Heart of the Matter

by Emily Giffin

  He gives me a blank stare. “I was at the hospital. I came home around five, had dinner with the kids, then went out for a few hours.”

  “You were at the hospital all day?” I press, saying a last-ditch prayer that Romy misidentified the man in the parking lot, that she is in dire need of glasses.

  “Pretty much,” he says.

  “So you didn’t go over to Longmere yesterday?” I blurt.

  He shrugs, avoiding my gaze, and says, “Oh. Yeah. Why?”

  “Why?” I say incredulously. “Why?”

  “Yes. Why?” he snaps. “As in—why are you asking? As in—why did you fly home a day early to ask me that question?”

  I shake my head, refusing to be fooled by his transparent tactic. “Why were you there? Did you go to take a tour of the school? Drop off an application? Did it have anything to do with Ruby?”

  I already know the answer as he sighs and says, “It’s a long story.”

  “We have time,” I say.

  “I don’t really want to get into it right now,” he says.

  “Well, you don’t have that choice,” I tell him. “Not when you’re married.”

  “See. There you go again,” he says, as if he’s having an epiphany, a lightning bolt of insight into my mysterious, difficult persona.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

  “It means . . . that there don’t seem to be many choices left in this marriage. Unless you’re the one making them.”

  “What?” I shout, becoming the first to raise my voice, something I vowed not to do.

  “You have everything all mapped out. Where we live. What club we need to join. Where the kids should go to school. Who our friends will be. What we do with every hour, minute, second of our free time.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demand.

  He ignores me, continuing his rant. “Whether it’s going on a forced march through Target or a neighborhood Halloween party or a school tour. Hell, you even govern what I’m supposed to wear in my own house over takeout sushi. For God’s sake, Tessa.”

  I swallow, feeling defensive yet outraged. “So tell me,” I say, grinding my teeth between words. “How long have you been feeling this way?”

  “For a while.”

  “So this has nothing to do with Valerie Anderson?” I say, going out on a dangerous limb.

  He does not flinch. He does not even blink. “Why don’t you tell me, Tessa? Since you seem to have all the answers.”

  “I don’t have that answer, Nick. In fact, your little friendship was news to me. A great, big newsflash. While I’m trying to have a good time in New York with my brother and best friend, I’m getting a text that you’re with another woman, sharing a cozy moment in the parking lot.”

  “That’s great,” he says with hushed sarcasm. “That’s fucking great. Now I’m being watched—followed—like some kind of a bad guy.”

  “Are you?” I shout. “Are you a bad guy?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask your posse of friends? Why don’t you take a poll of all the Wellesley housewives?”

  I swallow, then raise my chin with a self-righteous flourish. “For the record, I told April that you’d never cheat on me,” I say.

  I study his face, bearing an expression I can only describe as guilty.

  “Why are you discussing me with April?” Nick asks. “Why is our marriage any of her concern?”

  “She’s not part of this discussion, Nick,” I say, determined not to be sidetracked. “Other than the fact that she’s the one who told me you were at Longmere with Valerie Anderson. When it was you who should have filled me in.”

  “I didn’t know you wanted a report of everything I did,” Nick says, standing abruptly and heading for the kitchen. A long moment later, he returns with a bottle of Perrier, refilling his glass as I pick up where we left off.

  I shake my head and say, “I didn’t ask for a report. I didn’t want a report.”

  “Then why do you surround yourself with people who would give you that report?”

  It is a fair question, but one that I feel is completely ancillary to the bigger picture, the one he is blatantly avoiding. “I don’t know, Nick,” I say. “You might be right about April. But this isn’t about April and you know it.”

  He remains infuriatingly silent as I sigh and say, “Okay. Let’s try this again, another way. Would you mind, now that we’re on the topic, telling me what you were doing at Longmere?”

  “Okay. Yes. I’ll tell you,” he says calmly. “Charlie Anderson, my patient, called me.”

  “He called you?” I say.

  He nods.

  “Was it a medical emergency?”

  “No,” he says. “It was not.”

  “Then why did he call you?”

  “He was upset. There was an incident at school. A little girl teased him and he got upset.”

  “Why didn’t he call his mother?”

  “He did. He couldn’t reach her. She was in court. She had her phone turned off.”

  “And his father?” I ask, even though I know the answer—that there is no father, perhaps the most unsettling fact in all of this.

  Sure enough, Nick looks more impassioned than he has in the entire conversation as he says, “He doesn’t have a father. He’s a scared little kid who has been through hell and called his doctor.”

  “He has no other family?” I say, unwilling to feel sympathy for anyone other than myself—and potentially my children. “Grandparents? Aunts or uncles?”

  “Tessa. Look. I don’t know why he called me. I didn’t ask him. I just went. I thought it was the right thing to do.”

  You are so fucking noble, I think, but instead press on. “Are you friends with her?”

  He hesitates, then nods. “Yes. I guess you could say we’re friends. Yes.”

  “Close friends?” I ask.

  “Tessa. C’mon. Stop.”

  I shake my head and repeat the question. “How close are you?”

  “What are you getting at here?”

  “What I am getting at,” I say, pushing my plate away, wondering how I possibly thought I could be in the mood for raw fish, “is what is going on with us. Why we don’t feel close anymore. Why you didn’t tell me that Charlie Anderson called you. That you’re friends with his mother . . .”

  He nods, as if granting me a small point—which has a way of softening my next words. “And maybe, just maybe, this nagging worry I have about our relationship . . . maybe it’s all in my head. Maybe I need to take some antidepressants or go back to work or something.” I pick up my chopsticks, holding them skillfully in my hands, remembering how my father taught me to use them when I was a little girl, about Ruby’s age.

  He nods again and says, “Yes. Maybe you’re the one who isn’t happy. In fact . . . I can’t remember the last time you seemed happy. First it was that you worked too much and were overwhelmed and resented the professors without kids who didn’t understand your situation. So I tell you to quit, that we will be fine without two incomes. So you do. And now. Now you seem bored and frustrated and annoyed by mothers who care too much about tennis or post inane Facebook updates or expect you to make homemade snacks for school parties. Yet you still fret about all of those things. You still play their game.”

  I try to interrupt, try to defend myself, but he continues with more conviction. “You wanted another baby. Desperately. Enough that sex turns into a project. A nose-to-the-grindstone project. Then you have Frankie and you seem on the edge. Postpartum. Miserable.”

  “I wasn’t postpartum,” I say, still focusing on the sting of his description of our sex, awash with remorse and inadequacy and fear. “I just had the baby blues.”

  “Fine. Fine. And I understand that. I understand how hard it was. Which is why I took the early morning feeding. Why we hired Carolyn.”

  “I know,” I say. “Nobody’s ever accused you of being a bad father.”

  “Okay. But look. The point is
—I don’t feel like I’ve changed. I feel like I’ve stayed the same. I’m a surgeon. That’s who I am.”

  “That’s who you are, yes. But that’s not all you are. You’re also my husband. Ruby and Frank’s father.”

  “Right, I know. I know. But why does that mean I have to have a full social calendar? And that my kids have to go to a fancy private school? And that my wife has to be consumed with what other people think of us?”

  “That’s how you see me?” I ask, my tears at their final tipping point. “As some kind of a lemming?”

  “Tess. No. I don’t see you as a lemming. I see you as a smart, beautiful woman who . . .”

  I begin to cry as he reaches over to touch my hand. “Who what?” I ask through tears.

  “Who . . . I don’t know . . . Tess . . . Maybe something has changed in our life. I’ll grant you that. I just don’t think that thing is me.”

  I look at him, feeling light-headed, the weight of his words making it difficult for me to breathe. It is the admission I have been driving for and now that I have it, I have no idea what to do with it.

  “Maybe it is partly my fault,” I somehow manage to say, too afraid to ask about the text or anything else about Valerie. “But I still love you.”

  Several seconds pass—seconds that feel like hours—before he replies, “I love you, too, Tess.”

  I look at him, holding on to the edge of the table and his words, wondering what kind of love we’re talking about and whether it will be enough.

  36

  Valerie

  She waits. And waits. And waits some more. She waits for ten excruciating days, the longest stretch of time she can remember, almost as agonizingly slow as the early days at the hospital. She stares at her BlackBerry, sleeping with it next to her pillow, the ringer on high. She parts the curtains, looking for his car whenever she hears a door slam outside. And when she can’t bear the waiting and wondering another second, she even breaks down and sends him a text that simply says, Hope you’re okay? She adds the question mark for the sole purpose of requesting a response, but she still hears nothing from him. Not a single word.

  At first she gives him the benefit of the doubt she believes he’s earned, coming up with all sorts of excuses on his behalf. There’s been an emergency at work or at home. Someone’s hurt. He’s hurt. And the most implausible scenario of all—that he told his wife he is in love with another woman, that he is unwinding his marriage, filing for divorce, wishing for a clean break before they continue, together, on an honest, true path.

  She feels foolish for even conceiving of such a notion (let alone dreaming about it, and once, in an especially desperate moment, even praying for it) when she knows what is far more likely. That he regretted what they did and what he told her. Or worse, that he didn’t mean it in the first place.

  The emotions send her reeling back in time, to what she has come to call her stupid years, before she learned to protect herself with a wall of distrust and cynicism and apathy. The wounds Lion inflicted, wounds that she thought had healed long ago, are suddenly fresh and raw. She begins to hate him all over again, because it is easier than hating Nick. But she hates herself most of all—for being the kind of woman who gets herself in these situations.

  “What is wrong with me?” she says, when she breaks down one bleak Tuesday afternoon at work, calling her brother, confessing what she did with Nick, and that she hasn’t seen him since, hasn’t even heard from him since his obligatory morning-after call.

  “Nothing is wrong with you,” her brother says, sounding half-asleep or stoned—maybe both.

  “Something is wrong with me,” she says, staring out her office window into another office across the block, where two men are literally standing next to a water cooler, laughing. “He had sex with me once, then ended things.”

  “He didn’t exactly end things. He just hasn’t . . . followed up . . .”

  “It’s the same difference. And you know it.”

  Jason’s silence erases another sliver of hope.

  “So what do you think it was? Am I not pretty enough?” she asks, knowing she sounds like an anguished, broken teenager. She desperately doesn’t want to be in this category of women who gauge their self-esteem by a man, pin their hopes on another. Yet that is exactly what she did, what she continues to do by asking these questions.

  “Are you kidding? You’re fucking gorgeous,” Jason says. “You got the face. The body. The whole package.”

  “So what, then? Do you think it’s the sex? Maybe I suck in bed?” she says, just as she pictures Nick’s face, twisted with pleasure as he came inside her. The way he stroked her hair afterward. Kissed her eyelids. Ran his hand over her stomach and thighs. Fell asleep holding her, clutching her to him.

  Jason clucks his tongue and says, “It’s usually not about sex, Val.”

  “Then what is it? Am I boring? Too negative? . . . Too much baggage?”

  “None of those things. It’s not you, Val. It’s him . . . Most guys are assholes. The gay ones, the straight ones. Hank’s a diamond in the rough,” he says, his voice radiant, the way it always is when he speaks of his boyfriend. The way she might have sounded only a few days ago. “But Nick . . . Not so much.”

  “He was so amazing with Charlie,” she says, snapshots filling her head. “They had a rapport. A bond. You could see it. You can’t fake that.”

  “Just because he’s a great surgeon and became attached to the best kid in the world doesn’t make him right for you. Doesn’t make him a good guy, either,” Jason says. “But I can see why you’d confuse the two. Anyone would. That’s what makes it even worse—what he did. It’s like . . . he took advantage of his position.”

  She sighs in agreement, although she can’t quite make herself believe that he is that manipulative, that awful. It would be easier if she could. Then she could agree with her brother, agree that this rejection would be about his flaws, not hers.

  “Charlie has an appointment with him next week. And we have another surgery scheduled for February,” she says, thinking of the number of times she has looked at her calendar, wondering what she will say to him when she walks in his office. “Should we find a new doctor?”

  Jason says, “He’s the best, right?”

  “Yes,” she says quickly, her heart breaking, but her loyalty, bizarrely, still intact. She remembers how she continued to praise Lion’s talent for months after their breakup. “Nick is the best,” she says.

  “Well, then keep him as Charlie’s doctor,” Jason says.

  “Okay,” she says, wondering what she will tell her son, what explanation she will give him as to why Nick no longer comes around, why it isn’t a good idea to call him from school or anywhere else. Why they only see him at the hospital or his office.

  “How guilty should I feel?” she asks, thinking of Charlie, his words in the car about wishing Nick were his daddy.

  “About what? Tessa?” Jason asks.

  She freezes in her chair. “I was talking about Charlie. Not Nick’s wife . . . And would you care to tell me how you know her name?”

  “Didn’t you . . . tell me . . . her name?” he stammers.

  “No,” she says with absolute certainty. “I did not.”

  “You must have.”

  “Jason. I know I didn’t. I’ve never said her name aloud. How do you know her name?” she demands.

  “Okay. Okay . . . So get ready for this one . . . It turns out Hank’s her tennis instructor.”

  “You’re kidding me,” she says, dropping her head to her free hand.

  “Nope.”

  “So Hank knows? About Nick and me?”

  “No. I swear I didn’t tell him.”

  She isn’t sure she believes him, given the fact that Jason is an open book even when he’s not in love, but at this point, she practically doesn’t care, and numbly listens to her brother’s ensuing explanation.

  “She’s been taking lessons with him for a while . . . Hank knew her husban
d was some hotshot surgeon, but he didn’t put it all together until last week when she mentioned one of her husband’s patients—a kid who burned his face at a birthday party.”

  Valerie’s heart races. “What did she say about Charlie?”

  “Nothing. She just said that Nick works a lot . . . Hank asked what kind of surgeon he was—and she told him. Used Charlie as an example . . . Small freaking world, huh?”

  “Yeah. But I wouldn’t want to carpet it,” she says, one of their father’s favorite sayings.

  “Exactly,” Jason says, the smile back in his voice.

  She sighs, processing this new profile of Tessa, picturing a country-club lady of leisure. A Botoxed, lithe-limbed blonde indulging in midday tennis matches, shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus, champagne lunches at white-linen-tablecloth restaurants. “So she plays tennis? How nice for her,” Valerie says.

  “You should pick up tennis,” Jason says, clearly trying to change the subject. “Hank said he’d give you free lessons.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have to work, remember? I’m not married to a plastic surgeon. I only sleep with one when his wife’s out of town.”

  Jason clears his throat and says her name as a “buck up, sis” reprimand.

  “What?” she replies.

  “Don’t let this thing sour you.”

  “Too late.”

  “Happiness is the best revenge, you know? Just be happy. It’s a choice.”

  “Be happy, huh? Like Nick’s wife?” Valerie snaps. “Did Hank tell you how happy she is?”

  Jason hesitates and then says, “Actually, he said she’s very pleasant. Down-to-earth.”

  “Great. Fantastic,” she says, the guilt and remorse from Saturday morning replaced by a thick, strangling jealousy. “Is she gorgeous, too?”

  She braces herself, realizing that there is no answer Jason can give her that would satisfy her. If Nick’s wife is unattractive, she will feel used. If Tessa is gorgeous, she’ll feel inferior.