Musical Chairs by Amy Poeppel

Author:Amy Poeppel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 2020-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

15

Gwen didn’t need to go to Edward’s house to have a luxury bathroom. Or Frette sheets on a king-size bed, a chef’s kitchen, or a spectacular view. Gwen had all of those comforts in her very own Fifth Avenue apartment. Nevertheless, in the summertime, while her show, Influence, was between seasons and she was doing more research and less filming, she enjoyed getting into her Range Rover and making the two-plus-hour trip up the FDR, out of New York, past commercial strip malls, pretty farms, fancy prep schools, and even an abandoned psychiatric hospital to go to her dad’s house. She couldn’t come as often as she liked, but she loved to step away from the city. Her dad’s house was the perfect place to read the galleys her producer gave her and study up on the talented people being invited on her program. She would return to the city feeling well rested but charged, fully prepped and ready to delve into the psyches of her subjects.

This weekend Gwen had made the trip to her dad’s with a pile of work, almost all of which intrigued her. She had a book of light short stories to read, a series of dark art house films to watch, a modern jazz album to listen to, and a possibly frivolous self-help book to evaluate. The summers were the best time to do this kind of digging, and depending on how she felt about the various works and the artists who created them (whether they be poets, novelists, musicians, dancers, psychologists, or philosophers), she would discuss them with her producer, Lucy, deciding whether or not to invite them on the show. Gwen’s job was heaven.

She preferred these recent summer visits to the ones she made when she was still married. Back then she would come to her father’s house alone, missing her husband, Charles, who would claim he had too much work to do, or a conference to attend, or a last-minute crisis at the office, when in fact he’d had none of the above. Charles was an ass-grabbing, coke-snorting, ethics-deficient cheater, a man so low in morality that a twenty-two-year-old receptionist in his office was now suing him for sexual harassment. Gwen was glad her marriage to him had been severed almost a decade ago so this latest scandal had absolutely nothing to do with her, not emotionally and not financially.

Charles. She should have known better than to pick a man with the same exact name as the cheating husband in the musical her father adapted for Broadway. Her Charles had been far worse than the “careless husband” onstage. He was certainly more lecherous than the fictional Charles (played by a young John Cleese), who cheated on his wife (Madeline Kahn) in her own house as the audience laughed at her expense. Gwen was a child when she saw her dad’s musical, but it had an impact. She remembered all too clearly when the wife, Lady Easy, wandered in on Charles as he

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