But looking back on it, Pandy wondered if it was purely coincidence that before she’d even met him, she’d associated Jonny with death and destruction.
* * *
When Meghan returned from her weekend, Pandy and Suzette heard all about it: the endless sex, including sex standing up, which Suzette declared she’d heard was his trademark move. They were also informed of the usual excuses as to why Jonny Balaga couldn’t get serious: No woman, he’d claimed to Meghan, could tolerate his schedule, and he wouldn’t want to put any woman to the test. His restaurants didn’t close until midnight, and then there was still work to be done, meaning he often didn’t get home until four in the morning.
Pandy had roared with laughter when she heard that one. “Come on, Meghan, you know better than that. He’s out partying.”
True to form, after two weeks of this whirlwind romance, Jonny stopped responding to Meghan’s texts. When Meghan went to Pétanque to confront him, he acted like he hardly knew her.
This made Pandy hate him even more.
* * *
And then Pandy began running into him. Every time she went to Pétanque, which seemed to be everyone’s favorite place for first dates, whatever man she was with at the time always made a big show of “knowing” Jonny when he came out of the kitchen in his chef’s cap and tightly wrapped bloodstained apron. The man would be effusive in his praise, while Pandy tried to say as little as possible, doing her best to ignore him.
This wasn’t easy.
Jonny had presence. Pandy herself had to admit that he possessed that indefinable “it” factor. He was one of that rare type of man to whom women couldn’t help but be attracted in spite of themselves. Like Bill Clinton and Bobby Kennedy Jr., they oozed sex appeal like musk aftershave. You might not like them, you might even despise their politics and their double-dealing attitudes toward women and cheating, and yet when you were near them, you couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to be one of those cheatees yourself.
This, coupled with Jonny’s unapologetic arrogance, was enough reason to stay away. Why, Pandy wondered, must the Beluga come rolling out after every meal, stopping to greet every patron so they could congratulate him and tell him how wonderful he was? This sort of patronizing strutting was the sort of thing only men could get away with, and it just made Pandy resent Jonny more. He was like an actor standing around the exit of the theater after a play, begging for compliments from the departing crowd.
And then, as often happens in New York, Pandy’s orbit changed. Five years would pass before she would encounter Jonny Balaga again. Five years in which she herself changed: from struggling writer to the creator of Monica and the toast of the town.
* * *
Returning to New York from that disastrous trip to the island with SondraBeth Schnowzer and Doug Stone, Pandy had vowed never again to allow herself to be drawn into such moral debauchery. Despite having seen just about everything, she was proud to fall back on her prudish side, which, she believed, allowed her to run to the edge of the cliff and watch everyone else jump off while she remained on terra firma. She chastised herself for having momentarily gone against her better values, and for thinking she could escape from life’s vicissitudes by scooting behind the curtain of movie-star glamour. She vowed to get back to real life; like Odysseus, she would stuff her ears to resist the siren’s call to land on that treacherous rock called showbiz, where, as her literary friends had warned her, no self-respecting novelist belonged.
She tried politics instead.
Enter the Senator. Twenty years older and twice divorced, at least he spent his time trying to make the world a better place.
He was nearly sixty. Almost old enough to be her father. This he informed her of within ten minutes of making her acquaintance at Joules. Within the next hour, he sadly revealed that he’d had prostate cancer. And he was still in love with his first wife, who had died of cancer. So she shouldn’t get her hopes up.
Pandy promised that she wouldn’t.
Other than that, he explained, his life wasn’t bad. He dined at only the best restaurants, where he was often comped. He lived in the most exclusive building on Park Avenue and named several billionaires as his closest friends. Indeed, he