It's About Your Husband

by Lauren Lipton

  “Probably,” I say. “Something like ‘Please, close the curtains.’”

  “Iris, the rest of the candles were fine. Only this one had wilted. It is purple, purple as in irises. It symbolizes awareness. I sense that you are bowed under a psychic burden. Perhaps you’d like me to send you an awareness candle?”

  On the street there’s a sudden commotion of honking horns. I hold the receiver between my ear and shoulder, open the window, and look out to see two women in business suits, screaming at each other: “It’s mine!” “I had it first!” They have unearthed a cache of discarded clothing from one of a dozen black plastic garbage bags heaped on the sidewalk and are blocking the street, playing tug-of-war with what appears to be a men’s blazer, each holding a sleeve.

  I feel it coming on: the tidal wave of loneliness and desolation that not even happy hour and flippant banter and an amusing potential new career can stave off. And I’m tired. Exhausted, honestly. Ready to cry and then sleep for a hundred years. It’s been like this since I got to New York: I feel as if I’m handling things, and then get blindsided by a sadness so deep and wide I could drown in it.

  I’m certainly in no mood for Joy. I’ll call her some other time, I tell her.

  We both know full well I won’t, but she lets my excuse go by. “Namaste, then, Iris. That is a yogic word meaning, ‘I honor the divine energy within you.’”

  But even after I hang up and set the alarm for my early wake-up call and crawl into bed with a take-out carton and the remote, I’m up for most of the night listening to the swoosh of passing traffic, keening sirens, people outside my window on their way home from restaurants and friends’ apartments. Thinking, too. A little about tomorrow’s assignment, a lot more about my money problems. But mostly reliving a scene that has haunted me far too often. It’s an overcast February day in the San Fernando Valley. Fog-shrouded sun shines into my burning eyes. I’m desperate to protect myself from the glare and bury my face in the crook of my arm. What if I had kept it there? What if I hadn’t looked up? I wonder as the hours tick by. What would life be like now?

  As with so many nights, it’s the last thing I remember thinking before finally falling asleep.

  TWO

  When the alarm rings at the dawn’s early light, I get out of bed, wash my face, consider what a real spy would wear for the morning’s errand, and, for perhaps the first time in my life, feel thankful for my inconspicuousness. Val is right: I do look like every other woman in America—at least, every other woman in my demographic subgroup. This is not low self-esteem but an objective fact. According to research, the average college-educated, thirty-to-thirty-five-year-old white female is five feet four and a size eight, at 140 pounds, with brown hair past her shoulders, and brown eyes. That is me except that, perhaps as compensation for a too-round face, a pasty complexion, short legs, and a tendency to blush at the slightest provocation, I got genetically lucky in the dress-size lottery. Usually I’m about twenty pounds lighter than the average. Right now the divorce diet—the continually nervous stomach and utter lack of appetite brought on by my split with Teddy—has left me twenty-five pounds lighter.

  As a corollary to this first point, despite what Val said yesterday about my getting in my morning workout, I do not work out. I have taken my share of spinning classes and all that and eventually will need to start going more often. For now my feeling is, if you don’t have to, why?

  Finally, freshman year at Pomona, my friend Audrey started a contest among some of the girls in our dorm. She called it T-shirt hunting, and the object was, the first time you slept with somebody, you had to steal one of his shirts as proof. Immature, yes, but the game evolved into a fiercely fought dorm-wide competition. In the end, I scored somewhere on the low side. I amassed more shirts than Evie, who majored in organic chemistry and had plenty of it with her lab partner, Doug Amato; she met him the first week of school, married him the week after graduation, and is now a mom in Palmdale. And far fewer than Jadey, who majored in art history and, last any of us heard, was bartending in the Turks and Caicos Islands. As for Audrey, she vanished quickly, but her influence remained. It’s embarrassing, but for years after graduation I kept stealing men’s shirts out of habit.

  This is all a very long way of saying that, as a corollary to points one through three, my choice of workout clothes this morning is limited to a single pair of sweatpants and a collection of ancient, stolen T-shirts. I can’t have gotten more than an hour or so of sleep, but after drinking three cups of coffee and slipping into my chic sportswear ensemble, I’m remarkably upbeat. Maybe it’s the idea of embarking on a new adventure, but I’m full of energy and ready to unearth what Mr. Steven Sokolov is doing behind his wife’s back. I secretly suspect he’s up to no good and won’t be jogging today. So I’m bringing my wallet and keys and my sunglasses for comfort, and a windbreaker in case it’s cold. I gather everything together and scamper out my apartment door—right into the bicycle my downstairs neighbor, who lives directly beneath me in what he probably calls the garden apartment but which is really the basement apartment, keeps chained to the hallway staircase. One of these days someone’s going to trip over that thing and break a bone, and with my luck, that someone will be me. It does seem that the bike lies in wait for me: Every outfit I own, including, now, my sweatpants, has a track of grease on the leg.

  No matter. I continue out the front door of my building, down the steps of the front stoop and toward the park, a few yards behind the woman in clogs and overalls who comes over twice a day to walk the building’s dogs.

  I smile at her and step around her and her four charges.

  “Rocky, down!” she bellows at one, a pug, who lunges at my ankles and begins to lick them as if they’d been rubbed with steak juice. To me she says, “Beautiful day!” She pulls on the pug’s leash. “He seems to like you.”

  I try to discourage the pug without actually shoving him away with my foot. “Might I ask a question?” I address the dog lady. “Can you please tell me what a Jack Russell terrier looks like? I’m pretty sure I know, but—”

  “Sure.” She points toward the end of the block, where a small white dog with pointy tan ears has its leg lifted beside a sidewalk planter. “Right there. They’re all the rage these days. I don’t recommend them as city dogs, in case you’re in the market. They’re way too energetic for apartment living, but what do people know? Most owners just buy for looks.”

  I thank her, disengage myself from the marauding pug, and walk to the corner. It is a beautiful day. Spring, Val tells me, is the most perfect time of year in New York for weather. The streets are quiet, and the air is cool and fresh. The sun has begun to break up the long shadows reaching across Columbus Avenue. A taxi driver notices me on the corner and starts to pull over, but I have planned for time to walk across Central Park. Stroll, even. It’s still only six forty, a full twenty minutes before Steve is due out of his building with the Jack Russell terrier. I walk down a block of single-family brownstones with sleeping cats in the windows and potted hyacinths on the stoops, cross Central Park West, and step through an entrance in the park’s stone wall.

  Inside, there’s a party going on. I wouldn’t have thought this many people would be in the park so early, but the whole place is humming with New Yorkers taking advantage of the soft spring morning. There’s a line of moms pushing baby strollers, skipping, bending, waving first one arm and then the other, as part of a group exercise class. Bicyclists dart single-file through the traffic on the park drive. I cut across the Great Lawn, which has been mowed into broad, dewy silver-green stripes, and wonder for the first time if the locals might be speaking the truth. Maybe this city is the center of the universe. The thought that I, Iris Hedge from the San Fernando Valley, am right here in the middle of it is at once so exhilarating that I stand still, breathing the heady perfume of daffodils and taxi exhaust. If life were a musical, this would be the moment where I’d rip off my “Three Stages of Tequila” T-shirt (Corey Najerian,
sophomore year) to reveal a sequined leotard, and then burst into song.

  Indulging in this New York moment, however, winds up not taking a New York moment, or even a New York minute, but a New York five minutes, which, it turns out, is just as long as it is everywhere else. By the time I emerge from the park near the Metropolitan Museum it’s one minute to seven and I am still quite a few blocks from Vickie’s building. I sprint like a lunatic across Fifth Avenue, up five blocks and over three to Lexington, my wallet in my windbreaker pocket pounding against my chest, the keys in my sweatpants pocket jingling, my sunglasses bouncing around on my nose. I’m all the more a spectacle here on the staid, wealthy Upper East Side, where the few people out on the street appear less hurried than people do everywhere else in New York. Since the Upper East Siders have obviously made it, they must have nowhere more pressing to get to.

  By the time I screech to a stop in front of Vickie’s building it’s five minutes after seven. I am thoroughly winded, not to mention thoroughly panicked, thinking I have missed Steve and have metamorphosed in a matter of days from levelheaded marketing professional into utter incompetent, when out of the building emerges the man himself. Brown hair, brown eyes, mid-thirties, six-footish, running clothes, zippy little tan-and-white dog; the life-size version of the photo on Vickie’s credit card. He also has the exact look I’ve been expecting: that “I’m entitled” look. I’ve seen it a million times. If he lived in Southern California, he’d be one of those BMW reptiles who honk the horn behind you on the freeway off-ramp—Wake up! Go!—before the light has turned green. He’d be the one who, in a ten-mile afternoon traffic jam on the Santa Monica Freeway, would drive along the right shoulder and then, at the last possible instant, cut back in front of everyone else obediently waiting their turn in the blinding sun to creep ahead a few more inches. Here in New York, he must walk down the sidewalk shouting into his cell phone. I hate him already, just on principle.

  Steve says something to the doorman, stops to untangle the dog (it has already managed to wrap its leash several times, maypole-style, around one of the brass awning supports in front of the building), and then stands there on the sidewalk, bouncing up and down a little on his toes, preparing for liftoff. For my part, I am so astonished to see my prey in the flesh, no more than ten feet away, that I, too, stop in the middle of the sidewalk, no doubt with my mouth open, and most definitely in his direct line of vision. To make matters worse, there’s little else to attract his attention: Aside from Steve, me, the dog, and the doorman, there are maybe half a dozen people on the street, most of them descending into the subway station. Whoever wrote that song about the city that never sleeps must not have lived in this neighborhood; otherwise he would have come up with the far more accurate “the city that doesn’t get out of the house until ten.”

  That is, nobody does but Vickie’s husband, who seems wide-awake and alert and, sure enough, looks right at me—Great! Brilliant work, Iris!—and then looks away. There’s no flash of recognition, no “Aha! I know my wife sent you to spy on me!” Nothing. Why should there be? He has no idea who I am or why I am here. I am filled with glee at not having bungled this too badly so far.

  Steve bounces once or twice more before walking right past me down Lexington to the end of the block, in the direction from which I came. The moment he seems far enough away, I step up to the doorman, tilt my head to one side, and smile—the very picture, I hope, of neighborly innocence. “Excuse me?”

  “Miss?” He touches his cap.

  “Is that Steve I see down there, with the little dog?” I gesture toward the corner.

  “Mister Steve, yes,” the doorman affirms.

  “Thought so.” I beam at him. He touches his cap again and steps back into the building. Then, as surreptitiously as possible, I follow Steve across Lexington and over to Park Avenue, where he turns north.

  This part goes quite well. My existence didn’t register with Steve in the first place, so he doesn’t notice me trailing him half a block behind. He doesn’t once glance back, just strides up the sidewalk, the skittery Jack Russell beside him leaping and nipping at its leash. Steve is behaving as if he’s headed to an important appointment. There’s no pausing to admire the tulips in full bloom, planted in rows, running red and yellow down the center of Park Avenue, or the polished, landed-gentry indifference of the apartment buildings lining either side. No slowing down to avoid getting sprayed by a maintenance man hosing down the sidewalk. (You could never get away with wasting that much water in California.) I have to trot to keep up with him.

  But as the blocks go by, my original buoyancy gives way to stomach-twisting tension. What if Vickie is right? What if I have to break it to her that her husband is having an affair? I imagine telephoning Vickie this afternoon and informing her that Steve entered the lovely red-brick apartment house at Park and Eighty-seventh and left, whistling, forty-five minutes later, or was greeted at the door of a graceful single-family town house on Eighty-eighth by a woman wearing nothing but a triple strand of pearls and a smile. Will Vickie be devastated at the betrayal? Will she take it out on me? Will she collapse and end up in the emergency room?

  It isn’t until Steve makes a second left, toward Central Park, that my stomach begins to unknot: Steve could just be going for a run. The answer reveals itself minutes later when he crosses Fifth Avenue to the East Side entrance to the Central Park Reservoir, which even I know is the most popular place to jog in the city. He stops and stretches his arms over his head. Then he takes off at full speed.

  Really. It’s like one of those car commercials: zero to sixty in five seconds. With no time for a sigh of relief, I take off after him, scaling the steps to the reservoir, dodging between the silent, focused runners as he hits his stride on the narrow gravel track. Within moments my heart is threatening to explode. My wallet is whapping against me, and my sunglasses are back to sliding around precariously on my sweaty face. Note to self: Next time, leave this stuff at home. If you live that long.

  I try to take a few cleansing breaths. Joy used to swear by this technique, but I never gave it much shrift until Michelle insisted I do it during my Hayes Heeley training. “It’s to relax the body and keep your nerves from getting the better of you,” she said, and I must admit, it works. I believe someone, possibly an instructor from a long-ago spinning class, also told me once that proper breathing makes strenuous exercise easier. I can’t seem to get any air at all, though; while my heart may explode, my lungs may implode. I struggle to turn my focus outside myself. The trees, the sky, the jingle-jingle of my keys harmonizing with the skrish-skrish of my nylon windbreaker, the morning sun on my face, the distance between Steve and me growing by the second.

  He must know there’s someone following him. Otherwise, why would he be moving this fast? He’s practically a blur. How can I keep up when I’m about to pass out? If I do pass out, will someone stop to help, or will I be trampled by the pack of runners behind me?

  Steve rounds the top corner of the reservoir. I can’t be sure, but he appears to stumble for a few steps, as if trying to slow down. For a fraction of an instant, he glances backward, over his left shoulder. And a moment later, he veers to the right—and runs right off the edge of the track.

  The move looks deliberate, although the embankment here on the northeast end of the reservoir has got to be fifteen feet high. I watch him and the Jack Russell leap over the edge, as if off the side of a building, and moments later spot them at the bottom, crashing through the trees in the direction of the West Side tennis courts. The whole incident takes no more than twenty seconds.

  Now my heart really is going to detonate. In the quiet I hear it thrashing around in time with my serrated inhale-exhale and my staccato thoughts: Steve suspected something. Saw me. Must have. Catch up!

  I muster every last bit of energy and run harder, the reservoir a blue haze on my left, the morning air scalding my lungs, my thigh muscles congealing like cement.

  By the time I get to Steve’
s jumping-off spot, he’s nowhere to be seen. I’m left at the edge of the track, doubled over and wheezing, still scanning the view below for some sign of him or the dog. I straighten back up, intending to jump down the side of the embankment after him, but my legs refuse to obey. So much for the mind-body connection Joy likes to talk about: The only place my body wants to go is back to bed.

  “What do you mean, you lost him?”

  A shower and a catnap later, I’m feeling somewhat better. Still, there’s a cramp in my side that won’t go away. My calves are throbbing. I’ve already downed four aspirin and am thinking of trying a more potent pain reliever, like ibuprofen or a bottle of scotch.

  I had assumed that after a home-cooked meal and a good night’s sleep in Connecticut, Vickie would realize she’d been acting crazy. I figured she’d be ready to forget the whole thing, to come home and resume spending her husband’s money. Not so.

  “I couldn’t keep up,” I say. “He is amazingly fast.”

  Vickie snorts. “That’s a laugh.”

  “It’s the truth. Surprisingly, your dog handled it quite well.”

  “Just tell me what happened.” Vickie isn’t crying today, and she isn’t interested in niceties. I relate the events of the morning, leaving out my tardy arrival at her building but including the part about her husband hurling himself down the reservoir embankment as if the IRS were after him.

  Vickie cuts me off. “Is he cheating or not?”

  “I don’t know.” That, too, is the truth. I have no idea. If he was simply out for a jog, why did he seem to be trying to throw me off his trail? On the other hand, if he is cheating, why go to so much trouble to fake a workout, especially with his wife out of town?

  “Was he gawking at other women? He slobbers over anyone who passes by.”

  “Not that I noticed.” He certainly didn’t look at me twice. Really, he couldn’t possibly have known I was following him.