“You know I feel like shit about this, right?” He peered at his hands while his stomach churned beneath the drawstring band of his pajama pants, as if trying to digest his unpalatable apprehension. “The overtime, the holidays . . .” The other man. “It makes me feel like a grade-A loser, like I had this amazing opportunity and I . . .” He hesitated, searched for the right word. “. . . I squandered it.”
She kept quiet, grabbed the abandoned coffeepot by its handle, and splashed fresh brew into two mugs—black for her, half-skim for him. Marriage did strange things to people. It could have been World War III in that kitchen, but if there was coffee, two mugs would always be served.
He waited for her to tell him that he hadn’t squandered anything, that he wasn’t psychic and couldn’t have possibly known what was going to sell and what was going to bomb. He hoped that, perhaps, she’d admit that with all the cuts and layoffs at her own firm, she wasn’t making as much as she used to either. He wanted to hear that it wasn’t completely his fault, but all he got was: “You should have fired John when I told you to.”
Lucas bit his tongue. Slow sales or not, John’s belief in his work had been steadfast. At his worst, most desperate moments, Lucas could pick up the phone and John would be there, telling him to take it easy, telling him to put his head down and keep working, Keep working. Fuck the reviews, screw the numbers, just keep working. Except year after year, things got steadily worse. Lucas knew this was his last shot, but Caroline was fed up with empty optimism. She’d crossed her fingers for so long they had fused together like the branches of a tree.
Caroline closed her eyes and exhaled. She held her mug aloft, the steam coiling around her features like tendrils of smoke. Lucas decided to wait it out, praying that she’d give him this one last try at turning things around. She never liked their house in Briarwood, never took to the neighborhood after living on Long Island for so long. The house in Port Washington had been her dream, the kind you’d see on holiday cards and Good Housekeeping spreads, every window dressed up in garlands and sparkling lights during the holidays, straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Watching her pack up their things because they couldn’t afford to stay had taken something out of him. It had been his fault. His slump. His failure. His work.
Caroline searched his face for some sort of answer. Lucas tried to stare back at her with a semblance of confidence, because this was the Big Idea, the book that would get him back in the game, the very thing he needed to redeem himself, to feel like a man who hadn’t let his family down, who hadn’t lost his wife to some Ivy League townie turned corporate sheep.
“I can’t leave my job,” she said. “I’ve got that conference. They’ve already booked my flight.”
Rome. They had visited a few years before Jeanie was born and had left unimpressed. It was crowded and dirty. The monuments looked as though they were part of some weird Roman theme park. The cafés wouldn’t let them sit without an exorbitant table service charge—the price of an espresso tripled if you wanted to pull up a chair. They had expected one of the most romantic cities in all the world, but what they got was a bad taste in their mouths. Back then, it had been nothing short of disappointing. Now, Lucas could see the irony of the metaphor. The life they had expected wasn’t the one they got.
And yet, the moment Caroline learned her company was flying her to Rome to broker a deal, she was giddy with excitement, as though she’d forgotten all about that unfulfilling vacation. Then again, Kurt Murphy was also going; the other man, who resembled a young, Interview with the Vampire Brad Pitt. The moment Caroline had announced her trip, Lucas pictured Kurt screwing her against a pillar of the Pantheon. He imagined them riding around the Colosseum on a fucking Vespa. He saw sundae dishes holding melted gelato, empty wine bottles, and half-eaten plates of pasta littering the kind of Roman hotel room he’d never be able to afford. Kurt was the brokerage’s key player. Over the years, dozens of people had lost their jobs so that Kurt Murphy could continue to buy overpriced champagne.
Fuck Kurt Murphy, he thought, only to have his follow-up thought assure him that, Oh, don’t worry, pal, she intends to.
“Why can’t you just write it here?”
Because that wasn’t the deal.
“Because I have to do interviews.”
“So fly out there and do them.”
“It isn’t that easy. We’re talking about a supermax. I can only get in there once a week, maybe for two hours a pop, and that’s if I’m lucky. Flying back and forth will cost us money we don’t have.”
Caroline was unimpressed.
“That, and I just need to be there,” he reminded her. “You know that.”
Before Jeanie was born, Lucas had spent nearly six months in and around Los Angeles while Caroline stayed home in New York, but back then they had the cash. He flew to the East Coast every two or three weeks between researching the Night Stalker and the Black Dahlia cases. He could have done the research from anywhere, but there was something about being where the crimes had been committed, something about standing in the very spot a person had died. Wandering through the rooms of a house haunted by death. Seeing the details. Touching the wallpaper. Smelling the air. It ignited Lucas’s work like nothing else. Bloodthirsty Times: The Story of a Stalked L.A. had put him on the map. Lucas lent its success to having walked Richard Ramirez’s steps, to having seen the people, the places, the things Ramirez had experienced.
“Right,” Caroline said. “Research.” Ire peppered her tone.
“We can’t afford to pay the mortgage on this place and rent another. It’ll drain our savings.”
She rolled her eyes at the reminder. “I know that.”
“There’s always New Jersey,” he said quietly, deathly afraid of the response to suggesting she move back in with her parents.
Caroline openly scoffed. “Sell the house and shack up with Mom and Dad? Good idea.”