Rent A Husband (3 page)

“Okay, deal.”

“Good.”

Darcy ends the call, feeling more in control.

Then she sees herself in the mirror and realizes she looks like hell.

She can’t receive guests looking like this.

Even though the man is never-to-be-hired-help, standards must be maintained.

5

Forrest Forbes (or Forrest Bennett Forbes III to be precise) feels remarkably restored as he sips a more than decent single-malt in the dining car of the train, staring out into the night.

His ribs ache, of course, and there’s a nasty twinge in the area of his liver where the Mexican thug sank his boot, but he is dressed in a crisp new Lacoste, chinos, loafers and a cashmere jacket.

A suit bag containing a very elegant tuxedo and dress-shirt hangs beside him.

After his trip to the outfitters, he’d made use of his gym membership (bought during an all-too-brief flush period months ago) and showered and shaved and dressed in his new clothes.

By the time he got down to Union Station he felt almost his old self again.

Lifting his glass to signal for another drink, Forrest feels a
sharp
pain in his shoulder, and he’s back in that filthy alley, being tenderized like the filling of a beef
fajita
.

Forrest’s good mood slips a little as he considers his predicament, understands just how messy and unpleasant his life has become, after such a promising start.

He was born into a very old Boston family, silver spoon firmly in place when he exited the birth canal.

The eldest of three children he was sent to Andover and Harvard just like his father and grandfather before him.

His father, Forrest Bennett Forbes II, seemed interested only in blowing the wealth accumulated by
his
father, FBF I, an austere Yankee industrialist who had served two terms in the Senate.

By the time he was ten Forrest had skied at Gstaad, holidayed in Monaco with the Grimalidis and had ridden on an elephant with an Indian princeling.

When he reached his early twenties—even though he’d scraped together a useless degree from Harvard—he’d been encouraged to play just as his father played.

His was a world of women, horses, racing cars and yachts.

Then in Forrest’s thirtieth year (on a day in late 2008) his father called him to his office.

Forrest—tanned as teak from a month in Morocco—assumed that the older man was going to tell him that it was time for him to curb his life of leisure, to at least feign some interest in the family business.

The elder Forrest Forbes, standing by the window, held up a decanter of fine brandy.

“Drink?”

“Of course.”

His father—whose face, disconcertingly, was like an age-ravaged version of his own—poured two glasses, and when he leaned over to hand a tumbler to his son his hand shook and Forrest could smell that this wasn’t the older man’s first drink.

“Good luck,” Forrest said.

“We’re going to need it.”

They sat and his father threw back most of the Scotch in one gulp.

“You know my father actually increased his fortune during the Great Depression?”

Forrest nodded, bored. He’d heard this story too many times.

“Yes, he was quite the captain of industry, wasn’t he?”

“That he was. His hands never left the tiller, if I may flog a dead metaphor.”

Forrest laughed politely, his mind on the Austrian princess he had been dallying with.

The filthiest woman it had ever been his pleasure to bed.

“Thing is, Forrest, I’ve never been much of a hands-on man myself.”

“God forbid. Too tedious.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought. So I let the so-called financial gurus handle our money. And, it has to be said, we prospered.”

“Certainly seems that way.”

His father looked at him with an expression he had never seen on the man’s face before. Was this fear?

“What’s up?”

“You’ve heard about
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae?”

“The old Vaudeville act?”

The older man bared his teeth in a snarl. “You know they went belly up?”

“I heard something to that effect.”

“And that Wall Street is in a panic, and that the whole damned financial bubble has burst?”

Forrest shrugged. “Not really my thing.”

“No, mine either.” His father slumped in his chair. “Forrest there’s no easy way to say this: our fortune is gone.”

“You’re not serious?”

“Oh, but I am. Those gurus consulted some poorly informed oracles, I’m afraid.”

“It’s all gone?”

“Everything.”

“What about our properties?”

“Gone. A house of cards.”

“The art collections?”

“Seized. Under lock and key.”

“So no more trust fund?”

“No.”

“You’re saying that I’ll have to work?”

“Yes, my boy. I’m sorry.”

“Good God.”

“Yes.”

“What will you do?”

His father, suddenly an old man, shrugged.

“I don’t know.”         

Forrest stood. “We’ll stay in touch.”

“Of course.”

Forrest shook his father’s clammy hand and walked out into a very different world.

The next day his father took his boat out onto the Sound and never returned.

His body washed up on a
Martha’s Vineyard
beach a few days later, causing an awful fuss at a society wedding.

Accidental death was the coroner’s verdict, but Forrest had no doubt that his father had polished off a few bottles of Bollinger and hopped into the cold Atlantic, unequipped and unwilling to live in poverty.

Forrest, though he was alive, fared little better.

He found that his lack of funds caused doors to slam in his face.

His calls went unreturned.

Men he’d thought were friends ignored him in clubs and watering holes.

So Forrest traveled west, to Los Angeles, with the half-baked notion of trading on his patrician looks in the movie business.

There was some initial interest due to the cachet his name carried, and he landed himself an agent.

A part in an independent movie came his way, playing himself, really.

But he found that once the camera rolled being himself wasn’t at all easy.

His usually flippant delivery became leaden and—most embarrassingly—he froze, was literally incapable of remembering a line of the script, take after mortifying take.

So his career was stillborn.

He got a couple of photographic shoots—no lines to forget—posing on the decks of yachts with pretty girls, or stepping out of luxury cars in tuxedos, but somehow the camera just did not love him, as his agent told him when he snipped all ties.

So Forrest Forbes started to gamble.

He’d always been a dabbler—it was in his blood—but now he played with desperation.

Desperation and very little skill.

He lost.

He lost badly.

Lost so badly that he ended up having the
pâté
kicked out of him in that downtown alley.

And now he is on a train rattling north toward one of those horrible coastal feeder-towns, all new money and Spanish kitsch, he is sure.

He sighs and polishes off his drink as his stop is called.

When Forrest steps out onto the platform he sees Eric Royce waiting for him, waving a languid hand.

“How are you, darling?” Eric asks.

“Peachy.”

“Good trip?”

“It was fine.”

They walk, Eric eyeing him.

“Why are you limping?”

“A jujutsu accident.”

“Ah.”

They arrive at a brand new Jaguar saloon.

“Your chariot, sir,” Eric says.

“Where does this come from?”

“A prop, darling. A rental. To fit with your image of the wealthy young scion.”

Forrest nods.

Eric holds out the keys. “You can drive, I presume?”

“I chased Michael Schumacher around
Nürburgring
when I was seventeen.”

“Well, I hope he let you catch him.”

Forrest dumps his things in the trunk and Eric directs him out of the train station that is—as he suspected—disguised as a hacienda.

“How can you live up here, Eric?” He asks as they drive down the depressing little main drag.

“It’s quiet and it’s pretty.”

“It’s a backwater.”

“I think you know all about LA and its temptations. Life up here is a simpler proposition. I can get my work done.”

“Sounds dire.”

“Not at all.” Eric turns to look at Forrest. “Now, I need to warn you that Darcy Pringle is a little nervous.”

Forrest bursts out laughing. “That’s her name? Darcy Pringle?”

“Yes, why?”

“God, Eric, Jane Austen meets potato chips! I can only imagine what she looks like.”

“Darcy is my very best friend and she’s a beautiful and charming woman.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Stop the car.”

“Why?”

“Stop the car!”

Suddenly Eric isn’t camp anymore and when he grips Forrest’s forearm it hurts.

As Forrest pulls over to the curb Eric reaches up and clicks on the dome light.

“Listen you two-bit little bastard,” the voice is pure Bronx. “You’re a nothing. A nobody. You’re here on my dime. You’ll cut the smarmy attitude and do what you’re being paid to do: you’ll be charming and gallant and make my friend look and feel good. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“And if you put one toe out of line I will personally beat the living crap out of you.”

“I know jujitsu.”

“You don’t know a damned thing,” Eric says, jabbing his fingers under Forrest’s ribs, right where he was kicked.

Forrest groans.

“Now drive.”

Forrest clicks the car into gear and he drives, wondering why, oh why, life keeps humiliating him this way.

6

Poor Billy Bigelow is having one of those uncomfortable conversations with his dead father again.

Big Ben, saying, “I can’t believe I have such a yellow-bellied, chicken-livered coward for a son.”

“Shut up, Dad,” Billy says, which he’d never been able to say when the old bully was alive.

Billy walks away from the depressing living room of the apartment above the bookstore, an apartment he’d shared with his father after the deaths of his mother sister twenty years ago.

The deaths that Big Ben Bigelow had blamed on Poor Billy.

Billy shuts down that stream of thought and then he does something very, very dangerous.

He finds a bottle of his father’s Wild Turkey in the closet above the sink in the kitchen and pours himself a solid jolt.

For Dutch courage.

Whatever that means.

Now, a clumsy man like Billy has enough trouble negotiating the world sober, so he has never been tempted to drink.

Has never been drunk, in fact.

But these are desperate times and desperate times call for desperate measures.

So he throws the drink back, coughs and wheezes as it burns, tears in his eyes.

He controls the coughing jag, pours himself another and belts that back, too.

Almost losing his balance he grabs at the kitchen table and knocks the bottle to the floor where it shatters, the dark liquid spreading across the linoleum.

Just as well.

Poor Billy’s ears are ringing and his vision is just slightly blurred.

But he feels a strange kind of calm.

And with the calm comes an unfamiliar bravery.

By God, he’s going to do it.

Before he loses this bottled courage and before Big Ben can talk him out of it, Poor Billy Bigelow heads for the door, stumbles down the stairs—banging his knee painfully on the banister—and hurries out to where his car is still parked hard against the fire hydrant, the warm breeze flapping the bouquet of pink parking tickets wedged under his wiper.

Poor Billy—no, make that Bill, Bill Bigelow—gets behind the wheel and fires up the station wagon, clicking on the windshield wipers, laughing as the pink tickets fly away into the night, ignoring the squeal of his fender as he bumps past the hydrant, swerving around a car that is perfectly within its rights to be driving toward him, and takes off toward Darcy Pringle’s house, where he intends to bang assertively on her door and invite her to the Spring Ball tomorrow night.

7

He’s not bad looking
, Darcy has to concede.

Come on, girl, he’s smokin’ hot.

Too much reality TV, Darcy,
she tells herself.

It’s starting to erode your vocabulary like candy rots teeth.

She stands up from the couch and walks across to the sideboard, holding up the bottle of wine.

“Can I top you up, Forrest?”

Forrest Forbes rises and holds out his glass.

“Please.”

Darcy smiles at Forrest and as she pours the wine she feels Eric’s eyes on her.

When she looks his way he winks.

He’s reading her like an open book.

Darcy dims the wattage of her smile and pulls herself together.

Yes, the man in good looking.

Yes, he is well-spoken and polite.

But he is a failed actor, and this is a sham, and she has to put an end to it, right now.

Eric says, “Tell Darcy about when you trained to be a mahout, Forrest.”

Darcy looks daggers at Eric, who pretends not to see her, sipping at his wine.

He knows her too well.

Knows her embarrassing fascination with colonial India.

Once, when she was a little tipsy she made the mistake of telling Eric that she was convinced she was the reincarnation one of those wan British girls who ended up going native in the heat and dust of the sub-Continent.