Four Wives (26 page)

“A
RE YOU SURE YOU’RE
up for this?” Janie asked her husband, though she wasn’t completely sure herself. It had taken the better part of the morning to build up enough resolve.

Daniel was in bed waiting for her. “Absolutely. I can’t wait to see what this is all about.”

She was working on a theory now, like a scientist conducting a study. She felt nothing for Daniel, the man she’d been with since she was twenty years old.
Nothing.
Not love, not anger. Just indifference’the absence of feeling. She’d tried conversation. Strike number one. Next, she would try to recreate what she’d found with another man. Great meaningless sex.

“OK, then,” she said. She emerged from the bathroom in a black teddy.

“Nice …” Daniel seemed happy, and Janie tried to ignore the fact that this disgusted her.

She reached into her night-table drawer and pulled out a box wrapped in red paper.

“What’s this? A present?”

“Something like that. Open it.”

Janie handed the box to her husband as she crawled seductively into the bed beside him. His eyes were lit up with anticipation as he tore off the paper.

“Let’s see,” he began as he read the label. “The Erection Blaster 2000?”

Janie raised her eyebrows and ran her hand across his chest. “Yup. Guaranteed to please.” She nuzzled into his neck, following the instructions she’d memorized for herself.
Think of him, Room 221.

But Daniel pushed her away. “What is this?” he asked.

Janie was perplexed. Was he actually angry that she’d bought him a sex toy?

“You just put it on and it’you know.”

“No, I don’t know. Are you trying to say I need a bigger erection?”

Janie let out a sigh of frustration. “No, it has nothing to do with that. It just makes it easier, that’s all.”

“Easier for who? ’Cause I don’t have any problems.”

Janie was on the verge of exploding. “It makes it easier to please both of us at the same time. I thought you would appreciate that.”

Daniel got out of bed and began pulling on his clothes. It was the middle of the day and he’d felt awkward about this whole thing from the start.

“Well, I don’t. If you have a problem with my dick, just tell me.”

Janie didn’t answer. She sat on the bed and stared at the floor as she listened to him storm about the room. She was trying, wasn’t she? Her heart wasn’t in it, but he couldn’t possibly know that. He hadn’t known or cared about what she was thinking for years. This was an act of desperation. A Hail Mary play. And its total failure was turning her anger to sadness.

“Dan,” she said softly.

“What?” He stopped to face her from across the room.

“Maybe we should see a counselor.” There’she’d said it. The idea had been with her for a long time. Still, it had been easier to hide behind the wall of their busy lives than open a door that might lead to profound and devastating admissions. What would she say to a counselor.
Why are you here?
There had been so many reasons before.
I feel disconnected. We don’t
talk. I’ve changed.
All of those could be handled delicately. Now, the truth would likely bring the end.

Daniel shook his head. “I don’t believe this. Are you saying you want a divorce?”

“No,” Janie said, her eyes meeting his. “I’m saying we need some help.”

“Maybe you need help. First you want to leave Hunting Ridge. Now you bring home sex toys. Maybe
you
should see a counselor. I feel fine. I’m happy with our life.”

Janie could see he was serious, and that this was his way of being sympathetic, supportive. But it was not enough.

He walked to her and kissed her on the head. “Sorry about the Erection Blaster. We can do it the old way tonight if you want. I’m pretty sure I remember how to give you a good time.”

Janie smiled and returned her eyes to the floor. She stayed that way for a long while, even after Daniel had left the room. Was that it? Had she exhausted the ways she knew how to reach him? She hadn’t pressed him
that
hard. Surely if she threatened to leave, told him about the affair, he would be called into action. She considered this, and the possible reasons that she was so attached to believing in the futility of any further efforts. Twenty years was a long time to know someone. A very long time. No’she could feel it now, in that place where the truth patiently waits to be found. She
had
reached Daniel Kirk. She had reached deep within him and she had seen all that was there and all that was absent. Her task was not to investigate, question, wonder, or even despair. Her task was, simply, to decide.

A
NTHONY
P
ASSETI SAT AT
his desk, a voluminous brief carefully laid out in front of him. They had been there together for the better part of an hour, though the brief was getting little of his attention. It was an important document, the one the team had been anticipating for days, setting forth the defendant’s response to their motion for summary judgment’a ruling that, if favorable, could mean a certain win at the settlement table. It was Anthony’s job to read every word, then tear it to shreds. They had two weeks to respond, which was hardly enough time to do anything in the legal world.

The case was dull, there was no question. No one would argue differently. But Anthony was used to dullness. For fifteen years, he’d been litigating corporate disputes. Most of the time, it came down to a few poorly worded sentences in a contract, murky questions about one party’s performance in the agreement.
Did the parties to said contract intend to exclude blah blah blah … was blah blah blah meant to be included in the blah blah blah listed in schedule blah blah blah.
Anthony was the king of word spin. He’d carved out a niche turning clear-cut meanings into actionable ambiguities, and the firm’s clients paid him well to do it. Still, thinking up new ways to define words as old as the English language didn’t exactly rock his world.

That being true, Anthony could not blame his work for the state of perpetual distraction he’d found himself in lately. For weeks his mind had been focused on one thing and one thing only. It was the reason he’d been slow to review documents, or return client phone calls. It was the reason he’d stayed so late, his normal workload now taking twice as long to execute. And it was the reason he’d stolen every possible moment to hit the golf course, indulging his need to escape the object of his thoughts.

It was all about Marie. He’d been noticing the change in their relationship for years, ever since the girls were born, though it pained him to admit it. He loved them, to be sure, the way fathers love their daughters’with a fierce, protective devotion. But in equal measure he missed his wife. Or, rather, he missed the spontaneous, fun-loving soul that used to live inside his wife. Who was this creature who occupied the other half of the bed? Overscheduled, overly concerned with household minutia, unable to let a damned thing go’he hardly recognized her anymore. That sense of perpetual contentment, those moments of real joy that were certain to come now and again’everything that being in love, and being committed to that love, inspired’was gone. Still, he knew there could never be anyone else. His heart was running empty in a hurry, but it was taken nonetheless. And that, to Anthony’s mind, seemed a miserable fate.

Luckily, he was not the sort of man to dwell in the wasteland of emotional analysis. That was, thankfully, the domain of the female sex. No’he was a man, and as such, fully in charge of his own mental energy allocation. Looking at the brief that was now threatening to keep him late’too late to sneak over to the club after the commute home’he decided it was time to stop thinking, and start working.

In short order he was fully engaged, his mind nowhere near the danger zone. It took three rings before he heard the phone.

“Anthony Passed.”

“Mr. Passed, your one o’clock is here.” It was his secretary, alerting him to the meeting with a potential new client.

“Take him to Conference Room A. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Anthony wasted no time, new clients being the key to everything holy in the legal world. New clients, and billable hours, of course. He marked the page of the brief, swung his jacket on, and headed down the hall. There was a time when meeting a new client had been downright exciting’the intrigue of a new battle, the inside scoop on some corporate mishap or scandal. Not to mention the ego boost of having a top-ranking executive hang on his every word. That the thrill had been killed off, case by case, hour by hour, until all that was left was a sense of ho-hum was one of life’s many disappointments.

“She’s in A,” his secretary said, as he walked past her.

She? As
he continued down the hall, Anthony felt a pang of interest. He hadn’t had a woman client before. Even with all the progress women had made breaking glass ceilings, this remained true. Not one woman client. Women had been on client teams and women had headed the legal team from his firm. But no woman had ever made the decision to hire him. It was an interesting twist.

The door to Conference Room A was closed. Knocking once, then walking inside without hesitation as he always did, Anthony quickly scanned the room for the client. She was seated at the table, removing papers from an open briefcase and setting them neatly before her. Dressed in a jet-black suit and crisp, white blouse, she was professional to a T. And, if pressed to admit it, quite attractive. He walked to the table and took a seat across from her. At this point most clients would get up from the chair, offer a hand and a verbal introduction. Most clients would then pass over a business card with the necessary contact numbers and other information. But this was not most clients.

This was his wife.

“Hello, Anthony,” Marie said, looking up at him just long enough to enjoy the surprise on his face. Surprise’and fear.

Settled into his seat now, and trying to keep an air of dignity, Anthony folded his arms defensively. “Well, you have my attention. What’s this about?”

“I’m here to negotiate.”

She said it with a straight face, giving nothing away. Anthony’s mind jumped like a pinball to a wide array of conclusions.
Negotiate what?
Separation terms. Divorce. Child visitation. Or maybe she’d been hired by an opponent. Who knew what she was taking on these days, spending so much time at work?

Her face remained steady, and he knew there was no way around it. He was going to have to ask.

“OK. I’ll bite. What are we negotiating?”

“The terms of our partnership,” she said matter-of-factly. Then she handed him copies of three separate sheets of paper. “Schedule A is a list of responsibilities concerning the house. Schedule B sets out the girls’ summer activities. Camp dates and times, ballet, gymnastics, summer reading requirements.”

Anthony looked over the lists, feeling his world sink that much closer to hell at the sight of so much domestic crap. The first sheet, with the house chores, seemed endless.
Grass cutting, weeding, small repairs.
Repairs could mean anything’things that could take hours upon hours.
Grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, bill paying and budget balancing.
Then there were errands.
Post office, dry cleaner,
and his personal favorite’
miscellaneous.
The second sheet, with the girls’ schedules, was a mind-bending maze.
Drop off Suzanne at camp 9 A.M., then Olivia at the YMCA. Pick up Olivia at noon, grab lunch in town, then drop at gymnastics by 1. Pick up Suzanne at 2, back to get Olivia by 2:10.
And that was just on Saturdays.

While all of this was disturbing, it was the last sheet, Schedule C, that had him most worried. On it was one word.
Golf.

Tossing the papers back on the table, Anthony looked at his wife. “What is all this, Marie? Do we have to go over this again and again?”

“Apparently so.”

“You came all the way into the city to bitch to me about chores?”

“Yes.”

“And what’s next? A trip to marriage counseling to discuss the cereal boxes on the counter?”

“Maybe.”

Anthony looked at her with squinted eyes and a cocked head’the expression he saved for the rare moments when he had the upper hand. “All right. If you want to talk about chores and cereal boxes, then maybe we should get down to the heart of the matter.”

“Which is?”

“
Which is,
the fact that you made a choice that you now regret. You
chose
to quit your job, move to the suburbs, stay home with the girls. I’m sorry that some of that job involves chores that are beneath you, but that’s the job.”

Marie got up and started to pace on her side of the table. “It’s just
so
damned easy for you, isn’t it? Now that you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Talking about
choices
and
part of the job.
There is no
real
choice when you’re the mommy. You either give up your career to change diapers and iron your husband’s shirts, or you work and hire someone else to do it. Your children are raised by strangers.”

Anthony was honestly confused. “I didn’t say the choices were perfect, just that they exist. No one forced you one way or another.”

“No? Do you not find it odd that
you
staying home was never even a consideration? I was making more than you were when I left the firm. They were desperate for women attorneys. Hell, I’d have made partner years ago! But’instead’I’m nickel-and-diming it in a hole above a schizophrenic diner that cooks bacon no one eats with their fat-free vanilla lattes!”

Anthony was silent for a moment, trying to get his mind around the conversation. What was she so pissed off about? His domestic failings? Her office? The Hunting Ridge wives again who didn’t eat bacon? There were many injustices in the world, plights far worse than that of suburban mommies.

“
You
chose suburbia.
You
wanted to stay home with the girls.
You
did the spreadsheets on the new mortgage, so
you
must have realized that one of us would have to keep working.”

Marie sighed. He was right about the choices she’d made and it pissed her off.

“I just can’t believe that having a lawn requires such total and utter submission to the patriarchy.”

“Christ,” was his first response. His wife could make an argument out of a sunny day.

“Listen to yourself, Marie.
Submission to the patriarchy,”
Anthony said, muttering her words under his breath. “We aren’t in college anymore. This isn’t a theoretical exercise. This is real life. We have children. We have a house. What is it you want to do? Do you want to restart your New York career? Do you want me to quit mine and play Mr. Mom? We have choices. Just none that you can live with, apparently.”

Feeling defeated, Marie sat down.

“There’s too much shit between us. I’m angry all the time now, not just part of the time, but
all
the time. If we don’t do something there’ll be nothing but shit, and I can’t live that way. I won’t.”

Anthony looked at his wife one more time, his heart beginning to feel the onslaught of panic. He knew she wasn’t happy. That much had become painfully clear. Somewhere along the line he had accepted the possibility that she just didn’t love him anymore. It happens. If you can fall in love, you can just as easily fall out of it. And all the signs had been there. He couldn’t remember the last time she looked at him as though she knew him, and believed that he knew her’as if they were intimately connected. There was a time when it had been that way. All the nagging to do things around the house, all the bitching about his golf hobby, had just seemed like noise. Never had it occurred to him that these were really the things erasing her love.

He looked at the sheets of paper laid out on the table, seizing the path that would put a stop to this meeting.

“Is this really what you want from me? To sign up for chores?”

Marie nodded up and down, then side to side.
Yes and no.
She really wasn’t sure what to do to change the indifference that was starting to overtake the anger.

“It wouldn’t hurt. And place some limits on your golf addiction. As you can see, I left Schedule C open. I’m willing to compromise.”

Without looking at her, Anthony reached onto the table for the pages. Marie handed him a pen, and he accepted it. Then they went to work, thinking through their schedules, the trial dates approaching on both of their calendars, and other demands on their lives. Line after line, they doled out responsibilities, the fallout from having a home and a family. They made time for Anthony’s golf, though it was nowhere near what he had planned on’nowhere close to what he needed to improve his game. And as they worked, hammering out the details of the future, Anthony could sense a hint of relief in his wife. Her husband was finally succumbing to the realities of their world, joining her in her misery. With each line item, he was signing away the small bits of his life that weren’t spent inside these walls, trying to keep up with the Hunting Ridge financiers. And though he knew he should feel hopeful, that perhaps this was all that was needed to be done to win back his wife, the larger part of him was bewildered at the high price of keeping a marriage intact’and wondering if it was worth it.