Secret Lives of Second Wives

by Catherine Todd

  “What are you going to do with … ah … the remains?” I asked Jennifer after the service. I assumed, from the absence of a coffin, that he’d been cremated.

  She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her hand. She looked tired and strained. “Why do you ask?” she said.

  “I was just wondering if you were planning to scatter his ashes near Lake Garda,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I mean, he always used to talk about how much Lago di Garda meant to him,” I added.

  She stared at me. “Lake Garda? In Italy?”

  “Yes. I gather he went there with your mother years ago.”

  “Good God,” she said, sounding surprised. “They did go there on vacation before they got divorced. My mother said it was the most dreadful two weeks she’d ever spent in her life. It rained every day, and the electricity kept going out in the hotel, so there wasn’t even a light to read by. Mother said she was all for getting on the first plane home.”

  “Why didn’t she?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I’M GLAD THAT’S OVER,” I said to Jack on the way home. “I didn’t expect to feel it that much.”

  We were driving down Campus Drive, through the eucalyptus groves and undeveloped land that was Stanford’s most attractive feature. I had mixed feelings about the campus; it was a wonderful school, but I’d gone there when it was at its worst—when people were hurling things at each other and burning professors’ life work in orgies of self-righteous protest—and I couldn’t help remembering that, despite all the elevated talk of Principles, it wasn’t even safe to leave your laundry on the communal clothesline lest someone with an overdeveloped notion of entitlement come along and rip you off.

  Jack smiled. “You do have your attachments,” he said, braking for a group of bicyclists crossing University Avenue.

  He meant my inexplicable attachments, but it cost me a pang anyway. “I suppose,” I said. “But I can’t help feeling sorry about it. And look how few people showed up.”

  “If the Ice Maiden was responsible for inviting them, I’m not surprised,” he said. “And anyway, don’t lose sight of the fact that he brought this on himself.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  I expected him to drop it then, but he added, “People are going to do what they’re going to do, and tearing yourself up over what is essentially the other person’s responsibility is pointless.”

  He sounded angry.

  “Are we talking about Harrison?” I asked him.

  “What else?” he said. He kept his eyes forward, on the road.

  “I guess I’m just sad at the way things turned out for him,” I offered. “It’s such a waste.”

  He didn’t answer me. “Do you want to stop and get a coffee on the way home?” he asked after a moment. “We can talk.”

  “No one’s home,” I said. “Patrick’s gone out with Brooke. Unless you’re expecting someone?”

  He shook his head. “I’d rather … just stop for coffee, I guess.” He meant he wanted to talk in neutral territory.

  I tried not to flinch. “Sure,” I said. “That’d be fine.”

  I ORDERED THE SWEETEST, most calorie-laden drink on the board, a beverage somewhere between coffee and cheesecake. Stress generally afflicts people with loss of appetite, but I am a firm believer in the restorative powers of sugar and chocolate. Not to mention whipped cream. Now that Dr. Atkins was in vogue again, I didn’t have to feel guilty about the cream at least.

  Jack ordered black coffee. “Wouldn’t you like a maraschino cherry to top it off?” he asked, eyeing my concoction with something akin to astonishment.

  “Maraschino cherries are retro,” I said. “Like pedal pushers. Nobody younger than we are even knows what they are.”

  “How … deflating,” Jack said with a smile.

  I shrugged. “Well, good riddance. And anyway, their turn will come.”

  Jack said, “That’s what I’ve always liked about you, Lynn. You take such a vengeful view of fate.”

  I laughed. “You mean you think I believe everybody will get what he deserves in the end?”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “Not at all,” I said, licking whipped cream from my spoon, waiting for the ax to fall.

  “Can you tell me…,” he said after a moment, “what it is you want?”

  I looked at him, wondering whether I should answer what I thought he was really asking or temporize. “I’m not really sure,” I said.

  He leaned forward and touched my hand. “What I want is what I’ve wanted all along,” he said. “I want to share the rest of my life with you. I want us—all of us, Merry and Patrick and, I guess, Justin—to be a family. Isn’t that what you want?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m not really sure,” I repeated. “I thought it was.”

  He sat back in his chair, looking shaken. “Oh,” he said. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” I said. Not yet.

  “Of course you are,” he said.

  “I guess I’m not really sure how I do fit into the family, Jack,” I said finally. “It’s a pretty tight circle, and a lot of the time I’m on the outside looking in.”

  “I know you think I haven’t been very good at setting boundaries,” Jack said. “With Meredith and Patrick, with Janet…” He looked at me. “But I’ve always been on your side. Always.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, as evenly as I could manage. Under the circumstances I could hardly let him shoulder all the responsibility for what had gone wrong between us. “I’m not blaming you.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I knew you had other … obligations when I married you,” I said. “The past doesn’t just disappear, even if you’d like it to.”

  “That statement tells me quite a bit,” he said.

  “It wasn’t intended to,” I told him. “Please don’t read something into this that isn’t there.”

  “It’s difficult not to, when I’m not sure exactly what the problem is,” he said.

  “It isn’t that I don’t care about you,” I said.

  “Do you know how desperately sad that sounds?” he asked.

  I looked into my cup. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to hurt you.” I tried to take another sip of coffee, but it wouldn’t go past the lump in my throat. “You’re the kindest man I ever met, Jack.” It was true. Even with his secretary, he defied the “no man is a hero to his valet” rule. “I don’t want that to change.”

  “So where does this leave us?” he asked eventually.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I need some time to figure it out. Can we just put things on hold for a bit?”

  He frowned. “I love you, Lynn,” he said. “I want this to work. I’m willing to make changes, if that’s what you think you need. If we have to leave here—”

  “I—” I started to protest.

  He waved his hand to silence me. “I know you’ve suggested it, and I shut you down. What I’m saying is, I’m not ruling anything out,” he said.

  “That’s very generous, Jack,” I said, because it was true. I knew how he felt about leaving. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said, “not until you’ve heard the rest. What I’m not willing to live with is being put on probation while you make up your mind whether I’m—we’re—what you want. At least not for long.” He looked at me. “I’m drawing a line here. Can you understand that?”

  We both had our lines and boundaries. The question was, could they intersect? “Yes,” I told him. “I understand.”

  33

  Alexei’s cell phone was turned off, and SLAC said he had called in sick three days in a row. On the fourth day, I picked up some soup at the deli (no, not borscht) and went to his guesthouse.

  After the third knock, he called, “Who is it?”

  “Florence Nightingale,” I said through the door, before I had time to consider
she might not be considered such a heroine to someone on the other side of the Crimean War. “I heard you were sick.”

  He opened the door about four inches. “Ms. Bartlett,” he said. “How nice of you.”

  I stepped back from the door.

  “My lawyer,” he said, to someone behind him.

  “A lawyer who makes house calls,” said the other man, stepping forward and opening the door wider to give me an assessing look. He was large and blond and clean-cut and looked like a Russian in a James Bond movie—smart and dangerous. “How interesting.” His voice was heavy with innuendo, which, under the circumstances, I could scarcely resent.

  “There are a few of us left,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster.

  Alexei smiled. He looked drawn and unshaven. “Dmitri Gregorivitch, this is my lawyer and my friend, Lynn Bartlett. Lynn, Dmitri is a former colleague.” He did not, I noticed, offer his colleague’s last name in addition to the patronymic, probably so I couldn’t run home and look him up on the Internet and find out he was last year’s Nobel Prize winner.

  “Aren’t you going to invite her in?” Dmitri asked. He added something in Russian, which, naturally, I didn’t get.

  “Speak English, Dima,” Alexei said.

  He did not move aside, so I said, “I really should be going. I just wanted to bring you this soup.” I offered him the sack.

  “That’s very kind of you,” he said, in his stranger’s voice.

  “Why does Alexei need a lawyer?” Dmitri asked me. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  I looked him in the eye. “I sincerely hope not,” I said. I turned to Alexei. “We can talk later, when you are well.”

  “Yes,” he said, “probably that would be best. I’ll see you to your car.”

  Behind him Dmitri laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said to Alexei. “I hope … you’re feeling better soon and that your friend doesn’t catch anything.”

  Alexei said nothing but smiled wanly.

  Dmitri laughed. “It’s not contagious,” he said. “And there is a cure, never fear.” He gave me the same assessing look he had greeted me with. “So nice to have met you, Ms. Bartlett.”

  TO BE A HEADHUNTER IN SILICON VALLEY, like being a venture capitalist, was to have lived beyond your glory days. Gone were the days when employers competed for workers with “zero drag” (no responsibilities, so they could work long hours and travel at a moment’s notice) with the ferocity of would-be homeowners bidding for a house on the Peninsula under six hundred thousand. Now that so much of the Valley business had proved to be vapor, supply and demand had shifted again in favor of the employer, and headhunters had to scramble to find positions even for people who were not watching their client lists dwindle, their assets erode, and their hormones expire.

  “I’m not going to bullshit you, Lynn,” said Richard Gregory of Gregory Associates. We had known each other only one hour, but already he was administering verbal slaps on the back. “It’s not going to be easy. Law firms aren’t taking a lot of lateral hires right now.”

  “I’ve also thought about going as in-house immigration counsel to some big company,” I offered.

  He shook his head. “Well, I gotta tell ya, since nobody’s hiring, there isn’t a lot of immigration work,” he said. “I’m going to be honest with you—I make most of my money these days placing people out of state.”

  “Look,” I told him, “lots of people are in a panic because their visas are running out and they want to stay on. Permanently. I’m a specialist in helping them. There has to be a market for that.”

  He looked dubious but was apparently too polite to ask why, if there were such a big market, my practice wasn’t making enough to support me. Or maybe he just didn’t think of it.

  “Anyway,” I added, “I’m just exploring my options at this point.”

  “Options, right.”

  “And you’ll keep this confidential, of course?”

  He raised a finger to his lips theatrically. “Of course,” he said. “I think I have a sense of what you’re looking for. I’ll check around.” He raised an eyebrow. “Um …”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you be willing to relocate? I mean, I know you said you and your husband live here, but that would widen your options a lot, if you know what I mean.”

  I knew what he meant. I folded my hands into my lap. “I wouldn’t rule it out,” I told him.

  “Atta girl,” he said. “I’ll call you in a few days and let you know how things are looking.”

  “I’M SORRY,” Alexei said when he called two days later. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  He was silent a moment. “A colleague. A former colleague. Really.”

  “A colleague from the Soviet Union,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “He was sent, wasn’t he? To pressure you to go back?”

  “Yes,” he said finally.

  “I see.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “Can they force you? Do they have leverage?”

  “No,” he said, but I thought I heard uncertainty in his voice.

  “Alexei?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think you should get an attorney.”

  “What a great idea,” he said. I could hear his smile.

  “I’m serious. A criminal attorney. You should be prepared in case they try to pin something illegal on you to force your hand.”

  “I’ll consider it,” he said.

  “Also,” I said carefully, “although I’m ashamed to admit that this is even a possibility, it’s not beyond the realm of imagination that you could be thrown into a detention camp somewhere without any rights, if somebody here gets the idea you might be a terrorist.”

  “American gulag?” he asked.

  “It’s not funny,” I told him.

  “I know it isn’t,” he sighed. He hesitated. “Can you come?”

  My throat closed, and I couldn’t answer him. “I can’t,” I said at last.

  “I understand,” he said.

  No, he didn’t. “I want to,” I said. “You know how much. But I can’t, not until I’m clear in my mind what I’m going to do. If I saw you …”

  “You don’t have to explain, Lynn. Really.”

  “You know that I—”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  34

  In the end it wasn’t Richard Gregory who called me about a job but Nora Larimer, one of the founding partners of Elson Larimer. I was so used to thinking of Elson Larimer as the Goliath to my David that at first I misunderstood who was calling, nor, when the caller identified herself for the second time, did I perceive exactly what it was she wanted.

  “Am I under a misapprehension?” she asked, sounding amused. “You did ask Gregory Associates to explore some career-change possibilities for you, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, yes I did,” I said, recovering my wits.

  “Well, if you’re not totally averse to the idea of joining Elson Larimer, perhaps we could meet for lunch?”

  At that point I was not totally averse to joining the Oakland Raiders, although I doubt they would have had me. I said I thought it would be very interesting to meet her.

  “Meet us” she said. “Barbara Elson will be there, too.”

  I was flattered and said so.

  “Barbara and I,” she said crisply, “believe in handling these things ourselves. We find we get much better people that way, and in the end everyone wastes far less time. At all events, are you free for lunch on Friday? The Clift Hotel?”

  I didn’t even pretend to check my calendar. I said I’d be there.

  THE CLIFT HOTEL used to be the embodiment of Old San Francisco snobbishness, the sort of place where, if you were a man, you got thrown out if your hair was too long or you weren’t wearing a coat and tie. In the moneyed and less contentious eighties, it was a beautiful, elegant place to
stay and eat, minus the rules. In the dot-com era, the hotel had become a bastion of trendy exclusivity, where, in the words of one L.A. Times journalist, “Being accepted there is a confirmation of your stylishness.” Of course, L.A. always has it in for San Francisco, but in this case I think the writer was right. “Accepted” was the key word. Forget “welcomed.” You can’t even find the place (on Geary Street) if you don’t already know where it is, and the atmosphere is about as friendly as it is in one of those ultra-chic boutiques that will only admit you by appointment.

  Since I am the sort of person who usually gets seated next to the serving cart or, worse, the men’s room in restaurants, it has been apparent to me for some time that I do not transmit the kind of hipness that maître d’s, waiters, or concierges instinctively recognize. Maybe if such people rushed to kiss my hand, I’d feel otherwise, but I hope not. I think that the desire to demonstrate your superiority to the rest of mankind for whatever reason is a natural human trait but not a very likable one, and I don’t think it should be pandered to. Since an awful lot of human enterprises—from Madison Avenue to MENSA—exist precisely because of this tendency, I don’t expect to be listened to anytime soon.

  Meanwhile, although the Clift’s restaurant was leaching money at an alarming rate (many of the hip young dot-commers having moved back in with their moms), it was still a lovely spot for lunch, if you go for a sleek, intimidating look reminiscent of the world’s most expensive safari. The food was “Chino Latino” and the prices sky-high.

  I had never met either Barbara Elson or Nora Larimer, but I recognized them even before the maître d’ conducted me to their table.

  They were laughing. It was the discreet, don’t-notice-me laugh of the middle-aged woman, but it was genuine, a joke shared by friends who know each other well. I relaxed a little. They might be high-powered attorneys in expensive suits, but at least they liked each other. A good sign, on the whole.

  We shook hands all around.

  “I’ll cut right to the chase,” Nora said, sounding exactly like the chase-cutting sort of lawyer she was reputed to be. “We know you’re desperate.”