The Bluffing Game (7 page)

I could tell that pained him to hear, but it was true. I would compromise for the sake of a relationship, but only for the sake of a healthy one.

I made my voice more gentle. “You want to give this a shot?”

He met my eyes again. “You know I want to.”

“Are you willing to, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then don’t say yes.” I picked up my briefcase and stood from the table. I was starving, but I wouldn’t be able to eat with him just then. “Think it over,” I said. “You know where to find me.”

And I left the restaurant with something I hadn’t felt in a long time and had trouble naming at first. It was warm and soothing and yet firm, unyielding. A foundation, sturdy, strong, and ready to support whatever load it needed to bear. I had felt a twinge of it when I decided to pursue Victor, but now that I was trying to give it a go with Nick, it was unmistakable. I knew what I wanted, and now I knew what I had.

Clarity.

Eight

There’s
a feeling of accomplishment in opening yourself to possibility. Like I imagine a fisher must feel when she casts her line into the surf, not knowing if any of the multitude of factors that would need to align for this to be a good day will actually come together and make it one. But swinging that pole, letting the line unwind and the hook glide across the air and make its little impotent sploosh into the water, it still opens you up. Suddenly you’re secure in the knowledge that you gave it a shot. And the feeling of security, that’s what gives you strength to try again if it doesn’t work out. The fullness of knowing you did all you knew how to do to make this one time a worthwhile attempt. If you can revel in that, let it pervade your whole body, live in it, breathe it in, then it doesn’t matter if you fail. It doesn’t matter if no fish takes the bait, or even if one does but it’s so small you have to throw it back. If you can attach yourself to the process rather than the outcome, then trying itself becomes the success you so badly wanted. Every attempt itself becomes the fulfillment. Maybe you come home at the end of the day with no fish, but you don’t come home with nothing. You come home full to the brim, ready to rest and fill yourself again tomorrow.

Three days went by, three long mornings and afternoons full of paperwork and meetings with smaller clients about smaller cases, stacks of papers packed from top to bottom with facts and citations of precedent, with technicalities of contract, with claims and litigation spun into rugs from the long, yarn-like innards of American law. I was the tailor, the seamstress who could see where some filament had been poorly stitched or sewn so weakly as to unravel. I could see where too much breathing room was left, where hems and panels needed to be taken in until the finished piece suited its purpose flatteringly. When I let the lawyer part of my brain run the show for a while, I never noticed the time. Three days was insignificant if you spent them weaving row after row of a tapestry.

So when Nick finally called me on the evening of the third day, I was surprised at how nervous he sounded, as if I was a tomato he’d kept simmering in a slow-cooker of doubt the whole time and I was almost completely dissolved.

“I’m fine, Nick. Just tell me why you’re calling.”

“I talked to my therapist. And I think I managed to decide.”

“Great to hear. So what’s the verdict?”

“Jeez, June, you’re so nonchalant. This is a big decision for me.”

“You’re right. I’m listening.”

“I’m willing to give it a try, if we can really be cautious and open. Listen to each other. Speak up when we need to. Call each other out when we could do better. Stand up not only for ourselves, but for each other, and for the sake of the relationship.”

I smiled. “I concur with all of those terms.”

“Can you stop with the legalese for a minute?”

“You’ve gotta admit it’s clear.” But he was right. I didn’t want to turn this into a no-strings contract like Sterling had with Andrea.

Nick said, “I just want to hear June the human being right now, not June the attorney.”

“Well, they get hard to parse sometimes. But I’m here. And I’m happy we’re giving it a shot.”

“Do you want to meet for dinner?”

I let openly myself flirt with him for the first time in years, guilt-free. It was a full and fulfilling sensation. “How about dessert? My place.”

~

If you’ve ever been on an extremely strict diet after a lifestyle of freedom, you know about temptation. There’s always the memory of that one thing you miss so badly, whether it’s chocolate, a juicy hamburger, or just a steaming slice of crispy white bread slathered with butter, the smell of it so overpowering you can taste it. Getting back together with an ex after eight years usually goes one of two ways—either you revel in the illicitness of sucking forbidden fruit, only to kick yourself in the morning and remember what it really does to you inside, or, on the other hand, you finally taste again that thing you’ve been wanting for so long, and not only is it every bit as scrumptious as you remembered, you also can’t believe you ever thought it was worth it to live without it.

Sometimes the initial rush of just doing the deed, breaking the abstinence, lasts so long that it takes a while to figure out which way it’s going, and the morning after, you don’t scold yourself, not for breaking your streak and not for waiting so long to break it. That’s how it was with Nick. A hug between close friends, even friends who were once together, is far, far different from the hesitant, exhilarated touch of lovers. Even the small act of putting our arms around each other right inside my front door, and letting ourselves feel, freely, everything we’d always wished we could feel forever, was like floating on a bed of air, letting it carry us in unconditional trust through whatever course it happened to take.

Our desire for one another came in like a long, slow wave, and we rode it, letting it lift us up, and up, and somehow further up. We loosened ties and unbuttoned shirts and unclasped belts and forgot to step out of our shoes, all with the nervously quivering hands and shortness of breath of teenagers secretly exploring for the first time, the adrenaline jolt that thumped our hearts almost too much to bear, almost painful, but by the time we were both topless and running our hands up and down each other’s familiar backs and tasting each other’s soft necks again, finally, finally wrapped in each other, the nervousness slowly but inexorably subsided, and the rise of the second wave rose up underneath us.

We left our clothes in a pile on the hardwood foyer, and in the living room lay on the couch, taking turns feeling each other’s weight on top of our own, re-introducing ourselves to every inch of each other’s skin, rubbing hands over arms and feet over legs and lips over chest and stomach. We kissed, gently, forcefully, penetrating with tongues one second and sliding back into soft grasping of lips the next. We felt each other’s wetness and firmness and readiness, and wordlessly we slid into closeness, him stretching deep inside me, me consuming and enveloping and squeezing him. We brought out old routines and rhythms as if asking each other how much we remembered, and then left them behind as if to say, let’s be something new.

This second wave took blissfully longer to crest, and we floated on it, rose toward the sky on it, blurring and dissipating into each other’s heat and strength and gentleness, our bodies sharing one taste, one smell, one touch, merging from the hips upward until, as if our minds could not rest until they became one as well, we climaxed together and moaned in each other’s ears, held each other by the back of the head, and held onto the peak of the wave until it crashed all around us and left us rocking on the couch and crying.

We held each other, damp with each other’s bodies, glued together head to chest, hand to neck and back, wetness to wetness, leg to leg. We breathed. We welcomed each other home.

~

I woke in the middle of the night, Nick heavy and slumbering beside me. I hadn’t woken with someone else in my bed in longer than I wanted to admit. When I’d lost myself in Victor on the beach, we had woken in the sand. He had never come into my bed there, though technically he had owned it. The whole affair felt like a dream, and whoever named the resort knew that what people came there for was to live, for a brief time, as if they had everything they could dream of. For Victor Sterling, it was neither brief nor even a dream. He really did own all of it.

For my part, having left that so-called paradise behind, I found myself deeply comforted by the sound of Nick breathing beside me, asleep. I was content to let my dreamlike affair with Victor be exactly what it was. The one thing I loved most about the island, I already had here in Cape Cod: the sea. I slid my legs out from under the sheets and stepped light across the carpet, robed myself and opened the door to my balcony.

The moon had already set, so the sky was dark, and though I couldn’t see the ocean, the wind off the water lifted my hair, and the sound of the waves came with it, like the breath of some sleeping, peaceful giant. The hiss of each wave so much like a slow exhale. I leaned on the painted wooden railing and imagined the undulating expanse stretching to the invisible horizon. I didn’t know what moved me so deeply about the presence of the sea. It was impossibly large, untamable, dangerous. I was insignificant next to it. I was like one grain of sand on the beach.

Maybe it was that next to the sea, I couldn’t help but accept my smallness, make peace with it, admit to myself that I couldn’t survive without the land, and that this was okay. The sea might rise, might storm, even someday destroy my house, but If I needed to, I could go inland. If the sea was one sleeping colossus just waiting to wake up, the land was another that was content, more often, to hibernate. What an odd place to be, the boundary between them. The long line of sand dividing the wet from the dry, the immovable from the unstoppable. In a moment of what must have been sleep and delirium creeping back, I felt an insatiable urge to drink down the whole ocean and bury myself in the sand. Become filled up with water all through my body, both held and insulated by the ground. I wanted to be part of the shoreline itself, both land and sea, and have that eternal breathing of waves be mine.

When I came back in from my balcony, I noticed my phone blinking on the bedside table. I’d set it on silent much earlier in the evening, and before I picked it up I had a feeling about what I was going to find. There was a text message from Sterling’s housemistress, Andrea.

“Get on a plane back here. Now.”

Nine

After
years of everyone telling you that everything all the time is urgent, you start to learn the difference between urgent, extremely urgent, and actually-drop-everything-now urgent. Sadly, this was the latter. While Nick lay like a giant, warm sleeping dog in the bed, I did my best to quietly pick out some traveling clothes without bothering him—the room being dark certainly didn’t help. I took the outfit into the bathroom, closed the door, turned on the light, and decided a quick shower was not something I could skip. I got clean and dry, put on my clothes, and worked just a touch of makeup in while I used my phone to confirm the flight Sterling had already chartered for me, to secure a cab to the airport, and to start a pot of coffee downstairs using the most helpful app I ever purchased. Sooner or later, coffee notwithstanding, my lack of sleep would knock me over, but if I could manage to get on the plane before then, it wouldn’t have to be a terrible night.

Something else you learn when midnight flights are more common than you’d prefer is to always keep a bag packed. For Sterling, I had two—one with clothes and one with the details of his case. I didn’t even remember packing it, but there it was on a chair by the bedroom door. You start to be very grateful for your good habits and thankful to your past self when you think ahead. It’s a good feeling.

Now that I was ready to leave, I had one last decision: wake Nick now, leave a note, or message him in the morning. Had I been in his position, I would have preferred a quick goodbye kiss and a speedy return to sleep, but I tried to remember the way Nick felt about such things. The memories of these kinds of little intimate details were there, buried somewhere, but my mind toiled, so full of planning and hurry that I couldn’t dredge the memories up from the depths. I leaned over him, ran a hand through his hair, and kissed his head. He didn’t wake up.

Yes, that was right. He slept so deeply, how could I have forgotten? I would call him once the sun rose. I shouldered my bags and left him there, sorry to be gone when he would wake in the morning. A wave of dark familiarity rose in me as I descended the stairs. I ignored it as I made a quick detour to the kitchen, grabbed my travel mug full of steaming coffee—thank God for modern devices and their synchronization—and headed out the door.

The cab waited for me at the street, and I got in. I told the driver where to go, sipped my coffee, and felt again that cloud of familiar guilt inside me. It took a second of leaning back with my eyes closed, letting my mind settle, before the dead memories floated to the surface. The midnight flights. One of the things Nick and I had not agreed on when we’d been together before. Not a deal-breaker, but a stressor for certain, and one he’d be starkly reminded of when he woke up. The guilt hurt, but I also knew that such a test on our new trial togetherness might as well come sooner rather than later. If he couldn’t deal, it was best to know now, before we got in too deep.

I shook my head at my rationalizing, my defensiveness. I was already building a wall to protect myself from the argument I knew this would lead to. Maybe instead I simply needed to apologize, admit that maybe I could do this less often, and actually arrange things to make that happen—we’d said we would both have to work on ourselves, after all. This was as much a test of my dedication as his. The way we both responded was the key, not the way one of us responded.

I let that notion glide around on the wind of my tired thoughts. It was a good place to switch over and let my subconscious work on the matter, and focus my conscious attention instead on preparing for what lay ahead of me at the island. That was one thing you could be sure of whenever something was drop-everything urgent: it was never good news.

~

When I sat down in the seat of Sterling’s chartered jet, literally the only passenger, I reclined it and tried to get some sleep. I couldn’t, and finally I texted Andrea back and asked for some details.

She wrote back promptly. “Hearing date moved up. Tomorrow.”

That settled it. This was going to be a sleepless night henceforth. I asked the flight attendant for another cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich, and got up from the recliner and went to one of the desk seats. It was like my own miniature version of Air Force One: truly excessive, and yet precisely what I needed to do the best job I could—a private, indulgently furnished office with a private, staffed kitchen and an open phone line to my client everywhere I could turn.

I drafted a statement for the hearing as best I could on as little sleep as I’d gotten, and from there my thoughts turned to my next conversation with Sterling, and how I would reassure him that the situation had improved, not worsened. Midway through this line of thought, I put my coffee on the desk, and leaned back in exhaustion.

I woke what must have been several hours later, and found the attendant had put a blanket on me, taken away my cold coffee, and chosen a place to stand nearby like a member of the Royal Guard in some European monarchy, ready to provide whatever I needed upon my awakening.

Out the window, a green tropical coastline slid past under the pre-dawn light, the air silent but for the steady drone of the plane’s engines. A few more minutes would bring sunrise.

“How long until we land?” I asked the attendant.

“About forty minutes. You can get breakfast for another half hour.”

I felt like I’d just eaten, so deep and invisible had been my sleep, but these were likely to be the last quiet minutes of the day.

“All right, what’s on the menu?”

After a sumptuous breakfast eaten while looking out at the sunrise, we landed. I had thought the walk to the Sterling House would be less breathtaking the second time, but in the few days I’d been back home the memory of it had receded into the fog of dreams and fantasies, and the sudden realness of it—here it was again, still as mind-bogglingly real—reminded me how much none of this was a fantasy, and how for Sterling all of it was at risk.

I rounded the bend in the path and arrived once again at the bottom of the grassy hill below Sterling House, and instead of Andrea, Victor himself stood waiting for me at the archway, picture-perfect but for the fatigue in his face.

“I have a draft for the hearing statement,” I said, all business. “Any update since the middle of the night?”

“We’re trying to set up a meeting this afternoon to convince them to drop the charges,” he said, turning to walk with me as I passed him. We continued toward the house.

“Why? You don’t want to look desperate. You want to look like the sooner date is good news. Because it is. They should be the ones to call you.”

“Well, they haven’t. And I can’t risk waiting. Not if there’s even the smallest chance that we don’t get the case thrown out.”

I stopped walking. “Oh for God’s Sake, Victor. Have you forgotten every word I said before we left? Are you still not trusting me on this?”

He stopped too, and turned to me. “The hearing went to a sympathetic judge.”

I processed that for a second. Could it change everything? “How sympathetic?”

“She has a history of ruling against people like me.”

“At trials, probably. Not at a hearing.”

“No, but she might send the case along to trial just to make a statement, to drag out the bad press.”

“Even if they don’t have a case and the trial is sure to go our way?”

“Yes.”

“Even if they don’t have the slightest ghost of a chance.”

“It’s possible the judge could ignore that.”

“According to whom?”

He was silent.

“According to the opposition?”

“We’ve kept close tabs on them. They’re through the roof about this judge.”

“But do they have a credible reason to be? Does this judge have a history of sending hopeless cases to trial in addition to ruling against billionaires?”

“Not that we can find.”

“Then this is another bluff. It’s one more calculated move in this absurd poker game. What makes you think they know something we don’t?”

“We can’t be sure either way.”

“Listen to yourself. You’re playing right into their hands, and we’re having the exact same conversation we had before. Try to take a step back—I know, it’s hard, but please: if you were in their shoes, a hopeless situation, utterly hopeless, and you saw a piece of news come out that you could spin in such a way as to appear less hopeless to your opponent, wouldn’t you do exactly what they’re doing? Celebrate, pretend you’ve won, in the hopes your opponent buys it and gives up a sure win because he believes he’s already lost?”

Victor knew I was right—I could see it in his face—but he dismissed it. “As you said, we’ve had this argument before.”

“And I won it, remember? You decided to trust me.”

He put his hands in his pockets, as he always did when he had something he ought to say but wouldn’t.

I toned down my severity a bit, tried to play it more gently. “Look, here’s what’s really going on. They’re playing this case like a poker game, like they could potentially have been dealt some winning card you can’t see, and you’re playing along. But it’s all misdirection—we’re not actually playing poker. We’re playing chess. Nothing is hidden. There’s nothing on the board you can’t see. If you follow the lines of possible response to every one of their possible moves, you can evaluate every possible outcome. And we are one move—one move—away from checkmate. This is literally their last play.”

He stood there and shook his head. “That’s what you said when they filed formal charges. But now they’ve come up with something else.”

“I know. I promised this case would never go to trial, and yes, depending on how the meeting goes today, it still may not have to. But since you called it, not them, you’re going to look like the desperate one. All you have to do is move your queen to the winning square by letting me take this case to the hearing tomorrow. That’s it. We win. If you make a different move, if you don’t ignore them, if you meet with them on the defensive, you’re adding in a whole other set of completely unnecessary moves that may involve completely unnecessary sacrifice.”

“The risk is higher in not meeting with them.”

“I disagree. This hearing is not only a win for us, it’s a double win—the fact that it’s this much sooner means there’s even less time for bad PR to take off any further. It’s effectively eliminating the opposition’s biggest strength. They are not celebrating right now, trust me. They are crushed. They are absolutely terrified you’re going to ignore them and go ahead to the hearing. Since the last time I was here, not one thing has changed except for the better.”

Victor stared off toward the ocean as I spoke.

I opened my briefcase and took out a few pages. “Here’s the draft of my statement for the hearing tomorrow. I’m going to keep working on it, but I think it should convince you pretty thoroughly that you have nothing to worry about. Not even an unreasonably sympathetic judge.”

He looked at it for a second, then at me, and then took it, but said nothing.

“Call me when you need me.” I left him there on the path as I went into the house. If he gave in and decided to waste enormous money on these completely ridiculous plaintiffs, that was his choice. I was his attorney, nothing more, and I had done my job advising him. His stubborn fear of imaginary risk had begun to sour his attractiveness.

~

Sometime around lunch I got a text from Nick. Before I read it I had a feeling I knew what it said, but I went into my ostentatious bedroom to read it anyway.

“I can’t go back to the old us,” it said. “We talked about doing this as a new us, didn’t we?”

I texted back, “We did. That won’t happen overnight, though. It may take time, for both of us.”

A few minutes later, more agonizing minutes that I wished they would be, he wrote, “How much time?”

I had no answer to that, and the question itself carried a very clear message that there was such a thing as too much, as a transition too long to be worthwhile. I agreed with that. The question was whether we were already so quickly at the point of diminishing returns—whether we were compatible in more than the short term, and how willing each of us was to do whatever was necessary for the long haul.

I finally wrote back, “If you’re willing to do whatever it takes, so am I. But if you’re not, then this probably won’t work.” It was an ultimatum of sorts, but an inevitable one. I had to be honest, brutally or otherwise, because my time was too valuable for a losing venture, even one as painfully lovable and often heavenly as Nick. I would go all in if he would, but if he was going to back out at some point, I needed to know what his limits were. We had talked about that, hadn’t we? It was possible he didn’t know what his limits were—to be fair, I didn’t either. But I was willing to say the hell with my limits and to be willing to change and grow despite frustration and discomfort. I needed at least an equal level of commitment from him. Changing and growing couldn’t be one-sided. Not with me.

He wrote back: “It was easy when you were here. Now it’s already stressful. If it’s going to be like this for a while, I don’t think it’s worth it. I want to be happy together from the beginning, not constantly compromising in the hope of someday being happy.”