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And of course she did. She called their house in Palo Alto when Timothy was on the flight home. Katherine answered. The waitress – angry, drunk – asked to speak to her ‘boyfriend' Timothy.
She described in great detail his body, the mole on the back of his thigh, and the positions in which he enjoyed having sex.

When Timothy returned home that night, he thought Katherine was going to leave him. She had packed a bag for him, and calmly told him to take it to Hyatt Rickey's. She made him stay there for a week, refusing his phone calls. When he showed up at the house and rang the doorbell, she declined to open the front door, yelling instead through the wood that he should leave before she called the police.

After forcing him to live in the hotel for seven days, she suddenly – and to him, surprisingly – relented. Just when he thought he had lost her, that divorce was imminent, she drove to the Hyatt, knocked on his door, and said, ‘Come home.'

He returned to the house, and they never spoke about the affair again.

Now – sitting with Katherine in the restaurant in Carmel, and discussing whether Timothy's secretary was in fact attractive – the incident with Mack Gladwell and the cocktail waitress lurked just below the surface of their conversation like a stingray. He tried always to head off discussions before they approached dangerous waters. Avoid all talk about other women, about jealousy, and, above all, about Palm Beach. And always tell her you love her.

‘I love you,' he said.

‘I know you do.' She opened her menu and started reading. After a moment, she peered at him over the top. ‘They have braised short ribs,' she said. ‘You like that.'

‘I like it when you remind me what kind of food to order.'

‘Well, after twenty years,' she said to her menu, and sighed, and Timothy knew exactly what she meant.

Over dessert, Katherine said, ‘There's something I want to ask you.'

The waiter, a little lithe man with a shock of dyed blond hair and the body of a dancer, pranced behind her and laid two coffees on the table. Timothy's was black; hers had cream and sugar. She always ordered it the same way: light and sweet.

Katherine waited for the server to leave. He made a little plié, bending at the knees, and scurried off.

‘It's a bit uncomfortable,' she said.

Timothy frowned. They had held many uncomfortable conversations in the past, but never had she pre-announced that one would be uncomfortable. What every uncomfortable conversation had in common was that it was a surprise, that it began with an innocuous comment or a flip remark, that it arrived like the monsoon, sudden and violent.

‘I'm very interested,' he said.

‘I need a project,' she said. ‘Something to do. While you're at work.'

‘Okay,' he said. It sounded unobjectionable so far.

‘I think about why I get sad sometimes, and I think it's because … because I have too much time, too much time to think, too much time to stew. I always stir things around in my mind. While you're at work, I'm alone at the house, and maybe that makes me a little crazy. So if I had something to do …'

‘Like what?'

‘Well, I don't know. It hardly even matters. But I need a project. Something to occupy my time.'

‘Okay,' he said. But it was clear she already had something in mind.

‘I was thinking about redecorating the house. You know, updating the look a little. Making it a little more …' She searched for the word. ‘Contemporary.'

‘Okay.'

‘I would hire a decorator. You know, and work with him. And that would give me something to do.'

‘That sounds fine,' he said.

‘But, Timothy, I want this to be my project. I don't want to keep asking you permission, asking for money, getting you to sign checks. I think I need to be, you know, in control of something.'

‘What are we talking about, exactly?' Somehow, life always came down to money. One person extracting money from someone else.

‘Don't worry. We would agree on a budget up front. Nothing
extravagant. But once we agreed, I would ask you to trust me, to let me manage everything.'

‘Give me a number.'

‘Two hundred thousand dollars,' she said.

‘To decorate? That's crazy.'

‘Well, maybe it's a little much. But that's the worst-case scenario. I'd try to spend less. But there's so much we could do. The house is full of dead space – the living room, the dining room. We could make it so much warmer.'

‘You're saying I should just put two hundred thousand dollars in your checking account, and let you spend it however you see fit.'

‘That would make me happy,' she said.

‘I would like to make you happy,' he said. ‘But Katherine.'

‘Please, Timothy.' She reached across the table and took his hand. ‘It would mean so much to me.'

He looked into her eyes. They were still the pretty blue eyes he had first looked into more than twenty years ago, but now there were crow's feet at the corners, and fine dry lines etched around her mouth. Maybe what she said was true, that she needed a project, something to keep her busy, something to call her own. She had been cooped up in the house for so long, while Timothy was able to enjoy his life, to come and go as he pleased, to travel, to work. And two hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money to most people, but to him it was one month's worth of management fees for his fund. It was one good trade.

‘What the hell. Don't spend it like a drunken sailor.'

She smiled. ‘Thank you, Timothy. I think this will really help us.'

‘I'll take care of it at work on Monday. The money, I mean.'

‘I love you.'

‘While we're on the subject of love and money,' he said, ‘I have something for you.' He removed the jewelry box from his blazer and held it out between his fingers, as if offering a cigar. ‘Happy anniversary,' he said.

She touched her hand to her mouth. Her hand shook nervously.
She opened the case and stared at the necklace. The diamonds and sapphire glittered in the sunlight. ‘Oh God,' she said.

‘If I had known about the whole house redecorating plan …' he said.

She ignored him. ‘Timothy, this is beautiful.'

‘Well, after twenty years,' he said, ‘you're more beautiful than ever, and you deserve something equally beautiful.' Timothy looked around the room for the waiter. He needed more coffee. ‘I hope you enjoy it,' he said. He made eye contact with the ballerina waiter, gestured to his coffee cup. ‘I think this is going to be a great year – a great year for us,' he said, hoping. ‘Our best year yet.'

And then something strange happened, something Timothy was not expecting. Katherine began to cry. A younger couple at an adjacent table looked up at her and then down again, quickly, embarrassed.

‘Katherine,' he said. He leaned over the table and grabbed her forearm. ‘Katherine, what's the matter?'

She shook her head, wiping the tears from her face. Other patrons in the restaurant turned to look. She sniffled, stopped crying. She dabbed at her eyes with her napkin. The waiter arrived with the coffee decanter, saw her eyes, and walked away without pouring.

‘Katherine,' he said again, ‘what's wrong?'

She shook her head. Timothy chalked it up to female emotion: the pretty restaurant, the anniversary weekend, his agreeing to her decorating scheme, the necklace. It was not until later that he realized it was something else, something he could never imagine. But for now he sat quietly, and wondered if he would ever be able to get that second cup of coffee.

6

Despite his initial dread, Timothy enjoyed the anniversary weekend. Outside the house, alone with her husband, away from the familiar landmarks that reminded her of her own unhappiness, Katherine was a different woman – or, rather, she was the woman that she used to be, before the years had worn her down. The weekend reminded Timothy of what he loved about her: her cool, reptilian insight – the way she could size up other couples from across the room and tell Timothy their story. ‘Look at them,' she said, sitting in the Ventana Inn restaurant, during Saturday's dinner. ‘He hates her. You can see it the way he won't look at her. He's embarrassed by her.' Or: ‘You see that couple? Third marriage. She's too young to be the first, and he's ignoring her too much to be the second.'

He liked the way Katherine's plain, fresh-scrubbed looks made her look more wholesome than the other older wives at the Ventana Inn, and the fact that, away for the weekend, she didn't bother covering up the freckles on her cheeks. He liked her sarcasm, the way she mocked the New Age pretentiousness of the resort, with its ‘Spa Menu' that included a Sea Enzyme Organic Mask (‘Seagull poop,' she said to Timothy through clenched lips, as the masseuse plopped it on her face) and ‘Astrology Readings' and ‘Color Energy Analysis,' whatever that was.

On Saturday they hiked through Point Lobos Park. They parked their car in a small lot and walked a quarter-mile to the beach. (‘Come on, Gimpy,' she called over her shoulder to him. ‘Don't let that war wound slow you down.') At the beach, they removed their sneakers and flats and padded through the sand, weaving a path of wet footprints through seaweed and stranded jellyfish. It
was low tide: it smelled of sulfur and salt. They were the only people on the shore.

The beach ended at a rocky promontory, a solid wall of stones a hundred feet high, which jutted into the sea. A sign indicated the beginning of a trailhead. It said ‘Use Caution,' and stressed the point with an illustration of a stick-figure man leaning precariously over the edge of a cliff.

Katherine's gaze followed the trail up into the rocks. ‘Can you make it to the top?'

He wasn't sure if she was teasing or genuinely concerned. Either way, that forced his hand. ‘Of course.'

They followed the trail away from the water and up onto the wall of rocks. The trail started off steeply and then pitched even steeper. At times it was not even a trail at all but rather a set of tiny steps carved out of the rock, a WPA project from back when chiseling sandstone by hand was a good day's work and shoes only reached size six.

By the tenth step, Timothy's knee hurt. He looked down and saw that he had managed to climb only twenty feet. Only another hundred to go.

The stairs ended and deposited them on a dirt path, which weaved back and forth, a long vertiginous switchback, with a heavy chain running along the ocean side of the path to keep hikers from falling down the cliffs.

After ten minutes they reached the top, a plateau on the crag. They looked down. One hundred feet below, beyond the switchback trail, the ocean pounded against the jagged seawall, throwing foam whitecaps into the air.

They stood there for five minutes, silently, at the edge of the cliff. Timothy held Katherine tightly from behind, his hands locked around her ribs. They watched the ocean crash and ebb. ‘It's beautiful,' she said, loudly, so he could hear her over the waves.

She took his hands and guided them down to her belly. She pushed them into her flesh. ‘Empty,' she said.

He understood what the word meant. The word represented
the greatest source of sadness for her, that they could never have children. It was one more strange thing about Katherine: every time she saw something beautiful, instead of being happy, she felt sad, as if she couldn't allow herself a moment of peace, and needed instead to remember the awful parts of her life.

They had tried several times to have children. She had first miscarried when they had been married for three months. They waited to try again. A year and a half later, she had her second miscarriage, this time at four months. She was devastated. All the women around her – at church, at her college reunion, in the supermarket – were having children. Some of her peers had already had a second, and dinner parties suddenly became new parents' forums, where the talk revolved around issues about which Katherine had no idea: teething, first steps, nursery school, doctors' visits, sibling rivalry.

Another year passed and Timothy convinced her to try again. This time, when she reached six months of pregnancy and she was showing, they thought she would make it. They decided what to name the child: if it was a boy, Connor, after her grandfather; if a girl, Lisa, after her grandmother.

At the end of the sixth month she knew it would be a boy, could feel it in her bones, and she and Timothy talked about Connor, imagined what he would look like, pictured him as a schoolchild, then as a teenager. The miscarriage came a day before she started her seventh month. The child was stillborn.

Katherine stayed in the house for the next month, refusing visitors, turning away company. Timothy cared for her as best he could, but didn't know what to say, whether to commiserate with her or to downplay the tragedy, to be sad or to be strong. So he did nothing, and instead just waited for her sadness to pass.

It did, eventually. When Timothy concluded they would never have children, he was disappointed at first, but the feeling passed. He realized that he was secretly relieved: relieved that the problem wasn't his fault, relieved that he could continue to enjoy his life – going to the office, putting in six-hour days, flying to New York to meet with investors, playing tennis at the Circus Club
on the weekend, traveling to St. Bart's once each year – without the burden of children.

At first there was some talk of fertility specialists, or of adoption, but Katherine dropped these ideas and stopped speaking about the subject of children altogether. Soon the entire matter was put away, never to be spoken of, just one more item in that cluttered attic that held their marriage's disappointments.

‘It is beautiful,' Timothy agreed, as they stared at the ocean below, crashing against the rocks. ‘And I love you.' Which was the only thing he could say when confronted with her sadness.