The Hazards of Hunting While Heartbroken (37 page)

“Are you sure you want to face them?”

“Absolutely. They should see I’m not going anywhere.”

Wow. That went better than any sane person could have predicted.

Oscar crosses the small space between us, cups my face in his hands and kisses me gently on the mouth. It’s a nice kiss, but that electrifying, have-to-have-him feeling that his mere passing touch used to elicit is gone. “Don’t be too shocked if I ask you again. I bet I can wear you down.” He smiles broadly, but it’s forced. His eyes give him away. “Now let’s get back in there and face the music.”

My family, naturally, pretends like they haven’t spent the entire time we were gone straining to hear our conversation. Laurie rockets out of her chair to start re-heating serving dishes, now that the coast is clear in the kitchen.

“Auntie Zoë, are you getting married?” Courtney demands. She looks adorable in her blue holiday dress with lace trim, and several ringlets of her hair tied back in a matching bow perched jauntily on top of her head.

“No, honey, not anytime soon.”

She sticks out her lower lip and pouts. “Grandma says if you get married, I get to be the flower girl.” She shoots an accusatory look at my mother, as if she suspects she’s been victimized by an adult fraud.

“If and when I get married, of course you can be the flower girl.”

My niece grins. Her whole face and demeanor change in an instant, in that way only a child’s can. God, I envy her ability to shift gears like that. My hands are shaking as I reach for my wine glass. Even though that conversation went as well as it possibly could have, it’s going to stress me out for weeks. The little voice in my head has already stowed away her cheerleader’s pom-poms and she’s nagging me with self-doubts. She wants to know if I’ve just turned down my big chance at happiness. She’s listing Oscar’s virtues and telling me I’m an idiot for not saying yes. Circumstantial evidence doesn’t make him a criminal. He could easily work for the CIA, she argues. He’s perfect for them: highly educated, with no family ties. The little voice also admires Oscar’s chutzpah for asking in front of my family. A guy who had the smallest doubt about his feelings for me would never go out on that limb. The little voice wants to retract her earlier statements. She thinks I may have fucked up utterly.

It doesn’t take Oscar long to have a change of heart over his decision to take my big, public rejection of him in stride. He’s gone after Laurie and I have cleared the dinner dishes, but before Mom serves dessert. I have no idea if he’s checking into a hotel, or making a beeline to the airport to catch a flight back to New York. But more troubling than that, is that I can’t figure out whether I’m heartbroken or relieved at his hasty and premature departure.

As soon as he’s out the door, all hell breaks loose. It appears unlikely that my family, who dazzled me with their collective, unexpected ability to hold it together in the face of such drama, will talk about anything else for the rest of the weekend, or indeed the entire holiday season. My mother, not surprisingly, offers the most vocal critique of the afternoon’s events, which is all negative, at least as it pertains to her only daughter. She practically wails that I’ll never have an opportunity with a man of “such quality” again. By which everyone assembled takes to mean handsome, rich and successful. Laurie snidely points out that maybe Mom shouldn’t focus on material goods and outer beauty if she’s trying to force her “neo-hippie ideals” on the rest of us. Dad fails to come to my defense. Instead he takes advantage of the distraction I’ve created to scarf some unauthorized apple pie that Laurie baked with an old-fashioned lard crust, topped with a generous scoop of non-soy ice cream. My brother makes a lame attempt to diffuse the situation with unfunny humor.

“At least now Zoë won’t end up divorced,” he tells my mother with a patronizing pat on her hand. “And you won’t have to shell out for a wedding.”

I suppress the urge to tell him to screw himself, and instead opt to go hide in the bathroom. Secure behind the locked door, I check my phone. Two missed calls from Angela, but no message. Her phone rolls to voicemail, but before I can exit the sanctuary of the guest bath, she calls me back.

“Definitely suspect, and of great interest to the authorities,” she announces breathlessly.

“According to your sister’s husband, you mean?”

“Of course. I haven’t shown anyone else. And Max said he might want to talk to you himself, once he does a little research. He says the accounts on the list are some kind of double blind accounts, where the bank doesn’t even know the customer’s identity. It sounds shady to me, but evidently it’s legal. When money hits one account, it gets immediately divided and portions get wired out to other accounts, where they get re-divided and re-wired elsewhere, and so on. If he deposits the foreign check in a foreign bank, he can avoid reporting the income to the IRS, but still be dealing with a legit financial institution. And if he wires it onward through these blind accounts, those banks won’t have records of him showing I.D. to make the initial deposit.”

“So that explains Anguilla.”

“You just lost me. Dare I ask what else is going on down there?”

“He asked me to marry him and I turned him down. So he left, right after dinner. Briefcase in hand.”

“That gets a big wow.” I can see Angela shaking her head in disbelief, trying to wrap her brain around this latest development. I can also tell she has no idea what to say, or even what to ask. Instead of waiting for a question, I give her a summary of recent events here in sunny Key Biscayne, to which she has nothing to add but a series of wows. I can’t stand to re-hash it all yet, mainly because I can’t decide how I feel. Instead I try to divert attention by asking how things are going at the Mancuso family gathering.

“So far, so good. My mother is so obsessed with my sister’s pregnancy that she hasn’t noticed I’ve been carrying around the same glass of merlot all afternoon.”

“I guess that’s in the positive news column. Talk about stealing your sister’s thunder. At her big holiday entertaining debut, no less.”

“Yeah, she’d never get over it. Everyone would be talking about my pregnancy, because it’s so juicy and scandalous, whereas her future bundle of joy was respectably conceived in church-sanctioned wedlock. But I’ll tell you this: sobriety sucks.”

“I imagine it does.”

My mother starts banging on the door. “Zoë, honey! Are you alright in there? You aren’t sick, are you?” This last part sounds almost hopeful, as if it would please her that Laurie’s cooking poisoned someone.

“Are the natives getting restless?” Angela asks.

“I think I’ve got a few minutes before they ram down the door. So are you going to spill the news?”

“I haven’t decided. I might tell my sister. She’ll be okay, no matter what I choose to do. I can’t tell my parents until I’m sure I’m having it.”

I don’t know if she means to say
until
instead of
unless
, but it sounds to me like her mind is made up and she hasn’t quite accepted or internalized that fact yet. “So you’re still weighing your options?”

“My boss loves to tell me that in life, there’s the plan and then there’s what happens. I think I might be too old to have an abortion. What if this is my chance and I blow it? It’s not like I planned this. I’m years away from actually planning for a baby, since I haven’t even identified a potential husband. Whereas you’ve had two proposals in the last year and a half, if my math is right. But I look around the office and see all these women who gave their twenties and thirties to their careers, and now they’re single and forty-something, and it’s too late for most of them.”

I wait a second to make sure she’s done. “Whatever you want to do, I’ll support you. Like a thousand per cent. But I don’t think you should look at this as your one opportunity for parenthood. It’s not like it’s game over anytime soon. If you want to keep the baby, for whatever reason, I think that’s great. You don’t need to justify it to anyone, or make any rationalizations about career, or age, or anything like that.”

“Really?” Angela’s voice sounds like a little kid’s again.

“Absolutely. You’ll be the chicest pregnant woman in the city.”

“Thanks, babe. You’re the best. Now I just have to work up the gumption to tell Claudio. Which will be tough, since the liquid courage option is off the table.”

“When are you going to talk to him?”

“I need to get it over with. I’m going to kill myself with stress if I put it off. So I guess I’ll do it as soon as I get back home.”

Angela’s brother-in-law, Special Agent Max Friedman, calls sometime after ten, when my family has called it a night and my brother and Laurie have tucked in their kids upstairs and snuck out to the hotel. He goes through this long and unnecessary explanation of who he is. Then he apologizes profusely for interrupting my holiday. I tell him it’s fine. I’m so anxious to hear whatever he has to say that I can’t bring myself to engage him in any more polite small talk.

“So it sounds like you have a boyfriend with unexplained wealth and unusual travel habits. I assume you’re familiar with the controversy surrounding the new mayor?” he says.

“Oscar is mixed up in the mayor’s pornography ring?” I should be prepared for bad news. It’s not like my mind hasn’t already detoured in a similar direction. A dry, metallic taste settles in my mouth, and the world starts to tilt under my feet again.

“Well, we’re not exactly referring to the situation as the ‘mayor’s porn ring,’” Max says. “Anyhow, we suspect your friend started out as more of a paid liaison than a key partner. We think they approached him because he had the perfect excuse to travel to Asia. He works for one of Japan’s most prestigious firms, which means he has legitimate business all over the continent. Plus, when he started, he would have been young and hungry.”

I want to ask about a thousand questions, but I can hear Max warming up to his topic so I let him keep talking.

“Thornton fits the profile: he grew up middle class and wanted to catch up to all the privileged kids as fast as possible. So when his path serendipitously crossed with the right person, he took a huge gamble and invested in a criminal enterprise. He probably told himself he’d only do it for a little while, but the money was beyond his wildest dreams. And the person who brought him in almost definitely put the screws on him to stay in. So now your friend is over his head. Or that’s my theory, and that’s all it is at this point, a theory.”

When Max finally pauses to breathe, I ask, “Who do you think it was? I mean, who lured him into the trafficking business? If he is indeed involved?”

“I can’t say. I’m sorry, I’m getting way ahead of myself.”

“Okay, but can I at least ask you, is it a crime to invest in adult entertainment?” I mean to sound skeptical, or at least defensive, but my question comes out flat. I cannot wrap my brain around the fact that I am on the phone with a federal agent and we’re talking about Oscar. My Oscar. Who wanted to marry me a couple of hours ago. It feels like Max and I are discussing fictitious characters. And like I’m a spectator instead of a participant.

“It depends on the kind of adult entertainment. It’s a crime to invest knowingly in the exploitation of minors. What we try to do in a case like this is establish a pattern. We’re not talking about one seventeen-year-old who slipped through the cracks. That’s sad when it happens, but it’s rare that we’d prosecute those, and even rarer that we’d get a conviction. But in this case, we suspect a knowing and concerted effort to recruit younger and younger girls for the productions. Which makes an enormous difference to our level of prosecutorial interest.”

“It’s so vile.”

“Yes, if what we suspect is true, it is completely vile. But the fact is, it’s rare for us to get a conviction on child porn charges. We’re more likely to try to prove tax evasion. Or money laundering, if we’re lucky.”

I swallow hard. I’m no expert, but these do not sound like insignificant charges. There has to be some enormous misunderstanding. Law enforcement makes mistakes. Oscar could
know
unsavory people, maybe even have business dealings with them, and not
be
one himself. That happens all the time.

Max interrupts my train of thought. “Does your boyfriend routinely leave his briefcase unattended?”

“I’m not sure he’s my boyfriend anymore, after today.”

“Fair enough. But assuming you two patch things up, do you think you could get back into the briefcase?”

“I can’t promise, but maybe.”

“Or better yet, does he leave his laptop lying around?”

“Sometimes.”

“Can you get access to it when he’s not there?”

“Technically, yes. He gave me a key. But it’s a doorman building, so someone will always know I was there.”

“Let me give this some more thought. I’ll be back in touch soon.” We hang up. I don’t know what to think. I feel disloyal, justified, pleased with myself, and horribly ashamed all at the same time. Oscar swept me off my feet. I thought I had found true love, with a wonderful, non-commitment-phobic guy. The real deal that every single woman in every bar in New York hopes to find, whether she admits it or not. And now, just when we should be settling into the next, more comfortable stage of our relationship, Oscar stuns me with a marriage proposal I never asked for. On the very same day I start to wrap my mind around the frightening fact that he—my supposed great love— is actually a criminal. And a particularly revolting kind of criminal at that. How did everything blow apart so fast?