by Darcey Bell
On the surface we must seem very different. E. has a stylish, expensive haircut. I get my hair cut by a lovely young woman in town who used to work in the city, but sometimes I go between haircuts so long that my hair looks as if I cut it myself. E. dresses in designer clothes, even on weekends. Whereas I am more likely to order comfy stuff—long skirts and tunics—online. Yet underneath all that, on a much deeper level, E. and I are very much the same.
Naturally, she reads my blog, and she’s full of praise for my writing. For the bravery and generosity of what I am willing to share about the amazing adventure of motherhood. I tell her things I never even told my husband. It’s such a great feeling: letting go, after you’ve been keeping things bottled up inside for so long. To know that there is someone who will understand and not judge.
Having a friend like E. has restored my faith in our superpowers: the ability we moms have to be there for each other. We can be friends. Real friends.
And so I’d like to dedicate this blog to my best friend, E.
So here’s to you, E.
Love,
Stephanie
11
Stephanie
When I put up the link to my blog post about becoming friends with Emily, I tried not to read it. But I couldn’t help myself. And just as I’d feared, it made me cry.
There was one little thing I remember now that I hadn’t paid attention to back then. I remember Emily saying that the umbrella she gave me—the umbrella with the ducks, which I’ve now put away in a back closet because the reminder of those early days is so painful—was one of a kind. But when I got to her house that afternoon, I noticed, in the front hall, an umbrella stand in which there were a dozen duck umbrellas. It looked almost like an art piece. Of course I didn’t ask her about it at the time—we’d just met. And then I forgot about it. But now it makes me wonder. Was I already misunderstanding her, hearing her wrong? Was she lying about the umbrella? But why would she tell a lie that would be exposed the minute I walked in the door?
Anyway, that was the least of the things that bothered me. Reading the post, I felt horribly guilty. Because I was beginning—just beginning—to have feelings for Emily’s husband.
There is that period of time when you’re pretty sure you’re going to have sex with someone, though you haven’t yet. Everything is clogged with desire. Everything feels like that hot, thick air that weighs so heavily on your skin on the swampiest day of summer. Especially when it’s someone whom, for lots of good reasons, you’re not supposed to have sex with.
Maybe one problem with my marriage was that we never had that sense of anticipation, that gradual buildup of desire. Someday I will tell Miles all the reasons not to have sex on the first date. Like his mom and dad did. Though I won’t go into the specifics.
My first date with Davis wasn’t even a date. It was supposed to be an interview. We met in a coffee shop in Tribeca, near Davis’s studio. His firm was called Davis Cook Ward, which was his name, all three of them. His architecture and design career was going extremely well. He designed houses for rich people and, for fun, beautiful but affordable garden furniture from recycled materials. He’d designed some wooden furniture that was going to be featured in the magazine I worked for. We had coffee, then lunch. Then we went to his loft, where we stayed until the next morning, when I had to go back to my East Village apartment and get changed and go to the office.
My relationship with Davis was comfortable. It was fun. It was easy. But there was never a moment when I felt that I would die if I couldn’t have him. Maybe because I’d already had him. The long, slow, delicious waiting had ended before it began.
Or maybe my problem was that it was safe. Maybe I need that thrill of the forbidden, the taboo, that sense of doing something that I know is wrong.
One evening Sean came to pick up Nicky and stayed for dinner. During dinner, a violent thunderstorm began. I invited Sean to spend the night in the guest room instead of going out in the weather. And he agreed.
Sean and I talked until it was so late and we were so tired that our eyes were closing. We exchanged a freighted but chaste little peck on the cheek. He went to his room, and I went to mine. As soon as I got into bed, I was wide awake. The thought of him there in the dark, in my house, was almost like having sex. I masturbated, thinking about him. I wondered if he was doing it too, thinking about me.
Just knowing he was a few rooms away was like phone sex without a phone. It took every ounce of self-control not to go to his room. Meanwhile I was still telling myself that nothing was going to happen, that I wasn’t the sort of person who sleeps with the husband of her disappeared best friend.
I knew that even if we could do it without anyone finding out, we would feel so guilty that the next time we saw the police, they would pick up on it and maybe mistake it for guilt about something else. I knew this was ridiculous, but still . . .
But there it is: desire in the air. Everything is soaked in it, even though I know that Sean and I are both thinking: your wife’s best friend, your best friend’s husband. Emily loves and trusts us. What kind of people are we? And the fact that we both feel that guilt and desire, and know the other is feeling it, makes everything hotter—and more confusing.
Many nights now Sean and Nicky come for dinner and stay late. Nicky falls asleep in Miles’s room, and Sean carries him out to the car and drives him home. Sean and I have been staying up, drinking brandy, and talking, and amid all the sexual tension, or maybe because of it, Sean has been opening up. He’s told me about his horrid childhood, his alcoholic upper-class British mother, whom his college-professor father left for a colleague when Sean was twelve and who has come way down in the world but not in her social ambitions and her illusions about herself.
I talk a lot about Davis and Miles. I don’t mention my blog. It’s interesting to me that I so wanted Emily to respect and admire my blog, but I don’t want Sean to even read it. I’m proud of what I write. But I avoid the subject. Maybe I don’t want Sean thinking I’m just another overinvolved supermom with a laptop. He makes fun of mothers who project that semi-aggressive competence and always have the latest baby equipment. He calls them Captain Mom. I don’t want him to see me as another Captain Mom. Maybe I worry he’ll compare me unfavorably with Emily and her glamorous career in fashion.
We talk a lot about Emily. He’s told me how they met, which—oddly, now that I think about it—never came up when Emily was talking about her life. Usually you exchange those stories early on in a friendship. Her fashion company and his investment firm were cochairing a benefit for a relief organization that works to bring clean water to women in Africa. The dinner was at the Museum of Natural History, which—with the flowers and candles and the mood lighting—was terribly romantic.
Emily introduced the person who introduced the person who introduced her boss, Dennis Nylon. And when Sean saw her on the podium, in a simple but stunning black evening dress, and he saw—on the giant screen monitors around the room—the tears in her eyes when she spoke about the charity and about the hard lives of the women they were helping, he decided then and there that he was going to marry her.
It made perfect sense to me. I knew how moving Emily’s tears could be. I’d seen her cry for me and my husband and my brother. Sean’s account of their meeting and courtship was one of those beautiful stories that I wish I could tell about my own life, my own marriage.
Talking about Emily helps us both. It makes us feel more hopeful about the possibility that she is still alive and will be found. And it defuses the tension between us, as if she were actually there, reminding us that she’s the person we love—and not each other.
One night Sean told me that there were a few things about Emily that I probably didn’t know. Things she’d kept secret. I held my breath because I still believed—even though it seemed clear now that I was wrong—that I knew everything about her. Or almost everything.
It turned out that she’d been abused by her grandfather when she w
as a little girl. Her parents never admitted it, which was part of the reason she’d been estranged from them. Also (possibly as a result) she’d had a drinking problem during her twenties; she’d also had a brief flirtation with painkillers and Xanax back then and spent a month in rehab. But she’d been clean ever since.
I was shocked, not by what he told me but by the fact that I hadn’t known. Was this what she’d meant when she talked about the “wild days” when she got her tattoo? In all the conversations and confidences we’d shared, why had those traumatic things not come up? I’d trusted her with secrets I’d never told anyone. Why hadn’t she trusted me?
I’d never seen any evidence of the problems Sean described. She always drank sensibly around me. Even after they beat their addictions, people with drinking problems are always weird around alcohol. And Emily wasn’t. Once, at her house on a Friday afternoon, I almost went for a third glass of wine, and she gently reminded me that I had to drive Miles home.
But every day was making it more obvious that unless she’d been injured or killed, she’d left us on purpose. She wasn’t the person Sean thought she was, the person I thought she was.
Where was she going in the rental car headed west? Whom was she going to see? Was there someone in her past? Someone she’d recently met? Some dark mystery she needed to solve, some unfinished business?
I read the Patricia Highsmith novel that Emily left when she disappeared. It’s about a man who is trying to kill his son-in-law, in Rome and in Venice, because his daughter has committed suicide and he blames his son-in-law. Nobody ever knows why the girl killed herself, though the husband gives some reasons that don’t make sense. Something about her loving sex or hating sex and being too much of a romantic to live in the real world. I couldn’t figure it out, and even though we know the grieving husband is innocent, there were moments when I didn’t blame the father-in-law for nursing his smoldering, deadly rage. I wondered if the book was a message from Emily, a hint that she planned to kill herself and that no one would ever know why.
In which case we could only wait for her body to turn up. In the Highsmith novel, the murderous father-in-law is always expecting his son-in-law’s body to wash up by the side of a canal. But the young wife who kills herself does it in the bathtub. There’s a body and blood—no question about what happened. But with Emily, there were mysteries leading to more mysteries, questions upon questions.
I think about Sean all the time. I put on makeup and my most attractive outfits (I try to keep it subtle) whenever I know he’s coming over with Nicky. I always offer to collect Nicky from school, in theory so Sean can get some work done but in truth so I’ll have an excuse to see him. I love his charm, his attention, his easy natural laugh. I’ve always had a weakness for men with beautiful smiles.
Sean has begun staying for dinner more often. I’ve found out what foods he prefers. Steaks and roasts mainly. After all, he’s British. I’ve learned to make them the way he likes. Burned. Miles couldn’t have been more delighted when I stopped trying to persuade him to eat vegetarian meals.
I’ve been eating red meat for the first time since Chris and Davis died. I’m amazed (and a little disappointed in myself) by how much I still love that rich, salty, juicy, bloody taste. And I’ve started to associate that delicious taste with being around Sean. I feel almost as if we’re vampires on a sexy TV series where the undead with their fangs and perfect bodies zoom across the screen to have sex.
I’d stopped eating meat for personal and ethical reasons, but I can hardly expect to get credit for being ethical about animals when I’m being so unethical about humans: wanting to sleep with the husband of my best friend.
I could never blog about this. Never. The moms would never forgive me. They need to think of me as a loving mother who would never want an animal to be hurt for my sake but who isn’t so rigid that I won’t make hamburgers if that’s all the kids will eat. Some of them might disapprove if I stopped being a vegetarian. But they would never ever forgive me for putting myself to sleep at night by having sexual fantasies about my friend’s husband. They would know what a terrible person I am, and they would send out a firestorm of furious hating posts, which I would deserve. And when they finished venting their anger at me, they would stop reading my blog.
Most nights, Sean and I drink wine with dinner. I’ve started buying good wine, the best I can afford, because it makes everything so much more elegant and mellow. In case I ever doubted Sean about Emily having had a drinking problem, all I have to do is watch the way he scrutinizes me whenever I drink. I sip my wine, and I always make sure to leave a few drops in my second glass. Do I secretly want to let him know that life with me would be better than it was with Emily?
Usually Sean stays and helps me clean up. The kitchen is steamy and warm, and the windows fog up, hiding us from the world outside, creating a private space where we feel safe and alone, shut off and protected from everyone and everything. I’d never realized how sexy doing the dishes could be.
Sometimes the tension is almost overwhelming. On those nights when Sean picks up Nicky before dinner and goes home—he says he’s been learning to cook, but I suspect that they grab a pizza on the way—I’m glad to take a break. It’s a relief when it’s just Miles and me, having our meal in peace.
Miles seems to like his new life. He enjoys hanging out with Nicky’s dad, and after all this time, I think it’s good for him to have a man—a father figure, even if it’s his friend’s father—around the house.
When Miles was a baby, I used to stare into his eyes all the time, but you can’t do that with a five-year-old. So I’ve taken to staring at Miles when he is asleep and noticing (as everybody says) how much he looks like me. But what they don’t say is that he’s a million times more beautiful than I am.
And so my attraction to Sean has become another secret I can’t tell anyone. Sometimes when I’m missing Emily, I think I could tell her. Then I realize that she would be the last person I could tell about being infatuated with her husband.
It only makes me feel more lonely, more desperate to see Sean. And to see Emily. A vicious circle, as they say. Though the truth is that the more I long to see Sean, the more my desire to see Emily starts to fade.
Once, when Sean left his iPod on my kitchen counter, I checked his playlist and bought CDs of his favorite music—mostly Bach and the White Stripes and old-school British bands like the Clash—even though my own taste runs to Ani DiFranco and Whitney Houston. When he and Nicky are around, I play his music instead of mine. When the kids are asleep in Miles’s room, we binge on TV series like Breaking Bad. Sean already watched all five seasons, but he wants me to see it with him. It would have been way too violent for me to think about watching before I met him, but it makes me happy to know that there is something he cares about and wants to share with me.
Sean has talked about how, when he was growing up in the UK, his ideas about the United States came entirely from Charles Bronson films and TV series like That ’70s Show. And now he sometimes wonders if there are kids like him in other countries who think the US is still the Wild West, full of high school science teachers batching meth in RVs and killing Mexican drug lords. I stare at him, rapt with interest. And it isn’t fake. I think what he says is practically the most fascinating thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.
When he told me that he’d watched the series before, I tried not to imagine him watching it with Emily. I try never to think about Sean saying the same things to her that he says to me. I try not to wonder if she thought what he said was as interesting as I think it is. It was Emily who read books, Sean who watched TV. I try not to think about her complaining that he made her feel stupid. I try to concentrate on the fact that he wants me to see it. I’ve begun to think that he cares about me as more than just as a friend, or a friend of his wife’s, or his son’s best friend’s mom.
Sometimes I try not to think about Emily, and sometimes I try not to think about anything but Emily, as if thinking a
bout her could work magic. One day she will simply show up, and everything will go back to how it used to be. Except that I may have fallen in love with her husband.
None of this makes me feel good about myself, but it does make me strangely happy. I feel as if I’m walking around on my own little cloud or swimming in my own little pool of warmth and light and heat, though the winter is coming on, and the weather has been awful.
I don’t know what’s worse. The disloyalty, I guess. Or maybe the most shameful part is that I’ve turned my son into a little spy. When Miles comes home from Nicky’s, I ask, fake-casually, if Nicky’s dad said anything about me. Is Alison still working for them? Are she and Nicky’s dad friendly? Does Sean talk a lot on the phone?
Miles says he never sees Alison. He doesn’t think that Alison is Nicky’s nanny anymore now that Nicky’s dad is home all the time and his mom is gone.
Poor Miles.
One night, putting him to bed, I said, “Honey, do you want to talk about Nicky’s mom being gone? I mean, how you feel about it—”
“No, thanks,” he said. “It just makes me sad. Everyone is sad. Especially Nicky.”
Tears welled up in my eyes, and I was glad that, in the glow from the night-light, Miles couldn’t see me well enough to notice.
I said, “We’re all really, really sad. But sadness is a part of life. Sometimes it can’t be avoided.”
“I know, Mom,” said my wise, beautiful child. The next thing I knew, he was fast asleep.