A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (21 page)

Jamie hadn’t been only loving and grateful when he had suggested that I sleep in and order room service. Even if he hadn’t admitted it to himself, he knew that I would be in the way at breakfast.

So I ate as quickly as dignity allowed and then laid my hand on Jamie’s shoulder in a cheerful but proper farewell. Steve Ellsworth, the local attorney, half-rose and said, “Are you going to be here through the weekend? My wife and I would love to have you and Jamie out to the house for dinner on Saturday night.”

The plan was that I should stay through Sunday. So I nodded. “Do you want to check with her about a time?”

By which I meant “don’t you want to check with her at all?” Steve Ellsworth had learned of my presence fifteen minutes ago, and he had not done anything to communicate with his wife. She was not being consulted about the invitation.

“No need to do that. Six-thirty or seven will be fine. You can’t be any more precise than that, not with our traffic,” he said genially.

So I thanked him and went back to the suite to figure out what on earth a perfect at-your-side wife was supposed to do with her day when there was no one to stand next to. What did women do when they accompanied their husbands on business-related travel?

I suppose a trophy wife would spend the day polishing the chrome so that she would glitter in the evening. So I read until the hotel’s beauty salon opened, and then I went and got my hair cut, highlighted, and colored. The color was warmer than I usually had, and the cut was edgier. I liked it. The manicurist had been available during the various processing stages so I also got a manicure and, as long as I was at it, a pedicure. I read so many issues of
People
magazine that I was really sick of looking at people who were far prettier than any human had a right to be.

It was now noon. Jamie said he usually had dinner around seven or eight.

I’m not used to being alone. At home, even when I’m the only person in the house, I don’t feel alone. The phone is always ringing and the laptop is chirping.

I suppose the other thing that trophy wives do is shop. The padded leatherette notebook of “Guest Information” had indicated that the fifth-largest mall in the United States was only eight miles away. How could you pass up the fifth-largest mall in the nation? I called for my car.

The valet parking guys urged me to take the hotel courtesy shuttle, but resolutely independent, I drove myself. And that was the right thing to do. The horrendous Houston traffic and the immense and crowded Galleria parking lot had the happy effect of killing almost an hour. Now I only had five or six hours to shop.

I took off my clothes fifty million times and bought almost nothing. I was trying to expand my wardrobe horizons, to buy things that I wouldn’t usually buy, and so I would try such things on and realize why I didn’t usually buy them. At the end of the afternoon, I was tired, my feet hurt, I was frustrated … and I was lonely. As I sat in traffic on the way back to the hotel, I called Annelise and whined.

She listened patiently for five minutes and then told me gently I had done this to myself. “Lydia, you know what looks good on you. You always say that the problem with your wardrobe is that you don’t stick with what you know is right.”

She had a point. I do know what looks good on me—V necks, diagonal lines, warm colors, prints with small figures and low contrast—and the reason that I don’t look spectacular every minute of the day is that I let other things override those rules. Sometimes I will buy a color that I love in a garment that isn’t great for me. Or I will pass up a pair of trousers that might be utterly perfect if I would just try them on in a bigger size, but I can’t bear the thought. And if something is on sale then all the rules fly out the door. The more times a garment has been marked down, the more I am willing to forgive. I’ll buy anything if the price is really great, and then I will never wear it.

It was much harder to be the perfect groupie at dinner that night. Jamie seemed more distracted, and whatever initial relief my appearance had created had worn off. I mentioned having gone shopping, but despite yesterday’s lecture on follow-up questions vis-à-vis wardrobe issues, he couldn’t ask a follow-up question because he didn’t ask an opening one. He also didn’t notice my new haircut. I was quiet for a while, and he didn’t seem to notice that, either. So I talked about what I had read, and he did seem to be listening to that.

Had I dropped my whole life, hauled Mimi’s mom across however many states to stay with our kids, so that I could give book reports? I could have sent Jamie some books on tape; it would have been a lot cheaper and just as effective.

The following morning I skipped the group breakfast. “I’m sure you have people to talk to.”

He seemed relieved. “We do have a routine. People often get ideas late at night.” He paused. “You are going to be okay, aren’t you?”

“Me? Oh, goodness, Jamie, of course, I’ll be fine. This is a luxury for me, all this time to myself.”

“Oh, yes.” Now he really seemed relieved. “I suppose it is.”

He wasn’t supposed to have believed me. He was supposed to have nodded and said that he appreciated what I was trying to do, appreciated that I didn’t want to add to his burdens by whining about myself, but, of course, he knew perfectly well that I didn’t like roaming around Houston with nothing to do. I waited until I knew that Mimi would be in from walking her dog. Then I called her and whined.

She listened to me for ten minutes and then told me that if I didn’t want to shop for myself, I should shop for her. “Just make sure that it is short and that two of you will fit into it.”

This time I did let the hotel courtesy shuttle take me to the Galleria, and I got to work with grim efficiency. In each store I looked for the saleslady who most closely resembled me in age and build and treated her neither like a hang-those-up-for-me-won’t-you-darling underling nor like a bitch-goddess put on earth to scare the bejesus out of me. I introduced myself and treated her like my partner. I told her what I thought I looked good in and then followed her around as she showed me what the store had.

I purchased things with crisp decision. I set very high standards and if the garment met those standards, I purchased it. I felt completely detached from myself and my life. I was a little robot with a mission. I don’t think it was the CIA that had planted a chip in my brain—although I suppose it might have been. More likely it was the mall’s management or the Federal Reserve or who else cares about people spending money.

I completely lost track of what I spent. Without a car to store my purchases in, I had everything shipped back to D.C. As I rode the shuttle back to the hotel, I pulled my receipts out of my purse to add them up, but the numbers didn’t seem real. I started to feel an odd churning in my stomach. Yes, we have enough money, but I knew that I had spent more than I needed to.

Shopping makes some women feel good; spending money on themselves makes them feel pampered, nurtured, taken care of. Not me. I was feeling icky. I didn’t want to become the sort of person for whom spending money solves things.

I called Blair. “Shut up,” she told me briskly, “and stop thinking about it. All those stores have branches around here. Come home, look at everything here, let me look at it, and then we can return whatever was ridiculously overpriced.”

That made me feel better. The van got completely stalled in traffic. So I called home. I chatted briefly with Erin—who had worn her Gap low-rise, slender-fit, boot-cut black jeans to school with the Haverford College hoodie Jamie had bought for her the last time he had visited his alma mater.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to wear anything with writing,” I, the queen of follow-up wardrobe questions, asked.

“Mr. Goddard said that the high-school kids could start wearing things with college insignias on them.”

Good for him. I started to ask Erin if he had explicitly told the middle-school kids that they could as well, or if she and her friends were pushing the dress-code envelope, but I decided to give that question to Jamie.

Bubbe reported that Mimi’s husband had taken Gideon and Thomas to Cub Scouts.

Why wasn’t I home? I wished I were with them.

Dinner was even more difficult that night because I could no longer believe that I was doing Jamie any good.

I couldn’t think of what to talk about. Relationships, personalities, and individuality are what interest me, and right now Jamie was sickened by how his legal case had become about those things, instead of about law or justice.

The silence continued. I thought about the dinner at Blair’s, how Chris had gotten me to talk about photography in ways that would have been interesting even to Jamie.

Jamie looked up from his plate with a sick, watery smile. “I’m not very good company,” he said.

“Don’t worry about that,” I chirped. “You don’t have to put on a dog-and-pony show for me.”

I suppose that at Blair’s Chris had been thinking of himself as at least the pony part of a dog-and-pony show. He had been trying to be interesting and engaging. Jamie just didn’t have the energy to do that now.

Thursday I went to the art museums, and I was lonely. I wanted to talk to someone about what I was seeing. One of the paintings was so sublime that I felt as if my eyeballs were being fried. I had an intensely physical reaction to the work, and I ached to talk to someone about it.

When I got back to the suite, there was a message from Jamie that the legal team was having a dinner meeting in the office suite, and I should join them there.

I wanted to go home. I missed the kids, Thomas even more than Erin. I missed how cuddly he still was, how sweet and serious. I missed the clumsy relish with which he and his friends were growing into stupid male humor. They were gleeful at even the most hackneyed potty joke because, however tedious the joke seemed to me, they were hearing it for the first time.

So why not go home? I could tell Jamie that Bubbe was having to leave unexpectedly or that something had come up with someone. He wouldn’t ask for details.

But I wasn’t going to lie to him. If I was going to leave, I was going to be honest.
Jamie, I’m not doing you any good. I should go home.

But he would protest.
Oh, no, Lydia, having you here is important, you do make a difference.
He would say what he thought I wanted to hear. He tells the jury what they want to hear, he tells reporters what they want to hear. Why should I be any different?

Saturday morning there was no breakfast in the conference room, and so I called for room service. “Shall we do something together this afternoon?” he asked. “I can take off a couple of hours.”

Was this the big thank-you for my having come? A couple of hours on Saturday afternoon?

I was angry. All week long I had stifled every impulse, every need of my own, so as not to be a bother to him … and he had let me do it. “You do remember that the Ellsworths are having us to dinner?”

“Oh.” He had forgotten. “But I can still take some time off this afternoon.”

“I need to get something halfway educational for the kids.” So far I had only bought them instant-gratification junk. “I was thinking about going to the gift shop at the Houston Children’s Museum, not to any of the exhibits, just the gift shop.”

“Just the gift shop? Isn’t that a strange way to go to a museum?”

“Give Erin that option next time we take her to a museum and see how strange she thinks it is. She would love it.”

“Oh, I suppose.” So he came with me to the museum, but stood at my shoulder like the ghost of Christmas past.

In the evening we took my rented car out to the Ellsworths’ house. The directions we had were simple enough, but it quickly became clear that the distances were considerable. I couldn’t imagine commuting that far every day, and I started to say something to that effect when Jamie spoke.

“You know, we need to be careful this evening.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Steve represents only one of the clients.”

Each of the defendants had his own set of lawyers, and as lead counsel, Jamie was trying to keep the entire cast singing the same tune, something that was becoming more challenging by the minute.

“In fact,” Jamie continued, “our going to the Ellsworths’ at all is making some of the other lawyers nervous. It looks as if we are playing favorites.”

This was a little too much like the sixth-grade parents’ coffee at the beginning of the school year. “You must hate this,” I said. Jamie would want to be judged on the quality of his work, not on which parties he went to.

“You have no idea,” he answered.

Marcy and Steve Ellsworth had a very large, very new house. They were a blended family. Marcy and Steve had two toddlers of their own, and apparently this was the weekend that all the various teens—the stepchildren, the half-siblings, and even a stepchild’s half-sibling—were at their house. If I had been Marcy, I would not have been happy about having to haul out my china and crystal for a pair of strangers on this particular weekend. The older kids, while very polite, interrupted us all evening, needing to rearrange the cars in the driveway, check in about curfew times, and borrow money. One girl wanted to look through Marcy’s sweaters because she had left all her own sweaters at her mother’s house. I sensed that had we not been there, Marcy would not have allowed the girl, a stepdaughter, to pillage her closet … and I think that the girl knew it.

Steve was making drinks much stronger than Jamie and I liked, and the wine goblets at dinner were equally Texas-sized. We all struggled to talk about topics of general interest—where each family vacationed, what sports our sons played—until finally Marcy rose to clear the table.

I hopped up to help her. “Oh, no,” she insisted. “You’re a guest. I can’t have you working. And I have my own way of doing things.”

The last sentence told me that she wasn’t simply being polite. She really didn’t want help. She wanted to be alone in her kitchen. I couldn’t blame her. This evening couldn’t have been any fun for her.

So I stayed in my chair.