Secret Lives of Second Wives

by Catherine Todd

  “From Russia?” He sounded slightly alarmed.

  “One or two,” I said. “The rest should be from non-Russians who are independent of Stanford. Maybe physics professors or other scientists you’ve met through your work.”

  “That could be a problem,” he said quietly. “I really don’t want anyone in Russia to know about this. Also …” He cleared his throat. “There may be a difficulty in discussing some of my work.”

  “Because it was top secret?”

  “In a way,” was all he said.

  I wondered what he was hiding. I couldn’t believe it was a criminal past, but stranger things had happened, and these days the Department of Justice was in no mood to take chances. “Don’t misrepresent anything,” I told him frankly. “Even if you get permanent-resident status, it can be revoked if there’s anything false about the application. Remember all those Nazis who lied on their immigration documents? Forty years after the war, the INS still came after them. And today they’re far more skittish, for reasons I’m sure I don’t have to explain.”

  “I understand,” he said. He looked almost amused and not at all intimidated. “I have nothing to lie about, but there is a difference between lying and telling everything, isn’t there?”

  He’d probably captured in a nutshell the essence of practicing law, but still. I gave him my best I’m-in-charge-here look and said, “I have to tell you, that kind of statement makes me very nervous, Dr. Strela.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. I waited, but he didn’t say anything further.

  “This is the point at which you’re supposed to offer some kind of reassurance,” I prompted him.

  He smiled, a slow, confident sort of grin. “How about ‘I haven’t done anything that would compromise you, Ms. Bartlett’?” he said.

  “That’s a start,” I said. “Full disclosure will have to come eventually. I mean it. We want to make the best case we can, and I have to feel comfortable with the facts as we present them.”

  “Okay.”

  His self-possession was intriguing, and more than a little attractive. I wondered if it came from always being the smartest person in the room. I was in the habit of sizing up potential clients rather quickly, and I didn’t get what people used to call “bad vibes” from him. On the contrary. He was certainly keeping something hidden, but I very much doubted if it was an affiliation with the Russian Mafia or a history with drugs. Countries like the Soviet Union had produced all kinds of people with reasons to hide things.

  “If I get my green card, I can work anywhere in the U.S., is that right?” he asked.

  “As long as you stay within your field. If you open an ice-cream store instead, they could revoke it.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Really? I like ice cream. It’s one of my favorite things about America.”

  Momentarily distracted, I asked, “Didn’t you have ice cream in Russia?”

  He looked at the ceiling and rolled his eyes. “Why did the Siberian peasant buy a refrigerator?” He looked at me expectantly.

  “Is this a joke?” I asked, caught off guard.

  “It’s supposed to be,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Why?”

  “To have someplace warm to spend the winter,” he said.

  “Oh. I see. But you take my point.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “I don’t know any Russian jokes,” I told him. “I never thought about it, but humor probably tells you a lot about the place.”

  He smiled. “Yes, it does.”

  I would have liked to ask him more about Russian humor, but business was business. “Anyway,” I said, “you can work anywhere, with that limitation. Also,” I added, “if your wife should join you here, she can work, too.” He’d already told me his wife wasn’t with him, but I thought I should mention it. Was I curious? Maybe just a little.

  “She will not be joining me,” he said flatly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I should say.

  “I suppose you would say we are separated. Legally separated.” He shrugged. “She went home.”

  I knew how that was, since I’d seen it happen. The wife was unhappy because she didn’t know anyone and didn’t speak English. Without a job, she was marooned, away from the support of friends or family. It was easy to imagine the loneliness, the isolation. “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “I don’t blame her,” he said.

  “Well,” I said briskly, “when you decide whether you want to proceed, I’ll need a deposit of half the fee. The money goes into a trust account until the work is completed. The other half is due at the time of filing.”

  “I’ve already decided,” he said. “Will you help me, Ms. Bartlett?”

  “My clients call me Lynn, Dr. Strela.”

  He smiled his celebrity smile. “Alexei.”

  18

  Il Fornaio is the new Silicon Valley—all glitz and mirrors and upscale menu—in the middle of Palo Alto’s funky old main street. University Avenue used to be a fifties-style collection of fairly pedestrian retail businesses, like drugstores and ice-cream parlors, with a couple of aging theaters and a handful of bookshops and cheap eateries, mostly catering to Stanford students, but without the psychedelic tackiness of Berkeley. If you overlooked the brief historical cachet enjoyed because it was the site of the original Mrs. Fields Cookies (where Debbie Fields herself used to hand out samples on the street, to promote sales), there was nothing much to distinguish it from a small-town Main Street in the Midwest.

  The dot-com explosion had changed all that, like a fairy godmother sweeping in to tart up a reluctant, dowdy Cinderella. Vestiges remained, but now the merchandise was trendy, the run-down, gilded movie theater was an elegant Borders bookstore, and the burgeoning numbers of cafés and restaurants were neither modest nor cheap.

  I circled the block a couple of times, looking for a diagonal parking place. Since I couldn’t parallel-park, I was relieved when somebody pulled out of something I could actually get into. Parking on crowded streets makes me start to sweat, and I was already annoyed at the prospect of meeting Janet. Sweaty and irritable—just the way you’d love to be perceived by your husband’s ex-wife.

  Janet was waiting at the table, in serene, air-conditioned composure. She was very slender, especially for her age, with close-cropped blond hair and a deep voice that sounded as if she smoked. I would have liked to believe that she did, but in the Bay Area hardly anyone committed such an egregious faux pas in public, so you could never tell. Lighting up exposed you to the same social opprobrium for moral laxity as did showing too much avoirdupois on the beach in L.A. or eating a Big Mac on the street in Paris.

  She stood when I entered and offered me both cheeks to kiss, like a European. I attributed this action to any number of unflattering motives, not the least of which was to discomfit me, so I went along with it, trying not to bump her with my nose. “Thank you for joining me,” she said when we had each smiled insincerely at the other and taken our seats.

  I waited for her to tell me the purpose of this luncheon, but she seemed in no hurry. She studied the menu as if it might reveal some secret bit of information indispensable to making the right choice. I glanced at my watch. I’d been there only five minutes, but they were long ones. I mean, what did we have to say to each other? I wanted to get this over with and get back to work. At length I skimmed the menu and told the waiter, “I’ll have the ahi salad and iced tea.”

  Janet didn’t look up from her perusal.

  “Would you like me to give you a few more minutes?” the waiter asked.

  Janet glanced at me, saw my look of consternation, and smiled. She hesitated. “I’ll have the abbacchio al forno,” she said. “The lamb,” she repeated, for my benefit.

  “So,” she said, when the waiter had gone, “how are you getting along with Patrick?”

  I let out my breath. I had to stop myself from shrugging. “Fine,” I said, as cheerfully as I could manage. “I don
’t see him all that much, actually.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  I heard the implied criticism but tried not to react to it. “I’m not home that much these days,” I said.

  Her lips twitched. “Well. Meredith says he’s depressed.”

  “I imagine he is,” I said, more sharply than I intended. “Who wouldn’t be, living at home at his age and having no job?”

  “Then, if you understand that, perhaps you could persuade Jack to find him something,” she said. “Also, maybe you could find it in your heart to be just a little more patient with him. He thinks you don’t like him.”

  I had to bite my tongue on that one. “He told you that?” I asked.

  “Not in so many words. Something Meredith let slip.”

  Meredith appeared to have been very busy letting things slip. “Quite honestly, Jack’s the one you should be talking to, not me,” I told her. “He’s in the better position to help him. I’m happy to have Patrick living with us for the time being, but I think his mood has very little to do with me.”

  “Then you aren’t the one who imposed the time limit?” she asked pointedly.

  I flushed. I couldn’t believe Jack would have told her that, so Patrick must have assumed it. “It was a mutual decision,” I said, in what I hoped was a tone indicating that the subject was closed. “Thank you for your thoughts. I’ll bear them in mind. And, of course, if he feels too uncomfortable, you can always invite him to live with you.”

  She parried my thrust with a shrug. “I’m just trying to be honest. I thought you’d appreciate that.”

  I’ve noticed that people who say unpleasant things often defend them on the grounds of honesty, as if that were some kind of ultimate justification, like an appeal to the Ten Commandments. It’s useless to argue with those who are determined to feel themselves your moral superior, however speciously. More to the point, she didn’t respond to the suggestion that she might take her son in herself, but in her case I would have pretended not to hear it either. I looked desperately for the waiter, who was, of course, nowhere to be found. I wondered how we were going to get through the rest of this lunch. “I understand that some of your ceramics are on display at the crafts gallery in Los Altos,” I said at length. Moira had gleaned that on her visit to her former daughter-in-law.

  Janet nodded. “Yes, they are. Have you seen them?”

  I said I had not had that pleasure. I did not add “yet,” but that is what she assumed.

  “I’ll be interested in your opinion,” she said. “It’s always interesting to see what someone who is not artistic perceives in a piece.”

  Thus consigned to the Philistine hordes, I occupied myself with buttering my roll in silence, until I remembered I didn’t eat butter anymore. I was determined not to let her provoke me. It was better to hold the high ground and get out early.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Patrick isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “No?” I said, my heart sinking.

  “No,” she said firmly. “It’s Meredith.”

  Uh-oh. “I hope nothing’s wrong,” I murmured.

  “Not at all,” Janet said, sitting back in her chair. “She’s getting married.”

  “To Justin?” I asked, sounding, I’m afraid, a bit dim. Who else would it be? But what a surprise!

  “Well, yes,” Janet said.

  “How nice,” I said. I wondered what Jack would say about his daughter’s marrying a fitness instructor at a health club. I mean, Justin was nice enough, but he was hardly the sharpest knife in the drawer. Plus, he was not a good foil for Meredith’s own somatic absorption and fear of unhealthy food. Come to think of it, I had to wonder why I hadn’t heard this news from Jack first.

  “Does Jack know this?” I asked her.

  “Probably not, unless Meredith has told him. I thought it might be a good idea to discuss the news with you first, before he finds out.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Several reasons,” she said as the waiter at last set our lunches in front of us.

  I took a bite of the tuna while I waited for her to continue. Delicious.

  “Meredith has lived in the community for a long time,” she said. “She has her heart set on a—how shall I put this?—showpiece wedding. I’ve tried to talk her into something smaller-scale, but she’s exceptionally romantic. She always has been.”

  I hadn’t noticed. I understood that she meant that the wedding Meredith wanted would be—how shall I put this?—expensive. “I’m sure you must be very excited to help her plan it,” I observed.

  She hesitated. “Yes, of course, but the truth is that I can’t afford to pay for it, and neither can she.”

  I remembered that this was the woman who had declared bankruptcy rather than contribute to her children’s college education, so I knew what she was angling for. It put me in a ticklish position, though. It was clear she couldn’t know about Jack’s financial difficulties, and I didn’t know how much to say. I put down my fork. My appetite was rapidly evaporating.

  “I’m sure Jack will be happy to contribute,” I told her. “I don’t know on what scale. It wouldn’t necessarily … Well, look. You really need to talk to him.”

  She looked as if I had just handed her a Christmas present, and a big one at that. “I will,” she said.

  Too late, I realized my error. I should have said Meredith really needed to talk to Jack.

  “It’s just that our friends have expectations…,” Janet said.

  “Yours and Valerio’s?”

  “Jack’s and mine,” she said matter-of-factly. “Well, they are still our friends, even though we’re not together. I hope you understand. I wanted to have this talk so that you would know that you don’t have anything to worry about—”

  “Worry about?” My voice rose involuntarily.

  “—even though Jack and I are going to be involved in this wedding,” she said.

  “Of course I’m not worried,” I lied, “although I can’t imagine that Jack will want to be involved in the details. Does Valerio go in for that sort of thing?”

  She took a bite of lamb and swallowed it with apparent satisfaction. “You might as well know,” she said, “that Valerio has gone back to Italy.” She wiped her lips delicately with the napkin and looked at me. “I’m not sure he’s coming back,” she said.

  19

  I called Meredith at work (she taught at a local Montessori school), because I wanted to ask her right away whether she wanted me to break the news of her wedding to Jack. I knew if I remained silent I would be seen as uncaring and manipulative, whereas if I was first with the tidings I would be seen as uncaring and manipulative. It seemed prudent to find out what Meredith wanted and dodge the ball, if I could, but the school secretary said she had called in sick. Thus thwarted, I put in a call to Naoko at Kojima Bank and got her voice mail. I knew she was ducking my calls, and I certainly knew what that meant. But I couldn’t see losing the client without a fight.

  I put my half-filled coffee cup (my sixth of the day) down on the desk, listened to the acid rumbling of my stomach, and suddenly felt very tired. I decided to pack it in.

  “I’m out of here till tomorrow,” I told Adam. “Call me if anything important happens.”

  “You mean like if Hewlett-Packard decides to change immigration counsel?” Adam asked with a smile.

  I laughed. “On second thought, why don’t you close up shop, too? We could all use a break.”

  “Not from too much work,” Brooke said from the doorway.

  Much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t disagree with her.

  My parents always told me I could be anything I wanted, and then they left me to decide for myself what that was. Since I had stumbled into someone else’s ready-made family life, I’d come to realize the extent to which they’d left me alone. Not physically alone, certainly, but just more or less to my own devices, as long as I was content and reasonably successful. I did not in any way resemble today
’s micromanaged child, scheduled from dawn to dusk and schlepped from music lessons to soccer games to play dates to tutoring sessions by hypervigilant parental attendants eager to provide every advantage. My parents apparently felt that every advantage was being provided by two benevolent if somewhat preoccupied adults, adequate food (if you don’t count the overcooked vegetables), and a house full of books. Since I was a quiet, independent child who loved to read, their method of child rearing probably succeeded as well as anyone else’s.

  Of course, that business about being anything I wanted was a crock. Ballerina was clearly out, despite my youthful fantasies and dancing lessons, as were cellist, race-car driver, baseball player, or anything remotely having to do with sports. Nor did I conceive an early inclination for the law by watching Perry Mason reruns. I drifted into law school because I was curious, because there isn’t much you can do with an English major that will earn a living, and because my grades were good enough to get in. Until Harrison’s bizarre peccadilloes had landed me in a royal mess, I’d been content enough with my choice, though I have already explained about my aversion to a big-time corporate practice. I liked the clients, I liked the way you had to be looking down the road, legally speaking, all the time, and I even liked, in a peculiar sort of way, the jousting with the INS. It suited my nature, which was, I suppose, critical and objective. What I didn’t like, just at the moment, was being responsible for the futures of all the people I’d inherited with Grady & Bartlett.

  Before I left, I put in a call to Kay. “Could you be looking around for some cheaper office space for me?” I asked her.

  “What about your lease?” she asked.

  “It’s a month-to-month. The landlord wanted to be able to raise the rates when space was at a premium.”

  “They’re a bunch of greedy bastards,” she said. “They squeezed people on the way up, and now they squeeze them when the companies fail. I could see it if you bought the building at the top of the market and have to make your payments, but a lot of them owned the properties long before the dot-com bubble. Anyway, I’ll keep my eyes open. How many people will you want space for?”