Secret Lives of Second Wives

by Catherine Todd

  There were a number of remonstrances I could make, a dozen points I could raise in negotiation. We could hammer out the details, get everything specific and nailed down. We could also end up thoroughly disliking each other. Sometimes the lawyers needed lawyers, so somebody else could be the bad guy.

  Besides, I’d been around long enough to know that “trust me” was a male thing, for better or worse. And also, I understood that what Jack wanted, more than anything else, was for Patrick to make a success of things. “Trust me” also meant “please don’t destroy my illusions.”

  “Of course, I do,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  SOMETIME LATER, when we had sat reading the Sunday papers, thinking our separate thoughts, he said with determined cheerfulness, “There’s coffee cake. I forgot to tell you. I got some this morning.”

  He meant he’d picked some up because Patrick was spending the night. No other reason would inspire him to admit a calorie-laden carbohydrate gut buster to his breakfast table.

  “Was it good?” I asked.

  The look on his face was comical. “Well … I didn’t actually have any, and Patrick wasn’t feeling well, so …”

  I laughed. “If you didn’t try it, why do you want me to dispose of it?” I asked. “Let’s just throw it away.”

  “Did you get something?” he asked solicitously, domestic harmony, for the moment at least, apparently restored.

  “Kay and I had coffee earlier,” I said. I neglected to mention my own encounter with the scone.

  “Oh, that’s right. What were you talking about? I forgot to ask you.”

  “When?”

  “When you came in. You sounded excited.”

  The house. Mentally I’d put it on hold, and I’d almost forgotten. I said carefully, “Kay’s found us a house. It’s practically perfect. I thought you might like to go see it this afternoon.”

  He looked away. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s it?” I said, more sharply than I intended.

  He put down the paper. “How much is it?”

  I tried not to wince. “Five million.”

  “Out of the question,” he said. He started to pick up the paper again.

  “Wait,” I said. “I thought we’d discussed this, but we can rethink it. What price range were you thinking of?”

  “I’m thinking now might not be the best time to move,” he said.

  “Jack, you know I’ve been looking at houses with Kay for months. Every month—every week—that we wait, the prices go up, even in this economy.” I stopped. Experience had taught me that when Jack, ordinarily the most companionable of husbands, clammed up, something was wrong. Besides, he had the stricken look from the night before. “What is it?” I asked after a moment. “Is it the business?”

  “Lynn—”

  I waited.

  “In a way,” he said finally. “The business is okay, but I did something stupid.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He sighed and swirled the dregs of the coffee around and around in his cup. “I exercised a lot of incentive options, and then I hung on to the shares,” he said.

  Uh-oh. “You didn’t sell,” I said. I thought he’d sold them already. He’d told me nothing.

  “That’s right,” he said curtly.

  “And, um, the stock price went down, right?”

  He nodded.

  “So,” I said carefully, “we have a big tax liability and not enough to pay it off with if you sell the shares now.”

  “I thought the stock would keep going up,” he said by way of confirmation.

  All over the Valley, disillusioned workers were singing this sad refrain. If you used your incentive options to buy, say, a hundred thousand shares of stock—paying five to ten cents for each share—and the stock is trading between sixty and seventy dollars a share, the difference between the dollar price you paid and what the shares were worth (approximately seven million in this hypothetical) is taxable to you in profit, even if you never sell the shares. You can see what happens if the value of the shares goes down before you sell. A lot of naive techies had been caught in this trap, but Jack was an attorney and a businessman, and he was supposed to know better. Holding on to the shares without selling—which might be seen as a demonstration of loyalty to the company—was in reality the most blatant and dangerous kind of gambling.

  “Anyway,” he said, sounding very tired, “it’s not your problem, it’s mine. It’s a good thing we’ve kept our assets separate, isn’t it? Maybe I should have put the house in your name.”

  I was in no mood to celebrate my good fortune. “How much is it?”

  “More than a million,” he said. “The thing is, the business is solid, even though the stock has fallen, so I don’t really want to sell. I have to figure out what to do.”

  “It isn’t that much, but I have some stock, and the profits from my condo in La Jolla…,” I began.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “I won’t take your money.”

  I was, I must confess, a bit relieved, although I didn’t see where else he was going to get it, unless he sold the house. My separate funds were my safety net. I didn’t like to admit the second part of that sentence—in case things didn’t work out—but it hung there nevertheless. “I’d still like to help,” I said.

  “I’ll handle it,” he insisted, picking up the paper again for emphasis, like some husband in a fifties sitcom.

  Except no one was laughing.

  “Jack—”

  He looked at me. “Later, okay? Please, Lynn.”

  “Okay.”

  Don’t shut me out, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

  6

  That was the weekend.

  On Monday I went into the office early, in part because I had a lot of work to do and in part because of the oppressiveness of trying not to trip any verbal land mines at home. At least at the firm I was in charge. More or less.

  Our administrative assistant, Adam Nguyen, was already at his desk when I opened the door.

  “You’re in early,” I remarked.

  He grinned. “I like the quiet,” he said. He never said so, but I suspected he came in early to use the firm’s computer to write his novel. I didn’t mind; he was a great secretary and a cheeky presence around the firm, although of course he would probably go on to other things eventually. His parents, who were fairly traditional, had expected him to study engineering or computer science at Stanford, but he’d confounded their hopes and studied English literature at San Jose State. “I couldn’t take all that money and go against their wishes,” he’d told me. “Now that the dot-com world is collapsing, they’re starting to forgive me.” Still, he lived at home, and he didn’t like to rub their noses in it.

  I wanted to read whatever he ended up writing, because he was almost scarily observant. The only problem was, I was afraid he might be writing about the firm, and, despite the adage about not being able to recognize a description of yourself in print, it was possible that complete candor might put a strain on our employer-employee relationship. If that seems paranoid, think of Boswell and Johnson. Think Survivor. Rarely does exhaustive scrutiny result in a flattering portrait, even if the subject is Mother Teresa.

  Anyway, instead of perusing some Generation Y cri de coeur, I locked myself in my office with a stack of H-1B visa applications that needed preparing or reviewing. H-1Bs were renewable (up to six years, plus extensions) visas for immigrant workers, and they were—or had been—the lifeblood of the high-technology industry. About half of all the H-1B visa holders in the United States were computer specialists of some sort, and about half of those wanted to stay on permanently after their visas expired. Not surprisingly, the program, although functioning reasonably well on the global level, was plagued with abuses, not to mention fraud. Employers sometimes used the visa to intimidate and underpay the H-1B workers, who couldn’t squawk without getting fired and, possibly, sent home. Applicants had been known to fa
ke their documents and submit phony résumés. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was overworked, understaffed, invariably chaotic, and occasionally cranky, particularly since immigration issues had become a matter of national security. Some INS officers got away with being downright mean. (One poor applicant waited three hours in line to be photographed and, observing the INS rule “no eyeglasses in the picture,” put his glasses in his pocket. The INS agent rejected the developed picture with the explanation “no eyeglasses in the photograph” because the edge of the frames could be seen sticking out of the applicant’s pocket. He had to stand in line all over again.)

  Practicing in the immigration field required a mind for details, a high level of ambiguity tolerance, and a sort of creative response to problems that would probably make a securities lawyer’s hair stand on end. Harrison’s practice had grown exponentially because of the Silicon Valley’s high-tech explosion, and a lot of what we did, in addition to securing temporary visas, was to find some way for the best-qualified temporary workers to stay on permanently. Most of our clients—computer scientists, financial experts, businesspeople—were better educated, more motivated, and a lot richer than we were. On the whole it was an interesting, satisfying job, and the clients were appreciative. So far I’d never regretted turning my back on a Wall Street practice and all-night orgies putting together S-1 Registration Statements or other equally riveting documents. I mean, my documents weren’t all that fascinating either, but at least the clients were generally entertaining.

  After an hour or so, our associate, Brooke Daly, tapped on my door. “Hi, Lynn,” she said, her wide, insincere smile plastered on, “mind if I come in?”

  I’m not sure why I had it in for Brooke, but I did. Maybe because she reminded me of the Reese Witherspoon character in Election. She was insanely perky, the sort of person who probably had three columns of activities under her name in her high-school yearbook, but no friends. The person the teacher picked to be the “safety” in fifth grade, the one who wore an arm badge and instructed other children not to run in the halls. The first kindergartner to learn to tie her shoes. You get the point. Brooke insisted that I was her “mentor,” even though I hadn’t hired her and she worked mostly with Harrison. She flattered me subtly and—when subtlety didn’t work—overtly, but she treated Adam in a manner just far enough above rudeness to escape rebuke. And, as Dave Barry has said, the person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person.

  Still, she was a competent—though inexperienced—lawyer, and in a small office (two partners, an associate, a paralegal, and Adam), no one has the luxury of avoiding someone she doesn’t particularly like. So I said, with scrupulous civility, “Sure. What’s up?”

  She sat in the client chair, bouncing up and down a couple of times, as if she could barely contain her energy. “Harrison called,” she said. “He wanted me to give you a message.” There was just a hint of something self-important in her manner that made me grit my teeth.

  “Great,” I said toothily.

  “He’s not coming in,” she said. “He’s sick.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. I hoped she didn’t mean “hungover.” “Did he say what was the matter?”

  She shook her head. “But he said he probably wouldn’t be in for a few days.” She straightened in the chair. “He said, if it’s all right with you, I could handle his work for him until he gets back.” She looked at me expectantly.

  “Okay,” I told her, “but don’t send anything out before I’ve looked at it, and ask me if you don’t know the answer to something, no matter how small it is.”

  “I know that, Lynn,” she said with a smirk, but she didn’t, not really. I’d already caught her giving inaccurate advice to clients over the phone, and once someone who called for counsel was stuck at the Canadian border for three days before Harrison heard about it and figured out what to do. Brooke had sworn the client misunderstood her, and Harrison let it go. But good lawyers, the ones who reach the top of their fields, don’t wing it. Ever. If you don’t absolutely, positively know the answer to a question, you find it out before you open your mouth.

  “Good,” I told her. “I know you know it, but it never hurts to be reminded.”

  She looked as if she would have liked to say something snippy, but she swallowed it and left the room. I didn’t think she’d ever get it, the internalized striving for perfection that characterizes a first-rate practice. She just thought I had it in for her (which was true) and wouldn’t let her try her wings (which wasn’t). She succeeded better with Harrison because he was, not to put too fine a point upon it, a man of advancing years and receding energy, far more susceptible to the allure of perkiness. Not to mention big tits.

  Anyway, after she left, I called Harrison at home to commiserate. If he was going to be out for several days, it had to be something serious. His cell phone was turned off, and I got his home voice mail twice; the second time I left a sympathetic message and figured he was taking a nap. I was debating whether to return to work immediately or sift through the day’s e-mails when Adam buzzed me. “It’s Ms. Burks,” he said. “She says it’s urgent.”

  “Hi, Kay,” I said, picking up. “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” she pointed out. “What’s wrong with you? You didn’t call me back. The house is going to get away.”

  It took me a moment to realize what she was talking about, which I hoped was more a problem of focus than of declining mental abilities. I’d already reached the age where people were starting to make little jokes about forgetting things. Ha, ha. “Sorry,” I said when the synapses had connected enough for me to recall the perfect house that would indeed get away. “I should have called you. We’re not going to make an offer.”

  “Why not?” she shrieked. “It was perfect for you. You said so yourself!”

  There are times when it is not an advantage to have a friend as your real-estate agent. I was about to have to tell her that all the time she had spent with me in a professional capacity was likely to be uncompensated. “Jack…,” I began.

  “Just take him up to see it,” she said. “I bet he’ll love it. In fact, I’m sure of it. You know I wouldn’t push you, but we’ve been looking for months, and I don’t think you’re going to find anything closer to what you say you want than this.”

  “It’s not that,” I told her. “I know it’s perfect. It’s … it’s just more than we can afford right now.”

  Her real-estate agent’s ear was perfectly attuned to the ring of sincerity and regret. “Oh. Okay.” She hesitated. “Do you want me to check out something in a lower price range?”

  “Um … actually we might want to postpone the search for a while.”

  “That’s a shame,” she said after a moment.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I’m so sorry. I know how hard you’ve worked on this.” I sighed. “That seems so inadequate. Sorry,” I said again.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

  I saw that she was imagining some greater crisis than a tax obligation, so I gave her a brief summary of the change in our circumstances. “It’s not so bad,” I concluded. “It’s not like I hate the house or the neighborhood. I would have liked something new, something ours together. It would have been like starting over. But now I guess we’ll be lucky if we get to keep the one we’re in.”

  “That bad?” Kay asked sympathetically.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Jack has this thing about how it isn’t my problem, how he can handle it all himself. He wants to protect everybody—me, Patrick, everyone. I offered to contribute some of my own money, and he wouldn’t hear of it.” I tried not to sound aggrieved.

  “Michael’s the same,” she said. “You might as well just let him do what he wants.”

  “It’s not that,” I told her. “It’s more a sense of getting shut out. He’s not telling me things. One day I’ll come home from work and there’ll be a big ‘For Sale’ sign in fro
nt of the house.”

  “And it won’t even be my listing,” she said.

  I laughed. “Probably not. Maybe I’ll be glad, if the time comes. It might be the only face-saving way of getting Patrick to move out of the house.”

  I could hear her sucking in her breath. “He’s not moving in with you?”

  “I haven’t told you. I found out when I got home yesterday. He’s lost his job, and he can’t afford his apartment.”

  “You shouldn’t have invited him to live with you,” she said in a horrified tone. “It’s a mistake. He’ll cause problems between you and Jack.”

  Her apparent certainty on this topic was alarming. I didn’t exactly feel like confessing that I’d more or less been presented with a fait accompli. “Jack says it’s only temporary. We’ve agreed on six months.”

  “And what happens when he’s still unemployed and apartmentless in six months? Which one of you is going to kick him out?”

  I was silent.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to suggest something I’ve already suggested, but this time I really think you should listen. I want you to come to a meeting of the Anne Boleyn Society. You need the support. You’ll get some good ideas about how to handle this sort of thing. You don’t have to do anything—it’s not like AA—and if you hate it, you don’t have to come back.”

  “I guess it couldn’t hurt,” I told her. “I don’t seem to be figuring this out on my own. When’s the next meeting?”

  “Thursday night. Pick you up at eight?”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling furtive, as if I were embarking on a career of crime.

  7

  Harrison didn’t come back into the office the next day or the day after that. He didn’t answer the phone either. I began to be concerned. Lawyers check in. There’s always some loose end that needs tying up, someone who needs some information you’ve got that he doesn’t. It’s a big nuisance when you’re in, say, Tahiti, trying to figure out the time difference so you can make your call when you’d rather be diving in to the pupu platter, but you do it anyway. And Harrison had never been one for shirking his responsibilities, at least not in the time I’d known him.