Married Sex (5 page)

Chapter 10

I could have talked to Blair about Jean Coin at home, but I was on a high. Jean was good news. I wanted to share it in a place where the exalted go to celebrate.

I know who I am in the great chain of being: a servant of Manhattan's ruling class. Not a bold-faced name. Not a divorce lawyer on the speed dial of talk-show bookers. Definitely not someone who can get a table at one of the city's shrines to celebrity chefs.

If I called to make a reservation at a three- or four-star restaurant, I'd almost surely be told that we could be squeezed in a month from now at five thirty.

But in September, there's an exception.

If you want a reservation anywhere in New York on the night of Yom Kippur, you're in.

On that holiest of nights, Jews are in synagogues, fasting and praying. Or at home, guiltily eating Chinese takeout. But they're definitely not eating Bresse chicken in a three-star restaurant. So at the upper end of fine dining, many of the regular patrons are otherwise engaged—and when you call, you get decent treatment.

I called Per Se, the most expensive restaurant in the city.

What time is best for you, Mr. Greenfield? Eight o'clock?
Looking forward.

I told Blair we were going out, that the destination was swellegant and to dress accordingly. I didn't tell her where we were going—we'd done this before, making plans without telling the other, presenting an evening as a surprise. But when the cab stopped at the Time Warner Center, Blair was quizzical. Why the black dress, pearls, and slingbacks if we were bound for Whole Foods or Barnes & Noble?

There are several restaurants on the fourth floor. Blair saw the steakhouse first and wasn't thrilled; fifty dollars worth of beef would have her computing how many gallons of water it takes to produce a pound of meat. Actually, it wouldn't. She knows, and I've heard the lecture: thirty-seven gallons.

Then she saw Per Se.

“David …”

I opened the door and held it for her. She had no choice. She stepped inside.

A few heads turned. One was that of Nancy Robb Russakof, at a table with a man who could only be her husband. She nodded, almost imperceptibly. Her husband had his back to me and was chatting with the sommelier; he missed the exchange.

Seated, we reached for our napkins. They were so impossibly soft that Blair held hers to her cheek.

Blair took my hand. “This will cost …”

“Don't look right now, but the blonde in a gray dress …”

Only Blair's eyes moved.

“With the trillion-dollar necklace?”

“My new client. With her soon-to-be-former husband—consider dinner on him.”

When Blair sees wealth, she wonders what crime was committed to get it. She looked around the room and saw who was in the night's cast—a random assortment of Wall Street chieftains, media executives, and unrecognizable foodies—and any small pleasure she felt evaporated.

“Why are we here?” Blair asked.

“There are only sixteen tables,” I said. “You can have an intimate conversation and not be overheard.”

Stupid line. It bathed Blair in concern.

“What's the topic, David?”

“Nothing bad.”

“Just being here feels bad.”

“We'll never come back.”

A waiter materialized. Blair looked up and smiled.

“In that case,” she said, “we would like champagne.”

The meal began with Per Se's signature offering: Northern California white sturgeon caviar atop a half dozen Island Creek oysters from Massachusetts resting on a bed of tapioca in a Limoges bowl. With it, we drank a Sémillon that added velvet to the brine, salt, and custard.

Blair didn't want the caviar. And in a better world, I'd be marching alongside her in protest against luxury and excess. But she ate it—all of it. She was right to. This was a voluptuous sensation. After, we sat in stunned silence.

Blair broke it, as I knew she would.

“So what's the secret?”

“I've had an … offer.”

Victoria is like family to Blair. Her reaction was immediate.

“You can't leave V! You can't!”

“Not a professional offer.”

Blair looked confused. What other kind was there?

“A personal offer. An invitation.” I paused. “More like a proposition.”

“Oh,” she said, with considerable relief. “Who?”

“Jean Coin.”

The name was lost on Blair.

“A photographer. Arty. Successful. I went to the opening of her show. She was there. We talked. A few days later, she told me she was going away at Thanksgiving and wanted me to be her lover until then.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That I couldn't be her lover without you being there.”

Was Blair pleased? Appalled? I couldn't tell.

At last: “So what did she say?”

“She'd like to meet you.”

“Well, then.” A long breath followed. “After all these years of talk … here it is.”

“What do you think?”

“I'm now thinking I'd be more comfortable if we hired someone. If we met at a hotel, made up names. In a few hours she'd be gone, and it would be like it never happened. A private experience guaranteed to remain private—why is this photographer woman better than that?”

“Hiring someone feels … cold. Clinical. However she responds … it's fake.”

“Yeah, but with someone in the arts, there's just enough in common that she could be a friend of a friend. Later, we might run into her.”

“I've thought of that too,” I said. “But it comes down to this. There are couples who go to clubs and drink enough to take someone home. And couples who read ads for escorts like they were shopping at Amazon. But we're not those people. If we're going to do this, it has to be with a … person.”

Blair looked out at the park. “When you see the three of us together …”

“Got an hour?” I asked.

A reassuring laugh. “I'll take the short list.”

Oh, I had a short one. And a long one, a much longer one, so extensive that it might make better sense as a PowerPoint presentation. But what came to mind at that moment wasn't all the hot, thrilling ways I saw the three of us playing together; it was pride. In my wife. In our marriage. In our ability to have a conversation on a topic that would surely have the diners at the other tables red-faced and tongue-tied. In our very intelligent way of confronting the challenge of monogamy. And in our very smart solution, one that would make our marriage stronger.

“I see a lot of things,” I said. “In the beginning, I see you and Jean just … kissing. I see your blouse …”

“Pretty tame,” Blair said.

“It's our first time. Best to take it slow.”

“You think I'm going to freak out? After all the vile scenarios you've poured into my ear?”

“Right,” I said. “Those.”

“We're going to see this woman …” Blair blanked on the name.

“Jean Coin.”

“We're going to see Jean Coin once and do all those things?”

“Maybe just Column A.”

“Is she …”

“Not quite as beautiful as you.”

A nod. Then a mood shift. Blair looked down at the table as if she'd just been told she had a minute to cram for an unannounced final exam on the silver setting. I said nothing; one thing I've learned from interviewing clients is not to break a silence with a first draft of the answer I want. And with Blair, I wasn't sure what answer I wanted.

“I've been doing a lot of thinking since Ann left,” Blair said. “And I've seen how … grooved our lives are. Mine, anyway. When she was in school, I was really tethered. Happily, basically. The child, the job, the marriage. Friends on the fringe, but this is New York; everybody understands that your friends are the only people you don't see. Now, with Ann gone, I'm thinking I should change … something. Get a hobby. Find a cause. But nothing comes to mind.”

“So … this?”

“This, for openers. And not just this. I've been thinking, no matter what the question is, my first answer should be yes. I'm not going to be a fool. I'll reconsider everything, and if I change my mind, well, so be it. But at the start, I'm going to affirm. Everything. And if I do that, my life will change.”

“For the better?” I asked. “Always for the better?”

“No idea,” she said, and raised a glass. “To change!”

Many courses followed, all small. More wine than we're used to. The hour grew late. The moon filled the restaurant windows. And we were filled too, less by dinner than by a sense of contentment and expectation. We'd made a plan. We were stepping into the future, together.

Chapter 11

At any moment, at a very low emotional cost, I could permanently postpone my fantasy. I wasn't doing that. I was advancing the plan. But everything that was happening seemed to be in the hands of the gods. I had no power here—it was as if I were watching a movie about characters who just happened to have our names.

So, late on a weekday afternoon, Blair and I found ourselves in an empty art gallery. Blair looked at Jean's photographs while I stood at the reception desk, watching, a voyeur twice over—there was Blair, and there was Jean's work, her icebergs, her mountains and monuments making Blair seem small. Then, as Blair walked toward me, Jean's pictures receded, and I could focus just on my wife, her eyes shining with admiration for Jean's work.

As we walked home, I backpedaled: “Just to get it on the record, we don't have to do this.”

“We're committed to nothing,” Blair said. “First I need to meet Jean in a way that's not … awkward.”

Coffee? Too banal.

A dinner party, with our friends never suspecting what was going on? Blair's best friend, Jared, who's mildly psychic, would have twigged that something was afoot, and Blair, who hates to lie, would have spilled the secret.

Or … but there was no other bright idea. So, after all, it was coffee.

What do you wear to a meeting with a woman who wants to sleep with you and your wife?

I don't usually shave on Sunday. But jeans, running shoes, and stubble didn't seem right for our coffee date with Jean Coin, so I tried on half a dozen shirts of varying degrees of informality before I surrendered to my off-duty uniform since college: a striped oxford shirt and khakis.

Blair cares about clothes and is smart about them, but she downplayed it and did that weekend thing where you dress well but not up: cotton sweater, jeans with a rip at the knee, a leather-and-silver bracelet, and moccasins. She looked beautiful. And pedigreed. And rich. But mostly, comfortable and self-confident—everything she wasn't quite feeling.

In a state of numb attractiveness we found ourselves walking across the park on a glorious Sunday afternoon in late September.

We'd arranged to meet Jean at Via Quadronno, an East Side coffee bar and restaurant that is the exact opposite of Starbucks. The entrance is almost impassably narrow, the coffee bar always crowded. In the small room in the back, shoppers from the designer stores on Madison and Italians too chic to be labeled tourists order paninis and salad. We like this place for the delicious sociology but even more for the barista, who makes the best cappuccino for miles.

We arrived early and waited outside, among the smokers and couples with dogs. A church bell tolled the hour. Jean strolled up, on time to the minute. In a pink shirt, suede jacket, and jeans with no rip in the knee, she looked quite at home in this zip code.

I touched Blair's hand, giving her a second of warning.

“Blair, this is—”

“Jean Coin,” Jean said.

Was there a tremble in her voice? Was she nervous too?

Blair and Jean reached out to shake hands at the same time. And laughed. Like they'd thought about this moment and had come to the same idea.

“David,” Jean said.

She offered her cheek, which I dutifully kissed.

“Coffee?” Blair asked.

“It's too nice to be inside,” Jean said. “Can we—”

“I'll get it,” I said.

I could feel Blair stiffen at the prospect of being alone with Jean so soon.

Jean read the moment correctly. “Cappuccino?” she asked. We nodded, and she went into the restaurant.

“Decisive,” Blair said.

I took that as approval.

As we walked into the park, Blair opened with a safe, correct move: “I loved the show.”

I could have predicted Jean's response. “The last one was better.”

And they were off.

“I can't see how,” Blair said.

“Technical things. I'll get it right next time.”

“In the pictures you'll take this winter?”

“Yes. In Timbuktu.”

“What's there?”

“Shrines. And a mosque. A mosque with an incredible door.”

“Incredible because …”

“It's been closed for six centuries. And tradition says it must stay closed until Judgment Day.”

“It's never been photographed?”

“Not well. And that may not change—the Taliban's been making trouble in the area.”

“What if you can't go?”

The first reference to the real business at hand.

“I promise you, by Thanksgiving I will be on another continent.”

“What's Plan B?”

“The northern coast of Germany. For the beach houses. Like the Hamptons.”

“Why not just go to Long Island?”

“The Hampton beaches are better protected. In Germany, if the ocean keeps rising, these houses will be underwater in twenty years. Shooting from a small boat at high tide, the pictures will look as if I took them just before the fatal waves hit.”

“You're not going to sell those pictures as house portraits to the owners,” I said.

“I didn't expect to,” Jean said, and if I wasn't mistaken, there was a touch of irritation in her voice, as if she'd heard me say all she ever wanted to hear about the commercial aspect of her work.

My stupid little comment broke the mood. Why had I interrupted? Feeling left out, perhaps? How like a man!

We reached the vine-covered terrace, a haven for chess players. At the one empty table, Jean sat across from us. Hard not to think of this as conversational chess.

Unsurprisingly, Jean turned to Blair. Because, at this moment, she surely liked Blair more.

“I hear a hint of the Midwest in your voice,” Jean said. “Wisconsin?”

“I'm from Iowa,” Blair said. “You?”

“Wyoming. But I'm obsessed with the heartland. And finally, last year, I went to Wisconsin.”

“What did you shoot?”

“At the top of the state, there's a town of seven hundred. Bayfield. A little arts community—the Provincetown of Wisconsin. Every fall, they have an apple festival, and ten or twenty thousand people show up. And at the end, a dozen high school bands march down Main Street playing ‘On, Wisconsin!' People weep.”

I couldn't not speak. “Jean Coin took pictures of weeping cheeseheads?”

“It's about the shot from the bottom of the hill as the bands come down … it's an abstraction, an avalanche of color.”

Blair shifted the topic. “Wyoming's so beautiful. Why did you leave?”

“Same reason you left Iowa.”

“Somehow I don't think you came to New York to study international business at Columbia.”

“Pre-law at Princeton. Same idea.”

“I wouldn't have guessed that. How did you get from law to photography?”

“I never tell this story.”

Blair turned to me. “I think Jean has a great story to tell us. Don't you, David?”

“You have a request from the floor,” I said. “Which I second.”

“You asked for it.” Jean drained her coffee. “My father was the irrigator for a ranch. I grew up riding the owner's horses. People think it's all Western saddle and rodeos and riding the range out there, but it isn't—they ride English too. It turned out I was an absolute whiz. At sixteen, I was probably the best jumper in Wyoming and Montana. And I got good grades. There was some press. Princeton gave me a full scholarship. So I went.”

“And?”

“I'd never been east. Princeton—the whole scene—blew my mind. Especially my first competition. It was huge, like every rider in New Jersey was there. I'm sure I was the only one who didn't have her own horse. I looked at the girls who rode ahead of me, and I saw: They were better. They'd had every advantage, and then they'd worked hard. I couldn't handle it—I'd always been the gold standard. I clutched. I went on automatic.”

“How'd you do?”

“This is where it gets crazy. If I were scoring it, I'd say fourth. Maybe third. But I won. I couldn't believe it. The other girls couldn't either. You should see the picture of me accepting the trophy—talk about stunned. Anyway, I go to take my horse in, and there's this kid waiting for me: Ben Griesman. We have a class together. Maybe I've nodded hello to him. But we've never spoken. ‘Nice going,' he says. I say, ‘I didn't deserve to win.' ‘You're right,' he says, ‘but the judge with the rummy nose thought you did.' I ask how he knew that. ‘Because I fixed the judging,' he says. And then he tells me how he went to the judge and promised the guy he'd have a date with me that night if I won. I couldn't begin to know how to have a conversation like that. But this eighteen-year-old Princeton freshman whose idea of a horse was a nag in front of a carriage on Central Park South—he knew how to bribe a judge.”

“Why did he do it?” Blair asked.

“I asked him. And he says, ‘I saw you in class and I thought … I felt … I know you. You're like me.' I had to laugh. I say, ‘Are you nuts? My father doesn't own a suit to be buried in.' He says, ‘You're a storybook girl. You want it all, and you're meant to have it.' I say, ‘Including dinner with an old drunk? What else did you promise him?' And he goes, ‘He knows I'm meeting you after dinner.'”

Blair, fascinated, gestured for more.

“And he looked at me, like he really did know me, and I felt something break inside, this wave of incredible relief, and I just … went to him. He bought me my first camera. We were together for five years.”

Blair couldn't get enough. “And then?”

“I was home for the summer. The owners of the ranch had a friend visiting. She wanted to ride, so I took her up into the national forest. We climbed and climbed, and when she saw that the eagles were flying below us, she wanted to stop. Then she kissed me. And …”

Silence. Interrupted by chess pieces clicking on concrete tables. And birds. And the distant sounds of football and baseball on the Great Lawn. And, finally, by Blair.

“So this thing we might do together … you've done it before?”

“This …
thin
g
?” I read Jean's smile as quizzical. “Yes. I have.”

“And …”

“Each time … when it was over … the same word described the quality of the pleasure …
annihilating
.” Jean drew it out, making it sound like the ultimate contentment.

I imagined the three of us, sheets rumpled, overwhelmed by what we'd done. And the sense of freedom, feeling no sin, anticipating no punishment. I looked over at Blair, and I could see she was reassured by Jean's answer. And pleased that Jean would be her guide.

I was stunned by what Blair did next. She stood, leaned over the table, put a hand to Jean's cheek, and kissed her, softly, but in not any way timidly, on the mouth.

“So, we seem to agree,” I said, when the kiss ended. “Saturday?”

“Works for me,” Jean said. “Downtown okay?”

“Downtown's best.”

“Why?”

I wanted all the physical intimacy but nothing more. A quick exit limited the possibility of an emotional connection.

“If we come to you,” I said, “I'm sure we'll all wake up in our own beds.”

A knowing smile from Jean. Kiss, kiss on the cheeks for me. Kiss, kiss for Blair—also on the cheeks. And, like that, Jean was gone.

She left a vacuum. I felt an awkwardness. Blair seemed to feel it too, for we took our coffee cups to the trash in silence.

“Someone is full of surprises,” I said.

“Someone surprised herself.”

“A good surprise?” I asked, a sliver of jealously in my question.

“Yes,” she said. “But not annihilating.”