“Do you consider Greta to be your life?” the therapist asked. His expression was neutral; nonetheless Phillip felt mocked by the question. It wasn’t even his idea to see the therapist in the first place, never having put much stock in the process, but Greta would only consider marital therapy if Phillip would agree to go individually. Greta was explicit in her clarification: she would attend therapy with him but not necessarily to save their marriage. She didn’t know if she even wanted to try to save it, as was evidenced by the fact that, as she told Phillip, she had been seeing another man for the past couple of months. But fifty-five minutes with her alone was worth any cost to Phillip, and he gladly paid the $260 session fee and endured Gerald’s shaggy hair, sideburns, and horn-rimmed glasses.
“I’ve been with Greta since my first year of college. Most of my life. We met first week. Mark Twain.”
“Mark Twain? The author?”
“We were the only business majors in the English elective. Initially, I signed up for T. S. Eliot, but at the last minute I switched to Twain. I hadn’t read him since grade school.”
Gerald scribbled something in his notebook and then looked back at Phillip.
“That year we dressed up as Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher for Halloween. Her idea. We were already a couple by then.” He smiled as he pictured Greta in the long blond braids and the freckles painted across the bridge of her nose with eyeliner.
“And this was at . . . ?”
“Stanford.”
Gerald nodded. Phillip glanced at the certificates on the walls. UC Santa Barbara. Cal State Northridge, Class of 2000. He waited for Gerald to comment on Stanford. Most people did. The obligatory “Good school” or “Congratulations.” But Gerald’s face remained fixed with the same neutral expression. Except people who went to UC Santa Barbara and Cal State Northridge, apparently.
“We both went there for undergrad, and then I went directly into the GSB. Graduate School of Business,” he qualified, in case Gerald wasn’t familiar with the acronym. God, how proud he had always been to drop this name any chance that he got. How proud it had made his parents. How much it had tortured his brother. Gerald probably just wrote it down in his notebook, next to “self-loathing philandering husband,” Phillip imagined.
“And Greta?”
“Greta applied and was accepted to every school but Stanford. She got into Harvard—but I didn’t.”
“So, she went to Harvard?”
“No. She decided to stay with me at Stanford. She ended up not going to grad school at all.”
Gerald cocked his head slightly.
“Her choice, not mine.” Phillip realized this sounded defensive. He remembered how much Greta’s parents had resented Greta’s decision not to continue her education. And she didn’t even tell them about Harvard. If he were honest with himself, he could have been more supportive of Greta. Had he insisted that she go to Harvard, she probably would have gone, but both of them knew that it was unlikely that they would have stayed together. Business schools were already known as “relationship breakers” without adding three thousand miles of long distance to the equation. Greta stayed with him that first year, in the couples and family housing on the outskirts of campus, and they married at the end of August, after his consulting internship ended. During the second year, Greta commuted back and forth to Los Angeles, where she began working for a boutique advertising agency.
“Let’s get back to the other women.” Gerald consulted his notebook. “Marlena?”
“Marlene,” Phillip corrected him.
“Marlene,” Gerald repeated. He scratched the side of his face. “Tell me about her.”
Phillip took a deep breath and leaned back against the itchy couch.
“Well, I cheated on Tammy to be with Marlene, and then we ended up together.”
“And how long were you with Marlene?”
“Until I cheated on her to be with Greta,” Phillip said. “Not long. Just the summer, really.”
“A pattern . . .” Gerald said. He took off his glasses and breathed on the lenses, fogging them up and then wiping them with the corner of his shirt.
“You think?” Phillip hadn’t meant for it to come out as sarcastic as it sounded. If it was detected, it went ignored.
“But then there seems to have been quite a stretch before . . .” Gerald consulted his notes. “Theresa?”
Phillip felt the muscles of his stomach involuntarily constrict. It happened every time he heard her name. How many times had he heard Greta scream Theresa’s name at him or hiss it if their six-year-old daughter was in the next room. Usually, but not always, the name had an expletive or curse attached to it. “Homewrecker Theresa” or “Fucking Theresa” or “That little cunt, Theresa.” Charlotte had even taken to calling her “T,” correctly intuiting that somehow her beloved violin teacher’s name was off-limits.
“Yes. A long time.” Phillip sighed.
Gerald closed his folder and motioned toward the clock.
“We’re out of time for today, Phillip, but I’d like you to think about what it is you would like to accomplish with our work together.”
Phillip nodded, though he had no idea how to answer.
As if reading him, Gerald continued. “No need to answer it now, I just want you to think—”
“I want my life back,” Phillip blurted out. He laughed without humor. “Can you give me that?”
Gerald arranged his face into an expression of what Phillip guessed to be encouragement. He stood up and went behind his desk, where he began shuffling papers. Phillip took this to mean that they were done and walked to the door he came in.
“Other door, Phillip.” Gerald pointed to the one on the other side of the room. “Take care of yourself, and I’ll see you next Tuesday.”
Phillip blinked into the sunlight as he edged his Volvo out of the narrow parking garage. Feeling around for sunglasses in his pockets and then on the floor, he narrowly missed a man who had stumbled into the crosswalk pushing a cart weighed down by plastic bags overflowing with recyclables. Phillip slammed on his brakes and watched the man stumble, obliviously, to the curb. Waiting for his pulse to slow down, Phillip leaned his head against the steering wheel. A honk startled him, and he glanced back over his shoulder at the enraged driver trapped behind him. Quickly, he put the car back in gear, turned right, and drove toward Lincoln Boulevard.
At the first traffic signal, he speed-dialed his office.
“Phillip Parris.” His assistant, Heather, coughed, the sound muffled as though she had stuck her thumb over the mouthpiece she wore. “Excuse me.”
“I’m on my way back to the office, just getting on the freeway now.”
“Oh, hang on.” She put him on hold and then came right back. “I’ve been trying to get you. Gabe has been asking where you are.”
“Shit.” He put his left-hand blinker on, but the cars sped past him. “Goddammit!” He swerved into the lane anyway, and the SUV behind him slammed on its horn.
“It’s okay,” Heather said. “I told him you were on your way and stuck in traffic, but he’s expecting you as soon as you get here.”
Phillip looked at the clock on his dashboard. Two fifteen. He was at least twenty minutes away.
“What else?” he asked.
“Lee scheduled the meeting with the shared services reps for five if that’s okay. I said I needed to check with you before confirming, but to go ahead and put it on the calendar.”
Lee was the project leader that Phillip had assigned to the Gap account. He was one of their best and brightest, but for the first time since Phillip had been at Connelly Consulting, he had been distracted and hadn’t carefully managed the project leaders. Greta had always called him a “micromanager,” but as it was becoming increasingly clear to Phillip, being a micromanager simply meant doing his job.
“What about Rebecca? Was she informed we’re moving her over?”
“She knows. She needs to tie up a few loose ends, and Brent is bring
ing her up to speed.”
“Good.” Phillip tapped the screen of his GPS to see what the traffic flow looked like on the way to Century City. Ropy red lines all the way to Santa Monica Boulevard. He veered off the freeway to try his luck on the side streets.
“What else?”
“Fund-raiser from Crossroads. I told her to e-mail.”
“What else?”
“Um . . .” Heather hesitated.
“What?”
“Phillip, could you pull to the side of the road for a moment?”
“What is it?” The sound of Heather’s voice alarmed him. “What’s happened?” It was the same tone that the police officer used when they called about his parents. Phillip cut across two lanes and double-parked in front of a car wash.
“I think you were served . . . with papers. This morning, just after you left for your meeting.”
Phillip felt hot and short of breath. He opened the window.
“I’m sorry,” Heather said.
His throat felt dry and constricted, and he searched around the car for a water bottle. He yanked an old bottle from underneath the passenger seat and took a swig of hot, stale water, swishing it around in his mouth before spitting it out the window. Then he raised the window and pulled back into traffic, racing through a yellow light, nearly running over a nanny pushing a baby carriage, who raised a furious fist at him.
“Tell Gabe I’ll be there in ten,” he said, and hung up.
During his rapid ascent up the ladder to managing partner at Connelly Consulting, Phillip traveled nearly every week. Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Atlanta, New York, Miami, Minneapolis, Dallas . . . Each assignment lasted anywhere from two weeks to six months, and for almost the entire duration, Phillip would fly out of LAX on Sunday night (to be there for eight a.m. meetings) and return to LAX on Friday afternoon. Every Monday morning, he would wake up and stumble to the door of the hotel to find the morning paper just so he could remind himself what city he was in. The first year alone he racked up so many frequent flier miles, he had enough to surprise Greta with a weekend getaway to Cabo San Lucas for her birthday.
The irony did not escape him that in all of those early years of incessant travel, layovers, hotel brunches and bars, Phillip had avoided the lure of an affair. His resistance had less to do with personal integrity than the fact that in those lean, magical years his desire for Greta had been stronger. The sweet moments at the end of the day when he would hear her voice from a great distance reminded him of how good their lives were, how different from their parents’, making him long to be back home tangled up in her in their tiny rented house in the canyons.
One year, after spending forty-eight hours in JFK over Christmas, Phillip arrived home and climbed onto the mattress on the floor where she slept. She was naked under the covers with one slim pale leg draped over the top like a comma. He started at her bare ankle and kissed his way up her leg until he found the sweet and damp center of her. She stirred and murmured his name in her sleep.
“You’re home . . .”
Her compliance in those days was intoxicating to him. After what seemed to be a lifetime of Tony’s hand-me-downs, at last there was something he desired that was his and his alone. Would it have been so exciting had she not been so full of promise herself? The fact that Greta gave up her own career for him made her acquiescence that much sweeter. She wasn’t like the other girls—the Jennifers and Caitlyns who went to university, majoring in communications as a ruse to meet a successful husband. Greta was driven to succeed herself. When she inexplicably gave it up for him, he had never felt so important in his life. He knew even then that it was probably unwise not to encourage her to continue. Her mother actually called him on the phone, unbeknownst to Greta, asking him to convince Greta not to give up her studies; Phillip lied and told her that he had tried but Greta’s decision was final, and he was powerless to dissuade her.
And so while Phillip put himself on the career fast-track, scrambling to rise from associate to consultant to project leader and all the way up to the holy grail of managing partner, Greta put all of her focus on their domestic life. While Phillip made spreadsheets at work to restructure divisions and companies, Greta applied the same single-mindedness to building their home and family. They agreed that they would wait to have kids until he at least became a project leader, but Greta’s determination to create the perfect life for them became all-consuming. It seemed that one day, he wasn’t sure when exactly, Phillip felt like an outsider in his own marriage. The “family” loomed as a rival for her attention, a separate entity that dwarfed and overwhelmed him.
There was a brief spell just after the birth of Charlotte when the mutual enchantment of their daughter mimicked the intensity of their early years together, but this fleeting magical period was followed by years of frustration as they attempted to make a sibling for her. Charlotte’s brother was supposed to be born exactly two years later, according to Greta’s strict timeline, and when they missed this deadline, Greta’s resolve for a larger family only intensified. As time passed, Greta became more and more preoccupied with a second child. Phillip would return home from work to find her in bed with the computer on her lap, reading fertility websites while their four-year-old daughter circled around her like a jackal, vying for her attention. He arranged lavish weekends for them to spend together as romantic distractions, but Greta seemed removed and distant. Every conversation seemed to revolve around the same cringe-inducing subjects: sperm motility and ovulatory dysfunction. One night, after he had stayed up until four thirty in the morning to complete a presentation, Greta nudged him awake to get his opinion on her cervical fluid.
“Is it copious and thinner than usual?” she asked, lying before him, legs spread.
He rubbed his eyes and tried to reconcile this view of his wife. The suggestive position completely devoid of all sexuality.
“Thinner than what exactly?” he asked. “I don’t know what to compare it to.”
“Go ahead, check,” she insisted. She backed up onto her elbows. “They say it’s supposed to be like rubber cement.” He reluctantly dipped his fingers in and tried to ascertain if it was the correct consistency.
“Yeah, I guess it’s rubber cement-ish,” he offered. “Can I go back to sleep now?”
“After,” she said, pulling him on top of her. But he wasn’t ready, and her impatience only served to deflate him further.
“I’m really tired, honey,” he said, shifting himself away from her. “I’m sorry.”
“The chances are better in the morning,” she reminded him, grasping him in her fist and handling his penis as if it were a switch connected to a lightbulb that had recently burned out. Up, down. Up, down.
He closed his eyes, resigned, and pictured the caramel-skinned waitress at the pool with the pretty gap between her two front teeth. Smiling, she had leaned over him that afternoon as she delivered his vodka tonic, her skin smelling of cocoa butter and salt, the scent lingering after she had moved on to another table. It might have been the sun or the vodka or possibly a combination of both, but in her smile Phillip had imagined a whisper of invitation.
By the time Theresa had arrived in their life, he was starving. Despite what he had told Gerald, he had already had affairs, but they were confined to a weekend here and there. He could barely remember their names or any distinguishing features. As soon as the hunger was satiated, the memory of them went into a box deep in the recesses of his mind and disappeared. Each time he swore was the last, and it conversely gave him the impetus and determination to try harder in his marriage. Each time he found that his love for Greta was enflamed just a little bit, and it made all of the little resentments he was harboring seem less important, almost trivial. He was so relieved and thankful every time he strayed to find that he had not been caught, that his marriage was still intact, that Greta’s good qualities came into focus again, the snap of her sharp analytical mind mixed with her unexpected easy laugh. Suddenly, his
heart gladdened to watch her doing something as simple as reading a book, stirring a sauce, or washing their daughter’s hair. But soon, against his own volition, he found himself resenting her for his getting away with it. It seemed like further proof of how removed from him she was. If she didn’t notice that, then what was she seeing at all? And in this state of self-delusion and justification, the little resentments piled up again, one after the other, brick after brick, until a wall of grievances stood between them, and the only way to break through it was to have another something else on the side.
Theresa had been coming to teach Charlotte for four months before Phillip said much of anything to her. He barely even registered her presence except for the occasional “Sounds good” or “Good job.” She always seemed vaguely startled whenever he spoke to her, and when she answered, he often had to ask her to repeat herself. Her voice was tremulous and she blushed easily.
It was just after a year that Theresa had been teaching Charlotte that he found himself alone with her. Greta had gone to her parents’ in Washington to help them with her nephew who was detoxing for the first time. Phillip arrived home and relieved the Venezuelan sitter, and then Theresa and his daughter emerged from her room laughing as Charlotte imitated a girl from school singing a song from Mamma Mia.
He realized that he was going to have to pay her, but he was embarrassed that he had given all his cash to the sitter.
“If you don’t have to go anywhere in a hurry, I can run to the ATM,” he said.
Theresa smiled and waved her hand “I don’t care. Really. You can pay me next time.”
He noticed that her hair was shorter than it had been the last time he had seen her. Her shiny dark hair was just under her chin rather than at her shoulders.
“Did you cut your hair?” he asked her on impulse.
She reached up and ran a hand through her hair, pulling on the ends as if she could lengthen it.
“She looks like my American Girl doll!” Charlotte squealed.
“Mistake,” Theresa said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
When It Happens to You Page 14
