“And none of the girls have said anything? I don’t know…”
“What would they say? There’s nothing to say. We all depend upon discretion, and they most of all. You know that most of them visit this establishment on a temporary basis. They have other ambitions. A few days ago I saw photographs of one girl’s wedding to a distinguished aristocrat in the marriage pages of the Times. I was very happy for her.”
My visits to Madame Agnès’s earned me a couple of accounts. The director of a multinational toy manufacturer with whom I chatted from time to time suggested that I take charge of a television campaign for his toys in the run-up to Christmas. I also signed with an outdoor footwear manufacturer.
Jim Cooper got to work on the campaigns but insisted that he couldn’t do it all by himself, and since Roy took up almost all of Evelyn’s time, he urged us once more to take on as a subcontractor his friend, who was unemployed but, according to him, was an ace. I agreed, in spite of Maggie’s protests, but I also asked Evelyn to help him out. It was a relief for her as she was getting tired of babysitting Roy.
I would see Roy from time to time at Madame Agnès’s. It was the best place for us to talk. And although I would see him laughing and enjoying the girls’ company, as soon as we were alone he would start to complain about losing Suzi.
“I feel lonely, Thomas. Damn you all for convincing me to agree to the divorce.”
“It was the right thing to do, Roy. Suzi had no option but to accept your conditions. She had no other way out. Sooner or later she would have ended up exploding: your ex-wife has a lot of character.”
“And what about my kids? I have to settle for seeing them one day a week and a couple of weekends a month.”
“It’s the same for other divorced fathers. Don’t complain. It’s good for you to be seen around the county with the boys; take them to see a rugby match, to eat burgers, I don’t know…Do the things that single fathers normally do when it’s their turn to see the kids.”
Roy had rented a small apartment in the area, but he wasn’t enjoying his life as a bachelor.
“Esther was right, I’m going to have to get married,” Roy admitted, “and not just because it’ll keep the voters happy, but because I don’t like living alone. I thought regaining my liberty would be fun, but I feel depressed when I get back to my flat. And in London, well, you can see…My only distraction is visiting Madame Agnès’s. That’s not a life, Thomas, I’m telling you.”
He was right. I had also begun to value my shared life with Esther. That was why I was eager to go back to New York. I found it comforting to find someone there when I got home from work, to have someone to talk to, to feel a hand on my forehead when I felt sick, to not have to worry about restocking the refrigerator and to no longer find, to my surprise, that there was nothing at home to eat.
Yes, I understood Roy, and I advised him to start looking for a wife.
“She shouldn’t be too clever, Roy, or she’ll make your life complicated. You need a calm, well-mannered woman for whom you are the main occupation.”
“They don’t exist, Thomas. Look at you. Esther’s so clever that she doesn’t want to marry you.”
“Marriage isn’t essential for us,” I claimed, annoyed by his comment.
“You can’t fool me, my friend, she’s the one who doesn’t want to get married. She’s right, she’s worth much more than you are. What does she need you for?”
—
I returned to New York three weeks later. I went straight to the agency from the airport. I found Esther and Paul Hard arguing about whether to take on a campaign for a new brand of detergent. Paul was saying it wasn’t worth it, that the manufacturer’s budget was too small to afford an advertising campaign that would make an impact. Esther thought that this was the very thing that made it a challenge and that we should try. I supported Esther. She looked at me gratefully. In reality I wasn’t worked up about the detergent campaign but I did want Esther to feel like I was always on her side.
I got back into my routine. We often got up early. Esther would go out for a run at six thirty in the morning and I would go to a gym near the agency at seven. The idea of going out for a run whether it was hot or cold did not appeal to me. The truth is that I’ve never liked sports, but I needed to follow Esther’s lead and she insisted that exercise led to good health.
The gym I had found offered one advantage: all kinds of executives used it. There were some who were obsessed with their physiques and some who did just enough. After speaking with both kinds, I realized that for many of them, going to the gym was an issue of status. It was good for extremely busy Wall Street executives to be seen spending at least an hour a day keeping in shape. The gym had a room where coffee and fruit juice were served all morning, along with whole wheat toast, organic butter and spreads, boiled eggs, and a whole range of guilt-free cuisines.
There were days when the only thing I did was have breakfast and then go to the agency. I was not the only one.
Neither Paul nor I were fooling ourselves. The work came in because of Esther. She was the rising star, the one who was sought out for her original ideas, the one who could make an advertisement for dog food into a work of art.
I took care of the finances and personnel and administered the business. She and Paul did the creative work, along with three young people they’d recruited.
I made a new attempt to persuade Esther to move to a different area, but she proved reluctant. She was proud of the apartment in Nolita, even though she was beginning to admit that we could do with more space.
“At least think about it,” I asked her. “I’m not suggesting we move uptown. I know you like downtown or Brooklyn, and there are reasonably priced places there.”
“Do you want to buy yourself a place?” she asked me.
“I want to buy us a place, partner, for both of us.”
“But…No, no, that wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t answer me. I knew the answer: because she still dreamed that I might free her from the duty of being with me. An unwritten commitment, but one by which she felt bound to me. Leaving things as they were meant there was still an air of the provisional about our personal relationship, but letting me buy us a place to live was to further tighten the bond between us.
“I don’t have the money to buy anything in Greenwich Village or Brooklyn,” she said eventually.
“But I do,” I replied, watching her closely.
“Yeah, but you can’t buy a place in both our names—it wouldn’t be fair.”
“I’m going to do something different, Esther. I’m going to go see my lawyer and ask him to prepare a document stating that all my worldly possessions are also yours. What I have, we will share.”
I regretted it as soon as I said it. It was the stupidest thing I could have done, but, on the other hand, I savored the drama of the moment, passing myself off as a man so deeply in love that he was prepared to put his life, or rather his money, in the hands of a woman.
Esther began to cry. She covered her face with her hands and began to shake. I knew what she was feeling: like a bad person for not loving me as I appeared to love her, for still longing to escape from me.
I was acting like an innocent child who was placing himself entirely in her hands: whatever her personal wishes were, she couldn’t abandon me.
I hugged her, trying to get her to calm down and stop crying. Then I called my lawyer, who asked me several times if I was sure about what I was planning to do. I told him yes in a serious voice and said I wanted the document written up that afternoon. Esther said she would come with me but with the intention of dissuading me.
“Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to marry?” suggested the lawyer.
I didn’t reply. But I urged him to call my bank so that the manager could take charge of the new situation.
“I can’t accept this,” Esther murmured, raising her hand to ask me to bring the conversation wit
h the lawyer to an end.
“I’m going to do it whether you like it or not. Nothing and nobody will prevent me from sharing what I have with you, not even you. If you don’t want it, give it away, or take the money and throw it out the window. It’s as much yours as it is mine,” I said when I’d hung up the phone.
She looked at me and I saw fear reflected in her eyes. She knew that if I took this step she would never be free again.
She started to cry again, perhaps out of even greater desperation. This time I didn’t go over to her but sat down to watch her. I felt like a fool. Only a fool is capable of giving away his fortune. But I didn’t want to back down. If I had done so Esther would have been relieved.
Yes, I could have taken it back:
“Don’t cry…I realize that you’re worried about this because you think I’m tying you to me irreversibly. You’re right, that’s my intention, this is my way of holding on to you. Look, don’t worry, I’ll call the lawyer right now and tell him not to do anything. It wasn’t a good idea. Forgive me, it’s just that…well, you know that I would do anything to keep you in my life forever. But I can’t force you to accept me. Let’s leave things as they are except…Well, perhaps you could let me twist your arm and agree to rent a place in the Village with a little more room…”
—
I could have been generous, given her back her freedom, but I didn’t. If I had, Esther would have regained her smile, and then she would have agreed that we should rent a place with a few more square feet of floor space. You can always escape from a rented home, but it’s much harder to escape from the home you own.
But I didn’t give her this opportunity. I didn’t say a single word that would be an open door to her freedom. I kept silent, watching her, hoping for her unconditional surrender. She was too decent to snub me, to offend me by rejecting my generous offer. You wouldn’t even give a wife as much as I was prepared to give her.
“Why are you doing this to me, Thomas?” she managed to say in a whisper.
“Because I love you, Esther; I can’t imagine life without you. If you’re not by my side I’ll stop breathing, I’ll become nothing. I need you to understand that.”
Once she’d stopped crying she ended up giving in. I was soldering her to me irreversibly.
I knew that Esther was too honorable to screw me over, but even so I didn’t stop telling myself that I was an idiot.
That very afternoon I signed the documents in which I made her co-owner of all my possessions. My lawyer made the good decision to introduce a safeguard that Esther accepted immediately: she couldn’t make use of my funds above a certain figure without my consent.
“That’s not what I asked you for,” I protested.
“We have always administered your family’s funds, and so we see ourselves as obliged to insist you accept the necessity of this clause…” said the lawyer who was in charge of administering the money I’d inherited from my father.
Esther was in a state of shock and only managed to whisper, “He’s right,” but I acted as if I hadn’t heard her. I was determined that she should belong to me forever.
I felt my hands trembling as I signed. There was no doubt about it, I was paying a high price to have her by my side.
“We should celebrate,” I suggested as we left my lawyer’s office.
I took her to the best restaurant in the city and, in spite of my efforts to make her laugh, all I got were serious looks. She seemed to be witnessing her own funeral rather than being happy at having become a rich woman.
A week later she surprised me by telling me that she knew of an apartment for sale in Brooklyn that might suit us. We went to see it. I liked it. It needed some work, but it was perfect for us. There was a large bedroom with a dressing room with two en suite bathrooms. By taking down a couple of walls we could create a reception room of considerable size where we could get together with at least thirty or so friends. It also had a separate kitchen and a couple of bedrooms that we would convert into our own offices, another room with its own little bathroom that could serve as a guest bedroom, and a utility room. In sum, more than three thousand well-appointed square feet.
The best thing was that we would no longer live in Nolita. The price was no bargain: a million dollars, which I paid without complaint.
“I think you’re mad,” Paul told me when he found out that we had bought a place in Brooklyn and that I had decided to share my entire fortune with Esther.
“Yes, I am,” I admitted.
“Do you think you’re going to hold on to her like that?”
“I’m not trying to hold on to her, Paul, just love her,” I replied, making Paul chuckle.
“Man, that’s a great line for an advertisement. Come on, Thomas, it’s me you’re talking to. You’re terrified at the possibility of losing Esther.”
“Is it so hard for you to accept that we’re a happy couple? I’m going to share the rest of my life with Esther, so all that’s mine is hers.”
“Right…How romantic! The role of lovestruck fool doesn’t suit you, Thomas, it doesn’t ring true. In reality you need her so much, so desperately, that you’re terrified that she might dump you for someone else and so you blackmail her emotionally. Even so, adding her name to your bank accounts is more than I imagined you were capable of. If I were you I would find myself a good shrink. New York is full of shrinks who’ll explain what’s happening to you.”
Two months later we were settled in our new home and gave a cocktail party for our friends. Unlike London, in New York we knew a fair number of people in the advertising world with whom we had good relations, in addition to the friends Esther and even Paul invited. So fifty people attended and for a moment I even thought we’d have to put guests in the bathroom. You couldn’t squeeze another person in.
Esther seemed almost happy. She would have preferred to continue living in Nolita, but even so she had begun to admit that it was good for us to have more amenities and enough room to each have our own space.
“You’ve got the cream of the industry here,” Paul told me, satisfied to see that most of the fashionable creatives had accepted our invitation.
“It’s all thanks to you and Esther. You were the ones in charge of the guest list,” I replied sincerely.
The party was a success. Everyone ate and drank without stopping, they made jokes, some of them smoked without anyone telling them off, and, most of all, they bad-mouthed the people who weren’t there, all those in the industry who hadn’t been invited.
The last guest—Paul—left at midnight. When we were alone, Esther sat down on a sofa and stretched her legs.
“Phew! I thought they’d never leave!”
“They had a great time. Would you like a drink?”
“That would be lovely, I haven’t had anything to drink all night. I wanted everything to go perfectly.”
I opened a bottle of pink champagne.
“I’ve always noticed that the things that matter are celebrated with champagne.”
“And you think that’s a bad thing?”
“In truth, I’ve never been able to afford it, it’s too expensive.”
“Well, you’ve been earning enough money to be able to drink champagne for a while now,” I joked.
“But it still seems expensive to me.”
“Well, it’s something that we’re not going to go without,” I added, laughing.
That was one of the nights when we pleased each other more than we normally did. This usually happened when she’d had a drink too many and we had something to celebrate. The rest of the time our intimate relations remained marked by monotony. It didn’t bother me. I was still seeing Olivia, the short model with green eyes.
To begin with, we saw each other a couple of times a week at her apartment. An apartment whose rent I helped pay.
The truth was that Olivia couldn’t get much work, and I knew that her earnings were the fruit of various nights when she was called upon to accompany some foreign busi
nessman or other who was passing through the city. But I decided that I would prefer that she dedicate herself to me alone.
Nonetheless, I did manage to get Esther to hire her for a few advertisements.
When did Esther find out that Olivia was part of my life? I’ve sometimes asked myself this, and I haven’t been able to determine the answer. In any case, it didn’t bother her, neither in the past nor in the present. I think that she was relieved that I fulfilled my sexual fantasies with another woman. Esther didn’t want anything else and I knew that I couldn’t ask more of her, although I didn’t give up on my attempts to persuade her that we should marry. She owed it to me. No man puts his entire fortune in the hands of a woman without her paying a certain price for it. There’s no doubt that Esther would pay me with her loyalty, a bond more solid than any piece of paper she could sign, but even so, it wasn’t enough for me because if I had my secrets, Esther had hers too.
My trysts with Olivia led me to invent commitments, meetings with imaginary clients. Esther accepted anything I told her in good faith. She didn’t fight with me or complain when I came home in the wee hours smelling of alcohol, my clothes impregnated with a woman’s perfume.
Paying Olivia’s expenses was no problem for me. It was worth it because this way she was always available to me. Furthermore, I had taken a liking to the dishes she cooked me. She was a fantastic cook who liked to give free rein to her imagination. I even paid for her to attend a cooking class run by one of the best chefs in New York. From that point on she began to surprise me with ever more sophisticated dishes.
Yes, Olivia was my secret, but my brother, Jaime, was Esther’s secret.
I found out shortly after we moved into our new home.
It was one of those evenings when I’d lied to Esther, telling her that I had to have dinner with a potential client and that she shouldn’t wait up for me. She nodded indifferently, as she usually did.