The Infidelity Pact Read online

  “Okay, start from the beginning and tell us everything,” demanded Victoria, her voice stern and all business. Victoria, who had an MBA from Stanford, had run a major division of Fox Studios before chucking it all a few months after the birth of her twin sons, Austin and Hunter. She had never fully been able to reconcile her advanced degrees with carpools and tennis lessons, and she often slipped back into boss mode. Eliza imagined this was the voice she’d used with her subordinates when she was a big-deal studio executive.

  Helen pushed her wavy dark hair out of her face and took a deep breath. “I don’t know, I don’t know…I went over to pick Anson up, as we all agreed”—she said this last part looking at them accusingly—“and then when I got there, there were a ton of cop cars and an ambulance with flashing lights—”

  “I heard the sirens!” interrupted Leelee.

  “Shhhh…let her finish,” reprimanded Victoria.

  “And, okay, so I drove up to the first cop. He was directing traffic away, and I said ‘What’s going on?’ and he said ‘Nothing, ma’am’ and I said ‘I need to know, my friend lives there’ and he said ‘I am not at liberty to say.’ He was all blow-offy and, like, Get lost. And then I saw…oh God, I saw a stretcher being carted out of his house—”

  “Just like on CSI!” said Leelee.

  “Totally, and I was like, ‘Oh, God, is that Anson?’ and he was like, ‘I’m not at liberty to say,’ and then I like, freaked out, because this is a joke! I mean, for all he knows, Anson and I are inseparable BFFs. So I start getting mad, and then finally another cop comes over and says yes, it is Anson, and I say ‘What happened?’ and he’s like, ‘We’re not sure yet, looks like he fell down the stairs’ and I said ‘Was it foul play?’”

  “You said what?” snapped Victoria.

  Helen stopped talking and looked worried. “I asked if it was foul play,” she said softly, fear creeping across her face.

  “Why in the world would you put that thought in his head?” asked Victoria, enraged.

  Helen looked like she might cry. “I don’t know…I guess I’ve seen too many episodes of Law Order.”

  Eliza put her arm around Helen. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you didn’t put anything in the policeman’s head. He’s a cop, for lord’s sake. He sees crime scenes all the time.”

  “In the Palisades?” asked Leelee skeptically.

  “What did he say?” insisted Victoria.

  “He said he wasn’t sure yet. Too early to tell,” said Helen.

  “So it might be murder,” said Leelee.

  “I guess, yes, it might be murder,” said Helen.

  The other three women were speechless, which for them was unusual. Eliza looked at each one of her friends and took a deep gulp. Leelee, the preppy mom who always had something dirty and outrageous to say to shake things up, was quiet. Victoria, the formerly cool and collected leader, just shook her head in disbelief. Helen, who had a propensity to look at everything from an existential or otherworldly angle, seemed shaken to her core. And Eliza herself, the reliable, steady voice of reason, was left totally stunned.

  “Um, okay, I have no idea what to say,” she said.

  “Me neither. But come on, are we certain he said he wasn’t sure if it was foul play?” asked Leelee.

  “I wouldn’t lie,” snapped Helen.

  “This cannot be happening,” said Leelee.

  Just then Juana entered the pantry. She stopped abruptly; surprised to see them all huddled in the corner.

  “Sorry, Missus, I need more napkins,” she said apologetically.

  “Sure, Juana,” said Eliza, sliding over to the cabinets and pulling a stack of toile cocktail napkins out of the drawer. Paper would have to do; she couldn’t be bothered to find the additional linen napkins.

  “Thanks, Missus,” said Juana, giving them all one more strange look before she reentered the living room.

  “You guys, we can’t really do this now, in the middle of the party. People will be suspicious,” said Eliza.

  “Suspicious?” asked Helen with alarm. “You don’t think that anyone will think we had anything to do with this?”

  Before Eliza could say anything, Victoria jumped in.

  “Eliza’s right,” said Victoria. “Let’s all go back in, pretend everything is okay, and then regroup later tonight.”

  “God, just when I thought this whole thing was going to be over…” began Leelee, her voice tight.

  “It is over, in a way,” said Victoria, sternly.

  “But not the way we thought,” said Helen.

  “But the way we all hoped,” said Victoria. They all turned and looked at her. She was right. They had never actually articulated it to one another, but in their daydreams, this was the best-case scenario. What could be better than to have Anson Larrabee, their nemesis, dead?

  For the rest of the evening, they all played their parts, all the while clenching the stems of their white wine glasses and praying for the night to be over. It was time to end this, once and for all. Their pact had taken a nefarious turn for the worse, leading them on an insidious course, slithering through every aspect of their lives, wreaking havoc on their marriages, driving them insane. If Anson had died from natural causes, they might have some peace. But if he was murdered…it could be the beginning of the end for all of them.

  •• 3 ••

  On an overcast Wednesday night in July, approximately eight months before Anson’s death, Eliza, Victoria, Helen, and Leelee had gathered at the Pearl Dragon for Girls’ Night Out. The sad irony that they were no longer girls was not lost on them, but they all thought if they changed the name to Women’s Night it would sound like some sort of angry feminist convention, and Ladies’ Night had a little bit of a porno twist to it. They all felt like girls, so while recognizing the misnomer, they made no attempt to change the name.

  The Pearl Dragon was mostly a sushi restaurant, but it also had the only full bar in the Palisades. This meant that on summer nights there was usually a throng of college-age students clad in miniskirts (females) and baseball hats (males), hanging out at the bar, trying to pick up members of the opposite sex. Eliza and her gang stayed toward the back, attempting to pay little attention to the pheromones flying in the front, distracting themselves with spicy tuna rolls, shrimp tempura, and baked cod. The four best friends saw each other often, but it was mostly on the fly, when they were picking up or dropping off their children at classes, grabbing coffee at Starbucks, or doing shoulder stands in yoga class. These nights were their chance to catch up sans diaper bags, attention-demanding kids, and husbands who had little interest in dissecting the latest issue of Us Weekly.

  “We’re so old,” lamented Leelee, glancing at the Jessica Simpson wannabe in the skintight lowrider jeans who had just planted herself on the bar stool, exposing her lacy pink thong to the entire restaurant.

  “It’s sad,” said Eliza, sucking the beans out of the edamame. “We could be their moms.”

  “No, we couldn’t!” protested Victoria.

  “In Oklahoma,” insisted Eliza.

  “If we were babies having babies, shopping in preteen maternity,” said Victoria dismissively. Victoria was a fact person. She had little use for exaggeration or drama.

  “I got my first gray hair the other day,” said Helen, picking the olive out of her dirty martini and taking a bite. “I’m thirty-three. I’m having a metaphysical crisis. Gray hair equals death to me. It’s all downhill from here.”

  “Come on!” said Eliza. “It does not equal death.”

  “Hey, they say the sex gets better when you’re older,” said Leelee, with a twinkle in her eye. Leelee adored talking about sex, which was odd considering she usually dressed like a forty-five-year-old who had just gotten off the golf course and was on her way to her second gin and tonic. But she had informed her friends again and again (almost too much) that underneath her prudish cashmere sweater sets she wore slinky black lingerie, the really raunchy kind with garter belts.


  “I don’t feel sexual,” sighed Helen. “I can’t even think that way. I mean, Wesley and I would rather watch a good episode of Lost than do it. It’s sad. And it’s a real crisis now that it’s summer. There’s no good TV on, all reruns and reality shows. I can’t wait for the fall season to start.”

  “Spice it up! Get some toys!” said Leelee mischievously. She swirled the chardonnay in her glass and took a large gulp. She had a large cache of sex toys in a box tucked away in the back of her closet. The truth was, she hadn’t used any of them in ages. The only thing that got any workout these days was her dildo, but that was when she was alone. And she would never tell her friends that.

  “Yeah, right. With Wesley? Don’t forget, my husband was raised in British boarding schools. I think I’d give him a heart attack if I whipped out handcuffs,” said Helen.

  Eliza and Victoria laughed, shuddering at the image of Wesley Fairbanks IV, Helen’s pale husband, who was twenty years her senior, chained to a bedpost.

  “Have you ever tried?” asked Leelee.

  “Ask Wesley? No, Wesley and I don’t even seem to talk to each other anymore,” said Helen, reaching over and picking up a piece of edamame. She played with it a little but didn’t put it in her mouth. “My husband and I are like two ships passing in the night. Friendly ships, but just…separate.”

  Helen became quiet. She thought about her home life and a dull numbness engulfed her. She was so used to the silence and the detachment that sometimes she had to remind herself that this was probably not how it should be. At the very least, it was not how she’d pictured married life should be. Maybe she should have married someone closer to her in age. Maybe they would have more in common. She looked up and saw her friends staring at her with concern. She didn’t want to be the downer. “So, what, do you all use toys?”

  “No,” said Eliza abruptly. “I mean, I’m not opposed. I have.” Eliza was evasive about her sex life. She would engage and talk about sex in the past, but now that she was married she felt protective of her husband. All that sanctity of marriage stuff had actually rubbed off on her. She knew that if she said something negative about Declan—related to sex or not—her friends would file it away and always have it in the back of their minds (the way she did when she heard their confessions). She didn’t want to let anyone have that over her. It was better to deflect.

  “You gotta do your hubby right, or he’ll get it somewhere else,” said Victoria firmly. Victoria talked about sex the way a man would. There was a certain hardness there, an anger. The others knew that Justin was a bit of an asshole. They figured that’s why Victoria was so blunt. It was as if by disengaging, not thinking her sex life could ever be a love life, she was launching a preemptive strike. She also liked to be in control of everything.

  “Isn’t it so sad that we just get older and fatter and less desirable, and men, even if they get older and fatter, get more desirable?” asked Eliza. “We’re saddled with baby weight, gray hair, and wrinkles, and we’re expected to have these kids, take care of them, work out like a maniac, get Botox, have a career…”

  “Well, you’re the only one with a career,” interrupted Leelee.

  “That’s because she’s the only one who had a career that could accommodate kids,” snapped Victoria. She was still bitter about leaving her job and saw it as some kind of failure. Why had she wasted all that time getting an MBA when she had no time to use it? She regretted that she hadn’t chosen a career in something like journalism. Something portable that she could do on her own schedule. If Eliza could do it, she was sure she could. But it was too late. She had chosen business because she wanted something intense and masculine. Something that depended on facts, where she could compete with the best of them. But she had learned the hard way that no matter how smart you are, the corporate world was just not set up for women with kids. And all that feminist progressive propaganda they shoved down your throat? Bullshit.

  “Honey, I don’t miss having a career, although I never really had a career, just a job,” laughed Leelee. “Let Brad do all the work, and show me the money!”

  Money was a sore subject with Leelee. She had married Brad when he had more of it, but then it all had come crashing down and Leelee was locked into a life that was—while still privileged—not exactly what she had in mind.

  “Declan doesn’t seem like the type who’s hard on you about weight and work and all that,” said Helen to Eliza.

  “No, he’s not. But come on, there’s pressure. I’m surrounded by some of the thinnest women in the world in this town. No way could I show up looking like a heifer,” answered Eliza.

  “But what are you talking about anyway? You’ve got a hot bod now, missy,” said Helen. Eliza protested but inside she burned with flattery. Finally someone had noticed her toned arms!

  “Isn’t it odd that this is our life?” asked Victoria, with sudden seriousness. “I mean, we are all basically suburban moms—I know the Palisades are technically part of L.A., but come on, we all drive SUVs with baby seats and hang out in playgroups and at the country club. There’s the tennis team, all that mundane crap. I went to an Ivy League college! I was third in my class at Stanford Business School! And now I’m organizing the charity bake sale at St. Peter’s? It’s bullshit.”

  All of the women looked at one another in commiseration. “It’s so true,” said Eliza.

  “But I mean, what do you miss the most about being young? What are you unhappy about? Is it that you miss things, or just that you want additional things?” asked Helen. Helen loved to dissect topics, look at everything from different angles, especially supernatural, spiritual, and existential. She was the master at asking probing questions that weren’t offensive, and her greatest quality was that she liked to hear the answers. This is a person who listens, thought Eliza the first time she met her. That’s so rare in this day and age. The funny thing was that she asked all the pertinent questions to everyone else and not to herself and her husband.

  “Oh, I can answer that one,” said Leelee, carefully aligning her third glass of chardonnay with her placemat. “I want to turn back time. To do it all over again. I want to do some things differently.”

  Leelee’s drunken honesty made everyone a bit sad. Without alcohol, she was usually evasive about personal issues, especially her disappointment with Brad, whom she had probably married way too young. But hints of anger came spilling out—just little glimmers—when she imbibed. She always tried to cover them up by being breezy and casual, but no one bought it.

  “What would you do over again?” asked Helen.

  “Oh, I don’t mean Brad or anything,” she said, although everyone knew she really probably did. “I just mean I’d get a lot busier before I got married. I would bang up a storm!” she said, trying to use humor to deflect the seriousness of her remarks.

  “So it’s a sex thing with you?” asked Victoria. She wanted the facts.

  “Don’t you think?” asked Leelee. “It’s great to be married, but it would be great to be given carte blanche to have sex with more people.”

  Leelee talked a big game, but again, no one thought it was sex she was after.

  “What do you think?” asked Victoria, turning to Eliza and Helen.

  “My sex life is pretty nonexistent,” said Helen, matter-of-factly. “I used to be quite wild in my younger days, if you can believe that.” Everyone could. “It’s funny because I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. How it was so exciting to discover a new position, or explore a new person’s body. I loved those first moments of running my fingers over a man’s stomach, someone I had never slept with before, and just tracing the outline of his abs or his nipples. I love the tactile part of sex. I miss the novelty, and I guess the variety. There’s something so exciting about making new human connections.”

  Everyone was quiet for a minute.

  “Not to mention that I’d love to do it with someone who cares,” added Helen. Unlike Wesley, who seemed to care only about hiking, smok
ing pot, reading scripts, and finding his next movie to direct.

  “What about you, Eliza?” asked Victoria. When she warmed to a topic she’d grill everyone as if they were witnesses and she was the prosecutor in a death-penalty case.

  “My sex life is fine. I don’t have any complaints,” said Eliza.

  Victoria was not going to let her off the hook. “You’re totally happy at the place you are now? You look at those girls over there,” she said, motioning to the scantily clad nineteen-year-olds, “and you feel great.”

  “No,” sighed Eliza. She didn’t think anyone could feel great next to those toothpicks. “Those are two different questions. Yes, it’s a bummer that we don’t look like them, but I am happy in my life now.”

  “You wouldn’t change a thing?” asked Victoria in disbelief.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” said Eliza. She leaned in. “Okay, nothing to do with my husband, whom I worship, and all those disclaimers…”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Leelee, waving them away in the air.

  “But I miss being coveted. It sounds lame, but I just can’t remember when I walked down the street or went to the grocery store and some hot, or even semihot, guy gave me a look like he thought I was attractive. I don’t even want a jump-your-bones look. Not sexy. Just romantic.” Eliza’s fantasy life was compartmentalized. She was happy with her husband and children, but perhaps because she was a writer, she had grandiose daydreams about being plucked from obscurity by knights in shining armor. It was as far as she would go.

  “I know what you mean,” said Helen. “The other day I was at Starbucks and this cute guy kept staring at me, and I thought, Wow! I got it going on! And then when I left and got in my car I noticed in the rearview mirror that I had a foam mustache.”

  “Embarrassing,” said Leelee.

  “Totally.”

  “I don’t even go there. If someone gives me a curious look, I assume I got my period all over my pants or something horrible like that,” said Leelee.