End of Secrets (23 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT

Charlie Canyon peered up at the hotel through the tinted windows of the limousine. The black stretch lurched forward in Park Avenue traffic and slid into an opening that was even with the hote
l’s
revolving doors.

Gray Heller, ONE Musi
c’s
VP of Marketing and Canyo
n’s
new boss, had won two near-shouting matches in the last five minutes: one with the limo driver, who had failed to nudge them close enough to the entrance because of curbside traffic, and the second with the hote
l’s
doorman, who was irritated with the drive
r’s
solution, which was to double-park in the right lane of Park Avenue. For the moment Heller had convinced all relevant parties that the vehicle was
n’t
moving until they had their guest on board.

Canyon offered to go up to get Jalen West, and he jumped out of the limo before Heller could suggest otherwise.

He knocked on the suite door at the end of a plush hallway on the twelfth floor. The eyehole darkened for a moment, and then light filtered through again. After a long beat of silence, the door opened and Jalen West, wearing only basketball shorts, stepped back to let him in.

They walked a few steps into the suite before pausing awkwardly. It was the first time they had ever been alone with each other.

Canyon whistled. “You know, the cost of this room comes straight out of my salary.”

Jalen smiled and looked down, as if embarrassed. The suite featured a bilevel living area, bedroom, and sprawling bathroom and changing room. Pulled forward by the view of Midtown, Canyon stepped around Jalen to approach the large windows. As he did, he cut close enough that the fabric of his shirt grazed Jale
n’s
naked torso. A few seconds later, Jalen came up beside him.

They both looked out at the city, though neither was aware of anything but the few inches of space between them.

“I should get ready—” Jalen started. But Canyon reached out and gripped his forearm before he could turn, an act that echoed into one continuous motion that neither of them resisted. Canyon shut his eyes. First, he felt Jale
n’s
mouth on his, and then Jale
n’s
open hand on the back of his head. They never made it to the bedroom. Undressing each other in stages, they stumbled as far as the living area until Canyon, sliding out of his underwear, pushed Jalen to his back on the couch.

“We have somewhere w
e’r
e supposed to be, do
n’t
we?” the pop star said when the
y’d
finished.

“Yes. The lim
o’s
double-parked downstairs.”

“Shit.”

They laughed hard, and then they got dressed.

“You think I should go to this nightclub?” Jalen said, checking himself in the body-length mirror before they stepped into the hall.

“I think you should do whatever you want to do.”

Jalen shrugged. “I want to work on my next album.”

“Then do that. I
t’s
only the publicist who wants you to go to the nightclub.”

“Why?”

“To get your picture taken.” Canyon paused. He was standing behind Jalen, looking over his shoulder at him in the mirror. “Scott Michaels is going to be there.”

“
I’m
not interested in Scott Michaels. Do you have his number?
I’l
l call him and explain.”

Scott Michaels was the star of
Apocalypse
, ON
E’s
tent-pole action movie due out a week later.

Canyon considered that for a moment. The thought amused him: Jalen West, ever the gentleman, putting in a call to Scott Michaels to tell him that it was
n’t
personal, i
t’s
just that neither his conscience nor his intolerance for boredom would permit him to spend all hours of the night at a hip club just for—especially for—a shameless publicity stunt.

“
I’l
l take care of it,” Canyon said. He wanted to kiss Jalen on the back of his neck. So he did. He pressed his lips to the firm tendon that descended from the pop sta
r’s
hairline and disappeared into his collar. The skin there smelled like Jalen West. It was magnificent. “How about the basketball game? The ca
r’s
still waiting.”

“You better believe we’re going to the game,” Jalen said.
“Pistons–Knicks
in the playoffs at Madison Square Garden? There’s only one thing I’d miss that game for, and we already did that. Let’s go.”

TWENTY-NINE

The news came in the late afternoon. Parker sat in stunned silence while his bosses, the fir
m’s
cofounders, expressed their excitement and outlined the details of the transition. Despite the celebratory atmosphere, Parker could not trigger those feelings within himself. To him, there was something crushing about the news, something that gnawed on his conscience as he walked the streets of the city. Helplessness mounted quickly, not like pressure building in a volcano or a gas line that could be relieved with the release of a valve, but a kind of depth pressure, like sinking under hundreds of feet of water. There was no release. He would drown or be crushed if he was
n’t
rescued.

He wanted to talk to someone who would understand—or at least listen. He walked into L@Ho and planted himself at the bar. He had come here ready to unload about the work situation, but instead, as soon as h
e’d
swallowed his first sip of gin, he began to tell the bartender what h
e’d
done to Kera. It bubbled out of him irrevocably. He could not stop it.

H
e’d
been in Dubai for four days. Four. An insignificant length of time for someone who had lived thirty-one years. He had always been a man in control of himself, deliberate and rational. He and Kera had dated a full month before sleeping together. H
e’d
waited a full year to propose to her, even though it was apparent long before where things were headed. Deliberate and rational Parker, the furthest thing from self-destructive.

In Dubai it had taken the length of the post-keynote cocktail hour for a young woman, a slim Dutch start-up consultant with a charming take on the English language, to invite herself up to his room. She was not particularly persistent, though she was absolutely attractive—blond hair, sharp but playful eyes, the whole package managed with a businesswoma
n’s
confidence. Still, she was no more attractive than women h
e’d
politely declined before. He always managed to sidestep trouble discreetly, disposing of any errant urges or fantasies later, in a few harmless moments with himself. H
e’d
never
actually
intended to go through with sleeping with anyone other than Kera.

But then he was in Dubai. On the other side of the world. The cliché of it all made it, in retrospect, almost laughably pathetic. One of the most frustrating characteristics of this brand of regret was Parke
r’s
inability to understand why things had been so different in Dubai. It was
n’t
oversimplifying it to say that it had just happened.

He paused his confession, trying to recall what it was that the Dutch consultant at the cocktail party in Dubai had first said that made him want to keep talking to her. Had he been jet-lagged? Had he approached her, or was it the other way around? He could only remember her saying, not long after they were acquainted, “We can lay together in your room?” At first he had
n’t
even understood what she meant, and then somehow it was too late. They were upstairs lying together in his hotel room, and the poisoned logic of the moment permitted him to go through with it.

In the cab ride home from the airport, Parker had been afraid to face Kera, afraid that she would know and that he would make everything worse by not telling her before she figured it out on her own. What if h
e’d
contracted something? Was that a burning sensation when he urinated? He had never been any good at keeping secrets. Secrets ate away at him. But when he walked in the door and saw the way they slipped so comfortably and safely back into each othe
r’s
lives, it occurred to him that it would be worse now to introduce trouble. It was over and done with. He started thinking of his mistake as a blessing, a wake-up call. Kera was, without a doubt, the woman of his life. Chastened by his brief failure of judgment, Parker had begun to feel more than ever that he was up to the task of deserving her.

But then, how could she not know? He could
n’t
let that question go. It was all he thought about, even when he was thinking about other things. He spent hours in his head trying to make it go away. Since it would
n’t
go away, he tried to make it better. Often he longed to come home and find her hurrying a shirtless stranger onto the fire escape. He wanted to surprise her at lunchtime and catch her kissing a coworker. He wanted that power back, the power to grant forgiveness. He did not have the balls to ask to be forgiven.

The bartender said little while Parker spoke. On a few occasions, the moments when Parker outlined his lowest acts, the bartender looked up from his doodling. And once or twice he nodded sympathetically. But otherwise, he kept his face down, offering nothing harsher than ambivalence in judgment of his customer.
H
e’s
disgusted by me
, Parker thought, and ordered another drink.

Hours later he approached the door to his apartment. He had trouble with the dead bolt and made a stumbling mess of his entrance. Kera was on the couch with her laptop. For a moment they both looked at each other.

“Wha
t’s
wrong?” she asked. She sounded concerned, also maybe a little judgmental about his drinking.

I cheated on you!
For a brief moment, he could imagine in sensational detail the words forming at the back of his throat and then dislodging, existing, those words in that order, floating across the air between them. He had no idea what would happen next. Tears, a slap, bitter silence, a great weight lifted from his chest? What did it matter? The words would not come out of him. They sat undigested in his gut like something heavy eaten too fast. Guilt, he thought, must be the most useless human emotion. Fear alerted one to danger and therefore saved lives. Love alerted one to living and therefore improved lives. But guilt—guilt was so uselessly after-the-fact, so absent as a tool of prevention and yet so powerful as a tool of misery. Guilt rotted men in cells and suburbs and churches. Guilt destroyed lives. Following that orgasm on the other side of the world, he had slumped against the foreign sheets, paralyzed with a sickening stillness of emotion. He smelled the strange girl beneath him and knew, as he should have anticipated ahead of time when they were downstairs talking, vertical and clothed and among chattering colleagues wearing name tags, that everything was ruined.

“Tomorrow morning my boss will announce that our company has agreed to be acquired by ONE,” Parker said.

Ker
a’s
expression was blank for a moment. And then finally she said, “Why?”

This question annoyed him. She wanted facts. What why who when how. It was
n’t
enough that his job was fucked; she wanted all the gory details. Tha
t’s
how she was,
who
she was. Who h
e’d
fallen in love with. He loved that idealism, that pure trust in the idea that situations improve automatically if you uncover all the facts. “Tha
t’s
a really excellent question. The
y’r
e calling it a
‘s
trategic acquisition
.’ ”

He could feel her watching him as he sat on the arm of the couch and bent down to untie his shoes. He wanted another drink. He did not want her to watch him pour it.

“Will you go and work for them?” she asked.

“No.” That felt good to say. He felt principled. He liked the little surge of power that came from feeling principled.

But then what? He knew the alternative. He could search for a new job. The thought was at the same time exciting and exhausting. It had been one thing searching for a job after h
e’d
first arrived in the city, when naïveté sheltered him from noticing the struggle. Now he was painfully aware of what a job search would entail. The résumés, the unanswered cover letters, dressing up for interviews, shamelessly e-mailing his network of friends and acquaintances—horrible, inhumane things h
e’d
not had to do the first time around, thanks to the friend of his fathe
r’s
whose son had gone to business school with the founder of his firm. No, he did
n’t
think he could put himself through all that.

“What will you do?” Kera said.

“What will
I
do? When did this not become about what
we
will do?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Babe, that is
n’t
what I meant.”

“Oh, i
t’s
not? How am I supposed to know what you mean? You work all day, all weekend. You work constantly. Do you ever think about our wedding? Or no, forget the wedding. Do you think about me? Am I as important to you as work? Do you wonder what your job does to me, what this city does to me? Tha
t’s
what I want to know: What will
we
do?”

The next few moments would have been more difficult to get through but for the convenient fact that he was wasted. It made it easier for them both to dismiss the things h
e’d
just said. They became silent partners in this conspiracy, together excusing the pain and brutality that lived in those words.

“Drink some water, babe. Take a shower. Yo
u’r
e not yourself right now.”

Rotting rotting rotting. He felt thirsty. They had gin and vodka and scotch in the apartment. He imagined mixing himself a drink. Three parts rotting, one part self-loathing guilt.

Later, she lay next to him in bed and told him that there was
n’t
any shame in keeping his job. “Yo
u’r
e successful. I
t’s
a good job. If you find you ca
n’t
stand it, then yo
u’l
l know i
t’s
time to look for something else.”

He did
n’t
respond to this. He just lay there, hiccupping at odd intervals, his body turned from hers. Finally he said, very quietly, “I wish we could just go away together. Ther
e’s
a place somewhere where w
e’d
be happier.” And then the next thing she heard was the deepening of his breaths into light snores.