Secret Lives of Second Wives

by Catherine Todd

  “Sure. So many houses, so little time,” she said.

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “So am I. So life is short. Make the most of it—is that what you were going to say? Find something that gives you joy? Don’t waste your time on the trivial?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “So get a T-shirt,” she said.

  “I realize it sounds trite,” I said.

  “Good.” She poured half a pitcher of cream into her coffee and swirled it around. “I’ve thought of leaving Mike, too,” she said, still looking down at her cup.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “The usual reasons. He’s never home. He lives for his work. My stepdaughter hates me.” She studied her magnificent diamond wedding ring. “Also, he has absolutely no sense of humor. None. And he tells orthopedic-surgery stories at the dinner table.”

  I laughed, assuming she was only half serious.

  “I’m not kidding,” she said.

  “Then why do you stick around?” I asked her.

  She spread her hands, palms out. “I can’t afford the very big house in Woodside on my own,” she said.

  “I don’t for one minute believe that’s the only reason you stay with him,” I told her.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, but don’t be too sure. I’d lose a lot financially if I left Mike. Socially, too. I don’t fancy being just another divorcée real-estate agent showing condos in San Jose. I don’t kid myself—I get a lot of business because of who my husband is.” She sighed. “Also …”

  “Also?”

  “I don’t want to look like a loser,” she said. “And I really don’t want to give her the satisfaction of saying ‘I told you so.’ ”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Suzanne. The ex-Mrs. Burks,” she reminded me. “She left him because he was never home. He lived for his work. He probably even told her about the latest hip-replacement technique over a plate of prime rib.” She dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. “Trust me, that’s enough to put you off rare meat for at least a month.”

  I laughed. “Well, presumably at least, her own daughter didn’t hate her.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Kay said thoughtfully. “She seems to hate just about everyone.”

  We sipped our coffee in silence. Jack isn’t like Mike, I thought. He’s funny and tender and generous. At least he was. We hadn’t laughed together about anything much in a long time.

  “So anyway,” Kay said, “it all comes down to the bargain you made, doesn’t it? We each get some things, and we have to give some things up, too. You have to decide for yourself when it stops being a good deal.”

  “Do you believe what Lorraine said? That there’s always something you can do?”

  “Probably,” she said. “But you have to want to make the effort. Otherwise what’s the point?”

  “What about love?” I asked, sounding, I’m sure, like some dewy, censorious adolescent. But I couldn’t believe she really took such a calculating point of view.

  She shrugged. “What about it? Mike loves me, or at least I think he does. I love him. Jack loves you. You love him. But if love were enough, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  25

  I wrote Alexei’s petition myself, focusing on his activities at Stanford and downplaying his career in the Soviet Union. I made references to topsecret work so awesomely classified and significant that it could not be discussed on the pages of a mere INS document, and hoped that would do the trick. Ilya Kopylov backed up the assertions. It was still an impressive case, but not as exceptional as it might have been if I’d been allowed to document what Alexei had told me. There was only one small hitch.

  “The company has agreed to help with the legal fees,” Alexei told me over sandwiches.

  We were alone in the remnant of my offices; I’d already found Ronnie another job as an office administrator/paralegal at a medium-size white-shoe law firm. It was a step up from Grady & Bartlett (even in the firm’s palmiest days), and I was happy for her. Adam had decided to seek his fortune in Los Angeles, where he was going to write screenplays by night and work as a lifeguard by day. “A lifeguard?” I’d asked.

  “Just for the summer,” he said. “It’s research.”

  “What do your parents think about it?” I couldn’t help asking.

  He shrugged. “I promised to come home if I don’t make it in a year,” he said.

  “Define ‘make it,’ ” I said.

  He grinned. “Precisely.”

  Brooke was still officially employed, but since there wasn’t much to do, I rarely saw her. Boxes were stacked everywhere; I was moving out into a tinier, much cheaper space at the end of the month. Meanwhile I couldn’t find anything and kept unpacking the things I’d already packed. It made me crazy and frustrated, which must have been why I welcomed Alexei’s appearance with such enthusiasm.

  “I’ve brought lunch,” he said, bearing a Draeger’s sack that wafted wonderful odors. “Sandwiches.” He smiled. “Not meat loaf, though. Nobody has it for takeout.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I’d rather have it as a special treat. Familiarity breeds contempt.”

  He smiled. “No it doesn’t,” he said. “That’s such an American way of thinking. There is comfort—probably even more—in the familiar.”

  The way he said it made me wonder if he was homesick. “Are we talking about meat loaf?” I asked.

  “And then there is that admirable American directness,” he said, reaching into the sack and placing two wrapped sandwiches in front of me. “I’ve brought shrimp with … sprouts, I think, and turkey with almonds or maybe pecans. I can’t remember. You choose.”

  “What about half and half?” I asked. “We can share.”

  “Okay,” he said, but he didn’t make a move toward the food. He managed to look almost insolently relaxed.

  “What were you going to say? About the fee?” I asked, to cover the slightly exhilarating nervousness I was feeling.

  He sat back in the chair. “The company will reimburse me for half the cost of the petition,” he said. “But they have their own immigration counsel, and they want to run it by them first.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, although of course it wasn’t. Competitors had every incentive to find fault with your work and none whatsoever to approve it; plus, they could hold up the process for weeks. “Who is it, do you know?”

  “Elson Larimer, I think.”

  It would be. “Well, fine,” I said insincerely. “But remind them we need to file quickly, won’t you? Sometimes these things can languish on someone’s desk for months.”

  “Languish,” he said. “English is such an incredible language.”

  One of the manifestations of Alexei’s intelligence was his curiosity about virtually everything. “Yes,” I said. “You’re not eating,” I pointed out after a moment.

  He smiled and reached for a sandwich half. “So tell me about you,” he said. “I said it was your turn, remember?”

  “What do you want to know?” I asked.

  “Whatever you want to tell me,” he said. “You have my complete biography from the petition, and I don’t know a thing about you.”

  “I don’t know where to start,” I said, blushing. I was carrying on like a seventh-grader at an eighth-grade dance. “I’m bad at math,” I said finally. “Seriously bad.”

  He laughed. “Thanks for warning me. I’ll remember to double-check the bill.” He looked at me. “Are you married?”

  I nodded.

  “Children?”

  “Stepchildren,” I said. “Adults.”

  “Do you like them?”

  “Not excessively,” I said. “We get along.”

  “And your husband?”

  “We get along, too,” I told him.

  He shook his head, smiling. “I meant, what does he do?”

  “He was a lawyer, too. Righ
t now he’s a consultant and part owner in an Internet company.” I felt acutely uncomfortable talking about Jack with Alexei, as if I were betraying one or the other.

  Alexei was watching me. “You don’t like to talk about him,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Not really,” I said. I couldn’t exactly say why. Well, possibly I could have, but I didn’t want to. One way or the other, I had the feeling I was going to get my heart broken.

  “Do you think,” he said slowly, “we could have lunch sometime? A real lunch, I mean. Not this.”

  “I’d like that very much,” I said.

  I DON’T THINK other people thought of me as particularly vulnerable or susceptible to getting hurt. Not because of some inherent chirpy optimism or general obtuseness (at least I hope not), but because of that straightforward self-possession Jack thought he had spotted in me the first time we met. But now I realized that, far from demonstrating some admirable character trait, this inability to be touched was a manifestation of the poverty of my emotional life. I hadn’t had that much to lose. Now I felt the fear of loss, the foreboding that nothing could be guaranteed. The conviction arose with increasing regularity, at least in my own thinking. That I would get hurt. That I might hurt someone else. That it might not matter.

  “HOW ARE THE WEDDING PLANS COMING?” I asked Jack when we were alone in the bedroom. Patrick had gone out to dinner with friends, and they’d come back “just for a few minutes” to take over the living room. I felt parental and superfluous at the same time and retreated to the only part of the house that was completely off-limits to stepchildren. Even the cat seemed to hang out there more frequently.

  Jack was wearing pajamas, a concession he’d made to his son’s presence in the house. He shrugged. “I don’t know. They don’t ask me anything. They just send the bills.”

  “That’s the dad’s role, I guess,” I said lightly.

  He pushed Brewer gently aside with his knee and slid under the covers. “Does he have to be on the bed with us? I get leg cramps from not being able to turn over.”

  “He gets scared when strangers are in the house,” I said. “I’ll put him out after Patrick’s friends leave.”

  “Whenever that is,” he muttered. “They looked like they were settling in for the night.”

  “Well, it must be hard on Patrick not having a place to entertain his friends,” I said, sounding, I thought, appropriately sympathetic.

  Jack looked at me suspiciously. “There are restaurants,” he said, “and clubs. Listen to them. It sounds like a fraternity party out there.”

  As someone who had once lived in the same metropolitan area as San Diego State, I could have told him he was dead wrong. “He can’t afford restaurants and clubs,” I said instead. “And anyway,” I added, using his line, “it’s only temporary.”

  He looked as if he would have liked to respond, but by now the topic was dangerous. Silence trailed the mention of Patrick’s name in any conversation. What he did say was, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up, Lynn. I don’t want to make too much of this, but I don’t think you should have discussed my finances with Janet.”

  I closed the book I’d been planning to start before bed, the latest Lisa Scottoline, with regret. “I didn’t discuss anything,” I told him. “She hinted that the reason you seemed to be less than enthusiastic about Meredith’s wedding was that what you’ve referred to as your finances are going to support my law firm.”

  He looked startled, as if he’d never considered the possibility. “We agreed that …”

  “That we’d keep that separate. I know. But Janet apparently doesn’t, not that it’s any of her business. Moreover, she told me you were, and I quote, ‘rolling in money.’ ”

  He looked away. “Good God,” he muttered.

  “Jack, why don’t you just level with her? That’s all I suggested, really. That you two sit down and have a frank discussion about finances.”

  He looked away. “It’s embarrassing,” he said indistinctly.

  “So is bankruptcy,” I said. “That’s where we’re headed if you try to float the cost of this wedding on your own.”

  “It won’t come to that,” he said. “Look, I don’t expect you to understand why I don’t want to disappoint Meredith—”

  “This isn’t about Meredith,” I said, “although I really think you should be honest with her, too. It’s about Janet. You don’t want to expose your own financial situation, but you’re perfectly willing to expose me—falsely, I might add—as someone who can’t manage her own business without your intervention. Try to see it from my perspective, Jack. I’m the one who had to sit there and listen to her.”

  “You wouldn’t have if you hadn’t accepted her lunch invitation,” he pointed out.

  “A mistake I don’t plan to make again,” I said. “But—”

  The sound of music—some ghastly Generation X,Y, or Z anthem—suddenly assaulted my ears. “They’ll blow out the speakers,” I said worriedly. My speakers, in fact. “The Magnepans may not be able to handle that much bass.”

  Jack sighed and threw back the covers, displacing the cat. “Sorry, big guy,” he said. “I’ll deal with the acoustical terrorists,” he told me, “if you’ll promise to drop the topic of paying for the wedding.”

  “I’ll drop it willingly if you tell Janet the truth,” I said. “Otherwise she’ll keep on with the insinuations, not to mention the importunings.” This might have been going too far, but the boom boom boom was starting to resound in my head.

  Jack ran his fingers through his hair in exasperation. “Where does that leave us, Lynn?”

  He folded his arms over his chest. We stayed stiff and motionless while the volume jolted us like an artillery shelling.

  Boom boom boom.

  “At a stalemate, I guess,” I told him, covering my ears.

  26

  Much to my surprise, the detritus from the previous night’s festivities was nowhere in sight when I went out to the kitchen to get my breakfast. Jack had left the house early, before I was even awake, so I was planning a quiet cup of coffee and some toast along with the San Jose Mercury. The San Francisco Chronicle was more frivolous and more fun (where else could you find a lengthy exposé of Danielle Steel’s twenty-odd parking permits?), but the techies and serious Valley entrepreneurs all read the Mercury, and Jack’s business life depended on keeping up.

  I started another pot of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table, bleary from lack of sleep. I am not at my best in the mornings, and lately I’d been plagued with bouts of insomnia, the multiple sources of which probably do not need to be analyzed. I’d finally drifted off when the stereo shut down just before midnight, but 4 A.M. found me, as my mother used to say in a throwback to her rural girlhood, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Now I was anything but.

  “Hi,” Patrick said, striding into the kitchen and startling me into almost spilling my coffee. I hadn’t seen him before ten in the morning since he’d moved in. Moreover, he was wearing a good shirt and decent pants. Like everyone young, he was noticeably more able to shake off the effects of a late night (and whatever else) than were those of us with a few more years under our belts. At that moment, propping up my eyelids, I sort of hated him.

  “Good morning,” I said, swallowing the impulse to say, You’re up early. “I’ve made a new pot.”

  “Thanks. And, um, thanks for last night, too. I mean, I know it was loud and all. We just …”

  I nodded, unsure what I was agreeing with.

  “I might be getting a job,” he announced.

  “That’s great,” I said, in a tepid tone. I knew better than to shout, Hallelujah! even if that’s what I was feeling. “What is it?”

  “I don’t exactly have it yet,” he said. “I’ve got an interview today.”

  I was glad I had not been too effusive in my congratulations. “That’s a start, though,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “So what’s the intervi
ew?” I prompted him.

  He looked away and mumbled something so indistinct I wondered if it was “Jack in the Box.”

  “Sorry?” I said.

  He sighed. “It’s in Dad’s old firm,” he said. “Paralegal.”

  “Oh, well. That’s great,” I said.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “I don’t have any training, and Dad’s just getting me the job. But if they hire me, I’d start as a kind of assistant, and if that works out, they’ll pay for paralegal training.”

  “Great,” I said for the third time.

  “The thing is,” Patrick said, with unexpected candor, “I really wanted to find something on my own.”

  Even though I thought part of his problem was that Jack kept rescuing him from his failures, I was not entirely unsympathetic. “It’s a tough economy,” I said. “And anyway, lots of people get help from their parents,” I added truthfully. “Business is all about connections of one sort or another, and so are a lot of other things. The movies, for example.” I smiled. “Or politics.”

  “That’s not necessarily the most flattering comparison,” he pointed out. At least he smiled in return.

  I laughed. “Well, but you take my point.”

  “Yes, and you take mine. It’s kind of humiliating.”

  I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. “Cheer up,” I said, deciding to venture a joke. “You can always blow the interview.”

  He looked startled for a moment. “Yes,” he said, looking rather buoyed at the prospect. “I could, couldn’t I?”

  BROOKE GREETED ME at my tiny new office as if we were still colleagues. I suppose in a way we were, since I’d agreed she could work out of the new space till she found another job. I’d stopped paying her at the end of the month, which effectively ended most of whatever power I’d exerted. Now that she was on her way out, I felt less irritated by her presence and succumbed, in my weaker moments, to a nostalgic affection for her as the last remnant of Grady & Bartlett. It was, like the retrophilia for bell-bottoms and lava lamps, entirely without a rational basis.

  “Hi! Guess what?” Brooke’s perkiness was apparently immune to both unemployment and lack of space. She waved at me from her cramped corner, her work area a small table the last tenant had left. My own desk was pretty modest, too; I’d tried to sell the one I bought when Harrison offered me the partnership, because it was too big for my diminished circumstances. Unfortunately, there was such a glut of expensive office furniture on the market that even Goodwill was overstocked. I had to put it into storage and make do with something tiny, cheap, and serviceable from Cost Plus.