Secret Lives of Second Wives

by Catherine Todd

  “So there are several things we can do. Fortunately, the INS has agreed to waive the penalties. Since he’s run out of time on his H-1B, we can apply for another kind of visa—an 0-1—while we work on getting a green card. It’s some work for the client and the company to put together, but that’s what I’d suggest.”

  She nodded.

  “I would charge you for disbursements,” I said, “but there would be no legal fee. Naturally.”

  “Naturally.” She looked at me. “You must realize there are other … firms interested in handling Kojima’s work.”

  Elson Larimer, our big-time rival, for one. I didn’t doubt it. “I understand,” I told her. “But I hope I can salvage my firm’s relationship with the bank. I think you know that I had nothing to do with the problematical documents, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “It doesn’t really matter, though, does it?” she asked.

  I knew what she meant, but I couldn’t leave it there. “It does to me,” I said.

  As a female executive in a Japanese bank, Naoko knew all about trying to break through the “rice-paper ceiling,” and I thought she would be reasonably sympathetic to another woman struggling to clean up a mess some man had made. If she saw it that way, however, she didn’t say so.

  She nodded. “I’ll have to get back to you,” she said.

  “HOW DID IT GO?” Adam asked when I got back to the firm.

  I sat down on the edge of his desk and sighed. “It was a less-than-supportive environment, to say the least.”

  “What happened?” Ronnie asked, coming out of her office.

  Now that we were in crisis mode, distinctions of rank, such as they had been, were notably absent.

  “They’ll get back to us,” I said. “It was so humiliating to stand there and beg to do all this work for free in order to keep them as a client. Naoko Watanabe—the head of HR—sat there and didn’t turn a hair. It was almost eerie.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t new news,” Adam suggested.

  Ronnie, standing behind him, poked him on the arm.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Give,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know anything. I just answer the phones.”

  This time I was the one who punched him on the arm. “Skip the self-deprecating crap,” I said. “You notice everything. I’ve noticed that.”

  He grinned. “Sorry. I really don’t know anything. It’s just speculation. It’s just possible, isn’t it, that somebody got to Kojima with the news before you did? And … well … undermined you?”

  I looked at Ronnie. She nodded.

  “It’s possible,” I said grimly.

  15

  You’ve changed a lot of things around the house,” Moira Hughes remarked, in a tone not entirely suggestive of approbation.

  “Well, naturally,” Jack said, much too quickly. “Once we got married, we wanted to redecorate.”

  Jack’s mother looked at him assessingly. “Is my room still in the same place?” she asked.

  “Well, actually, Mother, Patrick’s using the guest room just now. We thought we’d make you comfortable in L—in the office. There’s a fold-out couch in there.”

  “How … convenient,” she said.

  Jack stood hesitating with his mother’s suitcase in his hand. He looked at me helplessly. Well, we are all reduced to fifteen-year-olds in our mother’s presence, but I was starting to get a clearer picture of their relationship.

  “If you don’t think that will be comfortable,” I said, “we’d be happy to give you our room and take the office ourselves.”

  “Perhaps that would be best,” Moira said, “if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  “No trouble,” I said. “I’ll just go and change the sheets.”

  Moira Hughes was a widow in excellent health, as she liked to say. If her husband—the late, apparently unlamented Foster Hughes—had left her in better financial circumstances, she could have spent every day playing shuffleboard and comparing symptoms with other survivors of long-term marital dysfunction on the deck of some Nordic cruise ship tricked out in a middle-class fantasy of opulence. Instead she was forced to limit these excursions to annual aquatic pilgrimages up and down the coast of Mexico, or to Alaska, but it was a sufficiently satisfying schedule, enabling her to garner an entire framed series of pictures of herself (posed for the most part in the same sequined dress) with The Captain. The Captains seemed interchangeable, too, in their mature Scandinavian competence and serenity. Not a single one of them looked Excitable.

  Foster (who had expired long before I came onto the scene) had liberated his widow from a lifetime of passive-aggressive reaction to the tyranny of his ill humor and infantile tantrums, a legacy that had also left Jack with a deep-seated aversion to confrontation and emotional displays. Unfortunately, the dynamics of family interaction do not switch off, even when the Prime Mover is … well, removed. You’re left to deal with the aftermath, like the eddies and swirls of a passing ocean liner. The Hugheses were still caught in the wake.

  I was in for a little buffeting of my own.

  “I’ve changed my will,” Moira announced, settling herself on the sofa in the living room.

  Jack’s coffee cup rattled on its saucer. “Oh?”

  She nodded grandly.

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

  “I’ll just see to something in the kitchen,” I said.

  Jack shot me a look of chagrin. Sorry, he mouthed.

  Moira ignored my departure. Since she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid, her voice was loud enough for me to hear anyway, unless I was going to be really noble and turn on the faucet or something like that.

  I wasn’t.

  “I’ve made a living trust,” Moira told him. “This nice man contacted me by phone and said his firm was holding a seminar, so I signed up. I never realized I should be putting my assets in trust like that,” she added, with a hint of accusation.

  I could almost hear Jack’s sigh.

  “Anyway, it’s all taken care of now,” she said. “I knew you’d be pleased.”

  “Do you want me to look over the papers?” Jack asked, with, I thought, remarkable restraint.

  “Oh, I don’t imagine that will be necessary, dear,” she told him. “But of course I’ll send you a copy if you’d like.”

  “Is there anything I should know about?” my husband asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, is there anything you want me to do?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’d like you to keep whatever you get from the trust in a separate account. I know there won’t be that much, but—”

  “Mother—” Jack protested.

  “I mean it. It’s what the lawyer said. Advised. If you keep it in a separate account, it stays your own property. That way it will go to Patrick and Meredith after you’re gone, and she won’t get any of it.”

  “Mother, that’s ridiculous,” Jack said. “It’s insulting, too.”

  “You never know about marriages these days,” Moira said. “How do you know you can really trust her?”

  She, the untrustworthy daughter-in-law, shredded her fingertip peeling a carrot and had to turn on the faucet anyway, so she never got to hear how her husband replied to that.

  COSTCO WAS INVENTED for occasions like The Family Dinner. In fact, Costco, which was probably invented or at least inspired by a woman with too much to do, was about the only form of market I really enjoyed, even though the portion sizes were usually too big for two people. Most of the other stores on the Peninsula, including all the formerly humble little corner grocers, had gone so upscale in the dot-com boom that they resembled miniature versions of Harrods Food Hall. I mean, I am as much an admirer of 171 types of exotic cheeses as anyone, but sometimes the cheese you’re really going to buy is cottage, and nonfat at that. The rest was like a museum visit—informative but essentially a spectato
r sport. Besides, I got tired of being sharp-elbowed by twenty-somethings weighed down by Dallas-size diamonds and demanding, alto voce, “that really special caviar you set aside for my husband last time.” Of course there were fewer of those these days, but the temples of gastronomy remained, like high-water marks of the Valley’s affluence.

  Costco, on the other hand, was a microcosm of Bay Area life. The Sunnyvale store, where I shopped, was teeming with Sikhs, other Indians, and Chinese, along with the usual mix of retirees creeping out of parking places in their luxury sedans and teenage boys pulling into the handicap spots (There was no place else to park!), cell phones in hand and caps in reverse. The SUVs were lined up in rows in the parking lot like Sherman tanks waiting for D-Day.

  I entered the store with a fixed menu in mind, but the cart kept filling all by itself, like some bountiful fairy-tale chest of gold. I bought salmon, but then I couldn’t remember if Moira liked it, so I thought I should add some baby lamb chops, too. And what about the following night? The chicken Kiev looked promising. And then there were luncheon fixings and an assortment of breads (breakfast and lunch), vegetables, appetizers, and dessert. It occurred to me, as I wheeled the overflowing cart from place to place, that I was losing my composure pretty early in the visit, not to mention my perspective. I’d told Jack I was going to keep it simple. I kept finding all my best intentions overturned.

  By the time I’d stopped at Whole Foods for organic vegetables for Meredith and Justin, I was far later getting back than I’d planned. Jack and Moira would be sitting in the living room wearing, respectively, looks of unease and disapproval, or so I imagined. The freeway was crowded (the freeway is always crowded, as people in the Valley will tell you) by the time I headed back, and nobody would let me on. Jack kept telling me to speed up to get into the line of traffic, but my natural inclination had always been to slow down. Sometimes I just hoped for the best and went anyway, and so far nothing terrible had happened. In L.A. that behavior got you a horn blast and the finger, but in the Bay Area usually the worst that befell you was a head-shaking gesture of reproof. Northern Californians were too civilized to honk, if a withering look sufficed. I maneuvered into the line of enemy cars the best I could and staked out a spot in the right lane, my default driving position despite Jack’s insistence that it was the most dangerous place on the road. I knew that, but I just didn’t feel comfortable driving fast.

  Moira was not glowering with impatience when I returned. Instead she was holding a salon in our living room, entertaining Patrick, Meredith, and Justin, who had arrived well in advance of the invited hour. That was okay—I’d already learned that the hour of invitation didn’t apply to family, at least in the family’s estimation. “Hi,” I said, walking into the room and trying not to notice that the conversation came to a dead halt when I did. “I got stuck in traffic, but I can have dinner ready in a few minutes.”

  “What are we having?” Meredith asked suspiciously.

  “For you and Justin I’ve brought some vegetables from Whole Foods, in addition to your entrée,” I told her.

  She looked at me blankly for a second and then with resentment for putting her in the wrong. “I didn’t bring one,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Well, vegetables, then. You can see what I have and pick what you like.”

  “Whatever,” she said.

  WHAT DO PEOPLE FIND to talk about if they don’t have a shared history in common? If they like you, they’ll offer you their pasts/histories/stories (My mother always liked my sister better than me. My father bragged, and that’s what made me shy) so that you can dip into the wellspring, too. If they don’t …

  “I rarely eat fish,” Moira said, bending over her plate to expose the pink scalp at the base of her curls. Like many of her generation, she favored a fixed and sculpted ‘do at odds with the diminishing quantity of her hair. She moved the salmon around on her plate before lifting a bite to her lips. She’d selected it herself as the entrée when I’d given her the choice.

  The others nodded agreement, even Jack. It made me feel oddly disconnected and in the wrong, as if I should have known. If we had had a past in common, even some shared embarrassments or trivial annoyances, we could have rescued the situation. Do you remember the time that… ? is a potent social anodyne. But the only person I really had a history with was Jack, and Jack’s mother certainly didn’t want to hear about that.

  I resisted the impulse to apologize and said nothing.

  Meredith sampled her vegetables with misgiving, as if she might detect their inorganic origins with the tip of her tongue. Justin, with no family loyalties to worry about, was less inhibited. I watched them, wondering why it mattered to me if they liked what I served. Maybe it was a Norman Rockwell thing (not that his family life was anything to write home about), some ingrained symbol of maternal nurturing I was unable to escape.

  Jack, at least, looked happy, his fantasy of fully functional family—all together around the dinner table!—momentarily fulfilled. He’d told me that, growing up, he’d always had a stomachache whenever his father presided at a family meal. In suffering he was clearly my superior; my stomachaches had resulted only from eating second helpings of my mother’s gravy with the Sunday roast. Like all unhappy childhoods, his had fueled a determination to make things different for his own family, a desire that manifested itself in increasingly futile efforts to smooth things over when they got the least bit tense. Unfortunately, there appeared to be an inverse relationship between blood kinship and susceptibility to his charm. It was as if his children had been vaccinated against enjoying themselves, at least around us.

  “What are you doing now, Patrick?” Moira’s voice cut across my thoughts like a bullet through mist.

  Patrick studied his plate. I could even find it in my heart to feel sorry for him. “Not much, Grandma,” he said.

  “Have you found a job yet?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Not yet,” he mumbled.

  “What? I didn’t hear you.”

  “He said, ‘Not yet,’ ” Jack interjected. I could see his good mood starting to melt away. “Don’t put him on the spot, Mother.”

  “Why not? Isn’t he looking?” she asked.

  “Yes, he’s looking,” Jack said, “But—”

  “What are you looking for?” Moira insisted, redirecting.

  “Oh, anything, I guess,” Patrick said, raising his eyes but focusing just past her. He had the hunched posture of somebody receiving blows on his shoulders.

  “I’ve heard the Layoff Lounge has a pretty good program,” Meredith said, attempting a rescue of sorts. “Also, some people I know go to a support group in Cupertino. You bring your lunch on Fridays.”

  “That’s a thought. Good for you, Merry,” Jack said, a shade too brightly.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Patrick said grimly.

  “Seriously,” she said. “It might do you some good.”

  “Maybe his father could find him something,” Moira said pointedly.

  “More asparagus?” I asked.

  “I’m keeping my eyes open, Mother,” Jack, the Good Son, the Good Father, said. “You know this is a really tough job market. There’s no need to panic. We enjoy having Patrick here with us.”

  Four pairs of eyes shifted to my face. Jack’s were pleading, so I nodded. “That’s right,” I said.

  Meredith made an indistinct noise behind her napkin.

  Patrick, who was not one of those who had needed to check my reaction, said sullenly, “It’s not as if I’m not trying. I’ve got my résumé out there.”

  “Right. Of course you do,” Jack said, a little desperately. “Was there more asparagus?”

  “I’ve been thinking about day trading,” Patrick said.

  Silence.

  “What’s that?” Moira said.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Jack sounded hoarse.

  Patrick shrugged.

  “What? What is it?” Moira demanded.

  “It’s a ki
nd of gambling on the Internet,” Jack said tightly.

  “Dad—”

  “Gambling?” exclaimed Moira in horrified accents. “Is that wise?”

  “It isn’t gambling, Grandma,” Patrick said. “It’s trading stocks on your computer.” He looked at Jack. “Anyway, all I said was, I was thinking about it.”

  “Also,” said Meredith, continuing the thread of her earlier contribution, “you could try Recession Camp. I mean, it’s supposed to be for laid-off dot-commers, but I’m sure they’d take you. They have outings and stuff. It might help you … you know, find something.”

  “I don’t see how hanging out with a bunch of losers is going to help me,” Patrick said. “Now could we please stop talking about this?”

  “I’ve gotten laid off lots of times,” Justin said, deciding to enter the conversation just as it was ending. He had the sweet disposition and—unfortunately—the brains of an Irish setter. “And I always find something. It’ll work out, Pat, you’ll see.”

  “Of course it will,” Jack said heartily.

  “Excuse me, Grandma,” Patrick said, pushing his chair away from the table.

  “Poor boy,” Moira said, in what she appeared to think was a low voice, after Patrick had left the table. “You can see how he feels it.”

  Even I could see how he felt it, though probably not in the sense Moira meant. I considered how it would be to have made your own family afraid to ask you anything directly. It must be terrible to have people worrying about you and waiting in patient silence for some reassurance that you might be all right after all. It must be even worse to be convinced that you were a loser, a conviction not obviously contradicted by the facts. It certainly made a gap between you and others. Even though I shared the rather pessimistic assessment of Patrick’s chances of Turning Out Well, at least in the short run, I had to admit a grudging sort of sympathy for his plight. In the midst of this family, I felt as if I were shrinking, too.

  Of the two of them—Patrick and Meredith—I guess I preferred Patrick, on the whole. That was a little like preferring Genghis Khan to Attila the Hun, and I certainly had no admiration for his sullen stasis or his passive-aggressive behavior around the house. I’d scarcely forgiven him for using my own cat against me. But at least his bad behavior seemed to be rooted in a general kind of unhappiness that encompassed everyone around him. Meredith was the one who had it in for me.