An Accidental Affair (25 page)

“Look, I know you’re in pain, pissed off, but that’s where I draw the line, Mr. Holder.”

“You’ve been in The Apartments for a few days. Men have been trying to get some of Ted’s wife for years. She won’t go near another man. But she comes to your door just like that.”

“Don’t fucking blame me because I’ve made better choices than you and you’re fifty years old living in a dump like this. Don’t fucking come into my space and try and attack me. I’m nice, but I’m not that fucking nice,
Chet
. You’d better adjust your attitude. This is not the day.”

Then he stopped talking, but his body language remained hostile.

Two guns were behind him and my bloodied face and anger were in front of him.

Mr. Holder said, “My car is not worth mentioning. I’m living the life of a poor man. I live with a woman who has two kids. You drive a
Maybach. You’re rich. You’re married to a movie star. You wedded one of the prettiest women God ever made. I’m stuck here. You have options. You’ve accomplished a lot at a young age. You’ve done more with your life than I have with mine. You have nice things. I have nothing to show for being on this planet for fifty years.”

“My wife has a porn tape. I’m on the run. And I’m sitting here with you.”

“
You’re here by choice
. You’re here because you’re not man enough to face your problems. You’re hiding. Your wife did you wrong and you’re afraid to stand up and tell the media how you feel. You tucked your tail between your legs and ran to the ghetto to hide.”

We stared each other down. We were moments from a bloody shooting.

There was a tap on the door. And we both jumped.

I swallowed my new anger and called, out, “Yeah. Who the hell is it this time?”

“Driver.”

I let Driver back in. He had a baseball bat in his hand. A Louisville Slugger. He’d been to his car, then double-checked, had looked for the rest of the Bergs Brothers.

Driver said, “Everything okay in here?”

“Nothing that I can’t handle. What about out there?”

“Not a Berg in sight. I’d bet they think you’re calling the cops.”

“That or they’re taking the one I beat to the emergency room.”

“This is just the quiet before the storm.”

“People think that I’m a joke until we have to go one-on-one.”

“Obviously. They don’t know how you get when you’re pissed off.”

“No they don’t. Johnny Bergs knows. And so does one of his fucking brothers.”

“You look pissed off.”

“I’m moving from storm to storm. And only a hurricane can beat a tropical storm.”

“Sure about everything being okay in here? Do I need to intervene?”

“All is good. Like I said, my friend, I can handle my own problems.”

Baseball bat in hand, Driver sat on the leather sofa, the leather sighing under his weight. He laid the baseball bat across his lap, patted it three or four times for good measure.

Mr. Holder regarded Driver for a short second. Driver returned the favor, unblinking.

I said, “Are we done here, Mr. Holder? Or do you have other accusations and insecurities and lifelong failures and bad choices in relationships that need to be addressed?”

Mr. Holder said, “What matters now is getting ready to go see my daughter.”

“Look, Mr. Holder.”

“What is that, Mr. Thicke? What does the young, rich man want to say now?”

“Look. Did you still want me to drive you down there in the Maybach?”

“No, I’ll drive. I’d hate to show up and have her think that I’m somebody that I’m not. Or I’d hate for her to see you and get distracted. If she sees you, your car, she might not see me.”

“I can arrange for a car service to take you down and bring you back.”

“I need nothing from you, Mr. Thicke. Like you, I’m my own man. Always have been.”

“I was just offering. I owe you from helping me move in. A promise is a promise. No matter what was said, no matter what you think, I’m a man of my word and I’ve been your friend.”

“A man has to make money, or he’s not seen as a man worthy of being in this world.”

“It’s not about the money.”

“When a man doesn’t have money,
it’s always about the money
.”

Mr. Holder took a breath, looked anxious, and then he opened the
door, ready to exit without saying good-bye. But he opened the door on Vera-Anne’s crying face. She was on the other side of my door, face red, pink hair pulled back, jean shorts and a black T, no sandals, as if she had run up here right after Mr. Holder had come to confront me. I didn’t know how much she had heard. But her face, the way her body trembled, her guilt was suffocating. Her chest rose and fell with her anxiety, and her neck was damp with stress sweat, her palms the same.

She saw my face, my bruises and looked like she was about to scream.

Mr. Holder snapped at her, “What are you doing up here?”

“I’m sorry, Poppa.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. It was just flirting. It wasn’t serious. I mean, I did hug him. But nothing happened. If he told you something did happen, he’s lying. He’s been looking at me and I was just being polite. He kept saying that we’re almost the same age. Then he kept asking me to put the kids to sleep and come up here by myself, but I turned him down.”

“He told me that you were crying. That’s the same thing you did with me. I told you that I was just trying to help you and your children, that I was trying to be nice, and you got off my sofa and came into my bedroom crying. You cried your way into my bed. You tried that with him.”

“He’s lying.”

“You undressed and stood in my doorway naked, breaking down with tears in your eyes.”

“Don’t believe him.”

“And I held you, and you whispered in my ear, and like a fool, I took you into my bed.”

“He just wants to break us up so he can have me.”

“I told you that I was too old for you. I knew that you were too immature.”

“I love you, Poppa. You know I love you.”

“You said age meant nothing and you’d be better to me than any woman I’d ever met.”

“My kids love you too, Poppa. You know how much my kids love you.”

“And you made me feel things no woman had made me feel in over two decades.”

“
Varg is a liar
.”

“
You have no idea who this man is
. That adds insult to injury.”

“He’s nobody. I bet that everything in his apartment is stolen. He’s a bum.”

Mr. Holder spoke in a voice so calm it was terrifying. “You started packing yet?”

“Packing? You’re really putting me out over this?”

“We had issues before he showed up. But I guess I just chose to ignore those issues. I can see the future. You’ll cheat on me. You didn’t do it today, but you will at some point.”

“You’re putting me out over Varg? I don’t like him. He’s not my type; you know that.”

“Eventually. If you haven’t already. Loving you has made me a fool.”

“What are me and my kids going to do? Where are we going to live? How will we eat?”

“You have two kids. That’s two men who need to be feeding you and them, and maybe it’s time for them to grow up, for you to grow up, for them to feed their seeds, not me.”

“Please, Poppa. Please. I haven’t slept with anybody since I’ve been with you.”

“Vera-Anne, I’m not stupid. I hacked your e-mails. Been reading your e-mails since you moved in with me. I’ve read everything that you’ve written about every cute boy or man that you’ve met on Facebook, and I know how you like good-looking men. Those are your
words. If you see a good-looking man, you have to go introduce yourself. You have to get his phone number. You have to friend him on Facebook. Those are your words. And so far as our new neighbor, since you first came up here uninvited and met him, you have wanted to be with
Varg Veum
. Every word you’ve sent, I read. I want you packed and gone by this time tomorrow.”

“You’re a hacker?”

“I can’t go through this again. I just can’t. You know how my first wife did me.”

“You’ve been reading my personal e-mails?”

“That was two decades ago and I still think about it, still feel resentment to this very day.”

Vera-Anne screamed, “
You’re a hacker
.”

“It’s better than what you are, Vera-Anne. Much better.”

“
I fucking hate hackers
. I sleep with your old ass and you hack me?
How dare you
.”

His expression was hard, judgmental, a mix of rabid disappointment, cups of sadness, tons of disbelief. He looked at her like he wanted to stab her over and over and over.

Mr. Holder pulled the door closed behind them and her cries followed, her begging and pleading and promising to be a good woman echoed, followed him up the hallway.

Driver said, “When I stepped out, she was in the hallway by your door eavesdropping.”

“First Regina Baptiste, then Bergs and now this shit with Holder and Vera-Anne.”

“So far as Holder, welcome to the ghetto. Young girls like that are dangerous. He’s a sucker, being played like that. Crap like that usually ends with bloodshed and body bags.”

I nodded and punctuated the moment with a deep sigh of regret. Then I shifted my mind, moved back to my real problems. My problems were the problems that mattered most.

One of the Bergs had found me. That meant that they had been looking for me since I had beat Johnny Bergs in the streets of Hollywood. And Johnny Bergs was probably orchestrating this revenge. I remembered the fight at Mapona. The rumors about the missing accountant. The boys who had been found dead after they had fought the Bergs.

Anxiety and fear tried to rise up. I refused to fall apart.

Driver moved the bat from his lap. “All of your cars have tracking devices.”

“I know. That’s how Regina found where the car was parked.”

“I could’ve taken it back to the house the day you came here.”

“I know that you could’ve.”

“You didn’t go too far. Less than an hour. You wanted Regina to find you.”

I nodded. “Next time I’m hiring a stupid driver. You’re too good. Like a damn detective.”

“Crossword puzzles keep the brain sharp.”

I made myself a cup of Kona coffee, gave the same to Driver, and we waited for Godot. Driver was hanging around, probably to make sure I didn’t take the guns and go retaliate.

I had plenty of time to be afraid of what was yet to come.

He asked, “When Mrs. Thicke showed up, how did it go?”

“Emotional and immature. We both digressed to being primates. Became hurt children.”

“Like Holder and that young girl did.”

“Compared to us, they were pretty mature.”

I sipped my coffee to calm my out-of-control nerves.

Driver said, “I missed the start of the fight, but you handled yourself.”

“You can look at it on the computer.”

He hesitated, and then he loaded the file and watched.

He analyzed and said, “Mean jabs. Your form’s not too bad, considering
that you were in a street fight. I could help you with that hook. And never drop your opposite hand.”

“Well, just look at the part where I beat his ass. It’s not the damn Olympics.”

“You have a great fighting instinct. Relentless. Like you grew up brawling. Brothers?”

“Two older, two younger, all bigger, all stronger, all faster, none smarter.”

Driver said, “Then you woke up fighting and you went to bed fighting.”

“Sure did. We lived on top of each other. Laughter. Depression. My mother and father in one bedroom. Six boys in either the living room or the other bedroom. And no books.”

“You overcompensated. Bought everything you never had as a child.”

“We all overcompensate. Material things. We buy too much. In the quest for love. We don’t know how to love and we try and we end up loving too many of the people who are not worthy of our love. What we don’t have drives us to obsession and we overcompensate.”

“You’ve never mentioned anything about your family. Never in an interview.”

“I don’t do tragic interviews. I don’t want strangers hearing me talk, and thinking that we have somehow bonded, then coming up to me as if they know me and telling me how shitty their lives have been. I grew up in areas that would make this place look like the W hotel. People hear that I grew up in London and think that I had the keys to Buckingham Place and an audience with the queen. London was horrible for my family and me. It was horrible for me. I went three, sometimes four days without food. I had a can of beans once. You know what I did? I hid it from my family and saved it. I was afraid to eat it because it was all that I had and I didn’t know when I’d get another can of beans. I made a can of beans last six days. But London was harsh. And for a while it wasn’t
much better here. That was how things were when we were growing up, before we came back to the States. I saw people eating and I used to pretend that I wasn’t hungry. I’d go to school so hungry that I thought that I was going to pass out. We all have shitty lives. It’s not supposed to be that bad in a Christian nation. Mr. Holder was just talking about a Christian nation. The hypocritical values of a Christian nation. This nation was built on the blood of a carpenter who was nailed to a cross and tortured until he died. We’re programmed to accept suffering and are addicted to tales of woe and sorrow and stories about suffering.”

“And we’re also addicted to crucifying and throwing stones and spears at the suffering.”

Mr. Chetwyn Holder’s diatribe had derailed me from my real mission and gotten to me.

I took a breath. “Anyway. Yeah. I just told you things that I’ve never told my wife.”

“And they won’t leave this room unless you take them with you.”

“God bless confidentiality agreements.”

“I’m a man who did two years in jail for not telling. I did someone else’s time.”

I nodded. “Well, whoever you did time for, I hope they appreciated it.”

He said, “You had a pretty big family. Had no idea.”

“Big family, small flat. My parents were not happily married, and I grew up as an introverted and reserved boy in a house of domestic turmoil. That introversion is what made me a writer. The brothers are what made me a fighter. That’s why it was no problem going after Johnny Handsome. I have a reputation to maintain, even if that rep is only inside my head.”