The Last Dreamer (3 page)

“Pretty nervy of her,” Iliana said. “She hardly knows you.”

“Yeah, but I’m like that, I start talking to someone on the street and before I know it I’m all into their business.” She shrugged. “Whatever. I like real estate. I like contracts. And she’s got some pretty stuff. Hey, as long as we’re right by the store, let’s stop in there. You can help me find my thank-you gift!”

Iliana shrugged—what else did she have to do?—and they paid the check and then walked over to the shop. A cheerful bell sounded as they opened the wooden door.

“Pick me out something nice!” Jodi whispered as she headed toward the back. “I’m just going to find her and say a quick hello.”

The place smelled good, like cinnamon and cloves, and Iliana wandered through the narrow alleyways formed by stacked chests and breakfronts. Everything looked old and weathered, as though the whole assortment had been brought in from some nineteenth-century New England estate. Eventually she came to a small writing desk in the corner and stopped to run a finger along its pewter drawer handles. It had a deep cherry finish and roll-down top, and it reminded her of the desk her parents gave her for her twelfth birthday. Her father, who had sold stationery products for a living, used to love the whisper that sharp pencils made on paper placed on a fine wood surface. He found it sad that pencils lost their points so quickly.

She opened a drawer and took out the price tag. Seven thousand dollars. No wonder she never shopped here.

Jodi came up behind her. “Hey, what’ja find me?” she said. “This? This desk? Isn’t it a little . . . I don’t know, sentimental?”

“What? No, it’s beautiful,” Iliana said.

“It’s not very practical. The drawers are so small!”

“It isn’t for storage, it’s for
writing
.
My parents gave me one just like it when I was in middle school. My dad went to six stores before he found the one he wanted. He said it was the perfect desk for writing down my dreams.” She felt her eyes filling with tears. Her father had died over a year ago, and she still missed him.

Jodi leaned over and rubbed her shoulder. “Come on, let’s go,” she said softly. “I can choose something later.”

Outside, she adjusted her fringed scarf. “Could you drive the boys to basketball today? The floor guy’s coming, and I don’t know how long it will take.”

Iliana nodded. “Sure, I’ll take them.”

“Great. And let me know when I should fill in for you.”

Iliana nodded. “Okay. I will.”

“Because that thing in New Jersey for Marc’s company is coming up, right?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right. The flower thing.” The owner of Marc’s company had a wife who grew up in New Jersey, and each year she hosted a flower-arranging workshop at her family’s estate for the nonworking wives of the firm’s male senior executives. Marc was ecstatic that she had been invited this year, because he thought it showed that he was finally on the partners’ radar screen and might be in line for a promotion.

“You don’t want to go? I think it sounds fun,” Jodi said. She reached out and nudged a strand of Iliana’s hair from her face. “What’s wrong with you today anyway? You’re not usually this down.”

Through the store window, Iliana could just make out the desk that looked like the one her father had chosen, the desk that Jodi had called sentimental. “I’ll see you later, Jo,” she said and started for her car.

Back home, Iliana stared at her laptop as she had known she would, looking for something positive in Stuart’s email. True, she thought, he had turned her down, but he hadn’t said he wouldn’t hire her, and he hadn’t said she wasn’t a good writer. Yes, his characterization of her taste in profiles stung, but maybe he was right—maybe magazines had to be flashier these days. And maybe there
was
some cool, well-known business star she could track down, now that she knew the kind of article Stuart wanted. Still, Jodi’s lament hung in the air. Were lawyers who’d left the workforce to have their families really as unmarketable as she claimed? Was the same true of former magazine writers?

She turned away from the laptop and rested her head in her palm. It would take some time for her to think of a personality who would impress Stuart and then figure out how to get the interview. She would have to be resourceful—maybe reach out to women she knew who could put her in touch with celebrity businesspeople. Who did she know with those kinds of contacts? Were there any doctors or lawyers in town who might have famous people in their practice? Any PR people who had famous clients? Brokers or financial planners with helpful connections? She tapped her forehead with the pads of her fingers.
Come on!
she told herself.
You know how to chase down a story! Think! THINK!
But the encouragement didn’t help. Nothing came to her.

Gradually her eyes wandered to the family room, and she saw the TV on the wall, as well as the coffee table where she had sat and watched Jeff Downs through four straight episodes of
Guitar Dreams
last night. Jeff Downs, the guy who had made her feel better about herself every week throughout middle school, even though she didn’t even know him. She couldn’t help but wonder how his story played out. He had had a career that took off fast and ended quickly—the show was off the air after three or four years, and she never saw him on TV again after—and she was starting to worry that her career was over, too. She wanted to know how he had coped and whether he’d been able to move on to something else. She wanted to know what became of him—and how he felt about it all.

She turned back to the computer and typed “Jeff Downs” in the Google search box. Her eyebrows lifted with curiosity as she hit the “return” key. But then she sighed, as more than eleven million results popped up, along with ads from companies claiming they could find his address, phone number, and arrest record instantly. This was not going to be easy.

Methodically, she read through the first page of Jeff Downs listings. There was a cardiologist in Tampa named Jeff Downs, as well as a police officer in Las Vegas and a professor of biology at Stanford. There was a pastor in Philadelphia and a few insurance brokers and financial planners in scattered cities. Sure, she could eliminate the basketball star at Syracuse University and the old man who just died in Buffalo—
her
Jeff Downs was neither nineteen nor ninety-three. But what about the others? Was the guy whose smile once drove preteen girls crazy now a doctor, professor, or policeman? Could he have invented a whole new life for himself after his star crashed and burned years ago?

She went back to the search box and typed in “Guitar Dreams,” staring intently at the screen for new results. Up came a Wikipedia entry—wasn’t there always a Wikipedia entry?—followed by a host of YouTube videos and several TV-centered websites. She clicked on the Wikipedia link, which described the show’s origins and gave some information she already knew. But within the wordy copy, an unfamiliar tidbit emerged:

After
Guitar Dreams
was canceled, Jeff Downs, once known as the Reese Jeans guy, moved to Maine to start a skiwear business with his brother, Jack.

Skiwear? Now
that
was an interesting piece of news, assuming Wikipedia was right. Googling “Jack Downs skiwear,” she held her breath while the results page loaded and then clicked on the first link, which brought her to the home page of a website called JackDownsHatsandAllThat.com. Locating the “About Us” tab beneath a picture of a lighthouse, she skimmed the paragraph that appeared. Sure enough, it said that Jack Downs had started the company with his brother—but added that Jack and Jeff eventually parted ways, and Jeff moved to New York to start something called Downs Textiles.

Leaning forward, eyes glued to the screen, Iliana returned to her browser and typed “Downstextiles.com.” Then she waited, tapping a fingernail against her teeth.

A few moments later another home page popped up, with a photo of a New York City showroom sporting multi-tiered racks with colorful blankets. Once again, she found the “About Us” tab and clicked. Up came a list of four company executives, with “Jeff Downs, President” at the top. She wondered: Was “Jeff Downs, President” the guy who dominated her imagination for two full years of her life—or just one of the other eleven million Jeff Downses sprinkled around the planet?

Iliana pinched her bottom lip and studied the computer screen, trying to think where to look next. How would she have tackled this sort of situation back when she was at
Business Times
? And then it hit her:
Business Times!
The magazine maintained a huge online archive of material about New York City businesses—everything from sales figures and profit estimates generated by the research department to small news articles that for one reason or another didn’t make it into the magazine.

So she went to the BusinessTimes.com archives—but quickly found that they were password protected. That was a surprise, as they had been available to anyone back when she worked there. How could she get in? She supposed she could email Stuart and ask for the password, explaining that she wanted to research past stories so she could develop a pitch he’d like. But that didn’t make sense—why would she be looking at old, musty stories if she were trying to come up with something fresh? She was going to have to think of another way. Was there anything she remembered that could provide a clue about how the tech people might handle online security?

She thought about the kind of security that existed when she was on staff. Back then, there were physical archives located in the building, and the entrance to the room where they were housed was locked. She remembered that there was a keypad outside the door, and the code to unlock the room was . . . the street number of the building! What was it again? She quickly went to the publication’s home page and found it: 2251. Might the company have used the same code when they secured the digital archives?

She entered 2251 into the box—and sure enough, she was in.

She typed “Downs Textiles” into the search box. Three short items popped up.

Bingo.

JEFF DOWNS
,
FORMER TV STAR
,
STARTS BLANKET BUSINESS

(New York: Sept. 2, 1999) Jeff Downs, a star of the one-time hit TV show Guitar Dreams, has launched a textile business and opened a midtown-Manhattan showroom at 295 Fifth Ave. to display his line of blankets.

DOWNS TEXTILES MOVES DESIGN AND ADMINISTRATION TO WESTCHESTER

(New York: Mar. 26, 2008) Downs Textiles, the blanket supplier started by one-time TV idol Jeff Downs, has opened a second office near his home in Mount Kisco, in northern Westchester. Downs, who has declined to talk about his past since leaving Hollywood, was unavailable for comment.

JEFF DOWNS, FORMER TV STAR, ADDS FLEECE TO BLANKET ASSORTMENT

(New York: April 8, 2012) Downs Textiles, headed by former teen idol Jeff Downs, has added a fleece line to its blanket assortment. The company said in a statement that the line would debut in Bloomingdale’s.

Iliana sat back in her chair and took in what she had just learned—that after all these years, Jeff Downs was living and working just about in her own backyard. How about that! It tickled her to know that at this very moment, he could be sitting in his showroom in Manhattan, a mere thirty minutes away, or working at his Mount Kisco office, just a few towns north. He could be seeing the same clouds out his window that she was, hearing the same whoosh of wind that she heard maybe thirty seconds ago. The guy girls everywhere had daydreamed about, the guy she loved to
actually
dream about each night, the guy she had once believed would value her in a way no one else did—that guy could be about to order a muffin from the same Au Bon Pain she stopped at when she took the kids to shop in Midtown over Christmas break. He could be right next to her any day now, if she knew where he got his morning coffee or what train he took to work.

But what did that mean? It was the very question she had asked herself at least once a day when she was working at the magazine, the question that led to the exhilarating process of creation. You found information and you processed it, and then you built a story. What was the story that was going to come from all she had uncovered?

The clock on the computer said one thirty. She had to throw in a load of laundry and go to the cleaners, and then it would be time to get the kids from school. She closed her computer.
Jeff Downs is in New York
,
she thought.

She couldn’t wait to discover where that surprising news would lead.

Chapter 3

She was asleep when Marc came home that night, but the pressure from his side of the bed when he sat to take off his shoes woke her. She pushed herself up on an elbow and watched him kick his shoes into his closet, then grab the single empty hanger and thrust his suit jacket onto it.

“Everything okay?” she yawned. “You look upset.”

“Did I wake you? Sorry. As long as you’re up, though
 . . .”
He went to his desk and switched on the gooseneck halogen lamp.

“Ooooh,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut and shading them with her hand.

“Sorry, sorry again,” he mumbled, taking his wallet out of his pants pocket. He placed it in the empty space on the surface of his chest of drawers, just like he always did. Then he pulled off his watch and put it in its usual position, straight and flat alongside the wallet.

“We missed you,” she said, hoping that would cheer him a bit.

He nodded halfheartedly and walked over to the bed to plant a kiss on her jawline. “Missed you guys, too,” he said. “In fact, I wish I had never left in the first place. Man, what a godawful trip.”

“Didn’t go well?” she asked.

With the tips of his first two fingers, he combed his short, ash-brown hair away from his forehead. “Damn contract. I knew it was trouble.”

“What contract?”

“The swimwear chain we picked up in Seattle—those bastards added this outrageous exit bonus for the management team. I red-flagged it a thousand times but Angers said forget it. Then we present the thing to Connors this morning, and Angers makes like it’s the first time he saw it. So I’m the moron lawyer who can’t read a contract.”

“It can’t be as bad as all that,” she said.

“I don’t know why we’re buying a swimwear chain in Seattle anyway,” he grumbled as he pulled his shirttails out of his pants. “They don’t buy swimsuits there, they buy
raincoats
.” He balled up the shirt and hurled it into the wicker basket. “Now Angers says he’s getting a conference room in a Midtown hotel next week so our project team can meet off-site and ‘regroup.’ I swear, I spend my whole life covering my ass. And then some jerk who’s covering his
own
ass up and throws me under the bus.”

“Everyone’s edgy at these meetings,” she said. “You’re all exhausted and stressed. At least it’s over and you’re home. Things will look better in the morning.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “I’m just gonna have to lie low and hope this whole thing blows over. Connors can be a real jerk, you know. You get on his bad side and bam,
you’re out.”

Iliana shivered and pulled the covers up closer to her shoulders. It was scary when he talked like this. Lately it seemed that he really thought his position in the company was precarious. She worried that they had overreached when Dara was born and they bought a large house, failing to foresee the tightening economy and naively assuming that Marc’s raises and promotions would continue to come quickly and easily. She knew that his responsibility to support her and the kids weighed heavily on him. She hated that he spent so much time feeling tense and worried.

“Is there anything I can do?” she said.

He pulled off his belt. “I’ll be okay,” he said. Then he pointed toward her night table. “Did you get a chance to call?”

She looked over to where he was pointing. It was the invitation to the flower-arranging workshop she had talked about with Jodi. “No, not yet,” she said. “I will tomorrow, I promise.”

“You’ve had it for a week already.”

“I didn’t mean to let it go this long.” Getting out of bed, she pulled some clean T-shirts out of his suitcase. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it. A flower-arranging workshop for nonworking wives sounded way too similar to lunch period back in middle school, and she hated to think that after all this time, she’d be back where she started, sitting near a group of rich girls with whom she had nothing in common. Just because she was a stay-at-home mom, it didn’t mean she yearned to make centerpieces for dinner parties.

“You know that I’m up for exec, and if you don’t show a little enthusiasm, it will reflect badly on me,” Marc said. “Especially after this Seattle mess. Dan’s wife was invited for the first time, too, and she called back the very next day.”

“I’ll call first thing in the morning,” Iliana said, putting the T-shirts in his drawer. “Believe me, I know how great this promotion would be, and I’ll be enthusiastic on the phone, I promise.”

He sat down on the bed and began peeling off his socks. “How are the kids?” he asked.

“They’re good. Matt left his violin again, and I had to go drop it off.”

“Anything else going on?”

“Not really. I read in
Business Times
that Stuart got promoted to editor in chief. I’m trying to get an assignment from him.”

“Yeah? What do you think they pay for an article?”

“I don’t know, a few hundred dollars. Why?”

“It just seems odd to me that you had time for that and couldn’t find a minute to call Jena Connors,” he said.

“Come on, Marc, I apologized—”

“If you don’t want to go, then don’t,” he said, taking off his tie and snapping his wrist to straighten it out. “I’ll just stay in this job for the rest of my life. If I’m lucky enough to keep it. But Iliana, if things go right, this could be good money. I mean, the refrigerator needs to be replaced, the patio steps are falling apart, and we have two college educations coming up. Let’s face it, the only way we’re gonna have any real security is if I get promoted to the executive team. Without that, I’m just a dispensable lawyer on staff.”

“I understand what you’re saying—”

“Look, I gotta get back on the right track after this Seattle thing, and you have to help me,” he said, hanging the tie on a peg on the closet door and adjusting the ends to make them even. “It’s not about you or me, it’s about our family, about this job that supports this life.”

She closed the door so they wouldn’t wake the kids. “Okay,
enough
,” she said. “What do you want me to do? Do you want me to call now? I’ll call right now if that’s what you want.” She picked up the phone.

“Tomorrow’s fine,” he muttered and went into the bathroom.

She put the phone down and stood outside the bathroom door. “It’s just that this is hard for me,” she said. “All I do every day is what you need me to do, you and the kids, and it’s starting to make me a little crazy. I mean, if my life is only about backing you up, if our family depends on you having a wife who arranges flowers and does everything you need . . . if you’re saying that’s the person I
have
to be—”

He opened the bathroom door so quickly, she jumped back in surprise. “For God’s sake, why is everything always about who you are and who you want to be?” he said. “Why can’t some things just be the things you have to do?”

“Because everything I do is about who
you
are!” she said.

He shook his head as if to say she still didn’t get it and closed the bathroom door.

Shaking, she left the room and went downstairs. In the family room, she curled up on the sofa and pulled the wool throw over her shoulders. She was mad at Marc, but before long she found herself questioning her actions and motives, the way she always did when they fought. She knew she had behaved childishly by not calling Jena Connors yet to RSVP. Marc was right—he was totally devoted to making a secure home for their children, and he never forgot that they came first. He was right to expect that she would help out in whatever way she could. She had happily quit her job to stay home with Matthew. That was the path she had chosen, and she had gotten a wonderful life in return. Wasn’t it selfish to ignore the invitation and waste almost a whole afternoon pouting about a rejected article and then looking for an old TV star?

Still, it stung that he had made her feel inferior by bringing up money—
What do you think they pay?
—as if the meager amount that freelance articles typically paid made her feelings unimportant. If everything she hoped to do with the rest of her life had to be measured by how much money it would bring in, then she was sunk before she even started. The days when she earned a respectable salary, with the potential for additional promotions and raises, were long gone. But had she really given up the right to all of her dreams when they jointly agreed that a stay-at-home mom would be best for their family? Couldn’t he see that writing something meaningful and having it published was a way of proving to herself that she mattered? She truly wanted to elevate Marc—to help make sure that he always felt he was important, appreciated, and capable of making a significant impact on the world. That was because she loved him. Didn’t he want the same for her? Didn’t he love her that much?

Jena Connors’s invitation was sitting beside her computer the next morning when Iliana returned from taking the kids to school. Marc must have moved it there from her night table before he left for work. Sighing, she read the printed card again:

Please Join Me

For a Three-Session Lunch-and-Learn on Flower Arranging

Featuring the Incomparable Manhattan Floral Designer Miyako

And Members of His Acclaimed Staff

Thursdays, March 13, 20, and 27

11:00 am to 2:00 pm

Obviously it was a thoughtful invitation. And to some people, it would be a very pleasant event. Even Jodi seemed to think it sounded like fun. But to Iliana, it sounded like torture. She knew the women who would be there. She had met them at the company’s periodic cocktail parties. There was Delia Braun, the woman who spent an entire evening complaining to Iliana and a bunch of other stay-at-home wives about how frustrating it was that her nanny could never properly pack the kids up for a weekend away at their beach house: “Why am I still reminding her to take extra swimsuits? I didn’t mind it the first few times, but I was hoping that by now she’d be more self-sufficient.” And then there was that other woman, Krista something, who for some reason decided to describe in detail exactly how she decorated the bed in her master suite: “I have a simple white duvet for a clean look, but then I place a red silk throw along the foot of the bed for a splash of color. And I have decorative pillows, with embroidered shams descending from the headboard in decreasing-size order
 . . .”

Iliana didn’t begrudge these women their concerns or their passions. It was nice that they had built lives for themselves that suited them. And they had lots of friends who shared their interests. But she simply didn’t. She thought she probably had a lot more in common with the working wives of the executive team, or the women who were on the executive team themselves. She’d love to lunch with
them
.
But most of all, she didn’t like people looking at her from the outside—
oh, Iliana, stay-at-home mom
—and thinking they knew her. It made her feel invisible, like the speechless blob she had been when she sat at the end of the lunch table bench in sixth grade, hoping that Lizzie or someone would notice her.

Why is everything always about who you are? Why can’t some things just be the things you have to do?
Many years ago, when Iliana was single, she had agreed to go with a friend to a singles weekend in the Poconos. The brochure listed mixer activities such as cooking classes, motivational talks, and risqué party games, and the hotel’s entrance sported a banner claiming “Soulmates Are Our Specialty!” But despite her friend’s insistence that it was all in fun, it took Iliana less than a half-hour at the opening cocktail party to realize she didn’t belong there. The women were all giggly and flirty, the men smirked and nodded appreciatively at the women’s antics, and while a few guys asked her where she came from or what she did for a living, she knew they weren’t really listening to her answers. She hated that nobody was really seeing
her
.

Funny enough, it was at the bus station where her friend had dropped her off before heading to her home in Philadelphia that she met Marc, who had had a similarly disappointing experience at the resort. They recognized each other from the opening mixer and sat next to one another on the bus, talking for the entire trip. At the time, Marc was an associate with a small law firm specializing in corporate downsizing, and he said that while he didn’t like helping companies fire people, he got satisfaction from preparing literature to make sure they knew about the benefits they were entitled to. Iliana found him thoughtful and smart. When he asked her questions about her life, she loved that he truly seemed to enjoy learning about her. They got back to Manhattan, and he asked her to dinner the following weekend. She loved that he didn’t make her feel anxious or insecure about whether he’d want to see her again.

Iliana looked at the invitation. She knew that she should just pick up the phone and call Jena Connors to say she’d be happy to attend. It wasn’t that big a deal to give up three afternoons to support her husband and their family, and to help put Marc in the best possible position to earn a promotion. It would be great if he could become a member of the executive team—and not just because of the money. He would feel good about himself, validated in the work he had done over all these years and the way his life had played out. That was what she was struggling with now. It was heartbreaking to think that all the work
she
had done had brought her to this place, a place where she served mostly as a support system for her family. A place where all her attempts to write and create and be published again amounted to very little.