No Strings Read online

  Frankly, I didn’t even know there were people like Monica in the world—people who didn’t have to bust their asses to make ends meet. All I knew was that I was sort of attracted to her, and that she seemed interested in me. An after-class cup of coffee one night started everything. And it was she who invited me.

  Later on I found out all the rest. By then we were already in love.

  I think Monica planned it that way. She had to.

  Because she’d inherited an ungodly pile of money when her father, one of Newark’s erstwhile great slumlords, passed away just before we got engaged.

  There’d been other guys before me. After all, Monica was attractive, if she wasn’t exactly beautiful. And when those other dudes caught on to what was about to come their way, the heat was on. But Monica didn’t want to get taken for her money. She wasn’t about to become a small-scale Doris Duke. And so the guys had to go, every one of them. That’s why she kept the truth from me until the very last moment, until she couldn’t any longer.

  If she ever thought I was out for her money, she never let on. She even wanted me after seeing where I came from. And I wanted her to know. One weekend we took a long, leisurely drive out to the shithole where I was born and raised, and I let her have an eyeful. I even took her out to the mine and made her look down the shaft. She said nothing, but I could see that she was pained for me.

  It was happening right before my eyes, like watching the RMS Queen Mary sail into port. Sure, I was still young, much too young to get married, but what else was I supposed to do? That development—Monica’s inheritance—was going to change my life forever, and I knew it.

  She was an only child, and had already been dipping into her trust fund, but the big windfall from her old man’s death allowed us to purchase—without a mortgage—a twenty-room gated Tudor mansion complete with heated in-ground swimming pool and carriage house in posh Essex Fells, cheek by jowl with professional athletes and CEOs and renowned medical specialists, and gave her the freedom for various charities and the time for a long season of clay-court tennis. And that same windfall permitted me the leisure to work, pretty much as my whims dictated, as a freelance consultant in the field of pharmaceuticals advertising, which was where I was trying to get to before hooking Monica. Becoming a wealthy man merely speeded up the process. Hell, I didn’t have to work at all if I didn’t want to, and she often reminded me of that once we were married.

  But like I said, I didn’t want to be a leech. I had my dignity.

  Yeah, I’d stepped into it, all right.

  The rest of our time was spent traveling—to Paris, London, Milan, and various resorts in the Caribbean and the South Seas. Or on our boat, the Beau Soleil, a Sea Ray 46 Sundancer with all the amenities, that was docked in an inlet off the Navesink River. All in all a very sweet life, and one I had no interest whatsoever in fatally disrupting.

  And, at the age of forty, I wasn’t about to downscale.

  Monica put her empty glass down with a clank.

  The vision in the black bikini had disappeared. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure her up.

  When I did, she had a name—Lindsey. A sexy name, Lindsey, in a wholesome sort of way. This time we went a little further, into an easy conversation. Then we ducked into the hotel lounge and swilled drinks with colorful paper umbrellas in them until we lost count. She invited me up to her room, and as soon as we closed the door she stripped off that skimpy swimsuit, stepped into the shower, and invited me in.

  “Why don’t we rinse the sand off first . . . ?”

  It was a beautiful daydream. But it was just that—a daydream.

  For a grown man, daydreams aren’t enough.

  3.

  I let some time pass after finding out that Pleasants and Van Loan had done a snoop-job on me before launching the next phase of my operation. And of course Monica never knew that I’d found that invoice.

  The point was to let the waters calm, allow our lives to go back to the way they were before I pulled my little subterfuge and forced Monica to set the hounds on my trail. After all, I’d waited this long, hadn’t I?

  The way I wanted it was with no strings attached. I was going to have my cake and I would eat it, too. Countless men before me had done it, not to mention women. I’d known some, read about others. If I could handle the guilt of living a double life—and though I’d never done it before, I was convinced that I could—there was no reason I couldn’t set up the ideal arrangement for myself, which was to have a relatively happy family life and an exciting sex life on the side.

  Who wouldn’t want that setup?

  For months I’d been chewing on all the angles.

  I didn’t want a paid escort or prostitute because they could be dangerous. With a pro, even a high-end type, you couldn’t ever know for sure who was lurking in the shadows, and you didn’t want to run the risk of pissing away all of your money. And you sure didn’t want to pick up an exotic disease and pass it on to your wife.

  I couldn’t hang an ad in the Village Voice or New York magazine because they demanded a photo to go along with your bio. Hooking up with someone online could leave too much of a trail, and nowadays it was the obvious place to look if you wanted to nail someone in the act. And no way in hell was I posting my picture on the Internet.

  I didn’t want the women’s photos on there, either, I decided. Even if they were sent to one of my private e-mailboxes, I didn’t relish having to erase all that history. Not only was it too much hassle, you could never really get rid of it. If Monica ever decided to look at me again, she could get the best experts to dig deeper this time.

  No, I wanted to keep it all nice and private. I wanted the candidates to send me a letter with their photo, to get a real feel for what they were all about. A babe could pretty much post anything on the Net, touch up her digital picture, and lead you straight down the garden path. I didn’t want that. I didn’t have time to waste with dead ends.

  That left the Personal Connections, a high-end, semiprivate newsletter that circulated throughout the entire metropolitan area. They let clients do things the way they wanted. I paid them an extra fee to forward letters to the Pine Brook PO box.

  At least it was a place to start.

  The first thing I did was open a PO box in the hamlet of Pine Brook, which is one of those nondescript, slightly rundown Jersey suburbs on a strip mall–lined stretch of Route 46 five miles to the west of Essex Fells. Then I planted an ad in the Personal Connections:

  Happily married, well-fixed male seeks extremely, extremely discreet married female between 25 and 35 for hot, sexy afternoons. I’m game for some secret adventure—are you? Not out to change the status quo. Just looking to shake it up a little. Photo a must. Will make contact only if interested . . .

  Etc. What I was after was a person exactly like myself—someone with a lot to lose and no desire to lose it. One of my old college buddies (I attended an extension of Penn State) used to say that what a guy needed for an affair was a babe who wasn’t looking to get out of her marriage, because that was about as foolproof as it got. A built-in system of checks and balances, so to speak. The advice stayed with me.

  There had to be hundreds, maybe thousands of others like me out there. I saw the ads all over the Web. So I was convinced that my plan was going to work. People as famous as Charles Lindbergh had stashed secret second families for decades and weren’t found out. What I was doing was much less risky.

  Within ten days of the ad’s appearance, PO Box 330 was stuffed to overflowing. A yellow note on top of the stack requested that I ask for the excess contents at the counter.

  “Looks like you’re a very popular guy,” deadpanned the clerk, handing over a fat sheaf of manila envelopes held together by rubber bands. There wasn’t a shred of levity in his voice. I figured that maybe he saw the return addresses—all carrying female names—caught on to what I was up to, an
d was green with jealousy.

  “That’s me,” I cracked. “Must be my lucky day.”

  The fact that the clerk had addressed me at all was worrisome. I didn’t want anyone at the post office ever taking notice of me.

  We exchanged a few more words, and Kenny—that was the name on his ID plate—looked me dead in the eye.

  The look made me recoil. I was feeling a little guilty. But what could happen, after all? I wasn’t about to commit murder here, was I? I was just some guy who happened to have a hot mailbox at the Pine Brook Post Office. I could have been anybody: a producer or casting director soliciting the head shots of actresses, or something of that sort.

  Nah, nothing to fret about.

  I lugged the pile out to the car—a black BMW sports convertible that Monica thought was on the pretentious side but that we bought anyway because I craved it. After my early deprivation—the Marzten family of Nanty-Glo, Pennsylvania, never owned anything but second- and third-hand cars, and often they were never completely paid off—I’d come to the conclusion that if you didn’t have to deny yourself, you shouldn’t.

  I needed a private place to look the correspondence over, so I headed down 287 to the county park just south of Morristown. It was a fine day in late April. Usually I was working on something or other at home or at one of the agencies I freelanced for, but today there was nowhere I had to be.

  I found an out-of-the-way parking area under some budding swamp maple trees, rolled down the window, and with my ignition key sliced open the first submission, which was from a housewife with three kids on the Jersey Shore.

  In her sloppily handwritten letter she bitched and moaned about her no-good husband’s indifference, her kids’ selfishness, her in-laws’ lack of understanding, and the fact that her career as a massage therapist was in shambles because she was stuck at home watching her rug rats. She’d had just about enough, and she wasn’t going to take any more. Yes, she was interested in meeting me if she could find a little time over the next month to break away. She was ready for an affair.

  I glanced at her picture, which had been taken with a digital camera and printed off her home computer.

  “Christ,” I heard myself say.

  “Annie” was dour-looking and overweight. She was dressed in a wrinkled cotton blouse and Bermuda shorts and was posing in front of a kitchen cabinet. The thought of getting a massage from her made my skin crawl. I dropped the photo and envelope onto the floor in front of the passenger’s seat.

  The next letter was a slight variation on the first, but this time the writer was a thirty-eight-year-old Latina with a bad case of acne who lived in Union City. Letters three through nine were more of the same: slight variations on a theme of unhappiness.

  I shook my head. What the hell was I getting myself into? None of the women came close to fulfilling the fantasy I’d spun in my mind. What I had on my hands here was nothing but a collection of human misery, and that was the last thing I wanted any part of.

  I told myself to relax. All I had to do was dump the lot and that would be the end of it.

  With letter number ten, the tide began to turn. “Terri” from Babylon was a looker all right, but there was something about the attached note—the “awesomes” and “cools” and references to hip-hop groups—that turned me off.

  What a goddamn smokin’ body, though. What I wouldn’t do with that girl.

  After thinking it over, I tossed her letter, too.

  It quickly got to the point where I could spot the mental cases a mile off, and right then and there I shredded their letters and pictures. The fatties and anorexics, they went, too.

  When I was finally through opening envelopes an hour later, I’d made a stack of my five top candidates and a small selection of alternates.

  When I got back to Essex Fells, I steered the Beemer into the carport, then went into the carriage house at the rear of the property and deposited my alternates, each in its own manila envelope, in the dark space on the floor beneath the tool locker. It was completely safe—my wife never set foot in there.

  The other five I slipped into my briefcase.

  I locked it and carried it into the house. Neither Monica nor Diane was at home, but I resisted the urge to sit down at the computer and start sending out e-mails right then and there.

  4.

  Oriole Health Marketing was the ad agency where I happened to be consulting at the time. It was the third straight contract I’d signed there; whenever I finished up one project, they immediately signed me to another. I got the idea they liked me.

  The building was one of those big, impersonal monoliths surrounded by rolling green lawn that you see all over the suburban North Jersey landscape. Inside it was as sterile and quiet as death, but the pay was good. All you had to do was check your identity at the door.

  I was responsible for composing a fat brochure that included the etiology of diabetes, signs and symptoms of the disease, a menu of healthy diets, and most important of all, a pitch for a major new drug to control it that was set to launch in a few months, pending US Food and Drug Administration approval.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  I removed the earbuds of my iPod, which had been piping in Gato Barbieri’s music from Last Tango in Paris, and turned around.

  “How’s that thing coming, Richard?”

  Carole Mills was my supervisor. A dowdy middle-aged redhead out of a bottle, she was always affable to me, at least on the surface. But she was the nervous type, always fretting that I wouldn’t meet her deadlines for turning the material around, which was irritating, since that was my specialty.

  “Great, Carole,” I told her with a broad grin, “just great.”

  It was the answer I always gave her when she came sniffing around my cubicle for an update.

  The best thing about being a hired hand is that you don’t technically belong to the company you’re working for. If the whim hits you, you can tell them to shove it, get up, and walk straight out the door without looking back. I’d done it once or twice, and I had Monica and her mucho bucks to thank for it. I hadn’t thought about walking at Oriole, but Carole was starting to get on my nerves.

  “Are we still on track to get the first draft out the door on the twelfth?”

  “Not a problem. Don’t even give it a second thought.”

  “Thanks, Richard. You’re so on top of things. If anything changes, if you get bogged down or something like that, let me know right away, okay?”

  “Don’t worry about a thing, Carole. Have I ever let you down before?”

  My reassurances seemed to calm her, and she walked off with a smile on her chubby face.

  But despite the fact that I didn’t have to take orders from anyone, even on a freelance basis, I needed my work—if not for the jack, then for my self-respect. I’d actually seen a shrink years before to deal with the jarring reality that I’d become rich overnight through my marriage, that I could easily fall into the lifestyle of a kept man, and he convinced me that it would be better to earn some legitimate money of my own rather than just sit around sponging off my wife. And while Monica’s inheritance paid for nearly everything major in our lives—the cars, the boat, the travel, the upkeep of the Essex Fells mansion, Diane’s private school—I enjoyed the ad-writing process and earning at least some of my own keep. Moreover, our cushy lifestyle allowed me to try and write novels in my spare time (I’d never been able to get anything published), so it was important for me not to feel totally indebted to my wife.

  Because no matter what, I was never going to be Mr. Monica LaRocca.

  And maybe that, too, was what was propelling me to do what I was about to do now. I didn’t want to lose myself altogether. Being with another woman might make me feel like somebody again.

  Well, somebody different, at least. For a while I needed to not be an impotent suburban papa who was under
his wealthy wife’s thumb, whether or not it was the reality of the situation.

  The minute Carole disappeared into her office, I jumped onto the Net. Using a new handle—whisperguy77—and an offbeat dot-com called Ssshhhhhmail that had 250 MB worth of space as my home base, I made contact with my top five choices. I dropped each a short note saying that their letters intrigued me and that I might like to meet them, but that I’d only write back if I intended to go through with a date in the near future.

  Three of the five wrote back within the next twenty-four hours. “Jen” and “Alexandra” got back to me fastest, but “Gretchen” was the applicant I settled on meeting first.

  The lady knew how to write an intelligent letter all right, but it was her photo that had stayed with me from the second I opened the envelope—she was absolutely stunning. Whether she looked as good in person and whether Gretchen was her real name was anybody’s guess. Which was okay—I was going to go by “Jonathan” until we got to know one another—if that happened.

  Through a brief exchange of e-mails we agreed to meet at the bar of a Thai restaurant, Kin Khao, on Spring Street in Soho on Thursday afternoon. It was my suggestion. I wanted a place neither Monica nor I had ever set foot in. I’d read about the place in Zagat. Dark and romantic was what it said, with martinis to die for. Perfecto.

  As we were climbing into bed Wednesday night I told Monica that I’d be in the city for most of the next day, and that after I interviewed with a search agency in Midtown about a possible future writing assignment, I’d probably hit a couple of bookshops, maybe take in a movie if I felt up to it.

  Given how her surveillance of me had turned out, she never even flinched.