Chapter 9
Jason dillinger and his wife, Kathryn, sat facing me in our cozy Metro-North four-seater, so that I was moving backward.
Dillinger had brown hair, brown eyes, and the palest, most translucent skin you’ve ever seen.
He was tall, with long legs (thankfully hidden beneath powder-blue summer chinos) that took up all of what little floor space there was between us.
Nobody in the office worked harder or longer hours than Dillinger, hence the never-seeing-the-sun thing.
He was only thirty-five, but his interoffice competition was already complaining about how he was most likely to be Robert’s successor.
“So this is your first one of these,” he said, making meaningless conversation.
I nodded. “You’ve been before?”
“Three times. But this is the first time I’m bringing Kathryn.”
Kathryn, who sat huddled against the window, was lost in her Kindle and gave no reaction to the sound of her own name.
She was good-looking, I’ll give her that, like J.Crew-catalog-model good-looking.
A surprising percentage of guys in the office had extremely attractive wives—wives who, as Emily would say, were not on an equal plane of hotness.
It wasn’t that these Titan men were wealthy, because most of them weren’t, but working in media—news media especially—still maintained a certain cachet, in New York at least. Plus, nerdy guys were having a moment, weren’t they?
It was simply the right time in history to be a pale dude who wore glasses and had a really big brain.
“I was blown away the first time,” said Dillinger, who at least had the decency to wear contact lenses. “You really get to see a new side of Barlow. Though, you probably know him better than any of us ever will.”
“Probably,” I said proudly, for this was the one thing I had on all the guys with hot wives in the office. My access to everything Robert.
“Got any good stories about him?”
Nice try, Dillinger. Of course I had good stories about him, but if I’d learned anything in my six years of servitude, it was discretion. Robert trusted me because I was good at keeping my mouth shut. (No ten-gallon mouths around here.)
However, I did keep in my conversational arsenal a few choice tidbits that I’d toss to the needy in moments such as these.
“Well, I do have one favorite story,” I said, leaning in and lowering my voice in such a way that even Kathryn stirred. “Did you know he once got into a fight with George Clooney on a golf course?”
This was a safe story to tell, because I knew Robert loved people to know about it.
“I heard that once.” Dillinger’s pallid face pinked. “Is it true?”
I nodded. “Apparently, Clooney left a bunker unraked after he’d bumbled his shot, and Robert is a real stickler for smoothing out the sand. So he marched right up to Clooney and told him to get back over there and get to raking—and don’t leave any furrows either.”
I should mention here that when I first started working for Robert, I would spend my nights searching the Internet, diligently looking up all the words, names, and places he’d thrown at me during the day that I didn’t understand.
In time, I figured out how to talk about all the things Robert cared about.
Golf, tennis, boating, Texas sports teams, luxury vacation spots, fine wines, and rare liquor.
My knowledge was shallow, but it was enough to sound like I knew what I was talking about—which is all most people need anyway.
“So what happened?” Dillinger asked.
“What do you think happened?” This was the best part of the story. “Clooney got his ass over there and smoothed out the sand.”
Dillinger shook his head, rosy with admiration. “I could totally see that happening.”
“I know, it’s so Robert,” I said. “But obviously never repeat that.”
“No, no, of course not.” Dillinger leaned back, silently deciding who would be the first person he’d relay it to.
“You know,” he said, “I asked Robert yesterday, what should we do if it rains today, because the forecast was predicting a storm, and he answered, matter-of-factly, ‘It doesn’t rain when I have a barbecue.’ Then I remembered the last three times I came out were all beautiful days. And now look.”
Dillinger pointed past disinterested Kathryn, through the sunny train window, to the clear cerulean sky. On top of everything else, he now accepted as fact that Robert could control the weather.
When we arrived at the Poughkeepsie station, we took a ten-minute cab ride to the house—or the estate or whatever. To say it was vast would be an understatement along the lines of calling the Great Wall of China or Michael Fassbender’s penis “long.”
The cab took us uphill along a gravel driveway, where the house—a white two-story colonial with dark trim—appeared to the left, upon another small hill. To the right there was a barn, and past that, a far stretch of grass that disappeared into a forest.
We stepped out of the cab just off the house’s front porch, and there was Robert welcoming us, glass of bourbon in hand, wearing khaki shorts, loafers, and a striped polo.
I’d never seen his knees before, and I was having serious trouble focusing on anything else.
His wife (Avery, a former Texas Longhorns cheerleader) was at his side.
She was the same age as Robert but didn’t look a day over fifty-five, dressed casually in white cotton shorts, sandals, and a sleeveless top.
Her auburn hair looked like she’d just stepped out of the salon.
“Y’all have a smooth ride getting here?” Avery Barlow had been to the office on a few occasions so this wasn’t my first time meeting her, but when I looked into her bright hazel eyes, I still couldn’t help but think: You are married to Robert.
You knew him when he was nothing but a brassy college boy who read too much James Lee Burke.
You married him before his first billion.
What was he like back then? Did he always speak in commands?
Was he even the natural leader of your friend group?
“Getting here was a breeze,” Dillinger said in response to Avery’s question. “The train ride was a pleasure.”
Already he was laying it on a little thick.
Robert pointed toward the backyard with his drink. “Come on around back.”
We did as we were told, and, reaching the backyard, the stunning swimming pool was the first thing to catch my eye—followed by red-faced Glen Wiles lounging poolside, smoking a cigar.
Shit.
Wiles struggled up from his chair and over to us. He was wearing a T-shirt, which he’d already mostly sweat through; cargo shorts; and no shoes. I thought Robert’s knees were bad. Glen Wiles’s feet were like two ham hocks past their sell-by date.
I was beginning to wonder what the hell I was doing here.
“Tina, you’re hanging with the big boys now, huh?” Wiles gave me a smack on the back with his big bear-paw hand. “That’s my wife, Carolena, over there, she’s catching some sun. Say hi, honey.”
Carolena, in a gold lamé bikini that she absolutely had to have bought at a store for strippers, looked like a Real Housewives of New Jersey reject.
Her skin was the blackened bronze of a tarnished penny, the kind of pennies I used to dunk in Taco Bell hot sauce to make them shiny again.
She peeked at us over her enormous sunglasses, waved, and then turned over to sun her back.
“She’s not a big talker, that’s why I like her,” Wiles said, before re-pacifying himself with his cigar.
I followed Dillinger to the patio bar and poured myself a glass of white wine.
Dillinger had bourbon because Robert was having bourbon.
Kathryn, who’d finally stowed away her Kindle, disappeared into the house with Robert’s wife for a tour—because that’s what women did.
They looked at house stuff. Though biologically I, too, was a woman, I had zero interest in oohing and aahing over period details and antique linens, so I stayed put and took a seat at the patio table.
Robert pulled up a chair beside me, slid my wineglass aside, and placed a tumbler of bourbon in front of me. “You want this,” he said.
I looked at him with owl eyes.
“That’s twenty-three-year-old Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve.” Robert urged the glass to my hand. “Best bourbon you’ll ever drink.”
I took a sip. He was right; it was good. And I wondered how he got it.
During the workday, Robert would often shoot me an e-mail along the lines of: Can you run down to the liquor store and get me a bottle of Famous Grouse forty-year-old blended malt .
. . And I would then spend the next four hours calling every liquor store in New York trying to locate the rare bottle, which I’d go pick up myself or have rush-messengered.
He had no idea how much effort went into fetching such things, or how much money it ended up costing.
All he knew was by six p.m. the bottle was on his desk.
So it blew my mind when Robert stood and fired up his own barbecue grill.
He planned to do all the grilling himself, just like a regular person.
And his wife started bringing out side dishes—carrying them herself—from the kitchen.
Avery Barlow was serving us? I was expecting maids and butlers, white gloves.
Maybe even someone on standby to chew the bigger pieces of food for us, I don’t know.
Instead, Robert ordered Dillinger and me over to the grill to show us exactly how he buttered the steak.
“You have to do it this way,” he said, dipping a brush in a bowl. “This here is a mixture of butter and oil.” He painted each slab of thick meat on both sides, while Dillinger snapped photo after photo of the process with his phone.
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why now, after six years, I’d finally been invited here to be fawned over and schooled in the essentials of barbecue grilling. And why I thought it was okay to come given the present (criminal) circumstances.