By the time Imogen left the office at nine she knew it was so late she would have no chance to see the kids before they got into bed. Alex had warned her he would also be working late every night this week, so Tilly stayed on to lend a hand. Even though he was in the middle of a big case, when her husband disappeared for these long stretches of time Imogen wondered whether she was missing something. Was he actually a spy? She swore he could be a spy.
Imogen asked the cabdriver to let her out a few avenues over from their house so she could nip into Li-Lac, the couture European chocolate shop, to grab a few of her favorite dark chocolate-covered espresso beans. They were her weakness and after a day like this she bloody deserved them. Golden Christmas lights twinkled in the trees along Jane Street. She’d canceled the family’s annual trip to Parrot Cay between Christmas and New Year’s, a time when the magazine was traditionally closed.
‘The Internet doesn’t go on vacation. I’m not even taking a honeymoon!’ Eve’s voice echoed in her head, as Imogen had reluctantly passed the hotel reservation along to her mum and stepfather.
Coming out of the shop she nearly collided with a tall man in a dark gray overcoat. She knew there was something familiar about him even before she could pull back far enough to see his face.
‘Immy!’
‘Andrew.’
He wasn’t drunk. Yet. He had obviously had a drink or probably two. His perfect helmet of hair was now slightly out of place, his smile easy and slightly goofy.
‘I just received your wedding invitation,’ Imogen said.
‘My wedding email, you mean?’ he replied, a tinge of annoyance in his tone.
‘A lot of people use Paperless Post these days, Andrew. I use it for all of the kids’ birthday parties. It saves a ton of money.’
He scoffed. ‘Oh, come on, Immy, you know I don’t care about the money. Would you ever send an Internet invitation for your wedding? You wouldn’t. You would never do something like that. You have class.’
Recoiling at the nickname, Imogen smartly chose to ignore the binary implication that Eve in turn did not have class. She smiled stiffly.
Most of the time she would be eager to find someone to commiserate with over Eve, but doing so with Eve’s fiancé, her ex-boyfriend, felt wrong.
‘I saw you on the news for something the other day, didn’t I?’
That did the trick. Given a carrot, Andrew preferred to talk about himself over any other subject. He straightened up to his full six foot two.
‘You probably did,’ he said, nodding his head, putting on the mantle of the serious and grave politician. ‘I’ve been working so hard to reverse the ban on large sodas in this city. It’s against federal laws and infringes on an individual’s personal liberty. It’s a fight we can win and it’s a fight that the voters will really get behind.’
Now Imogen remembered that she hadn’t seen Andrew on the television news. She’d seen a cartoon version of him in the New York Post, his head poking out from a Big Gulp. The bubble coming out of his mouth read ‘Like me.’
She nodded as though she were interested, starting to look past him to indicate she was ready to end the conversation and go home, but Andrew wasn’t picking up on her signals.
‘Hey! Let’s grab a drink.’
Imogen shook her head. ‘Not tonight, Andrew. I’m completely knackered.’
‘Come on, just one drink. We’re in our old stomping grounds. One quick drink to catch up. Please.’ He lowered his head. ‘I don’t want to go home yet.’ Imogen wasn’t sure if he and Eve were living together now, but she imagined Eve being home might be the reason he didn’t want to be there. She could sympathize. And so, against all her better judgment, she agreed.
‘Just one drink.’
Andrew insisted on going somewhere nostalgic and so he led her downstairs to one of those neighborhood bars in the West Village that are always subterranean, but have the best jukeboxes in the city and cheap beer despite the astronomically expensive rents in the rest of the neighborhood. It was a place they had spent many a late night in their twenties, Imogen drinking and smoking too much, Andrew hitting on waitresses and doing cocaine in the bathroom.
‘What are you drinking, Immy?’
‘Just a glass of rosé.’
‘A glass of pink wine for the lady and a double bourbon straight up for me.’ He flung a hundred-dollar bill down on the bar.
‘Keep ’em coming,’ he said to the tattooed woman with the face of a model and the arms of a bodybuilder behind the bar.
‘Andrew, I really can be here for only one drink. I want to see my kids before they go to sleep.’
He placed his index finger over her lips. ‘Shush. Come on, even I know Imogen Tate wouldn’t keep her kids awake past nine. We both know they’re already in bed.’ This was obviously a mistake. Imogen resigned herself to the fact that she had agreed to this one drink and so, no matter how awkward it was already making her feel, she would have the drink, deal with twenty minutes of conversation and get out.
Andrew threw back his drink the second it hit the bar and he signaled the bartender for another, the same. Andrew had always drunk quickly, the way alcoholics often did, hating themselves for taking the drink in the first place, but wanting to feel its sweet effects with as little interruption as possible.
‘So how is Adam?’ Andrew was starting to slur. Imogen took in a breath and examined his profile. What was once a chiseled jaw had softened into something more like papier-mâché.
‘Alex, darling. My husband’s name is Alex.’
‘Adam, Alex, same difference really. The guy you married who wasn’t me.’
What was the point in reminding him that he hadn’t proposed to her, nor attempted to contact her after his mother dragged him off to rehab, a rehab that, judging from this evening, hadn’t been effective.
‘Alex is good. He is working on a big case right now, a Ponzi scheme.’
‘Oh yeah. Good old Marty!’ Andrew slapped his thigh. ‘My old man had some bucks invested with Marty. Lost a pretty penny when your hubby went after him.’ Now Andrew was laughing. ‘I never put my money in those crazy schemes. I like it in real estate, where I know it is working for me, but Dad really got fleeced by Marty.’ Imogen had forgotten the many layers of animosity Andrew had for his father. ‘You should have seen the old bastard’s face when he found out that Marty got charged. I’ll bet he wants to absolutely murder your husband.’ That made Imogen shift in her seat.
The bartender paused to ask if they wanted another. Andrew was too busy checking his phone to hear so Imogen just shook her head slightly, rolling the stem of her wineglass back and forth between her thumb and her index finger before shifting the subject back to Andrew.
‘It’s been a long time since I saw your parents. I assume I’ll see them at the wedding.’ Andrew threw back his head to laugh and then did it a second time, taking his drink with him on the next pass, dumping the brown liquor down his throat and then asking for another one. Imogen stared hard at the baby white-yellow hairs on his knuckles as he clutched his glass like a man holding on to a life preserver. She knew that his grip would loosen, become all butterfingery the more booze he went through.
Imogen wanted to place a hand on his arm and tell him to slow down, but she remembered quickly that it wasn’t her place to do that anymore. What she needed to do now was finish her own drink and get out of there.
‘You’ll probably see them there. They don’t mind Eve that much. They think she’s a little tacky, but they like her credentials. Harvard B-school and all.’ He drew out the a sound in Harvard, pronouncing it ‘Hahvahd.’ ‘The B-school their ne’er-do-well son sure didn’t get into. Yeah, they like her enough to show up, I think.’
Imogen didn’t think they would have liked her enough to show up at their wedding had things ever reached that point between them, but she kept silent.
‘She’s good for the campaign trail … Eve is. She helps a ton with the young voters. Smart young go-getter. Young women like that. Entrepreneur. She courts the girls and the tech industry here, which is becoming a big constituent, my guys tell me.’ He paused, his eyes now bloodshot and tired looking. ‘She photographs well. My team wants to get her covered up a little more, but she looks good on camera.’ Imogen picked up her glass to take a healthy sip, now only a few sips away from being able to politely excuse herself. Andrew was still wound up and going, his Windsor knot slowly coming loose at his Adam’s apple.
‘But she isn’t you, Imogen. She definitely isn’t you. There’s absolutely nothing cool about her. You were always so cool. Sometimes I think Eve might be a robot. Do you ever think that Eve might be a robot?’ He traced the shape of a body with square corners in the air in front of him and looked at her, his eyes longing for her to agree. She let out a laugh, because Andrew wasn’t completely wrong. Sometimes she did wonder whether Eve was one of those cyborgs sent from the future to try to fix what was wrong with the present.
She chose her words carefully. ‘Sometimes I do think she’s a little bit mechanical.’
‘I don’t think she has feelings at all.’ Imogen tipped the rest of her glass of wine into her mouth. Andrew was worked up now, moving his hands around his head in jerky mechanical gestures, doing what appeared to be some kind of robot dance that Imogen vaguely remembered from the eighties.
‘I am Eve. I am a robot. I am Eve. I would like to give you a blow job now. Would that be all right with you,’ he said in a monotone.
No matter how much she despised Eve, everything that came out of Andrew’s mouth made her feel sad for both of them.
‘I’m not the person you should be saying this to.’
He nodded his head and looked at her like a shamed puppy dog, then attempted a chuckle that cracked in an effeminate way in the middle, further shattering the façade of his confidence.
Before she knew what was happening, Andrew was lurching toward her, his breath heady with the smell of bourbon. She couldn’t move away before his full lips landed firmly against hers. She wasn’t sure if it was shock or flattery, but for the briefest of moments she felt a power rush through her before she snapped back to reality.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Andrew?’
‘What were you doing, Imogen Tate?’ He straightened up as though the brief kiss had awoken him from a drunken slumber, and blotted his forehead with the pointy end of his silk tie. ‘I believe you may have kissed me back.’
‘And I believe you just took advantage of a friend who wanted to sit here and listen to you talk about your problems.’
She stood in disgust, disgust at him and disgust with herself for being so slow in her horrified reaction to the kiss. She picked up her purse.
He pulled on the arm of her coat as she put it on. ‘Have one more drink with me?’
Imogen shook her head. ‘I can’t, Andrew. And you probably shouldn’t have one either. Go home. Get some rest. This can’t be good for your campaign. You know that.’
‘I’ll just have one more and then go to bed,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I just need one more before I can go there.’
Imogen greedily gulped at the frigid air outside. If she were a different kind of woman she would have immediately rung one of her girlfriends and divulged the whole story. Instead she pulled her coat tighter around her body and picked up her pace to get home.