Chapter Six

It was nearing seven as Babette hurried from the subway to Robin’s office, a studio apartment in the building where he lived with Shawsie. The Brodys’ home and Robin’s office were separated by at least ten floors, so Babette was reasonably sure she wouldn’t run into her. She certainly never had the few times she and Robin had crashed there late at night.

Babette entered the lobby and ignored the doorman’s wink. “Miss Steele is here,” he announced on the house phone, and she turned her back on him while waiting for the elevator. She took off her gloves and tried rubbing some warmth back into her hands. Being this nervous didn’t help matters. She had stuck to her resolution to stop seeing Robin for well over a month now, and she felt pretty good about it. But how could she know she would find herself in a situation like this?

“Hey.” He opened the door and gave a halfhearted wave to welcome her in.

“Hey.” She unwound her scarf and stuffed her gloves into her coat pockets. She took her coat off, but when he didn’t offer to hang it, she dropped it on a chair.

“Drink?” Robin asked, gesturing toward a few bottles of liquor grouped on an end table.

“Yeah, I’ll have a cosmo.”

“Shit, Babette, I don’t have that kind of stuff here. What’s in a cosmo? Vodka? You want that?”

“Never mind,” she said, exasperated. “Can you manage a beer?”

He retrieved a bottle of Heineken from the refrigerator and gave it to her without a glass. She sat on the couch and watched him pour a scotch before he took the easy chair opposite her, never meeting her eye. When she phoned him the day before, she’d said they needed to talk, that it was urgent and he had to see her in private, immediately. No bars or restaurants. He agreed, feeling trapped and slightly nauseated. He knew what was coming next: He hadn’t called, he hadn’t bought her a Christmas present, she deserved to be treated better, blah blah. But what she didn’t know was that he had been doing some thinking of his own.

“Listen,” he began, reaching for his cigarettes. “I’m glad you called. I was just going to call you. Because here’s the thing. This is really, really hard for me to say, but I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I think we have to stop seeing each other.”

Babette held her beer and tried not to look surprised. “Go on,” she said.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, with the new year and everything. I know resolutions are bullshit, they never work, but in my life now, something has got to change. This baby thing has been killing me—and Shawsie. And I’m convinced that if I change, if I try to, you know, stay home more nights, spend some more time with Shawsie, maybe things’ll work out better. I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but I almost feel like God’s been punishing me.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“No, I don’t mean that about you! You are the furthest thing from a punishment a guy can have. You’re gorgeous and sexy and smart—well, you know all that. It’s not you, it’s me. My behavior. It’s rotten, really. I’m a married man, and I need to try to do better at that.” He looked like he actually might cry. “Can you understand that at all?”

Babette stared at the floor for a long time. “I guess I can,” she said finally. “I mean, it’s hard to hear. But I get how you must feel. I think it’s great you want to try and make your marriage work. It’s the right thing to do. Shawsie’s a great girl.”

He nodded eagerly. “She is. And jeez, Babette, so are you. Thanks so much for understanding.” He was so relieved, so happy, he looked like a kid at his own birthday party.

She took a sip of beer and put the bottle on the table. “Um, I’m sure you know all about this, since Shawsie’s such good friends with Ponce, but I need you to tell me something, just for myself.”

“Sure,” he said brightly. “What?”

“How long has Ponce been fucking Neil Grossman?”

“What?”

She could see that he didn’t know a thing about it.

“Are you insane? Neil Grossman is the most happily married man in America!”

As he got up to pour himself another drink, she began to tell him what she’d seen in Chicago. He poured too much—because his hand was unsteady or because he needed a triple, she couldn’t tell.

“No shit,” he said, heading back to his chair. “Wow.”

Babette shrugged. “I guess Shawsie has some secrets of her own.”

“She has no idea about this,” Robin protested hotly, reaching for another cigarette.

“How do you know?”

He didn’t answer. He just knew, that’s all. Shawsie told him everything, always had. She didn’t keep secrets from him. He felt his heart pinch. He was the one who did that.

“I’ve told you that I’m uncomfortable talking about Shawsie, and that hasn’t changed,” he said. “Leave her out of this.” He smoked. “And by the way, why are you telling this to me?”

Babette finished her beer and held up the bottle. He went to the refrigerator and brought her another.

“Because I need your advice,” she said. “From the minute I met Ponce at Jacqueline Posner’s party, I was dying to get to know her better. I asked Shawsie to arrange a drink for the three of us, and she gave me some lame excuse about Ponce’s court schedule so I knew Ponce must have said, ‘Forget it, it’s not worth my time.’ Then I was thinking I might try to write a profile about her and get to spend time with her that way.

“But I’ve come to realize that Ponce Morris has decided she has enough friends in her life and I’m not going to be one of them,” Babette went on. “I’ve had to make my peace with that. It was naïve of me to expect a total stranger to let me into her life just because I wanted her to. Ponce Morris doesn’t owe me anything. And I don’t owe her anything, either.” She drained her second beer.

“What I saw in Chicago is news. No one knows this affair is happening except me—no one in the media, that is. In that respect, Ponce has actually given me something even better than her time. Because the one thing I know about New York publishing is that if you print a scoop like this, you are launched. So I’ve decided that I want to go back to my original idea of writing a piece about Ponce, but use her affair as the news peg. Do you think it’s something Topher would run?”

Robin clutched his head in his hands and tried to keep up. “Do I think Topher is going to run a piece smearing Shawsie’s best friend? No, I don’t. Jesus, Babette.”

He tried to focus. Seriously, there was no way Shawsie knew about this. Robin knew how hard she took his cheating, and he knew that she kept her feelings about it pretty close to the vest. He also knew that was easy to do with a friend like Ponce, who never forced an issue, ever.

But for Ponce not to tell Shawsie that she was cheating, too? With the most virtuously married doctor in New York? What a hypocrite. Shawsie would be furious. This idea emboldened him. Fuck Ponce! That morally superior cunt, always looking down on him because her great friend could have done so much better. He was a cheat? Well, what about her? What about Grossman? That guy was doing what comes naturally all over the fucking place. What a racket he had going!

“You know, Babette, I think the real story here is Grossman.”

“What do you mean?”

“The guy is the top fertility doctor in the country right now, with three kids and this great marriage to a wife who’s like the Jewish Mother Teresa with a medical degree, and he’s sneaking around with this rich, spoiled divorcée who famously never even wanted children. He’s the scoop you’re looking for. Scandal and ambivalence. It’s Peyton Place for Freudians.”

“You think so?” Babette looked hopeful. “So if Topher wouldn’t do it, then who?”

“Manhattan magazine, hands down. You need a weekly that’ll get it done fast and play it up big. It’s an incredible scandal.”

Robin was starting to like this idea. All those years of Shawsie thinking Ponce was so much more reliable, so much more trustworthy, than he was, and Ponce never told her this? And how stupid could Ponce and Neil be, necking in a hotel lobby where anyone could see them? Hell, maybe Grossman even deserved to be exposed now. No, it wasn’t exactly Neil’s fault that Robin had to keep going in there to come into a cup, but the only solace the guy ever had to offer was this continual horseshit about the great strides of science. Well, fuck science. Neil was in for some old-fashioned human drama. Just like he and Shawsie had. All the fucking time.

“Well, if I write it,” Babette said, “I want you to help me. You’re a great writer. And I’ve never written a long piece before.”

Robin felt queasy. “Listen, any editor at Manhattan magazine can take a reporter’s notebook and turn it into a piece overnight if you’ve got the stuff. You don’t need me.”

“Of course I do!”

He lit another cigarette. “I’m the husband of Ponce Morris’s best friend. Why would I get involved in this?”

Babette’s eyes filled with tears. “Because you just told me you don’t want to see me anymore so you can be a better husband. So not only are you dumping me completely out of the blue, but you’re saying you won’t even help me with my work? With something you’re so good at? Jesus, Robin, I didn’t think you were that mean. I thought we had some good times together, and I hoped we could stay friends. I thought I could count on you for at least some things.” The tears spilled over.

“Oh, hey, no! Don’t cry about it.” He got up to search for a tissue and found only a cocktail napkin. “I’ll definitely look at it, okay? Really. Jeez.” He sat back down. He should have realized how upset she’d be about his breaking it off. That was stupid of him. Okay, so he would look at the piece, move around some commas. What would it cost him?

“Listen,” he said authoritatively. “Here’s my advice. Start by making a list of the people who know Ponce and Neil, and follow the trail back to whenever their relationship began. I mean, from how you describe them, this has been going on for years. So if they’ve kept it a secret this long, there’s no huge rush on your end, you know? You can do it smartly. The only thing, though, is that you have to be right. I mean, I didn’t see this kiss. You’re sure it wasn’t just ‘Bye, pal, nice to see you in a city not New York, have a great day’?”

“No, it wasn’t like that at all. It was romantic. Intimate.”

“Fine. So first you make sure your facts line up, from a variety of sources. That’s where you take your time, make sure to get it right. Because the piece won’t make the splash you want if it’s only your word against theirs. You have to have a foundation of facts. Right?”

“Sure. But you know how you said before that the scoop is Grossman? That may be, in terms of the gossip factor, but I also think that learning anything about Ponce is news because for all the pictures that have been taken of her through the years, she’s never really been interviewed—not alone at least. I mean, Lee spoke to people all the time, and she was in some of those pieces. But I think she’s a scoop, too. Annabelle’s known her forever and says just terrible things about her. How dumb she was for leaving Lee in the first place, and then being a lawyer and never fighting for the money that was rightfully hers. How if she was really a good lawyer she’d still be at Corning but no one there wanted her. How except for her little handful of friends, she’s such a bitch to other women and never goes to lunch or helps anyone with their charities.”

“Well, I’m not sure that’s a tragedy,” Robin began, then caught sight of the grim expression on Babette’s face. “Hey, you know what? I think you’re right. She’s a controversial figure in New York because she doesn’t play the game. And people who are rich enough to play the game and don’t are about as entertaining a target as you can find. So go get her. By all means.”

Babette smiled. “Okay.”

“Okay.” He smiled, too.

She glanced at her watch. “I guess I’d better go. ’Cause you’re spending more time at home these nights, right?”

“Right.” He stood and started toward the door. She got her coat and came up behind him.

“Bye, bunny.” She grabbed playfully at his ass. “I’ll miss you.”

“Oh, hey—”

He reached for her, but she evaded his grasp. “Now, now,” she said. “We need to think of Mrs. Brody, don’t we?”

She stood in the doorway to his office, big and blond. In this light, he would swear she wasn’t wearing a bra. He reached out to feel for himself, and she grabbed his hand and sucked his middle finger. He groaned and reached for her with his other hand, but she pulled his finger out of her mouth and backed out of his reach.

“’Night, Robin,” she said, starting down the hallway. “Thanks for being my friend.”