“Pant!” Val starts to giggle.
“That’s it, pant.” I can’t help laughing myself. It’s all too absurd.
“Hey,” says Val, “maybe the dog’s the one straying.”
I should keep out of it. I should. I can’t. “Dogs are such dogs.”
“No!” Val howls. “Dogs are such men!”
“Oh, forget it!” Vickie starts crying again, with gusto. “This is why I never see you, Val. This is why I hate to tell you anything personal. You have no idea the stress I’m under right now. No idea!” She struggles to free herself from her chair, which is wedged between our table and the back of the woman behind her, and pulls an overnight bag I hadn’t noticed before out from under her seat. “I’ll wait for my train on the platform.”
I realize how heartless I’ve been acting. Val must feel equally bad, because she grabs her sister’s mascara-and-cashmere-covered wrist. “Where are you going?” She sounds contrite.
“To Greenwich,” Vickie says. “I want Mother and Daddy.”
“Don’t you think you ought to stick around here and—Iris, how do you say it?—work on your marriage?”
“Work on your marriage,” I repeat somberly.
“No.” Vickie starts to gather up the rest of her packages. Not an easy feat, since the lot of them is taking up as much cubic footage as my entire apartment. The couple at the table next to us ducks to avoid being B-headed by a Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bag. “I should hire myself a detective to catch him in the act, and then use the evidence to stick him for a big, fat divorce settlement.”
I could tell her, because I know, that she’s oversimplifying things. In the no-fault-community-property-divorce state of California, for example, your assets get divided right down the middle, regardless of who did what to whom, unless you were cynical enough to draw up a prenuptial agreement. I could tell her, but I keep my mouth shut.
“Here’s a plan!” Val pipes up. “While you’re gone, want me to keep an eye on him? I could follow him around and see where he goes. I could be your scheming lookalike hiding in the bushes!”
“That’s brilliant, Val. He’ll never notice you. Make sure you wear that exact outfit.”
Maybe Val hasn’t been exaggerating about her twin. Whether or not Steve is the cad Vickie seems to think he is, he can’t have it easy being married to her. Still, I have a real problem with cheaters. I know exactly what infidelity can do to a person.
Then it comes to me in a Joan of Arc moment, like a celestial omen from Grand Central’s soaring signs-of-the-zodiac ceiling. I have no job and nothing to do. I have no social life. I barely have a love life. I have exactly one friend in this city: Val. And I’m broke. “Vickie!” I practically shout. “Hire me to do it!”
In the weeks to come, the foolishness of this idea will become so clear I’ll wonder why some sort of actual winged messenger didn’t appear—to grab me and smack some sense into me. At the moment, with a little alcohol in my system, and a thousand commuters bustling to and fro on the floor below, I’m picturing myself in an office with a frosted-glass door, smartly dressed in a suit (peplum, shoulder pads, brooch), feet up on my circa 1945 standard-issue metal desk, answering my old-fashioned dial phone: “Iris Hedge, dogcatcher.” For some reason, the image is in black-and-white.
Val, too, seems to have caught the fever. “Iris would be perfect! See how unobtrusive she is? She looks exactly like every other woman in America! She could follow him around all day, and he’d never notice.”
“She’s right,” I add. “Just tell me when to come over in the morning. In one day, you’ll know whether he’s telling the truth or not.”
Vickie wrinkles her nose. “How?”
“Come on. Think about it.” Val is Hayes Heeley’s youth expert, specializing in focus groups for teenagers. Right now she is using exactly the same casually jolly voice I’ve heard her use while passing around samples of pimple cream to a roomful of sulky eighth-grade goths. “She waits for him to come out of the building. She follows behind him on his, you know, morning rounds. If he is going running, then she’ll just get in her workout for the day. If he’s not, you’ll have your answer, once and for all.”
An incomprehensible message, the departure of the something-o’clock train to Staticville on track mumble, crackles over Grand Central’s public address system. Vickie consults her Rolex. “That’s my train.”
“I have to go, too.” With no small amount of difficulty, Val pushes back her chair. “You don’t mind cutting this short, do you, Iris? I’m meeting someone. He’s a musician. Really cute. We met on the subway.”
“You did not.” Vickie looks horrified. “He could be anyone! What do you know about him?”
“That he gets on at Fourteenth Street and has great tattoos,” Val says. “And his name is Ian, or Liam—something. Anyway I only just met him this morning.”
“Oh, my god! And you’re going out with him already? Don’t you know no man will ever marry you if you aren’t at least a little hard to get?”
“I have no intention of being hard to get,” Val says.
I’m only half paying attention. I’m swaying slightly from the beer, looking past the twins at the magnificent four-sided brass clock at the top of the Grand Central information booth. “Five thirty-six,” it reads. I’m thinking, But Val, you invited me to happy hour. I’m thinking I didn’t get to talk about my day.
Val and Vickie stand up and eye each other warily: opponents trying to get away with not shaking hands after the big grudge match. In the end, Val avoids the issue by patting her sister’s shopping bags instead of her sister. “Say hi to Mom and Dad.”
“Okay.” Vickie turns to me. “Take care.”
“Yes, right. You, too.” No spy assignment. So much for my new calling.
“I’ll talk to you soon,” Val promises me as she (thank goodness) settles the bill, and we all descend the stairs into the crowd, and the opposite twins head back to their opposite lives. For a moment I linger in the middle of the terminal, wondering what to do with myself, and am hit with the irrational urge to return to the bar, blow my future unemployment money on booze, and spend the night having gymnastic sex with a stranger off the six fifteen. Simultaneously, I am aware that what the evening really has in store for me is leftover sesame noodles from Szechuan Palace and, if the gods are smiling, a movie on TV I haven’t already seen. I wonder if I’ll have to cancel the cable.
“Iris!”
It’s Vickie, hurrying back over from the doorway to track fourteen, shopping-bag handles looped over every inch of both of her arms. She glances nervously back toward the platform. The train must be close to leaving. “Go ahead,” she calls over the din of the crowd. “Tomorrow morning. The address is Twelve Seventy-five Lexington, between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth. He always leaves by seven sharp. You can hide across the street and follow him.” She waits, tapping her foot the way Val, impatient for drinks, was tapping her finger on our table earlier. “Okay?”
Sure, except I’ve never met her husband and have no idea what he looks like. “Can you give me a physical description?” I’m so busy being pleased with myself at “physical description” that when Vickie shifts her bags, works a hand into her purse, extracts a credit card, and holds it up to my face, it takes me a moment to understand she’s showing me her husband’s postage-stamp-size antifraud mug shot on the front. “Steven Sokolov,” the card says. I lean forward and study Steve’s tiny face: brown hair, brown eyes—your basic aging frat boy.
Vickie slides the card back into her purse, readjusts her packages, and starts back toward the train.
“Wait!”
She whirls back around, looking agitated.
“Height? Weight? Clothing? Unusual birthmarks?” I don’t want her to miss the train, but, according to the New York State Department of Labor, it’s important to gather the correct equipment for my job toolbox.
Vickie edges backward. “About five eleven, one-eighty. No birthmarks. Shirt, shorts
—you know, jogging attire. He’ll be with a Parson Russell terrier. It’s really, really time for me to go.” She backs up a few more steps toward the platform doorway.
“Wait! What’s a Parson Russell terrier?”
“For heaven’s sake. A Jack Russell terrier. Same thing. All right?”
“Got it. Do you want me to call you afterward, or . . . ?”
She rips off a piece of the striped Bendel’s bag, again reaches into her purse, pulls out a Tiffany pen, scribbles a 917 cell phone number on the back of the piece of bag, and practically throws it at me. I’m impressed at Vickie’s ability to manage this cumbersome array of possessions while simultaneously walking in reverse and making me feel as if she’s my superior. “What’s your fee?”
“What?”
“Your fee. What you charge.”
My fee? Good question. She’s about to break into a run, so it might be smart to pin her down first. What would one charge for this kind of service?
“We’ll talk about it later!” Vickie shouts, and runs for the train.
Cognitive dissonance. That’s the official psychological term for what happens when you find yourself in a situation that completely contradicts the situation you were expecting, and your brain refuses to accept it.
For instance, you’re in Grand Central to meet a friend, and get her mixed up with her twin sister.
Or, on your birthday, at the out-of-the-way restaurant where your sweetheart has taken you for a quiet dinner for two, you bump into someone you know: your boss, or a friend you made in the Blue Jay cabin at Camp Sequoia when you were eleven. Your eyes take in this out-of-context character, and your brain thinks, Pat Sweeney at La Ventana the same night as us? Small world! In walks someone else. Aunt Rose, too? Spooky! Only in the face of overwhelming evidence—
like fifty people jumping out and yelling, “Surprise!”—does your brain finally make the connection.
Or maybe, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day, you’re somewhere arbitrary—perhaps in a parking lot, walking back to the car after an appointment. Someone you love, someone you trust more than anyone, could be no more than a few feet away in an illicit embrace. But you’re not expecting to see this person, so the scene doesn’t register, and you walk on by. Cognitive dissonance is just another way of saying it takes some time to come to terms when a person you thought you knew turns out to be somebody else entirely. My mother once felt moved to describe it, “Just as Mother Nature hates a vacuum, human nature hates a discrepancy.”
This is what I ponder on my long walk home from happy hour. Any other day I would have taken a taxi without a second thought, but my new econo-life has me spending a lot of time—the one thing I suddenly have in abundance—performing what my “friend” Kevin would call cost-benefit analysis. Let’s see. A cab from Grand Central to my brownstone at Seventy-sixth and Columbus equals about what I make an hour, based on my new state-subsidized paycheck—about an eighth of what I was bringing in at Hayes Heeley. There’s the subway, but ten subway rides not taken equals one meal—two if I stretch the leftovers. Over the past two days everything but my rent has begun to seem a frivolous waste of resources. Truthfully, my rent has always seemed a frivolous waste of resources, but Val assures me that after enough time in New York it feels normal to spend half your take-home pay on a “cozy” studio with a parked-cars view and a kitchen renovated in seventies reject materials.
Michelle, my erstwhile boss and head of the qualitative-research department at Hayes Heeley, promised to send a check for two weeks’ severance in a week or two, and I’ve got six months of medical insurance, which seemed pretty good at first, considering I wasn’t there that long. (“Guilt money,” Val called it when I told her. “You should have cried. They would have started throwing hundred-dollar bills at you.”) I can also count on twenty-six weeks on the dole while searching for a new job. I’m certain I’ll land one before the money runs out. Fairly certain.
The truth is, we responsible career-girl types know we’re supposed to have a cushion of savings, equal to six months’ salary, specifically earmarked for times like these. I remember back in high school reading that savvy financial tip in Cosmopolitan, along with the more interesting advice about how to attract a man at the office by ever so subtly crossing and recrossing your panty-hosed legs: “The faint whisper of nylon on nylon will drive him wild!”
I never imagined I’d end up in a time like this.
“My roots are here. In Los Angeles,” I tried to explain to Michelle Heeley, after she phoned me at my old firm in Brentwood one day out of nowhere with what she called “a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity.” Despite my protests, she insisted on flying me to New York for an interview. “I couldn’t think of leaving,” I told her again in person a week later. “My whole life is in California.”
Michelle wouldn’t take no for an answer, ticking off arguments on fingers laden with gems so large they looked edible. “It’s time you moved out of recruiting. It’s a dead end.” She paused to move the clasp of her necklace from her throat to the back of her neck. “You’d have a much better future as a focus-group moderator. And as you know, no firm offers a better pedigree than Hayes Heeley.”
Michelle was right: I did want something more. For seven years, I’d been slogging through data banks of names and numbers and making phone calls. Hello, Kimberly Anne Smith? Are you between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four? Do you purchase mass-market cosmetics? Would you describe yourself as having dry, oily, or combination skin? Dry, you say? Would you like to take part in a two-hour discussion about moisturizer?
I took the job and moved, telling myself it would help my career and make me rich at the same time.
On my way to Midtown the first day, I pulled a wad of bills from the ATM, paid for a MetroCard for the subway, a taxi after I couldn’t decipher the subway map, a cup of coffee, a bagel, a copy of the New York Post, a box of Band-Aids to protect me from my new pumps, and a few other assorted sundries. By the time I arrived at the office, I’d spent every last cent. Val calls this the ten-bucks-a-block rule, and until now I’ve coped by stopping every ten blocks at the ATM—a strategy that, clearly, will no longer work.
I meditate on all this for thirty blocks, up Madison Avenue, through Central Park, and on up Columbus. It keeps my mind off both the developing blister on my left heel and the nagging little voice in my head insisting the real reason I took the position was, in fact, to run away from my life. Shush, I tell it. Following Vickie’s husband will keep me occupied until I can figure out what to do next.
I’m in the front hallway of my brownstone, about to unlock my mailbox, when I hear the phone start to ring inside my first-floor apartment. I have time only to grab a FedEx envelope addressed to me off the table in the foyer before bursting through my apartment door and catching the phone on the fourth ring, just as the machine is about to pick up. Maybe it’s Val; her date canceled and now she can come over. Bad girl, Iris, that’s unsportsmanlike. Maybe Kevin, my friend-with-benefits? I wasn’t expecting to hear from him until tomorrow night but could use the company, not to mention the benefits.
“It’s me,” a woman says.
There’s no one in the room, but I glance around anyway: Somebody, help! No luck. I frisbee the FedEx envelope onto my bed, bend to remove my belligerent shoe, limp across the hardwood floor into the two-foot-by-three-foot bathroom to rummage under the doll-size sink. “Joy,” I say into the receiver. The two beers have done nothing for my verbal skills, even with a thirty-block walk to help sober me up, but on the one or two occasions a year when I accidentally answer one of my mother’s phone calls, she does most of the talking anyway.
“You’re in psychic pain,” she says.
I locate a Band-Aid, put it on, and straighten up, examining the tiny crinkles under my eyes in the five-by-seven mirror over my bathroom sink. It occurs to me that I haven’t seen myself completely since moving here, except reflected in the odd shop window.
“I’m
sensing negative energy,” Joy continues. “What are you doing in New York? I called your house, and Teddy said you’d moved out.”
I’m going to kill him. My estranged husband, aspiring voice-over artist, eternal pursuer of the big break that never materializes, can barely remember to bring home a carton of milk, take out the garbage, or pay the water bill. He spent the month before I left camping out on a succession of actor-friends’ sofas and twice had to call me because he’d forgotten at whose place he was scheduled to stay when. Now, having settled back into our house, he’s efficient enough not only to recall where to find the address book but also to accurately relay my new contact information to Joy.
I back out of the bathroom and into the main apartment, where my bedroom furniture, after years of having its own space to itself, now rubs joinery with my living room furniture: The queen-size bed in which Teddy and I slept is next to the overstuffed armchair we’d squish into to read the Los Angeles Times; my nightstand, in its current dual role as nightstand/
mail table, sits on the rug that was our favorite living-room spot for eating pizza and watching movies. I sit on the bed next to the FedEx envelope and suddenly realize what it is: the court document saying my divorce is on track and will be final in six months, unless one of us tells our lawyer otherwise. I pull on the tab to split open the cardboard sleeve and peek in at the paper on top: “Interlocutory Decree,” it affirms in fancy, legal-document lettering. “It’s been a strange few months,” is all I can think of to say to my mother.
“The candle told me. I came through the meditation room just now and found that the purple taper had wilted. The midday sun must have been unbearable. It’s in its holder, slumped over onto the offering table. I thought, It’s trying to tell me something.”
It's About Your Husband Page 2