My Father's Wives (2 page)

I came home early. I saw you.

As the jet picked up speed he would sit with his thumb hovering over the
send
icon. And as the plane lifted off the ground you would hear a voice-over, the husband narrating in a dispassionate voice.

“When I woke up that morning,” he would begin, “my life was perfect.”

WHEN I WOKE UP
that morning, my life was perfect.

My alarm went off at 5:40; I was in my car ten minutes later and drove two miles to the train station, where I have the primo parking space that took years on a waiting list to acquire. It is not
a
primo parking space, it is
the
primo parking space; people in this town will be killing each other over it when I die. I got to the gym in Manhattan at quarter past seven and spent forty minutes on an Arc Trainer, watching Angelina Jolie talk about homeless children on the
Today
show. Then I went up to my office, still in sweat-soaked Under Armour. When my assistant saw me she picked up her phone and ten minutes later there was a toasted bagel, side of low-fat cream cheese, banana, and grande latte on my desk. I didn’t see who delivered it. I was flat on the floor, stretching my lower back, reading the
Wall Street Journal
.

By nine I was through with the paper, my breakfast, and seventy-three e-mails that required immediate attention. I had also fired off a note to our IT staff to complain about the advertisements for penile enlargement kits that continued to sneak past our firewalls and into
my mailbox. “Honestly,” I wrote, “my six-year-old sent me an e-mail in which he said I stink like farts and
that
got rebuffed, but suggestions for becoming king of my bed by adding inches to my love life seem to be welcome. Can we do something about this?”

Bruce, the CEO of our firm, popped his head in the door just before ten. “What time today?” he asked.

“I’m ready now.”

“Meet you there,” he said, looking down at his tie. “I need to change.”

Five minutes later I was in the elevator. My office is on the sixth floor; the basketball court is on nineteen. It’s a terrific court: an abbreviated full court with regulation baskets on both ends and a three-point arc that stretches over the half-court line. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen where you can play one-on-one on a full court, shooting at different baskets. Bruce designed it himself.

Bruce grew up playing ball in the city, just like I did. We figured that out in China the beginning of last year. Michael Jordan happened to be there at the same time, and his picture was on the cover of every newspaper. On the third day of our trip, Bruce looked at me and said: “I
really
feel like playing ball.” We went out, bought sneakers, and asked the concierge to find us a court; we played two hours of one-on-one in a dusty elementary school gymnasium in Shanghai. It was a great day, for two reasons. First, it got me motivated to get back into shape. Second, and I guess more important, from that day on Bruce never went anywhere without me.

Since China we’ve played nearly every day that we are both in the office. Bruce is eleven years older than I am but he’s still quick, and stronger than me and about four inches taller. But I can shoot the ball. Always could. Wake me up from a dead sleep and I can drain a sixteen-foot jump shot. When they tell you they can teach you to shoot they are lying; they can teach you the proper form, but either you can shoot or you can’t, and if you can’t then LeBron James could coach you and you’d never get really good. Bruce is a lousy shooter but he goes hard
on the court; playing with him is about the best workout you’ll ever have.

When we were done I went into the men’s room, pulled my top over my head, and wrung it out into the sink. I loved the way I looked in the mirror. I hadn’t been in this kind of shape since college. I took a shower and put on a navy suit, blue shirt, and lavender tie, then I went back to my office to talk to my kids. My daughter is nine, my son six. I have pictures of each of them facing me at my desk and almost every day I chat with them. I often don’t see them at all during the week, even though we all sleep in the same house, because I leave too early and get home too late. Sometimes I catch Phoebe still stirring, so I kick off my shoes and get into her bed and she tells me stories about her day and her friends and her dance class and the tooth she is on the verge of losing and the type of dog she’s decided she wants and the funny thing Drake said to Josh on television. Then she falls asleep on me, and I stroke her hair and watch her lips shudder and part, shudder and part. I seldom catch Andrew awake, but I love to go into his room and marvel at the impossible positions he manages to twist his body into beneath the covers. I swear, the child has never once slept a night vertically in his bed; he is always at some varying degree of diagonal, his arms splayed in one direction and his legs another. It always makes me laugh, no matter how long my day has been.

I miss them terribly during the week and I find that talking to them on the phone only makes it worse, so most days I speak to their photographs. That day, for instance, I recall saying something to Phoebe about how much I liked the dance number she was working on for the talent show, and I told Andrew how proud I was that he had dropped the bat halfway to first base in his T-ball game, which was a marked improvement from the previous time when he nearly decapitated an umpire. They are perfect, my kids. At least I think they are.

Now it was noon and the distant ache that talking to the pictures usually soothes was instead growing. I had been traveling too much of
late; that goes along with being hoops buddies with the CEO. And we were going back to San Francisco that night, another night away, without even the pictures to talk to. So I decided to go home early, which I never do, but the hell with it; I needed to see the kids.

I had to sprint through Grand Central Station to catch the 12:37. I made my way to the bar car and ordered two beers, then stretched out and popped one open. I was unaccustomed to all the free space; coming home at rush hour the train is always SRO. Now I had it almost all to myself. On the other end of the car was a college girl drinking coffee, all spread out with books and bags and scarves. Midway between us were two blue-collar fellows with construction boots up on seats, talking too loudly about the Yankees. Aside from the bartender and me, that was it. The beer was crisp and tasted sweet. A calm feeling spread from my brain into my throat, down my chest, and all the way to my gut.

I was going to get home a little before two o’clock. Claire would be at a tennis lesson, then home to meet the school bus, only the kids wouldn’t be on it. I was going to pick them up as a surprise and take them for ice cream, then we’d go home and my son and I would throw a ball around and my daughter would play Taylor Swift songs on her iPod, and it would be just like a Saturday except it was Monday. As I drove myself home from the train I was thinking this was a great idea, one of the best days I could ever imagine.

I burst through my front door in a hurry; I didn’t want to be in a suit. I bounded up the stairs two at a time, headed to my closet to change. It was when I reached the top step that I first noticed something askew. Everything looked normal, but it didn’t
sound
normal. There was a noise coming from the opposite end of the hallway that sounded both familiar and completely out of place at the same time. I started down the hall, loosening my tie as I passed the kids’ bedrooms, both empty and quiet. The sound was coming from farther down the hall. There was only one more room on the floor, a guest suite where Claire’s parents stay when they come to visit; they like that it is remote enough within the house to offer a bit of privacy. I don’t know that I’d
set foot in that room in a year. As I approached my heart began to slow down, even before there wasn’t any question what I was hearing; my heart figured it out before my ears did. There was a keyhole in the door. I knelt, shut one eye, and when I looked in my heart almost came to a dead stop. What I saw was consistent with what I thought I had heard: a man and woman from behind, naked. He was pulling on a pair of jeans with no underwear beneath, long brown hair in a ponytail; I didn’t recognize him. The woman I only saw for an instant, a flash of dark hair, before she disappeared from sight, headed toward the bathroom. I watched long enough to see the man sit on the edge of the bed, still facing away, putting on his shoes. I don’t know why I didn’t wait to see his face—of course I should have—or, more important, why I didn’t confront them both right then. But I didn’t. Watching him tie his shoelaces was already more than I could bear; I didn’t want to see any more. I just stood up, opened my other eye, and dusted off my pants in the place where I had knelt. My mind was completely blank. My hands were beginning to shake. And my life suddenly didn’t seem so perfect anymore.

MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS
of the sheets.

I remember vividly the day we bought them. They’re Frette, which is very fancy, and Claire and I got into an argument, first over how expensive they were, then over the pronunciation. Is it “fret”? Or the Frenchified “freh-tay”? I still don’t know the answer. What I do know is the reaction I get from Claire if I approach the sheets while wearing shoes: it’s as though I’m walking toward the Mona Lisa with a pair of scissors. She treats the sheets the same way my mother used to treat the good towels when I was growing up. The better towels were always in the guest bathroom, even though we never had any guests; they were all at my father’s house. But that wasn’t the point. The point is: I might have just witnessed the finish of my wife having sex with another man, and my first thought was of the sheets. The mind is
funny that way. Oftentimes, the first thought it has is one that doesn’t do you any good at all.

My next thought was that I was freezing. It was seventy degrees in the house but I was ice cold, shivering. There were so many things I could have done—should have done—but in that instant I didn’t think of any of them. All I could think was that I needed to get warm. So I turned around and went back the way I’d come, out into the sunshine. I didn’t look to see if Claire’s car was in the garage, or any other car for that matter. Instead I just stood in the driveway and watched the postal truck as it rambled toward my house, paused at my neighbor’s box, dropped off some mail, and rambled on. I don’t know my mailman’s name but he smiled and waved as he rambled toward my mailbox, opened it, dropped off my mail, and rambled on. I’m not sure if I waved back or not. On the lawn across the way, my neighbor’s yappy little Jack Russell terrier was racing about in circles. The circles weren’t consistent; sometimes the dog stopped and changed direction. I thought maybe it was chasing a butterfly. My neighbor’s wife came down her driveway, wearing workout apparel and a pleasant smile. “Hey, Jon!” She looked down at the dog and shook her head; she knows the dog is a pain in the ass. “You’re home early!”

“Yes,” I said, and watched as she went to her box and fetched her mail, then snapped at the dog to behave and went back inside. The dog paid no attention; it went right on running in circles. I heard the whirring and clicking of a sprinkler kicking on, maybe even mine, I’m not sure. Someone’s grass was being watered; it didn’t really matter whose.

I was thinking of the day my grandfather died, when I was twelve years old. We were at the hospital, my mother and I, and I remember standing on the sidewalk on a busy street in Manhattan when it was time to leave, staring in amazement at all of the normalcy that surrounded me. How could the garbagemen and the shoemaker and the meter maid and the honking truck driver all be going about their business as though nothing was at all unusual? Didn’t they know it was
not
a normal day? That’s what I was thinking about while my postman was
delivering mail and my neighbor’s dog was chasing a butterfly and my wife and a stranger were getting dressed in my house.

I wasn’t cold anymore. I just needed to see the kids. I was feeling so far from normal, I desperately needed normalcy; I needed my kids. So, rather than waiting for whomever it was to leave my house—or, better yet, slamming through the door and demanding answers—I did probably the least sensible thing I might have under the circumstances: I got into my car and drove away. I backed slowly out of the driveway, watched the mail truck and the dog running in circles in my rearview mirror until they disappeared from sight, then turned left on the main road and drove toward town.

The silence in the car was soothing for an instant, then it became deafening. It left me nowhere to go but inside my own head, which just then was not the best place to be, so I turned on the satellite radio, set to the channel that plays eighties music. Howard Jones was singing “Things Can Only Get Better.” Down one notch to the seventies was “Don’t Pull Your Love.” I kept clicking around, trying to find a song that fit my mood, with no success. What I needed was a song that could turn time back ten minutes or so, and since no song can do that I finally just shut off the radio and drove to school.

I love visiting the school my children attend. I don’t get there often, which may be part of the reason I so enjoy it. I find I feel peaceful and at ease when I am in the building no matter how loud all the children are when the bell rings; even the chaos is therapeutic. It reminds me not at all of the strict, competitive environment in which I was raised. My father insisted I attend the most elite New York prep schools, just as he had, a demand my mother honored even though he went out of our life the day I turned nine. My kids’ school is nothing like that; it is a warm, nurturing place where the emphasis is on sharing and kindness. Claire occasionally voices concern that the school isn’t academic enough, but nothing could worry me less. There will be ample time for all of that—eventually their entire lives will be all of that. Right now they are in fourth and first grades; let them be kids.

When I pulled into the parking lot I was still more than twenty minutes early. Instinctively, I reached over to the passenger seat, where my iPhone would be in the zippered pocket of my briefcase, only there was no phone. There was also no pocket, and no briefcase. Which meant my credit cards, driver’s license, the
New York Times
sports section, a tube of Purell hand sanitizer, and a roll of Tums were all gone. I felt my face flush, a moment of panic;
this
was the last thing I needed. Visions of standing in line at the DMV flashed through my mind. But then, just as quickly, the answer came to me. The briefcase was not lost; in fact it had probably already been found. There was no question I was holding it when I went into the house, and equally little doubt that I wasn’t when I left. I was sure the briefcase was inside, I just wasn’t sure where. Though it didn’t much matter. If it was destined to be found then it would be. If Claire stumbled over it she would, no doubt, be surprised and confused, which would make two of us; I’d deal with the briefcase when I got home.