My Father's Wives (4 page)

“Just you,” he said. “Should be wheels up in a few minutes. You want to watch this?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I need to respond to a few things.”

The screensaver on my phone is a picture of Claire and the kids and me at Disney World. We had stopped at a stand where they painted faces and Phoebe wanted hers done but Drew, then only four, was afraid and would only do it if we all did. So in the photo my daughter has butterfly wings extending from her eyes, my son is Bozo the Clown, I have a tiger’s stripes and fangs, and Claire is a fairy princess. It is the only picture I have on my phone; Phoebe e-mailed it to me
and then made it my background. It always puts a smile on my face. Even now.

I opened a new e-mail and entered Claire’s address. In the “subject” field I entered:
This afternoon
. Then I rolled the device about in my fingers, glanced over at Bruce, picked one of the cookies off the tray, and popped the whole thing in my mouth.

“Something to drink, Mr. Sweetwater?”

I had forgotten all about Sandra, our flight attendant, a delightful woman of about sixty, always cheery and deathly afraid of flying. She applied for the job when Bruce first bought the plane and he was taken by her sunny disposition and professional manner; it was not until the first time they hit a patch of turbulent air that her fatal flaw was revealed. I usually give Sandra a hug upon boarding but I wasn’t myself this day.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked again sweetly.

I pointed apologetically to my mouth as I chewed the cookie.

“Perhaps a glass of milk?” she asked.

I swallowed. “Just some water,” I said, rising, “and I’m sorry I didn’t say hello—how are you?”

She gave me a quick hug, then pointed at the iPhone and shook her head. “Always too busy with
that
thing. You tell the boss here not to work you so hard.”

I still hadn’t quite decided what I wanted to say to Claire when I heard the engines roar to life. I sipped from the near-frozen bottle Sandra had brought and wiped my hand on my pants. My mind was racing and yet I was perfectly still. I could hear the roar of the engines, the reverberation of the fuselage. Sandra was taking her seat, strapping herself in, pulling her lap belt impossibly tight, crossing herself. I felt so empty it was like someone had sliced me open, removed all my organs, and sewed me back up again. There was nothing left inside.

I covered the screen of my iPhone with my left hand as I typed with my right, even though no one was around to see, nor would anyone, even Bruce, read over my shoulder. But there are some things
you just don’t take chances with, even if the chances are zero. I didn’t want anyone to see the words I was typing. I didn’t even want to see them myself.

I came home early. I saw you.

One of the two pilots, a pleasant, round-faced fellow whose name I never remember, stepped out of the cockpit. “We’re ready to go, gentlemen,” he said.

I nudged Bruce, who looked up from his game for the first time since I’d boarded. I pointed a thumb up in the air, and he nodded and shut down his iPad. Then he glanced up at the pilot and put his own thumb in the air.

The pilot disappeared again and I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes. Bruce might want to chat now and I wasn’t ready. Once we were in the air he could activate the satellite and watch the game on the television embedded in the front console; that would be just a few minutes. We were taxiing, my thumb hovering over the icon marked
send
. My eyes were closed, the engines roared in my ears, a faint aroma of jet fuel wafted through the cabin, and my head began to spin into what felt like a dream but was actually a memory. I was remembering the best night of my life.

Claire and I were on a beanbag in front of a fireplace, miles away, years before. A fire was crackling and the heat warmed my face, in the wonderful way that only follows a day of skiing in bone-chilling cold. We were in the Poconos, in Claire’s parents’ home, the night before Christmas. Three days later we would travel to Hawaii to celebrate New Year’s. Five days later I would ask her to marry me. But that night, on that beanbag, drinking warm apple cider laced with rum, our feet digging into a white shag rug, Claire was talking about the two kinds of people in the world.

“There are those you lie
to
and those you lie
with
. At the end of the day, that’s the most important distinction you can make. When you
concoct a lie, am I in it with you? Or is it me you’re lying to? If you promise always to lie with me and never to lie to me, I’ll do the same.”

Her face was so close to mine our noses touched, and I could smell the apples and cinnamon on her lips, feel the warmth of her breath. It was the closest I have ever been to anyone, in every way. It didn’t feel like lightning at all—just the opposite. Lightning is loud and scary; Claire made me feel quiet and safe.

I took her hand in mine and held it to my face, kissed the tips of her fingers. They were chilled despite the heat of the fire. I put them to my cheek and pressed them against my skin. I wanted to promise her so many things. I wanted to tell her that I knew, from the first moment we met, that I needed to be with her, in the same way that I knew I needed to breathe to stay alive. I wanted to tell her that she made me feel as though I had spent my whole life looking in all the wrong places for all the wrong things, because it was clear to me now that so long as I could smell her breath and feel her frozen fingers on my face, then everything was all right and always would be. I wanted to tell her that all I needed in the world was for her to marry me. I would have proposed to her right there on that beanbag in front of that fire, but just then her mother walked in.

“My, look at you two,” she said. “I can hardly tell where one of you ends and the other begins.” She said it in a sweet way, as though she could feel at least part of what I felt. But if she had any inkling of what she was interrupting she didn’t show it. She just dropped onto the sofa and breathed a heavy, exhausted sigh.

“He’s a handsome one, isn’t he, Mom?” Claire asked.

Her mother chuckled softly. “Oh, I’d say everything is about where it’s supposed to be.”

Claire was looking into my eyes as she spoke. “He’s a sweet one too, isn’t he?”

“He is,” her mother replied. “But it’s the sweet ones you have to watch out for, because they can get away with murder and they know it.”

“Can you get away with murder?” Claire asked me.

“Probably,” I said, “but I promise I will never try.”

We both knew what I meant. Claire’s smile was the softest I had ever seen. It said she was as comfortable as I was, that she knew everything I wanted to say. Not just then, but always. The way Claire looked at me said she knew better than I did what I felt and what I wanted, and that she had always known. Her face could say that to me back then. Sometimes it still does.

I would have asked her to marry me right there had her mother not fallen asleep on the sofa. Instead, it was five days later that we became engaged, but to this day I better recall the way I felt that night, by the fire, than I do when I knelt before her a few nights later. And I’ve always felt as though the promise we made to each other that night, to always lie together and never apart, was the most significant we ever made. It’s a promise I’ve thought of often and never broken, not a single time in all these years. And I was always certain she hadn’t either. Until today, when suddenly I wasn’t certain of anything at all.

Then I heard the sounds of a basketball game on television, and I opened my eyes and found the game on the flat-screen. Bruce was again stretched out on the couch, a contented smile on his face, the silver tray of cookies balanced precariously on his stomach. I hadn’t even realized we’d taken off, but as I looked out the window the lights below seemed a lifetime away. I looked over at Sandra, who was seated with her eyes tightly shut, mouthing what was surely a silent prayer.

I looked back to Bruce. “How long was I asleep?” I asked.

His eyes never left the screen. “Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty.”

I nodded. The iPhone was still in my hand. I entered my passcode and rubbed a finger over the face, clearing away a smudge from the screen. The words were crystal clear and seemed unusually bright.

I came home early. I saw you.

“No,” I said aloud, though Sandra couldn’t hear me and Bruce wasn’t listening. “I’m not ready for that.”

I hit the
delete
button and the words disappeared, instantly replaced by the Disney World picture again. There we were, the four of us, in face paint. We looked so happy, like the perfect family, an advertisement for Disney World. I stared at the picture as we ascended through the clouds, and quietly thought that I would have traded anything in the world just then to have been one of us.

WHEN WE LANDED IN
San Francisco I was exhausted and Bruce was starving. Only one of those was unusual; I am almost never exhausted. Bruce is almost always starving, and one of the few drawbacks of traveling with the CEO is that when he is starving you eat, even if it is after midnight where you woke up that morning, back in the life you had before the afternoon changed everything.

We ate in the restaurant at the hotel, four-star French cuisine with a wine list roughly as long as the Old Testament. We were seated immediately, at a private table in the rear, and Bruce ordered Belvedere on the rocks and a Coca-Cola.

“I’ll have the same,” I told the waitress, “but hold the Coca-Cola.”

Bruce smiled. He doesn’t like to drink alone.

“You win?” I asked.

He knew I meant his wager on the Lakers game. “Won big.”

I nodded as the waitress brought the drinks. “I’ll drink to winning big.”

Bruce clinked my glass with his, then looked up to the server. “Skip the Coke,” he said, “and keep these coming.”

Two hours later we had finished two sirloin steaks, baked potatoes, creamed spinach, a loaf of freshly baked bread, salads with Thousand Island dressing and a bottle of four-hundred-dollar Bordeaux. Bruce was leaning back, swirling the last of his wine in the glass. “This is where I really miss cigars,” he said.

“You’ll live longer,” I said.

“I think I’d rather live shorter and smoke a cigar every now and again,” Bruce said, a faraway look in his eyes. “They make me think of Brooklyn. My father loved cigars. Every night after dinner he would have a glass of brandy, and he would smoke a cigar and dip the tip of it into the brandy while he smoked.” Bruce poked his finger into the glass. “He said it added flavor to the wrapper. My father was always working and he was always stressed out; he hated being poor and could never do anything about it. The only time I ever remember him relaxing was after dinner; he’d smoke his cigar and we’d talk about baseball.”

“Which team? The Yankees?”

Bruce looked at me with horror. “My old man hated the Yankees. They were the enemy. My father’s team was the Dodgers, the
Brooooooklyn
Dodgers.”

“You aren’t old enough to have seen the Dodgers in Brooklyn.”

“No, I’m not,” he said, still sloshing his glass. “But
he
was. He never got over them leaving Brooklyn. My mother used to say he started dying the day they left. Which would mean he started dying the year I was born.” He paused, sucked the wine off his forefinger. “After the Dodgers left my father didn’t have a team to root for, so after dinner we talked about how badly he wanted the Yankees to lose. He became obsessed with them losing. He didn’t care who won, so long as the Yankees lost. If you asked which was his favorite team, my old man would say it was whoever was playing against the Yankees.”

“At least you still had the time together,” I said.

Bruce stared right in my eyes. “When you root for a team, you celebrate when they win,” he said. “When all you do is root against one, there is only misery. My father took no satisfaction in seeing the Yankees lose. He said he did but he didn’t, really. And he suffered when they won. There’s nothing in the world worse than rooting for something not to happen, because if that’s all you care about then all you can do is lose.”

Bruce leaned back in his seat, still sloshing the wine in his glass.
He was looking away, out a window. “That’s why I have never allowed myself to get attached to any team in my life,” he said. “I love sports so I bet on every game to keep it interesting. But as far as emotionally, I couldn’t care less.”

I felt a familiar flutter in my stomach. Fathers are complicated for me. “And you got that from your dad?”

Bruce turned back. “Johnny, we get
everything
from our fathers.”

I cringed. “Not me, unfortunately.”

“Even you. Even if you didn’t know him at all, you’re still his son. Whether you realize it or not, you are just like him.”

I shook my head vehemently. “No,” I said. “In my case, I’m not.”

“You
are,
” Bruce said. “Listen, the one thing I remember most about my old man is how much he hated being poor. He used to say to me all the time, ‘Brucey, we don’t have a pot to piss in.’ That was his big phrase: A pot to piss in. All I wanted was to get rich and get him the hell out of Brooklyn. I didn’t make it. He died two years before I got to high school. But even after all that time, when I bought my mother her house on Long Island, I told the designer I wanted the word ‘pot’ engraved in gold on every toilet.” He started to laugh. “He thought I was crazy.”

“You bought your mother a pot to piss in.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Because we are always our fathers’ sons, whether we like it or not.”

Bruce got quiet then, just finished the rest of his wine, and we called it a night. We had an early start in the morning and a long day ahead. I went upstairs, undressed, and then lay in the unfamiliar darkness of the hotel room, exhausted but unable to sleep. And what I found was that I was thinking more about my father than I was my wife.

THIS SEEMS AS GOOD
a time as any to mention that my name is Jonathan Sweetwater, and yes, he was my father. Percival Sweetwater III.
Five-term United States senator, liberal lion, legendary lothario and bon vivant, author of nineteen books, sponsor of eleven legislative bills, trusted adviser to three presidents, husband to six women, and father to one boy.