The Seven Year Bitch (3 page)

“You can do this,” she said, with the seriousness of Harriet Tubman leading the Underground Railroad. “Two words:
Jet Blue
.
New life
. And you won't have to take his abuse anymore.” Throwing out my Diet Coke hadn't exactly been abuse. Forget wrinkle cream, the way she was talking was making me feel like I had two black eyes and a fat lip.

“I'm not ready for that,” I said. I would never be ready to do that to Duncan, I thought, but I didn't want to hurt Joy by saying that out loud.

“You'll see. I'm telling you. Once the idea occurs to you, and I know it has, then it all spirals quickly.”

“But the boys,” I said. “Ethan and Jake and—”

“The boys,” she said, looking me straight in the eye, “are just fine. And yours will be just fine too.”

I noticed she was doing a slight tapping motion around her eyes as she spoke. “Just.” Tap, tap. “Fine.” Tap, tap.

At my wedding, right before she marched down the aisle just ahead of me, she'd whispered to me, “I have a car waiting in case you change your mind.” And now I imagined a new scenario, five years later at my son's first birthday: a birthday cake with its one candle burning down while the birthday boy and his mother were thousands of miles away in a Jet Blue aircraft.

“You're going to be thirty-nine, Izzy. In four months you're going to be thirty-nine. Which is forty, which is fifty. This is your chance.”

“Wait, am I going to be thirty-nine or am I going to be fifty?” I said, beginning to get extremely annoyed.

“I think that a happy mother is the greatest gift I can give my kids,” Joy said. “Instead of someone who's always yelling at their father. Having children raises the stakes, Izzy. You'll see. It's cute that they're dopey and forgetful when you get married, but it stops being cute when they don't pick the kid up when they say they're going to and put their shoes on the wrong feet. Duncan's going to be one, but wait until he's two and then three. I had to remind him to kiss them good night! He turned me into something I didn't want to be,” she said. “Seven years of having to nag, and scream, and fight, and be a policeman in my own home was enough for me. It's not that you get a seven year itch. It's that they turn you into a seven year bitch. After seven years you can't take it anymore. I'll never let anyone do that to me again!”

Had he really turned her into that, or had she been like that already? I wondered. And then I wondered, Had I?

I watched her tap herself for the rest of the meal. There was a smile in her fingertips. Each tap was filled with love and urgency as if she were resuscitating a tiny heart. But despite that, or maybe because of it, I couldn't help but notice how radiant she looked. She had lost at least thirty pounds. Not five or ten, but thirty. She was wearing some kind of incredible garment from Africa and the newest Vivienne Westwood bag. In fact everything she was wearing was incredible, no secret spreading milk stains hidden under her jacket every day. “Are you going to live your life in captivity?” she asked me.

There had to be something to this freedom trail, I realized. I just had to board Jet Blue and I'd look like her—thin, happy, wrinkle/husband-free.

 

 

“ Joy and Harry are
divorcing,” I told Russell when I got home.

“But she just had a baby?” he said.

“Two years ago.”

He sat at his desk even though it was after midnight, contemplating a manuscript.

“Where's Harry living?” he asked.

“At his parents'.”

“I guess if it happened to us, I would live at Marlon's.”

He said “happened to us” as if it were something that required flood insurance, like an act of God. His voice was somber. We were used to finding our mailbox jammed with oversized wedding invitations, thank-you notes with photos of the bride and groom, save-the-dates. We weren't used to being faced with news of divorce.

Joy's announcement startled us to our senses. Instead of inspiring me to leave that night, I clung to Russell, who put both his arms around me, and we lay very close to each other until morning.

I couldn't sleep, thinking of the exit interview I'd had to endure, walking to my office afterward, escorted by security, to find a cardboard box on my desk that I was supposed to fill with my belongings and somehow carry downstairs to the chauffeured car waiting to take me home. Layoffs had been inevitable for months, so anyone in finance who hadn't already cleared out her desk was a fool. In the weeks prior, anyone you saw disappearing into the Wall Street and Rector subway stations was carrying increasingly bulging briefcases. My files and contacts were safe at home with my photos of Duncan and my dog, Humbert, and enough tape, markers, Post-its, and paper to get us through elementary school.

At my exit interview, I'd sat across from Mark, and Flavin, an executive vice president in charge of special projects, and Merry, a horrible HR drone who was there to make sure I wouldn't sue the company.

“Now you can spend some time with your baby,” Mark had the nerve to say to me.

“And you too,” I said because he was every bit as laid off as I was and had his own baby.

“You have a good package,” he said. It was good. Enough so that Russell and I wouldn't have to worry for a long time.

“I'm sure you have a good package too,” I said.

I was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement and listen to Merry tell me how my benefits were continuing and that I should make good use of the outplacement counseling they were providing for an entire year.

I had floated out of the exit interview, completely free, except for the security guard. And I thought about what someone had told me about the people who jumped from the towers on 9/11. They'd had so much adrenaline coursing through them, they may have even thought that they could fly.

O
n Sunday I woke up more excited than I had ever been. Duncan was one. I had survived the hardest year of my life. Duncan was still alive. We had made it. I nursed him for what was supposed to be the last time. I ran all around the apartment setting everything up, accepting deliveries, helping the caterer, opening stacks of plastic cups and the first dozen bottles of wine.

Russell's only job was to make sure the batteries in the video camera were charged so we could capture Duncan tasting his first cake.

I had never understood the word “congratulations.” At my graduation from business school when people said it, I shrugged, thinking I had done what hundreds of others had done right along with me, and it hadn't even been that hard. At my wedding and after Duncan's birth I couldn't understand why people were congratulating me. Getting married and having a baby didn't seem like my achievement; it required no skill; anyone could do it; most people did. I'd found those acts almost embarrassing really—banal, bourgeois, clichéd. Getting married was like posting a public announcement to the world that you were going to be having sex with this one person for the rest of your life, and having a baby was like an announcement that the sex had been had. But now, as the mother of a one-year-old, I understood. I deserved all the congratulations I could get. I had never felt more proud or happy in my entire life.

I took Duncan's outfit from Makie out of its black tissue paper and put him on his changing table. I peeled off his shit-filled diaper and breathed it in. It would never smell like this again, I realized. Now he would no longer have breast milk. He would have regular milk, and birthday cake, and more and more regular food, and things like little boxes of raisins and juice boxes and grilled cheese sandwiches and Chef Boy-ar-dee and I would never smell this same smell again.

Then I flung open my front door and let all the congratulations come pouring in.

When the party was over and Duncan was passed out in his crib, still in his clothes like a frat boy, I turned on the video camera to replay some of the day's big moments. The tape started with Duncan, still unable to walk on his own, cruising around the coffee table grasping a balloon. Not since Albert Lamorisse made
The Red Balloon
had there been anything as perfect captured on film. Then there I was guiltily nursing Duncan because when I'd refused him for the first time ever he'd cried and banged on my breast like it was a TV he was trying to get to work, turning my nipple like it was the knob on an old, broken-down black-and-white. Then I appeared with the gigantic cake and everyone sang and then . . .

Suddenly, the scene cut to a close-up of Russell in our bedroom, drinking from a plastic cup. “Make sure you don't tape over anything. Izzy will kill me,” he said.

“I won't,” I heard his friend Ben say. “So how does it feel to be the father of a one-year-old?”

“I actually think having a child was a big mistake,” Russell said. “Irresponsible really. If you want to have a happy marriage, don't ever have a kid. Actually, don't ever get married.”

“Come on, man, it's your kid's birthday,” Ben said off-camera. The camera was still close in on Russell's face.

“Well this is what I have to drink to get through the day.” Russell held up his cup and the camera zoomed in on what looked like scotch. I knew it was scotch because Russell's voice went up several octaves when he drank scotch, so he sounded like a woman. I begged him not to drink it in front of anyone.

“So this is the day I'm going to kill myself.” The camera zoomed in on Russell's face. “This is the window I'm going to jump out of.” The camera zoomed in on the window and then out the window and down six floors to the street below. I heard Ben cackle and the sound of clinking ice.

Then Ben said, “That's really dark, man,” and suddenly we were back to Duncan with cake all over his face licking frosting from my fingertip, my cheeks lit with pleasure.

I'd hired two belly dancers for the entertainment because Duncan's favorite things were long hair and big breasts, and as they shimmied and undulated on the videotape, I shimmied and undulated too, with rage. As one threw her spangled scarf around my totally embarrassed father and the guests cheered and sipped champagne, I wondered how I would possibly avenge Russell's turning my child's first birthday video into a live suicide note.

As the other danced with Duncan in her arms and he tried desperately to free her left breast from her sequined bra, I wondered if my other birthday gift to him might be a broken home. How could a day that was so joyous for me be so traumatic for Russell? He'd been joking, I was almost probably certain. But what if he hadn't been and I really did find his body splattered on the sidewalk one morning, answer the buzzer to find Rashid, the handyman, complaining that there had been a mess from my apartment? And, even worse, what if I hadn't watched the video, just set it aside and played it for Duncan one day?

“That's dark, man,” I said out loud to myself. “That's really fucking dark, man.”

T
he next night our neighbor Sherry's daughter came over to babysit, and we went to a benefit gala at Capitale. As soon as we got there I realized that the word
gala
on the invitation was a bit of an exaggeration, but it still felt good to be out. I had been laid off but life still went on. I perused the silent-auction options. There were theater, sports, and concert tickets, dozens of country houses, Swiss chalets, and Italian villas, every kind of spa treatment, five private yoga classes, five couples therapy sessions, five dog training sessions, your portrait painted, your makeup done, your apartment designed, your event planned, your photograph taken by a million different photographers, LASIK surgery, one round of in vitro fertilization, a vasectomy, dinner with Philip Seymour Hoffman, dinner at Jean-Georges, Gramercy Tavern, and Rao's, dinner with Gabriel Byrne served by Moby, and a scarf knitted for you by Uma Thurman.

“Here's mine,” I said. “'Asset allocation analysis by a chartered financial analyst. Are all your eggs in one basket? Let Isolde Brilliant help you to attain your dreams.'”

They had punched up my copy with the “eggs in one basket” and “attain your dreams” part.

The benefit was for the private school that I hoped Duncan would go to in four years when he was ready to start kindergarten, even though I had been rejected from it myself when I was four. When Russell told me on an early date that his aunt was actually the head of admissions at that very school, my heart almost stopped. I knew it was the closest you could come in New York to dating royalty. And to my utmost joy, on the day Duncan was born, she'd come to the hospital with a tiny school T-shirt and proclaimed him accepted.

In a moment of madness, to show my enthusiasm, I'd called the benefit committee chair and offered my services. I'd thought of donating a week or two at our country house but when I started to think about its selling points—inflatable kiddie pool, wind chimes, tire swing—it didn't seem like it would compete with the other houses that were being auctioned off with their twelve bedrooms, ocean views, and vineyard. I'd also thought of offering myself as a lactation consultant but then I couldn't imagine putting another woman's tit in another baby's mouth or slathering lanolin on someone else's nipple.

The prizes were grouped in categories, and mine was on a table with a placard that said “Death and Taxes” with a little drawing of a coffin on it.

Whenever I saw a coffin, I always thought about the Grim Reaper. I thought about the Grim Reaper a lot actually—black cloak, curved scythe, the whole nine yards. And whenever I thought about the Grim Reaper, for some inexplicable reason, I thought about fucking him.

In a certain way it would be like fucking a cartoon character. I thought about the Grim Reaper like some men thought about Jessica Rabbit. I supposed Jessica Rabbit symbolized physical perfection that no real-life woman could come close to, but the Grim Reaper symbolized a kind of perfection too. Death was my idea of the most romantic love. He came to you, he chose you, and, no matter what the circumstances, you had to go with him, like being pulled down a wedding aisle on a black conveyer belt. There was no fighting him. It was what I always thought love would be, a man would know I was the one and prove it to me, until I had no choice but to love him back. He would fuck me from behind on the way to wherever it was he was taking me and I would grab his balls to see what he really had under the cloak.