Live a Little (21 page)

Why second best? Ask any mom what her best day was, and she’ll tell you—as she peels her newborn off her shredded nipple or locks herself in the bathroom to escape her haranguing teenager—that the number one slot belongs to the day she delivered her children into the waiting arms of her OB. She will be lying. That slot belongs, by rights, to the day she received notification of her acceptance to NYU Law, consumed five flawless piña coladas, and bedded the elusive Trinidadian underwear model on her belly-pierced-flashing roommate’s Amish quilt. Nevertheless, she will derive real pleasure from her conviction, reinforcing, as it does, the rightness of her current purpose in life.

In any case, my second best day thus far consisted of the following:

• Finding five dollars on the ground outside Starbucks ( tax-free).

• A call from Shiny Pony confirming that, thanks to the success of my guest spots,
Living with Lauren!
ratings were up.

• Lunch with Ren White at a trendy restaurant, enhanced slightly by hard-laboring push-up bra and massively by air kiss from fellow diner.

• Securing three more commissions, none of which will require me to adorn Jesus in a football jersey.

• Taylor breaking up with Biter via text message (kapow!).

• Neither dog peeing or crapping anywhere in the house, mud closet, or foyer.

• Refusing Rochelle Schitzfelder’s request to chair the next session of the Hillsborough Native Tree Club.

• Relishing the knowledge that there will be no subtle retribution for said refusal, since Rochelle Schitzfelder now believes I am—don’t laugh!—“adorable.”

See what I mean? Even with the unnerving reason for the lunch hovering in the back of my mind, this day is tops.

“Sorry,” I say to Ren when my cell phone chimes for what seems like the fifth time since we sat down at twelve-thirty
P.M.
I consider ignoring it, but the call window says “Mic.”

Duty calls.

“Hon?”

“Hey, Mom.”

“What’s up? I’m a little tied up right now.” I try not to watch

too avidly as Ren tucks his silky periwinkle tie back between his shirt buttons. It is possible that Ren, being Ren, knows his tie is periwinkle and not blue or lavender or silver; that’s the type of guy Ren is. On the rare occasion Phil dons a tie at all, it is brown, stained, too wide, or all three.

“Ronnie and I are going to a game in Marin tonight, so I’ll be home late, okay?” Micah says.

“Late as in?”

“Midnight. Or one.”

I have no idea what sort of game my son means, and the steadily weakening Mommy warden inside me sounds a brief alarm at the hour and distant location of the event. Nevertheless, the ever distracting presence of my brother-in-law quiets her.

“Call if you’re going to be later, okay?” I tell him.

“I’ll just wake you up.” Based on my experience, this is what kids say when they already plan on breaking curfew.

“Okay, bye,” I singsong and click the phone off.

“Everything okay?” Ren says.

“Yeah. You know, kids.”

Ren smiles a bit sadly. We both know he has yet to know what it is like to tolerate children. I’m ashamed to say, I have mixed feelings about the imminent prospect of my sister’s adoption of a baby, negating, as it will, the only thing I’ve ever managed to best Laurie at: the womb war.

“Any news on a baby?” I say.

“There was a fifteen-year-old girl in Kentucky who picked us to adopt, but she decided to keep the baby. There were a couple of others—one of the mothers turned out to be an Oxycontin addict. We’ve been talking to a Chinese agency. It’s hard . . .” Ren shrugs. Over the years, his face has earned a network of gently trod paths that only makes his cheekbones finer and his smile sexier. I am pretty sure Ren has not had work done— if he has, it is subtle—his restraint no doubt a selling point for his more discriminating cosmetic-surgery clients.

“Ren, can I ask you something?”

He nods. Something about his lack of surprise—he didn’t even question the purpose of the once-in-a-decade lunch invitation when I called him this morning—sends a spike of dread drilling into my stomach. In fact, when his receptionist sent my call through to Ren’s desk line and I heard him say my name in welcome, I was struck with the weird notion that he had been waiting for the call and was relieved it had finally arrived. This would have bothered me more at the time, except that, in the intervening days since Vesuvio’s, I have convinced myself it was not my husband who grabbed Tate Trimble’s thimble-sized ass and licked the perfume off her throat through the telescopic lens of the bar window but, rather, some other middle-aged Don Juan with a thinning rotunda and dun-colored coat.

It bothers me now. Naturally, I take steps to comfort myself—in this case by spooning large shovelfuls of chocolate mousse into my mouth.

“Um, this is a bit awkward,” I mumble, my tongue trapped in a thicket of chocolate. “But I need you to be honest with me, okay? If I had any other option, I wouldn’t be asking, and actually, I suppose I’m really just coming to you for confirmation that I have, um, imagined something that doesn’t, in fact, exist—that is to say, that I’m just being paranoid.” Ren lowers his eyes at this disclosure, sparing me his vicarious shame and enabling me to continue past the increasingly dry lump in my throat. “The other day? In San Francisco? I was having drinks with Sue at a bar”—in a flash, I see myself lurching out of Vesuvio’s onto the empty sidewalk, hoping (and not hoping) to catch my husband entwined with his boss’s wife— “and I saw Phil on the street. At least I think it was Phil. He was with Tate Trimble, and they were hugging. And kissing.” I say it very calmly, like those tall, emotionally distant women in Alice Adams novels who are able to maintain composure in the face of death, financial ruin, and bad produce. We all know they don’t exist—and we’d hate them if they did—but isn’t it nice to pretend just for a second?

“Is Phil having an affair with Tate Trimble?” I say. Quickly now: Get. Chocolate. In. Mouth.

“Not anymore, to my knowledge.” Like a normal person, Ren has stopped eating and is concentrating on looking embarrassed. Frankly, I am a bit shocked at his honesty. It hits me that I expected him to prevaricate a little, to deny knowledge or squirm or claim an urgent surgery that required his immediate attention. Also, a part of me, the newly lean, frequently bubbly, tentatively confident part, believed I
was
being paranoid, which, in spite of its psychopathologic implications, is infinitely preferable to actually being cheated on.

“Phil and Tate?” The words are gruesome; I choke on them.

Ren’s face darkens with that guardedness we are all familiar with from men-misbehaving movies, the one that indicates guilt over the betrayal of a fellow male’s right to poke his penis into anything human, animal, or PVC.

“Raquel,” he says. It is clearly a plea.

“What? Wait a minute.” I grab at the waiter’s sleeve as he rushes past. “Can I get another one—no, two—of these?” I point wildly at the half-eaten chocolate mousse. Tears have already started to blur my vision. The waiter darts away from me, his fluffy blouse escaping my hand like a set of reins trailing a galloping horse.

Ren leans forward and takes my hand. As on the day fifteen years ago when my father’s heart convulsed its way into a final infarction and Ren’s touch was my sole hope at temporary solace, my heartbeat slows and healing warmth pervades my bones.

“Look, obviously, this is none of my business. You and Phil need to talk, and soon. But our friendship goes back a long way, and that’s why I’m telling you this, Quel. Because I know you, and I trust you to do the right thing with this information. And because it is your right to have it.” Even after all this time, his touch is silken, narcotic.

“As far as I know, it was a brief, meaningless thing, a blip, and it ended years ago. Years. I know that’s small comfort now, but you have to concentrate on the big picture. Think about what you have together, what you’ve built. A marriage, kids, a home—there’s a lot at stake here. Phil fucked up, I’ll be the first to say it. But if it’s any consolation, he was a wreck afterward. It wasn’t just the guilt; he really felt like he’d made a big mistake. He wasn’t even into her. Let’s just say she made it real easy for him. Real easy. Caught him in a weak moment, I suppose. She may even have gone after him deliberately, back when she and Ross still gave a shit and were baiting each other.” Ren’s controlled voice drones on, drowned out by the slushy pounding of my own heartbeat. It occurs to me that Ren may have told Laurie. The idea that
Living with Lauren!
knew about Phil’s affair before I did sends shards of crazy rage deep into my spine.

“That shit!” I choke back the howl that threatens to explode out of me. Ren leans back, his hazel eyes brimming with concern, my hand still tucked under his. The fact that his eyes have yet to start the darting, frantic search for escape adds another layer of affirmation to my belief, deeply held, that my life took a potholed, dead-end detour the moment Ren broke up with me.

“I can’t believe Phil would make that mistake again. Are you absolutely sure it was him?” Ren says.

I think back to that night at the bar, about what I saw through the diamond of glass. It was a flash, so fleeting I am not sure even now whether I imagined it. If my neglected imagination plastered Phil’s face on the compact body of another wayward husband, pasted Phil’s overcoat over a pair of gray slacks I have, in actuality, never seen hanging in our closet, between Phil’s cracked leather bomber jacket and my too tight cocktail dress.

I don’t respond, can’t respond, as false nirvana in the form of chocolate delivers me from misery.

What do you do when you’ve just forced your sister’s husband to validate your own husband’s treachery and three hours remain until the lout slides his Accord under the garage door?

You go stark-raving apeshit, that’s what.

It’s not hard. Right now I am pathetic, horror-movie, spittle-flying, crazy-lady mad with hurt. Any minute the lantern-jawed men with pumped arms and fat batons are going to pull up in their paddy wagon, shake their oversize noggins sadly at the hurricane-force destruction that afflicts my living room, truss me up in white straps, and tote me away to drool down my days in a human paddock with a euphemistic name under a canopy of vomit and Lysol. Also, I am plain old pissed. The timing, as ever, is appalling, the latest horror falling on the eve of that most hallowed of events: my twenty-fifth high school reunion.

After lunch with Ren, which leaves me so damaged I cannot even manage to cop a feel when he hugs me good-bye, I sail home on autopilot and continue my eating spree in the tidy confines of my kitchen. Bologna, Brie, Triscuits, leftover refried beans with a scrim of blue fuzz, M&M’s, picked-over tri-tip all disappear into my gullet while I alternately gag and sob and curse.

At exactly 5:35
P.M.
, I hear the automatic garage door groan open.

Some weird melodramatic impulse prompts me to draw the drapes and stow my bloated body in a straight-backed chair. Standing sentry in the darkness, I am simultaneously interrogation subject and executioner, victim and attacker, wife and stranger.

“Quel?” Phil flicks on the kitchen lights and sees me. His face is creased and tired. Nobody, not even naturally gifted— yes, I’ll admit it—teachers like Phil can spend eight hours interacting with teenagers and not need a Valium and a sitcom glut to regain the equanimity they’ve lost.

In the interest of spontaneity, I have planned no speech. It shows.

“Philly, how
could
you? She is so”—my mind rifles through stinging adjectives— “
Fresno.
”

“Wha—”

“Tate.”

In the split second that follows my saying her name, a small, girlish part of me curls up and dies, because the rough crumpling of Phil’s face under a barrage of guilt, shame, and fear tells me all I need to know.

The phone rings.

We freeze. Because I am standing closer, I peer at the wall unit. The screen says “R. Greenblatt.” Ronnie. Who’s with Micah. At a game. In Marin. After school. Yet he is calling instead of my son. Visions of highway patrol checkpoints and gnarled wreckage cause my pulse to gush.

“Hello?” I nearly howl into the phone. In this thin slice of existence between ignorance and total devastation, I am very nearly Joan Crawford, and Joan is having a very bad day.

“Hey, Mrs. Rose. This is Ron. I’m really sorry to call so late. Is, uh, Micah there?”

Two questions: When did Ronnie Greenblatt of the washboard abs and after-school lawn-mowing venture graduate to Ron, and why isn’t he with my son?

“Um, no, Ronnie. Mike’s at a game. In Marin, I think.”
With you, asshole,
I want to scream. Like I don’t have enough to worry about?

Ronnie Greenblatt’s headed-for-Cornell 4.5 GPA brain kicks in. “Duh. Yeah, I was supposed to go with him, but my car battery was dead, so I was just going to meet them after I got a jump. I called his cell, but it went to voice mail, so I thought maybe he cut out early.”

“Sure, Ronnie.” We both know he is lying like George W. Bush at a press conference.