With Friends Like These: A Novel (36 page)

One moment I was peeling a carrot and the next Tom was insisting, “You’re not telling me everything.”

I kept reminding myself that when I was observed in Santa Monica, sharing laughter with Winters Jonas, if I’d been the least bit provocative, it had been on behalf of the Fisher-Wells Fund. “Stop
hocking
me. You’re being a jerk,” I said, as witless and childish as I felt. Squabbling did not become either of us. But Tom was right. The day before, I hadn’t been, as I’d claimed, at a free introductory belly dance class. I’d been getting the best job offer of my life.

He threw the dish towel onto the counter and walked out of the kitchen. Before he picked up his gym bag, he announced, “You’ve changed, but I am exactly who you signed up to marry.” With that, he was out the door.

One day you have a well-muscled marriage and the next it’s as flabby as your abs after childbirth. So sayeth Mean Maxine. You start to see your husband through a cataract of doubt, 20 percent less amusing, 40 percent more annoying. Even the color of his hair looks dulled, and you wonder if he’s seeing you the same way. You’re cornered where disappointment
meets frustration, robbed of energy, because you are a mother, a breadwinner, a woman who has to carry on, and, dammit, not the sort to shirk.

Yet things could be worse. You could, for example, be Jules, whose outsize problem had been on my mind all day.

“Mommy,” Henry bellowed from the living room, snapping me back to attention, “can I have my applesauce?”

“Henry,” I shout back, “remember, bath first.” I’d popped in his favorite
Cars
DVD, handed him a cut-up toaster waffle, and called it a proper dinner. Henry didn’t answer, so I marched into the living room, snapped off the TV, and scooped up my sticky boy. “To the bathtub, you,” I said.

He proudly undressed himself and peed in the toilet while I drew the water. “Bubbles, Mommy,” he said. “Don’t forget the bubbles.”

We’d used the last of the bubble bath two nights before. All a-flutter about meeting Winters, I’d never gotten to the drugstore or, for that matter, the library. The books would be overdue, the late fees mounting, the child disappointed. “No bubbles tonight, boychik. Tomorrow, I promise.” This one I hoped I could keep.

“You promised last night,” Henry, my conscience, reminded me.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. Mommy forgot.” Had I really become a mother who spoke of herself in the third person? Mean Maxine snickered. “But here are your people.” Henry was fond of tiny action figures, and I could count on him to play with them until the water grew cold. I handed over Lightning McQueen, Chick Hicks, Batman, Robin, random pirates, dinosaurs, and astronauts, and sat on the edge of the tub, impressed by my son’s lengthy attention span but, I could not deny, bored. Which made me feel guilty. What kind of mother is bored? Henry activated his repertoire of voices—squeaky, whispery, creepy, automotive—looking up at me every minute or two. I chirped approval punctuated by obligatory
vroom-vroom
s, but my mind kept volleying between the offer from Winters, with its invisible strings attached, and the conversation with Jules.

When I’d made my emergency landing at her house the day before, I’d
expected to see the real Jules, not a tearful impostor. This had put me as much in shock as the fact that she was pregnant and couldn’t decide what to do next.

I’d always depended on Jules for stability. She’s the one who’s kept us together—Quincy, Chloe, and me—the whalebone in our corset. I realized that she and Quincy were on the outs, for reasons that seemed obtuse on Jules’ end, and which I hoped would be temporary, yet I hadn’t counted on Julia de Marco herself being unhinged. As we sat in her kitchen, her anxiety had been contagious. I’d hoped to rise to the occasion and offer comfort, yet I’d been relieved when my allotted time was up.

I’d walked out of Jules’ kitchen dumb with amazement. I’d known her for years and never once detected the faintest pining for motherhood. For an actress, she’d done an appalling job of concealing her disinterest in Henry and Dash. Nor did she seem to be burdened by the proverbial biological clock most childless women hear clanging even in their sleep. I’d have taken Jules for a woman who, on discovering she was pregnant, would have slipped in an abortion between the dry cleaner and the tailor.

Was she frozen because she’d mixed up her decision about the baby with whether she should raise the child with Arthur, which would mean having him in her life forever? To that I said if anyone was up to the job of being a single mom, it’d be Jules. Why hadn’t I told her that? I’d already called her twice and she hadn’t called me back. If her hesitation was because she needed a friend to hold her hand while she took the next steps, I would be that person. I hoped I’d gotten that message across.

“Mommy, Mommy, I’m cold,” Henry said. He shivered dramatically and stretched tall, having grown, I swear, since the previous day.

I wrapped him in his hooded towel that looked like a bear and breathed in his fresh, buttery smell. “Let’s get dry and put on pajamas, then we’ll do dessert and a book.”

“Can I wear my Superman PJs?”

If Daddy has washed them, you can
. “We’ll see.” I followed Henry into his bedroom nook. The pajamas were freshly laundered, neatly folded in
his drawer, smirking in my direction. I handed them to Henry, who started to dress himself.

“Meet you in two minutes, mister,” I said. “You pick the book.” I returned to the kitchen, poured applesauce into Henry’s chipped but beloved blue bowl, and placed it and a spoon next to a small glass of milk and two oatmeal raisin cookies—one for Henry, one for me. Tom had baked the day before, ratcheting up the fiber by substituting whole-wheat flour for white. The result was less revolting than I’d expected. Super-Mensch won the bonus round.

Henry trotted into the room in his fuzzy slippers, hoisted himself onto the chair, and handed me
Guess How Much I Love You?
“You start, okay?” he said. He shoveled in applesauce while I read. When we got to our favorite part, he lip-synched, “Little Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare discover that love is not an easy thing to measure.” This was where we improvised. “I love you a hundred hugs,” he said, and grinned, his widely spaced pearly teeth on display.

“I love you two hundred hugs and a ginormous smooch,” I said, planting one on his belly. Mean Maxine stuck her fingers down her throat; she could go to hell for thinking less of me because I was drippy sweet with my son. We finished the book and progressed to tooth brushing, and then Henry’s bed, a cot he would soon outgrow. As we cuddled, I heard the front door open, and in twenty seconds Tom stepped to the bed to kiss Henry goodnight. He walked away without acknowledging me. I began to tell Henry an installment of
Talia by the Sea
, the spellbinding rip-off of
The Little Mermaid
. Today our three-year-old heroine and her sidekick, Sammy the Seahorse, befriended Stewart the Starfish. They all lived in a
shtetl
under the Santa Monica pier.

“Tell me again the name of my school for when I’m big,” Henry said when my storytelling ended.

He was stalling. I said, “Jackson Collegiate—maybe,” and nothing more, except goodnight. The minute the school’s name popped out, I regretted it, and wished the public school was known by more than a number. It sounded like a place where imaginations went to die.

I didn’t want all of us to be disappointed if Jackson didn’t select Henry for a jumbo scholarship, but that wasn’t all. As the weeks passed, I’d begun to think of this school as a
dybbuk
in a navy blue blazer. The tension between Tom and me had begun to go off the charts when we set out on the path to that school. A place where I was convinced that we’d never feel comfortable with its Chloes and Xanders, parents who wouldn’t wince when their Dashes and Dylans hit them up for a two-thousand-dollar cello on top of ice skates, tennis rackets, and new sneakers every other month. That night, I decided, we would chew this through and spit it out.

“Hey,” I said. Henry was tucked in and I finally was able to sit on the couch and open
The New Yorker
. In an austerity move, we’d canceled our other subscriptions and bought the
Times
only on Sunday.

“Hey,” Tom said, looking up from our computer. It occurred to me that I should stand behind him and massage his neck. We hadn’t touched in two weeks. Like a crippled woman throwing off her crutches to hobble to the faith healer, I slowly propelled myself across the room and placed my hands on the knotted muscles of Tom’s broad back. He flinched. I stopped.
You’ve got to do better than that
, Mean Maxine said. Gently I started to knead.

“Your hands are cold,” he said.

“They’ll warm up,” I said, and continued. I hoped he would speak first. He said nothing, and then words sputtered from both of us.

“I’m sorry,” I said, although I hadn’t decided exactly what the apology covered.

“It’s the secrets that get me,” Tom said.

His admission trumped mine. I am a klutz of a liar, even when I haven’t been drinking wine, which puts my brain on seven-second delay. When I came home the night before, I might have predicted that Tom would ask for a belly dance demonstration. A more cunning wife would have hummed an Arabic tune, grabbed a scarf, and shimmied across the room. Instead, I stood as stiffly as a camel in the desert sun and outed
myself as a person with something to hide. One bad lie begot another. I should have told Tom two days earlier that I’d scheduled an interview with the man I’d hoped would be offering me a job. If my parents had known how I’d acted, they’d have started by calling me foolish, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have wanted to hear the rest.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “But I’m not really all that mysterious.” I was aiming for self-deprecating; I landed on sarcastic.

He swiveled toward me. We were no longer touching. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “in so many ways.”

This was when I should have murmured, “You’re wrong—I’m not disappointed at all.” But since I was, I gracelessly continued with the small speech I’d rehearsed. “I was thinking that we should forget about the private school, the extra costs, no matter what. Henry should go straight into public pre-K. It would be a load off.”

“Always worrying about money,” he snarled.

The Tom I knew never snarled. Perhaps his behavior was because I said things like, “I worry about it because you don’t.”

This made him glare. “I doubt the answer to anything is to deprive Henry of the best possible education.”

“I hardly think public school in this neighborhood is deprivation.”

Tom stood. “I’m not trying to be a hardass about this,” he said. “I’ll think about what you say, but I’d rather not talk now.” That was something. “Anything else?”

I felt as though I were in a conference with an academic adviser. I probably shouldn’t have leaped to item number two on my agenda, but I couldn’t help myself. “That guy I was having coffee with in California?”

“Oh, yes,” Tom said with his own scum of sarcasm. “I do vaguely recall.”

“He offered me a job.”

“Good for you. I suppose it pays exceedingly well?”

“It would.” I reported the salary, more than twice what he earned.

“Congratulations,” Tom said, and scrunched his face. “But I’m
confused. If you have this offer, why do you want to can the idea of Jackson Collegiate, or not at least play it out and see if Henry gets a scholarship?”

“Because I’m thinking of turning down the job.”

“Why in fuck’s name would you do that? The two of you got along so famously.”

All those weeks I’d been waiting to hear from Winters, and now that I had his offer, it felt coated in
schmutz
. I couldn’t tell Tom,
I don’t trust myself around him
, because that was the smaller piece of it. Mean Maxine woke the dead with the bigger half of the answer. “Because it’s really Chloe’s job. I went on the interview under false pretenses.”

When I finished, all Tom said was, “How could you?” He shook his head. I crashed into his disappointment and disgust as if it were an iceberg. Again, he slept on the couch. I didn’t sleep at all.

  
Jules