My Father's Wives (3 page)

I got out of the car and walked over to the playground. A few small kids were running around, none that I recognized. One, a little blond boy with too-long hair, was on his tummy on the ground; I think he was licking the grass. I wanted to grab him by the belt—if he was wearing one—and lift him out of the mess. But before I could, I heard a familiar voice.

“Daddy!”

There is no other word that sounds like that one does. And it never sounded quite as good as it did right then, on that playground, the sun shining on my face.

It was Andrew, age six, racing toward me, one shoelace untied, breathless. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see
you
, of course,” I said, and to my surprise my voice cracked.

I knelt and he ran into me, full speed, almost knocked me over backward. Phoebe was a few steps behind him, also running, though not quite as fast. Excited, though not quite as much. I wrapped my other
arm around her and squeezed them both tight, buried my face in Phoebe’s hair so I could smell her shampoo, like raspberries and a rainy day.

“What are we going to do?” Phoebe asked.

I cleared my throat. “Well, I had an idea,” I said, my voice returned. “How about if we see if the ice cream shop is open on Mondays?”

Phoebe threw her arms up in the air and cheered, while Andrew, less certain, wrinkled up his nose as he does when he is thinking especially hard. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think I’ve only ever been there on weekends.”

“Let’s find out,” I said, and took them each by the hand and walked jauntily toward the car, feeling marginally better. That’s the thing about kids. They can’t make all right a thing that could never be all right, but they can make it as close as it can possibly be. That’s how I felt just then: as close to all right as I possibly could.

A few minutes later, after the short drive to the ice cream shop, during which Phoebe was ecstatic and Andrew was genuinely nervous that it wouldn’t be open on a Monday, I made a discovery of an entirely different sort: I couldn’t taste anything. I ordered soft-serve vanilla in a waffle cone with chocolate sprinkles and paid with the twenty bucks I keep in the ashtray for emergencies. On the first lick my thought was it didn’t taste right, and on the second I realized it didn’t taste like anything at all. This confused me because in
every
movie when a woman is wronged she turns to ice cream for consolation, and never once have I heard Sandra Bullock say: “You know, I can’t even taste this.” I tossed most of the cone in the trash. My son was delightedly licking chocolate from between his fingers; my daughter was wearing the contented smile of a nine-year-old who just got ice cream she wasn’t expecting. Then we all piled into the car to drive home. And I assumed my life was about to change forever.

SO MANY THINGS HAPPEN
in my house when I’m at work.

There are deliverymen with packages and lawn-care professionals
with mowers and electric company inspectors with measuring gadgets and pool cleaners with long nets and Girl Scouts with cookies and religious nuts with pamphlets and the cable guy between noon and six and somebody’s mom with a jacket my daughter left at a birthday party. I have always been a bit intimidated by the sheer volume of activity Claire manages around the house, though I suppose I’ll never quite think about it the same way now.

I turned onto our street and saw Claire at the end of the driveway, poking through a magazine, the day’s mail tucked beneath her arm. She was looking the other way, in the direction the bus would be coming from any minute. I reached in the glove compartment for my glasses, which I ordinarily only use for driving at night. I wanted to see her face as clearly as I could when she turned and saw me coming. Would there be anything there? A tick? A shudder? A moment of panic? I put the glasses on and took a deep breath, then tapped gently on the horn.

Claire turned, squinted, and stared, shielding her eyes from the sunlight with her hand, looking appropriately surprised. As we approached her face broke into a wide smile, and she began waving goofily at the kids, who both unsnapped their seat belts and leaned into the front seat, shouting.

“Daddy came home early!”

“We had ice cream!”

“Hi,” I said, lowering my window. Claire walked right up alongside the car, looking perfectly normal. I hadn’t any idea what to think. “How was your day?” I asked.

“My day is still going on,” she said. “Is everything all right?”

Of course, that was the pertinent question.
Is everything all right?
I hadn’t any idea what the answer was. My sense was everything was probably as far from all right as it could ever be. But I wasn’t ready to say so. “I just missed everybody,” I said.

“Now,
that
is nice,” she said sweetly. And then, with enthusiasm, “Isn’t it nice to have Daddy home?”

“Oh yeah, oh yeah, ohyeahohyeahohyeah!”

“It’s lovely to have you home,” she said, and leaned closer to kiss me, but I pulled forward into the garage before she could.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said as the kids rushed for their scooters. “I’m going to run inside and change.”

I said that staring straight at Claire, certain there would be a signal of something in her face. Surely she would want to beat me inside, to straighten up, something. But there was nothing. She never diverted her gaze from the kids.

Alone, I went inside and up the stairs. For the second time that afternoon, I turned right instead of left, away from our bedroom and toward the guest room. The door was open, the French sheets in place, normal, crisp; they appeared clean. I couldn’t bring myself to smell them, but there was no indication there would be anything out of the ordinary to smell. It looked the way the room always looks, the sheets looked the way they always do, the family photos on the nightstand in place, the four of us staring at me, smiling.

I considered, for a moment, that I was losing my mind. I hadn’t experienced a hallucination since my sophomore year in college when I was talked into trying acid and spent three hours hiding under a blanket because I was absolutely certain the poster of Jimi Hendrix was breathing. I remember not knowing what to think back then, and now as I stared at a perfectly normal bed in a perfectly normal room, I didn’t know what to think again.

I had an hour before a car would arrive to take me to the airport, so I changed out of my suit and into jeans. I was on the stairs headed back down when I heard The Police singing “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” That’s the ringtone on my iPhone, which meant my phone was ringing and I could hear it. I looked downstairs toward where the music was coming from and saw my briefcase right in the center of the living room where I had dropped it an hour before. And, a few feet away, staring at it with a puzzled expression, was Claire. She didn’t see me on the stairs, just heard the music and saw the briefcase,
and her head dropped to the side, the way a dog’s might when trying to make a decision. She had to be trying to decide why she hadn’t seen me carry in the briefcase, wondering how it had managed to get from my car to the living room. Maybe she was trying to decide if I had seen her, if I knew. She looked worried. Not enough that anyone else would have noticed, but I know her really well. I know when she is worried, even if it is only a little.

When she finally shook her head and walked away, backward, into the kitchen, I found myself thinking of Hawaii and the night I proposed to her, both of us tipsy, she especially because the seasickness medication she had taken made her susceptible to the champagne. There came a moment when both of us knew it was time, a momentary silence across a candlelit table when our eyes met and there wasn’t any question about it. Nor was there any question that I was the one obligated to begin, which I did, on my knee in a crowded restaurant. Twelve years later, alone at the top of the stairs, with the kids waiting outside, I decided this time it was Claire who was obligated to begin. Maybe she wouldn’t get on her knee, but she would tell me.

I ran down the stairs and outside, grabbed a basketball, and shouted for Andrew, who came scootering across the driveway, followed by his sister. We were on the court for almost an hour and I remember none of it; I couldn’t feel the joy of my children any more than I could taste the ice cream. All I could think of, through the yelling and the scootering and the slam-dunking, was my wife staring at the briefcase. Maybe she still was. Suddenly, without a word of explanation, I raced inside, leaving the two children alone. I needed to see if Claire was staring at the briefcase.

She wasn’t.

I found the case exactly where I had left it and Claire nowhere near it. Was she upstairs, furiously laundering expensive sheets? Or in the bathroom, cleansing herself of whatever residue remained after an afternoon tryst? Or perhaps she was hidden in the attic where no one would find her, silently crying tears of remorse.

Then I heard the clatter of pots and pans and realized she was none of those places. She was behind me in the kitchen, rustling about in the drawer where the cookware is kept. It was a startlingly normal place for her to be and a startlingly normal thing for her to be doing; the only thing out of place was the briefcase.

You see, I know my wife as well as I know anyone. I don’t claim to understand her, but I know her, which means while I cannot analyze most of the things she does, I can usually predict them. There is no way, under normal circumstances, she would ever leave my briefcase in the center of the living room floor. My wife is the sort who reminds you to put things away before you have even removed them from their place. If you say to her: “I think I’m going to watch a little television,” she will reply with: “Sounds good, make sure you leave the remote control where you found it.” She cannot, and does not, tolerate clutter. But now, she had made the conscious decision to leave my briefcase in the center of the floor where my children could trip over it or the dog could chew it up or a neighbor could see it and assume the household was in a state of abject chaos. That wasn’t normal.

This was my chance to let her know it was time. “Honey,” I shouted, as close to calmly as I was capable of. “Have you seen my briefcase?”

She was kneeling behind the island in the kitchen, still rummaging noisily among the pots and pans. Without looking up, she called back, “I think it’s in the living room!”

“What is it doing there?” I asked accusatorially.

Claire stood, popping from behind the island like a magician making an appearance after having been sawed in half. “Where are the kids?”

“Shit,” I said, and ran back out through the garage without another word.

If the children were surprised to have been left alone they didn’t indicate it; they had just continued singing and slam-dunking and scootering as though I’d never been gone. We stayed outside and played until the familiar black Town Car pulled into the driveway.
Phoebe put her hands over her nose and smiled. That’s her inside joke with me. The driver from the limousine service I use, Sonny, is dependable and friendly but has a bit of an odor problem. It doesn’t bother me as much as it does Claire; the kids think it is absolutely hilarious.

What his arrival meant was that it was time for me to leave for the airport, so I took the kids inside for cold drinks. When we got to the kitchen, Claire was in front of the stove, warming olive oil in a pan.

“Wash your hands!” she yelled, adding, just for me, “That includes you.”

I did. Then I got a bottle of water and two juice boxes from the refrigerator. And then, as casually as I could, I wandered into the living room without a word and saw that my briefcase was no longer on the floor.

WHEN I BOARDED THE
jet I found Bruce stretched on the couch, watching basketball on an iPad, a silver tray of chocolate chip cookies balanced on his stomach. Bruce is a brawny man with voracious appetites, not limited to food, though he does eat as much as anyone I have ever seen. Since we began traveling together I have observed, with a combination of awe and disgust, that there is never a time when food is placed before him that he will not eat, and there is nothing discerning about his palate; from French truffles to Buffalo wings, Bruce will always partake. And, amazingly for a man of fifty-one, he pays no noticeable price.

There was a smile in my voice as I slid into the seat beside him and motioned toward the cookies. “You going to save any of those for me?”

“Have,” Bruce said without looking up from the game. “There’s plenty.”

I shook my head. “You know the story of Dorian Gray? Somewhere in the world there is a painting of you as a very fat man.”

Bruce still didn’t look up. He is not the sort who cares if you give
him a hard time. I can tell you a great many things about my CEO, some of them not so attractive, but the one thing I will always credit him with is supreme self-confidence. I have never seen Bruce express a shred of doubt in himself, his leadership, his athleticism, anything. He will eat and drink and buy whatever he wants, fight or fire or fuck whomever he wants, and never look back. He is like a shark in that way, more machine than beast, because of the singularity of his focus. He considers nothing and no one that interferes with his intentions and it’s hard to argue with the results: Bruce is among the most powerful executives on Wall Street, has unwavering support from his board of directors, and has to be worth close to a billion dollars. He also has a beautiful, doting wife who tolerates all of his indulgences, including the rampant infidelity of which she could not possibly be unaware.

“Who’s playing?” I asked.

“Lakers,” he said, still not looking up. Bruce consumes sports as voraciously as he does food, and wagers huge amounts on basketball and football.

I was trying to act normal. I wasn’t feeling normal, but I was trying to behave as though all was well because I didn’t want Bruce to notice. He is very hard to lie to, and I really didn’t want to tell him I was pretty sure I had found my wife with another man.

I took out my iPhone and fiddled with it. “We waiting for anyone?” I asked.