Every Other Saturday (35 page)

The afternoon passed at a snail’s pace. Marci couldn’t tell whether Doug was back in the office or still out at Motorola. She wished someone on the production side of the office would ask for her help with filing. Not only did those days put her in a position to interact with Doug, but that side of the office had a wall of windows with a spectacular view of Town Lake.

More than that, those days brought her into the midst of the writers and designers, who did the work she was desperate to do herself. Nine months earlier,
that
had been her initial reason for taking this assignment; the staffing agency had insisted it would be a great way to get her foot in the door as a copywriter. She had jumped at the chance, even though it paid two dollars less per hour than any other temp job. The more often she could show her face on the production side, the more likely they would be to think of her for entry-level opportunities.

But no such luck today. None of the other departments had requested her help, so she plodded along entering invoices into the accounts receivable database. Her mind drifted to Doug frequently, and her excitement that he would be free tonight. She wondered what was pulling Cathy away.

Since the unexpected start of their relationship five months earlier, Marci had tried hard to block thoughts of Cathy from her mind. Primarily because they made her feel like a horrible person, somewhere between pond scum and dog feces. But lately a kind of morbid curiosity had begun to overtake her when she and Doug were together. Perhaps it was a self-preservation instinct, but she couldn’t help questioning whether Cathy really believed the explanations for Doug’s frequent absences and whether his excuses were really as believable as he seemed to think. Maybe it was because she had seen Cathy in person now.

Knowing the spouses would attend, she had carefully avoided the company Christmas party back in December. But a few weeks ago, Marci had been asked to fill in for one of the secretaries in the fancy wooden cubicles in the more public part of the office, just a few offices away from Doug and the rest of the vice presidents. She liked working for Elena and Tracy, the account managers, and it was nice to be able to see the office running, people going back and forth all the time, discussing creative choices and arguing about visual impact.

Cathy had walked into the office around midday, laden with bags and packages, in fashionable skin-tight jeans tucked into knee-length boots and a long thin sweater. She had a perfect body, perfect hair—slick-straight light brown with blonde highlights—and a lovely tan face accented with subtle pearl earrings. On seeing her, Tracy had practically run to help with the packages. “Hi, Cathy, what a nice surprise! Doug didn’t tell us you were coming by today.”

At the name, Marci had frozen in the act of pushing back her chair to offer to help with the packages. Tracy had escorted Cathy halfway to Doug’s office before Marci could get to her shocked feet. “Oh, he didn’t know, sweetie,” she heard Cathy saying to Tracy. “I was down at the League and needed a place to stash some of these auction items for the Valentine’s Gala. We just don’t have any more room in our garage.”

Marci cringed at the mention of “our garage” and immediately pictured Doug in faded jeans and a sweatshirt, working on an old car surrounded by boxes and, apparently, decorations and auction items for the Junior League of Austin’s annual gala. Her stomach churned, and she felt light-headed. She sat down, and before she knew it, Cathy was gone again.

“I don’t know why everyone says she’s such a
bitch,
” Tracy said to Elena a few minutes later, with the final word whispered so softly Marci could only assume that was the word used. They were in Tracy’s office a few feet away. “I think she’s nice.”

“Well, she
can
be,” Elena said carefully. Marci mindlessly typed a memo while she strained to listen. “She’s just a typical Junior League trophy wife.”

“What do you mean? I have friends in the Junior League and they actually do a lot of good charity work.” Tracy sounded defensive. Tracy was the youngest account manager, and Marci knew she idolized Doug. Clearly, her admiration extended to Cathy.

“Yeah, I know. I probably shouldn’t say anything,” Elena conceded. A brief silence ensued, and for a second Marci thought the conversation was over. But then Elena continued, softly, “I’ve just always had the impression that she was kind of . . . well, kind of hard on Doug. Like when they started the company after college, Victoria told me she was always pressuring Doug to quit and go work for her dad in Beaumont instead. Then when the company started getting successful, she suddenly changed her tune and started broadcasting to everyone who would listen that her husband was Doug Stanton. And she made him buy this huge expensive house off Thirty-fifth, even though he really wanted to keep his mom’s ranch . . .”

This last part Marci knew to be at least somewhat true, because Doug had mentioned it. Elena’s voice got even lower then, and despite straining hard to hear, Marci could only make out the tail end “. . . Doug really wants kids. He’d be a great dad.”

“I’m just saying,” Tracy was talking now, “you can’t tell what a marriage is really like from the outside, and she has always seemed like a nice person to me.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Elena replied with a sigh. “You never know.”

The conversation had ended there, and Marci had never mentioned any of it to Doug. Since that day, however, her musings about his marriage had increased tenfold. In their stolen moments alone together, she found herself asking more and more often about Doug’s life, trying to understand his feelings and, maybe, venerate her own behavior. It was as though she were hoping to hear something terrible enough about Cathy that it would justify what she and Doug were doing. Maybe she just wanted fuel for her own fantasy of what a domestic life with Doug would be like: to imagine herself breezing into his office for lunch or folding his laundry on Saturdays. Deep down, though, she knew she would never have the garage and the old car and weekend mornings. Because they weren’t rightfully hers.

Marci always felt on guard, even in the privacy of her tiny apartment—obsessing about whether Doug’s car was parked far enough away, his alibi watertight, contingency stories ready if someone discovered he was not where he said he would be. Marci also created excuses for dodging her own friends. In the past few months, she had pretended to be taking a pottery class, going to church (she couldn’t imagine what special place in Hell awaited her for that one), and, once, to avoid a blind date, stricken with walking pneumonia.

In the long, lonely stretches away from Doug, it all sounded perfectly absurd to her. She knew, for instance, what Suzanne or her mom would say if they knew. It was not just that she was helping violate the sanctity of marriage (Mom), but that she was allowing herself to be exploited and putting her life on hold for a man who could not—
would
not
—do the same for her (Suzanne).

In her mind, she had ended it a thousand times. She would spend hours rehearsing three versions of the parting speech:

RATIONAL

Doug, I can’t do this anymore. Neither of us intended for this to happen, but it has to stop. I love you [Should she say that?], but I can’t be responsible for breaking up a marriage, however unhappy it might be. I deserve better than this. I need someone who is free to make a life with me, and you are not. I know in my heart that part of you still loves Cathy, and I think you should return to her and really invest in your marriage.

MAGNANIMOUS AND MELODRAMATIC:

Listen, Doug. This has been wonderful. It really has. But it’s wrong and it’s been wrong from the start. It’s tearing me apart. I am not an adulteress, I deserve to be more than “the other woman.” I can’t live with myself for another day this way, and I can’t let you do it, either. Go back to your wife, your home, the life that you chose all those years ago. I will treasure our time together and you have my word that I will never tell anyone about us.

JEALOUS AND GENERALLY PISSED OFF:

Doug, your little weekend getaway with your wife gave me time to get clarity and realize that I am better than this situation, and better than you. If you loved me, you would no longer be married. If you loved your wife, you would not be with me. You act like this is torture for you, but really you’re just a typical cheating sleazebag who wants to have his cake and eat it, too. I want you out of my life forever. If you try to speak to me again, I will call Cathy and tell her everything. Get out.

This last version was the most emotionally satisfying, of course. She would march into work armed with these words, confident, resolute and ready to take back her life.

Until she saw him. She’d find a sticky note on her keyboard: “It was awful. I missed you.” Or he would pick her up at lunch, and they would drive to the top of Mount Bonnell and look over the Texas hill country and talk. She would feebly threaten to end it, crying pathetically and remembering none of her kickass speeches.

Occasionally he shared his agonizing feelings about his marriage. He’d been with Cathy since middle school and genuinely loved her. She was everything he had ever wanted. Their families were close, and she knew things about him that even he had forgotten. But their relationship had changed over the years, and he now described their interactions as distant, even businesslike. But one thing was clear: he was totally unprepared to leave his wife.

Doug often talked with sadness about the day that Marci would end things for real, the day she would realize, fully and finally, that he was wasting her time. He joked with a touch of pain in his voice about the guy she would ultimately end up with: “He’ll be funny, obviously,” he would say, tapping her nose lightly, “like you. And he’ll be good-looking, I’m sure, and probably an all-around great guy. Smarter, better than me.”

She would squirm, rejecting his self-deprecation. “Doug, stop, let’s not talk about it.”

But he never wanted to stop. He needed to suffer. “You know it’s true. You deserve better than me. But in my eyes, no one will ever deserve you.”

No matter how often he said them, these words were a knife to her heart. She was the other woman; she was putting someone’s marriage in danger. Who was to say what she deserved?

By the time her thirtieth birthday rolled around, Marci knew the ball was in her court. Tortured as he might be, Doug seemed willing to continue their relationship indefinitely. It would be her responsibility to someday choose the high road and make a better life for herself. She sometimes wondered whether she would ever find the strength to do that. Her relationship with Doug was the only one she’d had in two years, and more intense on every level than anything before it. How could she walk away from that for some tepid date with Jeremy or to be fixed up with someone’s single friend?

She had explored Internet dating, but it was difficult to be fully present in the small talk and getting to know you, when she knew Doug had arranged to be at her place for several hours the next weekend. It was unfair that Doug expected her to be the one to cut the strings, especially when she couldn’t help noticing that he made an extra effort to be present in her life when she mentioned having a date.

So they limped along in a relationship netherworld—not together, not apart, each day full of the twin possibilities of limitless passion or good-bye forever. With stacks of invoices and mindless tasks in front of her each day, Marci had entirely too much time to contemplate both ends of the spectrum. Today was no different, except for the fact that she was officially no longer wasting her late twenties in a hopeless relationship.

Thirty had arrived, and a new decade was waiting. And there was an e-mail from Jake.

Find
The Marriage Pact
at a bookstore near you beginning November 3, 2015

http://mjpullen.com/books/the-marriage-pact/