Secret Lives of Second Wives

by Catherine Todd

  Jack said, “My ex-wife, Janet, was very artistic and creative. She felt stifled in the marriage—I was building the firm, and I was working a lot—so she left me for an Italian professor at Stanford. The marriage hadn’t been good for quite a while, but I didn’t want it to end because the kids were still at home, and they were very upset. I don’t hold it against her, though; we all get along now. She and Valerio moved to Florence for a couple of years, which the kids loved. Now they’re back on the Peninsula.” He looked at me. “Family is very important to me,” he said. “My own parents didn’t get along that well, and I was determined not to duplicate those hostilities in front of my kids.”

  When you’re in a relationship with somebody, you listen to this sort of speech very carefully, even (or especially) when you’re in love. Reading between the lines, I extracted mostly positive things: He didn’t trash her character (I hate it when divorced people do that, however justified they think themselves), he’d taken a responsible attitude toward his children, he didn’t seem to be pining, and the ex-Mrs. Hughes was securely remarried. What I didn’t learn till later was that Janet had declared bankruptcy when it was time to send Patrick to college so she wouldn’t have to fork over her portion of the tuition money. That Jack had been paying her psychiatrist bills for years because, according to Janet, “he owed her.” That her second husband was spending more and more time in Italy, alone. That she called Jack at least once a week and sent him postcards of impressionist paintings with cryptic little messages, “just to keep in touch.”

  Anyway, we went on like this for some time. In many ways a longdistance relationship is just about perfect—there isn’t enough proximity for those endearing little habits to become annoying, and you get to preserve a measure of privacy and “space.” It takes work to sustain romance when you’ve seen somebody flossing his teeth, or worse. The next step—the one where you get to wash each other’s dirty underwear and see each other first thing in the morning (no joke when you’re over forty)—was one I wasn’t in a big hurry to take.

  Which is why, when Jack started his campaign to get me to marry him, I at first resisted.

  “What’s the rush?” I asked him. “Aren’t we fine as we are?”

  Also, I’d already been married, so I knew the downside, you might say.

  I MARRIED MY FIRST HUSBAND, Jonathan, while I was still in law school. Law school is such a bleak and lonely experience that I made the stupid mistake of thinking that shared misery might make a sound basis for a successful marriage. It actually did, for a while; we were both too busy to disagree about anything. But then Jonathan graduated and took a job at a top-tier New York law firm, so I transferred to NYU to finish out my second and third years.

  The life of a new associate is something like a medical intern’s; perpetual exhaustion is de rigueur. Anxiety runs high, because you don’t learn practical things in law school, so when you do land a real legal job, you don’t have a clue what’s going on. You compete with a lot of other smart, volcanically ambitious associates from good schools, all of whom have their eye on the mere handful of partnership slots seven years or so down the road. All this is not conducive to a stress-free life, and the spouse is expected to be Understanding.

  I was, up to a point, but Jonathan was extreme even by new-associate standards. He worked nights. He worked weekends. He worked Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Eve. He had a sleeping bag and an air mattress in his office, and on more than one occasion, he spent the night. He voluntarily passed up his vacation without consulting me, although he was entitled to at least three weeks. He brought work home when he wasn’t at the office, muttering to himself and glaring at me when I made any noise. He lost weight and started to develop a hollow-eyed, fanatical look reminiscent of a young Savonarola.

  “You don’t understand,” he told me after an entire year in which we went out to a movie together approximately three times and to cultural events virtually never.

  “But what’s the point of living in New York if you don’t take advantage of it?” I’d complained. I did almost everything alone.

  “This is what you have to do to succeed,” he said fiercely. “This is what it takes to make partner.”

  I pointed out that this is what it took to be important enough to get your heart attack reported in the Wall Street Journal, which he did not appear to find amusing.

  “Is this what life is going to be like for the next seven years?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer me, which of course was an answer in itself.

  What did animate him was my apparent lack of interest in a corporate career similar to his own. “Did you sign up for the Tinker MacDonald interview?” he asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s the biggest firm on Wall Street,” he said. “Do you have any idea of how much you’d make to start?”

  I knew.

  “You have good grades,” he said more urgently. “You might get an offer.”

  I had already explained that I didn’t want such an offer, information he appeared not to have absorbed. By the third or fourth missed opportunity, he started to panic. “Do you know what you’re giving up?” he said.

  I did not think it would be tactful to point out that I could see what I was giving up every day. To live the life Jonathan was living, or even an approximation of it, was unthinkable. I tried, once more, to explain: “I don’t really want to practice corporate law,” I told him. “I’m looking for something more low-key.”

  “Low-key?” he said in a horrified tone. He made it sound as if I’d confessed to a preference for necrophilia. Which, I suppose, is about as low-key as things can get. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’d like a smaller firm and a practice that’s less”—I searched for the right word—“intense. I’m looking around,” I added, more confidently than I felt. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “You’ll be left behind,” he said seriously. “I hope you know that.”

  “Left behind how?” I asked, although I could guess.

  “Financially. Professionally. Socially. You name it.”

  He meant that he would be embarrassed to be married to someone who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—Compete. It would be okay if I made a living selling macramé plant hangers or herbal supplements, but if I was going to step into the arena, I had to play hardball.

  “Think about it,” he said.

  “I will,” I told him.

  Three months later I accepted a job with a medium-size immigration law firm in Los Angeles, where my parents lived.

  THE WORST THING ABOUT A BAD MARRIAGE is that it makes you doubt your own choices. Once I had failed rather dramatically to choose wisely, I’d lost confidence in my powers of discernment. Serial monogamy with a succession of glowering workaholics didn’t appeal to me at all, but the truth is, I admired competence and dedication, and I might go on being attracted—at least initially—to Jonathan’s type. Not only that, but “choosing” implies one selection from a range of possibilities. The range was narrowing, to say the least, and anyway, it seems to me that most relationships are the result of a series of benign and intriguing accidents. Choice might not have all that much to do with it, whatever Freud had to say on the subject.

  All of which is a roundabout and probably inadequate explanation of why, despite his charms, I hesitated when Jack asked me to marry him. He was competent and dedicated and successful, all the qualities I’d once thought I admired in Jonathan. Maybe his virtues would turn out to be vices, too. Also, by then I’d been essentially alone for a long time and I craved a certain amount of solitude and privacy, which might have been another way of saying that I’d become crotchety and inflexible, depending on whom you asked.

  Jack, on the other hand, was optimistic enough for two. “You’ll love living in the Bay Area,” he said cannily. “People don’t start tax revolts every time there’s some needed public expenditure. They support the public library. It’s your kind of place. A
nd professionally it couldn’t be better,” he said, warming to the topic. “There’s a huge demand for immigrant technological workers. It’s the perfect locale for an immigration practice. You’d have unlimited opportunities. Besides,” he added, looking at me in a way that had an extremely positive effect on my anatomy, “I love you. I want to be with you all the time, not just now and then.” He smiled. “I won’t crowd you, I promise. I know you’re independent. It’s what I love about you. I wouldn’t try to change that.”

  “What about Meredith and Patrick?” I asked.

  “They love you already,” he said firmly. Too firmly, probably, but I didn’t know enough to be suspicious. “And anyway, they have their own lives now. They just want me to be happy.”

  Okay, anyone over the age of fifteen will probably recognize the naiveté on both sides of this conversation. But Jack’s certainty was so convincing. Plus, he was leaving his law firm—cutting back, he said—to become a consultant at an Internet start-up. With options. With luck he could retire altogether in a couple of years. Plus—and this plus was a big plus—he wooed me with books. Not just any books, but books he thought I would like. Even better, I did like them, for the most part. It was very flattering and not a little erotic to be courted through your mind. I mean, how could you resist a man who sent you Le Mariage and Le Divorce because he knew you’d love Diane Johnson? Even if he hadn’t read them himself?

  Also, he was the only grown male I had ever met, dated, or heard of who did not scream at the set during televised sporting events involving some kind of ball. I mean, think about moving in with someone and discovering that a dialogue with the refs formed the backdrop of every weekend afternoon, not to mention Monday nights.

  Not only that, he made me laugh. It’s not always easy to remember that now, but he did. Not that I had to tot up a scorecard. I was in love with him, too. I think I had been ever since he fished a daddy longlegs out of the bathtub and, wearing only a towel, carried it outside on the edge of a Kleenex box and put it down in a flower bed outside my front door. I am not a big fan of spiders, and personally I probably would have squashed it, but I had never met a man so tenderhearted and affectionate.

  So there was Jack—kind, gentle, smart, funny, well read, decent, and honorable—all the qualities you weren’t supposed to be able to find outside the pages of a novel. And intent on getting me to marry him.

  The outcome, as they say, was never really in doubt. The clincher (if you discard Dear Abby’s test: “Are you better off with him or without him?”) was one of those moments of introspective clarity in which I realized that I’d become almost feline in my fondness for routine. I had a comfortable practice, a comfortable condo, and a comfortable life. I was wryly unmarried, but not unhappily so. I’d had my share of uninspiring dates. After more than a decade, I was ready for something more than nights curled up with Jane Austen and a truculent tomcat. There comes a point in your life when you finally internalize the fact that no one is given an eternity of looks and youth and options. You have to do something. You have to move on.

  The Spanish explorer Cortés scuttled his ships on the coast of Mexico so there could be no going back. If I did marry Jack, I would have to sell my condo, close my practice, burn my bridges, sink my boats. Anything less would be cowardly, a failure of nerve. It was time to stop hedging my bets.

  “Marry me?” Jack asked, for approximately the sixth time, as we were having black-bean soup, my favorite, at George’s at the Cove terrace café in La Jolla. A half dozen proposals. Expecting more might be pressing my luck.

  I would miss George’s view, not to mention the soup, which was outstanding.

  I put down my spoon decisively. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I will.”

  5

  He wants to move in with us, just for a while,” Jack repeated.

  Various responses—ranging from the juvenile (“I’d rather be flayed alive”) to the just (“But we agreed …”)—came to mind. I opened my mouth to shriek … something … and then closed it again. Sometimes there is a tactical advantage in silence.

  I looked at him.

  “I know we talked about this before we were married…,” Jack said.

  “We did a little more than talk,” I pointed out. As a matter of fact, it was part of the pre-nup: No other residents in the house except in the case of emergency and by mutual consent. So far this didn’t seemed to qualify on either basis.

  “I know that,” he acknowledged. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think this would ever come up.”

  “Jack, I really don’t think it would work out very well,” I said. I didn’t want to elaborate my reasons, so they hung there unspoken: The house is small, your son dislikes me, I need my space. You promised….

  “It would only be temporary,” he said.

  The universe was only temporary, when you put it into a large enough time frame. I didn’t want to trust “temporary.”

  “Just till he finds another job,” he added.

  “Jack, he keeps getting fired or quitting. It’s not going to be that easy to find something else.” This was probably tactless, but sugarcoating the situation would have Patrick installed in the guest room by the end of the day.

  “I have some contacts,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I can probably help.”

  He’d helped far too much already, in my opinion. It’s always a little too easy to analyze somebody else’s family dysfunctions, but I thought that a big part of Patrick’s problem was the fact that he’d never had to do much of anything on his own. Jack had told me how much the divorce had upset the children and how guilty he’d felt when he realized the extent to which his absence had changed things for the worse. It didn’t matter that the divorce wasn’t his idea; he’d been making it up to them ever since. I had to respect him for his feelings, but I couldn’t really approve of the results, especially now that I was having to live with them in every sense of the word.

  “Wouldn’t it be better for him to live someplace else?” I asked. “It can’t be very good for his self-esteem to move in with his dad.” Usually I hate the term “self-esteem,” but I was desperate.

  “Who else would take him in?” Jack said. “I’m his father.”

  His friends. His mother.

  I didn’t have to say anything. Jack knew what I was thinking. “Janet’s going through a really bad time right now,” he said bleakly.

  Right. She’d looked like it at the birthday party.

  “Plus, they don’t get along that well,” he added.

  This conversation was beginning to have “done deal” written all over it. “So what did you tell him?” I asked.

  He looked grim.

  “Please be honest,” I said.

  “I said I would check with you.”

  “And?”

  He hesitated. Then he met my eyes. “And that I was sure you would agree.”

  Done deal, definitely. “So basically he’s gone to pack up his stuff, right?”

  “Probably,” he said. “Look, if you really object, I’ll call him right now. I’m trying to do the best thing for everybody. I didn’t think I had any real choice, but I won’t insist if you just can’t live with it.”

  Oh, great. Then I could be the heavy and wreck their plans. “What I object to is not being consulted before you told him it would be okay,” I said quietly. “I know this is hard for you, but this is my house and my life, too. We’re supposed to make decisions that affect the two of us in concert, remember?”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He looked at me. “Don’t think I don’t understand that this isn’t fair. I do. I wish he—” He stopped. I knew what he wished. I wished it, too, more than he did probably. “I really need your help with this,” he said after a moment. I could almost see him searching, cannily, for the right approach. There were no flies on Jack. “We can help him together,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “So what do you want me to do, Lynn?”

  Not put me i
n this situation, for one thing. I knew he didn’t like having to ask permission regarding something concerning his children. Or anything else. But if I didn’t protest now, what would the future hold? “Would there be a time limit?” I asked.

  “To what?”

  “To how long Patrick lives with us. Three months? Six months? A year? Or would it be open-ended?”

  He looked horrified. “He’s not moving in with us for good, Lynn. It’s only temporary. I promise.”

  “It might be a good idea to define how long temporary is,” I suggested.

  “If that’s what you want,” he said coldly.

  None of this was what I wanted. “It’s what I’ll agree to,” I said.

  “He’ll probably think we don’t trust him,” he muttered.

  I looked at him. I wasn’t going to touch that one if my life depended on it.

  “Six months, then,” he said, lips tight. “Will that satisfy you?”

  “Jack,” I said, “I’m sorry to keep picking at this, but I think it’s better—much better—that we lay our cards on the table now rather than after Patrick moves in. I know you don’t want to hurt his feelings, but I have to know what happens if he hasn’t found a place after six months.” The muscles in my neck and shoulders were knotted and tense, and I could feel a headache starting at the base of my skull. The confrontation I’d always feared—the one with Patrick or Meredith on one side, me on the other, and Jack in the middle—was taking shape. I’d been fending it off ever since we’d been married. I sensed the ground rules shifting.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said. He looked at me. “Surely you can trust me as much as that.”

  Marriage, especially remarriage, is a continual balancing act. Sometimes you’re a team, and sometimes it’s just you in the outfield, all alone with the fly ball. Separate but equal. Figuring out exactly how to achieve that without degenerating into a nagfest on the one hand or a dictatorship on the other has fueled counseling sessions since Adam and Eve (who was, at least according to some versions of the annals of the First Family, a second wife herself).