Page 101 of Love Deep
The hostess assures me Gerry has already arrived andleads me to the back of the restaurant to the private dining room.
“Gerry,” I say. “Good to see you.”
His mouth falls open, but he recovers quickly. “What a surprise. Is the lovely Vivian with you?”
I turn to the waitress. “We’re going to need a bottle of your finest tequila and two shot glasses. You drink tequila, don’t you?”
Gerry’s wearing a tense smile, but he nods.
“And a selection of appetizers. Unless there’s anything in particular you were looking to order?”
Gerry’s smile falters. “Anything works for me.”
I take a seat opposite Gerry, and we stare at each other until the hostess closes the door.
“You’ve hated me for a long time, Gerry,” I say. “And I’ve always wondered why. At first, I thought it was just the way you did business, but over the years, it’s become clear that you do business differently when it involvesme. You try to undermine me. Undercut me. Steal artists. Take credit for things I did.”
He stares at me blankly.
“I let it go mostly. Avoided you when I could. When you got into management, I deliberately swerved doing business with your artists, ducked out of parties when you arrived. But when you turned up at the Colorado Club, I realized that this game of cat and mouse was never going to stop. It got me thinking.”
I stop as the door to the dining room opens and a waiter appears with a bottle of tequila and two glasses. Before he can offer to pour us some shots, I take the bottle. I need something to take the edge off of this terrible conversation.
The waiter leaves and I pour us out a shot each. I slide one across the table toward Gerry and pick the other oneup. I knock it back. The burn at the back of my throat feels good, like a grazed fist after a deserved punch. It fits. Feels right.
Gerry doesn’t touch his. I get it. He wants a clear head. He might suspect, but he doesn’t know what’s coming.
“It got me wondering why?” I say. “I realized this was more than professional rivalry. It was more than I just irritated you, or I reminded you of a guy back in high school. But what?”
The corner of Gerry’s eye twitches.
I pour myself another shot and sit back. “So I did some digging. You’re not the only one who can track people down at remote locations in the way you did with Vivian.”
I’m grateful he doesn’t deny it. We both know it would be ridiculous, and I admire him in a way for just staying silent.
“For a long time, I had a very happy childhood. I thought my mom was thirty percent cookies and my dad hung the moon. They were loving parents to me and, I thought, in love. Our house looked just like my friends’ houses. My backyard the same as theirs, complete with water pistols and Slip ’N Slides and a barbeque when the weather allowed. I don’t know why or how, but even though my life looked a lot like my friends’, something told me I was lucky. That I’d hit the jackpot. Maybe it was the way my friend Jonny’s mom used to yell at us when we trailed mud into their house. Or if we got too excited, the way Jody’s dad used to grab him by the arm and whisper in his ear with his jaw clenched, like he was threatening to murder him. My mom rarely yelled. My dad always joined in the fun.”
Gerry’s mouth is set in a straight line, his jaw clenching tighter and tighter as I speak.
“And then, just before I left for college, my parents announced they were divorcing.”
I exhale. Every time I think of that day, I always get a little unsteady on my feet. It’s a hint of the feeling I got that day—that the earth I stood on was no longer solid.
“No big deal, right?” I ask him, not expecting an answer. “Plenty of couples get divorced. And I was technically an adult. But to me, they might as well have told me they were Russian spies, or that they weren’t my real parents and they were just looking after me for the couple next door. It was as if they’d revealed a fundamental lie about my life up to that point.”
Gerry takes the shot of tequila I poured him and downs it. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and replaces the glass on the table. I pour him another shot and then, together, we both take our second.
It doesn’t burn as much this second time. I wish it did. I wish the discomfort in my throat could make me think of something else other than the lies my parents told me.
“From that moment, I trusted nothing and no one. If my own parents could lie to me so easily, if they could pretend so well that their own son believed them, then there wasno onewho wasn’t capable of lying to me.”
I swallow at how fucking lonely my next confession feels.
“In that moment, our relationship was fractured forever. All I could think about was how I wished I was Jonny, having a mom who yelled, or Jody, who had to put up with his dad’s temper, because at least those parents weren’t liars.”
We sit in silence, my thoughts loud in my head. I’d been so angry. So let down. So altered from that moment.
“And then,” I say eventually, “when I did some diggingon you, I found out that about the same time my parents told me they were divorcing, your mom had finally gotten the courage to file for child support from my father.”
