Rent A Husband Read online

  Forrest dumps his things in the trunk and Eric directs him out of the train station that is—as he suspected—disguised as a hacienda.

  “How can you live up here, Eric?” He asks as they drive down the depressing little main drag.

  “It’s quiet and it’s pretty.”

  “It’s a backwater.”

  “I think you know all about LA and its temptations. Life up here is a simpler proposition. I can get my work done.”

  “Sounds dire.”

  “Not at all.” Eric turns to look at Forrest. “Now, I need to warn you that Darcy Pringle is a little nervous.”

  Forrest bursts out laughing. “That’s her name? Darcy Pringle?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “God, Eric, Jane Austen meets potato chips! I can only imagine what she looks like.”

  “Darcy is my very best friend and she’s a beautiful and charming woman.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Stop the car.”

  “Why?”

  “Stop the car!”

  Suddenly Eric isn’t camp anymore and when he grips Forrest’s forearm it hurts.

  As Forrest pulls over to the curb Eric reaches up and clicks on the dome light.

  “Listen you two-bit little bastard,” the voice is pure Bronx. “You’re a nothing. A nobody. You’re here on my dime. You’ll cut the smarmy attitude and do what you’re being paid to do: you’ll be charming and gallant and make my friend look and feel good. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you put one toe out of line I will personally beat the living crap out of you.”

  “I know jujitsu.”

  “You don’t know a damned thing,” Eric says, jabbing his fingers under Forrest’s ribs, right where he was kicked.

  Forrest groans.

  “Now drive.”

  Forrest clicks the car into gear and he drives, wondering why, oh why, life keeps humiliating him this way.

  6

  Poor Billy Bigelow is having one of those uncomfortable conversations with his dead father again.

  Big Ben, saying, “I can’t believe I have such a yellow-bellied, chicken-livered coward for a son.”

  “Shut up, Dad,” Billy says, which he’d never been able to say when the old bully was alive.

  Billy walks away from the depressing living room of the apartment above the bookstore, an apartment he’d shared with his father after the deaths of his mother sister twenty years ago.

  The deaths that Big Ben Bigelow had blamed on Poor Billy.

  Billy shuts down that stream of thought and then he does something very, very dangerous.

  He finds a bottle of his father’s Wild Turkey in the closet above the sink in the kitchen and pours himself a solid jolt.

  For Dutch courage.

  Whatever that means.

  Now, a clumsy man like Billy has enough trouble negotiating the world sober, so he has never been tempted to drink.

  Has never been drunk, in fact.

  But these are desperate times and desperate times call for desperate measures.

  So he throws the drink back, coughs and wheezes as it burns, tears in his eyes.

  He controls the coughing jag, pours himself another and belts that back, too.

  Almost losing his balance he grabs at the kitchen table and knocks the bottle to the floor where it shatters, the dark liquid spreading across the linoleum.

  Just as well.

  Poor Billy’s ears are ringing and his vision is just slightly blurred.

  But he feels a strange kind of calm.

  And with the calm comes an unfamiliar bravery.

  By God, he’s going to do it.

  Before he loses this bottled courage and before Big Ben can talk him out of it, Poor Billy Bigelow heads for the door, stumbles down the stairs—banging his knee painfully on the banister—and hurries out to where his car is still parked hard against the fire hydrant, the warm breeze flapping the bouquet of pink parking tickets wedged under his wiper.

  Poor Billy—no, make that Bill, Bill Bigelow—gets behind the wheel and fires up the station wagon, clicking on the windshield wipers, laughing as the pink tickets fly away into the night, ignoring the squeal of his fender as he bumps past the hydrant, swerving around a car that is perfectly within its rights to be driving toward him, and takes off toward Darcy Pringle’s house, where he intends to bang assertively on her door and invite her to the Spring Ball tomorrow night.

  7

  He’s not bad looking, Darcy has to concede.

  Come on, girl, he’s smokin’ hot.

  Too much reality TV, Darcy, she tells herself.

  It’s starting to erode your vocabulary like candy rots teeth.

  She stands up from the couch and walks across to the sideboard, holding up the bottle of wine.

  “Can I top you up, Forrest?”

  Forrest Forbes rises and holds out his glass.

  “Please.”

  Darcy smiles at Forrest and as she pours the wine she feels Eric’s eyes on her.

  When she looks his way he winks.

  He’s reading her like an open book.

  Darcy dims the wattage of her smile and pulls herself together.

  Yes, the man in good looking.

  Yes, he is well-spoken and polite.

  But he is a failed actor, and this is a sham, and she has to put an end to it, right now.

  Eric says, “Tell Darcy about when you trained to be a mahout, Forrest.”

  Darcy looks daggers at Eric, who pretends not to see her, sipping at his wine.

  He knows her too well.

  Knows her embarrassing fascination with colonial India.

  Once, when she was a little tipsy she made the mistake of telling Eric that she was convinced she was the reincarnation one of those wan British girls who ended up going native in the heat and dust of the sub-Continent.

  Forrest Forbes is saying, “Oh, when I was a kid I had a pal, Bolly Singh.”

  “That would be Prince Balachandra Singh of Jaipur?” Eric says.

  “Yes, Bolly. They lived in a rundown old palace that dated back to the Moguls. They’ve always kept elephants and when I spent a few months with them one summer during the monsoon their old mahout showed me a few tricks. I got quite close to a young bull elephant named Kipling. It was silly, really. But fun.”

  He smiles at Darcy and she can’t deny that she enjoys listening to this man’s self-deprecating tales, his throwaway tone making them all the more exotic, and suddenly she has a real sense of how limited her life with Porter was.

  How sterile.

  How provincial.

  Always staying at new, impersonal hotels, that all looked the same no matter if they were in St. Louis or St. Tropez.

  No run down palaces in Jaipur for Darcy and Porter Pringle.

  She wonders how Forrest sees her house.

  Is it nouveau riche?

  Is it kitsch?

  Forrest Forbes is smiling at her even more warmly and she can feel the muscles of her face stretching in reply.

  She bites down on her teeth, killing the smile.

  Darcy stands, thumping her wine glass down hard enough to spill liquid onto the marble table top.

  “Mr. Forbes,” she says.

  “Please, call me Forrest.”

  “Forrest, I really do appreciate you traveling all the way up here.”

  “Oh, not at all.”

  She feels Eric kicking her ankle, so she steps away.

  “But really, I can’t—”

  And as she’s about to send him packing, with his Bollys and his mahouts and his perfect profile, the doorbell rings.

  “Excuse me just one moment,” Darcy says and hurries over to the door, opening it to reveal Poor Billy Bigelow.

  “Billy? This is a surprise.”

  “Darcy, hello.”

  He moves toward her, but trips on the top step and he’s falling, those huge catcher-mitt hands headed—yet again—for her chest.
r />   Darcy steps to the side, light as a toreador and Poor Billy crashes through the open doorway and ends up on his hands and knees, staring up at her.

  “Darcy,” he says, struggling to get up.

  “You’re not going to propose, are you, Billy?”

  He gawks at her, then looks down and realizes he is now on one knee.

  He hauls himself to his feet, so tall that his wild hair nearly brushes the chandelier that lights the hallway.

  When he laughs awkwardly does she smell liquor on his breath?

  He certainly looks flushed.

  “Darcy,” Billy says, too loudly, “would you do me the honor of accompanying me to the Spring Ball tomorrow night?”

  When Darcy, stunned, looks past him and sees Eric and Forrest watching from the couch, she realizes that all her options are present in one room: the clumsy, sad, and just plain embarrassing book dealer; the gay screenwriter and the down-on-his luck Boston Brahmin.

  Darcy puts a hand on Poor Billy’s shoulder and he rears away from her like a startled horse.

  “Billy, that is so sweet of you and I’m terribly flattered, but I already have a date.” She takes his hand and leads him into the sitting room. “I’d like you to meet my very special friend, Forrest Forbes.”

  Darcy speaks the line this as if it were scripted by Eric who raises his eyebrow along with his glass and gives her a smile of naked triumph.

  8

  Men.

  A procession of men going into Darcy Pringle’s house.

  Somethings afoot.

  But what?

  Carlotta McCourt, her husband’s binoculars pressed to her lifted and tucked eyes, stands in the dark in her bedroom, spying on the house opposite.

  A house that for years has left her in a state of toxic envy, occupied by the loathsome Darcy Pringle living the life that should have been Carlotta’s, with the man who should have been Carlotta’s husband.

  But the last months have been delicious, seeing Darcy dumped for a young bimbo.

  And earlier, at the bookstore, Carlotta feared that her heart was going to simply explode with delight when she saw Darcy confronted with the pregnant trophy wife.

  Oh joy!

  Even Darcy’s catty comment about breasts—the barren bitch hadn’t whelped twins now had she? And who could blame Carlotta for shoring up what motherhood and gravity had dragged down?—couldn’t dampen her mood, and she’d rushed out to her car, A/C blowing icy air at her while spread the news to the many, many members of her gossip network.

  Speaking to Sylvia at the beauty parlor: “The new wife is at least three months preggo. It was priceless, absolutely priceless, you should have seen Darcy’s face.”

  To Jenny at the boutique: “The ball tomorrow night is not to be missed, darling. Darcy Pringle will be steamrollered by Porter and his very pregnant young thing.”

  To Elsie at the drugstore: “Stock up on Ambien my dear, our darling Darcy’s nerves are going to be absolutely shredded by the time this weekend is over, what with Porter shoving his new bride and their lovechild in her face.”

  Ringing of before Elsie—always such a stickler—could finish telling her that lovechild applied only to a baby conceived out of wedlock.

  The thought of going to the Ball tomorrow night, seeing Darcy on the arm of that hideous queen Eric Royce, watching the parade of the Young and the Pregnant was something she looked forward to with almost sexual yearning.

  But now: these men.

  When she saw the new Jaguar purr up, she grabbed the glasses and stood in the window where she had stood for so many years that her footprints were engraved in the pile of the carpet and watched Eric Royce slide out of the passenger seat.

  The driver, lit by the bright beam of a streetlight, stood a moment, inspecting the street. He was a hunk. If he were gay—and since he arrived with Eric he must be—it was a criminal waste.

  But he didn’t at all resemble the toy boys Eric usually favored, discarding them like used Kleenex when he was bored.

  He was tall, in his mid-thirties, with those finely chiseled looks that spoke of a very deep and very exclusive gene pool.

  And when he and Eric walked up toward Darcy’s front door, Carlotta’s gaydar—finely-calibrated and usually infallible—didn’t peep once.

  The men went inside leaving Carlotta simply overcome with curiosity.

  She couldn’t see the license plate of the car from upstairs, so she went down to the living room where her slob of a husband lay slumped in his recliner, asleep in front of a ball game.

  She couldn’t look at this man without feeling revulsion.

  Porter Pringle had been the gorgeous quarterback, who had kept his looks and athletic frame.

  Walt McCourt had been a linebacker, and at thirty-six he was bald and fat and didn’t seem to give a damn, spending his days selling houses and playing golf and eating like a pig at a trough.

  He had planted twins in Carlotta’s womb the night of the prom, Carlotta so furious at seeing Darcy and Porter together that she’d allowed Walt to ply her with booze and have his clumsy way with her in the backseat of his father’s car.

  So, she’d married him.

  The McCourt’s had money: unglamorous, realtor and car dealership money, and Carlotta had wanted for nothing financially.

  But seeing Darcy and Porter together day after day, and seeing her twins—a boy and a girl—growing up with the unfinished features and thick bodies of their father, had left her feeling cheated.

  Walt, snoring on the chair, doesn’t waken as she bumps past him to get to the window.

  She pulls the drapes open and scans the car.

  Los Angeles plates.

  A very familiar old station wagon clatters to a halt outside Darcy’s house and she sees Poor Billy Bigelow shamble up to the front door.

  He hesitates, speaks to himself, turns away and heads toward his car, then spins violently—almost losing his footing—and rushes back to the door where he rings the bell.

  The door opens and Darcy lets him in and not two minutes later he comes speed-walking out.

  He gets into his car and fights it into gear, lurching off down the road, collecting a trash can as he goes.

  Carlotta continues her vigil upstairs.

  After an hour Eric Royce leaves, walking next door to his house, but the mystery man stays the night, and Carlotta is left sleepless, in the grip of tormenting curiosity.

  9

  A hot wind blows open diaphanous curtains and Darcy can see a minaret spearing the molten sun like a cocktail olive, the trill of a sitar wafting up to her and the sexy, earthy beat of a drum getting her bare feet dancing on the mosaic floor, ankle-bracelets whispering.

  Despite the fans dangling from the painted ceiling—dusky, bearded men and shameless women bursting out of the saris as they demonstrate sexual positions of incredible athleticism—the air is thick with heat, and Darcy feels a sheen of sweat beneath the sheer silk shift that covers her naked body.

  She hears the sound of a footsteps and turns to see Forrest Forbes striding into the room, wearing jodhpurs and carrying a riding crop.

  “Darling,” this husky, British-accented Darcy says, “I thought you’d never come.”

  Forrest rips off his sweat-stained shirt, revealing a lean torso corded with muscle.

  He reaches for her, the riding crop still clenched in his fist. As he takes her in his arms, she smells sweat and musk.

  Forrest flings her on the huge bed, enclosing in billowing drapes, and rips the shift from her.

  Lying on her naked belly, looking over her shoulder at him, she licks a bead of sweat from her upper lip and watches as he lifts the rising crop, ready to discipline her in a way she knows she will love oh so terribly much.

  When Darcy wakes, she is on her belly and she is sweating, but she’s in her bed, in her modest PJs, and there is no riding crop threatening her butt.

  She clicks on the lamp and checks out the clock.

  1:20 a.m.
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  She gets the A/C going and sips on the Perrier at her bedside and tries to compose herself.

  The dream is absurd of course, enough to bring a blush to her cheeks.

  The only man she has ever made love to is Porter.

  And the only man she has ever had an erotic dream about is her ex-husband.

  Until tonight, that is.

  She sees Forrest Forbes smiling at her over his wine glass down in the living room, staring at her with those eyes that—she’s sure—have drawn endless weak, silly women into his bed.

  But whatever Darcy Pringle may be, she’s neither weak nor silly, and when she showed Mr. Forbes to the guest room on the lower floor last night, she was polite, but aloof, as if she were dealing with a slightly over-familiar employee.

  She closes her eyes.

  But when she sees that torso and that nasty little black leather riding crop and hears jangly sitar music she opens them again, pretty darn smartly.

  Breathe, Darcy, breathe.

  Just get through this damned ball and then you can go on with your life.

  But what is my life, she asks?

  She feels a yawning emptiness and when she closes her eyes tears sting her cheeks and she tries in vain to bring back the sitars and the sweat and the riding crop.

  10

  Forrest Forbes has felt his share of pain.

  He was gored by a bull in the run at Pamplona, broke three ribs during a luge mishap in St. Moritz and was once squatted upon by a sumo wrestler at a school near Osaka.

  But, as he sits up in bed in the nauseatingly bland guest room of Darcy Pringle’s shrine to nouveau riche taste (or lack of it) he feels as if his insides are being jabbed at with a molten rod.

  And his head hurts like ten kinds of hell.

  He curses himself for not stocking up on painkillers.

  The drinks on the train and the wine he had earlier served to dull his aches, but now they have returned with a ferocity that has him moaning.

  To distract himself he takes himself on a little virtual tour of this house.

  So bland.

  So sterile.