One Good Friend Deserves Another (7 page)

Gabriel was an
artist.
A
Brazilian
artist. Showing up in her gallery like the ghost of Christmas Past.

“You should come by the fair,” he said. “I’d love to show you my work.”

Wendy stilled the reflex to say
yes.
She loved discovering new artists, loved the juxtaposition between who they seemed to be and what subjects they chose to draw. But she had to decline. This offer went beyond a friendly exchange between a contractor and his client. She’d heard this approach a dozen times while she’d worked for the art gallery, spoken from the mouths of so many bohemian artists, unshaven, unwashed, eyeing her three-hundred-dollar shoes and hoping for more than just a showing. It wasn’t quite
“come up and see my etchings,”
but often the sentiment was the same.

And in that moment, Parker materialized beside her. Not kind-but-stubborn Parker, holding firm against the idea of Birdie at the wedding, but possessive Parker. She imagined him slipping an arm around her shoulder and giving Gabe the eye before deftly changing the subject to sports.

“My weekends are pretty busy these days,” she said, granting Gabe a noncommittal smile, “but I’ll certainly try to drop by.”

And then, to save them both from any more awkwardness, she switched her coffee to her right hand. With her left hand, she tucked her hair behind her ear and let her fingers linger, wishing for the first time that she’d opted for a garish two-carat Harry Winston engagement ring, rather than the discreet topaz heirloom Parker had inherited from his great-grandmother.

Certainly Gabriel would understand this gesture, this international sign language for
I’m already taken.

He greeted the exaggerated motion with a brief curiosity, and then, as his gaze fell upon the ring, the expression in his eyes shifted.

“I understand about busy weekends.” He tossed the rag with careless aim toward his toolbox. “So hard to fit everything in, especially if you have family.”

“Every Saturday with my mother,” Wendy said, “and every Sunday with my sister.”

“Me, I spend all my time with my son.”

My son.

The information sank in, like a flint skipping across water and then diving beneath the surface to drift, in a rocking motion, to the bottom.

“Just so we’re clear,” he said, thrusting out his hand. “You’ll be calling me Gabe from now on, yes?”

She hesitated. His expression was open, regretful. A teasing smile twitched at the corner of his lips. This situation could have been awkward, if Gabriel had had the usual contractor swagger or if she’d been forced to verbally turn him down. She shouldn’t worry about ceding him this one small request. She was not, after all, one of the American Woodland Indians, reluctant to reveal her own name lest she lose a piece of her soul.

“Of course.” She took his hand in hers. “Gabe.”

He had a working man’s hand, callused and thick-knuckled, still rough with the grit of the ceiling. Holding it, she understood three things in swift succession. In a few weeks, Gabriel would be finished updating the electricity in the museum. In three months, she would be wearing a sixteen-thousand-dollar designer wedding gown on the grounds of the Briarcliff Country Club, taking Parker Pryce-Weston as her lawfully wedded husband. And right now, there was absolutely no harm in gorging herself on the glorious sight of Gabriel Teixeira—and his strangely haunting, beautiful puzzle of face.

His lips curved as he read her mind. “My grandmother was Japanese. People always wonder.”

Caught again.

“I’m
pardo.
Mixed blood.” He shrugged. “In Brazil, it’s very common.”

“You have most unusual features.”

“And you,” he said, his gaze roaming, “have the most incredible skin. Almost translucent. I’d don’t think I could ever….”

Paint it.

In the trailing silence, she heard what he didn’t speak. Her heart did a little flutter. An image bloomed in her mind of Gabe behind an easel, and her reclining on a sun-drenched couch, naked.

Then she felt a tingling between their palms. A strange sort of prickly static, concentrated, like the electric charge she’d gathered as a child shuffling in her socks across the Aubusson rug in the parlor. It grew in intensity until it was pinpoint-painful, until she felt the heat crackle between their skins.

She pulled her hand away, like a little girl afraid of the spark.

M
arta called the pity party, and Kelly was the first to arrive. The pint-size redhead wandered into the hip East Village bar like a lost soul. Catching sight of Marta alone at the far table, Kelly launched herself across the room as fast as her gladiator sandals could take her and dragged Marta off her chair to envelop her in a hug.

Marta braced herself as her circulation was cut off at the waist. She was a good half foot taller than Kelly, but Kelly was squeezing for the kill. Marta tried very hard to blink back the tears that prickled behind her eyes. If she started crying now, it would be a hell of a watery night.

Kelly pulled away long enough to take Marta’s face in her hands. “I’m so,
so
sorry.”

Marta gave a casual shrug, the airy response she gave to anyone who asked her about the breakup with Carlos, because it was always easier to pretend it didn’t hurt so much than admit she was cut full through.

“Drinks are on me tonight,” Marta said, as the waitress approached. “Are you having your usual sticky poison?”

“Absolutely.”

“A rum and coke,” Marta said to the waitress, and then she tilted her own pomegranate Cosmo. “And another one of these for me.”

“This whole thing just doesn’t compute.” Kelly heaved her messenger bag over her head and slung it across the back of the chair. “The last time we talked, I thought you and Carlos were completely mind-melded.”

“I know.”

“When you called me with bad news, I thought you were going to tell me you were
engaged.
”

“I know. Your voice hit dolphin pitch. I had to tell you quick, before you woke up the neighborhood dogs.”

“Listen, I can be dense about these things.” Kelly gathered the swirl of her floral skirt and hiked herself on the chair. “But you were talking in the cab when we left Dhara’s engagement party like all that was left to do was finalize the design of the rings.”

Marta lifted the rim of the glass to her lips to hide an involuntary spasm. She knew Kelly meant well. Kelly was just being Kelly. The girl honestly didn’t understand that reiterating Marta’s own idiocy might not be the best way to soothe an already battered heart.

“Apparently,” Marta said, “I can throw together a twenty-million-dollar IPO, but I’m not so good at reading men.”

“I can’t believe he’s been living with you while he has a wife in Miami.”

“With three kids.” Marta tapped her glass back down on the table. A boy and two girls. Their school photos, tucked in his wallet. “The oldest is maybe five. She just lost a front tooth.”

“He’s one hell of a son of a bitch.”

“To both women involved.”

Then a purse landed with a clank on the tiny table, and Dhara came up behind it, looking disheveled and heavy-eyed. “Please solemnly swear that this is not some lame ploy to get me to another intervention.”

“
Chica,
I honestly wish it were.”

Dhara visibly deflated. She sank into her chair, covering her cheeks with both hands. She stared at Marta with widening eyes.

Marta swept her fresh Cosmo off the tray as the waitress approached. “You’d best get the doctor here a ginger ale,” Marta said to the waitress. “For her, that’s the hard stuff.”

“I’m going to need something stronger.”

“Whoa, we’re cutting loose. Make it an ice tea,” Marta corrected. “But
not
the Long Island type.”

“Yes, yes. Sweetened. With a lemon.” Dhara ran her hands down her face and then let them drop onto the table. “I’m an ass. I should have known you wouldn’t joke about this. How long?”

“I kicked him out the night of your engagement party. I haven’t seen him since.” She tightened her grip around the stem of her glass, remembering how she’d tossed the pictures of his children at him, ashamed at the tears on her face. “So, which one of you won the pool?”

Kelly’s brow furrowed. “What pool?”

“The betting pool.” Marta tried that casual shrug again. “Over how long this thing with Carlos would last.”

“Oh, Marta, you must really be hurting to suggest something like that.” Dhara shook her head. “You know that all of us were hoping that Carlos was the one.”

Marta’s throat constricted even more. She’d thought Carlos was the one too. She’d even brought him home to her family last January for El Dia de Reyes,
the feast of the three kings. Must have been fifty people in her mother’s cape house, twenty-one of them children. He’d played dominos with her father. He’d dissected every dish, asking her mother how she made the meat and plantain
pasteles,
sniffing the
sofrito
that flavored the rice dish her aunt made with pigeon peas. He’d even chased around her three bratty nephews, the ones Marta referred to as Pedro Stop, Sanchez Put-That-Down, and Alejandro Don’t-Hit-Your-Brother.

It was the only time, she now realized, that he’d ever met her family.

“Tell me he’s out of the apartment.” Dhara dragged her purse off the table, dropping it with a clank to the floor by her feet. “Tell me you launched all his stuff out the fifth-floor window.”

Marta thought of the echoing spaces she’d confronted when she’d come home from work last night—the stretch of her closet, the two gaping drawers, and the pot-rack devoid of copper-bottomed saucepans. It had been days since she’d thrown him out, but she couldn’t seem to get the smell of his aftershave out of her towels. “His dry cleaning showed up on my door this morning. But from what I hear,” she said wryly, “the Salvation Army is always in need of Egyptian cotton shirts.”

“Sure you don’t want to take a scalpel to them? I have a supply.”

“Tempting.”

“And if you see him again, I could teach you how to make two small incisions on either side of his scrotum—”

“If I ever got that close, it wouldn’t be the scrotum I’d cut.”

“How could he keep a secret like that for so very long?” Kelly said, looking genuinely uncomfortable. “I mean, eventually, isn’t it going to come out anyway?”

“Kelly, here’s something I have to face.” Marta searched for courage in the rosy depths of her drink. “I’m no better than those well-meaning women who marry door-to-door salesmen only to discover—to their surprise—that those long trips the guy makes? Well, they are to one of his other four wives.”

Dhara made a muffled noise. “Marta, don’t do this to yourself.”

“Think about it. If I hadn’t made Carlos sign those loan papers, I’d be like some Florida granny who’d had her fortune siphoned off in marshland real-estate scams.”

“No,” Dhara insisted. “No.”

“Did you know that there’s a new reality show called
Who the Hell Did I Marry?
Can’t you just see me on it?” She morphed her voice into the drawling lilt of last night’s televised victim. “’Sixteen months I lived with him, and all that time I thought it was
charming
that he was so
affectionate
over the phone with his ‘nieces’ and ‘nephews.’”

“Clearly,” Dhara said, “he was very good at compartmentalizing.”

“Yeah, like the wives of those serial killers.” Kelly leaned over the table. “They never seem to notice the human remains in their freezers, you know? You’re lucky Carlos didn’t go all Sweeney Todd on you—”

“All right, that’s it.” Wendy waltzed into the conversation, holding a drink in each hand. “You are all hereby banned from late-night TV.”

Marta met Wendy’s wryly amused gaze, her heart swelling in gratitude that Wendy had made the long trip from Westchester to this East Village bar. After Marta had first absorbed the shock of Carlos’s betrayal, it was Wendy she’d called first. It was Wendy she’d kept abreast of all the developments in their sad detail.

Once a freshman roommate, always a freshman roommate.

Wendy scraped a highball glass across the table. “I asked the bartender for a good postbreakup drink,” she said, swinging into the chair next to Kelly. “He called it a
Bastardo
.”

“Perfect.” Marta shoved her Cosmo aside, raised the
Bastardo,
and tipped it to each of them. “Cheers, ladies. Here’s to saying good-bye to one no-good cheating Cuban.”

Dhara raised her ice tea. “Good riddance.”

Kelly heaved her rum and coke in the air. “
Hasta la vista,
baby.”

Marta took a sip of the
Bastardo
and felt the bite of the bitters all the way down her throat. The taste mixed really well with the ashes of failure and the gall of being duped.

She’d had her fill of both. Last Sunday at her mother’s house, after confessing a modified version of the bad news to her hovering gaggle of female relatives, she’d been smothered with clucking sympathy while cousins thrust their sticky babies into her lap, her aunt overfed her empanadas, and her mother casually discussed the nice young man who worked at the Home Depot. The growing miasma of unmet expectations threatened to suffocate her as she stared at the collage of pictures on her mother’s refrigerator.

Pictures of other brides, other people’s babies.

And now, among her friends, all she wanted to do was sink her head onto this sticky café table and collapse into a bubble of shame, remorse, and self-pity. These friends had followed her romantic misadventures with great compassion since that life-altering weekend in college. They knew better than anyone how important it was for her to keep her head on straight, to avoid getting swept away and making a dangerous misstep. She’d thought, after meeting Carlos, that she’d finally figured it all out.

But she’d come here not to wallow, but to understand. She filled her lungs with air and summoned the memory of Coach Sammon at the regional Catholic Sports League finals, rolling his wheelchair in front of the bench at halftime when they were down twelve points, his black hair standing up from clutching his head in frustration. He’d yelled at her—bruised, heaving, and achy—to get up off her sorry ass and stop acting like a sobbing little girl.

Start
playing
smart
.

Playing smart. It worked for her in basketball. It worked for her in college. It worked for her in the law firm.

It must work for men.

Seizing her briefcase, she riffled through the pockets and pulled out a fresh yellow legal pad. “Now that you’re all here,” she said, slapping it on the table, “it’s time to start the Marta Lauren Sanchez Arroyo love-life reclamation project.”

“Uh-oh,” Wendy said. “Deposition time.”

“I need some help figuring out what went wrong so I can make sure I don’t make the same mistake again.”

Wendy arched a brow. “Can we start by trashing your infamous Life Plan?”

“My Life Plan is fine—it’s my love life that is not. Now, I’ve been thinking it over, from the first time I met him, all the way to the moment he grabbed his Williams-Sonoma corkscrew and walked out my door.” Marta rolled the pen between her fingers. It felt good, to pull back and think logically about things. She was good at picking details out of six hundred pages of documents. She was good at carrying through plans. “What were the signs I missed? There had to be a pattern of some sort. One thing I
do
know is that you girls never really liked him. And I, blinded by the Cuban god that was Carlos, just ignored everything you said.”

The three women exchanged furtive glances.

“
Ay Dios mío
, be honest, please! How am I ever going to figure this out, if you all don’t help me? I mean, c’mon, Carlos was
perfect
—he was smart, he was ambitious, and he was one of the hottest guys I’d ever had.”

Six foot three, all lean muscle, and even now, after all that had happened, she found her body responding to the memory of him. She hated herself for thinking with her loins. She was smarter than this.

At least, she liked to think she was smarter than this.

“Honestly, Marta, we hardly knew him.” Apparently, with the silent vote tallied, Wendy was chosen as the spokesperson. “I think I met him only three times.”

“No, no, that’s not right.” Marta resisted the urge to pull out her BlackBerry and scroll through past appointments. “Off the top of my head, I can think of three times you all have met him just since the New Year’s Eve party.”

“At the New Year’s Eve party,” Wendy said, “he was working in the kitchen.”

“And when I made partner—”

“Again,” she interrupted, “he was working in the kitchen.”

“And your engagement party.”

“At my ridiculously large engagement party,” Wendy added, with a roll of her eyes, “I was lucky to speak more than two words to anyone all evening.”

“That’s the only time I remember him too,” Kelly added. “I mean, you talked a lot
about
him, Marta, and we made a lot of attempts to get together, but that’s the first and last time I remember actually meeting him.”

Marta looked at Dhara, waiting for her take on the subject.

“He was a very good-looking man,” Dhara conceded, “and apparently he made a mean mojito. But frankly, Marta, he was no Tito.”

The sound of Tito’s name brought the old familiar pang. Her friends still adored him. Tito, with his easy ways, his laid-back attitude, his quick laugh. Years ago, when she was in law school, Dhara in medical school, and Kelly struggling at her first job, it was generous, dependable Tito who’d take them all out to a small Puerto Rican restaurant in Brooklyn, plying them with drinks and food, and showing them how to dance the merengue. He never had much money, but he spent it generously. Tito had adored her. Marta had adored him back.