The Fixer

7

Rick’s ex-fiancée, Holly, had a small studio apartment on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay. She’d moved back into it once their engagement was broken. He should have realized from the glaringly obvious fact that she insisted on holding on to it even after they got engaged that she’d always had one foot out the door. She’d claimed one day they’d be glad “they” had the extra space, for storage and such. Maybe an office.

They’d lived together in a spacious three-bedroom condo on Beacon Street, in the same building where Tom Brady, the Boston quarterback, had once lived with his fashion-model partner. When Rick and Holly broke up, neither of them could afford it. They could scarcely afford it even when Rick had a job.

Holly’s tiny apartment was lovely, elegant, and jewel-like, like the woman herself, though also a bit cramped and impractical, like the woman herself. Or so he thought when she opened the door in a toxic cloud of recently reapplied Chanel No. 5. He was not in a forgiving mood.

She’d insisted he come over and take away his Wilson Audio floorstanders or else she’d sell them to the building super. She didn’t want those giant loudspeakers, and she was in a hurry. The movers were coming tomorrow to pack and move her out. She was moving to Miami. She worked in the fashion division of a luxury branding agency, and they’d offered her a promotion and a big raise, and besides, her mother and sister lived in South Florida.

“Oh, hi,” she said as if she didn’t expect him. As though he were a salesman, a nuisance interrupting her day. “Come on in.”

She’d taken her lunch hour to meet him here and didn’t look pleased about it either. She was dressed for work: a black leather motorcycle jacket over a white top that draped at the neck, skinny black jeans and studded black leather booties. Her ass was perfect.

She’d also recently reapplied her lipstick, so clearly she cared what she looked like to him, even though she had pointedly not kissed him. In her business, everyone was always kissing each other’s cheeks, even strangers’.

“I’ve got plenty of bubble wrap if you need it.” She waved vaguely toward a few big rolls in the corner next to her vanity. Her nails were painted ruby red. He rolled in the hand truck he’d borrowed from Jeff, navigating a fjord between cliffs of neatly packed and labeled boxes.

“Also, Rick, I’m sorry to have to ask, but you owe me like a thousand bucks.”

“For what?”

“The Amex bill. Remember, we had to use mine because your cards were full up?”

“Oh, right.”

“I’m sorry it’s come down to this. You can give it to me when you’ve got it. It’s not due until next week.”

He took out his wallet. “Like a thousand?”

“Eleven twenty-five, to be exact. One thousand, one hundred twenty-”

“I can do math.” He shucked out eleven hundred-dollar bills, searched for a twenty, found a fifty instead, and handed her the sheaf.

“Whoa, someone’s flush all of a sudden.” She smiled, displaying her perfectly upturned upper lip, her perfect teeth. Her parents had not stinted on their two beautiful daughters’ orthodontia.

“Sold some of my dad’s stuff.” He began wrapping each speaker in bubble wrap and then fiddled with a complicated packing-tape dispenser, gave up trying to make it work, and scratched the end up from the roll of tape. “Congrats on the promotion,” he said. Doing whatever it is you do, but for more money. “What’s the new gig?”

She did something involving “brand positioning,” developed “brand voices” for her clients, doing image and messaging revamps for fashion designers. Solving for a brand’s “challenge,” delivering an “impactful” message, working on the engagement strategy and developing actionable plans to deliver agreed-upon goals.

Or some such mumbo jumbo. It was all just verbal Styrofoam anyway. Packing peanuts of meaninglessness. It was a job, something that paid the rent between modeling gigs, which weren’t all that plentiful in the Boston market. Her company’s motto was brilliantly stupid: “Simplify.” Maybe he should have paid more attention: When it came to their relationship, her “engagement strategy” had been to simplify him out of her life.

“I’ll be-” she started. Then: “Like you’re actually interested.”

“Of course I’m interested.” A car alarm went off somewhere nearby.

“Anyway,” she said, “it’s a lot more responsibility and a thirty percent bump in pay, and I get to move back to Miami so I can be there to help out Mom.”

“How is Jackie doing? Is the lupus flaring up again?”

“Rick, okay, you can stop now.”

“Stop what?” He slid the hand truck’s nose plate under one bubble-swathed speaker and realized this was going to take two trips out to the car.

“Pretending you ever gave a shit.”

“Not this again,” he said with a groan.

“I’m sorry, Rick, but you were so not ready for marriage. I have no idea why you even proposed.” She’d sold the diamond engagement ring for not much money to a jeweler downtown. He thought they should have at least split the proceeds, but he was too demoralized to wage battle over it.

“Because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. Which, by the way, you were totally into until the paychecks stopped.”

“Oh, please.” She put one hand on her slender waist. She was in even better shape than when they lived together. Mourning their engagement obviously hadn’t kept her from Pilates. “You couldn’t have been less interested in my inner life. I was an… accessory. Every time we walked into a party or a fund-raiser it was so clear I was just your arm candy. You were so into the way other people were looking at me. You showed me off like I was your goddamned fire engine-red midlife-crisis Ferrari Testarossa. Eat your heart out, look who I’m tapping.”

He bristled a bit. “You just didn’t want to live in poverty, and you finally figured that out.”

“No, Rick, I figured you out. You were always clocking who’s up and who’s down. I was that tall blonde who looks great in tennis whites. You loved the idea of making other people jealous.”

“That’s not true. I loved you.”

“No, Rick. You loved that.”

He shook his head and scowled, but something acid at the back of his throat told Rick she might have a point.