“Please, Matt,” she said, riding me harder, her fingernails digging into my shoulder. “
Please
.”
I slapped her firmly on the ass a few times, and she acted like she got what she needed.
Afterward, we sat on the couch watching
Brideshead
Revisited
on television, neither of us paying much attention.
I said, “You know, if I take this job with Javi, I’m going to be traveling a lot. At least for the first year or two.”
“Meaning?”
“Nothing. It’ll be different, that’s all. I’ll miss you and the kids. We’ve never really been apart before. Not more than a couple days a year.”
She lit a cigarette. “And you’re wondering if I can handle it?”
“No, honey,” I said automatically, though the idea had crossed my mind. At least twice during her depression, she had confused her medications and fallen asleep, leaving the children untended. The first time, which I didn’t learn about until several weeks after the fact, the woman next door noticed Sarah playing alone in the yard after dark. When she brought her inside, she found Lucy passed out on the couch. Nathan was in his crib, naked and crying. The second time, Jill told me she came for a visit and saw Sarah standing on a chair by the stove, trying to figure out how to turn on the burner so she could fix Nathan a bottle. “I was just thinking it will be hard on both of us.”
“No, that’s okay, I know what you mean. You have every right to be concerned. I’ve been a shitty mother, shitty housekeeper. Shitty wife. If it weren’t for you, this family would have fallen apart a long time ago.”
“Whoa! Where did
that
come from?”
“From reality. Careful observation of the parties in question. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
“Honey, you went through a rough patch, is all. We’re in this together. When you’re down, I help you. If I’m down, you help me. Isn’t that what marriage is all about?”
She gave me a skeptical look.
“Isn’t it?”
“When are you ever down, Matt? When are you ever anything less than perfect? You don’t smoke, don’t do drugs. Never drink too much, hardly ever swear. Christ, you never even look at other women.”
“Is that what you want? You want me out there running around with another chick?”
“I want you to be
human
. I want you to fuck up sometimes, like me and everybody else.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you.”
She took a drag on her cigarette, then looked at it in disgust and stabbed it out in the ashtray.
“I’m sorry, Matt. You don’t deserve this.”
“No. I don’t.”
Later, for the first time in more than a year, she curled herself around me in bed. As she fell asleep, I tried to forget the nasty things she had said. I knew her anger was mostly aimed at herself. We had some things to work through, but we’d made a start. Maybe the new business venture with Javi would help us get back on track.
Lucy
Lincoln Halstead stepped to the front of the line at the hostess station, ignoring the others who were waiting to give me their names. “Table for four, Lucy.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
“Thanks, doll.” He palmed me a bill.
The hoi polloi were stacked three deep at the bar, but A. Lincoln Halstead, defender of the rich and famous, had no intention of waiting. Tillie, the owner of Garbo’s, didn’t want to keep him waiting either.
It was mid-August, and I had been working at Garbo’s for four months. In the spring, I told Matt I wanted to get a job, something to get me out of the house and make me feel useful. The timing wasn’t great. Matt was up to his eyeballs getting the courier business established, but we had Brenda to take care of the kids, and he agreed that going back to work would be good for me. He said he wanted to see me smile again. I tried to convince myself that we had come through my long depression with no lingering issues or resentments—we didn’t bicker or snipe at one another, there were no major disagreements about the house or children—but things still felt unresolved. I wanted him to hate me a little the way I hated myself for all I’d put us through.
This wasn’t something we could talk about. The Grand Inquisitor couldn’t have made Matt admit to any resentments of his own; he just plowed ahead with his amiability and relentless optimism, consumed by the challenges of the new business, making it up as he went along, coming home and telling me about his successes and blunders, flying off to Florence and Tokyo and Buenos Aires. I had never thought of him as a risk-taker, but he’d left a cushy job with the police force to step into the unknown, and he deserved whatever success he found. My pride in him was exceeded only by my envy.
The first place I went to look for a job was the Class Report Office at Harvard. My old friends were glad to see me, but there were no openings. Several publishing companies told me they might have some freelance work, but nothing came through. I finally got the job at Garbo’s through Sandor, who was a friend of Tillie’s. Tillie was a blunt woman about sixty who chain-smoked Parliaments, and the two of us hit it off immediately. She offered me a job as the lunchtime hostess, eleven to three-thirty, Monday through Friday, the perfect schedule for me. The restaurant catered to athletes and politicians and other celebrities. Not much intellectual stimulation, but rumors and gossip wafted through the place like the smell of fried clams.
I glanced at the tip Lincoln Halstead had given me—a twenty—and led him and his minions to a table. (He had slipped me a hundred once, back when he still thought he could get in my pants.) We were so busy the wait for ordinary customers stretched out to over an hour. The highlight of the afternoon was three guys with English accents dressed like lost rockers from the Ziggy Stardust tour who were ordering Mouton Rothschild at two hundred dollars a bottle.
When I got home from my shift, there was a note from Brenda on the kitchen table saying she’d taken Sarah and Nathan to the playground. Brenda did a good job with the kids, who adored her, but I felt like she judged me constantly and found me wanting as a mother. It was never anything direct—Brenda was too smart for that—just a look or a veiled question. Matt, in her eyes, could do no wrong. I lit a cigarette and checked the answering machine. The first message was from Jill, checking in. The second message was a hang-up—a distinct pause before the caller broke the connection—which had happened several times earlier in the week. I erased the messages and opened a bottle of pinot grigio. Knowing the look I’d get if Brenda saw me with a wineglass in the middle of the afternoon, I poured the wine into an orange plastic tumbler.
On the way upstairs, I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror in the foyer. I stopped and sucked in my tummy and brushed the front of my skirt. Tillie expected me to dress up for the job, and I enjoyed wearing stylish clothes, putting on makeup and jewelry. For the first time in ages, I felt attractive again, the feeling affirmed by the men who flirted with me at the restaurant. I leaned closer to the mirror and examined the crease between my eyes. When I frowned, the crease deepened, and I tried to smooth it away with my thumb. Amanda had the same crease, which was permanent now, time and alcohol and cigarettes taking their toll.
***
I went upstairs to change clothes. Matt was away in Madrid and due home tomorrow afternoon. The courier service was growing steadily, but Matt still did most of the traveling himself. For the past several months, he had been gone two or three nights a week. Meticulous as ever, he marked his trips on the calendar in the kitchen and always left a phone number of the hotel where I could reach him. I never begrudged his time away; it gave me a chance to be alone with the children, bathing them and reading to them before I put them to bed. After doubting myself as a mother for so long, I’d begun to feel competent. Needed.
When Matt first started going on the road, I hoped, as I’m sure he did too, that his travels would rekindle some romance between us. I imagined horny homecomings when we couldn’t wait to be alone. Or, perhaps, accompanying him on a trip somewhere—Venice, Barcelona—just the two of us in a luxury hotel, the theater, museums, breakfast in bed. No hint of that yet. Matt grumbled about the time away, saying he was looking forward to the day when other couriers would take all the trips and he could be home every night with me and the kids. Perhaps it was my vanity or complacency, but with all his absences, I rarely gave much thought to the idea that he might stray.
Then, a few weeks ago, as I was gathering his shirts to take to the dry cleaner’s—he always wore a coat and tie when he traveled—I pricked my finger on something sharp and found an earring post poking through the fabric of the breast pocket of one of the shirts. The earring was unique, a red stone set in a gold leaf-shaped setting. I was actually more surprised than hurt at finding it. In some ways, I didn’t blame Matt; our sex life, which had dwindled to nothing during my depression, had not exactly come roaring back. There were no lipstick stains on the shirt, just the faint whiff of another woman’s perfume. I stuffed the shirt in the laundry basket and put the earring in my jewelry box along with the other lost sisters of my own that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away.
A few nights later after I found the earring, I said, “I just want you to know that I know what you’ve been doing.”
I was sitting sideways on the couch in the living room, Matt in an overstuffed chair.
“What’re you talking about?” he said.
“That you’ve been unfaithful.” I tried to sound matter-of-fact, but that word,
unfaithful
, was larded with rebuke and self-pity. “I found her earring in your shirt pocket.”
Matt stared at me for a moment, then looked away, his face stricken with guilt. When he looked back, he said, “Lucy, I…” He tried again but couldn’t speak.
“Is this serious or just a one-time thing?”
“Just once, but it’s not what you think.”
Of
course
it was only once, that “forgotten” earring probably a cry for attention. Even so, I gave my lip a skeptical curl, savoring my victimhood; it had been so long since I felt righteous about anything.
“Honey, I didn’t actually…I was in a restaurant and—”
“Please, spare me the details.”
His eyes welled with tears. I let him dangle for a moment, then smiled sadly and opened my arms. “Come.”
He knelt beside me, and I stroked his hair. I thought about that night in the kitchen of my apartment in Cambridge when I told him I was pregnant with Sarah. I had lied then and said nothing had happened with Griffin. I wasn’t about to confess to that now, but didn’t his betrayal make us even? I came from a family of serial adulterers; this was nothing we couldn’t work through.
I kissed him. “I haven’t been much of a wife, have I? I need to take better care of you.”
We went upstairs and made love and fell asleep. When the baby woke up crying in the middle of the night, Matt got up with him and didn’t come back to bed.
The next morning he was quiet, unable to look me in the eye. I assumed he felt guilty and ashamed, and I let him be. At dinner he acted like everything was fine, but after the kids were in bed, it all came boiling out.
“Is that it?” he said. “Is this whole thing over for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You think I slept with some other woman, and you just sit there and act like nothing happened. How can you be so fucking nonchalant?” His tone turned to mockery. “Matt cheated on me. Tsk tsk, naughty boy. I hope he doesn’t do
that
again.”
“Sorry,” I said, caught off guard. Wasn’t I the injured party? “You said it was only once. I didn’t want to make a scene and have some horrible fight.”
“Why not? Aren’t you jealous? Don’t you want to start throwing dishes? Don’t you want to strangle me? If this isn’t worth fighting about, what is?”
“Guess I’m not the dish-throwing type.” The moment I said it, an image of the crystal vase I’d flung at Griffin sailed through my brain. “I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. You made a mistake and said you were sorry. What was I supposed to do? Kick you out of the house? File for divorce? Is that what you want?”
“I want you to
care
, Lucy. I want you to act like this is something more than me forgetting to take the garbage out. I want—”
“You never forget to take the garbage out.” I was teasing him, trying for a little humor to take the edge off the situation.
“Yeah, that’s right. I forgot. I’m perfect. I don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, never look at other women. Well, not this time. I looked and she looked back. We went up to my hotel room and fucked our brains out. I ate her—”
“Stop! You don’t have to be cruel.”
“
Cruel?
I’ll tell you what’s cruel. We’re dying here, and you act like there’s nothing wrong.”
“I know things were rocky during my depression, but we got through it, Matt. We’ve been doing okay.”
“I don’t want
okay
, Lucy. I want us to be great. I’ve been crazy in love with you since the day we met. I don’t want to lose you. To lose us! I don’t want some half-assed marriage where I cheat and you cheat and we smile and have friends over and act like everything is peachy keen. Is that what you want? Lies, secrets, denial? Your parents all over again?”
I let him rant without trying to defend myself. What he said rang true. He was a good man, a terrific father. I liked being married to him and loved him as best I could, but it would never be enough for him. His love for me was almost more than I could bear. As I stood there listening to his complaints, I knew with absolute certainty that one day our marriage would end. It was only a matter of time before Matt looked at me with disdain or utter indifference and said that he was tired of trying, that he didn’t care anymore. But not now, not this time. He was still striving, his anger and frustration still laced with the yearning. It was a feeling I knew all too well, the belief that if you did everything perfectly—listen, fuck, laugh, pretend—you could win over your lover and make him realize this was the only place on earth he wanted to be.
Matt railed on until he wore himself out. Since then, neither of us wanted to bring up the subject again.
***
I was pulling on a pair of jeans when I heard the front door open.
“Mommy?” Sarah called from the front hall.
“I’m upstairs, sugar pop. I’ll be right down.”
“We picked some
flowers
.”
“Really? I can’t wait to see.”
I slipped on a T-shirt and went downstairs with my wine in the orange plastic tumbler.
Sarah presented me with a bunch of daylilies. “A nice lady had them in her yard and said we could take some home.”
“Oh, thank you. They’re so pretty.”
Nathan said, “Up, Mama.” I handed the flowers to Brenda and unbuckled the stroller and lifted him up.
“How’s my big boy? Did you have a good day?”
“We
always
have a good day,” Brenda said.
I wiped an imaginary smudge of dirt from Nathan’s cheek, took the flowers back, and told Brenda she could go. Out in the kitchen, I gave the kids a snack. Sarah got out her coloring book and crayons and went to work on a picture of Snow White and Dopey. She had changeable gray-green eyes like mine; otherwise, her face was all Matt. Rory jumped up on the table, and I shooed him off. Sarah watched me pour some more wine into my tumbler. Maybe it was my imagination, but she seemed to have Brenda’s look of disapproval in her eyes.
The telephone rang. I picked it up and said hello.
“Hello, Lucy,” Griffin said.