American Wife (51 page)

“That just reminded me.” He rolled onto his side. “Guess who I saw tonight?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to focus on the conversation we’re having.”

“Just guess.” He grinned.

Coldly, I said, “I know who you saw, and I don’t think it’s funny at all.”

“You have no idea!” He still was jovial, pleased with himself.

“Charlie, Shannon called me as soon as you dropped her off, and she seemed very rattled, which I can’t blame her for. Do you have any idea how you must have come across? You’re twice her age, you’re her
employer.
I don’t know that we can ever ask her to sit for us again, and even if we do, I doubt she’ll say yes. I wouldn’t if I were her.”

“You’re nuts—she had a great time. She’s a solid person, real salt-of-the-earth. Did you know her dad’s a plumber?”

I was sitting up, leaning against the headboard of our bed, and I folded my arms in front of me. It was hard to know how to respond, hard to explain something so blazingly obvious. I took a deep breath. “She’s our
sitter,
” I said. “You’re forty-two years old, and you took her to a bar.”

“But it’s okay for you to take Miss Ruby to a play?” He smirked, and I understood: I’d been set up. He’d orchestrated his evening for the sole purpose of asking me this question. It was the reason he had picked Shannon, of all people—not because he’d enjoy her company but to teach me a lesson. And it was the same reason that since Shannon’s call, I had felt deeply troubled without feeling romantically threatened or betrayed as a wife. Charlie just wasn’t a philanderer. A flirt, yes, with men as well as women, but I couldn’t picture him embarking on a real affair, the subterfuge and logistical complications. Though he might mock or humiliate me, he would not be unfaithful.

I said, “You know what the difference is.”

He shrugged. “Housekeeper, babysitter—seems pretty similar to me.”

Our eyes met, and I wanted to slap his face or shove his chest. Instead, I pushed back the covers and stood. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see this isn’t a joke? And Shannon told me how much you drank—what if you’d been pulled over? What if you’d crashed your car and gotten yourself killed, or if you’d killed someone else?”

He rolled onto his back again, this time leaning on his elbows. Slowly, calmly, he said, “Alice, I’m not real sure you’re in a position to be lecturing me on driving.”

It was amazing—in the last few weeks, each time I thought Charlie had said the worst thing he possibly could, a few days would pass and he’d outdo himself. Furiously, I strode around the foot of the bed, and when I’d reached his nightstand, I yanked open the lower drawer, pulled out the issues of
Penthouse,
and flung them at him one after the other. “You’re awful!” I said, and I had a dim knowledge that I was shouting, and that Ella was asleep a few doors down, but I felt power-less to quiet myself. “You’re a spoiled brat, and you have no regard for anyone except yourself! You think that life is so amusing, so easy, and the only reason that’s true is that you’re insulated by being rich. You’ve always had people doing the dirty work for you, getting you in to schools, offering you a job at the family company, offering you a
base-ball team,
for God’s sake, and now you have me to smooth over all your odd, offensive behavior. But I’m tired of it, Charlie, do you understand? I’ve had enough. Just because you never get in trouble, it doesn’t mean you haven’t done anything wrong.”

There were no magazines left. Charlie was shielding his face with his hands, a gesture of self-protection, and in the space between his fingers, his expression was surprised but still not entirely serious. It seemed he was holding out hope that I was kidding. I turned on my heel, walking toward the door.

“Lindy—” he said. “Jesus, will you calm down—”

I went to the guest room and shut the door behind me, and I was shaking. How could Charlie and I possibly remain married? And then I heard footsteps in the hall, and I was glad he had come to fight it out, it seemed somehow adult of him, or at least this was what I thought until I heard a tiny voice say, “Mommy?” When I opened the door, Ella began to cry.

WE ALL WERE
quiet on the flight to Newark, just as we’d been quiet at the house in the morning and quiet driving to the airport, and the quiet continued as we picked up the rental car and merged onto I-95 South. Charlie seemed to be waiting for a sign from me, and I did not provide it; I barely met his eyes. Ella, too, was unusually watchful, looking tentatively between us. In the kitchen that morning, Charlie had shown Ella the article in the
Sentinel
about the Capital Group’s purchase of the Brewers, and though his demonstration was subdued, I sensed that it was as much for my benefit as for hers. I didn’t read the article myself.

Waiting for our plane, I had wondered if we might run into Joe Thayer, but it appeared we were on a different flight. Instead, we saw Norm and Patty Setterlee—Norm was a Princeton graduate from the class of ’48, and he lightly punched Charlie’s bicep and said, “Just promise we’ll never let the White Sox win again.”

On the plane, with Ella in the seat between us, Charlie had said to me, “I’ve given it some thought, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Jessica Sutton is eligible for a scholarship.”

Ella looked up from the book she was reading, which was
Bunnicula.
“What does
eligible
mean?” When neither Charlie nor I responded, she pulled on my sleeve and said, “Why is Jessica eligible?”

“It means qualified for,” I said. To Charlie, I said, “That’s what I was trying to explain. She probably would be, but they’ve given out all the financial aid for the upcoming school year.” I tried to sound matter-of-fact—calm and civil, not overheated, as I’d been the night before. If I was seriously thinking of leaving him, there was no reason to be anything but cordial.

Charlie said, “It’s an admirable thought on your part, there’s no doubt about that, but this isn’t the ideal time for us. I’m unloading a huge chunk of our assets for the purchase of the team, and I want to be prudent in other areas.”

I said—civilly, I hoped—“Do you know what the tuition for a seventh-grader at Biddle is?”

“Five grand? Six?”

My plan had backfired. “Fifty-five hundred,” I said. “But”
—calmly, matter-of-factly—
“that’s a fraction of the savings you’re using for the Brewers. It’s almost unnoticeable, isn’t it?” Why was I still arguing for this? Even if I could convince him now, if I told Charlie I was leaving, there wasn’t a chance he’d go through with it.

“We’re not just talking for one year, though,” Charlie said, and he, too, sounded like he was trying his utmost to be conciliatory. “Let’s say she enrolls for the fall, we pony up the fifty-five hundred, and then Nancy Dwyer says, ‘Whoops, clerical error, turns out there isn’t money for her in next year’s budget, either.’ At that point, we’re not going to yank Jessica out, are we? If we signed on, we’d have to assume we were signing on for the next six years.”

He wasn’t wrong, but still, he could spare what would amount to forty thousand dollars. It wasn’t nothing, but we—he—could do it. Besides, wasn’t part of the incentive of buying the Brewers the likelihood that eventually he and the other investors would make a profit? My impatience swelled; really, this conversation was only an opportunity for him to show his thoughtfulness. He’d ultimately reject the possibility, but he wanted credit for having examined it from all angles.

“I guess that’s true,” I said, and I went back to my
New Yorker.

In the rental car, we hardly spoke until we were near campus. From the backseat, Ella said, “I’m hungry.”

I turned. “They’ll have food in the tent, but snack on these.” I pulled a plastic bag of pretzels from my purse.

“I don’t like pretzels.”

“Since when?”

“Since always.”

“That comes as news to me.”

Charlie, who was driving, said, “Then I guess you won’t mind if I have a few.” He reached toward my lap, wriggled his hand into the bag, scooped up most of the pretzels at once, and shoved them into his mouth. His cheeks bulged, and crumbs collected on his shirt as he chewed and, his mouth still full, he made the Cookie Monster noise: “Nom, nom, nom.” Ella giggled, and he grinned at her in the rearview mirror. Then he swallowed and glanced at me. “Hope you weren’t saving those, ’cause if you were, I can give ’em back.” He jerked forward and to the right, pretending to vomit: “Blegggggh.”

“That’s
disgusting,
” Ella cried—the performance clearly pleased her—and I said, “Will you watch the road?”

We parked behind the New New Quad and made our way to the twentieth-reunion tent. I had accompanied Charlie to his tenth reunion, in ’78, when we’d been married under a year, and to his fifteenth, in ’83, when Ella was four, and both times my reaction to the campus was similar to the one I had now: that it looked, in its perfection, more like a movie set of a college campus than a real campus; that you initially resisted its charms as you’d resist the advances of a handsome, charismatic man at a party, knowing that he probably flirted with everyone.

Its buildings were Tudor or Victorian Gothic, brick and marble and ashlar blocks, with many-paned Palladian windows, with crockets and finials and coats of ivy (I had not realized prior to my visit in ’78 that the ivy in the Ivy League was literal). There were towers and turrets and arches you walked under, arches that were shaded enchantingly, that
smelled
like learning and promise. There were the grassy quads bisected diagonally by walkways, and at the front of campus there was Nassau Hall, the first structure you saw upon entering FitzRandolph Gate, built of sandstone, grand and upright and sprawling; on either side of its front steps, bronze tigers whose coats were silvery-green from age and exposure sat guard. And then there were the students, the graduating seniors and also the underclassmen who’d stayed on to work at Reunions—among them our nephew Harry and our niece Liza—who were smart and sporty and privileged. Being at Princeton felt unfair in the way our lives in Milwaukee sometimes felt unfair, unfair in our favor. I could see Ella eyeing these nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, and I knew they were creating formative ideas for her of what it was to be a college student when, in fact, a student at Princeton University was as representative of a larger type as a thoroughbred racehorse or a Stradivarius violin.

The twentieth-reunion tent was in Holder Courtyard. Like the other reunion tents constructed at various locales around campus, it was massive—perhaps thirty by forty feet of white canvas supported by three interior poles—and at its entrance were black wooden signs with the class years in orange, and orange lightbulbs over the numbers: on top 1968, and below 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970. The tent held a wooden dance floor, a raised stage for the bands that would play that night and the next, a long buffet table covered in an orange paper tablecloth (I spotted some not terribly appetizing-looking turkey sandwiches as well as some cookies that were more tempting), and many round tables surrounded by folding chairs where, already, men in orange warm-up suits and floppy white hats sat drinking beer and laughing loudly. Besides the main tent, there were smaller tents where Bud and Bud Lite were free and on tap, along with water, all served up by student bartenders—at present, by a tanned, good-natured young man wearing an orange bandanna. Charlie had graduated from Princeton before it went coed, and a certain manly feeling pervaded the setting, despite the presence of wives in black-and-orange silk scarves, black or orange blouses or wraparound skirts, wives carrying purses made of woven orange grosgrain ribbons or, in one case, a wooden handbag, like a miniature picnic basket, on one side of which was painted Nassau Hall; I also saw two separate gold tiger pins with emeralds for eyes. The children wore university paraphernalia, and face-painting occurred in a corner of the tent, kids’ cheeks being adorned with black and orange stripes and whiskers.

We walked to the registration booth, where a very pretty girl who had a long blond ponytail and wore an orange T-shirt gave us our room assignment in a dorm called Campbell (I’d previously sent in the reservation form—staying in a dorm would be much more fun for Ella, I thought, than staying at the Nassau Inn). She then directed us toward the pickup line for linens, which was overseen by another girl, also pretty, who was hanging out a first-floor window of Holder, distributing sheets and towels.

Already Charlie had said hello to perhaps twenty men, some of whom I recognized, some on their own and some accompanied by their wives. There were many warm exclamations, bear hugs, backslaps, mild bawdiness: “You’re shitting me, right?” said a fellow named Dennis Goshen, grabbing the bottom hem of Charlie’s jacket. “You still fit into this thing?” Since we’d left Milwaukee, Charlie had had on the socalled beer jacket from the year he graduated: a cotton jacket featuring an illustration of a tiger lying passed out atop an hourglass, its feet splayed, its curving tail forming a 6 and the top and bottom of the hourglass forming the 8; a mug of beer was slipping from its paw.

In greeting, Charlie’s classmates would lean in and kiss me on the cheek, and to Ella, they’d make a pseudo-outrageous proclamation about Charlie. Tapping Charlie’s shoulder with a pointer finger, Toby McKee said, “Spring of ’68, for nothing but a cold six-pack, this guy got me to type his entire thesis. A hundred and twenty pages, and I even corrected his lousy spelling!” Or, courtesy of Kip Spencer: “Don’t even get me started on the time your old man talked me into stealing the clapper from the bell on top of Nassau Hall!”

There’d be inquiries into our lives in Milwaukee, and eventually, I realized Charlie was prompting them, asking his classmates if they were still practicing medicine in Stamford, or still at that ad agency in New York. When they turned the question around, Charlie would say, “Matter of fact, I’ve got a new gig—just went in with a group of fellows to buy the Milwaukee Brewers.”

“The baseball team?” a classmate might say in response. “Not bad!” Or “Holy smokes!” Or, in the case of a guy named Richard Gibbons, “Oh, man, I’m so fucking jealous!” Then Richard glanced at Ella and mouthed to me,
Sorry.
The more enthusiastic the reaction Charlie had elicited, the more modest he’d become. He’d say, “I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time” or “If you look at the ups and downs of our last few seasons, you know I’ve got my work cut out for me.” Only one person called him on his false modesty. Theo Sheldon said, “Come off it, Blackwell, you’ll be in pig heaven! When you’re out there playing catch with Paul Molitor, you think of schmucks like me filing briefs, and that ought to alleviate your pain.” I wondered again if Charlie had arranged the baseball deal in time to crow about it here, but it was hard to imagine he’d had that much control; it truly seemed, as events in Charlie’s life often did, to be serendipitous.