Secret Lives of Second Wives

by Catherine Todd

  He shrugged. “I’ll call my roommates. Somebody will come.”

  “I’m sorry about your car,” I repeated.

  He gave a half smile that made him look his age instead of the German-car-buying techno-tycoon obsessed with the oily excesses of sudden wealth. “E-holes,” they called them in Silicon Valley. “It’s okay. I will get it back, or one just like it.”

  His determined optimism reminded me why David and his ilk had transformed life as we knew it, for better or worse.

  “I sure hope so,” I told him.

  2

  What was that all about?” Jack asked when I had joined him inside. Despite my reassurances, he still hovered protectively just inside the door. “Aren’t you busy enough without trolling for business at my birthday party? And in the garage, no less?” He smiled.

  “They find me everywhere,” I told him. Which in a way was true. The high-tech boom had created such an incredible demand for skilled personnel that even the swollen immigrant stream—from China, India, and elsewhere—couldn’t fill it fast enough. Now the boom had gone bust, and the visas were expiring or void, stranding a lot of talented people who had no desire to go Home. It was an interesting time to be an immigration attorney.

  “Seriously,” I said to Jack, “didn’t the maître d’ tell you?”

  He shook his head. “He just said that someone called ‘Madam’ wanted me in the garage.” He laughed. “I thought that had possibilities, so down I came.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It was just some poor kid getting his car repossessed. Another swiped-out techie. The maître d’ thought it might be one of our guests. It wasn’t.”

  Jack stopped smiling. Even in the dim light, I could see the color drain from his face. Heart, I thought again. I tried not to clutch at him. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said, a shade curtly.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “You look—”

  “Don’t fuss, Lynn. I’m okay.”

  Second wives, contrary to the popular stereotype of the buxom bimbo stealing away the man of some poor female more endowed with virtue than with appetite, do not have it easy. There are so many players from the past imposing on the future. You imagine experiencing your life together as something new, but instead it becomes a series of linked vignettes that are something to be compared to. Every word, every gesture, has a history. Or not. You can’t know—that’s the problem. It’s like walking onto the stage in the middle of the play, when all the other actors know their lines except you.

  Maybe his ex-wife used to nag him. Maybe he has a headache. Maybe he just wants you to shut up.

  I dropped my hand from his arm.

  “Harrison is here,” he said after a moment. “He’s talking to Kay. They were asking about you. I think somebody might need rescuing.”

  “No doubt,” I said. Harrison was my law partner. He was sixty-four and courtly, but he always drank too much at parties and got sort of weepy about a weeklong vacation he’d once had at Lake Garda with his ex-wife. Usually it wasn’t Harrison who needed rescuing, but his conversational partners. Outside of social events, he was a good lawyer and my mentor besides, so I didn’t mind.

  Kay Burks was a real-estate agent, the hottest profession in the Bay Area after übergeek. We’d become friendly looking at houses from one end of the Peninsula to the other after Jack’s business started to grow and we decided to find a bigger place that didn’t have a History. Unfortunately, just about the time Jack’s business took off, everybody else’s did, too, resulting in a housing market whose prices reflected a constricted supply and an insatiable demand. “The sky’s the limit” wasn’t just a saying anymore. We were still looking. Meanwhile the appraisal on our own little tract house in Los Altos passed the million-dollar mark and was still climbing.

  Like me, Kay was a second wife. I suppose that was part of the reason for our friendship; sometimes you like people better as club members than if you just meet them on your own. For Kay second-wifedom (-wifery?) was more an avocation than a happenstance; she collected aphorisms and anecdotes the way other people collected knickknacks. Still, she was very smart and very amusing. Her husband was an allegedly brilliant but somewhat humorless orthopedic surgeon. I couldn’t see it, personally, but she seemed content enough.

  “Lago di Garda,” Harrison was saying, ominously. Kay, backed up against a table with her wineglass in hand, was giving him her best real-estate’s agent smile, the one you give the client who’s insisting his house is really worth $50K more than it’s listed for because of all the work he’s done on the flower beds. Her mind was obviously elsewhere.

  Harrison hadn’t noticed. “We had dinner on the terrace every night,” he was saying, awash in a tide of nostalgia augmented by a steady flow of bourbon. How had he gotten to this state so quickly? I’d been downstairs only a few minutes. He must have arrived half sloshed already.

  “Hi,” I said, opening my arms in a gesture meant to encompass them both. “Thank you for coming.”

  Kay’s fixed smile turned genuine. “Lynn, you look fantastic,” she said.

  My outfit for this occasion was a collaborative effort, for which she deserved at least half the credit. “You need more glamour,” she’d said, urging me away from the simple black dress I’d been planning to wear.

  I do not generally favor a look with which the word “glamour” can comfortably be coupled. “I don’t want to look like I’m trying too hard,” I told her on a reconnoitering trip at Nordstrom’s, waving away a velvet skirt-and-jacket ensemble whose price tag made me feel the need to breathe deeply into a paper bag.

  She closed her eyes. “Possibly, but it isn’t showing off to make some effort. Lynn, you have got to try this on. It’s stunning.”

  Kay frequently spoke in superlatives, a habit, I have noticed, not uncommon in her profession. “I don’t know…,” I said doubtfully.

  “Jack will love it,” she said.

  I wavered.

  “It makes you look thin,” she said when we were in front of the dressing-room mirror.

  You don’t have to be a marketing guru to appreciate the power of those five little words, the basis of more than one retail fortune. Glamour with an elasticized waistband.

  “Cash or charge?” the salesclerk asked.

  “You do look pretty nice, kiddo,” said Harrison now. He glanced over at Jack, who was talking to some of his business associates in a circle. “But your husband looks like he’s going to puke.” He laughed a little unsteadily. He looked as if he needed to sit down.

  Kay rolled her eyes at me. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to freshen my drink,” she said.

  ‘I’ll catch you later,” I said. I turned back to Harrison. “Jack’s a little depressed about turning fifty,” I told him.

  Harrison patted my arm. “He’ll get over it. We all do,” he said kindly.

  “I hope so,” I said, not wanting to confess any secret worries.

  Harrison leaned very close. He was still a handsome man, with a full head of white hair, but the bourbon had given his blue eyes a slightly watery, unfocused cast. He had never looked that way at the office. “I’m past it, Lynn,” he whispered.

  Christ, not another one. Was there something in the air? “Nonsense,” I said briskly.

  “I mean it,” he said. “I’m thinking of retiring.”

  “You’re not serious,” I said, genuinely surprised. Harrison and I had been partners for just a year. I’d counted myself incredibly fortunate when he’d taken me into his practice and offered me a stake in the firm. I’d had no clients to speak of in the Bay Area, and I’d closed my office in San Diego. I knew he wanted someone to turn the business over to eventually, but I never expected it would be anytime soon.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “I’m just … tired.”

  “At the moment maybe, but not tired tired. You have more energy than most men half your age.”

  “You’re a nice girl, Lynn,” he mumbl
ed.

  I hadn’t been a girl for about twenty-five years, but that was the way men his age talked. I wasn’t offended. Still, I hoped he wasn’t serious about retiring, at least not in the foreseeable future. Grady & Bartlett had far too much work for me to handle on my own, even with the associate and the paralegal Harrison had hired before he invited me into the firm. “You know we can’t afford to lose you, Harrison,” I told him. “The clients would all go to Elson.” Elson Larimer was the biggest immigration law firm in the Bay Area, the General Motors to our Audi boutique practice. Because they had a lot of the major institutional clients—the investment banks, the biggest consulting firms, the large-scale businesses—locked up, most of our clients were individuals who heard about us by word of mouth. There were enough of those to prove a thorn in Elson’s side, about the best we could hope for. Fortunately, for the moment there was plenty of work to go around.

  He shook his head. “You can handle it, Lynn. I wouldn’t consider it otherwise.” He sighed.

  “Well, we don’t have to talk about this right now,” I said. “Not immediately, right?”

  In truth, a move like this would take a lot of preparation, something Harrison undoubtedly realized. I assumed it was just the liquor talking or what I now realized was the dolorous effect the mention of birthdays seemed to have on men of a certain age. A warning shot over the bow maybe, but not an imminent threat.

  “Sure. Right,” he said. “Well, I think I’m going to go home now,” he said in the deliberate enunciation of the inebriated. “Wish your husband many happy returns for me, will you?”

  “I’ll do that,” I said. “Right after I call you a cab.”

  He squeezed my hand. “Okay,” he said sadly.

  “DID HARRISON LEAVE?” Jack asked me as we were standing in the buffet line.

  “He wasn’t feeling well,” I said succinctly. “He said to wish you many happy returns.”

  “Oh. That’s a shame,” he said. He understood perfectly well why Harrison had left, but he was going to be diplomatic and not mention it. Harrison was on my side of the guest list. I appreciated his discretion.

  There is an art to drawing up the invitations for a party given by a couple when one of them has lived in the area his entire adult life—including grad school, marriage, children, and career—and the other is a relative newcomer. It was Jack’s birthday party, but it would hardly do if all the invitees were people who used to be friends of Janet and Jack’s when they were together—people who had known them from student housing or soccer or Jack’s law firm before he left to start his own business. I’d been to some events like that, and it was like going to your spouse’s high-school reunion when you were the only person there who didn’t attend the school and get all the stories about lecherous Coach Snyder and what happened on Senior Ditch Day. The business of reinventing your life is a sticky one. It takes a surprising amount of careful planning, not to mention tact.

  I twisted my wedding ring, little diamonds surrounding a larger one in an antique gold setting. It was lovely and original and entirely unostentatious. Inside, Jack had inscribed, LOVE AND FORBEARANCE. It was as good a motto for a second marriage as I could imagine.

  “The food looks great,” Jack remarked. It did, at least for a steam table—the right combination of grilled vegetables, a low-fat entree, and sinful offerings (prime rib, seafood pasta Alfredo) to appeal to every taste. He looked at his watch. “I wonder if we should go through the line yet. Patrick and Meredith aren’t here.”

  Patrick and Meredith, my stepchildren, were an hour late. “The problem is,” I said carefully, “that if we don’t go through the line, no one else will eat either, and then the food will just sit here and congeal.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said in a distracted tone. “Still, I wonder if something could have happened….”

  “Were they coming together?” I asked innocently. Meredith lived with her “significant other,” Justin, a health-club instructor, and Patrick lived on his own. They didn’t seem to like each other much, and so far the only nongenetic unifying factor I had noted in their relationship was their resentment of their father’s second marriage.

  “I’m not sure,” he said.

  I was beginning to feel somewhat less festive myself. I stepped forward and took a not insubstantial portion of seafood pasta. Despite my southern California roots, I held a decidedly Continental view of the consoling properties of nourishment.

  Jack helped himself to grilled salmon, which he picked at. No speeches, he’d insisted when we made our plans for this event. No toasts. And definitely no gifts.

  I studied him surreptitiously while we ate. I hoped it wasn’t No fun either, but I was afraid he wasn’t enjoying himself. He smiled and joked with everybody who came up to congratulate or commiserate, but when he thought nobody was watching, his expression was drawn. He was good-looking, rather than handsome, with curly, light brown hair going to gray. His eyes were hazel, flecked with brown. Thanks to an abstemious diet and a ruthless exercise schedule—the results of a belated realization that immortality was increasingly unlikely, to say the least—he hadn’t gained an ounce over the last decade.

  Or so he claimed. I’d never so much as seen him step on the scales. I envied that kind of confidence.

  He caught me watching him and smiled. “I’m sorry, Lynn. The party’s wonderful, really. I didn’t mean to … I’m just a little preoccupied. It’s business. It’s not important right now. I promise I’ll tell you about it later.” He held out his hand. “Want to dance?”

  “Sure,” I said, somewhat relieved, although I felt a little like Michael Corleone’s wife in Godfather Part II. “It’s business” was usually a code for “none of yours.” Still, it was an apology of sorts. I took his hand, wishing my skirt were fuller cut. I did not excel at dancing, any more than I did behind the wheel. In fact, before we were married, I hadn’t danced since approximately 1978, which suited me just fine.

  Jack, however, was a skillful dancer, as well as a tactful one. He apologized every time I stepped on his foot.

  “You look great,” he said. “I know I told you before, but you really look nice tonight.”

  “Thanks,” I said, somewhat mollified. “So do you.”

  “Do you remember the first time we ever danced?” he asked.

  Of course I did. It was the night we met.

  “I’m not terribly good at it,” I’d told him then. Usually I didn’t apologize for my shortcomings in advance, but I figured he’d find out soon enough anyway.

  He’d laughed. “I don’t care. Neither am I.” That was a lie, I discovered, but a kind one. He took my hand and led me onto the floor of the hotel ballroom. After our chaste dinner, the physical contact upped the ante quite a bit. He put his arms out, and I stepped into them. The beginning of the beginning.

  “My lucky day,” I told him now. “Happy birthday, Jack.” I leaned forward to kiss him on the ear in a way that usually signaled that his present was coming later.

  I missed, because he turned his head away at the last second, looking across the room. Patrick was waving his arm, signaling him from the door. Meredith leaned against the wall, her arms folded, her expression, as always, disapproving.

  Jack waved back and propelled me over to where his son and daughter stood, his arm still around my waist.

  My best stepmother smile froze on my face.

  Jack’s arm dropped to his side.

  Between them, dressed to the nines, was their mother, Janet Katera Hughes Vivendi, her eyes alight with mischief.

  “I hope it’s okay,” Patrick said, addressing his father rather than me, his usual habit. “Mom wanted to wish you happy birthday. She didn’t want to crash your party, but—”

  “But we promised her you wouldn’t mind,” Meredith said, putting her arm around Jack’s waist and drawing him into the circle, away from me. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. You don’t mind, do you, Dad?”

  I looked at Janet’
s well-coiffed frosted hair. She’d just had it done, or I’d eat my napkin.

  “Well…,” Jack said.

  “I won’t stay long,” said Janet gaily, sweeping into the room. “I just wanted to say, Bon anniversaire! Feliz cumpleaños! Buon compleanno!” Her eyes slid to mine for the first time. “That means—”

  “I know what it means,” I said.

  3

  So what did he say when you got home?” Kay asked me. It was Sunday morning, after the party, and we were having coffee and splitting a mango-passion-fruit-macadamia-nut scone at a bakery on the main street of Los Altos village. She’d called me at eight A.M. to tell me she had the perfect—perfect!—house to show me in Los Altos Hills, Los Altos’s even more affluent neighbor, but it had to be today because another buyer was unmistakably interested. She’d made an arrangement to show it at 10:30, and why didn’t we meet for coffee first?

  I knew she was as interested in confession (mine) as commission (hers), but I didn’t care. Despite the early hour, I definitely needed to get out of the house.

  “Not much,” I said, taking a bite of the scone. It was as big as a softball and about as heavy, but delicious. Pastry on hormones.

  She looked at me inquiringly, waiting for me to swallow.

  “Patrick came home with us,” I explained, trying not to whine. “He had too much to drink. Jack thought he shouldn’t drive.”

  Kay rolled her eyebrows. “Why didn’t she take him home, then?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I didn’t ask. As a matter of fact, I said as little to her as possible. Under the circumstances that seemed like the wisest course.”

  Kay shook her head. “That’s just what she was counting on. You know that, don’t you?”

  I took a sip of coffee. “What difference does it make?” I asked. “I couldn’t make a scene. It was Jack’s birthday party. He wanted the kids there. They wanted their mother there. I couldn’t spoil it for him. It wasn’t his fault Janet showed up uninvited.”

  She leaned forward earnestly. Her diamond, whose size was somewhere between extra-large and ostentatious, caught the sun and sent a light beam straight into my eye. I blinked. “You’ve got to talk to Jack,” she said earnestly. “He has to put his foot down with his children. Otherwise they’ll make your life miserable. Mark my words.”