Blessed Are the Cheesemakers Page 27

  “Oh, come on.” She grinned. “I only went because of the court order. I’m not the one with a drinking problem, darlin’. Y’all should know that.” She reached for the flask and wrenched it back from him, fumbling with the top and swerving half off the road before correcting the steering with an unconcerned laugh.

  “Jacey,” Kit said anxiously, snatching the flask back after she’d swigged from it again. “You’re going to get us killed. Jesus, pull yourself together, will you?” Jacey just laughed again, and held out her hand, waggling her fingers by way of requesting the drink.

  “You can’t say you don’t have a problem, Jace,” Kit said, holding the flask by the door away from her grasp, his voice slow and deliberate. “You overdosed on heroin, for chrissakes. You miscarried our baby on the floor of our apartment. You lied to me from the day I met you until the day you went into detox. Jesus Christ, Jacey, you’ve never even said you were sorry.”

  Jacey’s smile faded and her face darkened but she fought the temptation to argue. She didn’t want to mess things up now. “All right, sugar, if that’s what y’all want to hear, I’m sorry. Is that better? I am real sorry.”

  “And you can cut the Southern crap,” Kit said, his voice sounding tired and empty. “You’re from Jersey, remember? Please, you can drop the charade, Jacey. I’ve met your parents. I know where you’re from. I know all about you. And there is nothing wrong with any of it.”

  Jacey’s eyes hardened. She did not appreciate reality coming along and snapping her thong. Not one bit. But she was determined not to mess this up. “You’re not still mad about that, are you?” she purred. “Jeez, honey, don’t you think you could try and get over it?”

  “Get over it?” Kit was aghast. “Get over it? Jacey, every single thing I knew about you, about my wife, every tiny detail, turned out to be a lie, do you really think I can just get over that?”

  Obviously if he had been able to get over it, they would not be where they were now. They would have moved on from that terrible day at the hospital and got on with the rocket-fueled life they were living. Instead, Kit remembered with spine-chilling detail the devastation he felt as the truth about Jacey unfolded in the aftermath of her overdose.

  Ed and his wife Mary had arrived at the hospital just as the bald bespectacled doctor had dropped his big bombshell, and Ed had launched a mortar attack of his own. Concerned at the downward spiraling direction of his friend’s lifestyle under the influence of his gorgeous party-girl wife, Ed had been prompted to look into Jacey’s background by a throwaway comment made by a bicycle courier. The courier had seen Jacey coming to pick up Kit for lunch one day, and commented to Pearl that she’d come a long way from Freehold Boro High School. Ed then attempted to locate the Louisiana newspaper baron Jacey claimed was her father, only, he told Kit, to find out no such man existed.

  She was estranged from her family, Kit had protested in the sickly green light of the hospital corridor. She had escaped a bad L.A. showbiz marriage and was hiding her failure from her wealthy powerful New Orleans family.

  Her family lived in New Jersey, Ed explained gently, and were neither wealthy nor powerful. The courier still knew one of her sisters, Cherie, and Ed had spoken to her. Jacey’s real name, he informed Kit, was Marlene Blundt. She had run away to L.A. as a teenager and married the owner of a suburban striptease bar who went bust and wound up stealing cars for a living.

  Jacey had been in contact with her family only once in the past decade, Ed said, to ask for money about three years ago when her husband went to jail. She was twenty-nine, not twenty-six. She’d been dabbling with drugs since she was twelve. Her much older boyfriend had given her a boob job for her fifteenth birthday.

  Turned out Kit didn’t know anything about Jacey at all.

  “You could try to get over it, couldn’t you, honey?” Jacey was smiling sweetly at him from the driver’s seat. “For me? For us? Y’all know y’all can do it if you try.”

  “Please, Jacey, drop it with the Southern stuff. It’s crap and you know it.”

  “Honey, I don’t think you appreciate how much the Southern thing works for me, professionally,” Jacey asserted, ignoring the chill in his words. “I don’t think the folks at Ford would be too pleased if I changed right now.” Kit was not to know, after all, she reasoned, that the folks at Ford wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire and neither would anyone else of their ilk.

  “But Jacey,” Kit said bleakly, “it’s not right to go around pretending you’re someone that you’re not; that’s basically the root of all your problems. And you of all people—well, there’s nothing wrong with you the way you actually are.”

  “Well, honey, you might not like me the way I actually am,” she replied. “Had you ever thought of that?”

  Kit sighed and shook his head. “Of course not,” he said sadly. “You don’t think I know the real you?”

  “Nobody knows the real me, sugar,” retorted Jacey. She seemed almost proud of the fact. “And that’s just the way I like it.”

  “But I’m your husband, Jacey, and if I’m going to stay your husband then you have to drop all this bullshit and just be you. Otherwise, what’s the point? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with a woman I’ll never really know. What are you so afraid of? What’s the big deal with being Marlene Blundt from Freehold, New Jersey?”

  Jacey, furious at having her past dragged up again, was having trouble containing her irritation. “Well, I don’t think you can rightly tell me who I should or shouldn’t be, Mr. Burlington, Vermont,” she declared with venomous sweetness. “You reinvented yourself too, you know. How come it’s only a crime when I do it?”

  “I never pretended to be anybody other than who I am,” Kit argued. “I worked hard and it wasn’t until you came along that I started getting messed up. Jesus, all that insane partying? The drinking? I was never into that shit before.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault you’re an alcoholic,” Jacey declared. “Of course. Heaven forbid you should ever blame yourself for anything.”

  “I’m not talking about that and of course I don’t blame you,” replied Kit earnestly. “I don’t blame anybody but myself and I blame me for what happened to you as well, because I was obviously so messed up I didn’t even notice what state you were in. What kind of a husband does that make me?”

  “Oh, Chhheeerist,” groaned Jacey. “Spare me the analysis. It’s like being back in therapy. Really, honey, I have had enough of that shit to last me a lifetime. Truly, I do not, repeat not, need any more. Could you just be a babe and hand me the vodka instead?”

  “What I’m trying to say,” Kit said, ignoring her request, “is that I actually used to be pretty happy being exactly who I was, and I’d like to be that person again. I think maybe I even have been, these past few days.”

  Jacey tossed her head and blew through her lips in a gesture of derision. “That little bumpkin sure turned your head, didn’t she?” she marveled. “What did she do—bake you an apple pie? Trust me, sweetie, two days back in the Manhattan swing and you will have forgotten her and this whole stupid country thing altogether.”

  “When did you get so hard?” Kit wanted to know. “I don’t remember you being like this.”

  “Honey, you don’t remember a half of it and you don’t need to either. Now why don’t you just sit back and relax, huh?”

  “You know what?” Kit suggested. “I think I will. And you know what else? I’m going to do it without this,” and with one swift right hook he threw Jacey’s hip flask out of the car, up into the air and into the long grass at the side of the road.

  Jacey’s pretty face screwed up with anger as she slammed on the brakes and slid the car to a halt.

  “Have you lost your fucking mind?” she raged, all Jersey now. “You get out and go back and get that. Go back and get my flask.”

  “I won’t,” said Kit, looking at her angry empty eyes and realizing that the scattered bits of his life were starting to rise up and rearr
ange themselves again. “I don’t want our old life back, Jacey. We’re better off without it.”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” Jacey bit back. “You were just a boring know-nothing bank boy before I met you. You never did anything but go to work and sit around watching TV. You thought Bang and Olufsen were Swedish magicians, for God’s sake. Nobody even noticed you before you had me on your arm, honey. You were wallpaper. You want to go back to that?” Her eyes sparkled with fury as she watched him, knowing that no matter what his head told him, she still had the power to make him do what she wanted when it counted.

  “I don’t want to be noticed,” Kit told her, quietly and calmly. “I want to be normal. I want a family. I want to stay in some nights and sit around in my sweatpants and watch TV. I want to invite friends over to play cards and have dinner.”

  Jacey threw back her head and laughed. Not her pretty Southern tinkle or her deep sexy chuckle but a hard mean laugh that came from somewhere deep and dark. “Give me a break,” she said, “you’ve just described my idea of hell. You wouldn’t last five minutes living like that, Kit, and neither would I. Maybe that’s what your little show-pony girlfriend down there on the farm does for fun but ga-holly, cowboy, anywhere else? I don’t think so. You want more than that, Kit, you know you do. You and I are the same like that, just admit it. We both want more and we are both going to get it. We’ll both do whatever it takes. Now be a honey and go get me my fucking flask.”

  Kit felt sadness leach out of his heart and into the rest of his body as he realized that for Jacey this was true. But for him, it was not. In that moment, the staggering emotion he had thought he felt for his gorgeous, graceful, flawless wife and from which he had been running ever since her overdose and betrayal evaporated. He looked at her and for the first time didn’t see the mesmerizing beauty who had kidnapped his soul and broken his heart, but instead a brittle shell containing nothing but a cold-blooded mass of manipulation. He had been wrong to abandon his wife and wish her dead, he knew that now. That had not been the right, not the brave thing to do, and it had led him down a path where escaping reality courtesy of Grey Goose was his best option. But in that moment, in that car, sitting there looking at her, Kit knew as clearly as he knew anything that even if he had stayed and been a brave understanding husband, he would have arrived at the very same conclusion he was arriving at now.

  Jacey, bored with the resistance she was meeting and fearful of what it meant, lurched out of the car and slammed the door behind her. “You think you’re so fucking special,” she said as she teetered back down the road in search of her flask, “that you’re so fucking righteous, throwing all our money at your stuck-up little brother and your crazy old mom, but you like to party with the big boys, too, Christopher. Admit it. You’re not as ‘holier than thou’ as you think you are.”

  She stepped off the side of the road and got down onto her hands and knees to search for the flask. Kit watched her, horror mounting, as she desperately clawed at the long grass and wildflowers.

  “Where is the fucking thing?” she mumbled under her breath. “Where the fuck is it?”

  Kit slowly got out of the car and started to walk toward her as she groveled around at the side of the road, her hands searching like a blind woman’s for the vodka.

  “If you think I am going back to New York without you, you can think again, you selfish bastard,” she said, her voice catching, as she continued scratching at the ground. “I will not go back to sharing one stuffy little room with three other catty bitches and schlepping around the city for pathetic little jobs that pay nothing.” Her voice was stretched with the effort of controlling herself. “I will not be groped by one more fat ugly married asshole desperate to get into my pants because he thinks that’s where buying me one lousy apple martini will get him,” she railed. “I will not suck up to Ghislaine for her fucking castoffs or wear Violet’s old shoes after she’s already worn them everywhere I want to go.” She seemed totally oblivious to a car flashing by, its occupants staring, their mouths hanging open, at the beautiful girl crawling on her hands and knees at the side of the road.

  “I will not turn the cushions on some crappy sofa inside out looking for enough change to buy half an ounce of fucking talcum powder. I am Mrs. Kit Stephens and as of next Thursday I am worth a lot of money so screw the lot of them.” She dropped her head down onto her arms, her butt in the air, and roared into the grass as she realized the hopelessness of trying to find the flask.

  Next Thursday? Kit thought about the date. It would have been, he realized with another jolt, his tenth anniversary at Fitch, Wright and Ray, and the date on which his vested funds would mature. The final scales fell from his eyes just as Jacey, her head at grass-roots level, spied something glinting in the grass close to the fence and threw herself on it. “I found it,” she cried, laughing as she grappled with the top, then throwing as much of the vodka as she could down her throat.

  When she opened her eyes, her husband was gazing at her with a look she had not seen before but which she suspected was far from mesmerized. Her plan, she realized, had gone slightly awry. “Oh, cut the saintly routine,” she said, wiping her sweating forehead with the back of one slightly dirty hand. “You’ll be back in the swing of it before we touch the ground at JFK. Don’t give me that happy-being-at-home-with-your-sweatpants shit, Kit. All this farm crap has messed with your mind.”

  “How did you find out where I was?” he asked her.

  She looked up at him, squinting into the sun and shading her eyes with the flask. “That little swamp creature from your office knew.”

  “She told you? Niamh told you where I was?”

  “Oh, what does it matter?” Jacey answered, getting clumsily to her feet and standing unsteadily for a moment before bending over to rub the dirt and grass from her knees.

  “It matters to me,” said Kit. “Did Niamh tell you herself or did you find out some other way?”

  Jacey’s face was red from exertion and stained where the dirt from her hand had mixed with her sweat and smeared across her forehead. She stepped out onto the road and started to walk toward him, and it was then that Kit realized how drunk, or stoned, or both, she was. She smiled lazily as she walked up to him, then kissed the tip of her index finger, and ran it across his lips as she passed him.

  “Of course she didn’t tell me,” she said, over her shoulder, “she hates my fucking guts. Her new boyfriend told me. I bumped into him at our old apartment.”

  Kit turned and looked at her. “You bumped into him?”

  “Well, I still had my keys, honey. I was a little surprised to find him there, I can tell you, but he was very kind and told me just where I could find you and then he gave me access to your personal effects.”

  So Tom wanted to sabotage Kit’s chances of returning to his career and Jacey just wanted his money. This was what it all boiled down to.

  “Come on, darlin’,” Jacey drawled. “There’s a big old jet airliner down the road and it’s got our names on it. Yours and mine, baby.”

  She pushed her hair back from her face, leaving another smudge on her cheek, and smiled at him, before slipping elegantly into her seat and starting the car. Kit walked deliberately toward her, thousands of cogs moving together in his head, finally synchronizing the machinery of his life as he knew it. He stopped at the passenger door. He looked at Jacey, taking a last slug from her now-empty flask, and he knew one thing, just then, and one thing only. He did not want to grow ten minutes older with this woman, let alone forty years. He could not imagine her wrinkled face smiling at him, nor see his own ancient arms adding strength to hers. He could not picture their children. He didn’t want to.

  “Jacey,” he said, feeling safe and strong outside the car away from whatever it was that made his wife so mortally magnetic, “why didn’t you tell me about our baby?”

  She rolled her eyes, then when she saw the look on his face tried pouting at him. “You’re not still pissed about that, are you, sugar?”
she asked.

  “Pissed?” Kit asked incredulously, gripping the car door, his knuckles white with the effort of not taking her scrawny neck and throttling her for her callousness. “You OD’d when you were pregnant with my child, a child I didn’t even know I was having. Pissed is hardly the word to describe how I felt about that, how I feel. Can’t you even see that?”

  Jacey looked at him, calculating, wrongly, how to play it. “Oh honey,” she said sweetly, “the truth is I didn’t tell you about the baby because I wasn’t planning on having the baby. I wasn’t ready for babies. I was having too much fun and so were you.” She smiled her sexiest smile, oblivious to her messy face and sticky hair. “It’s only because I forgot about the Valium and the coke and tried that stupid shit of Violet’s that you even knew about it. I was going to deal with it the very next day and you would never have had to worry about it.”

  She looked at him and assumed she’d hit her mark. “We can have all the babies you want when we’re done with the good life, darlin’,” she added. “There’ll be plenty of time for that.” She leaned over and patted the empty passenger seat. “Come on home, Christopher honey. I want to go home.”

  Kit’s smile was sad but Jacey couldn’t see that. “Jacey,” he said, as softly as he could, opening the door and kneeling on the seat, then leaning over as if to kiss her. Her face softened with the glory of triumph as she realized she had won and that he was coming with her.

  “I knew y’all’d come around eventually,” she breathed, offering up her face.

  But Kit, instead of kissing her, moved quickly past her newly resistible lips and pulled the keys out of the ignition, then jumped out of the car and threw them as hard as he could into the rhododendron bushes behind the stone fence at the side of the road. She would never find them.

  “Our time is up,” he said calmly as he turned, closed the car door and reached into the back, pulling out his bag. “I’m going to be a cheesemaker.”