Relax. It’s going to go fine,” he told me as he chomped on a large cauliflower cluster drenched in green dip and roughed up the back of my hair like I was his kid sister. I was a kid when I started this job a decade ago in my early twenties, and neither he, nor I, to my dismay, ever got past that initial dynamic.
Georges—the famous-in-his-own-right maître d’ of the Tudor Room—rushed to the table, an invisible cloud of his cologne preceding him. Georges ladled more dip into the ramekin dish as he asked, “Would you rather I pour the sauce on your tie directly, or should I allow you to stain it yourself?”
The very French Georges knew that the powerful always favor those employees willing to show jocular insubordination. I watched as he moved off into the room, slipping from table to table making clever, and often hilarious, asides to the assembled men and women who pretty much ran every major hedge fund, real estate empire, and media conglomerate in Manhattan.
Murray sat at the helm of the biggest public relations firm in New York, Hillsinger Consulting, hell-bent on saving the reputations of most of the people in this very room, many of them guilty as charged for causing the recurring economic downturns that trickled down and crippled the rest of us. The Tudor Room was a new hotspot for these powerful warriors who dined in packs, many having migrated from the more clubby Four Seasons Grill Room. The new place was part lunch spot and part womblike secret society where they all felt cozy in their amniotic bubble—this protective coating thickening ever since they had been targeted by America for causing the biggest economic downfall since the Great Depression.
“Order something, Allie!” Murray barked, always solicitous in his own special way.
“Thanks,