The Secret Lives of Married Women (16 page)

When Abel asked Tom Roscoe about the repairs to his sister’s house, Erica was in the ladies’ room and Matt was outside making a call. The conference room door was slightly ajar and Nan, on her way to tell Abel that his next appointment had arrived, overheard this exchange between the two men:

“...if you want, I can bury those charges in the Navy Yard invoice.” This was Roscoe, speaking low.

And then there was a long startled pause before Abel said, “Now that’s an idea.”

* * *

(“What did you think, when you heard that?” I asked Nan in the tavern.

“It really wasn’t my place to think anything.”)

I hardly spoke to my husband during the week that followed my discovery of Leda’s movie. And for several days I didn’t talk to my sister either, though she called to check in about our proposed visit and left at least two messages. I stayed late at the office, digging into the past of John Bonney, a frustrating endeavor. Other than a few IRS audits and a paternity suit (filed against him and thrown out in short order), there wasn’t much on the guy.

Abel and Nan came in once during this time. While Nan went out to pick up the Japanese takeout we would have for lunch, Abel filled me in on his formidable career. During the trial, I would need to cast him as a hero and he made it easy. There were the countless artisans and craftsmen—many of them first-generation Americans, skilled in some old-world trade— who would have been mopping floors or working the deep fryer at some fast-food joint if it weren’t for the subsidized space provided by Abel. There were the historic buildings, condemned by the city and slated to be torn down, that he saved and renovated. He was a tireless champion of the city’s endangered manufacturing sector. He’d saved and created hundreds of jobs. He gave money to many causes, including the National Federation of the Blind, the Guide Dog Foundation and the American Association of People with Disabilities. He had adopted a Romanian orphan.

Nan returned with a paper bag and, without a word, began setting its contents on the conference table: three bento boxes, napkins and several sets of chopsticks. Then she took the lid off Abel’s box, placed his tray in front of him, and spoke low near his ear.

“Chopsticks are on the left, maki in front of you, edamame on the lower right and the soy sauce just above that.”

“Thank you, Nan.”

Watching them, I remembered the first time they came in, and how I’d wondered if they were sleeping together. For some reason, I was now sure that they weren’t, and yet I still had the sense that this young woman spent her every working hour in a kind of erotic trance.

What else could account for the serenity that seemed to radiate from her? Her job involved no glory. It would lead to nothing better and it surely didn’t pay much. And yet I was only more certain as time went on that she had something I didn’t: a certain kind of fulfillment I’d never known and might never know.

I married my best friend. And I know that sounds enviable. Darren was in my class at the University of Chicago Law School and we did everything together: studied for the bar exam, ran along the river, worked the Sunday
New York Times
crossword in bed. I was only twenty-four on our wedding day. Leda, of course, was my maid of honor.

In our family, I was the worker bee—diligent and reliable— while Leda was the firefly, glittering and unpredictable. She got more attention and I got more approval. My boyfriend in high school was my debate team partner, a serious young man named Daniel who went on to Harvard; we were together from sophomore year through graduation. Leda had a string of romances. She dated the star of the senior class play and the captain of the basketball team and a drummer who went on to modest fame in an indie grunge band. Her college experience wasn’t much of a departure from this pattern. She broke a lot of hearts and had her heart broken too.

After graduating law school with highest honors, Darren and I married and moved to New York City, where we settled in an apartment near Lincoln Center. We spent the next several years working the long hours of ambitious, dues-paying associates at two of the city’s top law firms.

Leda, on the other hand, wanted to be an actress. She moved to L.A. and worked at a string of dispensable jobs while landing various acting roles that paid little to nothing. She fell in love with a cast of dubious characters, both onstage and off. And apparently she’d had at least a brief stint as a porn star.

That movie.
Payback.
In the week since discovering it, I’d watched it at least half a dozen times. Darren had kept it a secret from me and now I kept my preoccupation with it a secret from him. Something about it would not let me put it aside.

Leda looked beautiful in the movie. Even blonde and blue-eyed, she was still like a wanton, wayward version of me. Watching it felt wildly uncomfortable, compromising.

Once during our high school years, I came into the bedroom I shared with Leda to see her diary lying open on the floor beside her desk, where it must have fallen. I had no intention of reading it but I caught sight of my name and couldn’t look away.
I’ve always been sexually open and free, whereas Lillian is very private and somewhat repressed,
she had written. This assessment haunted me constantly during the days and weeks that followed.

Some time later, during a fight about my refusal to tell her the details of what I did with Daniel—this was after she called me withholding, called me a prig—I sneered, “Well, not everyone can be as
open and free
as you. Some of us are
repressed.”

“Bloody hell, Lillian,” she said. (She was dating a British exchange student at the time.) “You read my journal. That would kill me, if it were anyone but you.”

I thought of denying it, but knew it was useless. “Why is it less awful that it’s me?” I asked instead.

“You know why. Because of how it is with us. You know that wretched phrase,
my better half,
which is supposed to be about your husband? No man could ever be that to me, Lily. Because that’s you, and it will always be you.”

Another time, deep in a pot haze—this was in our late twenties—she intoned, “It’s like we’re one person split in two. I got the wildness, the darkness and the artistry.”

It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. “And?” I demanded when she said nothing further. “What did I get?”

“You got the credentials, the integrity and the sense.”

But after an extended youth of doing exactly as she pleased, Leda was engaged and then married and then pregnant in less time than it took for an average case of mine to come to trial. Meanwhile all the doctors Darren and I consulted over the years found no reason for our failure to conceive, but at this point we pretty much expected to remain childless. Of course, like Abel and his wife, we could have adopted, and perhaps we would yet. But by now, our childlessness had permitted a full-bore professional intensity for so long that we both had a prized place in the legal firmament and we both liked it there very much. Even as I made myself a slave to the ovulation calendar, the idea of having a baby became less and less imaginable.

In the meantime, the sex between us had long been stripped of the spontaneity and joy of our early years. Now it was fraught with shame and sorrow, a pervasive sense of failure.

Somewhere within the dream of slavery is the dream of adoption: of being taken off the auction block, taken home. Perhaps this had something to do with the way Nan felt when her phone rang on a Sunday night in April, and it was Abel.

“I’d like you to come to the house tomorrow morning, instead of to the office,” he told her. “Deirdre broke her right arm over the weekend. I’m going to try to work at home if I can. It would be great if you could read for me and then, if you don’t mind, run a few errands for her.”

For months after she started working in the office, the image of Abel’s house had stayed with her like a faded snapshot, washed in sepia and stashed out of reach. And now, finally, here it was: her chance to return there. She told him she would be there by 9:00 A.M., then lay awake most of the night, staring into the darkness and trying to contain her anticipation.

When Abel let her in the next morning, he said, “There’s coffee on the stove. Why don’t you have a cup, and help yourself to whatever else you want. I have a few phone calls to make and then I’ll be with you.”

Nan went into the kitchen but instead of pouring herself coffee, she cleared the remains of breakfast from the table. She rinsed the dishes, wiped down the countertop, and was sweeping the floor when Deirdre spoke from the doorway. Her face was chalky with pain and her arm was in a sling.

“You’re a real self-starter, aren’t you,” she said.

Her tone was so flat that Nan couldn’t tell whether it held gratitude or censure.

“Oh, Deirdre, I’m so sorry about your arm,” she said in a rush. “Can I get you anything? Coffee or tea or...anything?”

“That’s all right, I’ve had my breakfast. When you’re ready, I can show you what needs to be done.”

“I’m ready now,” she said.

In the foyer, a stack of outgoing mail lay on a side table and a laundry bag had been left by the front door. Nan was to take the mail to the post office and the clothes to the cleaners. There were instructions for Abel’s work shirts: pressed but not starched, and a button on one cuff that needed to be replaced. And there were two different shopping lists: one for the neighborhood co-op and one for the regular supermarket. Deirdre had written them with her left hand, in print as uncertain as a child’s.

As she was going over these lists, a man with wild, matted hair and a grease-stained sweatshirt appeared in front of the house and began sweeping the walk. Through the open window Nan could hear him muttering to himself, a fierce monologue punctuated by strokes of the broom.

“Nan,” Deirdre said. “Take five dollars out of my purse.”

But as soon as she had done so, Abel called down from upstairs. “Don’t talk to him and don’t give him any money!”

Deirdre smiled at her and spoke in the lowered tone of conspiracy. “Honey, you run out and give him that.”

Nothing in Nan’s experience had prepared her for this moment. She stood rooted to the spot and felt her neck flush with distress.

“Go on,” Deirdre urged. “It’s all right. We go through this every morning. He’s just fussing.”

Nan didn’t move. She wasn’t afraid that Abel would really be angry. She understood that this was a ritual of theirs. But she could no more defy an order from Abel than she could grow a pair of wings. She stood looking at Deirdre helplessly, pleadingly.

“Oh, give it here,” the other woman said finally, and took the money back. Nan heard her call out, “Good morning!” as she went down the front steps.

* * *

At the cleaners, before surrendering their clothes, Nan lifted one of Abel’s shirts from the drawstring bag and pressed it to her face. Inhaling its scent—the tang of its last iron, a trace of talc and his own faint sweat—stopped her breath and tightened her throat. The clerk raised an eyebrow at her as he gave her the receipt.

At the health food store, Nan realized that much of what was on the list was just for Lulu. All-natural animal crackers and alphabet soup. Tiny ice cream sandwiches with frozen tofutti filling. Little boxes of juice individually wrapped with their own red-and-white-striped straws. Other items had been qualified with her in mind: “Bran cereal. No raisins,” Deirdre had explained when going over the list with Nan. “We like raisins but Lulu won’t touch them.”

Abel had described Lulu’s orphanage to Nan once: a place so primitive and understaffed that some of the kids were tied to the beds. Lulu was still a baby, only twelve weeks old.

“Did you pick her out right there?” Nan asked then. She knew there were still places in the world where children could be picked out like pets from the pound. It hardly made her sorry for Lulu. She couldn’t imagine anything closer to heaven than being picked out by Abel and Deirdre. The two of them
wanted
Lulu, they crossed an ocean to get her, and they hadn’t done it out of any sense of piety or charity.

“We had already picked her out,” Abel told her. “We were there to pick her up.”

In the dairy aisle, Nan found the brand of cream cheese that Deirdre had written down. On the box was a picture that might have come from one of Lulu’s books: a cheerful cow jumping in a field of grass. The side panel promised that its ingredients were pure and no harm had come to any of the cows on their farm. It was cream cheese for a happy family in a sunlit kitchen, and the colors on the box blurred as Nan’s eyes filled with tears.

* * *

At eight o’clock that evening, while Deirdre was putting Lulu to bed, Abel said, “Nan, thank you for everything you did today. I know this kind of work wasn’t in your job description. It means a lot to me that you have this kind of flexibility.”

She had eaten dinner with the family—a pizza she’d picked up on the next block. She wondered if they were going to be living on takeout for the next six weeks.

“I was happy to help you,” she told him.

“I’ll call you a car,” he said. “Just tell the driver to put it on my account.”

“Oh, no, please don’t bother, the train’s just two blocks away.”

“I’m not going to have this conversation with you,” Abel told her. “And listen, I might have you come back tomorrow. I’ll call you in the morning and let you know.”

* * *

The next night, she cooked for them—nothing complicated, just pasta with vegetables. Deirdre stood next to her and told her what to do. Nan was glad for her direction—cooking was a skill she had never learned. The nuns’ meals were spare and plain, and the same sister was always responsible for them. Nan had never even been inside the convent kitchen.

After dinner, Abel said, “I’ll call you another car. And tomorrow I should be back in the office. Just come in as usual unless you hear from me.”

And then, as he moved toward the phone, Nan had a sudden inspiration.

“You know,” she blurted to his back, “I’ve been meaning to ask—how have all of you been getting along in the mornings?”