Young Wives (7 page)

She thought about taking a shower. Another day or two and her hair would go Rastafarian, but she didn’t care. God, she hadn’t just lost a husband, she’d lost her hairdresser! Who could do her unmanageable hair like Todd?

She was too tired to stand, and her body felt too limp to be safe in a bathtub. Then again, the idea of rolling under a tub full of water and dying was not an altogether unattractive one. Except for the part about breathing the water in. That would hurt like a bastard. She hated to get water up her nose. If only her father had sleeping pills—lots of them and the good kind, the kind that killed you. None of that over-the-counter Sominex stuff that gave you diarrhea. The only useful thing she’d found in Tony’s medicine cabinet was a half-empty bottle of Nyquil. Hey, Angie told herself, she should stop being so negative—the bottle was half full. Or had been till she got a hold of it.

Angela bent over and reached for her sweatpants—well, they were her father’s sweatpants—and slipped into them. As she pulled the waistband up over her legs and past her thighs she realized those were the thighs that Reid had just stroked the night before. A hot tear, and then another, escaped from under her right eyelid and immediately coursed down her cheek and into the crease beside her nose. She hated Reid. She hated him touching
her
thighs, and then she wondered who else’s thigh he had been touching. What had he said? An older woman? Someone at work. Could it be Jan Mullins, the only woman partner at Andover Putnam? No. She was a fifty-two-year-old wrinkle bunny. One of the drab paralegals? Unthinkable. Maybe a secretary? Oh, who had he touched, who had he kissed? Had he told her he loved her?

The thought made her so angry that she had enough energy to stand and pick up the Rangers sweatshirt from the floor beside the sofa and slip into it. Her dad, unlike most Italian-Americans, didn’t care about baseball but adored hockey. He’d taken her to dozens of games. This sweatshirt might be from one of those father-daughter trips.

Well, she’d make him important in her life again. She and Tony. And-she’d get a pro bono job, something with kids or old people, not just the usually guilty scum at Legal Aid. She’d bust her butt, and she’d…Angela gave up. She’d pull herself together and join Mother Teresa’s order tomorrow.

She started to weave her way through the house to the bathroom. As she passed the living room she couldn’t help but wonder what frame of mind her father had been in when he furnished his house. The chairs were overstuffed and covered in blue velvet. The sofa was leather and one of those modern Italian shapes that looked like a surreal mountain range. Angie got a chill at the thought of having to continually sit on the leather furniture and touch it with her bare skin.

After his divorce from his second wife—a marriage that had been shorter than a normal menstrual cycle—her father had given up on the Park Avenue life he’d briefly attempted and moved to the suburbs. He’d dated a bunch of suburban women but complained that they bored him. So he worked compulsively, and watched a lot of sports on TV. It must be a work day, Angie realized, because if it was Saturday he’d be here, probably sitting on that cheesy sofa. What a life.

It was frightening to realize that it could become her life, too. She hadn’t been here long, but already she was feeling Middle-Aged Suburban Despair. And not just because of the horrible decor. Why was it, she wondered, that after a divorce men decorated so badly while women let their wardrobes go to hell? It was as if each gender blew off an area of good taste in a single legal instant. How long would it be before she was dressing in earth-tone stretch-waist pants and a leatherette jacket, coordinating perfectly with this room? Fuck joining Mother Teresa’s. Her life had ended.

Angela shivered, though the sweatshirt was warm. Yes, her life had ended. There had been the childhood phase, the pre-teen years, the high school and college coed period, law school, and the brief marriage. Now she would begin the Miss Havisham of Westchester segment, a segment that might—if she was as healthy as her Nana—last for fifty years. She looked down at the Ranger sweatshirt and wondered if it would also last that long. Not as dramatic as a wedding gown, but more practical, she thought. Now all she needed was a rosary.

She fell onto the couch and back asleep, woke long enough to catch the end of the
Today
show, and then fell asleep yet again. It was almost eleven when she next opened her eyes. It was odd: she had a morbid need to check the time. No place to go, nothing to do. Still, the idea that almost five hours had drifted by since she first woke up frightened her. When the phone rang, she jumped. Should she answer? It could be her dad, who checked in. She picked up and was relieved when Lisa’s voice greeted her.

“Hey, Angie,” she said. “How are you faring?”

Only Lisa would use the
word faring
. You had to be born in Back Bay Boston to get away with that. “Well, I’ll put it to you this way,” Angie told her friend. “If I were back in first grade right now, Mrs. Rickman would give me an ‘unsatisfactory’ for attitude.” Angie paused. “I really hurt. I miss Reid.”

“Let me tell you what your attitude should be,” Lisa said. “You should be furious and hurt and unforgiving. What Reid did means he doesn’t love you. He probably never did. You were his pet ethnic. Believe me, I know all about it. A little rebellion for the family. You don’t need that. You don’t need to do anything except move on.”

“I know, I know,” Angie agreed. “I’m such a tool. Of course I know it, but I have the weirdest feeling. I have the feeling I just want to hear his voice to ask him one more time whether he really meant to do it.”

“He meant it,” Lisa said, her voice full of certainty and controlled anger. “Look, it was unbelievable the way he did it, and unforgivable in the way he told you.”

Angie was about to agree when the doorbell rang. She started. “Hey, Lisa. Someone’s at the door. I gotta go.”

She hung up and glanced nervously at the front of the house. What was this? Nobody came to a suburban Westchester door—not in this section of Westchester—uninvited in the middle of a weekday morning. Who the hell could it be? Avon ladies? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Door-to-door electrologists? Whoever it was, Angie decided she wasn’t going to respond, until she peeked out the hall window and saw the florist’s truck. Then she flew to the door, threw it open, and had grabbed the two dozen white roses and snatched the note from the cellophane in less than thirty seconds.

It was from Reid! Obviously, it wasn’t in his handwriting, but he had dictated the words.
I love you. Don’t punish me for telling the truth. Forgive me, Reid
. The fragrance of the roses was faint but sweet. Oh God! He loved her. He’d fucked up—big time—but he loved her. One act of generosity on her part could free her and Reid from this pain. With one stroke, her conversations with her father and Lisa were stripped from her mind.

Yes. Yes! She
would
forgive Reid. What he had done was horrible, unforgivable, but she would forgive him. She was hot-tempered, like her father and mother. But she’d be big enough to do it. He had learned his lesson. Angie would look at this horror, this incident, as a last fling. Oh, she’d grant that most last flings came
before
the wedding, but Reid had always been a little slow emotionally. You couldn’t completely blame him. Look at his parents. He would promise to never do it again, he would shower her with more Shreve, Crump & Lowe boxes and they’d go back to their big white bed. She couldn’t restrain a shudder. Well, maybe they wouldn’t go
right
back to it, Angie realized Maybe there would be some healing time necessary.

Then, in a single instant, the image of Reid alone, miserable, lying curled in a fetal position on their big white bed came to her. Guilty. Despairing. It had taken him this long to track her down. He had been frightened, then remorseful. She knew that without her he was lost. He needed her energy, her drive, her warmth.

Clutching his card to her Ranger sweatshirt, Angie ran to the phone and punched in their number. She heard the first ring and knew the stretch, the exact arc of his beautiful back as he reached for the phone. She could perfectly imagine that four hundred miles away in Marblehead, his hand was reaching across the sheets to the receiver. He was there, she knew it, too desolate, too sick, to go to work. He had been lying there in a painful pool of guilt and regret worse than her own misery. Because he
did
love her. Despite his cold parents, despite their disapproval, despite his own limitations, he loved her. The card in her hand said so, and Angie knew it deep in her gut.

When the phone was lifted from the receiver on the second ring Angie smiled in vindication and waited to hear his voice, a voice as deep and clear as the sea off the Marblehead coast.

“Hello,” a high-pitched woman’s voice said in a breathy exhalation. Angie nearly dropped the phone. “Hello?” the voice said again, this time in a questioning tone.

Angie pulled her hand from the receiver as if it were on fire. She dropped it into its cradle. “Oh my God,” she said aloud. “Oh my God.”

She’d called her house. Who had answered? Not a relative or an in-law. She didn’t have any sisters and neither did Reid. The voice certainly wasn’t his mother’s.
What is going on
? Angie looked down at the phone. She must have misdialed. She’d misdialed or, worse, Reid had already had the phone disconnected. Somebody new had their phone number. It must be one or the other. Angela snatched the receiver up and punched in their old number, but much more carefully this time. Had she remembered to dial the area code? Maybe she hadn’t and it had been a Westchester call.

The phone rang and Angie held her breath. She pictured Reid again, but this time the picture was a little…well, mistier. This time, again on the second ring, the phone was lifted and again the soprano voice said, “Hello.”

It wasn’t a wrong number. Reid had obviously changed numbers. But did they reassign phones so quickly? She should inquire. But her voice box was paralyzed. Maybe it was a cleaning lady. Yes. That was it. Or a stranger making a delivery or reading the meter. It could happen, she told herself. She looked down at the florist’s card she was still clutching to her chest.

“Hello?” the soprano said again. “Hello. Reid? Is that you?”

Since it wasn’t, Angela hung up the phone.

Wherein Clinton and Jada have their talk, we learn about the nature of man, and the difference between milk, water, and blood

“Clinton, we have to talk.”

“
Again
?”

“I’m afraid so,” Jada said. Once the kids were on the bus, she closed the kitchen door and turned away and started wiping down the stove top. She could still see his face in the reflection of the stainless steel. She wondered when he had last cleaned the stove. “I’m afraid so,” she repeated, but she wasn’t really afraid. She was outraged. He had finally gone too damn far bringing dirt into the house.

Jada had suspected for years during their marriage that Clinton may have occasionally strayed. It was something she preferred not to think about, though awareness had sometimes been thrust upon her. That rich, bored woman in Armonk who had installed the two-hundred-thousand-dollar pool had called a little too often. And so had that black record producer’s wife, the Pound Ridge one who wanted to sing. Jada had decided to ignore them. They had never interfered in her marriage, never stopped Clinton from bringing home his paycheck, playing with his children, or loving her. Since then she’d learned that, in sales parlance, overly attentive client handling was called “petting the goldfish,” and if Clinton’s work had sometimes gotten a little up close and personal, Jada had turned a blind eye. He was a man, after all. And a good-looking, virile one. When men were offered what she thought of as POP—pussy on a plate—it was hard for them to walk away. Especially in Pound Ridge.

Jada sighed. That was back then, when her marriage was good and the children were small and she stayed home with them. Now her life was made up of working all day and cleaning all evening. Of getting meals on the table, laundry folded, and then waking up to do it all again. Clinton’s life, as far as she could see, was made up of lying around watching television, having it off with this new girlfriend of his, and in his free moments making sure the kids didn’t burn down the house. Jada wasn’t complaining about her life; she was doing this for her family and she could keep on doing it as long as she had to. It was just that when she looked at Clinton’s life, if he would only make a few changes, everything could be so much easier for both of them. Easier and worthwhile. And she knew a part of him wanted a worthwhile existence. But a part of him was also willing to risk what they had by being lazy, taking her for granted, and tickling the fancy of some woman in Pound Ridge. “Well, I’m not in Pound Ridge,” Jada said aloud and strode into the dining room, snatching up a tray and a rag as she passed her husband.

“Say what?” he said and followed her into the messy dining room.

Jada began throwing empty cups, cereal bowls, and a couple of crumpled paper napkins onto the tray.
I’m losing it
, Jada thought. It wasn’t just the glassware that rattled; she was, too. She was speaking her thoughts out loud. It was a family trait—her mother did it when she was disturbed. “I was saying we have to talk,” Jada snapped.

“Don’t you have to go to work?” he asked nervously.

“No. Why? Are you expecting someone over here? Let me straighten up for your guest.” She wiped down the table. It amazed her, even after all these years, that Clinton could stand there watching her do for him without lifting even a fork. That’s what came of marrying a man who was DDG. Well, that was the least of it. Jada felt she had risen above the small stuff; long ago she and Clinton had promised each other that if they had children—and they obviously had—that unlike the two generations of Jacksons before Clinton, their kids would grow up with a father. That was the big stuff. Until now, despite whatever brief flirtations might or might not have arisen from his work, Jada had never doubted that Clinton’s NUP was taking. Like most men. But there was a limit.