Epilogue #2
She cackled to herself and relaxed as if we were old friends. I took a moment to survey the room. I sat in a dressing room old enough to be stained with cigarette smoke on the wallpaper, and new enough to have the landline phone jacks painted over. Except for the vanity and the makeup mirror, the room was rather dimly lit. Not far away, I heard Stan’s cackle, followed by Ramone shushing him to silence.
“It’s all right, honey,” the makeup girl said, giving Ramone the eye. “He’s not bothering me.”
“We don’t’ want to interrupt you making your Mommy prettier, do we Stan?” Ramone asked.
Stan looked up at Ramone and giggled with the high-pitched energy that only a toddler can muster.
In my mind, I was thinking ‘go ahead and interrupt her, my ass is falling asleep after sitting in this chair for so long.’ I didn’t say that out loud, though. I didn’t want to hurt the makeup girl’s feelings.
“Oh, I can’t make her any prettier than God already has,” the make-up girl said with a smile. “All I can do is make sure that the camera captures the essence of her beauty.”
By covering it up with a pancake’s worth of foundation, I thought to myself. Again, I didn’t say it out loud, though. I had become too polite since becoming a mother.
Part of it was I didn’t want to upset my hosts. Not even the makeup girl. I wanted tonight to go off absolutely without a hitch. A lot was riding on it.
“Well,” Ramone said as he lifted Stan up and put my child on his lap. “I guess it’s not every day that you appear on Gordon Godfrey Live.”
Ramone pronounced the name of the show with a kind of religious awe. I was never a huge fan of late-night talk shows. Even when I was in high school and college. I always thought there were better things to do at ten thirty at night than watch a bunch of celebs hawk their latest project while a failed stand-up comedian attempts to say pithy things and make the live studio audience laugh.
Like sleep, for example. Or certain other activities which also involve a bed. Watching television seemed like a waste of time to me at that point of the day.
Yet, I knew that millions of people did just that. They watched Gordon Godfrey Live because it was a saccharine take on the world. It made everything easier to take, I supposed. For me, I preferred the unvarnished truth. Then again, look at all of the problems I had because I had a fake relationship and an equally fake marriage.
After all of that chicanery and fakery, I wanted things to be real as possible. Gordon Godfrey was pleasant and entertaining, but he was not exactly real. He was what he was. A huckster, a ringmaster for a three-ring circus that was the Hollywood hit-making machine.
I hoped to use his powers for good tonight. His audience would tune in to hear the juicy details of my fake marriage, real divorce, and subsequent real marriage to Evan. But I would make sure that when they turned off the television at the end of the show, they had a good, thorough understanding of how crucial it was to preserve the Amazon rainforest.
“Ow,” Ramone said as Stan pulled on his beard.
“Stanley, no,” I said from across the room. Stan snapped his gaze over to mine, a sheepish expression on his cherubic face.
“Sorry,” he said, and I think he meant it. Stan wasn’t a bad kid, but he was a kid. He sometimes got overly excited and did things without thinking about them. He would never inflict deliberate harm on his uncle Ramone, or his uncle Jack or Aunt Jennifer for that matter.
Evan and I were raising him right, as far as I was concerned. He would not grow up damaged to the point he had to wear calloused armor to protect himself from the world like his father did. I worked long and hard to help Evan shed his armor and be his real self, unafraid to laugh or sigh. Unafraid to feel.
“Hey, where is your better half, anyway?” Ramone asked.
“Oh, he’s still trying to work,” I said with a laugh. “I’m sure he’s driving the make-up people crazy with how he keeps putting a phone up against his face. I finally told him that if he was going to network, he needed to do it outside.”
“Don’t you worry, hon,” the makeup girl said cheerfully as she flounced my hair a little, then shot it with a cold blast of hair spray. “Everyone is going to be looking at your gorgeous self. Your husband could come out in a potato sack and a ten-dollar haircut and look fine.”
“Ten-dollar haircut. “Ramone sputtered. “What’s wrong with a ten-dollar haircut? I have a ten-dollar haircut.”
“I never would have been able to tell,” I said wryly as he primped his frizzy mane.
The irony of course being that Ramone made more than enough money to get his hair styled anywhere in the city. The truth was, he hated to spend money on himself. He’d lavish his family with gifts and vacations and the like, but he rarely took anything for himself or for his own desires.
The door to the dressing room popped open. My heart lit up as my husband walked through. He looked so dashing in his three-piece tailored Italian suit. Evan knew that part of his function tonight would be to glam up and show the world that caring about the environment didn’t mean you were a frumpy nerd. Even the ‘cool’ people were doing it, to misquote my fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Periwinkle. Sometimes I wondered about whatever happened to her. I couldn’t picture her going home and being a regular person when I was a kid. I assumed she just slept at school.
Evan was still on the phone, and to be polite he didn’t want to come in the dressing room until the conversation was over. However, since he stood halfway through the door with it hanging open and we could hear everything he said, I don’t know why he bothered.
“No, you listen to me, Dave,” Evan said, his eyes narrowing dangerously. “I’ve emailed you about fifteen alternatives to using Dynacamp energy solutions for your project.”
Evan listened for a moment, and then his face twisted into a grimace.
“Well, those other companies don’t cut down vast swaths of forested land around the world to fuel their paper factories. No, Dave, I didn’t ‘turn into’ a tree hugger. I’ve always given a damn about the environment; I just didn’t realize how much power I had to change things until I met my wife.”
Evan’s lips twitched a snarl as Dave said something back.
“Soft? You think I’ve gone soft, Dave? You think I’ve gone soft?”
Evan extracted his other smartphone from his blazer pocket and tapped on the screen with his free hand .
“I’ll show you soft,” he muttered under his breath. “There, it’s done. Oh, what’s done, you ask? You forgot that I get to say which companies get to bid for our contracts. Newsflash—Dynacamp is not going to be on the list.”
Dave said something back. Something loud and obnoxious from the sound of it, though I still couldn’t make out what he specifically said. I heard some cuss words, though.
“Well, you’re the one who called me soft. You started it. I tried to be nice about it. I tried to let you make your own decisions, but you had to go and be a dick about it and insult me and my wife. That means I cut you off. And if you want to continue to draw in that nice six-figure salary and drive around in that leased Tesla, you’re going to do what I say, when I say.”
Dave said something back, sounding more subdued this time.
“Yeah, you’re right. I AM an asshole. Only these days, I’m more of hemorrhoid. I irritate assholes. Assholes like you. I’m hanging up now, Dave. Let this be a lesson on being stubborn.”
Evan ended the call and thrust both his phones back into their respective pockets. He turned his gorgeous eyes my way, and they filled with the light of affection.
“Hey, darling. You look gorgeous, though I’m not sure about that shade of lip gloss.”
“I kind of thought it was too dark, too,” I said. “But Kathy here assures me that when it’s on camera, under the bright stage lights, it’s going to look like a totally different shade of red.”
“Don’t you worry none, hon,” Kathy the make-up girl said with a big smile. “I’m going to make sure your wife looks like the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Evan cocked an eyebrow.
“But she’s already the most beautiful woman in the world.”
I melted, and Ramone rolled his eyes. I don’t know why he was being so dramatic. I’d seen Ramone with his own wife, and he was just as sweet and bubbly with her. I guessed that most people didn’t expect that kind of behavior from my husband. Evan had been known as the iceman of wall street for a long time before we met.
Fortunately, he hadn’t really been the cold-blooded bastard the media made him out to be. To be fair, the media only portrayed him that way because Evan took so many pains to act as such. He wanted to craft a public image of the ruthless business mogul so that it would make his brand more valuable.
Evan had been shrewd from the get-go. He realized that a man with his kind of wealth and influence would have a rather large public footprint. He decided to use that footprint to his advantage. In fact, when we met it was all about creating value for the companies he owned.
I wondered what tonight’s admissions would do to his Q ratings. Probably nothing. Even so, he’d moved some of his assets around to make sure to protect our wealth in case things went badly.
I didn’t think it was going to cause problems. The tabloids had already had their field day with our original divorce and then re-marrying. They already ran us through the mud, so to speak, a couple of years back.
Now, though, we were something of the sweethearts of the world. Our work with charity and the fact that we’d remarried in such a small intimate ceremony had done wonders for the urban legends surrounding our brand. And it was our brand now.
Evan didn’t seem to mind. He knew as well as I did that our fame was only a means to an end. We didn’t get off on being famous. We wanted to use our public footprint and world-renowned fame for good. We wanted to save the planet.
“Now, if I could just get you back in my chair for a wee bit of touch-up, Mr. Jones.”
Kathy smiled, showing both rows of teeth, and pushed the chair out invitingly toward my husband. Evan looked as if he wanted to argue about it. I decided to shut him down right real quick.
“Honey, just sit down in the chair and let her have her way with you,” I said chidingly.
“Daddy gets lipstick,” Stan said, which made both him and Ramone almost fall all over themselves laughing.
“Oh, spicy,” Kathy said with a chuckle. “I didn’t know you two had an open marriage.”
“We don’t,” Evan said dryly. I caught his gaze with my own and gave a slight shake of my head. He sighed. “Of course, I’ll get back in the chair and let you finish, Kathy. Make me look like a trillion bucks.”
“You already look like a trillion bucks,” Kathy said, trying to steal his thunder but it didn’t go over so well.
“Now, dear, you know what you always say about letting a professional do their job. And about not interfering with a professional doing their job.” I gestured to Kathy. “She’s going to make you look so good that all of the women watching at home will…”
I glanced over at my son. I’d been about to say ‘cream their panties’ but I thought better of it.
“…want to go on a date with you,” I finished lamely. Sometimes being a parent really put a cramp in my acerbic comebacks and witty repartee.
“Well, they’re going to be disappointed. I’m a one-woman man these days.”
I loved it when he said things like that. It warmed my heart. I looked on adoringly as he got his makeup touched up by Kathy. I sat down in a different chair and Stan immediately came and started pulling on me.
“Leave mommy alone for a little bit, bud,” Ramone said, wrangling my child. “You don’t want to make her dress all wrinkly or smudge her lipstick before she goes out on stage, do you?”
“Uh uh,” Stan said, shaking his head.
Evan put up with the makeup process like a champ. He knew how high the stakes were. More than a dozen different companies were fighting for the rights to chop down vast swaths of the Amazon rainforest. It was our job to shine a light on all of that and also to try to stop it.
It wasn’t like Evan could buy every company in the world engaged in deforestation. I mean, he probably had the money, but not all of them wanted to sell. Some of them were involved in local politics and even organized crime.
A sharp rap at the door drew all of our attention. Ramone almost jumped right up out of his seat.
The door opened slightly and the face of a man wearing headphones appeared.
“Five minutes until they call you out, Mr. and Mrs. Jones.”
“Thank you,” I said to the producer. I couldn’t remember his name, though I’d heard it spoken a dozen times. He looked like every Hollywood producer of a television show. Short, balding but with frizzy hair on either side of his head. The tweed jacket he wore looked cheap and probably was, belying the fact he probably made as much money or more than Gordon Godfrey himself.
I turned to Kathy as she administered to my husband.
“Did you hear that, Kathy? You’re going to have to hurry.”
“Oh, I’m almost done with him, hon. Doesn’t he look so handsome?”
“Yes, he does,” I agreed, though it had nothing to do with her makeup. I didn’t mind seeing him without makeup. In fact, I liked seeing him when he didn’t wear anything at all… which was how I’d gotten pregnant in the first place.
“I can’t believe either of you aren’t nervous.” Ramone shook his head, eyes filled with confusion. “If I were about to go out and be interviewed by THE Gordon Godfrey, I’d be pi…. that is, I might pee my pants.”
He looked anxiously at Stan, but my son didn’t seem to have heard. Stan knelt in front of a mahogany coffee table with lots of coffee rings stained into the wooden surface. He busily used a fistful of crayons to create a bunch of dots on a piece of paper. The rapid tattoo of his stippling filled the air with his childish joy.
Stan thrust his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he hammered the crayons down. I used to worry about him breaking them, but that was the old me’s way of thinking. The old me who worked as a waitress and had to make everything last as long as possible.
My days of worrying about the price of crayons and their subsequent consumption were over. As were the days of my buying two-ply toilet paper and pulling it in half to make it last longer. Money wasn’t a problem any longer for us. Awareness of what was going on in the Amazon rain forest, now that was a problem.
I was glad that Jennifer and Marshall had decided to go ahead and let us be the public faces of the charity work. Evan was made for the spotlight, and our crazy love story had captured public attention in a way that it would be foolish not to capitalize upon.
Otherwise, Gordon Godfrey would not have invited us onto his show.
The producer stuck his head back in and motioned for us.
“Kathy, I love you, you’re the best, but that’s enough. I need them now! They need to be on point for the big introduction.”
I headed out into the hallway first. Evan had to don his blazer again, so he brought up the rear. We stood together while the producer barked orders into the microphone attached to his headset .
“We are less than thirty seconds to go time, people! We’ve got to make this work right the first time, we’re live for crying out loud! Doris, you better have the band ready to play the intro or I swear to God I’m billing my ulcer medicine directly to your Discover card. Why the Discover card? Because I know you never use it. Just get them on cue.”
I shot a smile at my husband. He reached out and took my hand, giving it a squeeze. It felt so good to have my husband at my side.
The producer led us to a large, peeling white circle on the backstage area. The red velvet curtains were a mere five or six feet from our location. I could imagine all of the people in the audience waiting to gawk at us on the other side. I was so used to public appearances at that point, though, that it didn’t give me any anxiety.
“Are you nervous, honey?” Evan asked.
“No, not really.”
“You just seemed like you were really deep in thought.”
“Oh, I was deep in thought.”
I gave him a cheerful smile. He waited, but I didn’t elaborate. I still liked to fuck with him from time to time.
“And what were you deep in thought about?”
“Are you sure you want to know?” I asked with a grin.
“I’m quite sure.”
“I was honestly thinking about where we’re going to eat after the show.”
“Oh.” Evan laughed. “I thought we would try Viviano’s.”
“Oooh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. The only thing that Stan will eat on the menu is spaghetti.”
“Why is that a problem?” Evan asked, cocking his head to the side while we waited our time to go on stage.
“Because” I said wryly, shooting a pointed look at Ramone. “ Uncle Ramone let him eat two cans of spaghetti-O’s before we came here tonight.”
Ramone had the good grace to look sheepish about it and shrugged.
“You were both busy ‘getting ready,’ he said with a knowing wink. “And you know how picky the little twerp is about his food. I’m lucky I got him to eat at all.”
The producer raced in front of us and held up his hands.
“You guys are on in five, four, three…”
He stopped talking but kept holding up his fingers until he reached zero. We heard the sound of Gordon Godfrey’s voice from beyond the curtain.
“My next guests need little introduction. If you’ve been near a mobile device, magazine, or newspaper in the last couple of years you probably already know who they are.”
Laughter rippled across the audience, and Godfrey waited for it to subside before speaking again. I glanced over at Evan and smiled. He smiled back, but you know who wasn’t smiling? The producer, the poor, nervous producer.
“No,” he hissed in a voice below a whisper. “Here, like this.”
He carefully took our arms and folded them into each other. I guessed at the time that it would probably look better on camera than the two of us holding hands. Holding hands is casual. Linking arms seemed more formal. Or so I figured. It seemed like a lot of quibbling to me, but I really wanted everything to go off smoothly.
Outside the curtain, Godfrey continued.
“They were once the darlings of the tabloids, always good for a shocking headline or photo op. Now, they’re the darlings of the charity world. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Amanda and Evan Jones!”
The curtain parted. I had always thought the shimmering barrier was moved by some sort of mechanical device, but I saw a stagehand busily yanking on a cord, so I realized it was not. The curtains opened and the stage lights flooded my vision. I knew my cues, even though I was temporarily blinded, and so did Evan.
We walked along the preset path, just like we’d rehearsed, smiling huge for the host. Gordon Godfrey leaped to his feet when we came out. He moved out from behind his desk, displaying his usual frenetic energy, and shook hands enthusiastically with both of us.
“Welcome to the show,” he said, though the mike didn’t pick it up.
Gordon was not a very tall man, but his portliness and frizz of white hair made him seem bigger than he actually was. The cut of his suit indicated it had been tailored when he was a bit lighter than he was on that night. Gordon wasn’t obese, but he did have a belly hanging slightly over his belt.
His hair was balding on top, but the sides were very long. It almost made him look like one of those old comic book characters from World War II. More like a caricature than a real person, but I knew that was a carefully cultivated look.
I couldn’t object to his appearance. After all, my own looks were carefully cultivated. Every accessory, every bit of jewelry and extra flair was designed to send a message. I made sure that all of the things I wore were both cruelty-free and responsibly sourced. It would have made me a gigantic hypocrite if I’d gone out wearing a designer who had done damage to our goal of saving the rainforest.
We were seated on the sofa. I felt Evan’s reassuring warmth next to me. The stage lights were so bright I really couldn’t see the audience much, except for some of the people in the closest rows to the stage.
I settled in and Gordon did the same .
“Welcome to the show,” he repeated, this time for the cameras.
“Thanks for having us,” I said. Evan and I had already decided I should do most of the talking. He was so magnetic we feared he would draw more attention to himself than to the cause we were promoting.
“Oh yeah, an absolute pleasure,” Godfrey said. “How’s the parental life treating you? I understand you have a toddler?”
“I wish I had his energy,” Evan said. “He just goes, goes, goes, nonstop.”
“Yeah, my kids are the same way,” Godfrey replied. Then, his smile faded ever so slightly. I knew we were about to ‘go there.’
“All right,” Godfrey said, rubbing his hands together. “I’m just going to address the elephant in the room. Namely, you guys are married, right?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling even though I knew where he was going with it.
“Buuuut,” he said, dragging out the syllables for dramatic effect “it’s not the first time the two of you were married, now, is it?”
Laughter bubbled up out of the audience. I smiled good-naturedly, as did Evan. Neither of us bore any rancor toward Gordon Godfrey for bringing it up. Like everything else that looked to be spontaneous on that stage, it had been carefully negotiated and rehearsed.
“No, it’s not the first time we were married.” I looked over at Evan. He put his arm around my shoulders and gently squeezed. “But I have no regrets.”
“So, what happened the first time?” Godfrey asked. “You seemed like you were both so much in love at the time. During your first marriage, I mean.”
“Our first marriage was one of convenience,” Evan said. “I wanted to keep her hard-working, brilliant mind near me as much as possible, and she needed my face for her most worthy cause of saving the rainforest.”
“So, you guys weren’t in love the first time around?” Godfrey asked.
Evan and I looked at each other, and it wasn’t scripted. We both smiled. I felt the warmth and affection coming out of his gaze and found the confidence to answer.
“We were too busy driving each other crazy to realize how much we were in love,” I replied.
The audience laughed, and Godfrey did as well.
“Oh man, I can totally relate. There are some days that my wife makes me want to tear what’s left of my hair out and run screaming into the wilderness.”
More laughter from the audience, though I didn’t think what Godfrey had said was all that funny.
“Well, the love was always there. We just had to find out our way to it.” I smiled up at Evan and then turned back to Godfrey. “I don’t know what else I can say about it.”
“So, the two of you are in love?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, and there was no chicanery there. Evan spontaneously leaned over and kissed me on top of the head. The audience responded with a chorus of ‘awwws’ that echoed through the theater.
“That’s obvious to me and everyone else in here,” Godfrey said with a nod. “But why the divorce the first time? If you were so much in love?”
“We were very much in love,” Evan said “but we didn’t know it. A whole lot of it was my fault. I didn’t get it.”
His jaw set hard, and I realized he was speaking from the heart. He was also ad-libbing, but I wasn’t about to stop him.
“I thought that if I held myself apart from the rest of the world,” Evan said, picking up momentum as he went “I would never be hurt. I thought that being an island would keep my heart safe. I wanted people to think I was a cold-hearted businessman, and I succeeded. I succeeded not only with the general public, but…”
He looked at me with hurt regret.
“But I succeeded in convincing my wife of that, too. You know what, though, Gordon?”
“What?” Godfrey asked right on cue.
“No man is an island. I can’t remember who said that quote off the top of my head, but it’s true. I thought I didn’t need anyone in my life. I thought that I was a self-made man, a kind of Ayn Rand antihero who could do it all on his own. But you know something? Nobody can do it on their own. Humans aren’t designed to live separately from each other. We’re designed to be together. Especially with the one we love.”
More ‘awwws’ from the audience. They were eating it up with a spoon, so to speak. I reached up to my shoulder and squeezed Evan’s hand affectionately. I so loved my husband in that moment, for speaking from the heart.
“And how about you?” Godfrey asked, addressing me. “How did the journey affect you?”
“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I think that a lot of it was me learning to have more confidence in myself. I thought for the longest time I would never be anyone other than ‘the rich guy’s wife’, but Evan helped me believe in myself and live up to my full potential. And that…”
I looked up into his beautiful eyes.
“…is why I love him so much.”
Godfrey and the audience were digging it so hard, I almost felt bad.
“Splendid, splendid.” Godfrey moved on to the real reason we were on the show. “So, you guys have a charity that benefits the Amazon, right? ”
And there we had it. I went into my spiel about how many square miles of the forest disappeared every year. I did the facts and figures. Evan did the emotional reactions and supplied hope in abundance. Our overall message was urgent, but upbeat. The world was in danger, but we still had a chance to put things right.
When we walked backstage after the interview, I scooped up my yawning toddler and held him to my hip. I no longer cared if he wrinkled up my dress or smudged my makeup.
“I think that went well,” Evan said.
I cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Pimping the charity, or your heartfelt confession?”
He laughed and kissed me tender.
“Both.”
The End.