Riverside Park Read online

2

  What Happened to the Darenbrook Marriage

  AFTER THE HUMILIATING defeat of her first marriage, falling in love with Jackson Darenbrook had seemed close to a miracle. Cassy remembered the day Jack realized he was in love with her very well. They’d been arguing (they had always been arguing in the early days of the fledgling network), and suddenly Jackson stopped talking and stared at Cassy with a sense of dawning revelation. Cassy knew then how he felt about her. And in that moment she knew that she had been falling for him, as well.

  She was forty-four when they married and Jackson forty-nine. His family and friends were astounded by the changes in him by the time he stood at the altar. “He’s a happy man, again,” Cordelia told her. “Thank God he’s a happy man again.”

  Cassy took her vows as sacred. She felt blessed and reborn to have such a commitment come to her at that point in her life, and she was determined to appreciate every nuance of it. With the exception of ongoing problems with Lydia, those first couple of years were blissful. When not traveling on business—which both did rather extensively—they were together at West End (the corporate headquarters of Darenbrook Communications on the Hudson River at Sixty-fifth Street), here at home on Riverside Drive, or at the house in Litchfield. They sailed and skied and traveled continents; they worked out together and often spent downtime just lazying around, reading newspapers, watching TV or movies, eating good food and making love.

  Cassy felt loved, respected and redeemed.

  She never tried to compete with the memory of Barbara, Jackson’s first wife, because she knew she could never win in comparison to a saint who had died in her thirties.

  Henry came home for brief periods while in college and he got on very well with Jackson. Kevin appeared erratically. They were married about two and a half years when Lydia tried to kill herself. Jack was away so Cassy hurried downtown to the emergency room of St.Vincent’s where the police told her Lydia had slit her wrists and then had been walking around Sheridan Square. The doctor said Lydia was on a combination of alcohol, painkillers and cocaine.

  Lydia was crying for her dead mother when Cassy saw her. Cassy tried to soothe her, explaining her father was rushing back to New York and would be here as soon as he could, that her father loved her so much—

  Something akin to The Exorcist then occurred. Lydia’s tears vanished and her eyes took on an eerie glitter while she told Cassy what a fool she was, what a stupid idiot she was. Didn’t she know that Jackson was incapable of caring for anyone except himself? That he had conned her like he conned everyone? And the only reason he had married Cassy was that Aunt Cordie Lou had thrown in the towel?

  “Don’t you get it? He married you so you’d deal with me and Kev! You are so fucking stupid! You’re a glorified housekeeper, taking care of things while he runs around getting his rocks off!”

  Cassy gratefully agreed with the doctor that Lydia be held in psychiatric for observation for the three days they could legally keep her. Or at least until her father arrived.

  Jackson ended up not flying straight home but continued on his trip because, he said, Cassy seemed to have matters so well in hand.

  In retrospect those two and a half years of marital bliss had been a gift from the heavens above. If Cassy’s world had exploded any sooner, she wasn’t sure what would have happened to her.

  “I came to say goodbye,” the outgoing publisher of the Darenbrook newspaper in Charleston told Cassy, coming into her office at West End not long after Lydia’s suicide attempt. “I handed in my resignation. I’m going to be the publisher of a new magazine in D.C.”

  “Well, I’m happy for you and miserable for us,” Cassy said, coming around from behind her desk, holding out her hand. “Congratulations, Sheila.”

  “Thank you.” Sheila glanced back over her shoulder at the door. She was an attractive woman, in her early forties, with dark hair and green eyes. “Do you think we can talk a minute?”

  “Sure,” Cassy said, going to close her office door, hoping Sheila was not going to try to pick her brain about how to effectively compete with the D.C. magazine Darenbrook Communications published.

  They had scarcely sat down when Sheila burst into tears. Cassy didn’t know her very well and felt a little embarrassed for her. She got up to get Sheila some Kleenex and thought, I hope nothing’s happened to her child. Sheila had brought her little girl to West End on bring-your-child-to-work day the year before.

  “I’m sorry,” Sheila said, trying to pull herself together. “It’s just been so stressful.”

  “I understand. It was hard when I left my old job at WST.”

  “You are such a wonderful person, Cassy,” Sheila said then, sounding miserable.

  “I don’t know about that,” Cassy murmured. “Do you think you might have made the wrong decision, Sheila? That you’d like to stay on with us after all?”

  Sheila looked at first stunned and then deeply pained. She brought the tissues up to press against her mouth.

  “I might be able to help,” Cassy said gently.

  Sheila slammed her fist on her knee. “I can’t stand it! I can’t stand by and watch how he’s deceiving you!”

  It had hit her like a physical blow to the diaphragm. Cassy couldn’t breathe and then an icy fear started down her spine. She gripped the arms of the chair and forced herself to resume breathing, to sit there and breathe, and to listen.

  Sheila told her. That she and Jackson had been having an affair. For a while. Since before he had married Cassy, in fact, while Sheila had still been married. She told Cassy about traveling with Jack on business trips, about meeting him once for a quick tryst in the side yard outside Cordelia’s mansion in Hilleanderville between dinner and dessert.

  “For a long time I thought it was just me, and then you, too,” she told Cassy. “I finally wised up when my secretary warned me that she would probably be leaving soon because, even though she had only slept with Jackson a few times, she was sure he was the man for her. Then she asked for my opinion of how long I thought it would take for him to divorce you.”

  Cassy excused herself, went in her private bathroom, quietly threw up, rinsed out her mouth and came back into her office.

  “It’s almost every day,” Sheila said, starting to cry again. “He takes whatever attractive woman he can find. I don’t know, maybe he buys them off, I don’t know.”

  Jackson didn’t deny a single thing Sheila had said. His eyes only took on deep, weary sadness. When Cassy had finished and was waiting for an answer, he took her hand, squeezed it and held on to it. “But it’s you I love,” he said simply. “That’s why I married you.”

  She did not let herself cry. “Then why, Jack?” Oh, she had thought she knew why and it burned. He obviously found her sexually inadequate. (“How many times do you think a guy wants to screw Snow White?” Michael used to say.)

  He had no explanation for his sexual exploits except to say that it had nothing to do with his love for her.

  What alcohol is to the alcoholic, Cassy’s therapist told her, sex is to the sexaholic. Then she went on about endorphins and about the brain chemistry of the drinker, the drug abuser, the gambler, the bulimic—and the sexaholic.

  Cassy had held her face in her lap. “You’re telling me I’ve done it again? I’ve married another addict?”

  Like alcohol, the therapist told her, there was treatment for the disorder. Even rehabs specifically to treat it.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Jackson said when Cassy asked him to see someone, a specialist that had been recommended. “I mean, not right now, Cass. I need to focus on this encyclopedia deal. I promise I won’t—you know—until I go.”

  They continued to share the same bedroom in New York and Connecticut, and even started having sex again on the proviso he wore a condom until he was cleared of any possible sexual diseases. The encyclopedia deal had dragged on and he kept putting off going to the counselor but Cassy remained hopeful, particularly when after six months the tests
came back negative. Lydia went off her rocker again in Mexico and they went there as a team this time, a united front. They resumed a more active sex life, no longer using a condom.

  During this period she remembered why she had fallen in love with him. Jackson was infinitely kind and funny and endlessly interested in anything he sensed might interest her. He was also very affectionate, an element that had been sorely lacking in her first marriage, and they often held hands and almost always lay down together while reading or watching TV. He could also be extremely thoughtful about little things. He always tried to keep the newspaper fresh for her because he knew how much she liked a crisp paper. And if he had a cold and was coughing, he would quietly take himself off to a guest room in the night so as not to keep her awake.

  He said he thought there was no need for them to go to counseling anymore. Didn’t she agree? That things were good? They were happy? She had hesitated but then agreed, mostly because he had said this on a Friday and she didn’t wish to ruin their weekend sailing.

  When Jackson came back from a meeting in Atlanta the following week she knew. She knew because he had seemed distant and depressed and could scarcely look her in the eye. She said as much out loud while they were lying in bed, waiting to fall asleep. He said she was crazy, he hadn’t done anything and snuggled closer. Instinct prevailed and she sat bolt upright in bed and told him she did not believe him. He protested he was too tired for this tonight. Then she got out of bed, wearing one of the red (ugh) nighties he liked her to wear, and said they might as well have it out, because if he was not going to counseling then he was moving into the guest room.

  “Fine,” he said in the darkness.

  “Fine what?”

  “Fine, believe what you want to believe, Cassy, but I don’t need a therapist so I’m not going. If you want to sue me for divorce over it, then go ahead. I’m tired and need some sleep.”

  She hesitated, standing there in the dark, crossing her arms against the cold and feeling warm tears rolling down her face. (In the first years of their marriage she had only cried tears of gratitude. She had felt so good about the world, about herself, about their future. How had she not seen this side of him?)

  “I mean it, Jack, if you won’t go to counseling…” She wasn’t sure how to finish the threat. She wasn’t sure how she wanted to finish it. They had already built so many things together, their families, their homes, the network. And what would she say? How would she explain? To Henry, to everybody? Oh, and would Michael ever get a good laugh out of this!

  “I’m sleeping in the guest room,” Jackson announced, sighing heavily as he hauled himself out of bed.

  She let him go and took a sleeping pill to knock herself out. The next morning when he came in to get dressed, she told him that if he valued their marriage at all he would at least go with her for counseling.

  “I love you,” he said, frowning at her. “But I’m not going.”

  “So you’re saying that our marriage is over?”

  “I think that’s up to you,” he told her, walking into his dressing room.

  That was where they had left it six years ago. If she hadn’t been so adverse to yet another public humiliation she would have left him then. The women, she had come to realize, had never stopped for more than three months in their entire marriage. A year later she sought the advice of a divorce attorney but then Henry announced he wanted to get married and the thought of that, of having to participate in the celebrations by herself in front of Michael and his young wife, had been too much. To his credit, Jackson had acted the role of the perfect husband to a T.

  Cassy was moving toward leaving him again when Maria had announced she was pregnant. Henry was so happy and scared and elated that Cassy didn’t have the heart to do anything that would further worry him. And Henry would have worried about her. (If Henry had said one more time, “I’m so glad you have somebody, too, Mom,” she thought she’d lose her mind.) So with Jackson acting the part of devoted and attentive husband (which reassured Henry and incensed Michael, whose second marriage had since broken up), and with Cassy acting the part of devoted and attentive wife (which elated her in-laws, who also happened to make up the Board of Directors of Darenbrook Communications), Cassy didn’t know how she could ever get out of it. Or if she even really wanted to. So much, it seemed, relied on their pretense.

  Perhaps the worst aspect of the situation was that their marriage was not always such a pretense. They still had their moments. Cassy wasn’t particularly proud of the fact that, on occasion, usually around some family event, they would look at each other with great fondness and sometimes, sometimes, they would make love.

  With a condom, of course.

  This last part, that once in a while they still had sex, remained the Darenbrooks’ special little secret, offering a little ghostly reminder of what Cassy had hoped their marriage would be.

  Jack swore he still loved her more than anyone. Since there still were so many women coming and going, Cassy could not see how this could be true. She did not say the same to him, though, that she loved him best. Because she didn’t. She was very much in love with someone else, but that relationship was fraught with obstacles of its own. Still, it was wonderful to love and be loved.

  Somehow Cassy was going to have to figure all of this out.

  3

  Amanda Miller Stewart’s Family, a Pretty Girl, and an Attentive Young Man

  THE PRETTY GIRL lived in their building and came and went at odd hours. Amanda knew this because their eight-month-old precious accident, Grace, was cutting her teeth and sometimes in the wee hours Amanda would take her down to the lobby so she could talk to the concierge and the night security man while walking the baby back and forth, patting her little back. (It was best, Amanda had found, to let the children’s nanny, Madame Moliere, sleep through the night so she could get their two older children—Emily, age ten, and Teddy, age eight—organized in the morning.)

  Grace had begun to fret at three-thirty in the morning on Thanksgiving, and since Amanda’s parents and Howard’s mother were staying with them, Amanda had quickly thrown on slacks and a sweater to scoop Grace up and pay a visit to the lobby. About fifteen minutes later a cab had pulled up to the entrance of the building and the pretty girl had come stumbling out of it. She had been rather astonishingly drunk. She was not as tall as Amanda, but taller than average, and had lovely dark brown hair. She also had a sleek body that only a girl in her twenties can possess. The girl had sworn under her breath as she banged her shoulder on the doorway, but did so in a manner that told Amanda the pretty girl was both well-spoken and probably well-educated.

  Of course, if the girl lived in their building Amanda knew she must be a young woman of means.

  The pretty girl had then almost collided with Amanda and Grace. She had reeled back, her large brown eyes trying to focus. She had looked at the baby and then back at Amanda. “You’re always stuck with the kids,” she’d said. “You should make Howard do more.”

  The night security guard, who was an off-duty NYPD police officer (who once showed Amanda’s son the derringer he carried in his boot), had stepped forward to say he would see the girl upstairs to her apartment. Just as the elevator doors were closing, Amanda had heard the girl say, “Thank God I don’t have any kids.”

  Amanda didn’t speak of it—the fact that the pretty girl evidently knew her husband on a first-name basis—until they had returned from the Thanksgiving Day Parade and she and Howard were in the kitchen trying to pull things together for dinner.

  “That must have been Celia,” Howard said, squinting through the blast of oven heat, trying to see the meat thermometer.

  “Celia who?” Amanda asked.

  “Honey, I can’t read this thing.”

  “Rosanne thinks we should sneak in a turkey with a whatchamacallit,” she said, looking over his shoulder into the oven, careful to hold her hair back. She still wore hers long, basically because her husband liked it that way. (Sometimes
when Amanda turned around on the street or in a store she could see the surprise in people’s eyes that she was forty-four and not twenty-four. She had such beautiful hair still.)

  “Fresh-killed turkeys from Ohio don’t come with whatchamacallits.”

  “I know, darling,” she said. “I think Rosanne meant that, when your mother isn’t looking, we should just switch turkeys.”

  “But then it wouldn’t taste awful and she’d know it wasn’t the one she brought and then she’ll start crying.”

  This was not the first time they had discussed the mysterious fresh-killed turkey Mrs. Stewart insisted on bringing with her from Ohio every year, or the meat thermometer she extracted from wads of tissue paper as though it were an irreplaceable heirloom. But Amanda felt bad for Mrs. Stewart, who was a widow and lonely, and wanted to make her mother-in-law’s visits as pleasant as possible.

  “Well, it is Thanksgiving,” she murmured. “We can do it once a year.”

  Howard muttered something and used a dish towel to shove the turkey back into the oven and slam the door. “Okay, it’s done.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Amanda, we go through this—”

  “Please just cut into it, Howard. We don’t want to poison anybody.”

  They looked at each other and started to laugh. Howard slung the dish towel over his shoulder and moved over to Amanda, sliding his hands around her waist. “You must be exhausted.”

  “I am tired,” she admitted, resting her head on his shoulder as he pulled her closer. She used to have such a narrow waist it was hard for Amanda to let Howard feel what she was carrying around now. She had been watching what she ate and exercised like a mad woman, but after Grace she could not seem to pull herself together like she had after Emily and Teddy. “How do you know this Celia?” she asked quietly from his shoulder.

  “That girl? She’s a bartender at Captain Cook’s.”

  “A bartender?” Amanda raised her head to look at him.