This, of course, had the instant effect of making me paranoid about living up to expectations. “I wouldn’t add extra bandwidth just yet.”
He laughed, asked me a bunch of questions, told me he was going to have Charlotte be the editor for the time being, and asked if I had an agent. We talked about how often I would update, and then he asked if I thought I could have the first one done by the end of next week.
Since the hurdles were all mental, a week, six months, basically made no difference. I told him that would be fine.
“Who was that?” my mother asked when I got off the phone.
“No one.” There was no way I was ready to discuss this with her just yet.
“The tone of your voice sounded very professional.” She looked both suspicious and interested; her Cassie-needs-a-life antennae were quivering. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to hoard this for a while. “Are you talking work with someone?”
“My pimp,” I told her and went outside to play soccer with the boys.
All in all, it was a relief to get in the car on Sunday morning. The boys were subdued. I didn’t blame them, I was too. For the first time, the dissolution of my marriage was starting to feel very, very real. And every time I thought about blogging, I got this little half spark in my stomach. I was terrified of what it meant in terms of leaving things behind, but also, for the first time, a little enticed by the idea of taking a step forward.
Jared was asleep by the Massachusetts-Connecticut border. “Mom?” Noah said, around Guilford. “Will Daddy be home when we get there?”
“I doubt it very much, honey.” I said it as gently as I could.
“Where is he? Is he coming back?”
I hesitated only briefly. “I don’t know,” I admitted.
“How could you not know?”
“I know this sounds strange, honey, but he decided he didn’t want to share with us where he was going.”
“Are you getting divorced?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh.”
When I glanced in the rearview mirror, he was looking out the window, his face closed. “Do you want to talk more?”
“No.”
By Westchester he was asleep too. The rage was coming up in me, creeping up my legs into my stomach. It was so powerful that I was almost afraid of it. I could understand, maybe for the first time in my life, in a real way, how people do things, violent, hateful, angry things that can never be taken back.
When it came to Rick’s actions so far I’d been able to avoid looking directly into them, adding some maybes and some mitigating factors that made things not completely black and white. But not showing up for the boys when he’d said he would, there was no other way to see this. For the first time since the night he’d left, I honestly wasn’t sure I would take him back.
“So guess what the new term for the blogging world intelligentsia is,” Randy said on the phone the next morning.
I’d been lugging a headache around since about two-thirty the previous Thursday. The fury that had come on in the car still glowed, but instead of filling me with energy and fire it felt like it was sucking the last vestiges of energy and life out of me. “Dunno. And I’m too miserable to make any oxymoron jokes.”
“Blogerati! I’ve been reading up.”
“Ran”—I grabbed my now-cold coffee with its film of half-and-half and took a gulp—“any particular reason you felt compelled to tell me that?”
“Just for that I hope you get blogstipation.” She paused, then added, helpfully, “That’s when you can’t think of anything to blog about.”
“Thanks. I didn’t ask.”
“I know. I just didn’t care that you didn’t ask. Did you hear from him?”
“There was a message on the answering machine saying he was really sorry, he ran into travel difficulties and would call soon. Don’t say it, OK?”
“ ’K. Did you get the number off caller ID?”
“I’m not sure. There was so much junk on the answering machine and some hang-ups, it’s hard to tell what number’s what. I wrote them all down, though.”
“Bring them when you meet me at Starbucks after dropoff this morning. I’ll have my secretary call down the list and see if she gets anything.”
“I don’t do Starbucks any more.”
“See you there at nine-thirty.” She hung up.
The kids tore in and we began the usual round of foraging for lost items, slapping together forgotten homework, bargaining over breakfast, and arguing over whether Jared (blue stitching) was wearing Noah’s (grey stitching) socks.
“Mom, why can’t we call Daddy or IM him?” Noah said. “How come only he can call us?” He stopped ignoring his toast and gave it a vicious poke. “I don’t get it.”
I straightened up from retrieving Jared’s pajama bottoms from under the table and looked at him. He hadn’t wanted to talk about things last night. He, they, deserved so much better than this. “I don’t know, honey, I really don’t. I think maybe the best thing would be to ask Daddy that yourself the next time he calls.”
“He never talks about anything like that.” He took a kick at a chair, and I didn’t say anything. “He just asks about school and soccer and stuff and says how he’s working really hard and can’t wait to see us but that he needs to be where he is right now. I don’t know what that means and he doesn’t answer any questions. Like when I asked you if you were getting a divorce and you said you didn’t know, he always just says, no, why would you think that? and then says he has to go.”
“Why hasn’t he called, Mommy?” Jared came through the kitchen door, his eyes swimming.
“He did leave that message on the answering machine while we were at Grandma’s,” I pointed out. I hated that I was defending Rick, but what the fuck was I supposed to do? It was one of the things that was starting to edge me over to rage—it wasn’t enough that he was choosing to hurt our sons; he was forcing me to do his dirty work for him.
“How come he didn’t call on your cell when we were at Grandma’s instead of leaving a message here?” Noah asked. “Didn’t he care where we were?”
“I don’t know, honey.” It was taking everything I had not to cry.
“He doesn’t love us,” Noah said, not tearfully now, an angry statement of fact.
I hugged him. “He does love you guys. No matter what, we both do.” I really hoped I wasn’t lying. I couldn’t imagine, no matter what, that I was.
“You know what’s funny?” Jared asked.
Not much.
“Strange funny or funny funny?” Noah asked. I figured he was hoping for funny funny. I know I was.
“Strange funny. He says he has no BlackBerry now because he says he doesn’t like them anymore and they don’t always work.”
“He’s lying,” Noah said.
“Daddy hates lying.” Jared looked aghast.
“BlackBerrys always work.” Noah sounded as confident as someone imparting an indisputable truth would, and he was. Skiing in the Alps and Colorado, on the beach in Thailand, in tavernas on a Greek island, by the Redwoods in California, through the thickest Nantucket fog, you name it, the fucking BlackBerry had not only worked but worked aggressively. “Always.”
“Mommy?” Jared had his hand in his backpack as he turned to me. “Is that true? Is Daddy—ugh!” And then we all got distracted by his discovery that sticking a half-drunk milk box in his backpack, forgetting about it, and leaving it over a four-day weekend was not the most awesome idea.
When I got back from dropping them at school, all I really wanted was to pull the shades and crawl under the two down duvets it currently took to thaw me out. I dialed Randy’s cell. “Why don’t you come here?”
“Agoraphobia is being whispered about in the speed-walking-moms group.”
“It’s not agoraphobia. I can go out any time I want. I just don’t want to.”
“Time to bite the bullet and have coffee in a public place,” she pressed. “Jen’s worried
about you. She says rumor has you crying in the frozen food aisle at D’Agostino’s and that you’re ducking her calls.”
“They were out of mini pizza bagels. And I am ducking her calls.”
“Cassie. Your husband’s been gone nearly two months and you haven’t even told one of your best friends. Although considering you haven’t told your own children—”
“I’m trying my best to answer them, Randy.” I sounded shrill. Pissed off. And I knew it wasn’t at her. “But what am I supposed to tell them? I don’t even understand it. And what’s better for them? To be told the honest version of what I do know when it contains some pretty unpalatable truths about their father? If you know the answer to that, please share, because I’m not so sure.”
“I don’t know, Cass. I was trying to be funny, but it wasn’t. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s OK, Ran. It’s an impossible situation. Besides”—my attempt to lighten things up—“if I’m going to be a mystery blogger, I have to be a mystery.”
“Surely not to Jen?”
“No, but it’s hard. Is there anything more aggressively normal than a couple of committed, nuclear-family-raising lesbians?”
Randy laughed. “She already knows that Rhonda Mitchell-Guertzmeier’s nanny saw you buying the mini pizza bagels.”
“This is exactly what I was afraid of. Everyone’s going to be staring into my grocery cart while I try in vain to hide the Double Stuff Oreos behind the organic apples and saying, Poor Cassie, poor kids in that superior thank-God-it’s-not-us-so-let’s-gossip-about-it-and-go-right-on-only-feeding-our-kids-those-organic-Newman’s-Own-fake-Oreos way. Well, frankly I think those Newman’s Own things suck. I’ll take an Oreo any day. Next they’ll be talking about my fake boobs.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“No,” I said sulkily. “It’s just that they all talk about Nancy Bosworth’s.”
“Oh.” She was quiet for a second. “To be fair, Nancy does kind of display those puppies. Why are you so sure everyone’s going to pity you?”
“Because I pitied Nancy and others of her ilk—”
“‘Of her ilk’? What does that mean?”
“Women whose husbands leave them,” I admitted. “I’m not proud of it, Ran. It’s one of my uglier traits, looking not so far back. And”—even now it was hard to say—“I know all about the pity thing.” Those poor Lorimer-Traske kids. How many times had I heard it before I’d decided to make sure I’d never hear it again? I’d learned early that if you don’t look weak or scared, no one ever needs to know you feel weak or scared. I’d become a master at presenting exactly the right outward appearance by the time I was ten, and I wasn’t about to let that go now.
“Jen might feel some anger on your behalf, I know I do, but that’s not the same as pity.”
“Is this coffee an intervention?”
“It can be.” That sounded ominous. “I know what he’s done defies belief, Cass, but you’re starting to scare me. Have you ever watched anyone fade away?”
“Just my mother.” I didn’t know where the words had come from, didn’t remember watching it, but as soon as I’d said it, I knew it was true. Even though it seemed like it now, her transformation from glossy, privileged, and successful to bitter and defensive hadn’t happened overnight. I sighed. I knew I wasn’t going to win this one and for my own good probably needed not to. “I just have to walk the dog again first.”
“Maybe,” Randy suggested, “you should FedEx the dog to Rick. Oh, right. You need an address for FedEx.”
I laughed. What else could I do? “You’re a hateful woman.”
“Don’t I know it. Be at Starbucks in an hour.”
When I walked in, Jen got up and hugged me, kind of like the way you hug someone who’s just been given a terminal diagnosis; like she was afraid to send cancer cells racing to new tumor sites.
Randy glanced at the counter. “It’s Double I.” (Incompetent Ivan.) “We’ll be waiting all day for him to get the order right. Assuming he’s having a good morning.”
“Do you think you could manage not to say that to him this time?” Jen worried that he secretly spat in our cups because Randy tormented him. “On second thought, you guys sit down, I’ll get the coffee.” She warmed up her most soothing smile.
Randy and I staked out a table. I passed her the list of numbers from the caller ID. “I crossed out all the ones I could identify.”
As she put it in her bag, I saw her glance at a couple with a very new baby. The woman still had that dazed look, and the man was pushing the stroller of the moment, a red Bugaboo. “I never had a Bugaboo,” she said. “It’s like there’s a whole new generation of parents. Maclarens might as well not even exist anymore.”
She was right. Even our strollers had become obsolete. It made me feel like all those years of marriage and family were just…gone. Like some fragile and elaborate sand castle, flattened by a rogue wave. “I’m going to be one of those old women”—I understood this was a total non sequitur—“who tells strangers on the crosstown bus about my bunions. If I even go out. I could end up hanging around in my bathrobe waiting to get my jollies by cornering the mail carrier.”
Randy stopped looking at the stroller. “You have bunions?”
“The point,” I said, glancing at Jen; Double I was smiling back at her, so I assumed our lattes were safe, “is the kind of sad, pathetic life I’m going to lead.”
“And you were thinking Rick was all that stood between you and that?”
Not for the first time, I looked at Randy and wondered how anyone who looked so angelic could say stuff like that. Actually, I knew the answer—it was because of how she looked. One too many people in her life had underestimated her one too many times based on nothing more than that. “How come there’s no one I’m close to who’s nice?”
“Maybe that says something about you,” she said, “who you choose. No one’s stopping you from spending your days with nicer people. And anyway, Jen’s nice.”
“I’m what?” Jen came over to the table and handed us cups.
“Nice,” I said.
She smoothed her Chanel jacket over her Pilates-sculpted hips and sat down. “Someone has to be.”
We whiled away a few minutes discussing the fact that Jen’s daughter, Emily, was in Theresa Stinson’s class and was working on the assignment requiring thirty-six yellow pegs in descending size, manufactured on the West Coast of Bali by a yurt-dwelling hermit, and, oh, by the way, native dress of the ancient Sri Lankan tribe we’re studying would be nice for the five-page oral presentation segment.
“Noah never even mentioned the thing until the night before it was due. Too late for me to go to Bali. I had to make pegs out of old chopsticks from Chinese food delivery and he had points deducted because the Farrow & Ball yellow I had wasn’t authentic enough and wasn’t completely dry and it stained Theresa’s new poly/cotton blend Talbots pants suit.”
“The night before it was due? First I heard was when I got the note that Owen hadn’t completed it.” Randy still looked annoyed.
“Thankfully the hermit FedExes now. For a hefty fee,” Jen said. “Poppy Strauss already has the yellow pegs because Betsy, showing her usual forethought, bought them during their educational visit to the hermit last summer. And Poppy made her own costume from authentic fabric. After touch typing her oral presentation.”
“Ah,” Randy took a drink of her coffee. “But that, Jen, is because Poppy’s—”
“—very independent,” Jen finished.
Betsy only mentioned that about fifty or sixty times a week.
“She can handle it,” Randy added Betsy’s other mantra.
“We probably shouldn’t be making fun of a seven-year-old,” Jen said. “Talk about visiting the sins of the fathers.”
“Mothers.” I looked at Jen. “You can’t make everything patriarchal just because you’re a lesbian.”
She laughed.
This conversation was almost l
ulling me into believing my life was normal. At moments like this it was like my mind could shut out the realities. I’d be coasting along in pretty much the same life I’d always had until I hit a bump: remembering Noah’s eyes in the rearview mirror yesterday, Jared’s hand, looking for mine at the Thanksgiving dinner table, the blog that was due at the end of the week, it would wash over me, each time bringing with it a wave of horror and desperation—Rick, the man I’d loved and trusted and believed I would spend my life with, had abandoned us.
Jen was looking at me. “I’m so sorry, Cass. How are you?”
Ugh. I hated that she needed that inflection. “Fine. Good.”
“Oh, come on.” Randy didn’t even try to hide her exasperation. “You are not fine or good.” To Jen: “She’s not fine. She’s not good.”
“I’m sorry, Cass.” Jen ignored Randy. “I’m shocked. I can’t believe Rick would do something like this. And Barry Manilow?”
Is there anyone else on earth who starts sniffling at those two words? If so, I’d like to meet them. Maybe we could start a support group. Jen reached into her Prada bag and handed me a tissue. I dabbed my eyes. “Making fun of a seven-year-old seems kinder than making me talk about this.”
“We were actually making fun of the seven-year-old’s forty-year-old mother,” Randy reminded me.
“Betsy means well,” I sniffled.
Randy looked at me over her cup. “Betsy is one of the Oreo gossipers you were so bummed out by before. The big cheese of Oreo gossipers.”
“Is this some committee I don’t know about?” Jen asked.
“No,” I told her, “this is stay tuned for today’s installment of the good moms versus the bad moms. I’ll shortly be crossing over to bad, courtesy of Rick.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jen sighed. “It’s so confusing. I never know which side I’m on.”
I looked at Jen, in her Chanel suit and huge diamond earrings. She was the kind of mom who never raised her voice to her children, always actively listened, boosted their self-esteem without overdoing it, fed them a one hundred percent organic diet, and read them Shakespeare in the womb. If she didn’t know where she fit, what was the hope for me? “You look pretty good to me,” I said. “How many committees are you doing this year?”
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