“Whose top is that? Jack Jerusalem? Adler?”
“Kyle Trilbee.”
She pauses. “Kyle Trilbee? From where?”
“Cardiff-by-the-Sea. Near San Diego.”
“Well, he’s fabulous. Maybe we should get him for the shop. The best part, though, is the way your shoes give it all a tarty little twist. An inspired choice.”
I let myself put the guilt aside, just for a moment. Me, inspired?
“I can’t believe you’re not in the Hamptons,” I tell Ilona. “I expected to come up here and see one of those ‘We’re closed the entire month of August’ signs.”
“You know, usually we do lock up for a couple of weeks. This summer my bosses have had some legal things to take care of, so neither of them could get away. I felt bad and offered to take my vacation in September, after all the chaos is hopefully over.” She sighs. “Divorce.”
“Who’s getting a divorce?”
“My boss.”
“I wouldn’t wish divorce on anyone.”
“Especially with a child involved, and a terrible custody battle.” Ilona’s sadness is genuine, and yet she’s as beautiful unhappy as she is happy.
“I can’t even imagine. If my husband and I had had a child, I would have never left, no matter what.”
“You mean your ex-husband, yes?”
“My husband. I’m moving back home.”
“To California?” Ilona frowns. “You’re sure that’s what you want?”
“I’m sure.” (Is that why you just cheated on Teddy? my little voice interjects out of nowhere, and I feel ill all over again.) “I knew we had almost nothing in common when we got married, but I still should have tried harder to—why are you looking at me like that?”
The store phone rings. Ilona walks over to the counter, leans across, and picks up. “Rubicon. Thank goodness! I’ve been on pins and needles all day. Are you in court now? Tell me some good news.” She sweeps a curtain of hair behind one ear and listens intently. Her expression grows grave. “You sure? Okay, then, concentrate on that. You’ll get custody. You have to.” She hangs up quietly and walks over to me.
“Do you need to get back to work?” Something tells me she’s moved on to other concerns besides Teddy and me.
“It’s okay. I’m worried, that’s all.”
“About your boss? That’s so remarkably sympathetic.” I liked my old boss in Brentwood fine, and Michelle seemed okay until she fired me, but I can’t imagine getting too upset over either of their personal lives.
“We’re talking about a dear, dear friend.” Ilona massages her temples for a moment, then opens her green eyes wide. “But just so you understand, Iris, I don’t think couples should force themselves to stay together if deep down they know they shouldn’t. No matter how hard you try, if the marriage isn’t right, it won’t work. Not really.”
The doorman opens the door, and three women rush over with squeals and hugs.
Ilona looks at me apologetically. “I’ve probably said too much anyhow.” She stands up to greet her customers. “Come back anytime, Iris. Think about what I said.”
After that, I decide to spend the rest of the afternoon being quiet. But sitting in my armchair with Rocky on my feet, trying to reread The Custom of the Country, I keep drifting between self-hatred and thoughts of last night. Was it only eighteen hours ago that we were together?
I step over Rocky to the bed, laying my cheek on the pillow Steve used and breathing in the faint scent of him I find there. I’m woozy and exhilarated and heartbroken all at once.
“Iris,” I say. “This is over. You can’t have this man. You never could, and you still can’t now, even though you . . .”
This is the problem with talking to yourself. When you speak words out loud, even into a room where only a dog is listening, they become real. If I say what I was about to say, then I can’t go home to Teddy. Once those words leave my mouth, I can never take them back.
So I say this instead: “You’re going to end this once and for all. You’re going to call Vickie in the Hamptons and tell her . . .”
Perhaps I should tell her she should most definitely reconsider staying married to Steve, because now I’ve slept with him and can therefore say without hesitation that he’s cheated on her. Unfortunately, I don’t think this through until I’ve already picked up the receiver and dialed Vickie’s cell phone number and am waiting for the line to connect. Fortunately, when I realize I have no good idea what to tell her, the call hasn’t gone through yet. “Lucky break,” I say into the emptiness, and hang up.
But five minutes later the phone rings.
“Hello, Iris,” says Vickie, and although I was just about to call her myself, my stomach flip-flops. Vickie doesn’t sound good. Her voice has a steely edge I’ve never heard before. “You can probably guess what this is about.”
I can hear, in the background on her end of the phone, the low roar of traffic. Trucks, sirens, the whole bit. Everyone says summer traffic in the Hamptons is apocalyptic, but it can’t be this noisy, can it?
“Vickie, where are you right now?”
“I came back early. I’m in the apartment. My apartment. He’s going to go back to Southampton tonight and wonder where I am, and I don’t care. I don’t want to speak to him.”
Fear harpoons me in the chest. “Vickie, before you jump to any conclusions, we should talk this through.”
“He’s cheating. For real, Iris. I suspected something was going on, so I followed him to his so-called meeting in the city and saw the whole thing.”
Each word is a punch in the gut. Not to say I don’t deserve to be caught and punished; I do. Vickie helped keep me in cereal and introduced me to The Elixir and Ultra Placid. I would give anything not to have betrayed her in this way. I would give anything to take it all back. “Please. I can’t even begin to explain. I feel terrible.” Beyond terrible. There’s no word for how terrible I feel.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is my fault!” It comes out a howl. I don’t know who feels worse. She’s the victim, but she will be able to look at herself in the mirror and know she wasn’t the one who went against every last personal more and, in doing so, wrecked three people’s lives. Hers, mine, and Teddy’s. And the baby’s life, too. My eyes brim with tears.
“It isn’t. You did exactly what I asked you to do. I asked you to find out whether he was cheating. Then I asked you to keep getting tips from him, which you did for as long as you could. I thought he’d changed.” Vickie laughs, bright and brittle. “My only regret is not being quicker to put it all together. I truly believe some part of my brain didn’t want to know.”
Nobody’s watching. So this time I don’t bother to bug out my eyes. The tears fall silently, streaming down my cheeks.
I’ve just lost my only two friends in New York. Vickie and Steve.
“If you can believe this, Iris, I’m pretty sure he wanted me to find out. There he was, right in front of my eyes, kissing this woman. Not even a beautiful woman. An entirely ordinary woman, like every other woman out there. Not special at all. Not chic, not beautiful. A big nothing.”
For the first time I feel a spasm of anger. I am not ordinary. I am not like every other woman out there. I never was. Then, through this miasma of sorrow and fear and offense, a question fights its way into the light: How could Vickie possibly have seen us kissing unless she was watching through my window? “Vickie, when did you see this? Did you talk to him?”
“I drove in this morning and saw him, twenty minutes ago. And no, I didn’t talk to him. He didn’t even see me. I ran home and called a locksmith to change the locks, and then called you.”
Anger at Vickie gives way to anger at Steve. Twenty minutes ago I was in Rubicon with Ilona. So who was he kissing?
Jessica. It can only be Jessica. After being with me last night.
“There they were at La Goulue. Right in front at a sidewalk table. Can you believe it? If it hadn’t been August, with e
veryone out at the beach, the whole Upper East Side would have seen him drinking wine with this shabby, dumpy, mousy nobody.”
Anger at Steve gives way to utter disbelief. With her model’s figure and honey hair, Jessica is anything but mousy and shabby. It can only mean that besides Vickie, Jessica, and me, there is at least one more woman in Steve’s life. Can I believe it? That the man who less than twenty-four hours ago told me, “It was real” would in fact have not just one but at least two other mistresses to whom he’s been whispering exactly the same thing? “What a dog,” I hiss. “What a worthless, amoral dog.”
Vickie laughs, and surprisingly, there’s a genuine note of humor in it. “I’ll say he’s a dog. He could have taken the poor thing somewhere fancier.”
I actually start laughing myself. What else is there to do?
“Iris, I need your help, just one more time. Would you do one last thing for me?”
“It’s not a good idea.” Given the circumstances I’m the last person who should be involved.
“Pretty please. He doesn’t know I know any of this. Eventually I’ll have to tell him I know he’s cheating, and when I do, he’ll have some perfectly reasoned excuse and make it seem like I’m imagining the whole thing, and if that happens, I’ll take him back like always. I need you there to make sure I don’t fall for it this time. I’ll pay you if you want. Please say you’ll help. Please, Iris.”
What I have to do becomes plain as day. I’ll come clean with Vickie and ask for her forgiveness, though I don’t expect she’ll give it to me. Steve doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to come clean, too. I’ll have to find some way to tell Teddy, but not before I’ve dealt with Vickie and Steve. “Can you wait until after the weekend to confront him?”
“Easily. I’m so furious right now, I’m afraid I’ll push him out a window. I’m sure he’ll call here looking for me when he gets back to the beach and I’m not there. But I’m not answering the phone.”
“Then I’ll help you, but you should know this in advance: You may learn a few things you’ll end up wishing you hadn’t. I want to make sure you understand that, and that you can live with it.” My hands are actually shaking.
“I understand. I’m going to get an earful. The thing is, I already know what he’s capable of. Hearing it once and for all won’t make it any worse. It already is true, and it’s time for me to figure out my next step.”
I know now what’s different about Vickie. She isn’t crying. She doesn’t sound sad at all. Angry, yes. Resigned, yes. Self-possessed, though, also, and strong. As ready as she may ever be to hear the truth. I’m ready, too, ready to own up to my sins. I will not be like my mother, tossing out hollow excuses and not taking responsibility for my part in this disaster.
“All right, then,” I tell her. “Meet me for lunch on Monday. One o’clock, at the boathouse in Central Park. I’ll make sure your husband is there, too.”
TWENTY-SIX
If I said, “Monday morning dawned hot and muggy,” it wouldn’t be entirely accurate. The day of my big confrontation is unbearably warm and damp, as every day has been for weeks. But I can’t say for sure that it has dawned that way, since I truly believe this time I have been up the entire night, listening to Rocky’s labored breathing and worrying about what the day has in store for me. So it’s impossible for me to separate Monday morning from Sunday night, except that when the sun finally does come up, I take Rocky out to the curb, hurry back inside, lie back down on the bed to rest for a moment, and instantly fall into a deep sleep. I even have a nightmare I can’t remember the details of, but it’s bad enough that at some point I say to myself in the dream, “This is awful. Wake up, for heaven’s sake, and go after it, girl!”
So I wake up to find that it’s past noon. This is not good. I must get to the restaurant early. I take a five-second shower, promise myself to beg Simon for a haircut the second he gets back from Fire Island, slip into my Rubicon blouse and skirt, touch Rocky’s head for luck, and head out the door. Hustling through the park, I regret not having had a few moments to get my thoughts together. I have obsessed over this meeting for the past forty-eight hours but am still at a loss for what to say, or even where to start. Perhaps Steve will be a good husband, for once, and explain it to Vickie himself. This is, after all, between the two of them and really has very little to do with me. You keep telling yourself that, says my little voice.
By the time I get to the boathouse, on the east side of the park, my stomach hurts so acutely, I want to turn around and go home. Instead, I breathe and step up to the host at the door. He sizes me up and smiles, a low-energy, toothless grimace. I return it in kind and tell him I have a one o’clock reservation. I scan the large, airy room and wish I’d thought to have Vickie come at ten minutes past one. I’m counting on the surprise factor to get Steve to tell all, and it won’t work if the two of them arrive at the same time.
“The name?”
“Steve.” The Dog, I add silently.
The host leans over his enormous black-leather book and uses a thick marker to slash a line through a name on the list. He leads me to a table at the far end of the room, set back from the doors that open onto the lakeside patio, but still with a view of the water. It’s a table for four, an unexpected blessing. I’d been fretting over having enough room at a table for two after Vickie arrived.
Once the host leaves, the busboy doesn’t remove the two extra place settings, and even fills up all four water glasses. It’s a service gaffe that might come in handy. Even if it weren’t sweltering, I’m feverish with fear. It’s a two-glasses-of-water kind of afternoon.
Vickie walks into the restaurant.
Everyone has heard the expression “her blood turned to ice.” This is what it feels like: Your entire body goes hot, then cold. So cold you get goose bumps, even on the Monday of the last week in August in New York City. So cold the little hairs on your arms stand up and you imagine that if you jumped into the lake, sparkling picturesquely before you and your fellow diners, your body would turn the surrounding water into a solid slab of ice: Central Park swans frozen in place, rowboat oars fixed into the water at odd angles.
This jumping-into-the-lake thought is not an idle one. As the host escorts Vickie over—all moonfaced, tree-trunk-legged, thirty extra pounds of her—throwing myself into the lake seems the only way to escape this mess.
She looks down at me, her brow damp with fatigue. “Thank you for getting this table. There’s no way I’d fit at one of those tables for two.”
“Vickie, you’re . . .” I can’t even say it. I just gesture at Vickie’s enormous middle. She’s still standing and I’m rooted helplessly to my chair, so it’s right at my eye level. “You’re . . .”
Vickie laughs ruefully. “A whale? No kidding. Do you know how many more weeks I have to go? Ten. Can you imagine? How could I get any bigger? Iris, what on earth is wrong? You look about to cry.”
“You’re carrying Steve’s baby!” I am about to cry.
The host guides Vickie into a chair, a tugboat nudging a cruise liner into its berth. He unfolds her napkin and drapes it over the place where her lap used to be. Vickie stares at me. “Are you okay?”
I take a long, deep breath and try to compose myself. Seeing her again has finally brought home the seriousness of what I have done. How could I have slept with her husband? How could I have been so selfish?
Vickie picks up her sweaty glass of icewater and presses it against her equally sweaty cheek. “I definitely could have planned this better, don’t you think? What woman in her right mind plans a pregnancy so she hits her third trimester in August?” She takes a camel sip of water. Then she slowly shakes her head. “What woman in her right mind decides to have a child with a man she’s known all along is untrustworthy?”
“Vickie, you . . . I have to tell—”
“Do you know I cried like a crazy person right before my wedding?”
“I didn’t, no,” I choke out. She’s carrying her baby the
way Carmen Riggio, from Hayes Heeley, once said women do if they’re having a girl: low down and spread around her hips. She’s hollow-eyed and sallow, too. Carmen said baby girls steal your beauty, while baby boys make you glow.
“I was with Val, getting into my dress,” she continues, “and Val let it slip that about a year earlier, she’d had a little . . . What did she call it? She’d had a little encounter with Steve at my parents’ New Year’s Eve party. ‘Encounter,’ that’s what she said. Val swore she didn’t sleep with him, they kissed for all of three seconds, and that they were both drunk and the whole thing was meaningless. That kind of thing is never meaningless. Not when it’s your sister and your fiancé, and you find out on your wedding day.”
I shake my head mindlessly.
“I was beside myself. I started crying, and screaming at Val, and decided to call off the wedding, then and there. It seemed like an impossible obstacle to me, starting a marriage hearing that.” She rubs her hand across her belly, caressing the child inside her. “But in Greenwich, Connecticut, you don’t cancel a three-hundred-person wedding, with your hair already up and the guests on the way. It simply isn’t done.”
I have the same feeling I did the first day I met Vickie, in Grand Central, and thought she was Val playing a trick on me: This has got to be a colossal practical joke. Any moment now, Vickie will pull the pillow out from under her dress. Just kidding! I was never really pregnant! April fool!
“No matter,” she says. “What’s done is done, and I’m ready to hear what you have to say. Where is Steve, anyway? I told him not two hours ago that if he was late, I’d kill him.”
“You told Steve?” My heart sinks. I wanted Vickie’s presence here to be a surprise. Now that he knows she’s coming, he’ll never show up. “But I thought you weren’t speaking to him.”
“I’m not. He came back from Southampton Saturday morning looking for me but I wouldn’t let him in. I have no idea where he slept. Probably at her house. Anyway I called his secretary today and left a message.”
It's About Your Husband Page 27