It's Hot in the Hamptons

by Holly Peterson

  “Lucky Charms.” She nodded. She would have poured a dump truck full of them into his room if he had agreed to lay under the blanket. “I’m, uh, honey, I’m going to actually run to the Food Emporium in about six minutes,” she said. “You are going to wait here under the blanket. You don’t even have to keep your head under it, once I go.”

  “I don’t?” He kicked the blanket off.

  “No,” Caroline said. “You do actually, for now.”

  “You said I didn’t.”

  She needed to get back to Eddie’s desk before he woke up. Her mouth was so dry, her tongue felt like it was sticking to her teeth. If Eddie knew what she’d seen, she would lose all her power. She wanted time to respond on her own terms.

  “You do, honey,” she said. “You actually do need to lie here under the blanket and cover your head for five minutes. I have to do one quick thing, but don’t worry—I’ll be in this room. And then I’ll pull down the blanket. In a little bit, I’ll run to the store for Lucky Charms, and if you need anything before I get back, you can wake Daddy, okay?”

  “Daddy doesn’t like it when I wake him,” Theo said. “And don’t touch his things, that makes him really mad.”

  Caroline nearly hyperventilated. She wasn’t sure what Theo had seen, but now she knew. “Touch his things? Oh no, honey. I just left something here. Besides, you know that Daddy’s things are my things too, and my things are Daddy’s.”

  “That’s not what Daddy says.”

  She placed the blanket over Theo’s head and dashed to Eddie’s desk.

  She opened the iPad again and sat in her husband’s chair. She closed the spreadsheet. She erased all the recent history too. She closed iMessage. Caroline figured she had covered her tracks.

  Now, off to fetch some Lucky Charms.

  Chapter 18

  Kitchen Confrontation . . . or Not

  Caroline watched the illuminated numerals of the floors morph, one into another, as her building’s paneled elevator rose. It felt like a tomb this morning, moving much slower than it normally did. On the twelfth floor, she inhaled deeply as she stepped onto the landing. Brushing the bottom of her shoes on the thick sisal mat, she noted that its green grosgrain border was in tatters, matching the Clarkson marriage inside.

  With the little boxes of sugary cereal hidden in a plastic bag hanging from the crook of her arm, she grasped the knocker ready to ring, as if it were someone else’s front door. She caught herself and plopped her head against the door instead. Everything was feeling foreign now.

  As she opened it, the smell of burnt toast met her.

  “Theo! Gigi!” Eddie’s scream came from the kitchen. The beaters of the mixer were clanging against the sides of a glass bowl. “Just cheese or cheese and ham? Cheese and ham will have more protein. Daddy burned the bagels as usual, but I got more!”

  Caroline slid the boxes of diabetes-inducing cereals under the living room sofa and walked by the kitchen and into Theo’s room. It was 7:35 a.m., twenty-five minutes before she’d have to walk her son and daughter out the door. Theo was brushing his teeth, perched on his tiptoes atop a small step stool with fire engines and his name painted on it. She massaged his shoulders and looked into the same mirror he was looking into. Theo asked, his hazel eyes wide, “Where’s the Lucky Charms?”

  “Honey, did you tell your sister or your father I was bringing home the cereal? You know we have a rule: only on vacation. I’m breaking the rule just this once.”

  He turned around, deeply offended at such an assumption of stupidity. “No way! Dad wouldn’t let me have it! You promised the cereal now. Today,” Theo said. He pursed his lips, the way he always did when he was thinking hard or lying.

  Caroline kissed her cherub-look-alike’s forehead again. Cupping his ears, she whispered, “I did say today, and you’ll have it today. Just not this morning. Daddy will be mad about the cereal, and it’ll get all of us in a bad mood before school. Maybe you’ll even get two boxes after school if you stop whining.” She sat on the edge of the tub and said, “I know you can wait.”

  “I can wait if I can really have two later.” Theo bobbed his head, just like his father did when he was considering the value of a deal.

  Caroline pressed her finger on the tip of her son’s nose, “Two boxes. I promise. When I get you after school,” she said. “When you were three, you never could wait for anything. Now that you’re almost five, you can wait, even though I know, it’s hard.” She had no idea where her son would go to school in the fall, but recognizing the benefit of delayed gratification would be great preparation for kindergarten—and a lesson his father hadn’t quite learned still.

  After checking that Gigi was getting dressed, and kissing her cute little plump belly twenty times as she always did in the mornings, Caroline walked into the kitchen to face Eddie.

  He didn’t wait a moment: “How come you went out? You never leave in the morning. Theo woke me up.” As she approached him, he put his hands on her hips and pulled her into him, his back against the kitchen counter. His favorite part about sex with Caroline was her looking him in the eye and explaining what she wanted, in minute detail, like a dare. He loved her always being direct, and on point. And when he was a selfish shit, she’d nail his ass, even though it sucked that she’d told him in therapy that she knew he was fucking someone else. He brought his hands to her face and said, “What’s going on in that beautiful head of yours?”

  “Just that money and sex make the world go ’round, Eddie, that’s all I’m thinking,” she said. She took one yoga breath exactly as that teacher had instructed.

  The spreadsheet scrolled by in her head: so much more money than she knew.

  “And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Eddie asked.

  If she left him, she wouldn’t make a huge fuss about the cash. She’d get plenty. And if he’d hidden a bunch, he could damn well keep it. She had enough clients now to keep her afloat anyway—that is, if she lived in a town out on Long Island with good public schools. She’d sign them up for East Hampton Elementary today, she could always cancel their spots later.

  “What are you not telling me? It’s me. Just me, honey. Your best friend. What is it?”

  Caroline pulled her shoulders back. “I’m just considering things, Eddie. I’m having a moment of reflection. Is that okay?”

  “Well, tell me,” Eddie said. He was very good at reading Caroline’s mind—and she hoped he wasn’t doing just that now.

  She played out the conversation in her mind:

  Enough of this bullshit where the men wander while the women nurture hearth and home.

  Enough of this bullshit where a woman can’t be a mother and screw someone hot once in a great while when she feels she needs it.

  How many men have done that?

  How many times have you, Eddie?

  “What is it?” Eddie asked again.

  He did know her better than anyone else did, she had to give him that. Marriage was comforting that way. The scene in couples’ therapy when he admitted his first affair came back to her. It made her even angrier now to recall it.

  “Now,” Dr. Haass had said, “this is the safe place where you can reveal the pain of feeling betrayed, so we can parse it up and examine it, all together.”

  Caroline had remained silent on her end of that uncomfortable couch. She didn’t like the doctor’s tone; he treated her as if she were a child and he was her pediatrician. Neither Eddie nor the good doctor recognized her ambivalence about the marriage and that her qualms about being with Eddie in the first place were far more consequential than any hurt his cheating had caused her.

  “Resistance to discuss your pain doesn’t help you get through this,” Dr. Haass had said, clearly after the victim character men love to paint on women in distress.

  “Tell me now, Caroline,” Eddie had said, emboldened by the doctor’s comments. “Express it, I need to hear it.”

  Caroline was wiser than both men in the sessions and was o
nly keenly interested in laying out a strategy that might save her marriage. The truth was that she adored Eddie’s lustiness for life, but she was never truly in love with him. What’s more, she would never be. She felt hurt for sure, but this dalliance was no dagger in her heart. Caroline knew herself; she might be anxious, she might second-guess herself, but she would never be the casualty in someone else’s battle.

  “Let’s all pause for a moment,” Dr. Haass had said. “Remember that two people see the same thing differently. Take this lazy Susan I made.” He pulled a large wooden circle from behind his desk and placed it on the coffee table, then turned it round and round. A wooden fence divided the circle, with two plastic toy animals on either side.

  “You actually got a medical degree, and you thought it was a good idea to spend your time making a lazy Susan? Are you for fuckin’ real?” Eddie had asked, over the marital therapy concept before it had even started.

  “Shhh!” had said Caroline. “Let the doctor explain his thing.”

  “There’s a wall in the center,” Dr. Haass had continued. “And as it turns, the husband sees this little elephant on this side while the wife sees this zebra, and—”

  “What’s next?” Eddie had barked. “Are you going to bring out a little dolly and ask me to show you where someone might have poked me with his dick?!”

  “Eddie, stop!” Caroline had laughed a little; she couldn’t help it. “I like the lazy Susan image. I think it’s helpful. I mean that. It is supposed to represent one situation. Not only do we see it from opposite sides, but we also see it as opposite things. One sees it as an elephant, and the other—”

  “I get it! Bang me over the head with it, I get it. Go on.” Eddie had adjusted himself in the chair, thinking that was one super fuckin’ annoying agreement he had made to see this guy.

  Caroline had given him that look.

  He softened a little, “I got you, baby,” he had said. “Just don’t make me twirl around a zebra to say I see how your view could be different.” Eddie felt they were ganging up on him and that they had this all planned before he got there. “I hear you, okay? But I’m going to use the English language to express myself, and not little dolls and plastic fuckin’ zebras, if that’s okay.”

  Just then, Theo busted into the kitchen. “What shirt should I wear?” he asked. “I can’t find my Eli Manning one.”

  “Wear the Odell Beckham one,” Eddie said. “He’s the Giants’ bigger star.” Eddie crouched down to tussle Theo’s hair. “What did I tell you?”

  Theo smiled. “Lucky number thirteen.”

  “Yep, my uncle Charlie told me that. Thirteen is lucky, so is blue. Don’t forget, thirteen was also Alex Rodriguez’s number.”

  As Theo wandered out of the kitchen, Caroline plunked two pieces of bread into the toaster. She said, “If you want to know, for me to treat you like a best friend, I woke up thinking about infidelity, Eddie.”

  “You did?”

  “Not exactly yours, just in general,” Caroline said. “How come when men cheat they are seen as virile? How come when women in literature cheat they end up walking into an oncoming train or guzzling arsenic? How come men say they could never handle the image of another man inside their woman? Why do they think they own them?” Then she opened the refrigerator door with so much force that it banged the counter.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Eddie said, grabbing at the door.

  “Don’t whoa me,” Caroline said.

  “Remember Doctor Haass said it was important to express . . . even years later you can . . .”

  “Please,” she said. “Please don’t bring up that guy; I never liked him. You know that.”

  “You made me go!” he said, stomping his feet.

  Caroline closed her eyes and said, “And while we’re on the topic, I’ve never cheated.” Now she was pissed that she’d said no to the artist guy who suggested he take her home to paint her nude. Why hadn’t she ripped her damn clothes off for him?

  Eddie closed in on his wife and hugged her. He smelled of his Giorgio Armani cologne. She resisted the urge to nuzzle into his neck, as was their way, and instead crossed her arms across her breasts. He held her in a tight ball. She hated to admit to herself he felt good, in charge, protective, trying his best with those parents he had.

  Caroline did a 180-degree twirl to escape him and poured herself a black coffee. Videos of those TED talks her shrink used to send about different forms of marriage flowed through her head: the one about forgiveness, the one about needing space, the one about unconventional unions and “the decision to ignore infidelities.”

  “What the hell is going on with you?” Eddie asked. “What did I do?” He worried for a moment that the doorman Constantine had told on him, the one who had seen him kiss Brittany before the car he had ordered drove her home. It was one night, okay, maybe two, and the family was in East Hampton anyway. And he was horny as fuck, what was he supposed to do to get off? Caroline was gone for three days!

  Caroline blew the steam off the coffee. Eddie took the cup and set it on the counter. He put his arms behind her and tickled her bottom gently, the same way he touched her between her legs. She closed her eyes. It turned her on more than it should have. Maybe, she figured, relenting a little, because she was mad as fuck, everything was churning inside her.

  “What are you doing, Eddie?” she asked, as his fingers reached down the front of her pajamas. She smiled—a little.

  “See?” he said.

  “I’m not smiling at you, it’s just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  Marriage is weird, that’s what. She wouldn’t tell him now. The know-each-other’s-mind, sense-each-other’s-sparks, the ambivalent yin and yang of it all.

  He pulled the string loose on her pajamas and kissed her breast—it silently reminded her that maybe he wasn’t all that bad. “I’m just trying to get a read on where you’re at,” he said.

  “C’mon. The kids will be here in a minute,” she said. “You don’t want to get me all turned on and then you turned on, which is worse than me getting turned on and way harder to stop.”

  “I’m working on getting you turned on, not me,” Eddie said. “Just trying to get a little rise out of you.” He licked her neck softly.

  She thought about his texts: little come-ons, silly flirtations, and things she knew would have made him feel masculine. In the end, they were adolescent pleas for attention that would leave him wanting his wife, his soul mate, even more. No doubt in her mind that the man she married loved her fiercely. The texts, on some level, had nothing to do with their marriage. Still, what the hell kind of marriage was this?

  “Caroline, you owe me,” Eddie said. “Tell me. Something’s up. Why did you go outside? You never go outside.” He wondered what—or who—got his wife to go out of the house in her pajamas at seven in the morning. No one could get her body going at full Mach speed like he could, right?

  She pecked his cheek, not looking him in the eye. “I just had a craving for that cappuccino on the corner,” she said. “You know, they make the little heart design with the frothed milk? And I was just, I don’t know, mine doesn’t taste the same.” She knew he wouldn’t buy it. Then she offered, “Don’t ask me questions you don’t want asked of yourself, Eddie.”

  “I’m not asking any questions, Caroline.” What the fuck did she know? “And don’t treat me like I’m an idiot. I know you didn’t go outside for a fuckin’ cappuccino.”

  Chapter 19

  Meditation Does Have a Downside

  “Darling,” Arthur said. “I need to keep my mind in the game today to handle the markets.” He cocked his head to the side like a dog begging for a scrap off a dinner plate. “And you’re so good at it. How could I not?”

  Often, just to avoid a hassle, Annabelle would oblige. He did have a good point: with her knees perched on a folded towel on the marble floor, it was an expedient way to get it all done.

  Today, the texts from Philippe had gotten into her hea
d, as had the spectacular peaks and valleys of his chest in that tight polo outfit, so she had trouble getting herself into Arthur’s game.

  Halfway through her expert performance, he whispered from above, “Annabelle, my beauty, you seem distracted. It’s no good for me if it isn’t good for you.” Arthur noticed everything. Always. His uncanny mind-reading ability came inside the same gene that allowed him to predict market flows. “Let me take you into the bedroom and get you a little revved up,” he said. “That should make things a little better for both of us.” And he reached under her arms to help her stand.

  “It’s fine, the girls, let me just . . .” and Annabelle slithered back down his legs. “I, just sometimes, every morning, it can’t be like . . .”

  “Oh, it can. I can show you,” Arthur said. He placed a finger across her lips, shushing her resistance.

  Now she’d have to do the full monty back in bed when she was hoping to get this over with. They put on their robes in case the girls woke up early, and he led her down his dressing room hallway to bed. She rolled her eyes toward God up above, thinking, This is exactly what I didn’t want to do right now.

  Arthur locked the heavy door to their suite. He lay his very substantial build on top of his beautiful wife and stroked her cheeks.

  “I love you, darling,” he said. “I won’t let us get complacent.” He squinted a little. He sensed she was not all there. “I’ll never tire of having you in the mornings before the fire.”

  Twenty minutes later, she heard water flow from his shower. Annabelle sat up in bed naked. She inhaled deeply. Her husband was, in fact, a damn good lay, and for sure more dashing than any man on Fifth Avenue with his graying, Michael Caine appeal. He knew how to get the job done on this front and many others. Even at the age of fifty-seven, he was quick and to the point. He was right about this too: she did feel better having allowed herself to enjoy her side of things. She had to admit, as he untied her robe and slipped her panties off, he wasn’t so bad. Powerful, if familiar, waves of pleasure weren’t such a terrible addition to her morning routine.