by Laura Hankin
In college, Whitney had gone to open houses on the weekend. She scoured the paper for listings in the nice neighborhoods of Boston. Then she’d put on her most sophisticated outfit and some high heels and take the T to Beacon Hill’s tree-lined streets. If anyone asked, she’d pretend she was a wealthy twentysomething, looking for a place for her and her fiancé to start a family. It was best when the houses were still totally furnished so she could see what wealth looked like to take notes for her own future. She wanted that house’s kitchen, with its six-burner stove top, and that house’s mantle, with the family photos arranged with just the right amount of clutter.
And sometimes, even after she and Grant had gotten married, long after she’d acquired the enormous apartment, she’d go to open houses when he had to work on the weekends. She never told Grant. There was something . . . not classy about it. After all, people like him who were born rich didn’t need to go marvel at other people’s homes. But her interest wasn’t just covetousness—she loved to see the limitless ways that people made themselves a home. It was a reminder, coming upon her like a flash, that everyone had an inner life, one they attempted to translate into their own corner of the world.
Gwen’s house was particularly exciting to look at—a grand, old, nostalgic place like something out of Edith Wharton, with dark carpets and wallpaper. Whitney passed a few others who had sought refuge from the main hub of the party and peered into one room on the second floor, a library lit only by a lamp on the desk. Well, she thought, the door was open. She stepped inside. It smelled just like she’d hoped it would—leathery, mixed with that particular old book scent. A dark wood, wall-mounted ladder lay against one shelf, and she walked over to it, running her fingers over its smooth slats and then over the books on the shelf. Strange to imagine rigid Gwen’s inner life coming out like this. Maybe she’d been one of those little girls obsessed with Beauty and the Beast. Or maybe this was all Christopher.
“See anything worth reading?” he said from the doorway, as if she’d summoned him into being there.
“Oh!” she said, startling. “You caught me. I’m being a snoop. I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” he said, stepping into the room with her, the door swinging closed behind him. “Frankly, I’m disappointed with anyone who doesn’t want to go snooping around this old place.”
She smiled and finished the champagne in her glass. It buzzed and pinged around inside her. “What happened in the bedtime story?”
“The usual. Princess meets prince. They invent a bunch of robots to fight the invading dinosaurs. Rosie’s a fan of genre mash-ups.”
“She seems like a wonderful kid.”
“She really is,” he said, his face softening.
“Well,” she said, self-conscious about being in a room alone with a man besides Grant, suddenly aware that Christopher looked very different in a suit from the way he did in a winter coat. “I should probably—”
“You need a refill,” he said, gesturing to her glass. He pressed a button on the side of one of the bookshelves, and a row of books slid aside, like something out of a 1920s speakeasy, to reveal a shelf of bottles and glasses. He frowned at them. “Hmm. No champagne. Scotch or gin?” He caught her staring at the hiding place and held his hands up in the air. “Not my doing.”
“Gwen’s?” Whitney asked, incredulous. “And gin, please.”
“Her father’s. Gwen grew up here. She likes to keep things how they were.” He poured a stream of gin into her champagne glass, the glug of it into her flute so much more immediate than the faint sounds of the party below them, and said in an offhand way, “It’s like living in a museum.”
“So does that make you a tourist or an exhibit?” she asked. He looked at her, cocking an eyebrow, as her stomach dropped. Every so often, to her own horror, her tongue sprinted ahead of her brain, hurtling over pleasantries and all the other barriers she’d erected, exposing the ill-mannered little girl within. She blushed. “I am so sorry. That was inappropriate.” She indicated her glass and tried to make a self-deprecating face. “My tolerance seems pretty weak lately.” He didn’t answer, just put the cap back on the gin and put it away, sliding the cabinet closed as the silence grew oppressive. Conversation had always come so easily when they were sitting in the open air, the bustle of people around them distracting from what lay underneath. “You’re not having anything?” she asked.
“I don’t drink,” he said.
“Oh.” Against the almost indiscernible hum of Christmas carols from downstairs, a grandfather clock in the corner began to chime the hour. “That’s a lovely clock. An antique?”
He sat on the edge of the desk. “You want to know if I’m an alcoholic, but you’re too polite to ask.”
“No,” she said. “That’s not—”
“Don’t worry.” He smiled a sly grin, like he was fully taking her in. “I won’t tell anyone your secret.”
“What?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest. “My secret?”
“That you’re not as nice as you pretend to be.”
“First of all,” she said, “that’s incredibly presumptuous. Second, are you an alcoholic?”
He laughed. Then he shook his head and pointed to the odd bent of his nose. “This happened in my early twenties, when I was drunk, and it seemed like a good idea to climb a rotting tree.” She winced. “After that, I decided that I wanted to be aware of my decisions. So now, if I climb a tree, I haven’t wiped away any inhibitions beforehand. I don’t have any excuses to fall back on afterward. I own what I do. I’m in control.”
She did feel like she was in a museum, but not during the bright, good-for-you daytime. Like she was trespassing after-hours, and everything was shadowy, suffused with a sense of exciting menace. “But being in control all the time is no fun,” she said.
“I’m not in control all the time,” he said. “I have children.”
“Right.” She laughed. “Nothing like a baby to show you how powerless you really are. Maybe what I mean, then, is getting carried away. Don’t you ever miss that?”
“No,” he said, leaning back, the glow of the lamp casting his face into shadow. “I’d argue that thoroughly weighing an action makes choosing to take it even more rewarding.”
Gooseflesh prickled the backs of Whitney’s arms. “So, screw spontaneity? Hurray for pros-and-cons lists?”
“I’m not saying there’s no room for spontaneity. But, for example,” he said, standing up from the desk, “say I were to kiss you right now.”
“Oh,” she said, unsurprised and dismayed and tingling all at once.
“A hypothetical,” he said, taking a step toward her. “I wouldn’t be doing it because all the alcohol in my body gave me a momentary, ill-considered impulse or because whiskey made me want to touch someone, and you were the closest person around.” He was inches away from her now, nearer with each word, the smell of him heady around her. “I would kiss you,” he said, “because I think that you are interesting and sharp and very, very beautiful in that dress and because I don’t think anyone has kissed you well in months. Because I—clearheaded and totally alert—want to and have wanted to since I met you. And that would make the kiss so much better than if I had just, as you say, gotten carried away.”
“I’m still not convinced,” she said, breathless.
“I’ll prove it to you then,” he said, and closed that final distance between their lips.
It wasn’t that she forgot she was a mother. (Was such a thing even possible?) But as he backed her into the shelf, pressing her up against book spines, his hands in her hair and on her neck, she forgot the necessary skills of motherhood: the self-sacrifice, the pushing away of one’s own needs. She was all need now. The rush of real desire came to her again. Over the past couple of years with Grant, sex had grown into a habit. And then, once Hope had been born, it had turned into a duty. She nev
er particularly wanted to have it anymore. Breastfeeding had sucked out all the moisture in her body, and she had a hard time getting wet enough for sex not to sting a little bit at best and actively hurt at worst. But when she turned down Grant enough nights in a row, she saw herself turning into one of those cold shrew wives who always “had a headache” and made their husbands wait all year for a birthday blow job. For the good of her marriage, she just sucked it up and faked her pleasure.
Now, though, she was practically dripping, as a pant of anticipation escaped from her mouth. And the triumph of unexpectedly being desired came back too with the catch of Christopher’s breath as he hardened against her.
But when he ran his hand up underneath her dress, his fingers inching toward that raw, wet place where she wanted him, remorse rose up in her, and she pushed him away, slapping his face once, hard, and then wiping her hand against her lips.
“Stop that,” she said. “We aren’t doing this.” She rushed past him before he could say anything, afraid of dooming herself if she looked back. She wanted to cry from the shock of it. She clattered back downstairs to Grant’s side, back to the role of compliant, pleasant wife.
But she hadn’t stopped thinking about him. She’d started seeing Christopher’s face when she’d closed her eyes with Grant (or, as she’d regained more and more energy, by herself during the day when Hope was down for a nap, sometimes multiple times in an afternoon, a voraciousness she hadn’t felt since her first adolescent discovery of masturbation). She liked imagining that he thought about her too in similar moments. A crush, she’d told herself. People get crushes. The important thing is not to act on them.
She was going to forget about him, she told herself now, as she sat in his brownstone and breathed his air.
Chapter 9
Gwen ran the final uphill stretch of her route in Central Park, pushing Reagan in a stroller in front of her, as a twenty-three-year-old woman in a bright pink T-shirt shouted encouragement at her and the rest of the playgroup mothers. “Yes, mommies!” the twenty-three-year-old screeched. “Empower yourselves! You can do anything! No one is stronger than a strong woman!”
Whitney had gotten an invitation for a trial exercise class through her Instagram, which was adding followers so quickly that it made Gwen a little nervous, and had invited them all along. Gwen gritted her teeth and pushed herself as Whitney’s Lululemon-encased bottom worked away in front of her. She felt an urge to laugh. The mothers had tried taking a different stroller exercise class once before, back when they’d first formed the playgroup, and it had been a disaster, far too intense for their aching bodies.
But this time, as they slowed down for a few final minutes of cooldown yoga, they all exchanged grins, flushed with pride as well as with exertion. They were Amazons, Wonder Women, whose bodies could go through hell and then bounce back better than before. The instructor came around and gave them all high fives as they caught their breath. “Amazing job, mommies,” she said. “I’m going to have to go harder on you all next class.”
They headed for the park’s exit together, breathing in the first hints of spring in the air, pausing to wait for Amara, who was lagging behind to tend to a wailing Charlie. He had not been the biggest fan of whirling through the park with a bunch of sweaty women, voicing his displeasure at frequent intervals.
“Not bad, team! Remember the last time we took a class like this?” Whitney asked.
“Oh, my God,” Meredith said. “Ellie vomited!”
“Hey!” Ellie said. “I think I’d eaten some bad shrimp earlier that day. At least I didn’t just quit five minutes in like Amara and sit on a bench.” Ellie put on her best approximation of Amara’s accent. “‘Leave me here to die. Tell Daniel I love him.’” The woman all laughed.
“And Joanna—” Gwen said. She cut herself off as the laughter faded, the women all replaying the scene in their minds. Joanna had simply started weeping as they’d run up their first big hill, a gasping, full-body cry, and when Whitney had stopped to comfort her, Joanna had pushed away her embrace. Then Joanna had grabbed her stroller and walked out of the park without saying goodbye. (Yikes, I’m embarrassed, she’d e-mailed them all that night with some blushing emojis. Guess I’d better start hitting the gym more often! Joanna had been very good at writing e-mails that made it seem like everything was fine.)
Now a couple of other moms approached. One of them, her face as beet red as the juice she had pulled out of her stroller, tapped Whitney on the shoulder. “You guys were incredible,” she said. “I think I’ve seen your Instagram!”
“Whitney, right?” said the second mother. “Tell me your secrets!”
Whitney laughed. “Thank you so much,” she said, glowing with pride.
“Seriously,” the first mother continued, “you guys are so inspirational, and your babies are always so perfect and happy.”
“Well, except . . . ,” said the second mother, indicating her head in Amara’s direction and grimacing, then looking back at the playgroup with a conspiratorial grin.
“‘Well, except’ what?” Whitney asked, her voice sweet, her eye contact with the second mother unwavering.
“Oh . . . I—nothing,” the second mother said.
“Strange,” Whitney said. “Because it seemed like you were about to trash our friend’s baby. But that couldn’t be it, because surely there’s no possible world in which you imagined we’d be okay with that, right?”
Whitney looked around at the other playgroup moms for confirmation, and although Gwen had been privy to a Meredith-Ellie conversation or two in which they’d bitched about Charlie’s ability to ruin a perfectly peaceful afternoon and how surely there was a way for Amara to keep him a little more under control, now they folded their arms and glared at the other women. “Very strange,” they said in unison while Vicki and Gwen nodded. The first mother turned even redder than before in secondhand embarrassment, and the second mother wilted.
Amara came up to join the group, having calmed Charlie to the occasional whimper. “Thanks for waiting!” she said. “Shall we?”
“Let’s,” Whitney said, and waved at the other mothers. “Anyways, thanks for following the account! That’s very sweet.”
“And by the way,” Gwen said to the second one as everyone else began to go, “your baby is getting way too big for that stroller. It’s a wonder she didn’t fall out.”
After the playgroup had all parted ways, Gwen bounded up the stairs of her brownstone, Reagan in her arms. Gwen lived her life in an extremely regimented manner, but sometimes, when she was in a whimsical mood, she’d greet the portraits of her parents in the front hallway as if they were flesh and blood, leaning forward to kiss them on their oil-paint cheeks like she was a little girl again. She did so today. After a series of rough patches, everything had been going so well lately, thanks in large part, however improbably, to TrueMommy. She moved to pour herself a gin and tonic as a reward, then stopped herself. She had to pick up Rosie from school in forty-five minutes. And she didn’t need the drink. She wasn’t her father.
* * *
—
Gwen was six years old the first time she tasted gin. For Labor Day, her family had gone up to the Connecticut house, a mansion stretched like a beached whale along the shore in Westport. Her grandfather had bought the house in 1948 after he made his first million. Past generations of the family had been well-off enough—respected if nominal members of New York society, with a Mayflower relative to boot—but it was Gwen’s grandfather who had gotten into real estate development and blasted them all to the stratosphere.
Gwen’s father had grown up in the Connecticut house, the youngest of three and the only sibling to survive into adulthood. (His brother, Martin, died falling through the ice on a frozen pond at age nine, and his sister, Alice, hanged herself in her bedroom at seventeen as, downstairs, her parents argued about lobotomies.) Sometimes, on cold, windy nights,
in certain rooms—the aforementioned bedroom, although it had been covered in heart-patterned wallpaper and turned into a playroom after a suitable period of mourning, or the wood-paneled library, where little Martin used to spin the creaky old globe and point out places he’d someday explore—you could feel the ghosts of the house come upon you, a chill rising on the back of your neck. Perhaps because of that, her grandparents had retired to Palm Beach, leaving Gwen’s father as the house’s owner, although Gwen’s family lived primarily in New York.
Still, in the summer, the Connecticut house had been merry and golden. Gwen’s mother would bring the children to stay in the country for a full two months while Gwen’s father came in from Manhattan on the weekends or sometimes more frequently. Gwen’s grandparents would fly up for a few weeks to join them. When they were sitting on the lawn, an acre of rolling green with steps leading down to the sea, as the sun caressed the tops of their heads, it was hard to believe that anything bad had ever happened, or could ever happen, there.
On Labor Day, guests came to eat fresh shellfish and drink spritzers on the grass, as the birds chirped above and the sea purred below. The crowd was made up of fifteen or so people—relatives, some old friends of her grandparents, and a couple of friends of her parents. The couple brought a baby, upon whom Gwen doted, and a terrible nine-year-old son, who decided to educate Gwen and her brother, Teddy, in the story of their aunt Alice, bugging out his eyes while imitating Alice’s final, twisting moments.
“I don’t believe you,” Gwen had cried. She hoped that maybe Teddy, age seven, would punch him, but Teddy didn’t do those sorts of things. (He was so sensitive, she heard adults sigh sometimes.) So she grabbed her brother’s hand and pulled him off to find their parents.
