Group

by Christie Tate

  When I got to group, a few minutes late, I pressed the group room button with my right index finger, and with my left, I twirled the keys to my condo, amazed that I now owned, along with the bank, a fifth-floor loft in River North. Two bedrooms. I felt high on progress and my ability to put 10 percent down on a piece of real estate. What good fortune, what a blessing. Everyone congratulated me as I took my seat, but as the session wore on, the high drained away, leaving me with one thought: Christie Tate, Spinster.

  I interrupted Max. I can’t remember what he was saying, but I sliced into his story with my panic. “Y’all, I’m not sure about this condo.” All those papers. All that official evidence of my spinsterhood under the Illinois state seal. I had to fill those empty, echoing rooms all by myself.

  Annoyed at my intrusion, Max huffed. “It’s fine. You’ll be fine. You did the right thing.” Then, he returned to his story. I sat quietly as long as I could, but the anger at Max and panic about the condo were too intense to stifle for long. My hands clenched, and I pitched forward, about to scream.

  “Oh, here we go,” Max said. I wasn’t looking at him, but I heard the eye roll in his tone.

  Fuck him. I slipped my feet out of my shoes—pink Uggs for the snowy streets—and threw one of them in Max’s direction. I swear I aimed for the wall above him, not his face. And I didn’t hit him, but I got close. As my shearling-lined shoe sailed across the circle, my “FUCK YOU” traveled with it. I stared directly at smug-ass Max. “I’m sick of being intimidated by you. Sick of your sighs. Your telling me what is and is not fine. You never had to buy—”

  Max grabbed the shoe I threw and strode right over to my chair, pointing it at me like a gun. He stopped in front of me, and I rose to meet him.

  “Fuck you too!” he yelled in my face.

  “No, fuck you!”

  We stood so close I could feel the brass buttons on his coat brush against my abs. My fury unfurled into his mouth, and his rage blew straight into mine. In his eyes, I saw flecks of gold and pure hatred. For me. And I hoped he saw my ferocity and hatred for him and every other person in the circle—in the world—who never had to buy a condo alone or date in their thirties or swim through thousands of hours of therapy to end up at the exact place she’d hoped to avoid. Christie Tate, Spinster.

  “You don’t fucking know me, Max!”

  “Yes I do! Of course I do! Why do you say such stupid things?”

  “I’m not stupid!”

  “Then stop acting like it!”

  All I knew is that I would scream into his face as long as he would scream into mine. I would not crumple into my chair, breaking the spell with pitiful tears. I would stand my ground and scream as long and loudly as he did. I would hold my power in my own body. He couldn’t have it.

  Then we were silent. Still inches from each other. Fury still pulsing between us. He backed away and sat down. Only then did I take my seat.

  Dr. Rosen didn’t make a grand pronouncement after the fight. There was no This means you’re willing to be intimate. No leading questions like Have you ever had a fight like that with a man? With anyone? Do you understand what this means, Mamaleh? I wouldn’t have heard it anyway with my heartbeat galloping in my ears. And for the first time in all my hours of group therapy, I wasn’t secretly hoping that Dr. Rosen would turn his attention to me and praise me for all the deep work I was doing. For the first time, I didn’t need his affirmation to prove I was moving forward and doing the hard things to become the person I wanted to be. I had keys to a new condo in River North in my purse. I’d thrown my shoe at Max and stood my ground in a highly charged confrontation. It was undeniably life altering to buy real estate, but I’d sat through enough group therapy sessions to recognize that my willingness to fight full out with Max might be an even bigger indication of transformation than a new address on Ontario Street. My body buzzed with adrenaline that was sure to wear off, but in those dizzy moments after the shouting match, there was a solid, still part of me that knew: I was moving forward in my own messy, noisy, frightened way.

  At the end of the session, I stood up, unsure if my shaky legs would hold me up. I wasn’t ashamed exactly, but I wasn’t sure how to deal with Max during the hugs or on the walk to the elevators. It was he who approached me after he hugged Dr. Rosen. For the second time in thirty minutes, he stood a few inches in front of me. This time, he opened his arms wide. I opened mine too. Neither of us said a word, but we held on to each other tightly.

  29

  I hung my red trench coat on the back of my office door, took a seat at my desk, and pressed the start button on my computer. It was still booting up when the phone rang. I checked the number on the curled business card clutched in my damp hand. Yes, it was him, just as he promised.

  “Christie Tate speaking,” I said to sound official, to steady my nerves, to prop up the sham that this was a business call. Reed, the new man in my Tuesday group, had been running deals—or whatever hedge fund managers do—for two decades. I’d been a lawyer for two years. He didn’t need my legal advice. When he laughed on the other end of the line, I could picture his dimples because I’d just seen them in group when we’d laughed at something Rory said about her dad.

  “You sound like a real lawyer,” he said.

  “That’s because I am a real lawyer.” My body temperature rose. I fanned myself with the card he’d pressed into my hand.

  “Did you think I would call?”

  Would truth function here—in the untamed, unsupervised space outside of group—like it did in there? Would it rescue me from the cliché I saw myself diving into like a shimmering pool in a 1970s nighttime drama like Dynasty or Dallas? What did I think would happen between me and this married older man with the ropy forearms and lean neck with a hairline like the seashore? The married man who joined my therapy group because he couldn’t stop getting blow jobs from other women?

  “I wasn’t sure.” But I hoped he would, was glad he did. “How can I help you?”

  “Do you know anyone who does M&A work?”

  My turn to laugh. Skadden was internationally famous for mergers and acquisitions work. I sat one floor away from thirty M&A lawyers. “I can give you the name of the head of the department.”

  “I’ll take a name and a number.”

  I gave him the name and number of the partner with the snow-white hair who wore custom-made pinstriped suits and closed deals that ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

  There was a pause. I flicked the corner of Reed’s business card, and then pinned it to the bulletin board behind my phone, even though I’d already memorized his number.

  There was another pause. Then another.

  “So,” he said, and I could hear his smirk and picture the glint in his eye. “If I keep you on the phone, are we going to need a chaperone?”

  “What for?” I wanted to make him say it.

  “For all the things we are going to say and do to each other.”

  When I hung up the phone, still smiling, still warmed and thrumming from my thighs to my scalp, I stood up and wrung my hands, trying to break the spell, the heat, the throbbing, the pleasure of having Reed’s attention. I relived each beat of our conversation, thrilled that he’d punctured the pretense that our conversation was work related.

  I cracked my neck and arched my back, but my body begged for release, so I pressed in the metal lock on my door. Pushed back my chair and lay on the floor. I slid my hands between my legs. My jaw tightened as I touched myself, thinking of Reed’s dimples, his strong hands, and his crisp collars. His voice on the phone. Those delicious pauses. I came with such force that I bumped my head on the edge of my computer tower. My whole body pulsed—fingertips, triceps, lips, belly, Achilles’ heel, toes.

  I was still breathing hard when I sat in my chair, straightened my sweater, and began to answer e-mails from Jack and the team in Germany.

  * * *

  From group, I knew that Reed viewed his marriage as a stalema
te. He was the guilty, straying husband; his wife Miranda’s rage simmered just below boiling. Their communication was limited to terse exchanges about the logistics of getting their girls to gymnastics and tutoring. They slept with their backs to each other.

  I also knew it was cliché for me to run headfirst into a relationship with him while I was still reeling from Alex. And yet I sprinted.

  The following Thursday and Monday sessions, I didn’t mention Reed, an omission I justified because he was in my Tuesday group, so I should talk about him then. On Tuesday, I set my alarm fifteen minutes early so I could take extra time getting dressed. My stomach somersaulted when the train pulled into the Washington stop. I get to be with him for ninety minutes.

  Reed arrived a few minutes late. He put his briefcase next to my chair, and as he sat down, he scooted several inches closer to me. Could they all feel the heat rising between us? My heart was pounding. Surely Dr. Rosen and everyone else could hear it.

  During the session, I stared at the dark indigo of Reed’s slacks, the fine hair on his wrists. When he talked, I watched his lips move; when he brushed his hand through his hair in frustration, I couldn’t make myself look away. But I also watched the clock obsessively, because at nine o’clock, group would end, and Reed would head north to his office and I would head west to mine, where my gray life of document review and Riverdance awaited me. But in group, less than a foot away from Reed, my life shimmered with color and promise because I could watch him challenge the Colonel, brush his foot with mine, listen to his laugh.

  And this: my feelings for Reed were undeniably of a sexual nature, which meant I should share them with the group. The pressure to disclose pressed against my lips, but Reed beat me to it.

  “I think about Christie all the time. When I get in bed with Miranda, I wish she was Christie. At the girls’ soccer games, I wish Christie was with me. We talked on the phone the other day, and it was really—” Reed looked at me as if for permission. I nodded. “It was really nice.”

  Everyone looked at me, waiting for my half of the confession. I admitted that I enjoyed talking to him. I didn’t mention how I shut my door and touched myself in my office after our first conversation. What words matched the sensations in my body? The constant thrumming, the woozy feeling like I’d pounded shots or snorted laughing gas. The only words I could imagine were ridiculous. I couldn’t tell them I was falling in love.

  At the same time, I wasn’t a woman who stole another woman’s husband. I’d taken women’s studies classes. I’d read MacKinnon, Chodorow, and Cixous. Plus, I knew better than to believe that married Reed would leave his colonial in the suburbs. I hadn’t sat through hundreds of therapy sessions to dive into the cliché of the lonely girl who falls for the unhappily married man from her therapy group. I’d already tried dating a man who saw Dr. Rosen, and it hadn’t worked. I remembered Monica Lewinsky—the public scorn and the rescinding of her Revlon job offer when the blow-job scandal broke. Given the loose boundaries of Rosen-world, I too could end up publicly shamed, not to mention I was jeopardizing my therapeutic home base.

  “What do you want?” Dr. Rosen asked me.

  “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know what I’m allowed to have.” I stared back at Dr. Rosen and believed he knew the answer: I wanted Reed.

  * * *

  Each morning my cell rattled on my bedside table. Reed on his way to work before dawn. Stock market hours. He always called my office midmorning to say hello, and then again when the market closed. At night he called on his walk from his office to the train. I could hear his shoes clicking on the sidewalk. Sometimes we talked from the moment he left his office, all through his train ride and walk to his front door when he’d put his key in the lock and whispered that he had to go. He showed me how to send PIN messages on my BlackBerry—messages that bypassed our firms’ servers and allegedly left no record. When my BlackBerry light glowed with a blinking red light, I knew it was a PIN from Reed and my body responded with a jolt.

  He told me I could ask him anything, so I asked about Miranda. Maybe then she would be real to me, and I would back off. What did she smell like? (Clean) How thin was she? (Size four) What was his favorite thing about her? (Her devotion to the children) When was the last time they slept together? (Couldn’t recall) Why did he marry her? (It felt like I was supposed to) Why hadn’t he left her? (The girls) I drew a picture of her in my head: a woman my height in a plum-colored dress with silver sandals with perfect sun-kissed highlights in her mostly blond hair and a coldness that I associated with super-thin wealthy women who didn’t have to work. I imagined she had a signature lipstick shade and nibbled at her food. I dreamed her as flawless but cold; self-possessed but starving; perfectly manicured but brittle. My body had more flesh, more warmth, more vitality, more youth, more power.

  I felt guilty. I was a fake feminist after all. A husband stealer. A cliché.

  And yet: I’d never felt so alive.

  * * *

  “I have to go to my noon AA meeting. Meet me there,” Reed said one morning.

  Jack was expecting me for a meeting in ten minutes. After he’d supported my German travel ban, I was loath to cause any trouble. How much would I risk for Reed?

  I e-mailed Jack: Something has come up. Can we meet at 1:30?

  The AA meeting was four blocks from my office, and I raced over in my heels with no coat, even though it was thirty degrees. I had no wallet, no money, no fucking sense in my head. All I had was the force of Reed’s voice inviting me to be with him and my reckless yes. Across the Chicago Loop, I bobbed and weaved between pedestrians and stepped into traffic so I could get to Reed sooner, so I could flee my gray, loveless life that turned vivid in his presence. Yes, I sprinted to an AA meeting:

  Even though I wasn’t technically an alcoholic.

  Even though I had to push back a meeting with the largest rainmaker in my department.

  Even though Reed was a married man with well-documented fidelity issues.

  I sat next to him in the back at the end of a row. He pressed his shiny black lace-up shoe against my black wedge heel. My breath hitched. I leaned back in my chair and snuck my hand into the space between his elbow and his rib cage. The throbbing in my fingertips was my own pulse, but it felt like his. The chairperson of the meeting passed around a flyer for a 12-step retreat, and when I passed it to Reed, I let my fingers rest on his palm. Skin to skin. Everything disappeared. The white-walled room packed with sober lawyers, secretaries, traders, and a massage therapist. The serenity coins. The stackable chairs. The woman in a security officer uniform eating her Chipotle burrito in the far corner. It was all gone and with it, the Loop, the El train, the traffic on Wacker.

  There was only my fingertips and Reed’s palm.

  And that throbbing through my body.

  He walked me back to my office. I matched his long stride so that every few steps our hands would brush. Each time, we pulled our hands away quickly as if shocked. Or busted. We wore goofy smiles.

  Oldest fucking story in the book. Older successful guy and his younger mistress. The end of this story would find me huddled somewhere bawling, leaving messages for Dr. Rosen, shaking my fist at my stupid-ass decisions. But this moment on corner of Wacker and Randolph with Reed’s hand centimeters from mine and my body bursting with unexpressed longing was all that mattered. It was enough.

  “I want you to know everything about me,” he said as we stood before the great glass revolving door that would churn me back into my office.

  “Like what?” Thanks to group, I already knew his dad was a prescription pill addict who pressured Reed into an MBA program even though he wanted to be an architect. I’d heard the story about the track coach who got him drunk and molested him at an out-of-town meet during middle school. I’d been privy to the sessions where he described who he was when he drank every day, and of course that blow job that brought him to group. And the other ex
tramarital shenanigans that fissured his marriage. I knew things. Knowledge was power that felt like love.

  “Everything. How I open a bottle of water. How I hold the steering wheel or swim laps in the pool. Stuff I can’t show you in group or on the street.” He leaned over and whispered in my ear: “I want you to know what I look like when I tell you that I love you.”

  * * *

  “I did something yesterday,” I announced in Monday-morning group, where it was easier to disclose because Reed wasn’t in that group. For weeks, I’d come right up to the line of committing a sin with Reed. I rationalized each near transgression as harmless because nothing overtly sexual happened. Grazing his palm at an AA meeting wasn’t an affair. Neither was meeting him for lunch in a dark bar hidden under the El tracks or talking to him late at night after his family had gone to bed. We hadn’t even kissed. I lied to myself that I was blameless, though deep down I suspected what I was doing with Reed was like secretly eating a dozen apples but professing to have recovered from an eating disorder.

  “What happened?” Lorne said. He’d predicted for weeks that my “friendship” with Reed might get too friendly. His wife, Renee, had been in group with Reed years earlier, and they’d come close to having an affair, which should have given me pause. It didn’t.

  “We were talking on the phone yesterday—and things got—out of hand.”

  “What does that mean?” Patrice’s brow furrowed with motherly concern. Grandma Maggie clucked as if she knew what was coming.

  “He called from the grocery store.” On the weekends, Reed and I patched together a series of guerrilla phone calls whenever he was able to sneak away from his family. I was glued to my phone at all times. “He said things—he was in the frozen foods aisle—”

  “Jesus, we don’t care about frozen peas!” Lorne sniped.