Ahead of her, something seemed to be happening at the main door and suddenly she was swept into the building. Furious that she had not paid more attention the only other time she had been there (then she had crept furtively into the school secretary’s office, guiltily proffered the two utility bills from an apartment they didn’t live in to secure the places, and, once she had established where the CCTV cameras were, grinned wildly into them in what she hoped was a carefree, innocent manner but probably made her look like the Joker from Batman), Robyn tried to orient herself, but her ten-year-old daughter, Madison, took control as usual and in about a minute had found her own classroom and Michael’s and was pointing her face up at Robyn’s for a farewell kiss. Robyn held her daughter’s chin in her right hand and lowered her face down beside it to feel the extraordinary preciousness of her perfect skin.
“Remember,” she whispered in her ear, “if anyone asks you where you live, say ‘near Washington Square Park.’”
Madison stared silently at her. Robyn was pretty sure her expression was one of contempt, but she decided to ignore it. She hugged her and nudged her gently toward her smiling teacher, who was standing in front of a collage about “restaurants we have visited in our neighborhood,” including a photograph of a tall blond child standing outside Babbo.
Robyn took a deep breath; it would all be worth it. This was clearly a superior educational experience for her children.
“Mom!” She turned to find Michael beside her, clutching at her handbag. “Why did we have to change schools, anyway?”
“Because your mother had sex on a yoga mat ten times with Julia Kirkland’s husband.”
What Robyn actually said was “Because your father and I wanted the best for you.”
Both statements were true.
One year earlier
It was all about revenge at first.
Robyn wanted revenge on Ryan for being a schmuck. And, as a pleasant side effect, she wanted revenge on Julia—well, on all of them, actually, all those women, those Mothers at the School who never talked to her, or listened to her, or even looked at her.
She had one theory that it was the cloak of invisibility that settles on middle-aged women, normally used to refer to that fact that men no longer looked at you as an object of sexual desire. Apparently some women find this a relief, but not Robyn. Robyn felt the cloak had wrapped around her at age twenty-eight, with the twenty-eight pounds she had gained after Madison’s birth that changed her curvaceous but petite figure into one that might most charitably be described as Rubenesque, if Rubens had ever painted anyone in jeans with a muffin top. Although Julia described her as “fabulously fecund,” which Robyn took as an insult until she looked it up in the online dictionary, her two babies seemed to have punched out her waist, and the clip-on, clip-off pregnancies of other women reduced her to fretful rage. When she caught sight of Christy Armitage walking her twins through the playground she had wanted to murder her. Literally. She pondered spiking Christy’s solitary miniature cupcake with rat poison at the mothers’ annual tea party. She even looked up a few scary sites on the Internet and worked out the exact amount of alpha-chloralose toxin required to cause instantaneous death to someone who was five-foot-ten and weighed about one hundred and thirty pounds. Understandably, this frightened her. That year she made an excuse and didn’t go.
Afterward, she spent a couple of days having an imaginary conversation about it that turned out quite amusing. She tried a little riff on it at Saturday-morning soccer, but it came out wrong and no one laughed and Julia overheard, didn’t have the decency to ignore her humiliation, and instead compounded it by putting her concerned face on and asking, “You wanted to kill Christy because she’s thin? Interesting.”
Worst of all, Julia didn’t get out her writer’s notebook. Robyn had seen her do it so many times, she had written down something the Hot Dog Stand Guy said, for goodness sake, which could only mean that Robyn was of no interest whatsoever to Julia. She was not fit even to be a minor character in some piece-of-shit TV series. In her heart she knew that this was because no one wants to watch a drama about a plump, angry woman who slaves every day to support her family and honor her marriage vows, for better or worse. They can look in the mirror, or on the subway, or at their mother, after all. But this realization did not make her feel better. In fact, if she had written down her interior monologue it would have been italicized with indignation at this point.
Robyn had few choices in her life because of the most important choice she had made. She had married Ryan the year he had been named one of New York magazine’s most promising writers. That his name, Ryan Anthony James, sounded like that of a successful novelist there was no doubt; in fact, it sounded like the name of someone who writes thick novels with foil titles that sell millions. But Ryan had spent seven years crafting his slim volume of short stories that eight hundred people bought. And one hundred of them were his family and friends. That seemed to be enough for him.
“I’m just an old Romantic,” he would say, quickly explaining that this was with a capital R, not that he wished to buy her jewelry or take them on a mini-break.
“Art for art’s sake,” he would say, a lopsided grin lighting up his bad skin but still handsome face. “I love the work. It’s not about an audience.”
While Robyn had found such idealism thrilling when she was twenty-three years old, fifteen years on she knew the reality of Ryan was that he might love the work, but he didn’t like work at all. She had lived for years under a false impression about artistic types, which she had drawn entirely from the musical Rent, a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, and her own upbringing. Robyn’s mother was “creative”; it was the one thing both her parents agreed on. One Christmas Eve she decided to decorate the tree with miniature goldfish bowls and, as the light from behind her eyes twinkled particularly brilliantly, she and Robyn plopped a tiny orange fish into each one. Unfortunately yuletide itself was one of Mother’s bad days, and Robyn, her father, and her beleaguered older brother awoke to find no presents and dead fish in the living room. Another year, the Christmas decorations remained up until summer, the cheap tinsel strung across the hallway a constant reminder that creativity and depression often live side by side, and sometimes when Robyn crawled into her mother’s bed and snuggled beside her, looking for love, her mother would tell her how she had so many ideas for poems or stories she just had to write, but that having children had destroyed any chance of her doing it.
Robyn’s brother became an accountant and married one. Robyn married Ryan and made a solemn promise to dedicate herself to the cause of his genius and protect him from the responsibilities and messiness of life, giving him the opportunities her late mother had not had, or so she believed. This had been a mistake.
The removal of this illusion was again Julia’s fault, as after only the briefest acquaintance with her you would know that she wrote all the time. There was no wandering round waiting for inspiration to strike. She was a workaholic, in fact, and while Ryan might sniff at the “commercial” nature of her output (he had seen an experimental film she had written about Virginia Woolf in 1999 and declared it the only good thing she had ever done), Julia made a very decent living and kept her husband and children in a style that made Robyn want to weep with envy. She was riven with self-recrimination at her youthful gullibility. Didn’t she remember reading Little Women? Jo March scribbled till her fingers practically bled. This was not a fate ever likely to await Ryan.
At the beginning Robyn had a romantic (with a small r) notion that Ryan should stay at home and write while she supported them. In due course this would be rewarded by the kind of life she wanted. This had been vague at first, with fantasies of a bohemian home, interesting friends, a literary soiree or two, but quickly solidified into a life where she didn’t have to worry about money. This did not happen. She worried about money all the time, for the very simple reason that they did not ever have
enough of it. In fact, after four years and thirty thousand words, although he assured her that his prose was reaching new levels of liquidity, it was Ryan who suggested he take a job. Before she could say “Don’t you have a job?” he informed her he had one lined up at a gallery of photography in SoHo. He would be on the front desk from eleven to seven every day, minimum wage, of course, but he could get commission if he sold a photograph. Best of all, he would still be writing, although when and if the companion volume would appear she had given up asking. And so it came to pass that he got to swan over the cobbles of Wooster Street and she trudged back and forth to Hell’s Kitchen through months that inexplicably became years, and two uncomfortable pregnancies, and then worked extra hours to pay for the childcare that Ryan did not feel was compatible with his artistic needs (while he supported her desire to experience motherhood, he would have been more than happy with one child, he always said).
Then one January morning, when they emerged from their building, late and arguing, and Michael had forgotten his pencil case and Madison cried when a puddle ruined her new sequined shoes (and Robyn wanted to cry, too, as she knew they did not have the fifty dollars that month to replace them), and they looked up just as a burst of rain streamed straight down from the sky with the speed and pressure of a series of fire hoses, suddenly she screamed (as she occasionally had done in the bathroom to herself, but this time it came out loud) that they couldn’t live like this anymore. And ignoring the placatory lopsided grin that he rolled out on these occasions, which normally elicited a pseudo-maternal calming response from her, she told him that she had been talking to his parents and that she wanted them all to move to his old home in Orange County. His parents had got planning permission to build a three-bedroom bungalow with study on the vegetable patch at the bottom of their garden. Robyn could work as his dad’s office manager, the local public school there was excellent, and the children would have grass to play on, a basketball hoop, and they could all spend time together.
Ryan froze. Robyn tried to pull the kids out of the shower, but he stood, hands juddering, as the rain poured over them. And then theatrically pretended that he had not heard her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you just say you’ve been plotting with my parents to imprison me in Disneyland?”
Madison and Michael looked at Robyn. They loved Disneyland and were very interested in her idea.
“My children are city kids.” He intoned, “They are going to grow up stimulated and excited, not dying of boredom like I did. The best fun I had every summer was hitting a tree with a stick.”
“Okay,” said Robyn, accepting immediately that she had blundered into the relationship area called bad timing. “Now we have to get out of the rain.”
At this moment, three of the young pierced punks who lived on benches in the park scuttled as fast as their bondage trousers would let them and joined them under the flimsy awning. Their Mohawks were wilting, and Michael and Madison stared. Robyn knew the kids were wondering if the spiderweb tattoos on their faces would wilt, too, and wanted to get them away before Michael said something that might result in him being spat at, but Ryan was not done. Robyn knew he secretly enjoyed his biannual explosions, always a response to an inconvenient emotional outburst of her own. He had not fled to New York to skulk away one weekend with a U-Haul back to Anaheim, he thundered. Robyn grabbed each child by a hand and started walking away. So Ryan decided he would lose his temper. The last words she heard as she turned the corner were: “I’m an urban writer. What about my inspiration? What about my book?”
She had given him a way out, a way she thought they could stay together, away from a city that took more from them than it ever gave back, and he had blocked it. She would never forgive him. So she raided the account that his parents had set up for Christmas presents for the kids and joined a gym near her office. Then she logged on to goop.com and followed her new friend Gwyneth Paltrow’s suggestions on how to coordinate your outfits from Uniqlo.
She was not going to be invisible anymore. She was going to have an affair.
• • •
SHE HAD ALREADY SLEPT with Vaughn Armitage, so that didn’t really count. He was very frisky with all the mothers, which Christy never seemed to mind, to the extent that Robyn wondered if she was relieved. One morning after Robyn politely said good-bye to him at the school gates, his arm tightened so hard around her waist she thought he might be feeling for her kidneys, so she brazenly suggested they have a coffee just to see what happened. Something did. Fifteen minutes of afternoon delight, as Vaughn called it, although it was nine o’clock in the morning.
The experience was not one Robyn wished to repeat, although she had a feeling she could. Christy might sleep in Egyptian cotton sheets with a 1,600 thread count, but she still had to feel Vaughn’s gray nose hairs rubbing against her thigh. And the scar from his heart surgery ran down his stomach like a red arrow pointing to the fact that he might die on the job, which would be extremely embarrassing and would mean she couldn’t do the book sale with Christy, which was the one day in the school calendar that she enjoyed. But Vaughn had been fantastically appreciative of her curves, and it occurred to Robyn that Christy’s concave stomach might not be that reassuring to cuddle up next to, you could give yourself a nasty bruise on her hip bones, so after Robyn had come in late to work, blaming the subway like everyone else did, she looked up “fecund” in the dictionary again.
There it was: “luxuriant, lush, fructuous (whatever that meant), FERTILE.” She scanned down: “fruitful in offspring and vegetation.” Ignoring the vegetation bit, she had an insight into something that might banish the cloak of invisibility to the back of the wardrobe of her life. She was younger, relatively, than most of the other mothers. She had not crossed the Rubicon of forty, after which the brutal regime of daily exercise and eating nothing but soup and a naughty little crouton stops making you “fabulous” and instead makes you “stringy,” with veins popping out of your arms and shoes that don’t fit. Moreover, while other women might consider her fat, men didn’t. No, Julia was right, they considered her fertile. Her hair, full of nutrients, was thick and long without extensions, and she had her own nails. Once she embraced this, and listened to Gwyneth’s advice about updating her wardrobe with some key pieces, she was amazed at the attention she received from the Fathers at the School. She began to scan the locker rooms like an affair-seeking missile.
Within a week one of the chess teachers sidled over, muttering something about showing her his antique pawns, but with his huge bald head he looked like an enormous lollipop and, after the Vaughn experience, she wanted a man she found vaguely attractive. She fixed Richard Lovett in a doelike gaze from beneath her bangs, but he was so English he didn’t even realize she was making a pass at him. He appeared to think she was asking for directions somewhere. So when she bumped into Kristian with a K in his Lycra yoga shorts and he suggested she try out his new hip opening workshop on a Saturday morning, as she had a lot of hip to open, she had a feeling she might have struck infidelity gold.
When he rubbed the massage oil into her temples longer than anyone else in shivasana, she knew she was onto something, and that if she took longer than anyone else to disinfect her sweaty mat after class there was a chance their eyes might meet across the incense burner. She did, and they did, and then they did it. “Vengeance is mine,” muttered Robyn to arouse herself, thinking of Julia, as her head bumped against the wooden blocks. In fact, it turned out to be rubbish revenge, because Julia never knew. Kristian with a K informed her seven sessions into their pathetic fling that Julia was in the middle of an “episode” and had left him, and all Robyn wanted to do was scream, “Why didn’t you tell me? It doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t cheating on her, if she doesn’t get to find out YOU PREFER ME!”
She still did it with him three more times. She wanted to practice a sexual maneuver one of her younger colleagues from accounts had shown h
er, having recorded it the previous night on her iPhone. (It was the holiday party; there had been free eggnog, and the administrative staff were all huddled in the bathroom, gasping at the sheer athleticism of it.)
So she vented her fury with Kristian that their relationship was not in any way threatening his love for Julia by ordering him around on the mat and telling him to move his leg an inch or so to the right and hold his breath. When she finally got the hang of it she knew it was time to move on, although Kristian protested, saying that he had never met anyone as “free” as her and he would miss her “uncomplicated attitude.”
Robyn didn’t feel free, but she did feel empowered, until Parents’ Evening, when Michael’s teacher, Miss Chang, told her that Michael couldn’t read and brought back home to her the fact that nothing in her life had really changed.
Ryan went into the idiotically flirtatious manner that incensed Robyn. He assumed at first that Miss Chang was referring to reading books and giggled about how uninspiring kids’ literature was these days and that he often felt that, if he wanted a break from his short stories, there was a fortune to be made writing for eight-year-olds. Ryan himself had read Dracula in third grade. Robyn became distracted thinking about Dracula and that among the ways of keeping vampires away, apart from the obvious garlic and crucifixes, was to draw a circle around yourself. She looked longingly at the stub of pink chalk on the desk, wanting to seize it and scribble round her chair, as, after all, marriage to Ryan was sucking the life out of her.
Miss Chang was unmoved. She repeated that Michael couldn’t read.
“As in bat, cat, pat?” said Robyn slowly.
“As in He. Can’t. Read,” replied Miss Chang with the weary expression of someone used to ignoring stupid comments shouted out from the back of a classroom. She looked at them across the desk. “How much do you do at home?”
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