Mayberry’s chairman was sitting in his vast mock-Tudor mansion in Bel Air, listening to his wife. He thought he’d rather have been almost anywhere else. Ugh! He wasn’t cut out for the family thing. Why did she have to bother him?

Claudia made a face. “Pete! Enough with the potty mouth. Paulie will be back from camp soon, you want he should hear his father talking like that?”

Pete glanced at his wife with dislike. By now she should know he didn’t give a damn about interior decor. Every goddamn season Claudia had to draft some new high-priced faggot, the latest “it” designer, to redo the Malibu mansion. His furniture changed around so often he could never find anything.

“I guess the beige,” he said.

It was the right choice; she beamed at him. “You know, honey, I thought the beige. Purple is a little out there. Donna said we should think about toile de Jouy, but I can’t stand that stuff. It’s so year two thousand. It’s over, you know? And any kind of print gets so dated. Ellie Krebs did her place in shabby chic. Shabby chic! That’s insane, nobody’s done shabby chic since the mid-nineties. . . .”

Claudia was well away. She let loose a stream of babble, seeming not to care when Pete flopped into his couch, the big leather sectional he wouldn’t let her change, and grabbed the remote. There was a baseball game on, Dodgers losing to the Red Sox, and it suited him fine. Pete didn’t give a shit about sports, either, but eventually Claudia would get the message and go away.

He had to stick around to welcome Paulie back from camp. He’d eat supper here, their cook had some kind of roast beef thing going, and then he’d take a ride to one of the girls—Pete was in the mood for Lily today, blonde and stupid and pliant enough as long as he kept the presents coming.

Mostly he let his mistresses slide at the weekends—it was too much trouble to make up excuses—but today he needed it. Claudia’s bleating was too much to take. Pete worked hard and he needed to unwind.

The House Massot deal was the perfect excuse. Even Claudia knew about it—there had been so many urgent phone calls and demanding memos from that self-righteous prick Montfort. If Pete said he had “work,” Claudia would buy it. Sometimes he suspected she knew about his little diversions and she didn’t give a shit.

Well, that was fine. Pete liked his life how it was. He had no reason to disturb things. As long as Claudia didn’t embarrass him by getting herself a bit on the side—everybody knew it was different for men. But he didn’t think there was much danger of that. Claudia hated sex with him, so how horny could she be?