The Idea of Him

“It makes me look like a snitch. She told him to play nicer and he told everyone I told on him, so don’t do it again. For real, Mom. Don’t.”

“I love you, honey. I’m here to talk if you want.”

“I said I don’t want to.”

I gently closed his door, mumbling to myself, “A mother’s only as happy as her unhappiest child.” Pained but resigned to let him stew, I ran into the kitchen to place thirty Trader Joe’s hors d’oeuvres on cookie sheets and into a warm oven. With the downturn having hit ad revenues hard, Wade’s magazine company had slashed his budget for home cocktail parties to almost nothing. They would only pay for a scant two college students, a mediocre bar, and the cheapest hors d’oeuvres from the frozen section. For every event, I had to fork out for flowers and a few extras with our own money. When I protested that these parties didn’t quite fit into our tight monthly budget in expensive New York City, Wade countered that he couldn’t make Meter successful if he couldn’t continue to network as he wished, and any and every time he wished.

The cut-rate bartender and server from the Columbia University Bartending service were late, and the wine and club soda cases were stacked in the cramped kitchen hallway untouched. Six thirty. It was getting awfully close to the seven o’clock game time and I realized the guests might actually arrive before the two servers did. I struggled to push the cartons a few inches across the floor so that I could maneuver around them and open the oven door.

In the oven, dozens of frozen miniquiches and spinach phyllo pies started to sweat off freezer burn as I pulled a chair up to the cupboard so I could reach above the fridge and get down two bottles of vodka. This being a New York apartment, table and shelf space in the living room were too valuable to use for cumbersome bar bottles when company wasn’t around.

Why I was the one about to break my neck reaching for a vodka bottle and stressing that our tonic and limes were low for his work party while Wade was lying around oblivious in bed tickling Lucy at 6:49 was a question most wives know the answer to.

My red silk blouse had started to show lovely little sweat stains around my armpits with all the aerobic activity I was performing in the kitchen. At 6:53, the server and bartender finally arrived from the Columbia campus, apologizing and blaming the poor subway service.

Back in my closet to select another shirt, I heard Lucy screaming with laughter and jumping high on the bed. Wade was trying to swing a pillow into her legs midjump so she’d flip down on the bed sideways. This always ended in tears. No matter how many times I begged them not to play this game, Lucy always wanted more.

“Wade, can you talk to Blake before the party? Jeremy and those mean kids are …”

Wade wasn’t listening. He was counting the timing of Lucy’s jump so he could slam her with the huge pillow as she pulled her feet up in midair.

“Wade. Are you listening?”

“Got you!” he yelled.

Lucy went flying ninety degrees sideways with the force of the pillow and was in full hysterics now. “Again, Daddy!”

Wade turned to me. “I got her. I told her we’d do it until I got her. Now I’ll go talk to Blake, but he’s not going to want to discuss it, I promise.”

“He could use some boosting from his father, so please go talk to him quick. I’m running around here like the Tasmanian Devil. I’m sweating, I look like hell …” I tore my shirt off and rummaged through my closet for another blouse that, by some miracle, wasn’t creased.

As I threw on a tight black sweater, Wade the design guru peeked back in and made this unwelcome suggestion: “That traditional red blouse was good with those spiky shoes. If you change to that more contemporary black look, you’re going to need a clunkier heel.”

When I shook my head at him, he walked over to me and kissed my forehead gingerly. “Sorry, honey, I know you try, but the outfit’s just not working. But I love you and if I wanted to marry a clothes designer, I guess I could have. Tonight, though, I need you to cope on the outfit because there’s a ton of fashion advertisers coming.”

Where I grew up, everyone wore shoes that sensibly confronted the environment, not the Fashion Nazis of Manhattan. What the hell did my crappy little hometown of Squanto on the Atlantic teach anyone about decor and style? My family resided in a small colonial home about five blocks from the docks where salt water and sand pervaded every room. We lived in winter boots or sneakers or flip-flops. I didn’t have a pair of heels until I went to Middlebury College, and I think I wore them five times total before I hit the judgmental shores of Manhattan.

“Which heel did you mean?” I yelled back at him. “And do you mean a sling-back sandal or a real shoe? Could you just come back here and show me? I’ve got to get Lucy settled now that you wound her up. If Blake won’t talk, make sure he’s doing his homework.” I was sure Blake was still on his Nintendo, and not ready to study at all, but I couldn’t really blame him, what with the students from Columbia now furiously clanging in the kitchen outside of the kids’ room.

“Which shoe exactly?”

But Wade was long gone.

“I wish Daddy would stay,” Lucy whimpered, with a whiplash mood swing to the dark side. This was the downside of their lovefest: she always craved more. I flashed momentarily on an image of my father walking out the door to his two prized fishing boats to cater to some wealthy summer tourists, past my outstretched five-year-old arms, off and gone, leaving me for days. When he came home and flashed that smile framed by his salty beard, it was as if he’d never left me with a mother who spent much of her day passed out from drinking in front of the blue glow of her television game shows.

My father’s charm, much like my husband’s, was so irresistible that I couldn’t help but forgive him the instant he reappeared at my bedroom door. No wonder Wade got whatever he wanted from me: I had had no practice staying angry with the man I adored most in the world.

“Blake’s just fine,” he announced. “Like I said, he doesn’t want us micromanaging all his friendships. Fourth grade is time to handle some stuff on his own.”

As always just before the parties started, Wade stood in front of the mirror once last time to admire his sporty frame. He flipped his tie over his shoulder while he smoothed down the front of his shirt. Working intently on his cool media master aura, he delicately brushed a piece of hair up over his brow.

Wade came from a small eastern town too, but, as an upper-middle-class accountant’s son, and an arrogant one at that, Wade’s lofty career aspirations seemed to be met anytime he damn well felt like it. His self-assuredness was another one of those interlocking parts of our relationship. Watching him in action helped inspire the part of me that feared I couldn’t achieve anything quite well enough.

“You know everyone’s name on the list, right, Allie?”

“I don’t know, Wade. I hope so.”

“This is important.” He rubbed my ear. “C’mon, babe. I know you’re freaking out about Blake’s bruised feelings and Lucy’s caterpillar costumes and that you are juggling a ton at work, but I rely on your uncanny ability to execute. Do me this little favor? I’ll owe you one.”

“Sure, Wade. I got it handled.” I wanted to help him out, but I was so fatigued that night. I gritted my teeth and carried on anyway, oblivious to the tsunami rolling my way.

“That’s my other best girl.” He kissed me quickly on the lips. “Now, Lucy, be a good girl, and I’ll sneak away to read you a book at bedtime.” She held out her pinkie and he looped his around it, beaming his love into her little face. Then he went into the living room to make sure the candles and music were setting the proper cool mood to match his look. I stood up and went down the hall to overcoddle and infantilize Blake some more—anything to delay my entry into the hordes of guests who would soon be shamelessly clamoring all over my husband.

5

That Woman Again

I maneuvered around the crush of people, placing small glass bowls of cashews and wasabi peas on every little table and windowsill to give the illusion that food was abundant. When I came back from checking on the latest batch of Trader Joe’s party treats, I almost tripped over Delsie Arceneaux’s gorgeous, cappuccino gams outstretched in the alcove corner. She nodded a lame attempt at hello to me, the woman who worked so hard to make her words clear and precise in every speech she’d given for the past two years.

I hovered around the cocktail bar and dropped some ice into a small glass while studying Delsie’s pounce technique with the still very horny seventy-two-year-old Max Rowland, freshly sprung from nine months in the white-collar division of Allenwood prison. He was one of our highest-paying (and highest-maintenance) clients. Murray had him invested in our film festival to diminish Max’s image as a tax-evading, greedy corporate criminal—one of those twofer conflicts of interest that Murray lived for.

“Tell me, Max,” Delsie purred, as she smoothed out her sky-blue Chanel knit suit with a short tight jacket and miniskirt. “How did you fare in there? Everyone was so damned worried about you and I kept telling them, ‘Puhleese. It’s Max. He’s what my daddy would call a high-stepper. He’s built an empire of parking lots with his own hands. He’s going to whip that prison population into …’”

Max, a heavyset Texan who started out in New York City at age twenty-one to make his equally outsized fortune, sank into the soft white corduroy couch. He placed his feet on one of the zebra-skinned Ralph Lauren ottomans that Wade had swiped from one of his photo shoots. “You’re rahhht,” he chuckled. “The food was crap, but the prison guys weren’t so dahmn bad. Have to admit, they kinda hung on my evereh word.”

“As we all do, Max.” Delsie’s librarian glasses only heightened the sexual potency that emanated from her every raspy, semi-out-of-breath word. She was positioned as if she were about to screw this old man’s brains out, hips arched back, chest thrust heavenward: her way of trying to score the first postprison interview. He hadn’t talked to the press since his release, and this was another win-win in the making if Murray could get him to talk to Delsie, since they were both clients.

The party was bursting with exclusivity, even though our apartment was situated on a busy block in the commercial West Twenties and not in a pricey location. We’d knocked out the wall between the dining alcove and living room, making a larger space that could accommodate a squished-up crowd. There was also a corner window off the green alcove that featured a giant beige couch and Wade’s home office desk, where the kinds of people who like to be cliquish tended to congregate.

Wade cared far more about the “stage” than I ever did, and he’d go to great lengths to get it just right on our tight budget: the exact shade of the red anemones, the black lacquer party trays he’d coveted enough to trek down to Chinatown to buy, the outfits the student servers wore (black shirts, black jackets, never ties, to exude the same Chelsea hipness as their host), the hors d’oeuvres (never crab cakes or smoked salmon—Mrs. Vincent Astor once told him a decade ago they gave the guests bad breath), and even the cocktail napkins (always in the same synergistic color as the cover subject’s dress, in this case a supermodel named simply “Angel”). High-gloss posters of the latest cover and photo spread hung like art on a blank white wall in our front entry. Angel’s dress was fuchsia, so was the Meter logo on the cover, as was the bold cover line YOU WANT ACTION?. And so were our cocktail napkins.

As I put ice-cold vodka to my lips, a shot of green in Wade’s general vicinity caught my eye, and I nearly dropped my glass. It was the gorgeous girl who had helped me at the Tudor Room bar the day before, all done up in a tight olive dress. She was talking in a highly animated fashion to a wealthy hedge funder sporting the facial expression of someone getting a lap dance. As I stared at her, she noticed, but then looked at Wade—whose back was to me—and nodded in the direction of the kitchen. She drifted down the hall. I found this strange. A woman I didn’t know was signaling to me in no uncertain terms that she was headed to my back kitchen … and what was she referring to about Wade exactly?

“It’s all okay, right, my love?” Wade shouted over the din, relishing that he controlled every last detail of the party turf and I didn’t care to. Even more guests had poured in and filled the loft space in what felt like seconds. “I checked on Blake. He’s fine, like he forgot all about Jeremy being mean. The party—going well so far, right?”

Yes, I mouthed without sound as I bit into a miniquiche that was warm to the touch, but cold on the inside. I took a deep breath and looked for the nineteen-year-old stoned-out server across the room so I could remind him to leave the next batch in the oven a bit longer.

“You sure?” Wade’s eyes searched the room. They moved toward the girl in green.

“Positive.” In that instant, with that one glance in her direction, I knew my instincts over that past year were correct and that I had to stop glossing over problems; while on the surface we were status quo, something beneath had changed for Wade. Warm on the outside, cold on the inside.

There had been a discreet but seismic shift in his smallest gestures: he used to let his eyes linger on mine, but tonight he broke the stare so he could steal a glance at this woman. I found his telling me I was so hot all the time inauthentic because he wasn’t acting on it. He used to want to make out in our elevator, even after the kids were born, last year even. Now his compliments were more frequent, but his kisses more like bird pecks.

“I’m going to check on the food. We seem to be running low.” Wade gave me another one of those hard-lip kisses, spun on his heel, and buzzed off after the impossibly hot woman, not even noticing me noticing him.

6

Bizarre Behavior

Mouth agape in a silent scream, I searched the crowd for Caitlin, my office right hand and friend, half hoping she had, and half praying she hadn’t, witnessed my husband chase after the gorgeous girl who’d helped me at the bar of the Tudor Room. I finally caught Caitlin’s eye, and she hopscotched over Delsie’s caramel, daddy longlegs to reach me.

“What’s wrong—other than this party, that is,” she said out of the side of her mouth. Her curly blond, 1920s bob slanted across her cheek as she smirked. “All the requisite douche bags are here. Wade must be very happy.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to remain calm as I watched the hallway for the return of either my husband or that woman. “He’s happy with everything.”

Caitlin squinted at my creased brow. “But you’re not. What’s up?”

I couldn’t stop myself. “He just disappeared down the hall with a lovely young thing who actually was very kind and generous to me during my Delsie meeting. I’m sure it’s nothing. He wouldn’t … he’s just all hyper tonight with the …”

“Oh, he wouldn’t in his own home.” Caitlin crossed her arms. She looked intensely angry. “Aren’t the kids back that way?”

I certainly wasn’t expecting to have my fears of a cheating husband reignited that night. When Wade strayed that one time, he claimed he was “ignored and lonely” and that he’d made a monumental mistake with a photo assistant for Meter magazine while I was breast-feeding Lucy. It almost derailed our marriage. A onetime thing, he had promised. Not a day went by that I didn’t remember my pain when I figured it out. I had heard him talking to her one night about the sexy things he wanted to do to her—whispering in the bathroom with the door slightly ajar. He didn’t realize I was home and had overheard the entire conversation. I had crumpled my mushy postpregnancy body onto the bed, waiting for the call to end. And there was nothing he could say to refute it when he saw me minutes afterward. It took me a very long time even to sit next to him on a couch.

For months after that, he came home directly after work every night to assure me it was a “mistake” and that he understood he had nearly destroyed everything between us. I had chosen to believe that it was out of his system and in the past. Now I wasn’t so sure.

“Hold on. I’ll be right back. I’ve got to check on the food,” I lied. Why would that woman approach me at the Tudor Room, help me, connect with me so brazenly and out of the blue if she were fooling around with Wade? She’d even just hinted a minute ago with that nod in the direction of the kitchen that they were headed together somewhere back there.

What the hell?

I pretended to waltz into my kitchen, no big deal, just checking on the food, and found the college server frantically filling black lacquer trays with hot-outside, frozen-inside hors d’oeuvres. No sign of Wade. “Jim. Have you seen my husband?”

“Sorry, I’m really too busy to …” Jim shook his head, clearly exasperated trying to feed sixty people with one small oven and too few goodies coming out of it and too much pregig marijuana slowing down his executive functioning.

The laundry room door was shut, but I could see the light under the crack. Couldn’t be. I nervously checked our back bedroom. No sign of two adults, just my two kids on our king bed, hypnotized by the television.

“Ten more minutes and you have to get into your own bunks. I love you both!”

My heart in pieces, I marched back to the front of the apartment to where Caitlin stood, arms on her hips, ready to help me in any way she could.

“Where are they?” She had urged me countless times to stop letting Wade go out late so often when he’d already strayed once. “And don’t tell me you were checking on the food. I am going to help you figure this out.” She seemed almost more determined to uncover his behavior than I did, which I thought a little bizarre.

“I think they are in the laundry room,” I said, squeezing my hands while tears pooled in my eyes. I blinked them away. “It’s the only room I haven’t checked.”

“No way.”

“He’s not at the party. He’s not in the kitchen. They didn’t jump out the window or tuck in the kids. It’s the only room that makes any sense—there’s a light on in there.”

“You sure she isn’t some writer?” Caitlin asked. “Maybe she’s helping him write a toast?”

“She’s definitely not from Meter. She’s hot enough to be on the cover. Besides, I already wrote his friggin’ toast.”

“When are you going to stop doing that, by the way; he’s a grown man with dozens of writers at his disposal …”

“In the laundry room, Caitlin. Where I wash his children’s clothes.”

“If I were you, I’d try to catch him in the act.” She forced the words out of her mouth with spit flying. “We should go back there and fling that door open.”

“Not we, me. You’re too rash; you’ll screw it up,” I said. She started to protest, but she knew what I meant. “Keep people from going into the back of the apartment. I need to sort this out myself.”

I walked down the hall and sat on a kitchen stool while my eyes burned with humiliation over something too crazy to be true. As the student waiter took out the latest batch of crumbly phyllo hors d’oeuvres, they went sliding onto the floor.

“The floor is clean,” I said. “Pick them up, place them on the lovely lacquer trays, and serve them to the guests, Jim.”

“Really, Mrs. Crawford? I would never …”

“Really. Do it.”

I was so tense I couldn’t breathe, so I waited down the hall in a hidden corner and stared at the light under the laundry room door. If my husband and the girl came out together, I couldn’t yell at him in front of her and all the guests. Or could I? I had to think of some approach that would give me the advantage and find an unflappable new personality inside me to fuel it. If I didn’t persevere, I would never be able to maintain that I “had the goods” on him. It would only be hearsay and innuendo that could be easily refuted. Then I wondered: Why should I be waffling if I’m catching him in the act? Easy answer: because I didn’t want it to be true.

Just when I’d decided (correctly) that nothing else would do but to knock, the knuckles on my tightly clenched hand mere inches from the laundry room door, a groggy Lucy appeared in the kitchen in the lint-balled, pink Disney princess nightgown she’d insisted, going on two years now, she could not fall asleep without. “Where’s Daddy?” she murmured while rubbing her left eye. “I’m ready for my story.”

“Honey, you need to get back in bed. If you walk around and get all excited, you’re going to get overtired and …” And witness me catching your father in flagrante.

Blake suddenly appeared behind his sister. This was getting dangerous. “Mom,” he said. “I tried to tell her to get into her bunk, but she wouldn’t listen. She had to find Dad.”

“It’s okay, Blake. Tell you what. If you read her the Angelina Ballerina, that will count as the rest of the reading you need to do.” I kissed the top of Lucy’s head, turned her around, and watched Blake shepherd her back to their room. If this laundry room situation was as bad as it looked, I worried, how would I mitigate the damage on them?

“Allie!” Murray yelled next, gesticulating with his muscular arms in huge circles around my kitchen. I noticed a gold watch the size of a hockey puck on his trunklike limb. I looked past him to give Caitlin the “WTF” for letting him back here, but she was nowhere to be found.

Murray’s thinning comb-over looked slightly askew as he stopped to catch his breath. “Allie,” he wheezed, picking up a cheese stick and pointing it at my heart before he mashed it down his throat with the center of his palm. “Where the fuck is your husband?”

I shrugged. Murray rested his elbow on the island counter, displaying sweat stains across the creases of his dark blue shirt. The Columbia server couldn’t place the last phyllo spinach pies or the new fried wontons on the tray in front of him fast enough to beat Murray’s rapid-fire arm movements from tray to mouth, tray to mouth, quicker than a real toad would catch a fly with his tongue.

Murray spat the following in my ear as he scarfed down a few more. “Delsie thinks you’re fantastic! Your pitch worked and she is so happy to have you handling her writing for the big media pitch we’d put—”

“Thanks, Murray, but I need to deal with the party.” At that I left and hid down the hall to witness how Wade would exit the room now.

Then the unimaginable happened. My boss eyed the laundry room door, saw the light on underneath, and strode over to the room where my husband was possibly shagging his mistress. He banged on the door with the back of his fist. Murray made my day, and my soft spot for him grew.

“Wade, you crazy schmuck! You in there?! You got me wanting to toast your fabulous ass.” He rattled the locked doorknob.

“Right out, Murray. Just gotta finish one, more, thing, here …” Wade yelled nonchalantly from the inside as if he wasn’t about to explode into a young woman’s voluptuous mouth.

A full, long twenty-two seconds later—I know, because I counted—Wade appeared with his nose high, as if he wasn’t ever going to be accountable to Murray, or his ball-and-chain, for his bizarre shenanigans. Only I detected a hint of anger in his posture. It couldn’t have thrilled him to find the irascible Murray on the other side of the door—or to have to rush his eruption in there.

“You good?” Murray then smacked his back even harder, leaving flecks of phyllo and finger grease stains on Wade’s shirt.

From twenty feet down the hall, I tried to peek around them into the laundry room, but Wade gingerly closed the door and steered Murray in the direction of the party.