It's About Your Husband

by Lauren Lipton

  FOUR

  If I was relieved that Steve wasn’t cheating, I was completely unprepared for Vickie’s reaction. I thought she’d be reassured and grateful. All she said was, “How much do I owe you?” Yesterday an envelope arrived in the mail with a check for forty-five dollars. Val says Vickie returned to New York the day after I called, took a taxi straight from Grand Central to Tourneau on East Fifty-seventh, traded in her Rolex for a Cartier, and charged the difference on Steve’s American Express.

  “In other words, life is back to normal.” Val punches a button on the arm of her adjustable massaging chair. It’s been just under a week since our incomplete happy hour, and when I called to ask if she wanted to try again, she said she had time only for a quick post-work chat at the nail salon around the corner from Hayes Heeley. While she gets a pedicure, I stand to the side, out of the way of the woman crouching at her feet. “The water’s getting cold,” Val announces loudly, rolling her eyes at me and lowering her voice to a level the pedicurist can still hear. “I never come to these cheapo nail mills, but I was desperate. I made last-minute plans to see Declan later, the bass player from the subway. Turns out he has a bit of a foot fetish! What are you doing tonight?”

  I’m doing nothing. Val, who’s truly like no one else I’ve ever met, must think I’m the dullest person on earth. How can I compete, with my unexciting, unemployed, unchic existence? Val always has a fun tale to tell, and her love life—make that sex life—is straight out of a madcap women’s novel. By the end of my second day at Hayes Heeley she’d already told me that once, for a Yankees fan she was sleeping with (only she didn’t phrase it quite that way), she’d gone to J. Sisters for a custom bikini wax in the shape of an interlocking NY, then broken up with him before it could grow back. During the same conversation she’d also revealed that the intensity and frequency of her orgasms had improved dramatically since she’d turned thirty. “How old are you?” she had asked. Thirty-three, I told her. She said, “So you already know.” Val dates men she meets on the subway, goes to nightclubs that open after midnight, and never, ever plans to be tied down. And she’s effortlessly stylish. Today she’s gone easy on the eyeliner but penciled in a beauty mark. She’s combined black flip-flops with a black pleated kilt and a black Peter Pan-collared blouse for a quirky twisted-schoolgirl effect. I am wearing ChapStick, a light blue cotton tank top, and an old denim skirt I bought before my marriage to Teddy.

  The pedicurist fishes Val’s left foot out of the water and squirts pink liquid on her toes. Val holds out a black satin bag. “I brought my own tools. There’s a cuticle-pusher in there.” She says to me, “Aren’t you getting a pedicure?”

  “Not in the budget,” I sigh.

  “That’s ridiculous.” Val sinks deeper into her massaging chair. “It costs nothing. And what, you’re going to do your nails yourself?”

  That’s the other thing. Even before I got laid off I couldn’t keep up with Val financially. Despite her arty Greenwich Village thrift-shop persona, she’ll never have to choose between getting her toenails tended and buying groceries. Even her fauxhemian apartment is subsidized by Daddy.

  I pick up a bottle of polish from the display and roll it around in my palm. “When you first moved here, did you feel invisible?”

  Val props an elbow on the arm of the chair and rests her head sideways in her hand, anchoring a strand of Hawaiian-Punch hair behind her ear along the way.

  “I was on the sidewalk just now, with people coming at me in all directions, people passing by with inches to spare, not one of them making eye contact, and I realized how profoundly separate each of us is. Have you ever felt that? There’s something about New York that underscores the loneliness of the human condition in a way other places don’t. Where I come from you can be by yourself in a car all day without speaking to a single other human being, and it doesn’t feel half as isolating.”

  Val isn’t listening. She’s watching an enormously pregnant woman weave her way between manicure stands, at times rotating sideways to get through, to reach the other, empty pedicure throne.

  “Hiya, stranger! Is this the hot new after-work hangout?” The woman hauls herself into the chair. I recognize her as Carmen Riggio, another Hayes Heeley staffer.

  Val smiles unenthusiastically. “Hi, Carmen.”

  “How are you?” I add. Carmen works a few doors down from my former office.

  “Ready to burst!” Carmen pats her belly. “I figure, might as well have nice toes while I can still see them, barely. Mind if I eat?”

  “Not at all,” Val says, like she does mind.

  Another pedicurist steps over to fill Carmen’s foot basin with water. Carmen takes a banana from her bag and devours it in four bites. “You can’t believe how ravenous pregnancy makes you. Also, you have to pee every five minutes. Meanwhile, we’re touring day-care places, trying to get on the wait lists, realizing we should have started looking three years before conception!” She hitches up the legs of her stretchy black maternity pants, and the second pedicurist swabs polish from her toes and says something in her language to Val’s pedicurist. I imagine the two as friends outside work, riding the subway home together once they’ve logged their ten daily hours hunching over strangers’ feet for three-dollar tips. Carmen catches my eye. “I heard you got downsized. Have you found anything else?”

  “You won’t believe what she’s been doing.” Val splays her toes so her pedicurist can weave cotton between them. “Detective work!”

  “Really?”

  My “no” is drowned out by Val, who’s already recounting my ill-fated experience with Steve.

  “So he wasn’t cheating. That’s nice to hear,” Carmen says when Val is finished.

  “I’m just glad it’s over. I need to start my real job hunt. If you hear of someone who needs a freelance moderator, I’m available. I can file, write reports, anything within reason.”

  “What would you call not within reason?” Carmen inquires.

  “I don’t know.” I watch another customer come into the salon. “Bringing the boss coffee? It’s too close to my waitress days.”

  “You were a waitress?” Val asks.

  “In college. I was awful. Every few months I’d accidentally dump a customer’s plate in his lap. It’s scary how few skills I really have.”

  “I bet I could get you a quick freelance gig,” says Carmen as her pedicurist props her foot on a roll of paper towels to better pumice her heel. “I have a friend who’s in a bind right now, and it seems right up your alley—”

  “Where does she work?” I interrupt.

  “At Shafran, Leonard and Stout. Should I call her? Of course I should. Give me a moment.” I spin my mental Rolodex, but the name Shafran, Leonard and Stout means nothing. Carmen finds her cell phone, presses a few buttons, and holds it to her ear. “Linda, great news. I think I’ve just found someone who can solve your problem. Incredible, right? I’m with a girl from my office, Iris, who just got laid off.”

  “Tell her it was a fluke,” I whisper. “I’d never been laid off until—”

  Carmen waves me away. “. . . detective. No joke! My friend’s sister? Iris followed her husband around last week. Isn’t that funny? I’ll ask.” She looks at me. “What kind of money are we talking about?”

  “Um,” I say. “Commensurate with my experience? I have ten years.”

  “I’ll let you two work it out.”

  Carmen passes me the phone, and I say hello to Linda, who skips the greeting and jumps right into the business part of the conversation: “You’d be willing to do this on such short notice? Because I’ve got a bit of a situation here. A total mess, more like it.” There’s a weird, whining quality to Linda’s voice.

  “I’d love to help if I can.”

  “Well, Carmen seems to think you’re the answer to my prayers. You work evenings, I assume?”

  “For after-hours focus groups? Sure. What kind of research does Shafran, Leonard and Stout do?”

  “We
’re an interior-design firm.”

  I’ve never heard of an interior-design firm that does its own market research, but certainly there’s a first time for everything.

  “I need someone right away. Maybe Carmen told you. Things have reached desperation level. It’s all gone horribly, horribly awry. All I wanted to know was whether he was the cheating kind.”

  Exactly what kind of work are we talking about here? asks the nagging little voice inside my head.

  “I didn’t think it through or I wouldn’t have gotten myself into this mess. I would never stoop so low as to plan out something this sleazy. Can you imagine? It was a whim. A stupid whim. Let’s get that perfectly clear. And now, what a mess. Are you cute?”

  My heart starts to head south into my shoes. Carmen offers no assistance; she’s regaling a yawning Val with the details of her pregnancy-related sciatica: “like someone grabbed a nerve in my leg and sliced it with a knife!” The pedicurists are deep in their own conversation.

  “This isn’t about a job in market research?”

  “What? No, it’s about my husband, Elliot.”

  Linda’s story unfolds quickly. For weeks her husband’s behavior had been most peculiar. He’d arrive home each night, and then after dinner, immediately disappear into the bedroom to get onto the computer. Linda would come in, and he’d jump up from the computer and stand in front of the screen with a funny look on his face. Still Linda thought nothing of all this until one Saturday afternoon last month, when she went to sign on to her gourmet cooking chat room, only to find a name she’d never heard of in the rectangle on the signing-on page.

  “Icarus. That was the name. I thought, Who is Icarus?”

  “Icarus is a character in Greek mythology. The sun melted his wax wings and he—”

  “Right, right, whatever. I meant, why was there a strange signing-on name on our computer? Finally, finally, I realize this is an account Elliot made up, probably to pick up women. For all I know he’s got a girlfriend with a Greek name, too—Guinevere or Ophelia or what have you.” I have the craziest desire to swat Linda’s mosquito voice away from my ear.

  On discovering that her husband of eleven years had a secret Internet identity, Linda naturally became obsessed with knowing more. But instead of asking him to explain, she decided to catch him in the act. She made up her own fake identity, and a few nights later, while he was in the bedroom on the big computer, she was in the living room on her laptop, using her new name to send him a provocative instant message. When he didn’t answer, she bombarded him with messages until he finally took the bait, and pretty soon they were instant-messaging back and forth. “Naturally he didn’t know it was me. He thought Sexy Lexy—that’s my made-up name—had spotted him once in a chat room or something.”

  “Why would you do this?” I lean against a wall. The nail polish fumes are going to my head.

  “To see if he’s cheating on me. Which he now is, with me. Well, almost is. He’s never seen Sexy Lexy, obviously, so no, nothing has happened physically. But it’s a deeply emotional relationship. Deeply emotional. He’s online every night telling Sexy Lexy how he regrets not having done more with his life, how he’s never been to Egypt or learned to hang-glide, and all your typical midlife-crisis baloney. He has no idea he’s talking to his own wife.”

  There’s no break in the conversation, so I can’t ask Linda why she doesn’t just tell him.

  “I should tell him. I know; it’s awful. I just really wanted to see if he would cheat on me. But up until last Thursday he never came on to Sexy Lexy. Never.” She stops for the first breath I’ve heard her take.

  “What happened last Thursday?”

  “Thursday is when I decided to ratchet things up a notch and so was like, ‘Why don’t we meet in person?’”

  I would laugh if I could. The world’s most hapless soap opera character couldn’t concoct a more harebrained scheme. Have I really understood this correctly? “You’ve set up a rendezvous with your own husband, hoping to catch him cheating on you with a fictitious woman you invented?”

  Carmen, having caught this last bit of the conversation, widens her eyes and bounces in her chair as wildly as a pregnant woman getting a pedicure can, touching her index finger to her nose—the charades gesture for “You’ve got it!”

  “Right. It’s this Friday night. What would it cost to have you go in my place? Just to show up, pretend that you’re Sexy Lexy, and see what happens from there?”

  I’m no longer blaming the nail polish for my light-headedness. The problem, I believe, is that I’m being asked to pose as someone who would willingly call herself Sexy Lexy—and, no doubt, to fend off the advances of an amorous husband. I don’t need to stoop to this sort of thing. I am sorry, I tell Linda, but I’m trained in market research and that’s where my interest lies.

  Carmen waves her hands frantically. I ask Linda to excuse me for a moment, and rest the phone against my leg.

  Carmen says, “Don’t tell me you’re turning her down. You’re perfect for this!”

  “Linda’s loaded. She’d probably pay you twice whatever Vickie did,” Val adds for good measure.

  The phone, with Linda’s voice trapped inside, buzzes against my leg. I crush it harder against the denim of my skirt.

  “Just help her,” Carmen implores. “She deserves to know the truth!”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Val says.

  It becomes clear that saying no is really not an option. I don’t have enough friends in this city to risk offending anybody, and—Val said it—I’m in no position to turn down work.

  I return the phone to my ear. “I charge fifty dollars an hour, plus cab fare.”

  Carmen pantomimes a cheer. Val ascends from her throne and walks stiff-legged to the drying area in her paper pedicure shoes. Linda, on the phone, asks me to come to her office Thursday so she can tell me everything I need to know. There’s more?

  “By the way, you wouldn’t happen to be a redhead, would you?”

  “No,” I say. “I wouldn’t.”

  “You’re probably not a double-D cup, either. But not to worry. Both can be arranged.”

  I awake the next morning with a mission. I’ve said it myself: It’s time to find a real job. Admittedly, this is easier said than done. I can’t just pick up the phone and call my former boss, Pat Sweeney, even though I left on good terms. Much as I would like to return to California, I have no desire to crawl back, explaining that my dream career in New York didn’t work out any better than my marriage did. I can just see Pat, with his goatee and square-framed spectacles and ironic sympathy: “Poor Iris. It seems you couldn’t make it there.” I don’t have enough for plane fare in the first place. And even if I did, where would I live, now that Teddy and two of his acting-class buddies have taken over my house? Evie Amato, my friend from college, the one who got married right after graduation, says I could stay in Palmdale with her and Doug and their three kids, Chadwicke, Fairchild, and Sinclair. It’s a sweet offer, but I’d sooner sleep in the back of my car. Not that I have a car anymore.

  So it seems staying in Manhattan is my only choice until I can scrape up enough money to go home on my own terms, and I suppose the sooner I accept that, the better. I do sort-of know three freelance moderators in this area, and I spend the morning calling each to remind her who I am. Each says she’ll keep me in mind for the future, but none asks me in for an interview.

  Having “utilized” every last one of my “existing contacts,” as Kevin would put it, I shower, dry my hair straight, put on some mascara and ChapStick, and locate on the Internet the addresses of two dozen other local freelance moderators. I update my résumé and print it out to take to the copy shop on Broadway, to have it reproduced on nice résumé paper. At the end of my block, I catch my reflection in the window of the gourmet kitchen-gadgets store on the corner and note that forty seconds in the sticky summer-is-coming humidity already has my hair back to its not-curly-enough-to-be-curly-but-not-straight-enoug
h-to-be-straight natural state. Also, there’s bicycle chain grease on my left calf.

  By the time I’ve walked the four blocks to Photo/Copy Express, my forehead is dripping with sweat. I fan myself with the résumé folder while the clerk, with jangling jewelry and an unflatteringly tight top, twirls, then inspects, a strand of her hair, which is orange at the ends and dark brown at the roots, as if she’s growing out last year’s highlights. On my way in I noticed that Rapture Salon is two doors down from this place. The salon has a sign in its window saying “We Specialize in Corrective Color.” That woman who accosted me by the wash-and-fold should be looking for customers a little closer to home.

  The clerk examines my résumé sullenly and takes it back to a copy machine. I mop my face with an old deli napkin from my bag.

  When she turns back around, she breaks into a huge grin. “Hey, you!” she squeals, tossing her hair and all but skipping back to the counter. Who is this girl, Dr. Jekyll with a dye job?

  “Hi!” I respond, then blush. She’s not talking to me but to whoever is in line behind me. To camouflage my mortification, I get busy digging into my wallet.

  “Not with your blond bombshell today?” the clerk says over my head. I hold out my credit card. She accepts it wordlessly.

  “You are the bombshell,” answers a male voice.

  The clerk titters. If she had a parasol and a hoop skirt, she’d be Scarlett O’Hara at the Wilkes family barbecue. Remembering me, she silently relinquishes my résumés and a credit slip. I sign it, and she plucks her pen out of my fingers.

  “May I have the receipt, please?”

  “What can I do for you today?” she says over my head.