The Secret Lives of Married Women (7 page)

“Leda?”

His voice came through clearly, with no din in the background. That didn’t mean he was alone, of course. He could be at her house already. Or she might be in his room.

“Stas—” I felt my voice catch.

“Yes, Leda?”

“Stas, where are you?”

“I am in my hotel room. Why do you ask? Is the client having a problem?”

“Are you alone right now?”

“Yes, of course.” Then, again: “Why do you ask?”

I exhaled as quietly as I could. “I just—I didn’t want to interrupt you if you were with someone.”

“Who would I be with here?”

I said, a little shakily, “Bryce mentioned some woman you were going out with tonight.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Antonia. I met her earlier.”

I didn’t want to ask, but I couldn’t stop myself. “What was she like?”

“She was nice,” Stas said. “She bought me a shirt.”

“A shirt?”

“We were walking on the street and she saw it in the window of a store. She asked whether I owned any silk shirts, and I said no. Then she said that every young man should have at least one. So she bought it for me.”

“That was generous of her,” I said uncertainly. “What...what color is it?”

“It is an unusual color,” he said. “In the store it looked silver but when we were again on the street it was more like blue. I must say the material is very nice.” He paused. “Leda, is something the matter?”

Overcome with self-consciousness, I spoke in a rush. “I just— listening to Bryce, I thought—well, I was sure she was going to invite you home with her.”

“Oh yes. She did invite me,” Stas said.

“She did?”

“Yes. But I apologized and told her I was tired.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well. Was she upset?” It seemed I was compelled to pepper him with senseless questions. As though maybe—if I didn’t allow the slightest lull in the conversation, if I created a distracting enough barrage—he’d forget to wonder what this was all about.

“It is possible,” he told me. “But how could I spend the night with a woman I have only just met?”

I closed my eyes and felt myself smiling. “Maybe she thought that if you felt that way, you shouldn’t have accepted the shirt,” I told him.

“The shirt?” He sounded surprised. “With the shirt she did not leave me a choice.”

* * *

“What an innocent.” Rae was laughing.

“Guileless. Yes.”

“So then what? Did you ever tell him why you were calling?

“All I said was that I needed to tell him something. He was flying back on a Friday evening. So I asked if we could have dinner at some point during the weekend. I named a pizza place we liked on the upper west side.”

“Ah,” said Rae. “And he said yes?”

He came straight from the airport, his duffel bag on his shoulder.

After Rae left, I cleared the teacups from the table. A light rain was falling outside and the radio was playing low. I was clench-jawed and awash with all the nostalgia I’d dredged up over the past hour, newly bewildered by the sight of our front lawn through the kitchen window. What were we doing here?

When we left Kaiser Tech to come west, Bryce told us that we’d regret it—that we were making the biggest mistake of our lives. That if it weren’t for him, I’d still be answering the phone somewhere; that Stas would still be a busboy. He said that within a year or two, he—Bryce—would be on the cover of
Fortune
magazine, and we would be nowhere. He told us we were ingrates and losers. We still missed him sometimes.

Bryce had been right about one thing—I made a lot of money at Kaiser Tech. Eventually even Stas made a fair amount of money. Once we had a captive client base, Stas came up with the idea of providing whatever peripheral equipment our customers wanted. If a client was in need of a printer, an extra monitor, a fax modem, Stas would order and install it and keep half of the fee. By the time we left the company, we had enough to live on for a few years.

This was fortunate, since I was visibly pregnant and therefore unemployable when we arrived in Portland. I didn’t work during my third trimester and I stayed home with Clara throughout the first year of her life. I walked around the neighborhood with the baby in a stroller or a sling. I was slow to lose the baby weight and wore maternity clothes for many months after giving birth.

In self-imposed exile from the world of theater and film, I had no life to inhabit but my own. It was like walking around in an invisible straitjacket. Was this how other people felt all the time?

Acting had made life so much more exciting. It was a chance to be other people and at the same time a way to access facets of myself I’d find hard to confront head-on. As Blanche DuBois, I could be aging, desperate and pathetic; it was safe to let myself feel those emotions beneath the cover of a role.

Having a very young child was both a distraction from, and a constant reminder of, the fact that my career was hopelessly derailed. There was at once no time and nothing but time. Nearly every waking moment was taken by the baby: by the need to feed or change or soothe or amuse her. I took her to a music class and an infant massage class and the children’s museum and the zoo. I took her to play spaces and our neighborhood Mommy and Me sessions and the local swimming pool. As countless other mothers had advised me, I napped when she napped. In bookstores and coffeehouses and storefront windows, I resolutely ignored flyers for local plays and audition calls for independent films.

Stas’ career, on the other hand, had taken a turn for the better. Intel’s working day began at nine and ended at five. He was actually making more money working forty hours a week in Portland than he had while working around the clock in New York, and now he had paid vacation days and full benefits and a fifty percent adjustment for overtime. He bought a used Hyundai and then a new Civic.

Then since Oregon, unlike New York, did not require a license, he also bought several guns: a revolver, a shotgun, and finally, startlingly, an automatic rifle. He added these firearms along with many boxes of ammo to his strange collection of military gear and body armor. Often he went to a local shooting range and came back with bullet-riddled paper targets.

What was all this about? He liked it. That was all I could ever get him to say.

Different Hours
was lying on the kitchen table. I opened it to a random page and read these words:

I was elsewhere, on my way to a party.

On arrival, everyone was sure to be carrying

a piece of the awful world with him.

Not one of us wouldn’t be smiling.

There’d be drinks, irony, hidden animosities.

Something large would be missing.

But most of us would understand

something large would always be missing.

The next afternoon, when I left the house, Jack waylaid me in the driveway.

“Hey, I’ve got a great deal for you,” he told me. “I know you guys want to rip up some carpet and put down wood.”

“In the future. Yes,” I said. “But as it turns out, we can’t really afford that right now.”

“Well, see, that’s why I’m telling you about this. Because you said you want to cut corners where you can, and I’ve got a whole pile of great wood left over from this job. It’s incredible quality, imported from Japan. Dark cherry, like you’ve never seen in your life. Top of the line, and I can sell it to you cheap. Real cheap—like less than half of what you’d pay anywhere else.”

I made myself meet his eyes. “Jack, that’s so nice of you, and I appreciate the thought,” I told him. “But like I said, I just don’t think we’ll be tackling the floor project anytime soon.”

“My thinking on this, though,” he persisted, “is even if you hold out a while on the installation, you won’t want to pass up a deal like this. You should grab the wood at this price and keep it in the garage until you’re ready. I mean, honestly? You’ll probably save hundreds of dollars this way.”

“Well again, it’s a very kind offer,” I said. “I’ll be sure to run the idea by Stas.” It sickened me to hear myself equivocating, placating. Playing the wife who couldn’t make a decision by herself.

“That’s cool,” Jack said, clearly disappointed. “But hey, at least come and look at it. You won’t believe the color.”

“It sounds beautiful, but I don’t have time right now,” I told him. “I’m actually running a little late to pick up Clara.” This wasn’t true. I was bringing our Hyundai to a mechanic in Portland, who would keep it until the next evening. The shop would loan me another car for the duration, but I didn’t want Jack to know that.

“It’ll just take a second.”

“I can’t.”

“All right, all right. When you come back, then.” He eased himself away from the car, then stopped short as I was opening the door.

“Oh, man,” he said suddenly.

I looked up at him. His jaw had slackened and his mouth was slightly open.

“What?” I stood just behind the car’s open door as if to shield myself from whatever he would say.

“Ohhhh...man.”

I waited.

“Now I know where I seen you before. Oh, man!”

I felt sweat breaking out under my arms and I was overcome by a nameless dread.

“Payback.
You’re the girl in
Payback!
Ain’t you?”

Unbelievable. It was unbelievable. Nothing he said could have been more alarming. Of everything I’d done in my nearly invisible career, the starring role in
Payback
had to be the most obscure—as well as the most compromising. It was the tawdriest part I had ever played.

In
Payback
, which could only be described as soft porn, I played Jenny J., a gold-digging bimbo who’s made a fortune moving from one hapless rich man to the next. At the movie’s outset, she’s married to an elderly millionaire. She takes a young man as a lover, a hard-muscled stud into whips and chains. By the movie’s conclusion, the husband is dead, but Jenny’s inheritance has been turned over to her lover, to whom she is now enslaved. She’s been brought down, reduced to a maid and a plaything. She does all the housework around the lover’s new mansion wearing nothing but a leather harness. She sleeps in chains and is forced to watch her master have sex with other women.

It was hard to believe that Jack had identified me. I would have thought myself unrecognizable. When that movie was made, I was seventeen years younger and forty pounds lighter. Also, my dark hair had been platinum then, and tinted contacts had made my hazel eyes blue.

“Oh, that.” I tried to laugh. “That was so long ago I can barely remember it.”

“Are you shittin’ me? It’s a classic. I’ve watched it so many times it’s a wonder the tape ain’t wore out. Oh man, I can’t believe I’m standing here talking to you! You don’t know how many nights I’ve gotten off on that flick. If you’ll excuse my saying.”

Breathe, I told myself.

“Hey,” he said. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your husband think of that movie?”

I could have lied. Could’ve said,
He doesn’t think about it much one way or the other.
But what if he said something to Stas? Something jocular and congratulatory? What if he raised a beer in drunken homage one evening? I couldn’t take that chance.

“He doesn’t know about it,” I said finally.

“Oh, is that how it is? Well, hey—I understand.”

“I mean, it’s just never come up.”

“Yeah, I hear you. Well, don’t worry. Your little secret’s safe with me. I promise.”

Nausea rose in my throat. “It’s not really a
secret.
It’s just, there’s been no reason to mention it.”

“I get it, honey. You don’t need to explain nothing to me. A girl’s gotta do things for her career sometimes. I know how it is.”

I looked away, afraid he would see how much I hated him.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “It’s a smokin’ movie. I don’t think you got a thing to apologize for. But I can see how I might feel funny about it, if it was my wife.”

* * *

After driving around the corner and out of sight of our house, I had to pull over to the shoulder of the road. My hands were trembling so violently I was afraid to drive. It was as if I’d pursued every possible avenue away from my former self: trading the acting life for the business arena; the east coast for the west; the limitless, glittering city for a small and unassuming town; the life of a free spirit for marriage and motherhood. But Jack had recognized me; he had found me. He knew things about me that my own husband didn’t know, and for that matter, it was as if he alone could see me for what I was: hopelessly compromised, desperate, dissembling, best suited for a fifth-rate blue movie.

If I told Stas about
Payback,
what would he think? It was possible that he would be appalled. In some ways, he was very concerned with propriety: he often remarked that this or that would not be proper. For instance, though he often saw other men wearing what appeared to be pajama pants in public (sometimes they really were pajamas; sometimes they were scrubs), he refused to wear his own even to the curb while putting out the trash. (“This would not be proper.”) On the other hand, I knew he saw me as a little scandalous, a little wild—and that, to him, this lent me some measure of glamour. My evening at the strip joint with Bryce, for instance, hadn’t diminished his crush on me, and perhaps it had even done the opposite. It was possible that Stas would secretly enjoy such a movie but hate the idea of other men watching it. I realized I had no idea what he would think or how he would feel.

But the idea of sharing a secret with Jack—any secret, but especially this one—made me feel so ill that after I’d dropped off the Hyundai and gotten Clara, I had to bring a pillow into her room and lie on the floor while she played.

* * *

“Is that the loaner car?” Stas asked. “That Pontiac?”

He was just in from work, and he was referring to the dark blue sedan parked on the street out front. We were in the kitchen, and I was trying hard not to reveal any hint of my own distress.

“Yes.”

“Well, why did you put it there instead of the driveway or garage?”