Nearlyweds (3 page)

I
found out my marriage was a sham two weeks before Thanksgiving. From my mother-in-law. Who could not have been happier to deliver the news.

I’d spent the day at a pediatrics conference in Florida, and after hours of sitting through lectures and making stilted small talk, all I wanted to do was call David, mumble “I love you,” and collapse into my hotel room’s king-sized bed. So I stripped down to my black cotton underwear, dialed my cell phone, and sank down into the sumptuous down comforter.

After three rings, I heard, “Hel-
looo
?”

Either David was embroiled in a clandestine affair and had carelessly allowed the other woman to answer his phone at eleven o’clock at night, or Renée had barged into our new house the minute I’d left for the airport.

I closed my eyes and prayed that he was having an affair.

“Hello? Erin, is that you?”

I whimpered softly. “Renée?”

“Call me Mom, dear.” Her tinkling, girlish laugh grated on my last nerve. “And of course it’s me. Who else would be answering your phone this time of night?”

“David might,” I ventured.

“Oh, he’s been asleep since ten. He works so hard at the hospital—their research is shockingly underfunded, I told him they should go on strike—and since you’re always too busy to make a hot meal or do his laundry, well, he was simply tuckered out.”

Through near-Godlike force of will, I managed not to take the bait. I stayed on topic and tried to match her saccharine tone. “Well, I’m just calling to say goodnight. Would you knock on the bedroom door and tell him to pick up the phone?”

“Oh, I just couldn’t.” She clicked her tongue. “He needs his rest, dear. But I’ll tell him you called when he wakes up tomorrow morning. How’s that?”

“Renée…”

“Call me Mom.”

“When did you move into our house?”

“Oh, I haven’t moved in, I’ve just come by for a few days to keep David company while you’re gone. He’s so lonely in this big house all by himself.”

Ah, yes. Our new house. Our new house located a scant
three miles away from Renée’s. Halfway through our engagement, David had pitched a whole spiel about how his mother was a frail, lonely widow and we should move to his hometown after I finished residency. In a moment of weakness—and despite grave misgivings—I’d agreed to leave Boston behind and join a primary care practice in the Berkshires. Family came first. Everyone else was moving out of the city; it seemed the grown-up thing to do. So why did I wake up every morning with a single question running through my mind:
What have I done?

“Erin?” Renée chirped. “Are you there?”

“I’m…yeah.”

“Good. Don’t worry about a thing. We’re having a wonderful time. Absolutely wonderful. I packed him a lunch to bring to work, and I made a chicken pot pie tonight. From scratch, not that frozen junk full of preservatives. That’s his favorite, you know. Then we sat in the family room after dinner and chatted and watched TV. It was just like old times, just the two of us.”

“Sounds peachy.” I sighed. Maybe it was me. I didn’t want to be one of those screechy, possessive wives who exploded into a jealous rage every time her husband called his mother. How degrading, not to mention clichéd. Maybe I should just take a step back and—

“You stay in Miami as long as you like, dear. Take a few days extra to shop, get your hair done. I know how you love to shop.
Even though the two of you both have some hefty student loans to pay off. And now you’ve got the mortgage, too…”

This was my cue to heap praise upon her (again) for gifting us with the twenty-thousand-dollar down payment for our house, but I was fresh out of gratitude. I heaved myself off the bed and hunkered down to rummage through the minibar. “May I please speak to my husband?
Please
?”

She sighed, sounding truly regretful. “Oh, it would just break my heart to wake him.”

I twisted the top off a miniature bottle of Absolut with my teeth and spat it out. “Please?”

“Don’t be selfish, darling. Just because you’re on vacation doesn’t mean David gets a vacation.”

I snatched up a three-pack of chocolate truffles to go with the vodka. “I am not on vacation. I am at a medical conference.”

She seemed to sense she had pushed me too far. “Well, don’t worry, the house will be spotless when you get back. And I bought some new drapes for the den. The ones you put up really didn’t go with the carpet and the davenport.”

“Thanks.” I crammed a truffle into my mouth. “And, um, when will you be leaving?”

The tinkly laugh returned. “Can’t wait to be rid of me?”

Yes.
“No, of course not! I just don’t want you to put yourself out.”

“It’s no trouble, Erin. We’re family now, not to mention neighbors.”

I threw back my head and guzzled the mini-bottle of vodka.

“Oh, and you got a letter today from the county clerk.”

“Okay, well, put it aside and—”

“I already opened it. And guess what?” Her voice soared in sudden triumph.

“What?”

“You and David aren’t legally married.”

S
urprise, sweetheart!” Mark puffed up his chest as he strode into the kitchen. “I got you something.”

I reached into a cardboard box marked “pots/pans/misc,” grabbed a mystery item swathed in paper, and unwrapped what turned out to be a blender. “A vasectomy reversal?”

His smile disappeared. “Stella. We’ve been over that and over that.”

We sure had. For the past ten weeks, while we’d written our thank-you notes to wedding guests and moved into the new house and had dinners with all of Mark’s married friends and pretended everything was blissful, the tension had been steadily mounting. But I couldn’t seem to force a direct confrontation with Mark, and to be honest, I didn’t want to; we hadn’t even been married three months. I knew what people
had said behind my back as I’d planned the wedding:
She’s too young. He’s too old. Gold digger meets midlife crisis—I give it a year.
No way would I give them the satisfaction of being right. We were going to be happy, damnit, even if it killed me.

I reached into the box and pulled out another wad of paper. “We’ve been over it, but that doesn’t mean we’ve solved anything.”

He sighed. “Sweetheart, I understand that you want to have a baby, but you’re going to have to accept that vasectomy reversal’s not a realistic option.” He leaned back against the gigantic Viking stove he’d insisted on installing, even though he knew I survived on takeout and Lean Cuisine. “Can’t we please table the topic until next week? Let’s not ruin our first Thanksgiving in the new house. I want us to have good memories to look back on at our silver anniversary.”

Silver anniversary, my ass. He just didn’t want his daughters to see us bickering and report back to his ex-wife that Daddy and his new bimbo trophy wife weren’t getting along.

Hmm. Now that I thought about it, I didn’t want that, either. No sense loading Taylor and Marissa up with more ammunition.

So I tried to remember that we should still be in the honeymoon mood and asked, “Okay. I’ll try. Now what’s the surprise?”

“Ta-da!” He whipped out a tiny pink leather dog collar, glittering with jeweled studs and a heart-shaped silver tag.

I took a step back. “If this is your way of trying to talk me into some freak show, S&M bondage fantasy—”

“I’m getting you a dog!”

“A dog.” I gave him the dead eye.

“A puppy. Specifically, a maltipoo.”

I frowned down at the bedazzled collar. “A whatie what?”

“A maltipoo. I found a breeder in New York and put our name on a waiting list as soon as we got back from our honeymoon. The litter’s due right before Christmas. You said you wanted one. Remember?”

“Like a maltese-poodle mix?”

“Right! White, fluffy, nonshedding. Like that singer has? You said it was the cutest dog you’d ever seen.”

I squinted at him, trying to remember any of this.

“You did,” he insisted. “Back when we first started dating. You said you used to love that show with that blonde singer and her husband, and you said he gave her a puppy onstage at a concert and it was a grand romantic gesture because he’d wanted to get a big dog instead.”

“A husky,” I murmured, a blush creeping into my cheeks. It was all coming back to me now: my youthful obsession with the reality show
Newlyweds.
Before Nick and Jessica’s scandal-soaked tabloid divorce. Before I’d married a man who’d pulled a vasectomy bait and switch on me.

Just a few short years ago, I’d been stupid and sappy enough to believe that my future marriage would turn out like the expertly edited fairy tale I’d seen on TV.

“What’s wrong?” He looked disappointed. “You don’t want a dog?”

I squared my shoulders. “A puppy is not the same thing as a baby.”

Guilt seeped into his voice. “I know.”

“This isn’t going to change my mind,” I warned. “About anything. Not now, not after Thanksgiving.”

He didn’t say anything else.

“Call the breeder,” I snapped. “Tell her to sell that guiltipoo puppy to someone else.”

Then I ran out into the frosty November chill, crossed the brick-paved circular driveway, and fired up the blue BMW convertible—Mark’s wedding gift to me—that had no room for a car seat in the back.

As I gunned the coupe down our deserted suburban street, I called my mother and told her everything.

“A dog the size of a toaster, Mom. He thinks that’s going to make me forget about having a baby.”

I waited through the usual pause as my mother dragged on her customary morning cigarette. “Cutting back to one a day is almost the same as quitting,” she’d said defensively. “And with what’s happened with your father, I need all the stress relief I can get, so don’t you dare judge me.” I imagined her sitting at the sunny breakfast bar in the airy, lakeside house I’d grown up in (that was about to be foreclosed), sipping tea from a bone china cup so thin it was almost translucent.

“Well, no one ever said marriage was perfect. Why don’t you wait and see what happens? Maybe you’ll end up adoring this dog.”

I tapped the brake as the car approached an intersection. “The dog is not the point, Mother. The point is, he lied to my face about having children. That’s fraud. That’s grounds for annulment.”

She gasped. “Stella Rose, I don’t ever want to hear that word come out of your mouth again! Mark may not be perfect, but he loves you. He stuck with you through all that messiness with your father’s company—”

By “messiness” she meant embezzlement and insider trading and an ongoing stint at a white collar prison, but I wasn’t allowed to let any of those words come out of my mouth, either.

“—and he can provide for you.” I heard a clatter as she replaced the teacup in its saucer. “Let’s face it, darling, even if your father’s attorneys win the appeal, we just can’t take care of you the way we used to.”

“I can take care of myself,” I insisted.

Her laugh was brittle. “Oh, please. As an au pair?”

“I was a nanny, Mom; don’t be pretentious. And for your information, I liked being a nanny. I loved the kids, and I made decent money.”

“Stella.” She had put on her best
Steel Magnolia
voice. “The Goddards hired you as their au pair so you would have room and board while you went to college. They employed you as a favor because your father and Mr. Goddard go back to Princeton. But you are meant for better things than child care, darling.”

“I’m meant to be a mom,” I said flatly. “AKA, full-time child care with no paycheck.”

“You won’t need a paycheck; you’ve got Mark. And you’d be well advised to hold on to him. A good man is hard to find.”

“You mean a rich man is hard to find.”

“All I’m saying is, marriage takes compromise. Perhaps if you had taken my advice and majored in business or finance, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but you insisted on studying, what was it? Early childhood development? And then you didn’t even finish your degree. You’ve put yourself in a very untenable position, and now you have to make the best of it.”

I gripped the steering wheel even harder. “But he had a vasectomy, Mom! And he didn’t tell me until after the wedding. I mean, who does that in real life?”

“Stella, what did I always tell you?”

I sighed and repeated her worn-out old catchphrase: “You never know a man until you marry him.”

“That’s right. Now, enough with the temper tantrums. Take the puppy and make the best of it.”

“But he’s my husband!”

“Exactly. And now you’re finding out what he’s really like. He’s a good man, but he’s still a man. You can’t expect too much.”

Part of me wanted to reach right through the phone and strangle her. The other part was horribly afraid she was right. Maybe I should stop worrying about my needs and start focus
ing on his. How could I call him selfish when he gave me every single thing I asked for except a baby?

I hung up and considered turning the car around and apologizing to Mark. For about two seconds. Then I stomped on the gas pedal and took a right on County Road 56. Mark had shown me who he really was; now it was my turn to show him.