Mike, Mike & Me (7 page)

Good. Now what?

I was so surprised to hear from you!

Good. Now what?

I’ve been thinking of you a lot lately.

Not good.

I replace it with I’m sorry things ended the way they did, and I’ve always hoped for the chance to tell you how sorry I am that things didn’t work out for us.

Definitely not good.

I backspace over that and sit with my fingers poised on the keyboard, trying to think of something to say. Something that will lead us not into temptation. Something that isn’t trite yet won’t dredge up the painful past.

I mean, I broke the guy’s heart. I let him believe we could have a future together, even though I was in love with somebody else.

The somebody else I married.

The somebody else with whom I have three children, a mortgage and a retirement plan. I should probably point that out first and foremost.

I immediately type I’m still married to Mike.

Then I realize it sounds as though I thought we might not last.

I backspace quickly. Of course I’m still married to Mike. Why wouldn’t I be?

I try again.

Mike and I have three beautiful sons and a house in Westchester. He’s working at an ad agency in Manhattan and I…

I pause, frowning.

Hmm. How can I make my hausfrau existence sound glamorous and exciting?

Perhaps the more pressing question is why do I feel the need to make my hausfrau existence sound glamorous and exciting?

I delete the last line, all the way back to Westchester. That was probably TMI, anyway. He doesn’t need to know the intimate details of my life.

I just can’t help wishing there were some.

Time to wrap things up quickly.

I’d love to hear from you again when you have time. Take care! Beau

There. Short and sweet.

I hit Send before I can read it over and change my mind.

Time for a reality check.

I log off, march over to the phone and dial Mike’s extension.

His secretary answers.

“Hi, Jan, it’s Beau.”

“Beau! We were just talking about you.”

“You were?” I say, wondering who
we
is.

I hate when somebody says they were just talking about me. Not that it happens regularly, but still…

What could anybody possibly have to say about me? I don’t do anything. I don’t go anywhere. I don’t see anyone.

“Yes, I was just telling Mike how lucky he is to have a wife who’s willing to stay home and be with the kids. If I had to be at home with my kids, I’d kill myself.”

“Oh. Well…” What does one say to that? “It’s not so bad.”

“Well, I told Mike he needs to bring you some flowers once in a while too, to let you know how much he appreciates you.”

Too?

“He’s such a sweetheart, Beau,” she goes on. “I can’t believe he always remembers that purple is my favorite color.”

“Oh…he’s got quite a memory.”

So do I. I remember when my husband used to stop at the florist in Grand Central on his way home every once in a while. He’d come in the door with a paper-wrapped bouquet of my favorite flowers, heavenly scented stargazer lilies.

He hasn’t done that in months.

I hadn’t even noticed until now.

“Hang on and I’ll go get him for you,” Jan says, and puts me on hold.

It’s not that I’m jealous. If Mike’s secretary were the least bit buxom or beautiful, I might be jealous. But Jan, a married mother of toddler twins, has crow’s-feet, prematurely gray hair, saddlebags and an upper lip that desperately needs electrolysis. She and I are about the same age, but she looks a good decade older. She’s so not a threat to my marriage.

In fact, until recently, I didn’t think anything could be a threat to my marriage.

“Hey, what’s up, Babs?” my husband’s voice asks.

I hate when he calls me Babs. But at least he sounds cheerful, so I say, just as cheerfully, “Hi! I just…I wanted to see how your day was going.”

“Crazy. How about yours?”

Upstairs, I hear the clattering of a million tiny plastic pieces against hardwood. Apparently, the Lego city has met its demise.

“Crazy,” I tell Mike.

Because if an out-of-the-blue e-mail from an old lover isn’t crazy, I don’t know what is.

“Crazy how? Are the boys okay?”

“They’re fine. One is playing, one is watching Dora, one is sleeping. When are you coming home?”

“Late” is his prompt reply. “I have to take some people out for drinks. Don’t wait for me for dinner.”

“I won’t. Will you be home before I put the kids to bed?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll try. Kiss them for me if I’m not, okay?”

“Okay. I wish you were coming home soon.”

“Believe me, so do I. I’d rather be home with you and the boys than drinking Grey Goose and tonic at the Royalton on an empty stomach.”

And I’d rather be drinking Grey Goose and tonic at the Royalton on an empty stomach. Ironic, isn’t it, that we long for what we can’t have?

Like…

No. Stop that.

“Let’s go away,” I tell Mike spontaneously.

“Away? What do you mean?”

“Let’s go on vacation. Instead of staying here and working on the house. Let’s just go somewhere. Please?”

“Beau, I spend every weekday of my life somewhere other than at home,” Mike points out, sounding weary. “I’m tired of going somewhere. I want to go nowhere for a change.”

“But if we went out to the Cape for the week, you could go nowhere once we got there. You could sit in a chair on the beach for six straight days.”

“Do you know what the traffic on 95 is like between here and the Cape in August? It would be a nightmare.”

“But—”

“I want to sit in a chair in my own backyard for six straight days, Beau. And when I’m not sitting in a chair, I’m going to be working on that bathroom under the stairs. Believe me, you’ll thank me when you’re flushing that toilet at the end of the week.”

I don’t think so. Not if it means also flushing any hope of a real vacation this summer.

I sigh. “It’s just hard to be at home with the kids day in and day out, Mike.”

“Maybe you should get a hobby.”

Is it my imagination, or is he being condescending?

“What do you suggest?” I ask in a brittle tone. “Macramé? Model airplanes?”

“You know what I mean. You need something to do, other than taking care of the kids. I don’t blame you for being bored.”

His unexpected sympathy catches me off guard.

Before I can respond, I can hear a phone ringing on the other end of the line.

“We’ll talk about it over the weekend, okay?” he asks, slipping from sympathetic to distracted in a matter of seconds.

“Yeah, okay.”

We hang up.

I don’t want a hobby. I want…

I don’t know what I want, other than for this sudden restlessness to go away.

I stand there in the family room, listening to the overhead hum of childish conversation, Dora’s theme song, the rhythmic, battery-charged rocking of the swing.

I almost wish Tyler would start whimpering, just to give me something specific to do.

When did I get to be this aimless housewife?

Mike and I have three beautiful sons and a house in Westchester.

It sounds so fulfilling when you put it in writing. So much better than the reality.

Reality is—

I hear a thud overhead, followed by the inevitable “Mommy!”

“Coming,” I say, heading for the stairs and reality.

eight

The past

T
wo days into Mike’s visit to New York, he had landed a second interview at a software firm and a lead on a possible commercial-banking position with a decent starting salary.

Things were looking up.

Rather, I assumed they were.

But then, I also assumed that Michael Jackson would always be a superstar.

And black.

Anyway, Mike didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about anything other than being with me. He was his usual romantic self, buying me roses, taking me to a fancy dinner at Windows on the World, giving me a full-body massage with patchouli-scented oil he’d brought with him from L.A.

But nothing about New York itself—not the superior bagels, not the breathtaking view from Windows on the World, not even the two orchestra tickets Janelle Jacques herself had given me for an evening performance of
Jerome Robbins Broadway
—seemed to thrill him.

Janelle was always giving away freebies to the underlings, but she’d never offered me anything more valuable than an ugly red nylon fanny pack before now. She definitely had great timing. Now Mike would see that my job was not only fulfilling, but had great perks. Maybe he’d realize that moving to Los Angeles—which he hadn’t officially suggested, but which definitely hovered unspoken between us—was out of the question for me.

“The great thing about New York,” I told him as we stepped out of the Imperial Theater after the show, “is that you can see a Broadway show whenever you feel like it.”

“Yeah,” Mike agreed with questionable enthusiasm, leading me through the after-show throng and across Forty-fifth street, weaving between the cabs and limos lined up outside the theater.

I brushed a clump of Aqua Net-sticky hair from my forehead. After the air-conditioned Imperial, the July heat felt especially oppressive. Kind of like going from a raging blizzard to my grandmother’s overheated nursing home in the dead of winter. Your instinct was to start shedding clothing immediately.

But I was already sleeveless, with bare legs and open-toed shoes. The only possible thing I could possibly shed was my rumpled blue linen shift dress, and believe me, after a few minutes trudging through that heat, it wasn’t out of the question. The night air wasn’t just hot, it was oppressively soupy. If it were any more humid, we could swim uptown.

“You want to go get something to eat?” I asked hopefully, thinking an air-conditioned restaurant and a big rare hamburger would be perfect right about now.

“Now? You mean like an ice-cream cone?”

“I mean like dinner.”

He checked his watch. “It’s too late for dinner, Beau.”

“Aren’t you hungry? You said you were starving before the show.”

“That’s because it was way past dinnertime then.”

“It was only six-thirty.”

“Exactly.”

“Who eats dinner before six-thirty?” I asked, and decided not to point out that we didn’t have time then, anyway.

The reason we didn’t have time was because I got hung up in an emergency meeting late this afternoon. Increasingly jealous of Arsenio’s success, Janelle wanted us to implement some kind of audience-participation stunt, on a par with Arsenio’s barking-dog pound. After three hours of brainstorming, one of the assistant producers finally came up with the idea of outfitting the studio audience in matching straw sombreros emblazened with Janelle Jacques’s trademark initials.

Personally, I think she was kidding when she said it, but narcissistic Janelle loved it. Next thing I knew, Gaile and I were being given detailed instructions for purchasing the sombreros wholesale.

So I was late meeting Mike, and he wasn’t thrilled to have stood on a street corner for forty-five minutes thinking, as he so eloquently put it, that I had been crushed by a cross-town bus.

“Who eats dinner at ten-thirty?” he was asking now, acting as if I had a hankering for fresh croissants and was insisting we board a plane for Paris
tout de suite.

Stomach growling ferociously, I gestured around us at the street lined with crowded restaurants. “A lot of people.”

“Not in the rest of the world, Beau. That’s a New York thing.”

“Yeah, well, when in Rome…”

He sighed. “If you’re still hungry when we get uptown, we’ll eat there. I can’t stand the crowds here. Let’s get a cab.”

I looked around at the traffic-clogged side street that led to the traffic-clogged avenue. There had to be a few dozen cabs in the vicinity, but none of them were moving, and all of them were occupied.

“No cabs. Are you sure you don’t want to grab a bite here?”

“Positive.”

Mike and I headed uptown toward my apartment on foot. He seemed to be brooding, so I kept up a running commentary on the show.

“I really love that one short bald guy,” I said.

“Which one?” Mike looked around.

“The one in the show. Him,” I said, leafing through my
Playbill
and pointing out the actor’s picture. “His name is Jason Alexander. Wasn’t he great?”

“Yeah. Great.”

His mind was obviously elsewhere.

I tried again. “My favorite part of the show was the scene with the three sailors from
On the Town.
” I proceeded to sing a few bars about New York being a hell of a town.

Hint, hint.

But before my one-woman tourism campaign could launch the lyrics about the Bronx being up and the Battery down, Mike cut in with a brisk, “Beau, we have to talk.”

“Can’t we just sing?”

He didn’t laugh.

I did, but only for a second. Then I saw the look on his face and reluctantly asked, “Okay, what’s up?”

“It’s just…this.” He gestured vaguely with his hand.

I looked around, pretending I had no idea what he was talking about.

There were people everywhere: strolling, gaping tourists with cameras and maps in hand, striding grim-faced locals mowing them down, drag queens, cops that were outnumbered by gangs of wandering thugs and pickpocket types, lone vagrants, food-delivery people, flamboyantly gay couples, honeymooners, dog-walking matrons, weary corporate drones just leaving the office.

Towering skyscrapers. Neon signs. Open manholes. Con Ed repair crews. Round-the-clock construction sites. Bright white spotlights and blue police barricades that betrayed a movie shoot down the cross street. Honking, bumper-to-bumper traffic. Open cellars in front of all-night Korean groceries; dripping window air-conditioner units overhead.

Noise. Traffic. Litter. Stench.

“What?” I asked, all innocence.