My Husband's Sweethearts (2 page)

Artie loves me like that
—it seems true in this instant,
as if she's stripped away all of the gestures that I've taken
as manipulation and just seen them purely, as a manifestation
of his love—for me. I'm shocked by this way of seeing
it—the bareness of it all. I'm not certain how to reply.
"I'm sure you'll do fine while I'm gone," I tell her. "I
know you can do it."

She's a little caught off guard. She blushes—again,
something she shouldn't do, but, in this case, I'm glad to
see it. She gives a little bow. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."
She hands me my pocketbook and looks at my
bags. "Do you have everything?"

"I'll be fine."

"Okay then." She turns and walks into the crowd.
She's all business now, her chin up, her arms swinging
strongly. I'm proud of her.

And just then the elevator lets out a loud
ding!
and I
think of Artie's #57—the one that arrived this morning
and that has been eating at me ever since:
The way you
love the sound of an elevator bell, and once said it was like
a little note of hope, the idea that things are bound to
change, that you are finally going to get to go somewhere
and start over.

The only problem is that I don't like elevators. I've
always felt they were little movable death boxes—if anything,
the ding seems to me like an awfully chipper death
knell. They've always made me feel claustrophobic, and,
another thing, I don't particularly care for change—like,
say, finding out your husband is cheating on you—and,
despite all the recent travel, I've never really had the feeling
that I was finally getting to go somewhere else and
start anew.
A little note of hope?
I never said any of these
things. Number 57 isn't mine. It belongs to some other
woman. Number 57 belongs to some other woman the
way my own life right now—my work life, my personal
life—seems to belong to some other woman.

An elderly woman in a wheelchair is pushed out of the
elevator by a young man—maybe her son? They move on
by, and the stainless steel doors close. I see a dim fuzzy reflection
of myself, and I feel like I am that other woman.
As misappropriated as it seems, this life is mine.

When I step onto the plane, I wave the
greeting flight attendant toward me.
She's wearing extremely red lipstick so
high gloss that she looks fishy—especially up close. "I'm
going to need a gin and tonic, pretty much immediately,"
I whisper. "I'm right here, four-A."

She smiles, gives me a wink.

I've already decided to drink my way through the
flight even before I look up and see the woman I'm to sit
next to. She's my mother's age, giddy, freshly sunburned,
overly smiley. I try not to make eye contact.

I used to be a nice person, I swear, I was. I used to say
Excuse me
and
No, you first.
I used to smile at strangers. I
used to banter with overzealous seatmates. But not now.
No, thank you. I'm not interested in the joy of others. I
take offense at it. When I look at this woman, it crosses
my mind to fake being foreign. I could muster a really
sweet, "No English!" But this woman strikes me as the
type to bully through a cultural difference like that—
to want to play charades and draw pictures—to really
connect. She looks like a combination of overly cheery
and prudish. Plus, I've already outed myself as American
(a desperate American) to the flight attendant, and since
she has the alcohol, I want to protect that relationship.

As I'm wrestling my borderline oversized luggage into
the overhead, the woman blurts, "It's my first time!"

I'm not sure how to take this. It all sounds way too
personal. "Excuse me?" I say, pretending I didn't hear her
clearly, and hoping that a little communication speed
bump will give her time to change her mind about revealing
things to strangers on planes.

She shouts—maybe thinking I'm a little deaf, "My first
time! In business class!"

"Congratulations," I say, not sure if this is the appropriate
response. What is?
Bully for you?
I stand in the
aisle, waiting for her to get up. But it seems she doesn't
want to relinquish her seat, not for a second—as if she's
afraid someone might horn in on her privilege. I have to
negotiate around her to get the window seat. I decide to
go by her butt-in-face—maybe a little passive aggression
is what's needed.

It doesn't register. She says, "My son got me this
business-class seat. 'Who needs a business-class to fly
from New York to Philly?' I say to him. But he doesn't listen.
He's a hotshot like that."

I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to say, "Oh and what
does he do?" But I let my cue die. I rise up in my seat to
see if the flight attendant noted the distress in my voice
and is working on the drink order. I don't see her now and
this jangles me. I look out the window at the ground crew.
I'm jealous of their headphones filled with engine drone.

The woman is staring at me. I can feel it, and I also
happen to know, immediately, that she's the kind of woman
my mother disapproves of—the kind who doesn't wear
makeup or dye her hair or go to the gym. My mother would
call her a "quitter," assuming that the woman once did all
of these things, which may or may not be true. But my
mother assumes that the quitters have given up on the fight.
"What fight?" I've asked in the past. "The fight against
looking your age." My mother is always fully dressed, often
in a coordinated velour sweat suit—I call it the formal wear
of sweat suits—and coifed, and overly made-up. She seems
to wear so much makeup these days that she's no longer
really trying to look more attractive, she's just hoping to
disorient people while she safely hides behind it. I don't
know if this is a fight that I want to be a part of, frankly. I
almost feel tender toward the woman next to me, because
she doesn't care what people think of her so very much. She
hasn't quit the fight as much as she has, maybe, risen above
it. But my tenderness doesn't last long.

She says, "Are you one of those high-powered female
professionals they talk about these days?"

Who's they?
I wonder. I lean toward her, conspiratorially.
"I'm not a high-powered
male
professional," I admit.

She takes this as comedic. She rears and laughs up into
the air nozzles overhead. She settles quickly though and
asks her next question. "You're probably part of one of
those high-powered couples with a baby that's learning
Mozart. I've heard of those genius babies from high-powered
couples. Am I right?" Her question has the air of
someone on a game show.

"Sorry," I say. "I don't have a baby. No kids—genius or
otherwise." This is an old wound. Artie and I had started
talking about a family. We'd started reimagining the bedrooms
to include a nursery. We'd taken up the habit of
interrupting our own conversations to say, "Wait, that
would be a good kid name." The names were always
ridiculous—Ravenous, Cotillion, why Nathaniel and not
Neanderthal? In the wake of the popular trend of place
names for kids (London, Paris, Montana), we were compiling
a list of our own: Düsseldorf, Antwerp, Hackensack.
Artie had just sold off another chunk of stock in the Italian
restaurant chain and had hired a young, tough, soon-to-be
mogul type to take some of the pressure off. Our lives were
calming down, and we'd started trying to have kids. I hated
the term
trying
—as if we were two bodies flailing aimlessly
at each other. It implies sexual incompetence and that was
never one of Artie's problems. And then just two months
later, I intercepted an e-mail from a woman with the screen
name "Springbird." (Springbird! It didn't seem right to be
duped by a woman self-named Springbird!) I'd come
across good old Springbird when I was looking for Artie's
travel info and mistook her for his agent. The e-mail asked
if Artie's back was okay from "sleeping on that lumpy futon"
and said that this woman "loved him" and "missed
him achingly."

Achingly.

Then I went to Artie's partner's secretary. His own secretary
is an austere, tight-lipped woman who'd never tell a
thing. But his partner's secretary, Miranda, is a legendary
gossip. I took her to lunch at her favorite place, the All U
Can Eat King Chinese Food buffet, pretending to seek
her advice, pretending to know a lot more than I did. She
spilled the news over sweet-and-sour chicken and fried
dumplings that Artie had someone on the side. She'd seen
an e-mail or two herself and corroborated the name
Springbird, but didn't have much beyond that. My fortune
cookie read "You will visit the Nile." What's that
supposed to mean? Was that supposed to be a metaphor?

When I got home, I confronted Artie while he was
taking a shower. He stepped out and told me the truth,
the whole truth, not just about the woman Miranda had
mentioned, but he confessed to the two other flings—
dalliances.
He said he'd tell me anything I wanted to know.
Full disclosure. He said, "I'll do anything to make this
right." But I didn't want to know any details. He sat on
the edge of our bed, a towel around his waist, shampoo
still in his hair. At this very moment, sitting next to this
woman in business class, staring at the upright tray table
in front of me, I despise Artie as much as I did then. I despise
him for what? Not so much the infidelity—this
sometimes overwhelms me—but I despise him for his
carelessness. How could he have been so careless with our
marriage, with me?

"Well, now," the quitter muses aloud, " high-powered
isn't right. Not exactly. That's more like what they call
newfangled cell phones. What
do
they call them? Power
couples? Is that right? What does your husband do?"

Finally the flight attendant is walking down the aisle,
my drink in hand. She smiles. She bends down and hands
it to me.

"What does my husband do?" I repeat the question.
"Well, flight attendants are always a big favorite."

The older woman says, "Oh . . . well . . . that's not
what I meant!"

The flight attendant isn't startled at all. She gives a sad,
wry, guppy-lipped smile—as if to say,
You think it's easy
being me?

I shrug.

I've successfully shut this conversation down, and I
didn't even have to pull out the great guns of
I'm an auditor,
which tends to clam people up. The older woman
opens up a book that she's made a little cloth jacket for—
to hide the cover. A bodice ripper? I'm not interested in
her little jacket-wearing book.

I turn my head to the oval window. I fiddle with the
plastic shade and I feel my throat tighten up, and I know
that I'm about to cry. I don't like being emotionally messy.
I try to distract myself with little mental notes about
which partner to call to talk through how this necessary
leave of absence from work will be sorted out, who will
lead my team of managers, who will hold the hands of my
clients. I decided to be an auditor because it sounded so
sturdy. I was drawn to it for its tidy rows of numbers, for
the way those numbers can be ordered around, for the
emotionlessness of it. Auditor. It's the kind of job my
father never could have held down. He was an "entrepreneur,"
but never discussed the details of what that meant.
He was, in many ways, the first lovable cheat that I fell in
love with. I went through a phase in college of being a lovable
cheat myself, but I couldn't stomach hurting people.
I tethered myself to the role of auditor to keep me steady.
Auditors don't cry. They don't get emotional about your
tax choices. They pore over digits. They calculate. They
decide whether those numbers are accurate or fudged. I
chose to be an auditor because I knew it would put me in
stuffy room after stuffy room with other auditors—mostly
men and none of them anything like my father. I imagined
falling in love with a fellow auditor and leading a very
well-ordered, emotionally tidy life. Auditing would
toughen me up, shut me down. And maybe it did for a
while. Maybe it did. But then I met Artie.

I stop fighting the crying jag. I just let the tears slip
down my cheeks. I pull a tissue from my pocketbook—
digging around Artie's love notes—and pinch my nose. I
drink the gin and tonic straight down, order another before
takeoff.

With each exhale, I'm aware that I'm
steaming up the shuttle van with gin
fumes. I'd apologize to the driver, but I
can hear my mother telling me not to apologize to those in
the service industry.
It's so middle class.
The fact that we
were middle class throughout my childhood never seems to
matter. I decide not to apologize though because I don't
want to make the driver uncomfortable. Apologizing for
drunkenness is something that you shouldn't have to do
while drunk—that's one of the benefits of being drunk,
right? That you don't care if people know you're drunk. But
the fact that I want to apologize is proof that the drunk is
wearing off, sadly. I pop a few chocolate-covered cherries
bought off an airport rack and make idle chatter.

"So, any hobbies?" I ask the driver. I've had drivers
who were epic gamblers, brutal genocide survivors, fathers
of fourteen. Sometimes I ask questions. Sometimes
I don't.

"I give tennis lessons," he says. "It didn't used to be a
hobby, but I guess it is now."

"You were good?"

"I've gone a few rounds with the best of them." He
looks at me through the rearview mirror. "But I didn't
have the last little bit it takes to push you to the next level.
And I didn't take it well."

He looks like a tennis pro to me now. He's tan and his
right forearm muscle is overdeveloped like Popeye's.
"You didn't take it well?"

"I took to drink—as my grandmother would say."

This is alarming—he's at the wheel.

He must read my nervousness. "I'm in recovery," he
adds quickly.

"Ah." I feel guilty for being drunk now—like the time
Artie and I brought a bottle of wine to the new neighbors
only to find out he was a recovering alcoholic. I'm sure the
driver can tell I've had my fair share today. I want to make
excuses for myself, but I try not to. More talking just
means releasing more gin fumes—this is my drunken logic
at the moment. In a fit of paranoia, I wonder if I'll become
a drunk. Is that the way I'll go down? Will I be the type to
stick out AA? I fret about my constitution, and then I
burp, and I hate the stink of it so much that I know I'll
never be much of an alcoholic. I lack some essential
heartiness, and I'm relieved.

"Do you play?" he asks.

I look at him, confused.

"Tennis?"

Oh, right. I shrug, give him the sign for "just a little,"
by pinching my fingers together and squinting.

The van is winding through my neighborhood, past
the plush lawns of the Main Line. I've never really fit in
here. There were barbecues and cocktail parties, and millions
of those other little checkbook parties where women
gather to drink wine, eat chocolate, and muster an unhealthy
adoration for candles or wicker baskets or educational
toys. There was one sex-toy party, but it's strange
how, after enough stiff Main Line conversation, vibrating
pearl dildos can seem as boring as vanilla-scented tea
lights.

There are friends, still, but not the kind I ever wanted.
In fact, when things started to go wrong, I was happy to
leave before they started phoning in with their alarmed
condolences. I didn't want their sincere sympathy and I
certainly didn't want the fake sympathy designed to get
me to hand over the inside scoop, which would then hiss
around the neighborhood. I was angry at Artie. For the
betrayal, but also for the wounded pride. I was the fool. I
didn't appreciate having the role forced on me. I wondered
what Artie told his women about me. I existed in
those relationships he had, but I was absent, unable to defend
myself. What version of me appeared? The obstacle,
the shrew, the dimwit? There are only so many choices for
the cheated-on wife to become—none of them good.

We round the corner and I know that if I look up I'll
see the house. I'm not quite ready. Artie and I had gone
halvsies on the house. He'd wanted to pay for it outright,
but I'd insisted. It was my first house and I wanted to feel
like it was really mine. My mother thought I was insane to
storm off and leave Artie there. My mother has policies on
how to divorce well. She told me, "When leading up to a
divorce, the most important thing is to stay in the house—
and it doesn't hurt to hide some of the expensive finery,
either. If you can't find it, how can you divvy it up?
Become a squatter. I always stay and stay until the house is
mine." I told her that I didn't want the house and I didn't
want to hide finery. But she hushed me like I was being
blasphemous—"Don't say things like that! I raised you
better"—as if my reluctance to be a squatter in my own
house were a social flaw, like not writing thank-you letters
or wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

It's been almost six months now, and I'm not sure
what kind of monumental change I'm expecting, but as
the airport shuttle van pulls in the driveway, I'm surprised
that I recognize the house at all. Did I expect it to fall into
immediate disrepair? Artie had fallen into immediate disrepair,
it seemed. The heart infection was detected just a
few weeks after I left. The timing was suspicious from the
get-go. I'd always thought it was a prank, a plea for sympathy,
but now it seems more like his sickness is my fault.
I lean forward in the van to pay the driver, and, despite
the fact that we're strangers, I have the overwhelming
urge to tell him
Artie broke my heart. I didn't break his.
I
restrain myself.

The driver/ex-tennis-champion-hopeful/recovering alcoholic
hands me his card, embossed with a racquet.

"If you ever want to work on your swing . . ." he says,
winking.

My
swing
. . . Is my driver/ex-tennis-champion-hopeful/
recovering alcoholic hitting on me? I do believe he is. I take
the card, ignoring the wink. "Thanks." In the wake of Artie's
cheating, I've been so austere, so tough, that no men have
flirted with me—at all. Am I looking vulnerable? Am I losing
my austerity just when I need it most? Or maybe it's the
fact that I'm drunk in the afternoon . . . I tip, modestly. I
don't want to give the wrong idea.

He offers to tote my suitcase.

"No, no. I'm fine." I'm one of those drinkers who
stiffens up to compensate for the looseness. Artie called
me a stilt-walking drunk. I stilt-walk over to my suitcase
and stilt-walk up to the house, relieved to hear the van
pull away without some sassy honk.

Someone's been keeping up the garden, weeding, trimming.
I suspect my mother—she has compulsions of these
sorts, always has. I make a mental note to tell her to cease
and desist. I walk in the front door. It smells like my
house—a mixture of sweet cleanser and Artie's aftershave
and soap and garlic and the damp woodsy smell from
the empty fireplace. And, for a moment, it feels good to
be home.

Our wedding picture—the two of us in an old Cadillac
convertible—still sits on the mantel. I poke through a pile
of mail on the lowboy. I walk through the kitchen, the dining
room—there I find the sofa, the one he had reupholstered
for our anniversary—the bright poppies. My chest
contracts with a sudden pang. I close my eyes and walk
away.

I can hear a television in the den. I walk down the hall
and find a young nurse wearing one of those uniform jackets
with cartoon crayon drawings of kids printed on them.
She's asleep in Artie's recliner. Did she have to be a young
nurse? Couldn't she have been old and pruned? Did she
have to be so blond? Sure, her presence was probably a
random, computer-generated assignment, but still, it
seems particularly, cosmically insulting.

I leave the nurse dozing and walk up the staircase,
glancing at the photographs lining the wall. This is the
spot you'd usually hang family photos, but these are artsy
pictures I took before I met Artie, back during my artsy
photographer phase: pictures of a dog with its head stuck
out of a sunroof, speeding by; a girl in a frilly dress riding
a pony at a fair, but crying hysterically; a Hare Krishna
talking on his cell phone. These are my quasi-art moments.
And I'm relieved they aren't the standard family
shots right now. I couldn't take the fakeness of Sears renditions
of a happy home life. And I'm relieved that they
aren't old photos of our parents and grandparents—Artie
and I both hail from scoundrels of one kind or another.
We couldn't have ever made the convoluted decisions of
which sets of families to include. For example, which of
my mother's husbands would make it in a staged photo
with her? My father, who abandoned us? Husband number
four, who was by far the sweetest, but, while wrestling
an ancient, bulky antenna, fell off the roof and died because,
as my mother put it,
His tragic flaw was that he was
too cheap for cable
? Or the most recent divorce, because
she got the best settlement out of him? How to choose?
No, I'm happy to see my old artwork. I was numb to them
when I left, but now they strike me as, well, funny and
sad, as I had intended, I guess, back when I had intentions
of this sort.

But at the top of the stairs there's a new framed
photo—one that Artie took, not me. I know it immediately.
It's a picture of me looking down at the freckles on
my chest—no obscene nudity—inked out to represent
Elvis, midcroon. I'm looking away, laughing, my chin
tilted back. I know now that Artie has been expecting me.
He's planted this framed photograph as a way of buttering
me up with nostalgia, and my heart responds. I can't help
it. I miss that moment in our lives together, so intimate
and so bound together. But I don't let myself dwell on
that. I'm in no mood for manipulation. I march up the final
stairs.

I walk down the hallway, quietly, toward the nearly
closed door of our bedroom. The last time I saw Artie he
was standing on the other side of airport security, staring
at me, wide-eyed, his arms opened, frozen, as if in the
middle of an important question. I was supposed to have
taken it as a plea for forgiveness, I guess.

I place my hand on the door. I'm afraid to open it.
He's been existing in my mind for so long that I can't
imagine his body, his voice, his hands. I'm afraid, suddenly,
that he'll look so sickly that I won't be able to bear
it. I understand the
idea
of Artie's sickness. I'm not so
sure I'm prepared for the
reality
of it. But I know that I
have to.

I push the door open a crack and see Artie in bed.
He's staring at the ceiling. He looks older. Is it just that I
have this youthful image of Artie in my mind, one that
some part of me refuses to update (probably because I'd
have to update my own), or is it the sickness that has aged
him? He's still beautiful. Have I mentioned that Artie is
beautiful? Not traditionally. No. He was punched as a
kid—yes, over some girl—and has an offset nose, but a
gorgeous smile and a certain boyishness, a restlessness
that gives him such ebullient energy, but also probably the
same part of him that led him to other women. He has
broad shoulders—a bulky manliness—but he's uncomfortable
with them. He slouches. He has always looked
best at the end of the day, loosened by a drink, when the
light gives up and things fall into shadows. He has thick
dark hair tinged gray and a way of pushing it roughly off
his forehead, and blue eyes—soft, sexy dark eyes under
heavy lids.

And now? Now. Artie's dying in our bed and it is still
our
bed, after all, and, although there is a knot of hatred in
me, I want nothing more in this moment than to crawl
into bed next to him, to lay my head on his chest while we
take turns telling each other everything we've missed—my
overly positive assistant, the lady on the plane—and in
this way saying:
it's going to be all right. Everything's going
to be all right.

"What are you looking at up there?" I ask.

He turns his head and stares at me. He has a charming
smile—a little cocky, but also affectionate and sweet. It's
as if he predicted today was the day I'd come, and it had
gotten late, but he'd remained confident, and then I actually
showed up, proving him right. He smiles like he's won
a gentleman's bet. "Lucy," he says. "It's you."

"Yep. Here I am."

"I planned on doing this some other way, you know."

"Doing what?"

"Winning you back," he says, eyes crinkling. "I mean,
dying wasn't really what I had in mind. It lacks charm,
frankly."

I don't know what to say. I don't want to talk about
dying. "What was the other plan?" I ask.

"Reformation. Penance. I was going to make amends
and become a new man," he says, tilting his head. "I
wasn't against renting a white horse."

"I don't think I would have bought into the white
horse." Artie has always loved a grand gesture. More than
once my fortune cookies at Chinese restaurants were
stuffed, behind the scenes, with more intimate notes. He
once had a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet write a sonnet for
my birthday. In a fit of nerves, I told a garish hostess
how much I admired her necklace—a gaudy, spangled,
Liberace affair—and for my next birthday, there it sat in
an enormous velvet box. I loved Artie's desire to surprise
me, but I truly loved the quiet, unplanned moments—
cooking pastries together, finding ourselves powdered
with sugar or arguing about some principle of physics or
the construction of aqueducts in ancient Rome—those
things neither of us know anything about. I've always
loved Artie most when he wasn't trying to be lovable.

"Well, the white horse might have been
my
little fantasy,"
he admits. "I envisioned a desert scene, you know, a
little Lawrence of Arabia. But deserts are hard to come by
here. And I don't think I'd have looked so great in eyeliner.
Basically, I'd planned on avoiding death."

"Ah,
cheating
death. Now that is part of your pattern."