I waited until the kids were sleeping to sneak onto Nick’s e-mail again. I made dinner by rote—Trader Joe’s organic shells and cheese and a salad. Nothing fancy. I would probably have burned it, I was so distracted. I fed our cat, Charlotte, and our little Shih Tzu, Daisy, and let her out back. I kept glancing at Nick as he ate his salad, wondering what secrets he might be keeping. After dinner, I was barely able to help Trevor and Will with their homework. I didn’t even know if the problems I double-checked were right or not. On a good day math made my head explode, so I broke my rule and handed them each a calculator. I simply told them to check it themselves, which surprised them and made them very happy.
I dished out ice cream and broke up three fights between Trevor and Will. I couldn’t even say what the fights were about. I just screamed, “Shut up!” and in their shock, they stopped for at least ten minutes at a time. I wasn’t proud, but they got over it. I soaped and sudsed Sam, supervised Will in the tub and demanded that Trevor shower. Emma had gone to sleep at her friend Kate’s house around the block. As she walked out, I heard her muttering under her breath that she might never return..
All the while, I calculated what I would say to Nick about the video and the e-mails, (if my hunch was right about “hotmama77”) and how I would say it. What kind of woman would use “hotmama” as an e-mail address anyway? None of the moms I knew were confident enough in themselves to ever use that, so that ruled out all of my friends. I had never seen it on any class or PTA list, so that ruled out most of the moms at my kids’ schools too—I would have remembered an address like that and whom it belonged to. If he was having an affair, I assumed it was with some young thing he met during his travels. Maybe she used “mama” loosely and was not actually someone’s mama. Maybe “77” wasn’t the year she was born, but the number of guys she had slept with.
I settled onto the couch and snapped open my laptop to check Nick’s e-mail. I didn’t know when he’d be back from his nightly run and didn’t want to chance him finding me on his. His runs had gotten longer lately—he said he was up to five miles a night. He certainly came home sweaty and disheveled. I gasped as my hand flew over my mouth. Of course—how could I be so stupid? He didn’t even strap on the fancy heart rate monitor watch that I got him for his birthday anymore. The one he’d dropped hints about for months, because it would help him train. He wasn’t running. I knew that for sure. I knew in my bones that the sweat was courtesy of hotmama77. I also knew that she was someone local. I was absolutely sure of it.
I minimized my Hotmail account and logged onto Nick’s. Thankfully he’s lazy and uses the same password for everything, so it was easy. I know it’s a cliché, but my heart was literally pounding in my chest. Daisy jumped up on the couch next to me and I rubbed her ears until she got bored and moved to the next cushion. I picked up Charlotte and held her until she wrestled away. I tried to breathe slowly and calmly—didn’t work. I clicked on the sent folder and squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t bear to see if there were even more messages. I slowly opened one eye at a time and glanced at the screen.
Nothing. The whole folder had been emptied. There was nothing there. I clicked on the deleted folder. Nothing. Nick had emptied everything. I clicked on his inbox. Just some old e-mails that I sent him and some store e-mails—Target, Sports Authority, Walmart. There was one unopened e-mail received earlier that evening from Nick’s sister with the subject “mom’s bday.” He must have deleted everything from his cell phone, because I hadn’t seen him use his laptop at all. All right, it looked bad.
I didn’t know how he knew I would be snooping. Obviously he hadn’t thought to empty his account before—it was littered with messages to hotmama77. I must have left a clue next to his laptop to tip him off that I was on it. The hair band. I had taken down my ponytail and was about to put it back up—a nervous habit—when Sam called me. I must have dropped it next to his laptop in my rush to check on Sam. When Nick saw it, I’m sure he knew I was at his desk. There was nothing else on it—no check book, no mail—only one pen. His desk is almost pathologically neat, unlike mine. There were a million things he could be searching for on my desk. But his desk? Nothing except his laptop, He had to know I was on it. Yup, it looked really bad.
I glanced at the clock, wondering when Nick would be back. He had started going running after the kids were in bed a few months earlier. He used to get up early in the morning and run, saying he loved the soft air and the way it started his day off right. Did he ever give a reason for switching to night runs? I never thought much about it before—didn’t think I had a reason to. I glanced at the clock again. It had been an hour and a half already.
How had I not noticed that he had been going for these super long runs without his heart rate monitor even on? And, what was I going to do about the video, about Emma, about what suddenly seemed like a very messy life? Up to now my life had been pretty much on autopilot—laundry, chores, supermarket, PTA meetings, chauffeuring kids to a gazillion activities—and in less than a day, everything had changed. I used to be besieged by a certain restlessness every once in a while that there had to be something else. I felt a nagging desire to do something new just to shake things up a bit. But suddenly I realized how good boring can be. Boring is safe and everything going on was anything but safe.
Nick ambled in around 11:00—a full two hours after he left. Grinning, he flopped down on the couch next to me and sighed. “What a great workout.”
“It must have been—it took you two hours,” I sneered, narrowing my eyes.
“Well, yeah. I ran all the way across town—past the diner and the post office, then circled back.”
“I bet your heart rate must have been great then.”
“Perfect. Right in the target zone.”
“Really? How could you tell without your heart rate monitor on?” I asked innocently.
Nick glanced at his bare wrist. “I guess I forgot it, but I can just tell the old-fashioned way—two fingers on my neck.” He grinned again.
I turned to him and just stared for a moment at his beautiful face. Age only made him look better, the crinkles around his eyes setting off the deep blue. The streaks of silver at his temples gave him a sexy air of experience, rather than making him look haggy as they did me. “Are you happy?” I whispered.
He kissed the top of my head and answered, “Why would you ask that? Of course I’m happy. Great wife. Great kids. What more could I ask for?”
“Perhaps a protective cup,” I said under my breath.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing,” I spit. I didn’t know what I would do if there wasn’t a reasonable explanation for the e-mails. I didn’t know what I would do if he was somehow responsible for that video of us being launched into cyberspace. I was truly afraid for a moment that I would kill him, but I knew that I was far too much of a people pleaser to commit homicide.
“Emma saw the video of us—the one you took on your cell phone; the one that was supposed to be hidden in a locked folder on your laptop.” Nick’s face went white, as white as Emma’s had. She must have gotten her pallor from him.
“What the hell? How in the world did she see it? Did she snoop on my laptop? If she did, she’s in so much trouble. Should I talk to her now or is she sleeping?”
“She’s not here. She went to Kate’s after it happened this afternoon and never came back. I can’t believe you didn’t even notice that she wasn’t here earlier.”
“I noticed, but she always has something going on. I just figured she was out with her friends and would be back later. How would I know why she was out and when she would be back?”
“Of course you wouldn’t know. You barely even know her. You’re always running out somewhere or holed up in the basement on your laptop.”
“Why are you acting like this, Max? Of course I know our daughter. Plus, it’s not my fault she saw the video. You’re so busy attacking me; you never told me how she even got it.”
“Well, she
didn’t see it on your laptop. That little snot Ashley from school sent it to her. I knew that girl was trouble. I have no idea how she found it, none whatsoever. I’m trying not to freak out about it, which is impossible. I mean how does a video that we made in our bedroom on your phone get into the hands of a ninth grader?”
The mention of Ashley’s name left Nick’s face whiter than before, if that was possible. “Do you know something about how Ashley got it?” I accused. Even though I could not figure out for the life of me what connection Nick would even have to her. I asked again, biting into the words. “Do you know how Ashley got it?”
“No, of course not,” Nick stammered. “I just know how much Emma wants to be friends with her.” He paused for a moment and glanced around while taking a deep breath.
I stared at him expectantly, until he continued, “Sorry, just still catching my breath from the run. Anyway, we bumped into her and her mom last week when Emma and I were picking up dinner at Fairway. Emma clearly worships the girl. There couldn’t have been a worse kid to send it to her.”
Something seemed off. Nick never noticed Emma’s friends and he hated Fairway, the cavernous gourmet outpost of the New York City chain. He complained that it was overpriced for the same stuff you can get at ShopRite. I always argued that Fairway had stuff you couldn’t get anywhere else, like my favorite organic popcorn—the best PMS food ever. In fact, I had gone to Fairway just that afternoon and the bag of snacks was still sitting on the counter behind me—right in Nick’s line of vision.
“When did you take Emma to Fairway?” I asked, narrowing my eyes again. I made a mental note to stop doing that. I didn’t need any more wrinkles. “You haven’t picked up dinner there in ages.” I would have remembered if Nick had picked up dinner. I knew I cooked dinner every night the previous week. Okay, “cooked” might be a bit strong of a term—“provided” is more appropriate, being that pizza, tuna and bagels, Chinese and, yes, a Fairway roast chicken were on the menu. At least I cooked two nights.
I stared at Nick while he tried to formulate an answer. It was painfully clear that he was grasping for a plausible reason why he would know Ashley, and the Fairway bag was probably the first thing his lying eyes landed on. In a flash, I pictured Ashley’s mom, Sloane, whose e-mail address I wouldn’t recognize if it bit me on the nose, because she’s allergic to any school activity with a whiff of commitment. It cuts into her gym and spa time. Of course Sloane was hotmama77—a gorgeous divorcee with shimmering blond hair cascading down her back. She was the only mom I knew who could actually use that e-mail address without a trace of irony. With her killer body and flawless skin, she really was a hot mama. I could have kept going on and on in my head, spinning my wheels cataloguing Sloane’s assets, while my hatred for her intensified.
“Hold on a minute,” I told Nick and grabbed my laptop off of the coffee table. I flipped it open and went to Facebook. I typed in the mystery e-mail address in the search box. I didn’t know why I didn’t think of doing that before. After a second, there she was—Sloane Silver Williams. Born Ruth Silverberg, she’d changed her name, gotten a nose job and dyed her hair blond the summer before college. She then promptly snagged the collegiate man of her dreams—rich boy Jake Williams—perhaps knowing that when she inevitably divorced him, the alimony sum would be quite hefty.
I knew all of this because my best friend Andi had gone to both high school and college with Sloane. Sloane pretended she didn’t know Andi all through college “That bitch never said ‘hello’ to me once when we were away at school, even though I was in homeroom with her every year in high school. She was too good for me when she morphed into Sloane from dorky Ruth,” Andi had confided to me after Sloane gave Andi a fake air kiss at a school concert. So, I already had my preconceived notions about stuck-up Sloane.
Add as a friend? Facebook asked me. Send a message it beckoned. Oh, I would have liked to send her a message, all right.
It made perfect sense once I thought about it. Of course it was Sloane. I should have known that as soon as I saw the address. Sloane was the “Hot Mama,” a personal trainer with a cult-like following in our town. All of the fancy ladies trained with her at the luxe gym she worked at—the gym where I’m betting she met Nick. He had gotten a single membership a few months earlier, because I thought it was too expensive for both of us to join.
I didn’t even know Sloane was the “Hot Mama” I had been hearing about at school pick-up and PTA meetings until Andi started making retching noises one day at the park and showed me a Facebook post one of her friends had liked. It was a photo of Sloane in some contorted pose with the words, “Hot Mama” beneath it. It had three hundred and thirty-seven likes. The most likes a post I put up ever got was about forty, give or take. But, Sloane was clearly adored in our town—the fanciest and fittest of the fancy ladies. To tell you the truth, I hated her even before I knew she was fucking my husband.
I truly felt like I was falling into hell—knowing that when I resurfaced, everything would be different. Of course, in my heart I held onto the tiny hope that things would stay the same—that it was all some silly misunderstanding. Nick wasn’t really sleeping with Sloane. He really did just run into her at Fairway. The heart wants to believe, or some Hallmark crap like that. More likely, I was delusional, hoping that the one person I thought I knew better than anyone in the world was not, in fact, a complete stranger.
I snapped my laptop shut, the sound magnifying in the silent room, and turned to Nick. “How long?” I asked.
“How long what?” He seemed literally dumbfounded. I honestly could not believe how arrogant he was to think that I wouldn’t figure it out. Did I seem that stupid? I wondered. Was I so entrenched in my own world of kids, chores and school stuff that he didn’t think I would notice that he was sleeping with someone else? Did he think I was oblivious? With growing horror, I realized that he may have been right. Obviously, I didn’t realize. I had to know for how long I’d been duped.
“How long have you been fucking Sloane Williams?” I hissed. I’m careful to keep my language squeaky clean in front of my kids. It was freeing to curse like a sailor.
“Max, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he answered with a shrug of his muscular shoulders and a blink of those gorgeous blue eyes, filled with supposed innocence.
I really, truly wanted to strangle him, but like I said, homicide just isn’t in me. Throwing his ass out was an entirely different matter, though. “Do you think I’m an idiot?” I snarled. “I figured out you’ve been sleeping with Sloane. And my guess is that you were at her house and Ashley found your cell or your laptop and decided to make Emma’s life miserable by sending her the video. Well?” I bounced my leg like a jittery caffeine addict, waiting for my answer.
Nick’s head fell in his hands. His shoulders shook and his body heaved. “Are you crying?” I spat. “I’m the one who should be crying, you fucking bastard.” I knew the tears would come for me eventually, but at that moment I was too angry to cry—too angry to feel anything but searing hatred for Nick. Sadness would come later, I was sure.
“Of course I’m crying,” Nick answered tearfully. “I’ve destroyed everything for sex. I’m an addict, Max. Between you and I—I need help. Will you help me?” He slid off the couch onto his knees, laying his head on my lap. “Baby, I’ll do anything if you’ll forgive me. I’ll even go into rehab.”
“Rehab? Are you kidding me? Call yourself a sex addict all you want, but to me you’re just an asshole who’s having an affair. And it’s ‘between you and me,’ you fucking moron. Speak properly. How many times do I have to tell you that?” Nick’s lack of proper grammar was always a sticking point for me. He accused me of being a grammar cop and I accused him of not caring about the way he came across.
Nick picked his head up, eyes watering. “That’s what you want to talk about now? My grammar? Are you insane?”
“No, Nick—I’m not insane. You know ‘between you and I’ drives me nuts and your usi
ng it at this very moment shows an utter disregard for me. Why should I forgive you?” It’s kind of funny what the mind clamps onto—what becomes the last straw. Even in my distraught state, I could see the ridiculousness of it, but I didn’t care. If he really wanted me back, if he really cared and it wasn’t all a show, he would have made damn sure he didn’t piss me off further by using that nails-on-the-chalkboard phrase.
“Okay, Max, whatever you want—between you and me, will you forgive me now? It’s us, Max. Come on, I won’t see Sloane again. She’s kind of a bitch anyway. She’s probably the one who sent the video to Emma, not Ashley. She was snooping on my phone before I took it off. She’s kind of a psycho. She said that if I didn’t leave you, she was going to put it on some porn site and tweet the link. Said she was gonna destroy your goody two-shoes image. I can’t believe she sent it to Emma too. I don’t know what I was thinking, Max. She’s fucking crazy.”
And then the room went black.
***
I came to on the couch, a cool compress on my forehead, with Nick standing over me. He hadn’t hit me over the head, though I think I would have preferred a literal bash over the head to the figurative one he dealt me. I have an extremely annoying, not to mention inconvenient, habit of fainting when I’m distressed. My doctor diagnosed it as hyperventilation syndrome—I hyperventilate at the drop of a hat. Most of the time, I catch myself before fainting. I know to breathe deeply and slowly, counting until my fingers and lips stop tingling. Apparently, though, finding out that my husband was sleeping with the neighborhood bitch was enough to make me forget my relaxation tricks.
“I’m going to bed now,” I said weakly. “I’m calling our lawyer in the morning. I get him. You can find your own.” I didn’t even know if our lawyer handled divorces. In fact, I really couldn’t even consider him our lawyer. He’d just handled the closing for our house.
Goddess of Suburbia Page 3