by Josie Brown
“I never thought of it that way. I just think some kids instinctively know what to do with younger children.” Upon hearing this, Harry frowns. Quickly I add, “I’m not saying that that’s a good thing or a bad thing. In fact, I think it shows that someday they’ll make pretty good parents.”
Harry stares off in stony silence. As we sit quietly, I wonder what I’ve said wrong.
On the other hand, what does it matter? It’s my guess that he will forget our conversation the minute we gather up the kids and say our awkward good-byes. And the next time we meet, be it in the carpool line or at a school function or at a neighbor’s party, he’ll vaguely wonder what the Stuckeys’ au pair has done with the usually caterwauling twins.
Right then and there I make up my mind that that is not going to happen, that I’m going to make a big enough impression on him that my name will finally be emblazoned on his brain, or at the very least that I crack his typically icy demeanor just this once.
Suddenly I remember another thing we have in common: our daughters.
“So, you’ve decided to give Temple a day off from school? My daughter, Olivia, is in kindergarten with Temple. Every now and then I let her do that too. Kindergarten can be so overwhelming for little kids, even with a year or two of preschool under their belts. It’s not like they’ll miss calculus or anything really important, right? And the trade-offs are some wonderful memories. To be honest, though, I hate when it’s called ‘quality time,’ don’t you? I mean, every second with your child is memorable. Even watching them while they sleep is precious—”
I’ve been blathering so much I haven’t noticed that Harry is crying.
The tears roll down his face in two steady lines. He turns his head toward me so that the children don’t see this, but my look of shock must be just as dismaying to him because he ends up burying his face in his hands.
And sobs even harder.
Harry Wilder, captain of industry, neighborhood enigma, one half of Paradise Heights’s Perfect Couple, is now a puddle of mush.
And it’s all my doing.
Out of habit, I still carry Handi Wipes. Although they aren’t ideal in situations like this, I can tell that Harry is appreciative of anything that will sop up this mess that is now his life.
When he’s able to face me again, he looks me in the eye. “My wife left me. She’s left us.”
At this point I could feign ignorance, but since we’re both striving for honesty here, I have no desire to muck things up with a polite albeit face-saving (for him) lie, a “Gee! Look how late it’s getting” exit line, and another year or two of polite neighborly oblivion. Instead, I nod and say, “Yeah, I heard. On Halloween. I’m—I’m so sorry about it.”
“You know about it? But I—I haven’t said anything to anyone yet! And she’s—she’s long gone, so I know it didn’t come from her.” He shakes his head at the thought that his personal soap opera is being bandied about at the local Starbucks. “Jesus! And I thought news moved fast on Wall Street.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll find out about the Heights’s mommy grapevine soon enough. I mean, if you plan on sticking around—”
“I do, for sure. I’m not going anywhere.” Harry’s face once again realigns into a steely implacability. “This is our home. My kids love it here. We’ll . . . we’ll work through it somehow.”
“Sure you will,” I murmur reassuringly. “There’s no place like the Heights for raising kids. That’s why we’re all here. Hey listen, really, I didn’t mean to scare you off. You know, about the way we mommies talk and all. It was just such a shock to everyone. The two of you always seemed so—so happy.”
“Yeah. Happy. I thought we were too.” His eyes get moist again. This time, though, he shrugs, then passes a broad palm over them. I assume he’s decided that the Handi Wipes give the wrong impression. “You were right when you said that every minute you spend with your kids is important. And I haven’t been around for most of them.”
Well, of course you weren’t, I want to say. You were out making a living! Bringing home the bacon, playing this millennium’s version of caveman . . .
And boy oh boy, your stucco palace has all the bells and whistles to prove it.
Too bad you found another Neanderthal in there with your wife.
But I keep my mouth shut. Because you don’t hit a man when he’s down.
Instead, I let him rhapsodize about how things will be from now on, now that he is home to nurture, protect, and defend. He has already asked his partners at his firm to cut him some slack, he tells me stoically. He’ll go into the office just two days a week, and only during the hours that the kids are in school. His partners don’t like the idea, but hey, they need him too badly, so they’ll work around it. Besides, he can still juggle things out of his home office, after he takes the kids to school, right? At thirteen, Jake is too old for a nanny—not that Harry would ever consider that in the first place, oh no, no way in hell! That’s all DeeDee would need to hear to make her case for full custody. He and the kids will muddle through together, everyone pitching in to help out. He’ll position it to them as a family adventure. . . .
As for the grocery shopping, or getting Jake to basketball practice, or Temple to her ballet and gym and acting classes, or nursing them when they have fevers, or covering them when their school is out for staff development days—not to mention showing up for parent-teacher conferences—how bad can it be? All it takes is a little planning, some adept scheduling on his BlackBerry. Heck, it’ll be a cakewalk compared to flying all over the country in order to take meetings and meals with CEOs and CFOs at the Palm in DC, or the River Café in New York, or the Grillroom in Chicago—
You poor, pathetic, misinformed man.
DeeDee certainly fooled you in more ways than one.
I am so tempted to level with him about his new life, to blurt out the truth:
That suburbia is a jungle, filled with lots of vicious creatures.
Gain a few pounds, and the hyenas start giggling behind your back. Fail to volunteer for that field trip, and the silence of those usually sweet-as-lambs mommies who must pick up your slack will be deafening. Forget that it’s your turn to bring the after-game healthy snacks for the Little League team, and you might as well not show up because the other mothers’ tongue-lashing will shred you into human tartare.
And you, Harry Wilder, are nothing but fresh meat. So please, please watch your back.
But what is his alternative? To wallow in fear of the platoon of Pilates-pumped Amazons who commandeer the streets of Paradise Heights in their Lexus LXs or their Benz GLKs, and pray that he doesn’t say or do something so DI (domestically incorrect) that his kids will be ostracized until they leave home for college?
Or perhaps it would be better to seek out the other househusbands in the neighborhood.
I wince at this thought. There are just two of them. Calvin Bullworth is a software geek, and such a hermit that he’s rumored to be a cyberterrorist under house arrest. His wife, Bev Bullworth, is the Heights’s number-one realtor. (Her motto: No Bull, Just Better Service!) Unfortunately, this means that she is always in other people’s houses with strangers, and rarely home with Cal and their two children: Sabrina, who at twelve and a half is already a study in disaffected Goth; and Duke, her ten-year-old brother, who has the callow demeanor and social skills of his father. The poor kid gets crammed into a lot of school lockers.
And then there is Pete Shriver, the Heights’s househusband extraordinaire: a trust-fund baby—yes, he’s heir to the Shriver Tectonics fortune—he has immersed himself in all things Paradise Heights. As coach of the Paradise Heights Middle School basketball team, he has led the Red Devils to three undefeated seasons straight. At the annual Heights Labor Day Blazin’ Barbecue Cook-Off, his melt-in-your-mouth brisket, prepared on a fifty-four-inch professional Lynx grill, brings home the blue ribbon every time. Under his tutelage, the Paradise Heights communal vegetable garden is shorn not only of errant weeds, but of an
y members who don’t work their plots prodigiously. And as the editor of the Boulevard Bugle, he ran an editorial on the aesthetic advantages of authentic antique gas lamps versus newer aluminum faux versions. It inspired the community drive that anted up the four thousand dollars needed to cover their additional cost.
Oh, sure, Pete is a dynamo. . . .
Although he’s rumored to be somewhat less energetic in the bedroom, which is perhaps why his wife, Masha—a Russian mail-order bride—is the neighborhood slut. And to everyone’s dismay, their thirteen-year-old daughter, Natassia, is rumored to be following in her footsteps.
I don’t have the heart to break the news to Harry about his new band of brothers. Not that he’d believe me anyway. No, it’s best that I ease him into this new world order.
As we round up the dogs and the kids and say our good-byes, I suggest that we make a playdate for Olivia and Temple for next Tuesday. Harry, grateful, promptly says yeah sure, then flips through the agenda on his BlackBerry and thumbs that in, along with my cell-phone number.
He is now officially a househusband.
His next task: file for divorce.
“I’ll never understand why this all happened in the first place,” he murmurs with a shake of his head. “I thought I gave her the life she always wanted. I guess I was wrong.”
3
“Don’t marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can’t live without.”
—James C. Dobson
12:14 p.m.
As I watch Harry Wilder drive away, I wonder if he’s ever considered that maybe it was DeeDee who was wrong about what she wanted out of life.
Or more to the point, their lives together.
I’m guessing no. But then again, I’m speaking from my own experience with Ted.
I accepted Ted’s proposal even though I wasn’t really sure that he was The One. I said as much to my mother, the day after he proposed.
“What is ‘The One,’ anyway?” The smoke from her Kool Menthol streamed out from the high corner of her curled smirk and floated toward the ceiling like a serene genie. “Hey, nothing’s perfect, right?”
It wasn’t a question but a warning. During the twelve years of her own marriage, she had assumed my father was The One for her. I had, too. He’d been my first and only love.
As it turns out, Father wasn’t The One for either of us. He proved it when I was ten. That was the year he left us both for his secretary, the giggly Patti-with-an-i, and the penthouse apartment where he’d stashed her.
Our consolation prize was our two-acre country-club estate in tony Atherton, with its overextended mortgage. But of course we couldn’t afford the house on our own. Within a year we had downsized to a one-bedroom rent-controlled walk-up in San Francisco’s Upper Tenderloin—a “transitional” neighborhood—where we crammed in as much of our large overstuffed furniture as we could fit.
The only good thing about that roach-infested hole was that it was a five-minute bus ride to the Saks Fifth Avenue on Union Square. My mother got a job at the cosmetics counter alongside the same women who, when she was married and flush, had showered her with Clinique and Estée Lauder samples as she swept by them on her way to the designer showroom. After the divorce, the Puccis, Guccis, Yves Saint Laurents, and Blasses she’d worn to the weekly cocktail parties at her country club either subbed as very expensive work attire or found their way to consignment shops, where they sold quickly at bargain rates. Whereas she was no longer living proof that you can never be too rich, she certainly proved that you could be too thin—if all you could afford to eat was canned tuna on saltines.
Like a good girl, I didn’t blame my father or complain to my mother. Instead I threw myself into my other love: painting big sad canvases that made people stop, look, and react.
The best reaction I got netted me a full scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute. Despite a few decent commissions, life as a starving artist was just as unsettling—just as scary—as life without Father. By my junior year I’d had enough of that and switched my major to graphic arts.
Within three years I’d parlayed a summer internship at a hot advertising agency into a coveted job as a senior art director, with a six-figure income along with a perk package that included four weeks of vacation time, an excellent 401(k) plan, bonuses, a shot at an equity share, and, oh yeah, the two-month “mind-cleansing sabbatical” that was encouraged for all employees after three years.
My hefty paycheck gave me the one thing that had eluded my mother: financial freedom. It also granted me enough emotional security that I didn’t feel the need to jump into the arms of the first man who asked me to marry him.
Instead I played hard, making the club scene with my girlfriends. And I played hard to get, holding off from any commitments as long as I could while one after another my girlfriends found the men they considered their soul mates—or settled for guys who, at the very least, took them off the market.
Then Ted came into the picture.
Ted, the ultimate salesman, who pursued women with the same philosophy he used when wooing new business accounts: Go in for the kill. Win at all costs. Take no prisoners.
His pickup line wasn’t original, but that just goes to show you it isn’t the message that gets our attention, but the messenger. “See my friend over there? He wants to know if you think I’m cute.”
“I find that hard to believe.” I wasn’t lying either. With dark curly hair and sad deep-set eyes that contradicted his playful smile, Ted had the kind of lanky physique that invited women to melt into his arms. No, this guy didn’t really need my assurance at all. Every other woman in the bar would have gladly confirmed that for him. “Do you need my vote for it to be unanimous? Isn’t it enough that every other woman in the room is flirting with you?”
“No one else’s vote counts but yours.”
“You’ve got to be joking.” So that he wouldn’t notice I was blushing, I gulped down my drink.
“I’ll tell you what.” He leaned in and locked eyes with me. “Spend the night with me and I’ll prove it.”
Of course I didn’t. But I did give him my phone number. Then I proceeded to turn down his daily calls for a month or so.
In the meantime, he made sure his wingman buttered up my best friend to get a rundown of all my quirks and passions. Obviously he wanted to be The One, even if I wasn’t so certain.
That is why, eventually, I took his call.
By quoting Mark Twain and wooing me with peppermint ice cream after a private tour of the Legion of Honor, did he win my heart? I convinced myself that only a man who was willing to love me forever would push so hard.
Then a year and a half later, I convinced myself that what he had to offer was good enough for me.
Slowly I found myself falling in love with a man who had a steady and lucrative job that he enjoyed as a sales manager for a software company, an undying allegiance to his hometown Lakers, an obsession with neatness, an allergy to strawberries, and a love for chocolate that matched my own. That he also had an aversion to any sexual position other than missionary style was something I hoped I could change in time.
Mother was right: nothing is perfect.
What made Ted perfect enough was his determination to turn all my noes into yeses, to whisk me away from the life I’d made for and by myself and into the perceived endgame of every woman approaching thirty: my very own picket-fenced cottage. Or in this case, a four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath shingled faux-Eastlake Victorian with a full basement, on three-fifths of a live oak–studded acre in Paradise Heights, a gated Silicon Valley community close enough to San Francisco to be worth the commute to any fast-tracking power ranger. In my mind, this posh enclave, with its broad sweeping streets, antique gas lamps, and well-manicured lawns, was as far from my father’s lies, my mother’s bitterness, and my own fear of loneliness as I could possibly get.
But Happily Ever After isn’t a place. It is a state of mind.
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More to the point, it’s a state of heart.
Two hearts: his and yours, beating as one.
To be honest with you, our union has been fragile since day one.
He told me so himself, five years into our marriage, as we lolled, naked, late one night in our new backyard hot tub, our inhibitions let loose by the roiling steam, a pitcher of frozen margaritas, and the knowledge that Tanner, then three, was fast asleep.
“Are you in love with me?” I asked casually. I guess I was anticipating a declaration of undying devotion.
Instead he paused—only a second, but even that was too long for a woman who is always waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under her.
“Yeah, sure. I love you.”
In spite of the hot water we were sitting in, a chill went down my spine. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. It means—it means just that.” Watching me blink my concern, he let loose a guilty chuckle. “Look, to be perfectly honest with you, I’m attracted to women who play hard to get. And you played the hardest. In fact, I lost a bet that night because of you.”
“In other words, if I’d said yes that night, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here now?”
Ted guffawed at that. “Well, I’m certainly not married to the girl who did take me home.” Then he kissed me on the forehead with frosty lips. “Come on, babe! You were a great catch, for sure.”
Go in for the kill. Win at all costs. And take no prisoners.
But nothing is perfect, right?
We didn’t talk after that. Later that night, as we made love (as usual, missionary style), I wondered: Now that I’m “caught,” have I lost my appeal?
Nine weeks later, I learned that I was pregnant with Mickey.
Yes, I could have left him . . . but I didn’t. With one child and another on the way, I couldn’t see myself walking away from my children’s father just because my perception of the love I thought I deserved didn’t match up to what he was able to give me.
Besides, I thought, maybe over time that would change. People who are in love sometimes fall out of love, so why couldn’t the reverse be true too?
