The Solomon Sisters Wise Up

by Melissa Senate

  Six women’s phone numbers, including a Ginger who dotted her i with a smiley face.

  Three hotel room receipts, two in the city and one here in Great Neck.

  Two Victoria’s Secret receipts.(I hadn’t received a lace teddy from Andrew for years.)

  Six florist receipts—red roses.

  Under our bed, next to a few dust bunnies, last month’s issue of WowWoman and the current Vanity Fair: one pair of black thong panties, size small (I was a medium).

  In his office, on his desk: countless bar tab and restaurant receipts in the high hundreds.

  His shirts smelled of perfume I never wore. The Armani sweater I bought him “just because” had a fuschsia lipstick stain on the hem.

  For a second I considered grabbing everything Andrew owned (or at least what I could lift), stuffing it into his precious Jaguar (which was in the garage because it was raining), and burning it all up the way Angela Bassett had in Waiting to Exhale.

  And then I remembered a case my law firm had won a few years ago, Arnock v. Arnock, in which Mrs. Arnock had done exactly that to the belongings of Mr. Arnock. The replacement value came out of her settlement. Maybe I wasn’t a fool, after all.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit! I was the biggest fool of them all. Trust me, Kris, if Andrew were even thinking of cheating on me, I’d know it. We’ve been married for eleven years, and we dated for two years before then. I know the man.

  I shook my head and dropped down onto my bed. My husband had been making a fool out of me for years. And no one had told me.

  “Who would tell you?” Marnie had asked when I’d gone to her house this morning to confront her.

  Oh, you bet I had.

  Not right away, though. Turned out that when you caught your husband of eleven years cheating on you in front of your eyes, in your own house, in the hammock he bought for you for Mother’s Day the first year you were married because “One day you’ll lie with our children in the hammock, reading them Dr. Seuss,” something other than anger could take over, like pain.

  Last night, after I slapped Andrew and ran out the door with Mary Jane, I drove to a hotel near LaGuardia Airport, checked in under the name Polly Smith, paid a clerk to run out and get me a few cans of Alpo and then flung a lamp across my generic, ugly room. In five seconds I received a phone call from the front desk asking if everything was all right, to which I’d replied that it most certainly was not, that my husband was a fucking cheating bastard, before I slammed the phone down.

  And then I’d stared at the phone and picked up the receiver, needing to call someone, and I put it back down and slid to my butt on the side of the bed and cried.

  Who was I going to call?

  My mother was gone. My father would probably take Andrew’s side, since he was a serial adulterer himself. My sister Sarah had her own problems, and besides, I wasn’t about to tell Sarah that my life was falling apart.

  I wasn’t about to tell anyone that my life was falling apart. Especially not my girlfriends, who were really just women I knew from the country club, women whose husbands Andrew played golf with. And I couldn’t tell Kristina. We were work friends and reasonably close, but I couldn’t handle the thought of being a “told you so,” lumped into the categories of cheating she’d been talking about this afternoon.

  And so I sat on the floor of the hotel, against the bed, clutching Mary Jane to my chest, and stared into space for a few minutes. And then the tears came.

  After an hour or so, I picked myself up off the floor and lay down on the bed and finally slept. I slept until six this morning, then ordered two pots of coffee and looked out the window for a few hours at planes taking off and landing. And then I decided to drive home and confront the bastard.

  But instead of making a left off the exit, I made a right, toward Marnie’s condo complex, where I’d gone many times for private Pilates and yoga lessons. I didn’t think, didn’t form questions. I just drove. I had a feeling that Marnie could provide me with more answers than Andrew could. Truthful answers, at least.

  I left Mary Jane in the car with the window cracked and her favorite car bone, rang Marnie’s doorbell and seconds later saw her peek out the bay window and then dart back inside at the sight of me. Scaredy-cat. It started to drizzle. A minute passed. Again I saw her part the curtain. Another minute passed. Two. Five. I sat down on the single step and waited, the raindrops fattening. Again I saw her part the curtain.

  Finally she opened the door. She wore her usual tiny sports bra over her supersized chest and yoga pants over her minuscule hips and butt. The familiar thick blond hair was in a knot atop her head, two sticks in the bun.

  “I can take you, Ally,” she said, one hand on the door, the other on her hip. “And you know I can. So if you’ve come here to try to beat me up, don’t bother.”

  When you slept with women’s husbands, women who were your own well-trained, hard-bodied Pilates clients, you clearly expected, like a seventh-grader, to get your ass kicked.

  I rolled my eyes at her. “I’ve only come for the truth,” I said. “Woman to woman, Marnie, tell me the truth. Are you having an affair with my husband? Was it a onetime thing? What?”

  Woman to woman was Marnie’s own favorite little thing to say. Woman to woman, Ally, you should think about liposuction for your tummy. It’s reasonably flat, but you’re in too good shape for that little jiggle. Woman to woman, Ally, you shouldn’t wear so much beige. Yes, I know it’s classic and elegant, but it washes you out.

  She stared at me for a second, taking measure of me just the way Andrew had last night, then gestured for the sofa.

  I’d sat on that blue-and-white-checkered sofa countless times for Marnie’s special just-squeezed vegetable juices, which began all her sessions. Now I wondered how many times Andrew had sat on that sofa, Marnie straddling him.

  “Do you really want the truth, Ally?” she asked. “Because if you do, I’ll tell you. But be sure you want it. Most people don’t. They can’t handle it. Ignorance is bliss and all that.”

  She was suddenly a fount of wisdom?

  “I’m a lawyer, Marnie. I understand the consequences of the truth.”

  “Okay,” she said with a shrug, and again gestured for the couch.

  I sat. I listened. I turned down a glass of wine because a) I was driving, b) I didn’t want to lose my anger or my grip on reality and c) what was she, my friend?

  Given what Marnie told me, you’d think I didn’t graduate summa cum laude from Cornell or make law review at Stanford. I made $230,000 a year because of how perceptive I was, and yet for years Andrew had been screwing his way through HotBods Health Club’s hot-bodied staff and I’d had no clue.

  According to Marnie, Andrew was successful at enticing the young lovelies into bed or backroom blow jobs because he was good-looking and hot-bodied himself, married, offered incentives in the form of gift certificates from Victoria’s Secret and diamond stud earrings (which, mind you, he got practically free since his brother was a dealer in the diamond district) and because he was discreet.

  “Why would anyone get off on sleeping with a married man?” I asked.

  She said something stupid about it involving danger and excitement. Oooh, falling naked off a hammock into a pile of dogshit—how exciting and dangerous!

  I thanked her for her honesty, then told her I thought she was a skank, to which she shrugged and said, “Save your hostility for your husband. Oh, and I’m sure you won’t try to hurt my business, because I’m sure you won’t want everyone to know your husband is cheating on you.”

  I was a bitch?

  She slammed the door shut behind me and I threw a “Fuck you” over my shoulder (now who was the seventh-grader?). Then I drove home, ready to confront my husband.

  But he wasn’t home when I arrived. My first thought was that he was out looking for me, but then I realized he was very likely spewing a poor-me routine to some diner waitress and hoping for a quickie in the bathroom. For fifteen minutes, I sat on
the sofa in the living room in a daze, unable to comprehend that this house that I’d lived in for eleven years had changed in a moment. Before the hammock moment, it had been my sanctuary, my beloved home. This morning, it was like a stranger’s house.

  Mary Jane’s bark had startled me out of my catatonic state, and I was suddenly obsessed with the idea of searching for evidence of Andrew’s infidelities just in case he tried to give me the Marnie is just trying to break us up crap. I could just hear Andrew in his supposedly sincere voice, the one I’d heard him use so many times in white lies to business associates and neighbors. She’s just a jealous cunt, Ally. She came on to me, got me a little drunk, and I didn’t know what I was doing. You’re not going to listen to her over your own husband, are you? Ally, I love you.

  In a matter of minutes—really and truly just ten or fifteen minutes—I’d found the hotel and bar and Victoria’s Secret receipts in his pants pockets. I’d found the lipstick-stained sweater. After finding a bra that wasn’t mine wedged behind the little trash can in the downstairs bathroom, I’d been compelled to examine the contents of the trash can.

  With Andrew’s tweezers, I dug out the used rubber and carried it upstairs at arm’s length, then set it down on his pillow, next to the lacy thong.

  And after I nixed the idea of burning up everything he owned in his precious little Jaguar, inspiration hit. If a friend were in a similar situation, I would advise her to immediately pilfer pertinent financial files, just in case the bastard tried to pull any funny business if things got ugly.

  On the desk in his office was our wedding photo. I picked it up and looked at it, but I couldn’t even recognize the smiling young couple. Had I been that young? That full of hope? That innocent?

  We had once loved each other. Really loved each other.

  Andrew and I hadn’t had one of those thirty-thousand-dollar weddings with rubber chicken and goofy bands that sang a lot of Kool & the Gang. We’d gotten married on the beach, on the whitest sand I’d ever seen in front of a turquoise ocean. And that night, our wedding night, we’d made love in the sand, and I’d felt loved. Cherished. We were going to be married forever, unlike both our parents. We were going to be happy.

  What the hell had happened?

  I set the picture frame facedown on his desk and yanked on the long drawer, but it was locked. I jimmied it open with scissors and threw the photo inside with a “Fucking bastard!” at the top of my lungs.

  The photo landed on a box of Trojan condoms. “Ribbed for her pleasure.”

  Bastard! I’d been on the pill for years before Andrew and I had stopped using birth control in order to start a family. I grabbed the condoms—there were three left in a box of sixteen—and flung them across the room, then searched through the file folders and papers underneath.

  Amid a bunch of ordinary papers was an insurance-claim form, dated five years earlier, for a vasectomy.

  I was packing when Andrew came home.

  “Oh, come on, Al,” he said, tossing his jacket on the bed. Hands on hips, he watched me fold my clothes and place them in my suitcase, which lay open on our bed.

  Our bed. Ha! It was his bed now.

  I turned around and stared at him, sure he’d look different now that I knew the whole truth, the extent of his lies and manipulations. But he didn’t look different. He looked exactly the same as he always had, just slightly older than the very good-looking guy I’d married eleven years ago.

  “Al-ly.” He drew it out, trying for sexy and cute. “C’mon, baby. Let’s sit down and talk.”

  I ignored him and continued packing.

  “Ally, don’t you think you’re being a little overly dramatic? Taking this a bit too far? C’mon, let’s talk this through. That’s what adults are supposed to do.”

  “You’re not an adult, Andrew. You’re an adulterer. And the adulterer in this room doesn’t deserve to be heard.”

  “Oh, so you’re just jumping to conclusions,” he said. “Is that what they taught you in law school? To jump to conclusions?”

  “Andrew, I think you’re confusing me with the brainless women you fuck. Don’t waste my time playing games. They won’t work.”

  “So you’re just going to believe what Marnie told you?” he said, throwing up his hands. “Great, you go talk to that little bitch and she fills your head with lies about me because she’s jealous, and you believe her over your husband. She told me everything—including that she wants me to leave you and marry her. She’s just trying to break us up, Al.”

  Was there really any reason to respond to that?

  “Great, Ally,” he said. “So you’re just going to believe her over me. That really makes me feel good.”

  “Oh, Andrew, you’re right! You poor thing! I am so sorry!”

  His eyes lit up, and I realized he didn’t even know me well enough to know that I was being sarcastic. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you—”

  “Yes, asshole, I am being sarcastic. And, in case you forgot, catching you screwing another woman with my own eyes helped me ‘jump to conclusions.’”

  “Ally, you don’t know what you think you saw,” he said.

  Was that English?

  “What you think you saw and what really happened could be two very different things,” he added.

  “Really. So you weren’t having sex with another woman on the hammock?”

  “No. I wasn’t,” he said.

  Amazing. “Andrew, maybe you’re forgetting that what I learned in law school was that people lie through their capped teeth with the most innocent expressions and without the slightest wrinkle on their foreheads. Liars come in all forms, even husbands you trusted five minutes before they destroyed your marriage.”

  “Ally, sweetie, you can trust me. You can. I’ve been worried sick since you left last night.” He put on his worried expression and came around the bed. “I left at least ten messages on your cell phone.”

  Andrew was wearing good black pants and a charcoal gray shirt, his “going out to dinner” standard outfit. Which meant he’d just come home from wherever he’d gone after I’d left last night. He was worried sick? What, while he was screwing some other woman?

  “Ally, c’mon,” he said, touching my arm, which I wrenched away. “Let’s sit down and talk about this.”

  “Andrew, just shut up.” I handed him the vasectomy claim form.

  It’s interesting to watch people when they’re confronted with the inalienable truth of their deception. Momentary shock replaced by the wheels spinning to think up a new angle.

  He sat down on the loveseat in front of the window and sighed. “Ally, look—”

  I threw down the two suits I was folding into my suitcase. “No, you look, you lying son of a bitch!”

  He leaned back the way he did when he was tired of our conversation. “You were so hellbent on having a kid, Ally. From the minute we got married. I wasn’t ready then, and I’m still not really ready.”

  “But you said okay to trying to have a baby,” I pointed out. “We had sex how many times without protection? What did you think I thought we were trying to do? Not get pregnant?”

  “I said okay because I couldn’t take it anymore, Ally. Having a baby was all you talked about. And you wouldn’t listen when I told you it wasn’t time. You never listen, Ally. So I made sure it wouldn’t happen. When I’m ready, I can reverse it. We can have a baby, Ally—when we’re both ready.”

  I laughed in his face. “Are you thinking for a second that I might continue in this shitty, sham marriage? You’ve been lying to me for five years about the most important thing in the world to me.”

  “There you go, Ally. Having a baby is the most important thing to you. Not me.”

  I stared at him for a second. “That’s not true. Wasn’t true, anyway. But it doesn’t matter now, Andrew. We don’t matter now.”

  “Ally, don’t get all melodramatic. I hate when you do that.”

  “Well, I hate you, Andrew.”

 
; “Ally, I know you don’t mean that.”

  “Oh, but I do.”

  And I did. I knew exactly how I felt about Andrew Sharp.

  For the past few years, Andrew and I had started to become known in Great Neck as The Couple Trying To Have a Baby. “I hear you’re trying for a baby,” acquaintances would say as conversation openers, and with a deadly combination of embarrassment and the human desire to discuss what was fervent in my heart, I’d launch into a monologue about our rate of intercourse and my basal temperature. “And when are you two going to start a family?” strangers would ask at parties or at the health club or at work dinners.

  Just as soon as rude people like you are obliterated from the earth, I always wanted to yell back. What if I couldn’t have a child? Huh? How would a question like that make me feel, then?

  I knew exactly how it would make me feel. Like how I felt when my father tried to explain to six-year-old me that he was leaving, even though my mother had just brought my brand-new baby sister home from the hospital. Like how I’d felt when that baby sister told me, eighteen years later, that our mother had died suddenly from a brain aneurysm while painting a watercolor in the living room of our house. Like there was a hole inside me, so deep inside I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t touch it, certainly couldn’t fill it with too much chocolate, alcohol, sleeping pills, exercise or bitchiness.

  And now I could add like how I felt when I saw Andrew having sex with another woman in the hammock in our backyard and like how I felt when I found the claim form for the vasectomy.

  Andrew stood up and stepped toward me, but my expression halted him. “All right, Ally, I’ll stop. I promise. I stand here right now before you and promise you that I will never even look at another woman. Doesn’t that tell you how much I love you?”

  “Andrew, you’re free to look at all the women you want,” I said, throwing my cosmetics bag on top of my clothes and snapping shut the suitcase. “All packed. Goodbye, Andrew. Have a nice life.”

  He shot up and grabbed the suitcase out of my hand. “Ally, I don’t have one friend who doesn’t have a little cake on the side. It never means anything. There are no emotions involved. It’s just sex, some release, like watching porn. Are you really going to throw away eleven years of marriage—thirteen years together—over nothing?”