The Secret Lives of Married Women (4 page)

“That does sound frustrating.”

Jack sighed. “With my luck that tightwad candy-ass bastard is gonna drag this out till summer.” He knocked back some water and proceeded to fill me in on his sad life story. Dad had walked out early. Mom died when he was nine. For a full week, he and his thirteen-year-old brother lived alone. Then they were placed in an abusive foster home. A few years later, Jack ran away. He’d never gone past the eighth grade in school. For all these reasons and more, he admitted to having “volatility issues.”

From there, he rambled onto the topic of other bosses he’d had. The rich lady for whom he’d been a chauffeur, the one who’d propositioned him from the back of her own Rolls Royce. The bored housewife on the estate where he’d done some yard work, who wanted to get it on with both him and his girlfriend.

“Hey,” he said after a while. “You know what I can’t stop wondering? Where the hell have I seen you before? It’s driving me up the wall.”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Do you get out to Portland much? Like I mentioned, we were there all last year.”

“Huh,” he said. “Whereabouts in Portland?”

“We were renting in the Mississippi District.”

“Huh,” he said again. He rubbed at his goatee. “I’ve done some jobs in Portland. And some drinking. But I think I seen you someplace else.”

“Well, I don’t know. Unless you’ve spent time in New York?”

“Not for a long time. I was there for a little while in the eighties. Driving a limo for this high society fashion designer chick. Now there was a wild lady.”

To my relief, I heard my husband’s car pull into the driveway and a moment later, he was at the door. Jack didn’t miss a beat as Stas came into the kitchen. He lifted his water glass in greeting.

“Hey man, how’s it going?”

Stas wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries. “I have work to do, and so do you,” he told Jack without smiling. As he helped Jack carry down his ladder and painting supplies, I went upstairs with Clara. I did not come down again until Jack had stripped the room of wallpaper and left, telling Stas he’d resume the job toward the end of the week.

* * *

“I told you I did not want you alone with him. Why did you let him in?”

“He said he wanted to start early so he could finish early. What was I supposed to say?”

“You didn’t have to answer the door.”

“I didn’t know it was him!”

“Well, who else did you think it might be?”

“Besides, Stas, as soon as I even came near the door, he could see me through the window. What was I going to tell him? Sorry, there’s a new rule now and I can’t let you in? I don’t want to offend the guy outright. I’m the one who has to see him every day.”

“That’s the point.
I don’t want you to see him every day.”

“I don’t want to see him either! But he
works next door.”

* * *

“Oh man, that sucks,” Rae said. We were at the bar in the Sapphire Hotel, she with her Guinness and me with a nonalcoholic beer. “I totally get what you’re going through. A few years ago, my best friend had big issues with her next-door neighbor. And it was even worse for her, because she was divorced and it was just her and her baby son. Plus the neighbor actually lived there, so it wasn’t like he was going away. At least your guy will be gone soon. How much longer could that job last? A couple of weeks?”

“What issues was your friend having?”

“Oh, the usual neighbor stuff. The guy made a lot of noise, for one thing. He was a low-life redneck nut job and his yard looked like shit, which drove down the value of all the nearby homes. He’d be working on his junk cars in the driveway and blasting heavy metal during her baby’s nap. In the evening, he’d set off fireworks for kicks, and he left trash around, which attracted raccoons. You get the idea. At first he was just a pain in the ass, but when she tried—nicely, mind you—to talk to him about some of these things, he became outright hostile.”

“What did he do?” I was almost afraid to ask.

“Well, nothing she could actually pin on him. That was the problem. He was just smart enough to avoid that mistake. But he did plenty. Like she’d wake up in the morning and find garbage on her lawn. Or worse—sometimes he let his pit bull do his business in her yard. Once she found obscene words chalked on her driveway and another time—sorry, this is nasty—there was a bloody tampon on her front steps. And of course he only did this stuff when she wasn’t home, or in the middle of the night. She couldn’t prove it was him, but she knew it was. And it’s like you just said. She started to dread going home. Her stomach would start hurting the minute she woke up in the morning because she was afraid of what she’d find outside her door. This was her
house,
so she could never relax. The stress was killing her. Her hair was coming in gray.”

“See, that’s just what I don’t want. I don’t want a war,” I said.

“Yeah, I get it,” Rae repeated. “I don’t blame you.”

I stared into my glass, which was nearly empty.

“You say this happened a few years ago,” I said finally. “So how did your friend resolve it?”

“She moved,” Rae said.

“Well, we just moved in,” I said. “That’s not an option for us.”

“I know it isn’t.”

“The thing is, I don’t know how to talk about this with Stas. If I tell Stas, it
will
be an open war.”

“I hear you,” Rae said. “I think most men would be the same way. My own ex, the one I mentioned to you? Forget it. I could never tell him something like this, without endangering the other guy’s life. Literally.”

“Well, not that Stas is violent,” I said. “But there’s a certain coldness in him that scares me sometimes.”

This was the first time I’d admitted such a thing to another person.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I added quickly. “He’s a wonderful husband—”

“Oh, he is,” Rae broke in. “I can tell. I think Stas is great. I mean outwardly, he’s all business, wants to get it done, won’t bother with small talk. I admit it was hard to get a read on him at first. But over time, I got the sense that he’s a really good guy.”

She paused to take some money from her purse as the bartender refilled our glasses. Then she lifted her beer and knocked it against mine.

“Where did you meet him, anyway?”

Kaiser Tech was a start-up company in midtown Manhattan that provided computer services to small businesses. I was there as a temporary receptionist. At the time, the company was just three men and me in a very small room. Bryce was the owner. He was in his early forties and looked like a cross between a koala and a cement truck. He had graying hair combed back in waves from his forehead, a barrel chest, and limbs like hams. Marcus and Stas were the two engineers, both striking in their way. Marcus was slight of build with eyes the color of a koi pond: a startling clear green flecked with gold. Stas was tall and lean with light brown hair, and his own hazel eyes were wide and dreamy.

When I’d taken this job, it hadn’t seemed promising, but I was so demoralized already that it hardly mattered. I’d just botched my first major role in a Broadway play, that of Blanche DuBois in a revival of
A Streetcar Named Desire.
The critics were unanimous in trashing me
(Leda Reeve is the weak link here...this Blanche would do better to rely on the kindness of casting agents for the afternoon soaps...painful to watch, for all the wrong reasons...shallowly rendered... lacking in conviction).
This flurry of reviews appeared the morning after our opening night, and the show closed before the end of the first week.

For many days afterward, I could not stop trembling. I trembled even while lying in bed at night. During the afternoons, curled up at one corner of my threadbare sofa, it seemed my every thought included the word
failure
, the word
finished
. I made cup after cup of tea just to have something warm to hold. I was afraid to talk to anyone I knew, even afraid to answer the phone. It felt like a matter of survival to shut down, as though maybe—if I could block out any reference to the play, shun each condolence call, never look at another newspaper—none of it would be real. If I kept my head down, put one foot in front of the other, aspired to nothing beyond my own next breath, maybe I could disappear, or turn into someone else. Answering the phone for a technology company seemed like a fine start.

The temp agency gave me an address in midtown west. Getting there involved a bus and then a subway, as well as several icy blocks on foot. The office was in a dismal part of town just south of the Port Authority, where junkies and hustlers still made up much of the street population. The building was run down, the tile in the lobby crumbling. Bryce’s company was on the fourth floor, and even before I reached his threshold, I could see that the space was little more than a hole in the wall. It had industrial carpeting and the walls were cracked and stained. A row of grimy windows provided a view of the building’s airshaft.

An aisle divided the office, which was otherwise partitioned into cubicles. Bryce was at the far end of the room, talking on the phone; he motioned for me to take a seat. By the near wall was one small table with a folding chair, and I could see nowhere else for a visitor to sit. But no sooner had I settled there than Stas entered the room, his arms full of computer equipment. I didn’t know his name yet, of course. And he did not introduce himself. What he said, in a heavy Slavic accent, was: “Please remove yourself from this table.”

I stared at him.

“Stas,” Bryce said, laughing. He had just hung up the phone. “That’s fucked up. Don’t mind him,” he told me. “He’s not trying to be rude. That’s just the way he talks. He’s a Siberian brute.”

Stas looked taken aback but said nothing further. I rose from the table and gathered my things as Bryce waved me over. “Come on back, I’m ready now anyway.” He stood and nudged his own chair toward me before seating himself on the edge of his desk.

Finally Stas spoke again. “What I said was rude?”

“That’s okay,” Bryce told him. “We’ll buff up your act yet. All in good time. Did you know I was the headmaster of a charm school before I got into the I.T. business?”

Stas ignored this. “What would an American say?” he wanted to know.

Bryce turned to me. “Lisa. It is Lisa, isn’t it?”

“Leda.”

“Leda, right. Leda, what would an American say? A polite American.”

I smiled gently and somewhat apologetically at Stas, hoping he wouldn’t hold this little etiquette lesson against me. “I guess if I needed to get someone out of my way, I might say something like...oh...
I’m so sorry to trouble you, but I’m going to need this table.
”

“I’m sorry to...trouble you?” Stas repeated.

“Yes.”

I’m sorry to trouble you,
he repeated in a murmur.
I’m sorry to trouble you...
And he turned back to the jumble of equipment.

Bryce grinned broadly. “Okay, great. I’m sure you’ll have a perfect phone manner and this’ll be the easiest money you’ll ever make. We don’t have any clients yet, so the phone only rings like once an hour. The pace will pick up soon, but for now you can read a book, surf the net, do whatever you want between calls.”

He explained that Marcus and Stas were in the process of building a proprietary server. When they were done, the company would sell its custom network to corporate offices. In the meantime, Bryce was placing his first few ads, and if any prospective clients called, he wanted to sound like a legitimate business.

“Now here’s what I want you to say when you answer the phone. No matter how dead it is. Even if it’s the only call all day. Pick up and say,
Kaiser Tech, can you hold?
Like you’re super busy and juggling a bunch of customers. Make them wait for like thirty seconds before you come back and talk to them.”

It would be hard to explain why I felt such a sense of consolation in that shabby room. But I did; somehow the hardscrabble space seemed to offer reprieve, deep cover, even an unlikely cheer. It was like a sheltered little cove where I could drift as mindlessly as a cork, expending no effort and incurring no censure: someone workaday and sensible, blameless and safe—someone else altogether. It had something to do with the anonymity: none of these men knew me, or knew anything of my failure. Also, they were glad I was there; this was unmistakable. It had something to do with the close, cozy quarters, the snow falling outside the windows, the space heater that Stas set beneath my desk. It had something to do with the banter, which went on all day and was comforting and enlivening, and something to do with Bryce, who was a life-force unto himself. Maybe even something to do with his disdain for the world of theater.

“I moved to New York ten years ago. Want to know how many Broadway shows I’ve bothered to see since then? Take a guess,” he said. “It’s a big, round number.”

“We’re going to take the world by storm,” he would say. “Marcus, Stas, the day we go public, I’ll step aside and let you two ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.”

“The only question is how much time we’ll need to take this thing through the roof,” he’d say. “But ultimately our success is guaranteed. It’s guaranteed, because I’m not going to stop until I’m done.”

“It’s a hundred and fifteen fucking degrees,” he’d say, “and we have the only swimming pool in town.”

After I’d been there two weeks, Bryce took me aside. “I have an idea for you,” he said. “Not just an idea, but a proposition. Not just a proposition, but a one-time opportunity. An opportunity that will
alter your destiny.”

By now I was used to outsized statements from Bryce and my only response was to smile faintly, patiently.

“I want you to stay on and help me build this company,” Bryce continued. “I want you to sell the system for me.”

I knew what this really meant; he’d touched on it a few times before. He wanted me to canvass the area businesses. I pictured myself going door to door like an Avon Lady. I imagined other receptionists, girls in their early twenties, whose job it would be to toss me out on my ass.

“Bryce, that’s very generous of you,” I told him. “But I can’t.”