A Well-Laid Trap: The Story Of A Professional Hotwife (2 page)

Was it Jordan?

There was room for error.

There were things that were Not-Jordan:

Bright make-up.

Long, straight hair. Not in a bun.

A fragrance, decidedly un-her.

And finally, time and place: wrong, wrong,
wrong.

I stared at the closed door, and I remembered to clutch my stomach for Doug's benefit.

I pretended to retch.

This was
not happening.

“Okay. No, the fresh air has me feeling better,” I said.

Douglas was frowning at the door. “Let's get out of here,” he said. His voice had ceased to be disappointed by the end of his sentence. Doug's life, after all, consisted of disappointment after disappointment.

We walked back to the office. I was glad to have the lie of feeling sick to cover up my need to be inside my own thoughts. 

The woman in the bar certainly looked like Jordan. And Jordan, with her huge tits, her small frame, and her very particular shade of red hair, was not an easy woman to look like. How many women looked like her? Almost none.

I looked at Douglas.

He would have said something, if it had occurred to him that the woman was Jordan. Douglas was blatherer. He was embarrassingly indiscreet.

So:

I
thought this woman looked like Jordan. But Doug, who had the view of her all that time, and had not hidden the fact that he was staring, had not said: “Hey, that looks like your wife.”

I almost stepped in front of a light rail train. Doug pressed his big hand against my chest. “Jesus,” he said. “Paddy, man. You look sick as fuck.”

I shook my head.

Yet...Doug had only ever met Jordan a few times. Usually she had her hair in a bun. Usually she had no makeup on.

But...Jordan didn't have anything in her wardrobe that expensive. There was that.

(Unless she was keeping it from me. There was that.)

It was a wash.

A wash of circumstantial shit.

I shook my head and tisked aloud.

But why would she go, if she were having an affair, to a bar so close to my office, where her chances of getting caught were so much higher?

I rubbed my forehead with the back of my thumb.

It
couldn't
be her.   

C
IRCUMSTANTIAL

When we got to the office, I went to the private bathroom two floors down, where some kind of accounting was done, and called her on my cell.

As the phone rang I stared upward at the pipes that ran like arteries through the whole building, and carried conversations with them. Stupid.

Oh well. She would answer, I would talk, Doug would ask me why I wanted to talk to my wife while I was puking, and that would be that.

This whole thing was silly. Jordan would answer, and I feel like an ass.

The phone purred in my ear, over and over. Click.

Hi -

and for a nanosecond my heart leaped with relief -

-
you've reached Jordan Goodall with Arest Greene. I'm unavailable to take your call, please leave me a message with your callback number and the best time to reach you.

“Okay,” I said to myself. I pressed “End.”

Her voice sounded strange on her message. I realized I hadn't heard it for a long time. The message. I almost never called her. She always answered when I did.

Did her voice sound the tiniest bit sultry?

I wiped my forehead. I was sweating.

This was just the heat, the infernal radiator heat that never ceased in this building.

I summoned the image of the woman in the bar. I knew it was too late to be recalling information: whatever I had really seen was being corrupted by my own paranoia. Now she had her hair in a bun, now she turned to face me and she
was
Jordan, now she was flipping me off.

The logical quagmire I had stepped into hit me suddenly in the face: by assuming it was Jordan in the bar, I had decided to call her on her cell.

But she
wasn't
the woman in the bar, so she was home.

I almost laughed out loud.

I called the house.

“If you are a telemarketer, I'm letting you know, it's 9:01 EST and I
will
be filing a complaint with the FCC.”

Olivia. Her voice was made of whorehouse velvet and satin, crimson red and entirely inappropriate for a nineteen-year-old, especially one I had known since age nine.

“Liv,” I said. “It's me.”

A silence.

“Is Jordan there, please?”

Another silence. I felt like I could hear my watch, a gift from Jordan for my birthday, ticking away for hours.

Why the pause?

Finally Olivia's breath rattled through the phone.

“I'm trying to get people to call me 'Olivia.' Or 'Olive,' if you must do something to my name. Liv is just so...Liv Tyler.” she said.

Her voice sounded disinterested, as always.

Olivia and Jordan were full sisters, but they couldn't be more unalike. Jordan was sunny and likeable, responsible and smart, and Olivia was...well, a crazy fucking bitch. Physically, only their enormous tits were similar. Olivia was tall, had big, Amazonian hips, had huge features and dark eyes in pale skin, and did indeed look a great deal like Liv Tyler. No one, upon hearing her called “Liv,” failed to point this out.

“I don't mind Liv Tyler,” she continued, when I didn't answer. She yawned. “It's just, so...”

“Have you been smoking?” I snapped. For a second my problems with Jordan were overshadowed by my irritation with Olivia.

Liv Tyler Deux was the bane of my existence. The last thing I needed on my climb up the ladder was a deadbeat sister-in-law smoking pot in my garage and probably growing it somewhere on my premises.

“Smoking
what,
Patrick?” Olivia yawned again. Very deliberately, very falsely. She wanted me to know that she was faking. Olivia loved getting under my skin, or anyone's skin, and then acting as though she had no idea what was going on. 

“Put Jordan on, would you?” I said, recovering from my flurry of rage and using my Most Patient Voice. With Olivia, like with a toddler or a dog, it never paid to get flustered.

“Jordan...is...not here, I'm afraid.”

The cool feeling I was having before Olivia drove me half-insane with her Cheshire Cat routine started to return. It was spreading out, into my limbs. My skin prickled.

“Where is she?”

“Uh...I don't know. I think...the gym or something like that.”

My temples burned with frustration and I could feel my blood vessels hardening with the pressure. “Did she
say
where she was going?'

“Probably. But you know I'm not very good at listening.”

Olivia was oh-so-amused with herself.

“Okay. How long has she been gone?”

Olivia's voice cracked back into perfect sobriety like a whip. “I don't know, Patrick. I forgot to set the timer when she left.”

“Could-you-estimate?” I sang.

I could almost see her, holding her fingernails in front of her with amusement, or twitching her tail like a psycho cat. A low hum came from the phone. I knew she was pressing her lips together, a smirk on her mouth. “Mmmmmmmm.....”

And then, perkily:

“Nope.”

I hung up, secretly pleased that it would irritate her that I had done it first.

I stared at the wall. Someone funny had penciled some balls onto a phallus-shaped stain.

Where in the fuck is my wife?

I had half a mind a mind to ditch Doug, and my cases, and return to the bar. Just to verify that it wasn't her.

And that's what you would be doing, isn't it, Patrick?

Because your wife does not own designer suits. She doesn't wear hooker boots. She doesn't flirt with fat men at an expensive bar.

Your wife wears yoga pants and buns, and goes to the gym.

You're imagining things. You haven't had sex forever, you work too much, you never see your wife, her fucking sister is driving you crazy, and you're imagining things.

I put my phone in my pocket.

I had no idea what to do. The amount of work that was piling up upstairs was absurd. I should go, finish my motions, review my notes for tomorrow's dep, think out some solution for the weak and risky Styles domestic violence case, and then go home. To find everything the way it should be: my wife in her bed, Olivia stoned and watching a screen saver while listening to bluegrass-techno or whatever she was into, kids glowing blue beneath their covers, texting eternally into the night.

I walked back upstairs.

“I have to take some of this shit home,” I said. “I feel awful.”

Doug shrugged. He had fished out a sandwich, in spite of having just eaten, and made himself some coffee. “Hope you feel better, man.”

Doug was not a man of ambition, he just hated going home. He liked being a fat, slobby prosecutor, and he liked staying away from his wife, and he liked making sure good police work saw its day in court. He just wanted to eat meat sandwiches (his wife was a vegan) in peace and put people in jail.

I locked my computer down and slipped it into my briefcase.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

I felt like someone else, someone else entirely, as I fast-walked down the street.

My life was all about looking calm and collected at every moment, and as I headed back to The Mile, I looked more like junkie. My pulse was racing, and my eyes were watering, and I had the undignified walk of the unhinged.

Believe me, I talked to myself all the way there, trying to get myself under control.

I threw open the door to The Mile, and a gust of wind caught my trench coat and my hair. A few patrons turned toward me, and their faces registered mild disgust before they turned back to what they were doing. The beefy bartender folded his arms, ready for trouble if I was going to cause it. I'm sure I looked insane as I scanned the bar.

The man was gone, and so was the woman.

I let the door close.

My jealousy seized me again, and I threw it open, stepping into the restaurant. I sought out Anna, who was busily circulating through her section. I pushed my way through the bar, and grabbed her arm. “Anna,” I said. “Anna. I need you to look at something.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly in irritation, but most of her face remained unchanged.

I held up my phone, showing her a picture of Jordan. “Was this the woman, you know the woman we were talking about earlier, the prostitute, or...Doug asked you if she was? You saw her, right? Was this her?”

Anna looked at the phone, and then lifted her eyes. She looked sleepy. “Maybe her. A lot more makeup. Maybe.” She shrugged. Her face was made of stone. “You are police?”

I shook my head.

What she said next did not seem contingent on how I answered her question. “I am busy.”

She departed.

I turned, all ready to ask like a crazy person at the bar and ask everyone sitting there if they had seen Jordan. The big bartender caught my eye and shook his head.

It was time for me to go, his face said.

So I left.

I drove home much the same way I walked to The Mile. Too fast, not thinking well. I saw my eyes in the mirror and I looked crazy. At a stoplight I patted my hair down.

We had moved, recently, to the suburbs. It had been a depressing moment in both of our lives. It was the place we had always said we didn't want to end up: gated community, cookie-cutter houses, affluent white people everywhere with labradoodles. In truth, the city was either unaffordable or horrible, with nothing in-between. The schools were better, having a pool was nice. The grocery store was clean and had no homeless people in front of it. No one wanted to
admit
it, but we liked it here. We were suburban people.

Middle age. 

The move had required us to get two cars, another thing we hadn't wanted to do.

And Jordan's car, the other car, was not in the garage. I watched the door open to emptiness and my heart began to flutter wildly again.

Olivia was standing, suspiciously and theatrically, in the kitchen. Leaning over the island counter top, flipping through a magazine. She looked up, and when she saw it was me, I saw a mixture of panic and disappointment flicker over her face.

Did I see that? Is that what I saw?

She was in a baby-pink nightshirt that came just below her ass, and white bobby-socks. Her long, brown hair was loose and carelessly pretty. She recovered from her moment of shock or let-down, and went back to her magazine. “Hello, Patrick.”

“Still not home,” I mused. “That's a very long time at the gym.”

Olivia gave the magazine a turn. I noticed that she did not have a copy of
Cosmo,
but instead a long-form magazine that she wouldn't ordinarily be caught dead reading. I set my briefcase down.

Now.

Now it was starting to get very suspicious.

Olivia is in on it. Of course she is, the horrible little bitch. 

I snatched the magazine away from her and flipped the cover toward myself. “The New Republic.” I arched my eyebrows at her, and she snatched the magazine back. “Very political Olivia,” I sneered.

What the hell was I doing?

“
You
,” she told me, “are very rude. Does Jordan ever tell you that?”

“Where
is
Jordan, Liv?”

I had gone into interrogation mode.

But the sound of the garage door made Olivia stand up, give me a very condescending look, and wave her finger at the ceiling. “Why, that must be her now, Patrick,” she sang snottily. 

She turned away from me and started to reach into a cupboard. I tried not to look as the nightie rose up, revealing a plump portion of her lovely behind.

The door opened and Jordan came through the door.

I looked at the clock.

It was now 10:21.

My eyes returned to my wife. She had several heavy bags in her hands. One duffel, another a wheely-cart she used for work. Her hair was in a bun. She had no makeup on. She was wearing black yoga pants and a gray sweatshirt. She struggled through the door and dropped the bags.

“Oh hey,” she said. “I thought you had a bunch of work to do.”

I looked at her face. She seemed genuinely surprised to see me. She did not seem shocked, however. She was not acting strangely. She was acting like a woman who had just gone to the gym, and returned home to find her workaholic husband here instead of still at work.

She smiled, and looked from me to Olivia, almost incredulously. “Whhhhhhaaaaaat are you guys doing?” she asked.

I felt relief, dumping into my system like anesthesia.

Obviously, this all added up to...nothing.

Obviously, I was a crazy person.

“I decided to work at home,” I said cheerfully. “I never see you guys, so...”

Jordan approached me, and gave me a kiss on the mouth. “Oh, so sweet. If I had known, I would have-”