Social Lives (27 page)

 

 

 

Cbow: It's cbow, are you there?

Totallyfkd: Hey. What's up?

Cbow: Nothing. Just hangin.

Totallyfkd: How was turkey day?

Cbow: Sucked. But I made it. Five days!

Totallyfkd: I know. Now we have finals. You?

Cbow: Same. Right before break. Are you going away?

Totallyfkd: Yeah—St. Barts. Can't wait to get outa here. My mom's practically having an orgasm over Smith so I'll get to party as much as I want. Ever been?

Cbow: Yeah. We go in March. We go to Florida after xmas. Just wanna sleep. Can I ask you a question?

Totallyfkd: Course.

Cbow: It's personal.

Totallyfkd: OK.

Cbow: I keep thinking about that guy you did it with. I keep thinking about my guy.

Totallyfkd: About DH?

Cbow: Yeah. DH.

Totallyfkd: You wanna know what it was like?

Cbow: I guess.

Totallyfkd: Hard to write about it.

Cbow: Then don't. I shouldn't have asked.

Totallyfkd: No, it's OK. It was kinda like getting high, except it hurt—no way around that. It hurt and it was over so fast I never got to the part where it's supposed to feel good. The worst part was I knew I shouldn't be doing it, like I knew the whole time he was going to fuck me over and I'd feel like shit after, but it felt good anyway—in my head it felt good. Does that make sense?

Cbow: Like it feels so good to be bad. I feel like that all the time now. After doing the OC and the whole thing at the party. Totally creepy but I can't stop thinking about it. Can't stop thinking about DH. Am I one of those messed up people who's gonna end up on heroin or cutting myself with little medical tools?

Totallyfkd: I dunno. I mean—NO! No cutting, please. Gross.

Cbow: I can't stop thinking that he'll suddenly start liking me but knowing he won't. But if I don't let myself believe it I feel like killing myself. Like there's nothing without that hope.

Totallyfkd: Be careful Cbow. I knew the guy I lost it with was a shit. I knew it! But I kept thinking maybe I was wrong. And I couldn't help it. Like I was totally addicted to my own self-destruction.

Cbow: That's what it is. Addicted to self-destruction. I really hate myself sometimes.

Totallyfkd: Do you really hate yourself?

Cbow: I must. Why else would I do these things?

Totallyfkd: If it helps at all, I like you.

Cbow: Thanks. It helps a little. I gotta go.

Totallyfkd: OK. Just promise me one thing, as your elder and everything (ha).

Cbow: What's that?

Totallyfkd: Think about what happened to me. I would take back those few minutes to not have the days and days of feeling like this. He's like my love heroin now, now that I've felt his body on mine.

Cbow: Yeah. That sucks. I'll try to think about what happened to you.

Totallyfkd: Promise?

Cbow: Promise.

 

 

 

 

 

S
ETTING A CUP OF
coffee down on her desk, Rosalyn looked at the letter she was composing on the computer screen.

 

Dear George and Betsy,

I am writing about the application of the Conrad family for membership to our beloved club
. . . .

 

It was a delicate matter. She had been left out of the loop this time, undoubtedly because of the inherent bias she carried toward this family of the boy who, for all intents and purposes, had molested her daughter. Still, she was on the committee. Her family had been members for generations, and she wasn't going to go away.

She was reading it over when Barlow appeared, stomping in and now hovering over her shoulder. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Rosalyn quickly closed the file and turned to face him. “Just some odds and ends. Paperwork.”

Christ
, it was hard to look at him now, to be cordial, knowing he was having an affair with Sara Livingston. It was bad enough Sara was a newcomer to
their circle of friends, that she was on Rosalyn's blow job committee,
and
was working on an article about the whole mess. But she was so young.
Twenty-seven.
They had friends with kids who were twenty-seven. Barlow was forty-five. It was disgusting, though it would be far easier to explain, to justify as a puerile midlife fantasy, than if he had chosen someone
mature
, for lack of a better description. All middle-aged men wanted to fuck someone young again. Wasn't that what people thought? And that was exactly what they would think about Barlow, even if it was far from the truth.

The truth in this matter was that a great divide stood between her and her husband, one that had been growing for years, and in particular since he sold his business and inserted himself into their lives. And in spite of the social advantages to having his mistress be so young, it cut Rosalyn deeply.

Barlow sighed, his arms crossed as though he had cause to be self-righteous. “Have you checked in on Cait?”

With her eyebrows raised, Rosalyn shot it back at him. “Have you?”

Another sigh. “I just got back from dropping the boys. You've been home all day?”

“Yes, Barlow, I've been home. And I decided to give her some space. In case you didn't notice, she wasn't exactly overjoyed at the quality family time we've all had to endure for the past few days.”

Barlow was suddenly incensed. “Why would you say it like that? Brett seemed great, playing with the kids, taking Cait to a movie. I thought it was a nice weekend.”

Rosalyn bit her lip.
A nice weekend.
Interesting interpretation. What she had seen were two freewheeling teenage boys who got Caitlin stoned, then came home and roughhoused with the twins
because
they were stoned, then passed out in front of the TV, woke up, and raided the fridge. But Barlow would see only what he needed to.

“Okay, Barlow. It was a nice weekend.”

“All I'm saying is that maybe you should spend less time looking for some speaker to talk to us about sex and more time talking to Cait. We aren't the teenagers here, in case you haven't noticed.”

Rosalyn felt the blood rush to her face.
No, but maybe that will be next for you . . . scoping out your daughter's friends.
Why had he done this, on top of everything? They hadn't been intimate for months, she would give him that. But there were reasons. And this was marriage.

“Don't tell me how to take care of our daughter. I've been doing it for fourteen years. You've been at it for six months.”

She didn't wait for a reply. A fight was not possible today. She was at the breaking point, and if he pushed her into a corner, she wouldn't be able to hold back. Caitlin. The Conrads. Barlow and Sara. Now Brett. And she felt like she hadn't seen the twins and Mellie all weekend.

She shut down the computer with two clicks, then pushed out of the chair and away from Barlow. Her shoulder brushed his as she made her escape, and he did what he always did when she walked away, huffed loudly and watched her with dismay. There would be nothing inside him but a recognition of his own feelings and the self-pity they would evoke. And knowing this disgusted her further.

Rushing upstairs, she closed herself off within the confines of her sitting room and leaned against the wall. Where did a person go from here? She hadn't felt this way for many years, since her return from Paris as a senior at the Academy. She had given in to the crushing wave of Wilshire conformity, and she had not come up from under its swell until she was away from it again. How ironic that even then, away at college, she had found a man who would bring her right back. But now the lives of five children were in her hands. She knew what to do with all of this, every little problem that was before her, and the plans were in place. She could lie down and die, let everything play out on its own, or scrape herself off this mental floor and stay the course. Her plans had never failed her before. Not ever.

She sat at her desk and pulled out the little box of engraved notecards. This was what she had left to do today, write the invitations to the dinner party. She took out her best pen, the one with the smooth black ink that rolled with perfection across the ivory pages.

Dear Sara and Nick . . .

 

 

 

 

 

S
EVERAL DRINKS INTO THE
evening, Sara found herself in the Barlows' dining room, cutting into a rare veal shank smothered in rich merlot reduction. She heard Nick laugh from across the table, and she was reminded of how they had suffered through the past ten days, speaking but not
really
speaking. Sleeping next to each other but never touching. Sara had gone to the fertility clinic. In spite of the ambivalence about the second baby that she had confessed to him on Thanksgiving, she had done the tests—blood work, ultrasound, a pelvic exam. He'd whacked off into a cup. It turned out they were just fine. Only they weren't fine, because Sara didn't want to get pregnant. How could the impact of
that
be measured? Surely it was part of the explanation. And now they had stopped trying by virtue of the distance that had grown between them.

The dinner was fabulous, of course, and the company certainly the reason for Nick's sudden change in mood. The Barlows, Halsteads, Ridleys, and Livingstons all enjoying food designed by a world-renowned chef. The first course was butternut-squash soup with a dollop of sour cream, accompanied by a large dose of town gossip. Sara had the soup and washed it down with a glass of white burgundy. The second course consisted of heirloom beet salad with blue cheese and finely chopped greens, and even more gossip, which
Sara digested with a glass of pinot noir. Now the veal was sitting on her plate as they talked about vacation homes—exclusive this, exclusive that—and she could not put a piece of it in her mouth. She reached for the third wineglass of the evening, a large bowl-shaped thing filled with something red.

“He's hot. I'm telling you. Hot, hot, hot. Hats off to the pool committee this year.” Eva Ridley giggled and raised her glass to toast the women who had just made their selection for the club's pool manager. “There are some perks to being on the board.”

Smiling at her with affection, Marcus Ridley raised his glass and clinked it against hers. “Thank God. Now I can play golf in peace. Gentlemen—I think we're in store for a great summer.” Like his wife, Marcus was lean, well dressed, and generally slick in both appearance and demeanor.

Seated at one end of the table, Rosalyn forced a smile. It was almost cruel how they could do that—pretend they were the stereotype of a dys-functional suburban couple when they were still deeply in love with each other. Marcus Ridley never played golf, and Eva rushed in and out of the pool solely to deposit and collect her children. They could make Brad Pitt the pool manager, and Eva would still race home for a quickie with Marcus while the kids had diving practice. But the people they pretended to be—the wife who sat poolside in her bikini all day reading novels and watching the lifeguards and the husband who didn't care, because it meant he could play another nine holes without complaint—were all around them. And what they represented could be found in some manifestation right here in this house. That's what was cruel. Unintentional on Eva's part, but cruel nonetheless. And with all that was going on in Rosalyn's life, it hit her particularly hard tonight as she watched her husband converse with Sara Livingston.

Barlow, who had been intentionally seated next to Sara by Rosalyn, was leaning in now to whisper in Sara's ear, “You've gone quiet.”

Sara smiled politely. There was no simple answer. This was her tendency when she drank, chatty for the first one, then pensive and dark as the intoxication grew. But it was more than that. Unlike her college days, when all she had to be pensive about were external, geopolitical problems facing mankind, she now had a litany of very personal crises.