“It’s part of her job,” Pandy said, narrowing her eyes.
“No, it’s not. Not when you say yes to everything because you’re afraid it’s all going to go away.”
“So she’s scared.” Pandy shrugged. “Maybe you need to reassure her.”
“All I do is reassure her!” Doug snorted. “Every day, it’s ‘Am I pretty enough? Thin enough? What about my hair?’ It’s, like, twenty-four hours a day.”
Pandy smiled coldly. “She’s an actress, remember?” This whole conversation, she realized, was merely another scene to him. “I’m sorry. But your relationship isn’t really my concern.”
“But SondraBeth is.”
“I never even see SondraBeth anymore. Except at the occasional Monica event.” Where, Pandy now recalled, SondraBeth always cleverly managed to avoid being photographed next to Pandy. Pandy had suspected it was deliberate, but she had dismissed the thought as her own paranoia.
“I don’t think you get what I’m saying,” Doug said, looking meaningfully into her eyes. For a moment, Pandy wondered if he was actually flirting with her, thinking he might get her into bed for another meaningless fling. Even if she weren’t with Jonny, Pandy would never have stooped so low.
“What are you trying to say?” she demanded curtly.
“Only that you need to watch out. Look.” Doug brought his face close to hers. “I live with the woman, okay? She hates you.”
Pandy drew back in surprise. And then, recalling her last moment with SondraBeth, she became angry. “She has no reason to hate me. I’ve never done anything to her. Never said a bad word about her. Raved about her in the press. What could she possibly have against me?”
“Don’t you understand?” Doug asked. “Without Monica, who is she? Who is SondraBeth Schnowzer? Nobody cares about SondraBeth Schnowzer. They care about Monica. Without Monica, she’d have no life. She doesn’t exist. That’s why she hates you.”
Pandy looked around the room and suddenly realized that maybe SondraBeth had been right—she didn’t understand actors. And she didn’t belong here.
“You know what, Doug?” she said, gathering her things. “SondraBeth can have her. She can have Monica all to herself if she needs her that badly.”
And for a moment, as she stormed off, she felt good. But as each block clicked by on the taxi meter, the metronome of sadness in her heart also gave another tick.
Pandy looked out the window at the still-bright storefronts and sighed. Ever since she’d met Jonny, she’d been secretly hoping that she and SondraBeth could get over their stupid rift and become friends again. Maybe even revive PandaBeth.
Doug, however, had made it patently clear this was never going to happen.
And two weeks later, when Pandy ran into SondraBeth in the bathroom at that black-tie event, SondraBeth did as well.
* * *
The incident occurred at a benefit hosted by Peter Pepper—PP, she thought in disgust, remembering what SondraBeth had said about how he didn’t approve of their friendship. He needn’t have worried, she thought ironically when she spotted four bodyguards holding back a crowd that threatened to engulf the head table. The focus of all the attention was, naturally, SondraBeth Schnowzer, who, thanks to the success of Monica, couldn’t go anywhere without being mobbed by fans.
With a sharp ache that nearly made her cry out in pain, Pandy remembered how much she’d loved SondraBeth, and how much she missed her. But then she recalled what Doug had said about SondraBeth hating her. Was it really true? For a second, Pandy considered approaching her, but the prospect of being turned away by the bodyguards was too embarrassing to consider, especially since she was with Jonny.
Halfway through the evening, Pandy snuck off to the ladies’ room. She was touching up her lipstick when there was a knock on the door; in the next second, a bodyguard pushed open the door.
“Excuse me?” Pandy demanded.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I need you to vacate this space.”
“Why? Has something happened? Is there a fire?”
And then she heard SondraBeth’s voice coming from behind him. “Really, Julio. This isn’t necessary.”
The bodyguard stepped back to let her pass. Before Pandy had time to figure out how to react, there was Monica herself, less than five feet away.
Her hair was teased up into a gorgeous golden puff with the shine of a glazed donut. A scattering of rhinestones were arranged like stars across the dark navy mesh of her bodice. The shock of seeing SondraBeth—Monica—a mere three feet away was so intense, it was like being in a car accident. It took Pandy a couple of seconds to comprehend that the situation was real; the subsequent rush of adrenaline caused her hands to shake as she tried to nonchalantly replace the cap on her lipstick and drop it into her bag. For a moment she was sure SondraBeth was equally distressed, but then her face relaxed into that impenetrable mask of eternal happiness.
“How are you?” SondraBeth asked pleasantly, as if she and Pandy were casual acquaintances who had run into each other at a party.
“I’m doing great,” Pandy said firmly, with a touch too much enthusiasm to sound convincing. Not knowing how to proceed, she added quickly, “I’m finally seeing a guy I really, really like.”
SondraBeth’s smile stiffened. “I heard. Jonny Balaga, right?”
“That’s right.” Pandy nodded awkwardly.
“Are you…” SondraBeth unexpectedly faltered. “Is it serious?”
Pandy raised her eyebrows and tried to laugh. “I certainly hope so.”
“Oh.”
“Why?” Pandy stared at SondraBeth in confusion. Then she thought she understood. “Don’t tell me you want him, too?” she snapped.
SondraBeth suddenly looked stricken. By guilt, Pandy guessed. As if Pandy had actually hurt her, she cried out, “Why on earth would you say that?”
Pandy stared at her in confusion as all of her complicated feelings toward SondraBeth swirled around her brain like detritus in a hurricane. She wanted to scream, “Squeege, it’s me, remember? We’re best friends!” but she was overwhelmed by the fear of SondraBeth’s rejecting her; the mermaid fishtail of her tulle and sequined gown trailing over Pandy’s shoes as she swished by…
“Pandy?” she heard SondraBeth say. “Are you all right?”
The guard rapped on the door. “SondraBeth?”
SondraBeth’s eyes shot from the door back to Pandy in panic. “You’ve got to listen to me,” she said urgently. “Jonny Balaga is a bad guy. I know some people who were going to do business with him, and—”
“SondraBeth!” The voice was more impatient and threatening this time. SondraBeth quickly gathered up her skirts. “Hate me as much as you like,” she hissed, “but don’t ever say I didn’t warn you.”
A thick arm in a black suit jacket swung the door open, and in the next second she was gone, leaving Pandy staring at the door. “SondraBitch,” she swore.
Of course she didn’t listen. Why would she? And besides, it was already too late. One month later, she and Jonny were married.
CHAPTER NINE
JONNY BELUGA, Pandy originally dubbed him.
Her first encounter with Jonny Balaga took place at the newsstand, where Jonny was staring out smugly from the cover of New York magazine, above a headline that read: “Is This Man the Messiah of French Food?”
The man in question was young, hot, and brandishing a knife.
Pandy hated him immediately. Unable to tear her eyes away, she’d picked up the magazine for a closer look.
His hair appeared to be some kind of statement in itself. It was his best feature—long, dark curls that you wanted to run your hands through, rippling from a center part. Pandy surmised that he’d carefully chosen this particular hairstyle to frame the sharp cut of his jaw while deflecting attention away from his nose. It started off fine but then went to the left, as if it had been smashed with a baseball bat and the doctor had tried to smoosh it back into place. (Pandy would later discover t
hat this was indeed true.) His curved lips formed what was probably an unintentional sneer; his ink-dark eyes shone with the knowledge that he was someone special—and he hadn’t landed the cover of New York magazine at the ripe old age of thirty-two by accident.
Pandy was broke, but she bought the magazine anyway, mostly out of envy.
This was back when she was penniless and struggling, before SondraBeth Schnowzer and Doug Stone, before Monica, even. In those days, there was nothing that raised her ire more than a contemporary who was actually “making it”—in comparison to her own diminished circumstances.
Asshat, Pandy thought as she turned the pages to the story.
Jonny Beluga was no doubt extremely lucky and completely undeserving of his success. At the very least, he must be hopelessly shallow.
“A culinary wunderkind,” proclaimed the magazine, with its usual irritating and demoralizing hubris. Pandy went on to read that Jonny had grown up on Second Avenue; his mother had been only seventeen when he was born and had raised him as a single parent. The man who had supposedly been Jonny’s father had died of a drug overdose before Jonny was born. In his youth, Jonny had been part of a gang, which Pandy decided must be yet another self-serving aggrandizement—who could believe there were gangs on Second Avenue?
According to the article, after being in and out of trouble, including a short stint at “juvie,” as Jonny laughingly referred to it in the piece, he had lied about his age, claiming to be sixteen when he was only fourteen, and taken a job as a busboy at an upscale pickup joint called Peartrees. By eighteen, the magazine claimed, Jonny was practically running the place.
And then he’d taken all the money he’d made in tips and gone to culinary school in France.
This was followed by the usual: He returned to his beloved city determined to create an exciting new version of French food for the New York lifestyle—Whatever the hell that means, Pandy thought with a snicker. While working as a head chef for various establishments, he raised money to open his own restaurant. Apparently it had been one of New York’s “best-kept secrets”—perhaps too well kept. It had failed, along with his second attempt. Jonny, seized by the spirit of the great American entrepreneur, declared his failures mere learning experiences that had allowed him to open his dream “eatery,” Pétanque. Pandy recognized the name—it was a game played by old men in the South of France. She rolled her eyes. Beluga, she decided, wasn’t quite as clever as he thought.
She tossed the magazine in disgust, and forgot all about Jonny.
In the next few years, Pandy would hear his name bandied about, and while he was often in the gossip columns, she skimmed over his mentions. He didn’t come back into focus until Pandy’s friend Meghan had an affair with him. She met him—where else?—at the bar at Pétanque. They started talking and the next thing she knew, she was going home with him to the same white brick apartment building he’d grown up in on Second Avenue. Then he asked her to go away with him to Atlantic City.
There was a great deal of excitement around this event. With the success of his restaurant and some new cooking show that Pandy had never watched, nor cared to, Jonny had become quite the man-about-town, a regular on everyone’s list of the city’s most eligible bachelors. Meghan was nevertheless determined to hook him, despite Suzette’s warning that Jonny took every woman to Atlantic City. Pandy suggested that this seduction strategy would also make Jonny the perfect serial killer. He lured women to his hotel suite, stabbed them with his enormous butcher knife, cut up the bodies, and then cooked them in a stew.
Meghan had been furious at the suggestion.
But looking back on it, Pandy wondered if it was purely coincidence that before she’d even met him, she’d associated Jonny with death and destruction.
* * *
When Meghan returned from her weekend, Pandy and Suzette heard all about it: the endless sex, including sex standing up, which Suzette declared she’d heard was his trademark move. They were also informed of the usual excuses as to why Jonny Balaga couldn’t get serious: No woman, he’d claimed to Meghan, could tolerate his schedule, and he wouldn’t want to put any woman to the test. His restaurants didn’t close until midnight, and then there was still work to be done, meaning he often didn’t get home until four in the morning.
Pandy had roared with laughter when she heard that one. “Come on, Meghan, you know better than that. He’s out partying.”
True to form, after two weeks of this whirlwind romance, Jonny stopped responding to Meghan’s texts. When Meghan went to Pétanque to confront him, he acted like he hardly knew her.
This made Pandy hate him even more.
* * *
And then Pandy began running into him. Every time she went to Pétanque, which seemed to be everyone’s favorite place for first dates, whatever man she was with at the time always made a big show of “knowing” Jonny when he came out of the kitchen in his chef’s cap and tightly wrapped bloodstained apron. The man would be effusive in his praise, while Pandy tried to say as little as possible, doing her best to ignore him.
This wasn’t easy.
Jonny had presence. Pandy herself had to admit that he possessed that indefinable “it” factor. He was one of that rare type of man to whom women couldn’t help but be attracted in spite of themselves. Like Bill Clinton and Bobby Kennedy Jr., they oozed sex appeal like musk aftershave. You might not like them, you might even despise their politics and their double-dealing attitudes toward women and cheating, and yet when you were near them, you couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to be one of those cheatees yourself.
This, coupled with Jonny’s unapologetic arrogance, was enough reason to stay away. Why, Pandy wondered, must the Beluga come rolling out after every meal, stopping to greet every patron so they could congratulate him and tell him how wonderful he was? This sort of patronizing strutting was the sort of thing only men could get away with, and it just made Pandy resent Jonny more. He was like an actor standing around the exit of the theater after a play, begging for compliments from the departing crowd.
And then, as often happens in New York, Pandy’s orbit changed. Five years would pass before she would encounter Jonny Balaga again. Five years in which she herself changed: from struggling writer to the creator of Monica and the toast of the town.
* * *
Returning to New York from that disastrous trip to the island with SondraBeth Schnowzer and Doug Stone, Pandy had vowed never again to allow herself to be drawn into such moral debauchery. Despite having seen just about everything, she was proud to fall back on her prudish side, which, she believed, allowed her to run to the edge of the cliff and watch everyone else jump off while she remained on terra firma. She chastised herself for having momentarily gone against her better values, and for thinking she could escape from life’s vicissitudes by scooting behind the curtain of movie-star glamour. She vowed to get back to real life; like Odysseus, she would stuff her ears to resist the siren’s call to land on that treacherous rock called showbiz, where, as her literary friends had warned her, no self-respecting novelist belonged.
She tried politics instead.
Enter the Senator. Twenty years older and twice divorced, at least he spent his time trying to make the world a better place.
He was nearly sixty. Almost old enough to be her father. This he informed her of within ten minutes of making her acquaintance at Joules. Within the next hour, he sadly revealed that he’d had prostate cancer. And he was still in love with his first wife, who had died of cancer. So she shouldn’t get her hopes up.
Pandy promised that she wouldn’t.
Other than that, he explained, his life wasn’t bad. He dined at only the best restaurants, where he was often comped. He lived in the most exclusive building on Park Avenue and named several billionaires as his closest friends. Indeed, he pointed out that while most people associated the Republican Party with billionaires, the Democrats actually had more billionaire supporters. This, Pandy said, was no doub
t due to the fact that if a man was smart enough to make a billion dollars, he must possess the intelligence to be a Democrat.
The Senator agreed, and invited Pandy to accompany him to Palm Beach for the weekend, where they would be hosted by his billionaire friend and supporter Steven Finiper and Steven’s wife, Edith, a Harvard Law School graduate.
“I think you’ll like Edith,” the Senator said. “When she found out I knew you, she wouldn’t stop bothering me. Monica is her favorite character, and you, my dear, are her favorite writer.”
“I’d love to come,” Pandy said, flattered.
* * *
They took a commercial flight from LaGuardia to Palm Beach. Walking through the airport with the Senator, Pandy was astounded by how popular he was. Every few feet, someone would come up and gush about how grateful they were to him and how he’d made such a difference in their lives.
“Wow,” Pandy said as they took their seats in first class. “Now that is something that’s never going to happen to me.”
“What, my dear?” the Senator asked, cocking his head. He was a little hard of hearing.
“People coming up to me, telling me how much I’ve meant in their lives.” Pandy raised her voice and realized how foolish she sounded.
The Senator smiled and patted her knee. “Oh, it will happen, my dear. Especially when you become a grandmother.”
Pandy smiled and rolled her eyes.
When they landed in Palm Beach, Pandy’s phone began beeping. She checked her messages: Page Six had called three times. During the two-hour flight, word had gotten out that she and the Senator were traveling together; now everyone was wondering if they were dating.
Pandy laughed and deleted the messages.
* * *
The Finipers’ Palm Beach home was a monstrosity of contemporary architecture: an enormous glass-and-brick rectangle with a helicopter landing pad made of the traditional coral and cement mixture.