A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (20 page)

So why did I feel so uncertain?

Until I met Jamie, I had never felt sexy or feminine. My mother had had a two-columned chart in her head. One column was labeled “smart” and the other “not smart.” Sexy, feminine, domestic, and athletic were all in the “not smart” column. I had always had a boyish figure—small chested with almost no indentation at my waist. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I had been built like a Barbie doll. Because I was smart, I couldn’t be sexy or feminine.

But Jamie thought I was all three.

During law school I lived, as did many students, on a residential street in a semidetached house that had been cut up into student apartments. The houses on the block were brick and they sat close to the street. Across the street from me was a lady in her early eighties, still living in her own home. Mrs. Murray had a narrow driveway to park her car in, but the sidewalk between the driveway and her front steps had cracked, having been pushed up and out by a rising tree root. I noticed that she was careful when crossing the fissure, her gloved hand resting first on the tree trunk and then on her stair railing. I sometimes helped her with her groceries. Once I noticed that her porch light was out and so helpful midwesterner that I was—
helpful
didn’t appear in either column on my mother’s chart so I could be helpful—I rang her doorbell and changed the light for her. She gave me two unopened gift packages of scented lotion, dusting powder, and cologne. I protested; she was being too generous, but she showed me her closet. She had at least five more such boxes. They were all that anyone gave her anymore.

Their scent was sweet and flowery, what people assumed that old ladies will like, but I used them and felt clean and fragrant. I looked like a boyishly built, first-year law student, I lived and acted like one, but I didn’t smell like one.

Jamie noticed.

We had already discovered how compatible we were, neither one of us given to procrastination or high drama. He could see that I was a behind-the-scenes kind of leader, the person who kept everyone else on track. And even though he would become by far the better lawyer, I was a better first-year law student, so he treated me as someone valuable. We organized a study group together, carefully admitting people who would complement us.

A week after I had started using Mrs. Murray’s scent, I was in the library with him and unthinkingly reached across him for a book.

He dropped his pen. “I can’t deal with this.”

There was a lot on this table that neither one of us could deal with—that no human being should have to deal with—but he was not talking about the curriculum. “What do you mean?”

He was not looking at me. His eyes were focused on his college-graduation pen, its cobalt enamel almost black in the dim light. “The way you smell.”

I hesitated. Did he like the way I smelled, or did I remind him of his grandmother?

He kept looking at his pen. “In all this mess, in all these gray papers, suddenly you smell so … I don’t know … like a girl.” Then he looked at me, and it was the first time that I noticed the light hazel circle around the pupils of his greenish brown eyes.

So that’s how our relationship started, in a state of sleep-deprived scent intoxication. He told me later that he had felt so detached from his physical self that it took seeing how much smaller my hand was than his to remind him that he had a Y chromosome.

The one Barbie-doll thing I had going for me—in that time long ago, in that galaxy far, far away—was a very flat stomach. If I wore a loose shirt tucked into snug jeans, I looked like I had a shape. Of course in the middle of a New Haven winter, you wanted bulk, but I didn’t let that stop me. I removed my heavy sweater at every opportunity.

Then I started baking. Cooking was the one domestic art that my mother allowed into the “smart” column. Julia Child was smart. A thinking woman could admire Julia Child. Cooking was creative, not degrading. While I would not have dared a hollandaise sauce in my student kitchen, I was perfectly willing to make cookies. I brought still-warm chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles, and peanut butter cookies to study group. I was so engrossed in pleasing Jamie that I didn’t worry, as my mother might have, about whether this made me look less serious to anyone else.

I had never before met another person’s needs so well. He wanted to feel masculine, I wanted to feel feminine—the world’s most fundamental win-win situation. When my bottles of lotions and scents from Mrs. Murray were empty, I bought more for myself. Part of why I loved Jamie was that it was the first time I had ever loved myself.

And so what happened to all the sexual deliciousness? Life, marriage, the kids. Thomas had slight signs of cough asthma, and the doctor suggested that we use as many unscented products as possible around him. We didn’t have to be compulsive about it. He could use scented toilet paper in someone else’s home—this happened at a moment in Thomas’s life when the thought that he could be relied on to use any kind of toilet paper was welcome indeed—but there was no reason for Mom (as the doctor called me) to be wearing a lot of products.

But Thomas wasn’t with me, was he?

Okay, so I didn’t know what I was doing, but when had that ever stopped me? Sometimes I faced the world with lists, schedules, and spreadsheets. Sometimes I didn’t even wait for someone else to hum a few bars, I just started singing along. I had ruled out being lawyer, caterer, and chauffeur. But what about being a groupie? That was a role I had never tried before.

I rented a car at the airport and, following a map carefully, drove into the heart of Houston, passing by miles of motels and park ’n’ ride lots. Jamie’s hotel was owned by a high-end national chain. The lobby of the hotel was sleek and European with strong horizontals and lots of smoky Plexiglas. I left my suitcase with the bellman and wandered down the little arcade of stores, finding a Crabtree-and-Evelyn type of shop. Although the saleslady clearly found me so far beneath her that it was going to be painful for her to conduct a transaction with me—a real Crabtree-and-Evelyn store would have fired her in a minute—I stared her down and managed to buy scented oils, lotions, and candles. By the time I heard Jamie unlocking the door to his suite, the rooms and I were smelling like an orchid who had mated with a vanilla bean.

He paused at the door. “Lydia?”

“You got the message that I was coming?” I asked lightly.

“I did, I knew it, but …”

I understood. He had known it as a fact, he had left word at the front desk so that I could pick up a key, but beyond that he had given my coming no thought. I crossed the room and hugged him. At first his clasp was routine, but then I could tell that he noticed my perfume. We kissed, open-mouthed.

And then I—soccer mom, curriculum committee member, former assistant Girl Scout leader, orchid-scented Spring Fair cochair—dropped to my knees and gave my startled husband a blow job.

“Lydia!” He laced his hands through my hair when he realized what was happening. This was not like us. Oral sex was a part of our vocabulary, but it was always nice married-in-bed sex. Never like this, fully dressed, him standing. But when I didn’t stop, the hands in my hair grew firm, holding me there.

And it certainly didn’t take long.

I sat back, laughing, while he—poor guy—was leaning against the wall, his pinstriped suit pants slipping down around his knees, looking exhausted, ridiculous, and very, very dear.

“That was unbelievable.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. You go take a bath, and I will order us dinner.”

“A bath? I don’t take baths.”

“You do now.”

I had the tub already partially filled—“be prepared” is the Girl Scout motto—so it only took a minute or so to add more hot water. I had lined up scented candles along the edge of the tub, and the water glistened with a perfumed oil. The orchids had abandoned the humble vanilla bean and were carrying on a mad fling with something richer and spicier. The bathroom smelled exotically tropical. I closed the door, hoping he wouldn’t fall asleep and drown.

The suite had two rooms, and it was spacious and comfortable, decorated in hunter green and sand with maroon accents. Everything was designed to give a welcoming first impression. The soft furnishings were deeply upholstered. The sofa and chairs in the living room were tufted; the bedskirt was lined; the headboard was padded. The living room had a chair rail and both rooms had a wallpaper border running around the ceiling. But after the first impression, there was nothing interesting to look at. Everything matched too well, and there was nothing intricate or unexpected in any of the prints or textures. The wallpaper borders gleamed with the pebbly sheen of a commercial-grade product. Although it would have been a great place to stay for a night or two, I knew that Jamie now viewed the suite as a sensory-deprivation tank. So I had brought some pictures I had recently taken of the kids and set them around the rooms.

As soon as he came out of the bath, he noticed the pictures. “Oh, you’ve brought the kids!” he exclaimed.

That was a potentially revealing comment. I had not brought our children. I had brought pictures of them, and a person would like to think that their father could tell the difference, but Jamie crossed over to the pictures so eagerly, and picking each frame up, looked at the images so attentively that I kept my mouth shut.

He shook his head. “They look so great. Don’t you miss them?”

Actually, I didn’t. I’m sure I would start missing them tomorrow, but I had just seen them about ten hours ago.

“How did you manage with them? Are they across the street?”

“No, they were able to stay home. Mimi’s mother came down to take care of them.”

He paused, trying to figure this out. “Mimi’s mother is staying with our kids? Why?”

“It’s a long story, but they’re fine, or they will be until Bubbe brings a live carp home.” I had called and spoken to Erin and Thomas when they got home from school. Gideon, Mimi’s son and Bubbe’s actual grandson, had obviously felt a little jealous and so had terrorized Thomas during the day with stories about Bubbe making gefilte fish out of a live carp that would swim in our bathtub until the time of its decapitation, an event that Gideon, right-minded second-grade boy that he was, had described in awesome and fantastical detail.

“He has never seen such a thing in his life,” Bubbe said after I told her the story. “It was
my
bubbe who made her own gefilte fish. My mother bought hers, and I certainly do, too.”

Jamie smiled. “I do like it when the kids get chatty on the phone, but I’m having trouble knowing what to say to Erin. I do okay with Thomas. He will go on forever about whatever games they are playing during recess. Erin, on the other hand …”

I knew. “‘School is fine.’” I drawled out the word
fine
with the flat, contemptuous sullenness of a preteen. “‘Homework is fine, the weather is fine, the post-Soviet Russian economy is fine.’”

“That’s about it. Doesn’t she want to talk about anything?”

“Probably not. You could try asking her what she wore to school, but if you do that, you’ve got to act interested and ask a follow-up.”

“A follow-up question about her clothes?” He sounded suspicious. Either he didn’t think much of that idea or he doubted his ability to execute it or both. “I don’t want to talk to her about her clothes. I want to talk to her about her.”

“Her clothes and her friends are what she understands about herself, and she isn’t going to talk to us about her friends. So clothes are your only hope.”

“Then I’m in a peck of trouble.”

Jamie had said that he was sick of looking at the hotel menu. Earlier in the afternoon I had spoken to the chef, and the kitchen was preparing a simple veal dish especially for us. I had asked for a tablecloth and candles to be sent up with our order, and I carefully moved the stacks of papers that had probably been sitting on the table for weeks.

He commented on the table and noticed the veal, but I could tell that, within moments of sitting down, he was swamped by a wave of weariness. He hardly spoke. So I chattered away, talking about the book I had read on the plane. I could tell that he was listening. Perhaps it was only in the way that you half-listened to a program on NPR, but that was enough to keep other things out of his mind. Because he wasn’t responding, I felt as if I was giving a book report. But that was okay. I was better at book reports than I was at blow jobs.

•  •  •

Jamie told me to stay
in bed in the morning and call for room service, but I was determined to be Ms. Energy, Mrs. Perfect-at-your-side wife. His legal team had an office in the hotel, and breakfast was laid out in the conference room so that everyone could touch base with one another first thing in the morning. I rode down the elevator with Jamie, thinking nothing of the fact that he was in a well-fitting business suit and I was in suitcase-creased khakis. At our breakfast table at home we never looked as if we were going to the same party—because we weren’t.

There were nearly ten people in the conference room, and all of them looked surprised to see me. With few exceptions they had no idea who I was, and even those who knew me had not known that I was coming. As soon as Jamie introduced me, everyone was very polite, very, very polite. After all, I was the boss’s wife.

I didn’t like that. I was suddenly conscious of how I was dressed. Almost half the people were women. They were dressed for success in dark suits and shoes with inch-and-a-half heels. Their hair was neat, their makeup fresh, and their blouses were made of woven fabrics, not comfortable knits.

I’m an attorney, too.
I suddenly wanted them to know that. But I wasn’t here as an attorney. I was staying in this expensive hotel, eating this expense-account food, simply because I was a wife.

Did Jamie think of me that way, just as a wife? I glanced at him, and the answer to that was clear—Jamie was not thinking of me at all. He was already engrossed in a planning session with one of the individual clients’ attorneys, a local man who belonged to the Texas bar.