My best friend appeared dubious. “That’s it with the sleuthing? A guy loses his shit and keys a Tesla?” Winifred Finkelstein had been my BFF since day one of first grade. Eleven years later, in high school, a month before she took the SATs, she changed her name to Wynne (“the e is silent”) Fairclough. Not that she was trying to be anyone but herself. It was just that her essence had a different name.
Wynne’s mouth often preceded her internal censor by several seconds, so it was no surprise when she added: “Not that I’m questioning your investigative instincts, but it seems more hostile adolescent behavior than a sign he has a grotesque secret life.”
“But he’s not an adolescent. He’s in his late forties. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have been angry. But at that age, when something mildly shitty happens, anger is the normal response, not rage. And even if he felt rage …”
Wynne nodded, and the tiny diamonds embedded in the platinum balls that were her most recent pair of overpriced, understated earrings reflected a hundred minuscule spears of light. “Gotcha. You’re saying that a guy his age should have the self-control not to act out.”
What drew us together when we were six seemed to be the same glue that still kept us together. Nothing escaped her vision and judgment, from the quality of the chalk we used to make pictures on the sidewalk to going shopping with me and my mom so she could signal me which denim overalls were the ones to buy. And I was the psychology maven, deciphering behavior, advising her on how to deal with her perpetually battling parents.
Friendships often fade after high school, but we stayed close both emotionally and geographically. Except we not only loved each other; we also loved learning about each other’s worlds. Wynne, not Win, knew she was meant for Manhattan and so went off to Hunter College. Like Queens College, Hunter was a commuter school, meaning she had to take the subway home to Chez Finkelstein in Forest Hills every night.
After our graduations, as I was leaving for Quantico with a BA in Middle Eastern studies, Wynne’s BA in art history scored her a job as an editorial assistant at Glamour magazine. After three years she rose to assistant editor but was still writing copy under headings like “What (Not) to Wear with a Sheer Dress.” She moved on to Vogue, which soon recognized her sans défaut taste and made her a photo stylist. A year later, she was promoted to associate fashion editor.
While I slept with guys from Agricultural Research to the National Nuclear Security Administration, the sort who’d mutter brief apologies for still sleeping on futons before we went at it. (Later, when I met Bashir—the only former boyfriend I could think of without a yawn or a shudder—I was awed that he’d built a Murphy bed in his studio apartment with bookshelves on each side and also that his sheets were clean.)
Anyway, while I was still in DC, Wynne became engaged to Clive Cohen, an investment banker. Wynne redesigned his library and sent him for removal of the hair on his knuckles. She redid his entire Village mews house and his wardrobe. He had her choose his car and then a weekend palace in East Hampton. When he decided that finally he’d become a patrician, he went rogue with a nineteen-year-old NYU philosophy major. Wynne ditched him, relieved. She’d clearly overestimated his capacity for personal growth. He still let his toenails grow to disgusting lengths and remained rude to waiters.
Just before I transferred from DC to New York, she quit Vogue and opened Wynne Fairclough, Design. Her first client was the wife of the guy who was to have been best man at her wedding: “If you can make Clive look classy, just picture how you can redo me and Ryan!” Ryan was a challenge, a man who resembled Jabba the Hutt; Wynne kindly envisioned “rich and rotund” and drew on Holbein’s painting of Henry VIII. A newly bearded Ryan in a coat with sable collar made GQ.
Wynne Fairclough’s taste was touted to be—and was—superb and expensive. She had no single “look” but suited each job to the individual client. An article in W called her the style whisperer and one blogger of Euro-chic explained her job as “life designer.” She looked as if she could come from anywhere: Paris, Cape Town, the Bronx. She was of average height, a touch below average weight. Chocolate chip–color brown eyes and dark brown hair that she always wore in a ponytail. “Wynne Fairclough’s iconic ponytail,” the New York Times called it. Her only makeup was a touch of eyeliner and false eyelashes, the latter obviously a better quality than the millipedes she’d worn in eighth grade.
“This Pete,” I told her. “He deliberately gets there early to grab the same seat every time, so he can keep constant watch.”
“So your dad agreed you should investigate him?” She pressed the upper part of her chopsticks against her forehead as if to nudge her mind into comprehension. “That was before he went to war against the Tesla, right?”
“Right.”
“I sort of get it.”
“No you don’t,” I told her.
She smiled. “I get that you and your dad have the same deductive gene, so investigating is probably the smart thing to do.”
We were having take-out Szechuan at the new dining room table in her loft. The table was a hugely long, dark wood thing that looked as if it had been lifted from dinner hour at Hogwarts. I muttered the word “refectory,” and Wynne offered a single chuckle, as if I’d made an ironic comment on furniture styles. I hadn’t; I’d just been pleased with knowing the word “refectory.” She told me it had been handcrafted by a brilliant young artisan in northern Thailand who was famous for the beauty of his chisel marks. Wynne sometimes drank her own Kool-Aid.
“When my dad used the word ‘investigate,’ he might have been humoring me,” I told her.
“I don’t see him as the humoring type. He’s always been more like: ‘What are you, some kinda dipshit?’”
“Exactly. But he and my mom … They seem to think I’m having trouble adjusting to suburban life. Which I’m really not. It’s just that it takes time.”
“Of course it takes time.” She furrowed her brows so deeply that a ridge formed between her eyes—that best friend intense gaze signaling concern, one step before worry, two before pity. “To be honest, I think they may be right. It’s not just suburbs. It’s aesthetics, too.” Maybe she picked up my exhalation of impatience. “Don’t get your knickers in a knot. I genuinely think your environment is so important for reinforcing your sense of self. You know your house isn’t typically suburban. If it was ordinary, simple, I wouldn’t say anything.”
“Of course you would.”
“But there’s an institutional quality about it. I’m sorry to say it looks like Tara—reimagined as a reform temple.”
“You’re not at all sorry to say it.”
“It’s not as if you chose it. Maybe that’s one of the reasons you can’t settle in. Face it, Corie. It’s not you. I don’t even see how Josh could have let Dawn buy it. An entire driveway of stone blocks with a double border.”
“Stop digressing,” I said, though our friendship itself was a thirty-two-year digression. I hadn’t a clue what our original subject had been.
“It’s not just about whether your house is attractive to whoever is visiting,” Wynne said. “It’s that it’s not you.” Then she went on, not even pretending to throw it off as a casual question: “Are you worried that he still daydreams of Dawn?”
I paused before answering. “No. Well, I’m sure he thinks of her on their anniversary, maybe other times. But I don’t sense any profound sadness in him. There must be times he misses the liveliness of the life he had with her. Being a litigator, he was an action guy. She was very social, loved getting dressed up, going to events. She was a throwback to her mother’s generation, a glam wife for a high-powered husband. Not a genius, but she was animated, hospitable, had ten outfits for any occasion. He hadn’t had that with his family.”
“The dress his mother wore to your wedding looked like it was made from infested mattress ticking. And his father keeps saying, ‘How duh yuh do?’ to people, like he’s in the House of Lords.”
“They’re not going to open a charm school,” I agreed. “Anyway, Dawn went like that.” I snapped my fingers. “What choice did Josh have? He had to make changes. He saw that after a few months.”
“What about the housekeeper, nanny, whatever she was?”
“He could lie to himself that Wanda was an ideal mother surrogate and then keep flying off to Paris and Stuttgart. But she wasn’t the ideal anything, just a nice employee. So he left his stimulating law firm world. And Dawn probably isn’t on his mind a lot, because she wouldn’t belong in the life he has now. Being a federal judge can be very cerebral, and you don’t get invited to clients’ weddings in Sardinia. So besides time healing all wounds and all that, he’s living in a different universe now.”
When Josh and I were becoming an item, I had worried that Dawn would be an unseen presence in our relationship. Whenever I visited the house in Shorehaven, there was no place I could turn without seeing her framed image. All over: Dawn, Dawn, and more Dawn. As Josh later told me, some grief counselor had suggested it nine years earlier so that Dawn could still be a part of his and Eliza’s lives. Nice idea, I supposed, though he and Eliza didn’t seem even to glance at those snapshots anymore. Early in our relationship, when Eliza was spending the weekend with Dawn’s parents, we headed up to Josh’s bedroom for the first time. Again, there on his nightstand: Dawn. This time she was in tennis garb with a teeny skirt, framed in silver bamboo. Long legs, not shapely, though not toothpicks. Slightly elongated nose. She came across as profoundly slender and pretty: Keira Knightley crossbred with a whippet.
So I suggested we find someplace other than their bedroom: I understood he might want to keep his wife’s picture, but I couldn’t make love with her checking out my moves. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Such a part of the landscape, you don’t even notice it.” The photo vanished in under thirty seconds. The ones in other rooms stayed. No one ever bothered to take them away. They appeared to be what Josh had said, part of the landscape—like doorknobs, always in the same place and never noticed.
“I wouldn’t call Josh’s taste cutting edge, but for a conventional guy, he’s got a decent sense of style. Except the house is so overdesigned. So it’s not him, it’s not you. Ergo …”
“Josh let her do what she wanted. His parents had money but the house he grew up in, where they still live, I wish you could see it. It looks like they bought it from Miss Havisham and then added indoor plumbing. Whenever he grew out of his clothes they sent him and the housekeeper to his father’s salesman at Brooks Brothers. He never gave appearance another thought.” (The Geller family’s only fashionisto had been Great-grandpa Irving who’d founded the still lucrative Tiny Togs a century before Josh.)
I took up a piece of lamb dotted with Szechuan peppers and, with a small prayer, popped it into my mouth. Naturally, Wynne had her own sets of chopsticks, elegant and enameled in darkest red. Our years of eating takeout from white boxes and drinking beer from bottles were done. She now had antique porcelain bowls she’d bought on her most recent trip to Shanghai. Also, we’d gone from Sam Adams to Puligny-Montrachet.
“Okay, Dawn had her chance to choose a house. Now it’s your turn. It’s not fair to you to have to live in Temple B’nai Tara.” It was so like Wynne to see style symbolizing a marriage, though maybe the idea had merit. A master bedroom so large it felt as though it should have tiered seating for an audience wasn’t—to me—loving. The downstairs half-bathroom was totally black and white. The silvery faucets had onyx handles and the toilet was black; it looked like a horror movie’s entrance to hell.
I knew Wynne was hoping for me to live the way I’d always wanted to, assisted by her design gifts and Josh’s money. But I said, “You don’t marry someone and adopt his kid and right away try to erase the past. I was enough of a change in their lives.”
“Not first thing. That would be selfish, to say nothing of tasteless. But you’re totally a unit now. If you’re going to stay on Long Island, you should have a fun project and a house that’s you. It might keep you from fixating on guys keying Teslas and staring at parking lots.” She adjusted her watch, a hefty gold oblong that looked as if it should be worn by a rich arms dealer. She insisted it was a classic.
“I don’t need a project,” I said. “I have a job—”
“Sitting around reading books all day—” Wynne interrupted.
“But I like reading books.”
“What I’m attempting to point out,” Wynne said slowly, “is that after all your years of action and badge flashing and hot guys who pack heat, you’ve moved to another country. Look, I’m not one of those snotty shits who mock suburbia. Some of my best clients live in Greenwich. But you may not have enough to occupy you. I didn’t tell you, Corie—you told me—that you haven’t exactly made a ton of friends there.”
“It’s so awkward. The women go around in threes, fours, and they’re so involved in their conversations that, you know, one of them might smile. But if you’re walking the dog and they’re out for a run, no one stops and says: Hello, I’m Daphne Teitelbaum. And wherever you could normally start up a conversation, they’re already in the midst of one, on their phones. I joined the temple, Citizens for a More Beautiful Shorehaven, the Wednesday lunch group. I was always part of something: fifth grade, the FBI. For the first time now, I’m alone.”
“It sucks. Look, I’m sure you will meet some cool people there and probably soon. But meanwhile, you’ve got to deal. Your biological clock is ticking louder and louder. Every day you’re worrying whether to have a baby because it’ll get in the way of your relationship with Eliza, which is certifiably insane. And Dawn’s last act on earth was buying those electrified candelabra sconces with fake wax drippings. What the fuck? Is that any way to live?”
“I couldn’t stay on the task force and be married, have a new kid, not with the hours I was working. Especially when I was totally wiped from years of exhaustion.”
“You could have taken family leave. Okay, that’s over, done. But you’ve got to know if Josh wanted another Dawn, another chic, aspiring suburban mom, he would have married one. He chose you.”
I sighed and rubbed my temples. I was weary after my parents, the conversation with Phoebe, and walking with Wynne around a gallery that looked like the Museum of Stripes. I just wanted a cup of strong tea and the brilliant strawberry gelato Wynne had been touting.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” she said.
“Whenever a suspect said that, I knew a shit storm was about to begin.” She grinned wryly at me. She knew and I knew her life wasn’t exactly too perfect to question—love affairs with twenty-six-year-old social media tycoons; convincing an oligarch in exile that a chair modeled on Tsar Nicholas II’s throne was not considered elegant in Manhattan; serial feuds that got started when she tried to enforce peace terms on her warring parents and siblings. It did not evidence what Socrates would have called wisdom. But I could see she was compelled to dive in anyway.
“I am not a terrorist,” Wynne said. “I’m your dearest friend and I am telling you that when one begins to obsess about a random man going crazy in Great Neck and decides something about him is deeply wrong, it might be a signal that one is not content with one’s life. Maybe you never really got over Sami. Maybe you’re subconsciously thinking ‘Someday’ and that’s why you’re not committing to this house, this life.”
That hit home and probably more forcefully than Wynne had intended. I poured some more wine into a glass that was so delicate that it looked as if it would crack if I sipped too hard. Never having been the sort who understood the phrase “comfortable silence” (unless it was some mutually agreed-upon period of quiet for reading or contemplating a Scrabble move), I guzzled the whole glass of wine I’d just poured, then tried without success to find the famous chisel marks.
I could see Wynne wasn’t going to talk first. She had an ability to move to someplace else mentally and deliberate whether to assemble a collection of vintage oyster plates for a client or simply get a hugely expensive matching set.
“First of all, Sami’s a nonissue. Or damn close to it,” I told her. “We were coworkers and—whatever—lovers. Both those ties are cut.” I made a snipping gesture with two fingers. “And second, I don’t live an undercover life. But except for Josh and Eliza, no one in Shorehaven knows that I was with the FBI. They all think I spent my entire career in the lit biz pushing stuff in Arabic. Mostly their response is: ‘Eeew, their writing is really gorgeous, but how do you read it?’ Plus, lowlife prejudiced remarks. I’m not living a lie, but there are times it’s better to be vague because of my contract work for the bureau.
“And here’s the thing: I don’t know when it started, but I started getting similar concealment vibes from Pete Delaney. I sense he’s hiding something, too. Either he’s not all he appears to be, or something else is going on. Unless it’s all in my head.”
“Unless,” Wynne repeated, which was more politic than: Of course it’s in your head, asshole.
“And I’ll concede that his verbal tells are almost imperceptible, that the other group members wouldn’t pick up on how he uses the same phrases about himself every time. Oh, and another thing I just remembered: that he seems to have an unvarying story, phrase-for-phrase if not word-for-word, about getting fired from his ad agency and how rough it was, looking for other work during the recession and having to open an office at home.”
“Isn’t that the truth?”
“Probably, but it’s as if he’s reading it from a teleprompter. Unvarying and unengaged.”
“But we all have stories about our lives that we tell over and over again,” Wynne said. “Like after I broke the engagement to Clive and Vogue was downsizing and wanted to send me on a photo shoot to the Everglades not just as editor, but to double as stylist, and how I took a hike and opened my own shop without a single client.” I nodded, having read or watched interviews with her. “The more you tell a story, the more polished it becomes. I’m sure I use the same phrases time after time.”
I breathed quietly for a minute. “But here’s the difference,” I said at last. “There was a video on how to keep a low profile for yourself that they had me watch before my exit interview. Keep your story short, light. Have a few vignettes of what your life was so you don’t sound like you’ve memorized your past. People do use the same phrases, okay? But it shouldn’t come out fluidly each time. Even my mom, who could memorize Shakespeare’s history cycle in a week, might stumble or hesitate. But it would wind up sounding authentic because it’s human. Not with Pete. It’s always smooth. Smoother than he appears to be, actually.”
Wynne didn’t say yes or no. She just offered an italianate shrug, complete with raised palms.
“One more thing. He has this combo of risk avoidance and risk seeking that just struck me as odd.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Funny, like this would occasionally happen to me for weeks before I started thinking something was up with him, but it’s just bubbling to the surface. When Hurricane Sandy hit, that was pre-Josh. But someone in the group mentioned to me how much he admired Pete. Pete was ‘awesomely prepared for any emergency.’ He had a backup of food, water, flashlights with good batteries, a sump pump. Oh, and a generator that was hooked up to his computer, so supposedly he could keep in touch with his clients in case of any disaster.”
“So? He read an article on emergency preparedness and followed every bullet point,” Wynne said. “Or he’s a control freak.”
“But he’s a risk seeker, too. He never looks before he crosses the street. One of the other guys in the group saw a car screech to a stop and said something to him like, ‘Don’t you look where you’re going?’ He said that Pete shrugged it off: ‘I’m not going to stop for them. They’ll stop for me.’”
“That is so arrogant.”
“I know, and so crazy. And another thing. This doesn’t fit into the crazy category, but he always pays cash. I’ve never once seen him with a credit card, and I mean that literally. He opens his wallet, and there are no cards in there. Not a one. Just a driver’s license and a Shorehaven Library card. And a couple of pictures of his wife and kids.”
“Do you want me to give you a list of reasons people use cash?”
“I know the reasons.”
That wasn’t stopping Wynne. “Okay, some have a cash business, which can be anything from selling drugs or stolen antiquities. Admittedly this Pete person is a product designer so his clients aren’t going to mail him, whatever, five thou in cash. But maybe at some point, like after he was fired, maybe he had to max out on credit cards and he’s scared about that happening again. He could have a spending issue and his wife doles out cash to him to keep control. He could have a political objection to consumer credit card debt. You can’t always tell from the outside what’s going on in someone’s life. You of all people, a trained snoop, should know that.”
“Of course I know that,” I said, as warmly as I could. I did not add: Everyone fucking knows that.
She paused, then gently asked, “What’s he like overall?” My guess was that Wynne wasn’t asking to get more info on Pete; she wanted to gain insight into why I was so intrigued.
“What’s he like?” It was less a repetition than my own query to myself. “Low-key, polite. Solid citizen type. He doesn’t talk all that much, but when he does, he’s all right. And in some ways, like being part of the community, volunteering at the soup kitchen at a church, and offering to teach one of the guys how to put new wire mesh in his window screens, he seems downright decent.”
“But you’re seeing some kind of similarity between you and him?” Wynne asked. “That there’s something he’s hiding, or at least not making public?”
“Yes. And you can see, it’s obviously a strong feeling.”
“So how about this? You feel some weird kinship or similarity. Hiding something. But does it have to be something bad? Maybe he’s like you, a retired FBI agent.”
“What?” I was thrown by what she said and couldn’t answer.
Wynne kept going. “Or a cop or who knows? Maybe he was a spy for the CIA. Hey! A product designer. He could have been like that guy in the James Bond movies who made all those cool weapons. Remember that gorgeous Aston Martin that sprayed an oil slick from the rear so the bad guy behind James Bond would skid off La Grande Corniche? There you have it! In the UK he was called … I think Q. But here? Pete Delaney.”