Secret Lives of Second Wives

by Catherine Todd

  Was this an innocent question? I doubted it, but I couldn’t be sure. Before I could answer, Jack said, “With me, Merry. Of course.”

  Neither of them reacted to what was, essentially, a declaration. At the time I remember feeling a bit relieved that nothing more was said. Ha.

  Meredith was pushing rice grains around her plate with the tip of her fork. “I think there’s coconut in this rice,” she announced. “Could you get the waiter?” she asked Jack.

  Jack signaled the waiter with a look of resignation.

  “Is there coconut in this rice?” Meredith asked him when he approached the table.

  Did his lips twitch just a little? I hope so. “I believe the dish is made with coconut milk,” he said. “Also a bit of onion and some garlic.” He straightened. “All the ingredients were on the menu,” he said. “Should I bring you the recipe? The chef is very happy to share them with our customers.”

  “I won’t be making it,” she said sternly. “Not with coconut milk. I won’t be eating it either.”

  “I’m very sorry,” said the waiter. “Would you like me to bring you some plain rice instead?”

  “Not white,” Meredith said. “Brown, if you have it.”

  “I’ll check with the chef,” he said. “Will there be anything else?”

  “Not just now,” Jack said quickly. “Thank you for your help.”

  “I was telling Mom,” Meredith said when we had resumed our meal, “that the school is finally getting around to wiring my classroom for the Internet. Every other grade level has already had access for ages. The parents have been complaining right and left.”

  “What grade do you teach?” I asked.

  “Third,” she said. “Anyway, the electricians and the phone company came in first thing this morning while I was teaching class. Right in the middle! And they …”

  She proceeded to tell a lengthy but largely innocuous (if you don’t count the invocations of her mother’s opinions, which occurred with suspicious frequency) story about the installation, directed for the most part toward her father. Patrick yawned conspicuously while I sat attentively, the model guest. I might have spared myself the trouble; she rarely glanced my way.

  The brown rice came at length, followed rather closely by the check. (No dessert. No coffee. A family tradition, apparently, since no one even asked.) “It’s on me, of course,” Jack said, although, as far as I could see, there was no discernible reaching for wallets. “My treat.”

  “Thank you, Jack,” I said. “This was lovely.”

  “Well, I’ve got to be going,” Meredith said. “I’ve got an early day tomorrow.”

  Jack smiled. “Tomorrow’s Saturday, Merry.”

  “I know that, Dad,” she said. “Justin and I are going for an early run.”

  “I’m taking off, too,” Patrick said.

  We stood and shook hands and pronounced “nice to meet you”s all round.

  Afterward Jack said, “That went well, I thought.”

  “It was a lovely dinner,” I repeated.

  “They liked you a lot,” he said. “I can tell.”

  I smiled at the hyperbole. “You’re prejudiced,” I said.

  He took my hand. “This is the point at which you’re supposed to say, ‘I liked them a lot, too.’ ”

  I felt a rush of affection for him, for his concern that all of us should be happy together. “It went fine, Jack,” I said. “I think we’ll all be friends.”

  “Patrick was a little quiet,” he said, “but when you get to know him, you’ll see that he has a wonderful sense of humor. And Merry …” His voice took on an indulgent tone. “She’s very … oh, I guess you’d say rigorous. Her standards are very exacting.”

  “Yes, they must be,” I murmured.

  He grinned suddenly. “Actually, she scares the hell out of me. I mean, how can anybody ever measure up?”

  Good, I thought. At least he can laugh about it. “She’s certainly very pretty,” I said.

  He smiled fondly. “She takes after her mother, not me,” he said. Then he looked at me quickly, to see if I’d taken offense.

  “Janet must be very attractive, then,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I suppose she is.”

  LYING IN THE DARK in Jack’s house in what would, in time, become our bedroom, I had leisure to examine the evening more objectively. I didn’t share Jack’s certainty that his children liked me, but I hardly expected that. They hadn’t attacked me (verbally or physically) or implied I was after their father’s money or any of the other hallmarks of second-wife horror stories. (In fairness, they didn’t exactly know I was going to be the second wife, but I doubted the news would come as a shock.) They had seemed, for the most part, indifferent to my presence, as if I were a stranger they’d encountered in an airport. That was perfectly okay with me. As long as the relationship remained cordial, I didn’t need to be the center of attention. In fact, it mirrored, in some respects, the relationship I’d had with my own parents.

  Quite frankly, I thought Jack’s children were a little weird, particularly Meredith, but if she wanted to regard the entire spectrum of edible creation with suspicion, I supposed there were worse neuroses. I foresaw some difficulties with family dinners, but I figured I could always prevail on Jack to cook. On the whole, their initial bland indifference was comforting, even hopeful. In time we might even be friends. I permitted myself a brief, warm fantasy of a loving family around the dinner table, trading jokes and catching up on one another’s news.

  And then there was Jack, lying beside me in a gentle, contented sleep. His body—I loved his body and the way my body felt when I was with him—was both familiar and mysterious. I felt a deep kind of peace, the kind that comes from a long-term emotional investment after a lot of relationships where my bags were always packed, literally and figuratively. So what if his family was a bit eccentric? It felt like home.

  I decided that Jack’s assessment, that the evening had been a success, was right after all. We would be happy; things would work out.

  That’s what I hoped anyway.

  I never claimed to be clairvoyant.

  23

  To: Lynn

  From: Alexei

  Russian physics joke:

  —Ivan, did you know that Albert Einstein is coming to Odessa?

  —Who’s he?

  —A famous physicist. He is the author of the Theory of Relativity.

  —What’s that?

  —Well, how can I explain this… ? Let’s see, you have two hairs on your head. Is that a lot or a little?

  —A little.

  —And now let’s imagine you found the same number of hairs in your soup….

  —Can this be true? Somebody’s really coming to Odessa with this stupid joke?

  To: Alexei

  From: Lynn

  Thank you so much for referring Drs. Sidykh and Pushkin for their H-1s. I look forward to working with them and appreciate your confidence in my work.

  I suppose I ought to try to explain how things got started with Alexei. I mean, obviously it wasn’t just the Russian jokes, some of which were little better than “Knock, knock …” I hope it wasn’t just that I felt myself shrinking in my life with Jack and needed a lifeline to keep my ego afloat either. I can’t even say Alexei flirted with me, although I think he did. He just noticed, and, paying attention, he somehow slipped under my guard. I found him touching—brave and playful and serious all at once. He was also so alone. Under the circumstances, that was undeniably part of the attraction.

  That is, once I realized it was an attraction. At first I didn’t think it was any different from the admiration I felt for a lot of my clients, who were, by definition, extraordinary. But then I started to anticipate the e-mails and the corny jokes and the little snippets of biographical data with the same sensation I used to feel when Mikey Stewart would leave notes taped to my locker in junior high. In the featherweight, anything-goes banter of e-mails, the crush got going almost
before I realized it had begun.

  Okay, I told myself the times I found myself thinking, surprisingly often, about a moment in my office when I had leaned toward Alexei, at the end of the conversation, and had had to stop myself from putting my hand out to touch him. As long as I didn’t act on it, the feeling would probably go away on its own. Whatever, I had to cure myself of the little involuntary twist inside my stomach when I saw him, but since it was involuntary, the best antidote was obviously not to see him in person.

  Send me your backup documents and the letters as soon as you have them, I e-mailed him. You can just drop off the materials when you’re ready. I’ll get in touch if I have any questions.

  Nevertheless, when I finally got the box of documents, I called him up.

  “The awards are great,” I said, determined to sound businesslike. There were at least five gold medals for mathematics olympiads—the Russian academic competitions in scientific fields. “And the publications.” (Sixty of them, in major journals, on suitably arcane-sounding physics-related topics no officer in the INS in his or her right mind would ever consider reading.) “But all the letters are about what you’re doing now, at SLAC. We really need something about what you did in the Soviet Union.”

  “I’m sorry, Lynn, but I don’t know anyone to write such a letter,” he insisted. “Not anymore.”

  I had prepared for this contingency. “I might know someone who could help us,” I said. “A former client, a Ukrainian here in the U.S. He’s not in your field, exactly, but he could at least write a generic description of your reputation and achievements, if you give him just a little something to work from. Shall I contact him?”

  “He’s not a nuclear physicist?” he asked.

  “No. Computer science.”

  “That might be okay,” he said. “But I would have to approve the letter before it goes in.” He was silent a moment. “I know I’m being difficult,” he said.

  “Yes, you are,” I agreed.

  “But I have my reasons.”

  “I just want to help you,” I said.

  He laughed. “What is that American expression? ‘I’m puddy in your hands.’ What do I have to do?”

  “Putty.”

  “What?”

  “You’re putty in my hands.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  I swallowed a giggle. “No, I mean the word is ‘putty.’ It’s a kind of cement.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” he said.

  ILYA KOPYLOV WAS A STAR in the former Soviet Union in the development and implementation of computerized-automation technologies critical to optimizing nuclear-power and thermal-energy electrical-generating facilities. I’d gotten him his green card several years before when I had my own practice, and he and his wife still kept in touch. Now he was a consultant in automated large-scale information-management and -control systems for American technology clients and, I hoped, making a bundle. I always liked to see my former clients doing well.

  Because he’d been through the process himself, I didn’t mind asking him for a favor.

  “Yes, I would be glad to help,” he said, as I knew he would, after I’d explained what I needed.

  “That would be great, Ilya,” I said. “I’ll send you a model letter so you don’t have to write it from scratch.”

  “From…?”

  “Make it up out of your head,” I amended. Ilya’s English was not yet up to colloquialisms. “I’ll ask him to call you, if that’s all right, and give you some background about his work. Maybe it will be easier for him to tell you. I haven’t been able to get much out of him.”

  “What kind of work?” Ilya asked.

  “He has a Ph.D. in physics,” I said. “He hasn’t said much beyond that. He works at the Stanford Linear Accelerator now. I just want some idea of what he did in the Soviet Union. It doesn’t have to be really specific.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out, Lynn,” he said. “What is the man’s name?”

  “Strela,” I told him.

  There was a silence on the other end of the line.

  “Ilya?”

  “Dr. Strela?” he said at last. “Alexei Strela?”

  “Yes,” I said, surprised. “Do you know him?”

  “I know of him, certainly.” He paused. “So this is where he went!”

  “Ilya, you’re making this sound very mysterious. Is he famous or something like that?”

  “Dr. Strela was one of the most brilliant young nuclear physicists in the former Soviet Union,” he said soberly. “He was one of the first people they called right after Chernobyl. Since my work involved nuclear power facilities, naturally I heard about it.”

  “You’re kidding!” I said. “If he was that well known, can you think of any reason he doesn’t want the INS to know about it?”

  Silence.

  “Ilya, if you know something, you should tell me.”

  “I don’t know anything,” he said firmly. “But he disappeared sometime after Chernobyl. When prominent people disappear from conferences and things like that, you assume they’re dead or they’ve left the country. There was no notice of death, so …”

  “So you assumed he’d gone,” I prompted.

  “Yes,” he said. “It was certainly not uncommon. Things may be changing now, but there was little future in science in Russia or Ukraine. But…”

  His sentences kept trailing off, I noticed. I waited.

  “Well, somebody like Strela is not easily replaced, do you see what I mean? He was a big loss to the country, and the government would not have been happy about it. Also …”

  He paused so long I wasn’t sure if he was still on the line. “Ilya?”

  “I don’t like to repeat gossip,” he said.

  “I’ll keep it to myself,” I assured him.

  “It’s not like computer science or pure mathematics,” he said modestly. “To the right sort of people—or maybe the wrong sort—Strela’s knowledge could be extremely valuable. Extremely.”

  He said something in such a low tone of voice I had to ask him to repeat it.

  “I said, there were rumors that he might have gone to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “Or even Pakistan.”

  “Yikes,” I said.

  “That is an expression I haven’t heard,” Ilia said, “but I can guess the meaning. Yes, you are right, yikes. But let me tell you one thing, Lynn: It was not unheard of for the government to make up such stories itself to cover the embarrassment of losing so many scientists. I personally do not know anything … bad about him, so I would not believe it so easily. If you still want me to, I will write the letter.”

  “Thanks, Ilya. I appreciate it. I’ll get back to you. Give my best to the family.”

  “CAN WE TALK?” I asked Alexei when I had tracked him down at SLAC.

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Business,” I said, as sternly as I could manage. “I apologize for disturbing you at work, but I wasn’t sure if you got my e-mails.”

  “I’m sorry. Is it urgent?” he said. “I haven’t been checking. I’ve been here pretty much around the clock on a project for the last few days.”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s urgent,” I said, “but it could be important. In any case, I didn’t mean on the phone. We need to discuss this in person.”

  “I’m free at lunch tomorrow,” he said. “But if you could possibly come over here, we could spend more time together. Otherwise it would have to be a very brief meeting.”

  He sounded brisk and rather businesslike himself, which made me feel both relieved and a bit disappointed at the same time. Though moments before I’d vowed to keep things professional, now I wanted the rapport, the sense of connection. The chemistry. Get a grip, I told myself.

  “Do you have an office?” I asked him.

  “I’d much rather get something to eat, if you don’t mind. Could we meet at the café on Sand Hill Road?”

  I hesitated. “This is a discussion about your green card,” I said.

>   “Of course it is. But I still need to eat, and so do you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  ALEXEI WAS ALREADY SITTING at a table in the spring sunshine when I arrived. He was the only person sitting by himself; everyone else was engaged in intense conversation with at least one other person. It made him stand out, like the eye of the hurricane. Oddly enough, no one was jabbering into a mobile; Sand Hill Road, the bomb center of Silicon Valley technology, is, ironically (and largely inexplicably), a dead zone for cellphone reception.

  “Hi,” he said, half rising from his chair. He had on a dark blue golf shirt and khaki pants. His ID badge brushed the table as he bent over.

  “Hi,” I said. “Am I late?”

  He shook his head, smiling. “I’m early,” he lied. “A bad habit.”

  “I’m always behind,” I confessed. “That’s worse.”

  He pushed the menu in my direction. “Not to rush you, but …”

  I nodded. “You don’t have much time. I understand.” This was not going quite the way I’d planned. I felt as if I’d lost the upper hand somehow, and I needed Authority if I was going to extract the truth from him. At least, that’s what I had assured myself was the purpose of this meeting.

  I studied the menu, salads first. Then it caught my eye, a meat-loaf sandwich. Suddenly I really, really wanted a meat-loaf sandwich, something I hadn’t had in years. I wondered if it came with bacon. Probably not. “I’ll have … um, number fourteen,” I told the waitress, lacking the courage of my convictions.

  “Meat-loaf sandwich?” she asked, in stentorian tones.

  I could have sworn that heads turned and conversation stopped, like one of those old EF Hutton commercials (When EF Hutton speaks, people listen….). I half expected someone to get up from his chair and talk me out of it. Even the waitress seemed to disapprove.

  I nodded faintly. “Chicken salad,” Alexei said, “and I’d like pickles, please.”

  We both ordered iced tea. “I learned to like it in Washington,” Alexei explained.

  After the ordering, he looked at me expectantly.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said, lowering my voice. “I’ve talked to the computer expert I told you about, the guy who could possibly write a letter?”