Outtakes from a Marriage (7 page)

The dogs threw their weight into their harnesses, and their frustrated cries turned into playful yips as the sled flew across the snow-covered parking lot. Joe and I screamed in unison at the sled’s first surge forward, and I cried, “Whoa, Lobo! Whoa, Lobo!” to the lead dog. But Lobo didn’t appear to know his name, which turned out to be okay, because after the first thirty seconds, the dogs ran out of steam. We left the parking lot and headed out over a field, the distance separating us from the three other teams growing larger and larger.

“Hup, Lobo,” called Joe. “Hup!”

Lobo had downshifted from a slow lope into a walk. He went to sniff a small fir tree and then stopped to lift his leg on it.

“Hup, hup, hup!” we called out.

Lobo released an agonizingly long stream of urine and then kicked at the earth with his hind legs. He kicked at the ground, and kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked, sending small yellow wads of snow and dirt all over his teammates and me.

“Bad dog, Lobo! Hup!” yelled Joe. Lobo meandered on, but only after pausing long enough for us to understand that he was moving forward only because
he
now chose to. The other dogs in our team stopped and lifted a leg or squatted at the exact same fir tree, each also sending chunks of their marked territory back into my face.

We proceeded across the field at Lobo’s lackadaisical pace, the dogs stopping every few yards to have a sniff at the ground, to relieve themselves, or just to have a friendly go at their neighbor’s genitals. The first time they came to a complete stop, Joe and I screamed, “Hup, hup, hup!” at the tops of our lungs, but the dogs didn’t get tangled in their harnesses or attack one another. They were having a leisurely morning walk and they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

“I feel like one of those dog walkers you see in Central Park,” said Joe, and I said, “Is it my imagination or is Lobo one of the most moth-eaten dogs you’ve ever laid eyes on?” Because once we had started moving, after Lobo stopped lunging and baring his fangs, we were able to get a good look at him, and it was clear he’d seen better days. His coat, where it remained, was graying. It was still thick around his neck and shoulders but started to thin out around the area of his waist, and for some reason, perhaps some kind of canine pattern baldness, parts of his bony hindquarters were completely bare. All four legs were still covered in fur, but the right hind leg was stiff and arthritic and appeared to torque sharply out to the side with each step.

“You know, I’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such an arrogant son of a bitch,” said Joe. “He’s not listening to a thing I say.”

“I think the handler sized us up and we got the equivalent of the old reliable nag at the dude ranch,” I said, and then we both kicked back and enjoyed the ride. The midday sun streamed down on us and I tilted my face up to catch its rays. At the end of the bright windswept field, we turned onto a wide trail that wove its way through a pine grove. The occasional clusters of grass poking up through the melting snow and the promising musky scent of thawing earth made me think of the Easter Sundays of my childhood, of starched flowered dresses and new Mary Janes. Joe squatted down behind me, giving up all pretense of “driving” the dogs, and wrapping his arms around me, he kissed me on my neck. I moved his hand down under the blanket, into the front of my parka and over my breast. The dogs settled into a pace that was just a tad slower than a normal walk and we slid in and out of the dappled sunshine, over a narrow frozen creek, and finally back out into another field that led to the barn. Joe and I untangled ourselves and Ruby turned around in the lead sled to wave excitedly back at us.

“It was like a dream!” she said, after a ten-minute showdown with Joe about why we couldn’t buy the lead dog on her team, who was also, curiously enough, called Lobo.

“Let’s get to the Ice Hotel before it melts,” I said.

The pictures we had seen of the Ice Hotel made the place look like the Winter Palace from
Doctor Zhivago.
The real Ice Hotel was a long, low structure that looked like a gigantic cargo vessel encased in ice. It sat in the middle of a parking lot with Dumpsters and Porta Potties set up outside. By the time we pulled up, there was already a small line of tourists waiting to get in, including the Wymans.

“That’s the Ice Hotel?” Ruby asked sadly when we joined them in line and we all wondered how anybody came up with this gimmick in the first place.

But the inside of the hotel actually bore a closer resemblance to the promotional photos we had seen. Something about the way the sun filtered through the thick blocks of ice gave the place a mod, clubby, blue-lit atmosphere. We walked through the ice foyer and the ice chapel and then into the ice lounge, where shots of vodka were being served in ice shot glasses.

“Now you’re talking,” said Joe, handing shots to Bill and Kate and me. The girls ordered hot cocoa from a waitress. As we tossed back the shots and Joe fetched us each another, I recounted our dog-sledding travails to the Wymans. The first shot had burned going down, but the second was just blissfully warm. Joe grinned at me as I described Lobo, interrupting occasionally with adjectives like
mangy
and
shit-encrusted.
We hadn’t really shared an adventure in ages and now we felt reunited by the ordeal. We were actually bent over laughing when we tried to explain just how hard it is to figure out where to look when your dog team has decided to embark on a spontaneous orgy in the middle of a snowy field.

Soon the girls had finished their hot chocolates and set out to explore each and every room in the hotel, and we set out after them. The Wymans followed the girls into one of the guest rooms and Joe and I wandered into another. It was empty except for the ice furniture and the faux fur blankets thrown across the “bed.”

“I wonder if people really stay here,” I said. “Just looking at that bed hurts my back.”

Joe swung the ice door closed and found that it bolted shut.

“Didja ever do it in an ice hotel?” he asked, and I laughed because this was an old running joke between us. Joe and I had discovered, not long after we met, that his sexual experience was a little more…limited than mine. Actually, a lot more limited. Joe hadn’t had a lot of girlfriends before we met in college—in fact, I’ve had to take him at his word that he wasn’t a virgin before me. I, on the other hand, had had a few boyfriends before we met. I never thought my sexual experiences were that vast until I met Joe and came to realize that maybe I had hung around with a bit of a fast crowd in high school.

“Didja ever do it in a car?” he would ask when we first started seeing each other, and I would say, “Of course, who hasn’t?”

“Me,” Joe would say. Then: “How about a train,” or “a parent’s bed, an abandoned building?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” I would say and also think to myself,
And a cemetery, a boat, on the beach, in the woods.
Joe would respond to each admission with his “You slut” look and I’d tell him what I’d like to do to
him
in a train, in a parent’s bed, and in an abandoned building, and eventually over the years we had made love in all these places and more—private planes, a yacht, a castle, once drunk out of our minds in an Irish peat bog….

Joe checked the bolt on the ice door and then grabbed me by the arm.

“Are you crazy?” I laughed. “All those people out there…” But he was already pushing me up against an ice wall.

“C’mon, I’m freezing. Warm me up, baby,” he said, and he put his arms around me, sliding his hands into the top of my jeans.

“What about Ruby?” I asked, giggling, and then we were down on that ice-slab bed. When we had finished our hasty, slippery love-making, our coats and jeans soaked from the melting bed, it thrilled me to allow Joe to pull me back up onto my feet. For months I had been lying on my back after more purposeful sex, my legs propped up on a pillow, hoping that gravity would help settle the impasse that seemed to have developed between my ovum and Joe’s sperm. We had had a quickie in the Ice Hotel—our first in ages—and we had another that night in our real hotel, and another the next morning, and four weeks later I bought a pregnancy test and I peed the line blue. Blue. Finally blue.

[
eight
]

I
met Karen Metzger at Bergdorf ’s for lunch. Karen and I had been having weekly lunches ever since we met in the late nineties, when Brian directed Joe in
Heartland.
Karen was my only friend who didn’t work and had the liberty to dine at places like the Bergdorf Café. Karen always chose the Bergdorf Café. I hate the Bergdorf Café.

“What’s to hate?” Karen said this time. “It is what it is. Get the chopped salad.”

“I just noticed something,” I said. I was whispering now because the tables were so close together.

“Look at them all.”

“Who?”

“The ladies who lunch here. The ladies with the fur and hair and nails. They’re our age. I’ve always thought of this café as the roosting place for glamorous grown-ups. Older people. When did I get to be their age?”

Karen looked at me long and hard. “You’re too young to be going through a midlife crisis,” she said. “I’m seven years older. Let me have mine first.”

“I’m not having a midlife crisis,” I said. “I just feel…old.” For the first time since the first overheard voice mail two days ago, I felt tears gathering.

“Oh, Julia, what is it?” Karen said softly.

I dabbed at my eyes with my napkin. I could feel the lunching ladies on both sides of me making a deliberate effort to not look my way.

“It’s nothing. Never mind. Really.”

“Is it the kids? Joe?”

I just shook my head.

“Oh my God. Have you been to the doctor? Everybody I know has ovarian cancer all of a sudden. I’m not kidding. Everybody has cancer! Are you all right?”

My emotional lapse was over. I didn’t have cancer. Things could be worse.

“I’m fine. I don’t have cancer,” I said. “Is there mascara all over my face?”

“No. Just a little under your left eye…That’s it.”

“Okay, sorry. I think…”

“What is it?”

“I think maybe I
am
having a midlife crisis. That’s all.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I really don’t want to go to this party tonight. I feel so…hideous.”

“Have you been back on the show’s Web site again?”

“No,” I said, but of course I had. I lurked on message boards on the NBC Web site almost every day. I’d been doing so ever since the show’s premiere season. There were constant postings about the show on the site, mostly pertaining to plot twists and speculations about where the season was headed, but there were also comments about the different actors, and Joe had a little harem of regular posters, people who gave themselves screen names like Joesgal and Mitchs-bitch (Mitch Hollister was the name of Joe’s character on the show).

JF is HOT.

—I’m a huge Joe Ferraro fan. Have been long before series.

—forget it ladies. he’s married.

—thought he was divorced

—no, long time married to wife

—I saw a picture of them in a mag. she’s not very hot. I was surprised.

—Makes me love him all the more. Didn’t leave dumpy wife when he got famous.

—I saw him making out with a blond woman at a bar in midtown a few weeks ago.

—His wife?

—Did she have bad soccermom hair?

—yeah

—wife

—definitely wife

—Awwww, that’s sweet.

I hadn’t yet started monitoring Joe’s voice mail when I read that particular thread, so I assumed, back then, that it was a case of mistaken identity. Joe and I hadn’t made out in a bar in Midtown…ever.

“You have to go see Dr. Calder,” Karen said.

“Who’s that, a shrink?”

“No, Julia. Dr. Alexa Calder! The dermatologist. She’s famous. She’s constantly on talk shows talking about procedures. She’s like the first person who did Botox in this country. She does my Botox.”

It was only then that I saw that Karen had no lines on her forehead and no crow’s-feet.

“Wow,” I said, “your skin does look really good. I have to admit I’ve thought about getting rid of these frown lines on my forehead….”

“I’ll give you her number. She can also get rid of those smoker’s lines around your lips.”

“Smoker’s lines? I haven’t smoked in years. I don’t have smoker’s lines.”

Karen squinted at my mouth.

“Do I?” I drew my lips together tight.

“That’s just what they call them. The little lines above your lip. My friend Helen had them—you know Helen Meyer from DreamWorks? She had Alexa inject a tiny bit of Restylane all around her lip line and now the lines are gone. She looks ten years younger.”

Ten years younger. Ten years ago I was one of the youngest mothers in Ruby’s class. Now I was one of the oldest in Sammy’s. There was certainly something appealing about the idea of having somebody eradicate all the years that had etched themselves onto my face. It occurred to me now that the face I saw each day in the mirror might not look the same to others as it did to me. I saw the Julia Ferraro I once was, with the so-called “great smile” and my father’s blue eyes and cheekbones, while everybody else saw the Julia Ferraro who had spent too much time in the sun as a teenager, had smoked too many cigarettes in college, and whose brow had furrowed in constant worry ever since Ruby was born. Julia Ferraro the wife, the soccer mom. The hag.

“Let’s order a bottle of wine,” Karen said, and although I usually never drink during the day—it makes me too tired—I said, “Yes, let’s!”

After lunch I said good-bye to Karen and took the elevator down to the third floor, to the designer formal wear department. The Golden Gobes were only two weeks away and I still hadn’t started shopping for a dress. I guess that was because I hadn’t quite wrapped my mind around the idea that I would have to
shop
for a dress. I actually thought that as soon as the nominations were announced, there would be a feeding frenzy of top designers vying for my attention, desperate to have the wife of one of the main nominees—Best Actor, TV Drama—wear one of their gowns on the red carpet. I had assumed that everyone was waiting until the holidays were over to call with their offers, but now that the holidays
were
over, I was coming to the dawning realization that Donna and Calvin and Vera and Giorgio were not madly sketching design ideas to propose to me, that in fact as far as they were concerned, I could wear a gunnysack down the red carpet.

It was a weekday afternoon and the third floor was relatively quiet. I wandered into the first of a series of boutiques and I have to admit I was feeling a little rich and splendid. I was all full of chopped salad and wine and chocolate ganache and felt instantly at one with the luxurious finery. The hanging gowns were displayed on racks along the walls. They were carefully spaced several inches apart from one another, bathed in soft halogen light, and I touched them dreamily as I walked past. The salesclerk was a slender, middle-aged man who wore a crisp linen shirt and tailored trousers, and had a shaved head. He was thumbing through a pile of invoices, and when I entered the space, he had nodded to me in greeting. Now that I was touching the garments, he looked up with a slightly bewildered expression and said, “May I help you find something?”

“Yes,” I said. I smiled self-consciously, preparing myself for his gushing advances. “I need a dress. For the Golden Globes.”

The man nodded. “Mmm-hmm?” he said. Then he glanced back down at the invoices.

“My husband’s a nominee.”

“Oka-a-ay,” the clerk said. He nodded at the dress racks and said, “Let me know if you see something you like,” and then returned his full attention to his paperwork.

It wasn’t exactly the level of enthusiasm I had anticipated, but I didn’t really care, because suddenly I saw something I liked very much. It was a skinny, floor-length black-lace gown by Jean Paul Gaultier, with a clingy silvery-gray lining. It had a rock-glam look, a look that had really worked for me in my youth. The attendant pointed me toward the fitting room, and when I slipped it on, it was as if Gaultier had designed the dress solely with me in mind. The stretchy lining clung to my body in all the right places, and the lacy pattern—delicate roses—seemed to camouflage all the necessary ones. I consulted the sales attendant and he agreed. It was a perfect fit, and as he wrapped it up, and I charged it to my MasterCard, I was very pleased with myself. “It was the first dress I saw,” I imagined telling Joan Rivers. “I just wandered into a boutique and bought the first dress I saw.”

“It’s gonna be hell getting a cab this time of night,” Joe said when we left our building that night.

“Joe! A cab? It’s three blocks to Susanna’s!”

“What’re you talking about? It’s six blocks, three of them
crosstown
blocks, and it’s freezing….”

It’s funny, I thought, looking at Joe’s clenched jaw and fierce scowl, how a marriage is sometimes like a minefield covered by a beautifully manicured lawn. Or at least ours was. If you saw us leave our building that night, for example, you might think,
There’s Joseph Ferraro and his wife. Joe Ferraro from
The Squad!
Look how lovingly his wife gazes at him as he talks to her.
Meanwhile, I was thinking,
Don’t get your panties in a bundle, diva-boy,
and he was thinking something along the lines of,
Why can’t you, for once, just do things the way I want to do them, you controlling bitch.

“Let’s start walking,” I said, and did just that—started walking east on Eighty-fifth Street, which, of course, goes west, so there was no chance of getting a cab headed in the right direction until we reached Amsterdam Avenue. Joe stood for a moment and I could feel his angry glare on my back. I pulled the fur-trimmed collar of my jacket up against my ears and bent my head into the wind. This was an old struggle of ours, the “Let’s walk/No let’s take a cab” dispute. Joe worked out for two hours every day in a gym, then, for the rest of the day, he went out of his way to exert himself as little as possible. He would take a cab across the street if he could. In my mind, if he could employ somebody to brush his teeth and wipe his ass for him, he would. Joe had befriended (translation: heavily over-tipped for a year) a driver from the BLS limousine service, and now Lou exclusively drove Joe. He drove Joe to work and to the gym, and at night he drove us to parties and events (this was his night off). The cost was exorbitant and it was a recurring battle between Joe and me. I wanted to walk to things that were in our neighborhood, the way we used to, and was content taking cabs to other neighborhoods. It bothered me that Lou billed by the hour and spent most of his hours parked outside our building or Joe’s gym, where somebody else was paid a huge sum to work out with him. Honestly, the amount of manpower it took to be Joe Ferraro was astonishing. He had started with only an agent, but over the years had acquired assistants, trainers, drivers, more agents, lawyers, a manager, and now he had just added a publicist to the payroll. All on commission or billing by the hour. And it wasn’t just the money that bothered me. It was the whole entourage trip that Joe thrived upon. Over time, Joe had come to think of most of these people as his friends, while his former friends fell, one by one, to the wayside. Our old friends, many of them struggling actors, were too “bitter” or “begrudging,” according to Joe, while his new “friends” were adoring and worshipful, and over the years, he had begun valuing many of their opinions and ideas over mine. Lately, he would ask me to read a script he was considering for a movie offer, and if I said I thought the script was bad, Joe would say, “Jake loved it.” To which I’d respond, “Jake’s a personal trainer with a tenth-grade education,” and Joe would say, “Who do you think the target audience for this film is?” And then: “Why the fuck do you have to criticize every little thing I do?”
Because you’re becoming an idiot,
I’d think, and he’d think,
Bitch!
And together we’d think,
I hate you. What did I ever see in you
?

I heard Joe’s angry stride behind me and we walked to the end of the block like that, with Joe hanging back just enough to be separate, and I closed my eyes against the raw east wind. It made my eyes tear, that wind. At the corner, Joe stepped off the curb and stuck his hand out and a cab pulled right up. Joe held open the door while I climbed inside.

When we arrived at Susanna Mercer’s apartment building one minute later, the doorman opened the cab door for us. “Good evening,” he said when I got out of the cab, but when Joe followed, he said, “Hey! Joe! How’s it going, man?”

“Great, great, thanks.”

“They’re expecting you. Have a nice evening.”

“Thanks,” said Joe.

“Have you ever been here before?” I asked as we entered the elevator.

“No, why?”

“The doorman seemed to know you.”

“I guess he watches the show. Like eighteen million other people,” Joe said.

Joe’s friendship with Susanna had irritated me on occasion over the past several years, but she was actually the first person I crossed off my mental list of suspects when I heard the initial phone messages. First of all, Susanna is Australian. The accents didn’t match. And she only dates billionaires. Plus, I had never heard her swear, and the caller had a younger girl’s voice and…well, why go on? It wasn’t Susanna’s voice.