In fact, I wanted to be home alone.
I had the whole late afternoon and the evening to brood and wander the house, my mood alternating between exhilaration and crushing defeat.
I made myself a few Scotches to calm myself down. But I ran out of Scotch and moved on to vodka, which was a mistake, because there was a lot of it around. By seven o’clock I was good and wasted and walking from room to room, talking to myself.
“It’s a fucking charity event,” I explained to myself in the round mirror in the hallway. The mirror was an inheritance of mine; I had taken it with me when I left for college and it had somehow survived all of the subsequent moves and girlfriends and wild parties, and Megyn’s tastes, and the children, and here it was, hanging in my hallway. “Not a real date.”
It wasn’t a real date. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I knew that Megyn probably did find this whole situation to be more of annoyance than anything else. I reminded myself of all the many conversations we’d had about just this type of event in the past – she’d organized a few of them, and every time she had said the same thing, more or less: that whoever the celebrity was they were going above and beyond the call of duty to sit there answering stupid questions from some dumb fan who probably had idiotic ideas about romance in his or her head. She said the thought of the dull, awkward conversations made her cringe.
I wasn’t sure how I felt each time I cycled through my thoughts and touched upon this likely truth.
Megyn came home at twelve-thirty.
It wasn’t so late, for a date. But it was a lot later than a date of that kind should have gone on.
I remained seated, and looked her up and down as she came through the door. I was checking to see if her dress was out of place, if her hair seemed to have been re-done. How rumpled did she look?
It was hard to say. I was drunk, my paranoia was at an all-time high, and in the past few hours I had begun the slow, painful sobering up of a man who had run out of alcohol far too late for his own good.
Megyn looked guilty. My temper flared.
She set her keys on the counter and opened the cupboard where we kept the booze.
“Wow,” she said, surveying the damage.
We didn’t keep much alcohol around – usually we just bought what we wanted and drank it – but I suspected she knew what had been in there.
She put her hand on her hip. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she began. It had the sound of a lame excuse. An insincere apology.
Or did it?
I knew I had a deranged look on my face. Megyn was reacting to it, and she wasn’t very happy about it.
It was almost as if we stood there having an argument with our faces.
“I had to wait a long time for a cab.” she said, angrily, almost as if she were snapping at something I’d said to her.
“Oh,” I said, and my tone was provocative and sarcastic.
Megyn rolled her eyes. “Anyway...”
She walked into the kitchen.
I stood up and followed her.
“That was an awfully long date,” I said. I wished I would stop talking.
“I know,” she said, pouring herself a glass of white wine that I suspected might have been a little off by then. I debated telling her.
She sniffed it.
“I think that’s expired,” I said. “It’s from like two weeks ago.”
“No.”
She took a sip.
“What is your problem?” I said.
“My problem? What is your problem?”
A pause.
I laughed. I had a feeling, as I often do when I’m about to do something stupid, that I should probably just get up and go to bed.
“My problem,” I declared instead. “Is... nothing. Why would I have a problem? My wife just spent like seven hours on a date with another guy.”
The look on Megyn’s face was priceless.
She brought the wine to her lips. “You caught me.”
This was funny, and I was about to laugh about it. Or maybe I was about to yell about it, and keep the argument going.
But I tipped slightly on the stool and fell off of it instead.
I caught myself as I started falling, but I was pretty drunk, so I made a sweep over the counter with my hand and knocked the glass I’d brought in with me onto the floor. It broke. I was still flailing around, and I managed to get back on the stool, but my hair had flung forward and I had to smooth it down.
Megyn snorted a little. “Smooth.”
“That wine is probably, actually, bad,” I assured her.
And then, thankfully, we laughed.
Megyn tossed the wine in the sink. “Okay. Do you want to talk about this or not?”
I looked at my hands. “Well, you were gone a pretty long time. I guess, yeah. I do. I want to talk about it.”
She made a face at me like, okay, Talk about it.
I was acting like an idiot.
“So what did you do?” I fired.
Megyn folded her arms across her stomach. “You know, it was just dinner. And then we had some drinks.”
My mind was just now catching up to something she had said.
“Why is it they didn’t send that car?” I practically shouted.
There was an icy pause.
I had blurted out the question without really thinking about it, and now that I did, it began to seem even more suspicious than before.
“The date was too long, the car had gone home. Or... well... it was just getting too expensive so I said send him home and I’ll take a cab.”
I raised my eyebrows. A lot of questions were surfacing in my mind about this, but I was too drunk to sort through them. I filed it away in my mind and hoped to hell I wouldn’t forget about it later.
What I really wanted to ask her was whether or not she had fucked Max Riley. I could see that she hadn’t; I could see it in her face and in her clothing.
Also, it made no sense. If she had come home later, sure.
No, this was much worse than that. She hadn’t fucked him. She had just really gotten along with him.
And him with her.
I didn’t really want to know if she had fucked him, so much as if she had thought about it.
“You want to know the truth?” Megyn said, abruptly. “I had a really nice time. I was surprised. He turned out to be a great conversationalist.” She glared at me. “That’s why I’m late.”
I made a sound through my nose.
The issue of the cab, and all the problems with that story that I couldn’t really figure out in this state, surfaced again. Why was she still talking about this?
Something was fishy.
There was another silence.
“Well,” I slurred. “That’s just... great, Meg. That’s just great.”
Megyn held one of her fingers up, and started wagging it. Not at me, just next to her arm.
So here’s the point in the story where I feel it’s fair to mention that, in case anyone is out there wondering if the rumors about redheads are true, they are.
Megyn doesn’t fly off the handle over every little thing. But she does get mad when she gets mad.
It was shaking under her skin right now.
“You,” she seethed. “You were the one who told me this was okay? You are the one who told me to do this. You are the one, if I remember correctly, who liked getting off on the idea that I would.. you know...”
I was backed into a corner, so I jumped at the only thing I could think of.
An offense.
“What?” I snapped. “Why don’t you just say it? Or can you? That you what? That you would what?”
I was regretting each word as it left my mouth. The voice of reason was screaming at me in a corner of my mind.
Shut up. Shut up, Peter.
But I just kept going.
“And what about this cab, Megyn? Why’d you take a cab?”
Now that the words were out of my mouth, they sounded preposterous. What
had I been thinking about the cab? I’d had some thought, some errant thought, and it had incriminated her in some way... but now I couldn’t remember what it was.
“The cab,” she repeated. “What about it?”
I was being irrational. I wanted to take everything back. This was supposed to have been fun.
But I also hate being wrong. I’m also no good at apologizing. I was also very drunk. So I said:
“The cab. Don’t try to tell me there isn’t something funny about that. You had a car to drive you around. And you came home in a cab.”
I had no idea what I meant by that. So I lifted my finger and pointed it at her to emphasize the words and hopefully make my point without needing any logic.
Megyn stared at me, her eyes wide. Then she shook her head and set her wine glass down. She walked out of the room quickly, into the hall, and down to the master bedroom. I heard the door slam.
“Fine,” I said, to no one at all. I stumbled into the living room and sat down in the chair.
I leaned my head back. This had all gone terribly wrong.
I started to pass out when the thought about the cab made its way to my consciousness.
Maybe she had taken a cab because they had sent away the car deliberately, so there would be no record of them violating the agreement about the rules for the... date... and that was why...
I awoke to something nudging my knee. When I opened my eyes, Megyn was standing over me, looking petulant, but holding a glass of water near my hand.
A glass of water, I realized upon looking at it, that I desperately needed.
I took it from her hand. “Thank you,” I said.
I swallowed the water in big gulps.
She was still looking down at me, her eyes narrowed into slits of dismay.
“I was an ass last night,” I said. “I had way too much to drink.”
She took the empty glass from my outstretched hand. “I’m glad you said it.” She sat down in the chair next to me. She sighed and folded her arms over her chest. “See? This is exactly why I wasn’t, you know, into-into this.”
I knew the best thing for me to do was to just shut up. I pressed my lips together just in case my mouth decided to start moving.
“Do you want to know what happened on our ‘date?’” she said.
I did nothing. I wasn’t sure where this was headed. My head, however, was throbbing, and keeping any other part of me from… er, enjoying the story. Which was probably for the best at this point.
“Well, he turned out to be really, actually, pretty nice. A pretty cool guy. I actually told him, right off the bat, that I hated the whole thing and I was just dressed up because of the pictures. And he was like, ‘cool.’”
I had somehow moved to the edge of my seat.
“So, I hate to disappoint you,” she said. “But in fact, all we ended up doing was talking about multi-universes and the San Diego Zoo. Oh, and we exchanged some good recipes. And life hacks.”
“Life hacks.”
Megyn patted me on the hand. “That’s right. Life hacks. And.. sorry, we also talked a lot about StreetRise, he had some good ideas and he’s really dedicated to the organization. I’m actually surprised how, uh… I don’t know. Informed he is. On things like accounting.”
“Accounting.”
“Yup. So there you go. That’s why I was late last night.”
She tapped her fingernails on the glass, and stood up.
She was waiting for something.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She leaned over and kissed me. “Thank you.”
She walked out of the room. “And now, we can all get on with our lives, and I have a new recipe for garlic soup.”
I stared at the wall.
In my heart, I wanted to be relieved. A normal man would be relieved that his wife had not, in fact, fucked Max Riley, the gorgeous black celebrity.
But in my heart, I also knew that I was not.
Though I was loathe to admit it to myself, I was ultimately…
Disappointed.
So, for the day at least, we went back to ordinary, hum-drum domestic life. I believed her that her date with Max Riley had been nothing more than recipe exchanges and shop talk.
Of course that’s what had happened.
And of that I remained convinced.
For about a day.
7: EAVESDROPPING
Megyn seemed to believe that our game had been something fun and experimental, like dressing up one day as a maid or using handcuffs obtained from a cheesy bridesmaid’s party. She had enjoyed the game, but she was able, evidently, to just put it away.
This infuriated me at first. It infuriated me in the same way it infuriated me that women, in general, could just take it or leave it with sex. It wasn’t this thing, coiling around inside of them all the time. Sex seemed to exist outside of them, a diversion, but not an obsession.
And then, I started to get suspicious.
There was no real basis for my suspicion, and as I write this story I realize that. All evidence pointed in the direction of this being a true story from start to finish: Megyn had gone to meet Max Riley, she found him surprisingly nice and easy to talk to, she had taken some pictures for the press release, and then she had gone home.
(The pictures were on the StreetRise website, which I spent a great deal of time looking at. Assessing every detail of the way they were standing together. Did they seem like two people who had just met? Didn’t my wife look a little more comfortable with Max Riley than she should? In one picture, they were embracing. It was the kind of photo-shoot, we’re-all-friends embrace that people use for… well, just this sort of occasion. But I spent hours envisioning it as something else, staring at the big, veined hands of the actor, who had placed one of them on my wife’s waist, right above her hip bone. She was leaning in to him in the photo, so her hip bone would be right under his palm, pressing against her dress, and he probably felt the ridge of her beige lingerie, a hint of the small bumps of lace.)
I wasn’t able to just leave it at that, though.
I had to pick at it, until I got some scrap of something to give me a little thrill, a little flutter of jealousy. I wasn’t ready to be done.
“So, when you met him, was he shorter than you imagined?” I said casually, my eyes on my phone as though I didn’t really care about the answer.
This was at breakfast time, and the kids were in the room with us.
So inappropriate.
Megyn was busy frying something on the stove. “Who?” she said.
I judged her question, the tone of it, whether it seemed believably innocent enough. Was she pretending she wasn’t thinking about him all the time, and so when I asked a question out of the blue she really didn’t know who I was talking about?
“Max,” I said. “Riley. Was he shorter than you expected? I hear a lot of movie stars are.”
This was, of course, an idiotic question and I knew it. Not only did I know it because Max Riley clearly towered all over everyone in movies, but because he had almost been recruited to the NBA, and because I had looked the information up myself when Megyn had won the date with him.
Which is why, probably, Megyn didn’t answer, and just rolled her eyes as she walked past me with pancakes on plates.
But I didn’t stop there.
“So, when you met him,” I asked, as she was rinsing her hair in the shower another day, “you weren’t attracted to him at all? Not even a little bit?”
Megyn kept her eyes closed and sighed audibly over the sound of the shower. “I didn’t say that.”
“So you were attracted to him?”
Megyn didn’t answer for bit.
“Do you remember,” she said snarkily, “that time you got pulled over by a female cop?”
This was a reference to a time when I had acted like a fucking idiot because a female cop, who had been really hot to boot, had pulled us over.
It was a good answer. I did not want to revisit tha
t scene.
Megyn effectively shut down all questions of this type, which should have struck me as normal. I should have become more convinced of her fidelity and not less so.
I decided, instead, to believe that it was all part of an elaborate act.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Well, scratch that: I wanted to know her true feelings. Or so I thought. I wanted to feel her loyalty to me, and her level of attraction to Max Riley, and weigh for myself whether or not she was attracted to him enough to let him fuck her senseless.
And maybe everything would have ended there, with me probing her with stupid questions and then losing hope.
Except I also began to kind of spy on her in the hopes of getting some juicy tidbit, some insight into her mind.
Which in the end, I did.
I’m not sure why I did it.
We might be the last people on earth to have a land line. Or maybe it’s an age thing, a function of having kids, or something like that. I think Megyn had wanted it because she wanted access to 911 “no matter what.”
No one ever called the land line, because we gave everyone our cell numbers.
Or at least, that’s how I remembered things being before this whole Max Riley thing.
And then it seemed to me that the land line was ringing all the time.
And then it seemed to me that Megyn was answering it all the time.
It may be important to say at this point that part of what fueled my next preposterous idea is that I had broken into Megyn’s cell and discovered absolutely nothing fishy going on.
So land line it was, as little sense as that might make. I became convinced that my wife had given out her home phone number.
To Max Riley.
To call her at dinner time.
But I went even further into the realm of stupidity than this:
Megyn For The Win: A Romantic Hotwife Novel Page 10