Killing Monica (14 page)

“Henry,” Pandy said. “He probably doesn’t have a thing in his house.” Carefully she tucked the prosciutto—for it
was
a whole prosciutto after all—under her arm like a linebacker with a ball.

“He’s on Gay Street. Let’s pick him up and then go back to my place.” She hurried to catch up with Jonny, leading him past a redbrick wall that led to a tiny, curved street.

The snow was nearly to Pandy’s knees. Her feet felt the way up the small stoop of a three-story brick house with a shiny black door. She lifted the heavy brass knocker and banged three times.

Henry opened the door. He hadn’t been lying about the smoking jacket, Pandy noted, suddenly annoyed.

“Can I help you?” he asked drolly, eyeing Jonny, who was heaving behind her.

“Oh, come on, Henry. Move aside,” Pandy said. She pushed past him into the tiny kitchen. “The internet’s gone out. And Jonny has a prosciutto.”

“And lots of other food as well. We were going to go to Pandy’s place and I was going to cook. We came to pick you up,” Jonny said, in a voice that displayed his willingness to please.

“We didn’t want you to be alone,” Pandy added coyly.

“No. You didn’t want
you
to be alone.” Henry gave Jonny a strange look, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

“Come on, Henry,” Pandy said, grabbing Henry’s cashmere coat off the hook and handing it to him. “And you, too, Jonny. You need something on your head.”

“I insist,” Henry said, handing Jonny an old wool cap. “I refuse to be the only man wearing a hat,” he added.

Back at Pandy’s loft, they had a magnificent meal involving figs, tiny langoustines, and an herb-infused cheese soufflé that was so good, Pandy made Jonny promise to make it for her again.

And after more wine, they began playing cards. Poker, Jonny’s favorite game. He took a hundred dollars off Henry, but graciously returned it. Henry, however, wouldn’t think of taking it back.

The storm blew out to sea around midnight. Henry was still trying to clean up when Pandy was finally able to shoo him out.

Pandy could tell that Henry wasn’t as enamored of Jonny as she was. And vice versa: At one point during the evening, Jonny had pulled her aside and confessed that Henry was the strangest man he’d ever met. “It’s like he’s from another era,” he said. “Like he learned how to be a man from watching old black-and-white movies.”

Pandy had laughed.

“You know what your problem is?” Jonny whispered in her ear as the door closed behind Henry.

“What?”

“You like everyone.”

“Oh, Jonny,” Pandy said. She had a feeling he was referring to Henry, but she brushed it off. Besides, what Jonny said was true. She liked most kinds of people, although she didn’t often admit it. Jonny, she realized, was already making her see her best self.

She had been wrong about him, she thought as he laid her down on the old leather couch and began removing her clothing. He was not an evil scumbag intent on hurting women. He was the opposite: a worshipper of women who lived only for the woman’s pleasure.

And then she found out what that “never having a dissatisfied customer” comment was all about.

It wasn’t about Jonny’s penis, which was perfectly adequate. It was about the vagina. And how Jonny knew exactly what to do with one.

When he stuck his tongue inside her, it felt like her soul had flown straight up into the universe.

And after that, like a little slave girl, she’d willingly done whatever he requested.

Jonny spent the night, and basically never left.

On their fourth evening, Pandy convinced him to skip out of Chou Chou early so she could make dinner for him.

“Should I have brought a doggie bag?” he asked jokingly, eyeing the ingredients she’d put out on the counter.

“Not unless you consider yourself a dog,” she replied, breaking the tips off a pile of French green beans.

“What am I having? Besides you?” he asked, coming up behind her to wriggle his hands down the front of her jeans.

She leaned back into him. “Lamb chops,” she moaned. “With mushrooms. In a heavy cream sauce.”

“Sounds French,” he murmured into her ear, turning her around to face him.

“It is. I learned it from my French roommate.”

“When did you have a French roommate?” he asked in between kisses.

“When I was in school. In Paris,” she added, as if somehow he should have known this.

“You went to school in Paris?” Jonny sounded impressed.

“Only for a couple of months,” she said, pulling his shirt over his head. “My sister was in Amsterdam, so I went to France to be near her. I learned one recipe while I was there—”

Jonny lifted her onto the counter and pushed her legs apart. Pandy fell back like a rag doll.

Fifteen minutes later, legs still slightly shaky, Pandy went back to her cooking. She browned the lamb chops, then added butter and sliced fresh mushrooms to the juices in the pan. When the mushrooms were browned, she poured in half a cup of heavy cream. She stirred briskly and poured the mushroom cream sauce over the lamb chops.

The meal was, as her Parisian roommate had guaranteed, what was known in France as “le closure.” Meaning it was the meal that closed the deal between you and your potential husband.

Sure enough, the next morning Jonny shook Pandy awake.

“What?” Pandy gasped, suddenly afraid. Jonny was glaring at her as if she’d committed some heinous crime.

“I can’t keep doing this,” Jonny said, with real irritation or fake, Pandy couldn’t remember. Because all she
could
remember was what he said next: “I think I’m in love with you. We’re too old to live together, so we’re going to have to get married.”

“My son is marrying Monica!” MJ proclaimed to everyone and anyone who would listen.

The next few months were a whirlwind of bliss.

For once, the man in her life was saying and doing exactly the right things. Without her having to prompt him! It was a miracle, Pandy exclaimed.

Indeed, she never tired of reminding people of the wondrous fact of Jonny. “I was convinced that since I’d been so lucky in my career, I didn’t deserve true love as well. I never dared to hope that I could have both; that true love could actually happen to
me
.” And on and on she went, proclaiming herself one of the converted. Love did conquer all, after all.

Once again, Pandy was the toast of the town. And so, too, was Monica. “Monica” was finally getting married.

There was only one person, it seemed, who disapproved. Henry was being a real Eeyore about the whole marriage, insisting that she and Jonny were sure to end up like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Pandy brushed this away, reminded of Jonny’s comment regarding Henry’s being old-fashioned.

And so, at ten o’clock on a cloudless morning in late September, Pandy and Jonny got married. The mayor performed the ceremony. Pandy wore a chic white lace suit with three-quarter-length sleeves and gorgeous white patent leather Mary Jane shoes. Then they all had a long, boozy lunch at Chou Chou.

Only sixty people were invited.

The wedding was exactly what MJ had promised it would be: small, discreet, intimate, and very meaningful.

P
EOPLE ALWAYS
said the first year of marriage was the hardest, but for Pandy and Jonny, the opposite was true.

There was the sex, of course. A wink, a stare, a nod of the head, and off they’d be, in the bathroom at a party or in the alley behind the restaurant. Once, they did it in the back of some billionaire’s car.

Sometimes it was shameful and downright tawdry. Like when the taxi driver made them get out of the cab. Afterward, they’d gone home and made love contritely, unable to look each other in the eye.

It was, as Pandy explained sheepishly to her friends, “One of those things. You try to stop, of course, because it’s so embarrassing. But then you can’t.”

“Is it unseemly?” she’d ask Jonny.

“Babe,” Jonny would reassure her, “they’re just jealous. We’ve got something they never will.”

This went on for weeks. Once again, Henry was not a fan. “You’re not writing,” he reminded her sharply. “You’ve written no new Monica pages since you got married.”

This was true, and Pandy didn’t know how to justify it. Jonny seemed to think he actually
had
married Monica, at least in the sense that he expected Pandy to stay out late with him several nights a week. He had yet to comprehend that in real life, “Monica” had to work. But it was too early in their marriage to disappoint him.

So she disappointed Henry instead.

“Monica, Monica, Monica,” she’d say with a sigh. “I’m so sick of Monica. Can’t I live my life as
me
for a moment?”

“Just give me twenty pages of Monica. Please,” Henry would beg.

And, feeling guilty, Pandy would promise to deliver pages by the end of the week.

But then her love for Jonny would once again get in the way, and forgetting about her promises to Henry, she’d put her energies into her husband instead.

For at last, just like in a fairy tale, after all those long years of uncertainty about marriage, career, and money, it seemed her life had actually worked out. Gone were the nights when she would wake at four a.m., tossing and turning and fretting about her future. Now, if she awoke at all, she’d feel the glorious heat from Jonny’s naked body and remember that all was well.

Indeed, even when they weren’t together, Jonny was like Peter Pan’s shadow, sewn onto her shoe by Wendy. She couldn’t shake him; at times it felt as if she had truly absorbed some of his molecules. She couldn’t pick up a lemon in the supermarket without wondering what Jonny would think of it; couldn’t pass a cute puppy on the street without wishing Jonny were there to admire it with her.

Of course, it wasn’t completely perfect.

There were some things they’d never be able to do together—like swim in the ocean. Jonny, it turned out, had never learned to swim, which seemed inexplicable to Pandy but perfectly reasonable to him. Lots of the kids he’d grown up with couldn’t swim—he hadn’t even seen a real pool until he was sixteen, when a hot older waitress had invited him for the weekend to her house in Hampton Bays.

Nor did they share similar tastes.

Jonny had come with a storage locker full of contemporary furniture, along with twenty or so plastic containers of his junk. The furniture was the kind of cheapish high-end box store stuff that a bachelor would buy, perhaps anticipating that when he married, he would get rid of it in deference to his wife’s tastes.

But Jonny didn’t want to part with one piece of it, and when Pandy asked him to and he refused, she realized she was already beginning to take on the dreaded “nagging wife” role. Vowing not to become a fishwife, she turned a blind eye to the furniture.

Unfortunately, what couldn’t be ignored were some of the matters of basic housekeeping. It turned out that along with his other masculine qualities, Jonny possessed that male propensity to completely overlook his own mess. You’d think with all the space in her loft, Jonny could have chosen one corner in which to dump his dirty laundry. But he couldn’t. Instead, he spread it all around like a dog marking his territory.

She’d tried scolding him, and once even picked up all his laundry and dumped it on his side of the bed. But Jonny feigned ignorance and lay down on top of it, making her feel that she was being petty. And so, instead of complaining, she reminded herself that love was about how you framed your partner in words. She decided that the words “Jonny” and “flaw” would never appear in the same sentence—even if that sentence was only in her mind. And so, when married friends expressed dismay with their husbands, Pandy affected a sort of astonishment, followed by the sentiment that she must be incredibly lucky, because Jonny was not like that
at all
.

This didn’t stop her from complaining to Henry, however.

“Does that dirty sock stuff still go on in marriages?” Henry asked over the phone. “How incredibly dull. How’s Monica coming?”

“I’m feeling a little boxed in,” Pandy said, eyeing a stack of plastic containers.

“Boxed in? How is that possible? You have nothing but space in that loft.”

“You know how men are. They come with
stuff
,” Pandy whined.

“Perhaps you should have considered that before you married him,” Henry said sharply.

“That’s not how a woman thinks when a man—a man like Jonny, by the way—says he’s in love with her and wants to get married,” Pandy replied.

Henry laughed. “My god, girl. What has happened to your brain?”

Little did Pandy know that she would soon be asking herself this very question.

Jonny wanted a restaurant-quality kitchen in the apartment, and Pandy agreed. She wanted him to be happy; after all, he was Jonny Balaga, the world-famous chef. Of
course
they must have one.

She assumed that the term meant high-end appliances. Only when the plans were drawn did she understand that for Jonny, “restaurant-quality kitchen” meant the kind of kitchen you would find in an actual restaurant.

The kind of kitchen that cost four hundred thousand dollars.

“But so what?” Pandy said to Henry when she stopped by his office to sign some papers. “What’s money, when it comes to love?”

“And is
Jonny
paying for his kitchen?” Henry asked.

Pandy blushed. “Jonny is paying for half. I’m paying the other half. I mean, really, Henry,” she said, reacting to his horrified expression. “It
is
my loft.”

“That’s exactly the point. Jonny moved into a space you’ve already paid for. Therefore, he should be paying for the renovations.”

“Everyone says the biggest mistake in marriage is keeping track. It’s not going to be fifty-fifty all the time,” Pandy admonished him.

“That’s exactly what worries me. Please tell me you had him sign a prenup.”

“Of course I did!” Pandy exclaimed.

She had never lied to Henry before. And certainly not about something so important. On the other hand, it wasn’t Henry’s business. And if she ever, for one minute, believed that Jonny would screw her over financially—well, she never would have married him! Besides, Jonny’s career was booming. Some men from Vegas had contacted him, and wanted to meet him in LA the next month.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to Vegas?” Pandy had asked.

“That’s not how these things work.” Jonny smiled at her like she was an adorable nitwit.

“How’s the book coming?” Henry asked again two weeks later.

“I’m thinking a change of scenery might help,” Pandy said, feeling guilty.

“Good idea. Why don’t you go to Wallis? Work undisturbed for a bit,” Henry said. Her childhood home was completely isolated.

“But then I couldn’t see Jonny every day!” she protested. “I was thinking more of LA. What do they call those pointy trees that are everywhere?”

“Cypress trees?”

“Yes. The cypress trees. I find them very inspiring. They always remind me of Joan Didion.”

Closing her ears to Henry’s protests, she flew off to LA with Jonny. They stayed at the Chateau Marmont, “in Monica’s new favorite room,” the desk clerk said, waving the key on its scarlet tassel as he led them down the brown-carpeted hallway to number 29. It held a white baby grand piano, and Jonny turned out to be a man who could play a little.

They had a ball, with Pandy staging intimate champagne evenings with her Hollywood pals during which Jonny played show tunes and everyone else sang.

And then, having heard they were in town, Peter Pepper himself called.

Pandy was shocked, but then pleasantly surprised when it turned out that PP was a huge fan of Jonny’s. A dinner for four was arranged on the terrace at the Chateau; PP was bringing his girlfriend. What was decidedly less pleasant was her identity: Lala Grinada.

Pandy couldn’t believe it. Lala, the very same actress who’d tried to steal Doug Stone to get even.

This, Pandy decided, was going to be interesting.

Naturally, Jonny and PP—who knew nothing of this history and would have dismissed it as stupid girl stuff if they had—got on like a house on fire. They had tennis, golf, and cigars in common. They had other men in common, guys with names like Sonny Bats and Tony Hammer. Pandy and Lala, meanwhile, had both nothing and too much in common.

SondraBeth was right about one thing, though: Lala was a snob. She and Pandy managed to studiously ignore each other throughout the entire dinner. It was an old British girls’ boarding school trick, and Pandy knew it well. Indeed, she might have managed to avoid talking to Lala at all if Jonny hadn’t gotten up to go to the bathroom, leaving her alone with the other two.

Since PP couldn’t be bothered to make conversation, he nudged Lala to speak. Lala wobbled her head on the stalk of her neck and said, “I’ve always thought Jonny was just
gorgeous
,” which meant something entirely different in British than it did in American.

Pandy smiled coldly. “Have you?”

And then, of course, she and Jonny ended up having their first fight.

Over Lala, naturally. Pandy was sure he’d begun flirting with Lala when he’d returned to the table. In the elevator going back to their room, she passionately informed him that if she ever saw him flirting with another woman again—well, he’d better watch out.

Then Jonny apologized and they had mind-blowing sex on the terrace, where it was just possible that other guests might have caught a peek.

And if they had? They would have been “envious,” Jonny said.

Afterward, back in bed and cuddled into the down pillows, Jonny kissed the top of her head. “We don’t ever have to see PP and Lala again if you don’t want to.” He yawned and rolled over. “They’re silly people anyway. They’re not real. Not like we are, babe.”

“No, they’re not,” she agreed, curving herself behind him and stroking the striated muscles of his shoulder.

She loved him so much then.

They returned to New York and got back to work. And this time, it really felt like they were partners on the same track. By nine a.m., they were both up and ready to go. She with her Earl Grey tea with lemon, seated in front of the computer, ready to begin another day with Monica; he with his protein drink and Nike warm-up pants, preparing to head to the gym.

Monica was rolling along at last. Nevertheless, Pandy felt a vague frustration. Marriage, she believed, had grounded and deepened her, and she wanted her work to reflect this as well.

“Of course I want this to be the best Monica book ever. But there’s so much else I can write,” she said one night when they were in the kitchen and Jonny was cooking.

“Is there?” Jonny asked as he rinsed some asparagus.

She explained how she’d always wanted to be taken seriously, to be considered a “literary writer.”

“Then do it,” Jonny said fervently. “Be literary. Be whatever you want, babe.”

“It means taking a chance,” she said. “It means I’ll probably make less money.”

Jonny dismissed this. “If you want something, you’ve got to take it.”

“Huh?” Pandy said.

“You don’t
ask
for it. You
take
it. How do you think I got to be the manager of the hottest restaurant in the city when I was just a kid? Eighteen years old, and I’ve got every pretty woman begging me to take her number.”

“Jonny,” Pandy said, laughing, “this isn’t about sex.”

“You want people to think you’re literary? Then
be
literary,” Jonny said, as if the answer were just that simple.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Pandy tried to explain. “You can’t just demand things and expect to get them. You have to earn your status.”

Jonny laughed. “Earn your status? You have to
take
your status. Listen, babe,” he said, motioning for her to sit. “Do you think I really give a rat’s ass about French food? The only reason I ended up going to France was because I needed to get out of town, and one of my buddies had a house in Saint-Tropez. When I saw what a big deal all the women were making out of the food…” Jonny shrugged.

Pandy nodded, thinking she understood. The next day, they both went back to work, like two little trains chugging around and around a track.

And then, after four months of labor, Jonny brought home a magnum of expensive red wine and said they were celebrating.

“That’s amazing!” Pandy declared, after Jonny told her all about the restaurant deal in Vegas and how it was finally coming through.

PP, it seemed, had put Jonny in touch with his pal Tony Hammer, who was some kind of Hollywood “guy” who had access to a celebrity clientele that liked to invest in restaurants. That made the Vegas guys happy, and in any case, the long and short of it was that Jonny was going to be opening a restaurant in Las Vegas.

Pandy was outwardly thrilled. But secretly, she was nervous. For she’d learned another thing about Jonny: He had far less money than she’d imagined. He had to take the money he earned and put it back into his restaurants. Adding another money-gobbling venture to what was already in the red didn’t seem like a good idea. But what did she know?

Instead of confronting him directly about it, she found herself pouting and then claiming to be angry that he’d “lied,” at least about PP. Hadn’t he sworn he was never going to talk to PP again?