Then she looked up at him, appealing with her eyes for him to return to sanity and say anything that made sense. Anything at all.
They stared at each other for a moment, and then his cold expression softened a bit. “Look, Marci, I really am sorry to do it like this. You,” he paused, considering, “you deserve better than this. But then, that’s what I’ve always told you.”
He looked at the necklace she had worn almost daily for weeks, and her fingers rose to her throat automatically.
“I guess the best thing to do is just tell you the truth. I never imagined it ending like this; I never thought that we... that what we had would end here. But I guess this is where it started, huh?” He tried on a smile that was more of a grimace. She could only stare at him, numb.
“There’s only one way to say this, and you’re going to find out anyway, so it should be from me. Cathy is pregnant.”
“She’s what? How can she be?” Stupid questions, she knew, but they came out without thinking.
“I’m sorry, Marci. I always tried to be honest with you about my relationship with my wife.”
My wife.
“There’s more...She knows about us. I mean, not you specifically, but she knows that I was unfaithful.” Past tense. “She knows that I have been having an affair with another woman. Apparently, she has suspected something for a while. But she followed me on Friday night –”
“Followed you? To my apartment?”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t know who you are. She’s agreed not to try to find out, and I’ve agreed...”
“To end it,” she finished for him.
“Yes.”
“She’s pregnant,” Marci said, more to the floor in front of her than to Doug.
“Yeah. Ten weeks. No one knows yet except family.” Was that excitement she detected in his voice? He had always wanted children. She realized that soon, he would be showing pictures of a sonogram around the office and half the women in the building would be pestering him to know everything about the baby. The baby. Another person was now in their little drama.
As if reading her thoughts he went on, “So obviously this changes things for me. A lot. Even if I was thinking about leaving Cathy –”
“Even if? Even if?” Her anger came from nowhere and surprised even Marci. “I think we both know damn well you were doing more than thinking.”
He looked taken aback, but maintained the icy calm veneer. “All right, fine. Even though I was thinking about leaving her, I can’t do that with a child in the picture. I was a child of divorce myself. I could never abandon my child, Marci.”
“Well, who the hell asked you to?” she spit at him, standing and tossing aside the stupid legal pad.
How dare he take the high road with her? As though she had lured him to her bed single-handedly and tried to pry him away from his family? As though she would hear the news that Cathy was pregnant and insist that he leave her anyway? Bad enough she was ignored for days and then dumped across a desk under fluorescent lighting, but having to watch him paint himself the hero in the process was disgusting.
“So this is where you have been for days? This is why you haven’t called? You’ve been out shopping for cribs and it just now occurred to you that you might need to mention to me that it’s over?”
“It’s not that simple,” he said.
“Oh, really? Well, do explain the complexities to me. Or do you think I’m too stupid to understand?” Her bitterness was unexpected, invigorating.
“No, Marce.” With an exasperated sigh, Doug put his elbows on the desk and his face in his hands. He stared at the pile of papers beneath him for a while and she wondered momentarily whether he was actually reading something. She saw traces of silver around his temples she had never noticed before. “No way out,” he said, almost inaudibly.
When he lifted his head, he was again composed. The next words sounded as though he’d been rehearsing them. “I know you’re upset. You have every right to be hurt and angry. You can even hate me if you want to. I deserve it. But we made a mistake. I made a mistake. And as much as I care about you, I have to do the right thing by my marriage and my family. You’re a good person and I know in time you will understand that this is the only way.”
She wanted to throw things at him. Didn’t he understand that his composure hurt her more than anything? He’d had five days to come to terms with this; she was learning everything now. It was unfair that he was asking her to rise to the occasion and be the bigger person. She had always known the end of their relationship was inevitable, and she feared it might not be pretty. She had imagined tearful goodbyes in the car on a rainy night as they came to terms with the idea that it couldn’t go on. She had even considered a raging battle in which Cathy stormed in on them one evening and all hell broke loose.
But never—in any of her morbid fantasies about the end—never did Doug extract himself like this. To be mentored through the moment in this condescending way, as though she could not grasp his moral obligations, as though they had not been partners in everything until now, was beyond insulting.
He had given her permission to hate him. And right now, she did.
Marci stood up. She had to get out of there. She needed to run and scream and cry, but she had nowhere to go and no one to cry to. The only person she gave a shit about in this town had just dumped her on his way to cigars with the guys.
“Doug,” she said, not sure what to say next, only that she wanted his attention. He looked up with raised eyebrows and it hit her. “Fuck. You.”
She spun on her heel and walked out, grateful that her purse was somehow on her shoulder and not back at her darkened desk. If she sat right now, she might never get up again. Doug had made no move to follow her, but she took the stairs rather than wait for the elevator just in case. She was unsure whether she was really trying to escape or hoping he would follow her, but either way there was no going back.
As she descended all fourteen flights of stairs, the missed opportunities of the last six months came to her in waves, as though her unlived life was flashing before her eyes. Nights out with girlfriends she had canceled last-minute when Doug found himself free. Three blind dates from which she’d excused herself, and a couple of nice guys she’d met on an internet dating site who never stood a chance after the first half hour. She remembered leaving one date alone at the table four times during dinner to text Doug from the bathroom. He must’ve thought she had food poisoning or something. Jeremy’s frequent and kind offers to take her to parties with his friends or catch a movie on a rainy afternoon. And Jake...
All of it wasted time. She was thirty years old and exactly nowhere. She had stayed on at a temp job for far too long on the false hopes of breaking into the business (yeah, right), and waiting for a future with a man who had chosen his future more than a decade before. Only now did she realize that this had been her secret hope—hidden even from herself—that somehow things would work out for them. Despite all efforts to pin herself down to reality, she had been carried away by the fantasy anyway. What a sappy fucking fool I have been.
She looked up and realized she’d gone down a level too far; her car was back up the stairs on P1. The stairwell now held the humidity of the Austin evening and smelled vaguely like urine. It occurred to her for the first time that she was alone in an almost-deserted office building at night, paying not even a little attention to her surroundings. What’s worse, if she were mugged or kidnapped or killed, no one would know until she didn’t show up for work tomorrow morning. Everyone who loved her was back in Atlanta. Everyone who had reached out to her here in Austin had been kept at a distance and trained to respect her privacy.
When she emerged into the parking deck, clutching her purse, she saw him. He was walking to his car with his beat-up leather briefcase and phone cradled under his chin. He had his back turned to her and was too far away for her to hear him, but she could guess who was on the other end of the line. She backed into the shadows and waited for
the familiar black BMW to pass her, oblivious, on its way out. She made her way to her car, put on the seat belt, locked the doors, and cried with her head on the steering wheel.
Chapter 8
“Fuck him. That’s right. Couldn’t have said it better myself. I wish I could say it myself.”
Suzanne’s outrage did little to ease Marci’s pain, but it was nice to have someone on her side. She was glad she had broken down and told Suzanne about Doug a few weeks ago, though at the time she had been thinking of it more as some sort of step toward legitimacy than a protective measure for herself.
For over an hour, she listened vaguely as Suzanne alternated between asking Marci whether she was okay and describing in detail the horrifying things she would do to Doug’s genitals if she had access to them. Once or twice, it occurred to Marci that in a previous life her best friend might’ve been an accomplished torturer of spies and heretics. She replayed tonight’s conversation repeatedly in her mind, looking for some minute clue that would make the whole thing make sense.
She did not expect to sleep that night, but by the time she had finished talking to Suzanne and forced herself through her nightly routine, her eyes were so tired and puffy from her tears that she could barely keep them open. A mercifully dreamless sleep took over and held her until the 6:00 alarm.
She debated not going in to work on Thursday, but needed the hours because her rent had gone month-to-month and was more expensive. Besides, she felt she had something to prove to Doug: she was strong enough to carry on without him. She wanted to prove it even if she didn’t feel it. A thick layer of concealer helped disguise the evidence that she had been crying all night. She dug out a brightly colored scarf to detract attention from her tired face.
It was amazing how the rest of the world continued normally when her life was in ruins. The usual e-mails were in her inbox, the same small talk with Jeremy and Victoria, the same choices for lunch. She found that anger was the best friend she had at the moment; it kept the spiraling depression at bay. The stubborn desire to be as unaffected by Doug as possible actually made her focus better on work. She plowed through her data entry in the morning and actually managed to finish a couple of minor projects that had been lingering on her desk for a while. Though she was always alert for his approach, Doug did not pass her cubicle and she made none of her usual excuses to go to his side of the office.
Somehow the day passed. Victoria stopped by Marci’s desk on her way out that afternoon. “Got a minute?”
“Sure,” Marci said. She instinctively went to hide whatever was on her screen and then realized there were no covert e-mails from Doug. There would never be again.
“I was wondering whether you had lunch plans tomorrow. There’s something we need to discuss.” Victoria’s tone was neutral but serious-sounding.
“Um, sure. I mean, no. No plans.”
“Great. It’ll be us and Candice from HR. You know Candice?”
Marci nodded.
“Great. We’ll do 11:30 at Carmelo’s. I’m taking the morning off for something personal, so I will meet y’all there.”
“Okay. Thanks, Victoria.”
Victoria gave a noncommittal wave and swept out of the office, leaving Marci to wonder once again what was coming next. On the drive home, her brain excavated a memory of Cathy and Candice chatting chummily one day when the former had stopped by the office several weeks ago. Could it be that Cathy did, in fact, know who she was, and was exacting her revenge by getting Marci fired?
She reminded herself that temp employees could be let go without cause and there would be no need to call a meeting with her if that were the case, much less a meeting at Carmelo’s. They would simply call the agency and say that Marci was no longer needed.
Despite this very sensible reassurance, however, she did not sleep at all that night. She had learned that the worst she could imagine was not always the worst that could happen.
#
Friday morning Marci used up the other half of a tube of concealer and stopped for a cappuccino with a double shot on the way to work. Between the caffeine, lack of sleep, anger, nervousness, and depression, she spent the morning trying to keep herself from bursting into either tears or hysterical laughter—never sure which might be coming. With Victoria out, Marci was unsure whether she was meant to ride with Candice or take herself to the restaurant, and each time she stopped by Candice’s office, she was on the phone with the door closed. At 11:15, she tried again and found the office dark and locked. Clearly, she was expected to make it there herself. Carmelo’s was just a few blocks away and she couldn’t afford to park twice, so she set out on foot.
After walking a few minutes, she glanced down at the post-it on which she’d scrawled the address and realized that while she was right that the restaurant was on Fifth Street, she was on the wrong side of Congress. That meant backtracking what she’d done and walking an additional five blocks in the opposite direction, and she had only five minutes. There was nothing to do but run for it, in the ninety-plus degree weather. Her sandaled feet pounded the hot sidewalk, breasts bouncing painfully as she went. A homeless man pushing a cart covered in anti-government signs cheered for her wildly as she passed him. She felt ridiculous, but could think of no better option. At least if they are firing me, they can add “lack of punctuality” and “slow runner” to the list of reasons.
When she got to the restaurant, she was soaked through with sweat and completely out of breath. She steered herself to the restroom to see how she looked and almost wished she hadn’t bothered. The concealer had caked with the sweat and made it look like her face was covered in mud. Her fuchsia t-shirt showed enormous sweat rings under the arms. She rinsed a paper towel in the sink and tried to clean up her face, and then stood under the hand dryer with her shirt lifted to try to dry her shirt. It seemed to work, but also made her face red and sweaty again. It was 11:43 and she needed to get to the table, but she wanted to give the dryer just a couple more minutes to work, hoping to make the sweat rings less visible.
This is why, when Candice walked into the restroom, Marci was standing with her shirt lifted high and hot air blowing over her body. Candice’s face registered shock, just as one would expect, but like any well-bred Austin woman, her words were polite in the face of even the oddest behavior. “Hi, Marci. We didn’t see you come in.”
“Hi, Candice,” Marci said, smoothing her shirt. She was glad she’d worn a nicer bra today, at least, instead of the beige standby with the fraying straps. “Hot today, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Candice said, still looking at Marci with something of an appraising look, but not cruelly. It was as though she were just sort of vaguely wondering what planet Marci was from, but not really with any strong feelings that she should return there immediately.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Marci finally managed.
“Oh, it’s okay,” Candice said. “Frank was late, too. We’re in the weird little nook by the bar.” She gestured toward the back wall and stepped into one of the stalls.
Frank? As in Frank Dodgen? Holy crap.
Marci took a last glance in the mirror and smoothed her hair. The sweat rings were mostly better, she decided. Maybe not immediately noticeable if she kept her arms at her side. The rest, well, it was what it was. At least the restaurant had soft lighting.
Frank greeted her warmly and shook her hand as she approached the table, but Victoria gave her an admonishing look behind his back. In response to both she repeated, “I’m so sorry I’m late. I...went the wrong way.”
“Fine, fine,” Frank said, and then, to the waitress, “We’ll have a bottle of Chianti for the table, please. Okay, ladies?” Candice was taking her seat, and the three of them nodded their assent.
After a few moments of staring at the very pricey menu, unable to concentrate, Marci was relieved when Frank tossed his menu on the table and said, “Well, let’s get right down to business, if that’s okay with you girls. I’m not one for a lot of bullshitti
ng, as you know.”
The waitress seemed to sense that this was her cue, and interrupted to get their orders. Victoria and Candice both ordered Caesar salad with grilled chicken, so Marci followed suit, even though she was starving and would’ve preferred one of the grilled panini. Frank ordered an enormous sandwich with every kind of meat known to man.
“Well, Marci, I imagine you know a little about why we’re here already,” he said, and she glanced at the other two women, both of whom wore neutral expressions. She did not. He went on. “I’ve talked with Doug Stanton—”
Marci let out a gasp that Frank did not seem to notice. She thought Candice glanced at her but couldn’t be sure. She tried to keep her focus politely trained on Frank while her insides turned to knots.
“—and he shared with me your portfolio of work. It’s good, Marci. Really good. I can tell you that Doug doesn’t get excited about new talent easily, but he has basically insisted that we create a position for you. And looking at your work, I’d say he’s right.”
Marci could not believe what she was hearing. Was this really happening? Was she being offered her dream job?
“So, of course, Victoria, I’d like to know from you what you need Marci to do in terms of transitioning out of your department. Of course, we’ll make sure we get another administrative worker. Candice, you’ll talk with the temp agency? I’m sure we have to jump through some hoops with them but we’ve given them enough business over the years; they ought to make it easy for us to hire Marci without paying an arm and a leg.”
It was all but settled in Frank’s mind, apparently. She had wanted this opportunity for years, and here it was. Solid, no interview necessary. Doug had made it happen. Doug...Was this his way of making it up to her? Buying her silence at work?
“...now, of course the pay won’t be much at first. More than you make now, I imagine, but it’s entry-level, keep in mind. Of course, if you’re good, you’ll do well and you’ll be able to write your own check in this town. Kids who come through our office are never at a loss for job offers...”
The Marriage Pact Page 9
