My Father's Wives Read online

  DEDICATION

  Everything I do in my life, I do for Stacy, Nikki and Stephen. So, this book is for them, as always. And, as it is a book about fathers and sons, it is dedicated to my dad, Arnold, with all of my love.

  EPIGRAPH

  “Just accept as a fact that everyone of any emotional importance to you is related to everyone else of any emotional importance to you; these relationships need not extend to blood, of course, but the people who change your life emotionally—all those people, from different places, from different times, spanning many wholly unrelated coincidences—are nonetheless ‘related.’”

  —John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Mike Greenberg

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PREFACE

  I’VE BEEN STRUCK BY lightning several times.

  Three, to be exact: once in high school, once in college, the last time afterward. None of them was my wife, by the way. You don’t marry the girl who strikes you like lightning, because that doesn’t last forever and you never know what you might be left with when it wears away.

  I assume it goes without saying I’m not being literal about the lightning.

  I mean it the way they did in The Godfather, when Michael first sees Apollonia: Italian countryside, exotic beauty who doesn’t speak your language. That’s the woman who hits you like lightning but you don’t marry her, because life isn’t in the Italian countryside, life is back in New York, where your brother is riddled with bullets under a tollbooth. And the girl you’ve fallen so hard for can’t drive and doesn’t speak English; good luck with that.

  So, I didn’t marry any of the women who struck me like lightning.

  The first was when I was seventeen. Her name was Tabitha and she came to my high school after being kicked out of boarding school for sleeping with a teacher. She was gorgeous, flaming red hair and green eyes, and furthermore she was almost entirely unsupervised, coming and going as she pleased in a chauffeured limousine. She was a year behind me in school but light-years ahead in every other way. Long story short: there was a biology class, there were frogs floating stiffly in formaldehyde, she couldn’t bear the smell, I dissected hers, and the next thing I knew we were having sex in the back of her car. It was in that limousine, with my school pants about my knees, that I first felt the lightning.

  The second time struck a year later. I was a freshman at college and fell hard for a blond senior named Alyssa, who happened to be engaged to a medical student who lived hundreds of miles away. Alyssa toyed with me for much of the year, flirting, leading me on, allowing me to kiss her occasionally, no doubt driven by loneliness for her man and the pleasure she took in the way I worshipped her. Whatever the reason, I didn’t really mind; I found her so fabulous I was just happy to be around.

  Toward the end of the year I was invited by a sorority sister of Alyssa’s to their formal dance and I accepted, even though I knew Alyssa and Phil would be there. I wanted to see them together, to put closure to it for myself.

  The party was in the ballroom of a hotel, and several of the girls took a suite upstairs, away from the glaring eye of the university-designated chaperones. I was on a couch in the center of the suite, drinking Heineken from a bottle, while Alyssa seemed fidgety and sad and somewhat sloppily drunk. Then, it happened. When her fiancée got up to use the bathroom, Alyssa was quickly in my face, her nose an inch from mine. Her eyes were stunning—I can still picture them, vivid aquamarine—and despite her drunkenness there wasn’t a streak of red. I could smell the alcohol on her breath too, sweet and fruity, as though she’d been drinking margaritas rather than the beer we had in the suite.

  “Am I making you uncomfortable?” she asked breathily.

  “A-a-absolutely,” I stammered.

  It was the opposite of what I meant to say, but I don’t think she was listening. She just stayed like that for what seemed like an eternity, like time had stopped, her lips so near mine I could taste them, wet and sexy.

  Then I heard a flush. The bathroom door opened, and as quickly as she’d come Alyssa was gone, out of my face and out of my life. That was the last time I ever saw her. She and Phil disappeared into one of the bedrooms and didn’t come out the rest of the night. She graduated two weeks later. They were married within the year, and as far as I know they still are. But I can still see her eyes and smell her breath, and feel her lips not quite kissing mine. And when I do, it all looks and smells and feels like lightning.

  The third time was in my early twenties with a model named Serena, who had a Jewish doctor for a father and an Indian mother who looked like a princess. The mother was stunning but drank like a fish and swore like a sailor, while her husband was patient and mostly silent, constantly monitoring his pager, ever aware of a pending emergency that never seemed to come.

  From this bizarre union sprang Serena: Blue eyes and skin the color of the inside of a malted milk ball. And brilliant. She only modeled part-time; the other part she spent at NYU seeking a postgraduate degree in architectural engineering even though she had no interest in pursuing it. That was her problem, and ultimately her downfall: too many options. Women that beautiful and intelligent have an almost unlimited menu from which to choose, which sounds like a blessing but is often a curse because they can never commit to anything. For every choice they make there is always debilitating uncertainty over the options left on the table.

  For a few months, Serena chose me. I vividly remember the first time I saw her, in Sheep Meadow in Central Park; I was playing Ultimate Frisbee, she was lying on a blanket. I chased an errant toss that landed a bit too near her and just as I began to apologize the clouds parted and it was as though the sun shone only on her, like a spotlight. The lightning stopped me in my tracks; I flung the disc back to my group and went immediately to her side. We had lunch and dinner that day and spent the night in her apartment, where in the candlelit stillness of her bedroom I said things so corny they sounded like lines from a movie you would walk out of.

  Serena became an obsession. First, in a blissful way—I found myself whistling as I rode the subway. Then in an anxious way. And finally in a way that was just plain horrible. We had nothing in common. I was grounded, career-oriented, bursting with ambition; Serena was just bursting. Nothing satisfied her, not her studies, not her modeling career, and certainly not me. Her wanderlust bordered on maniacal. Once she told me how desperate she was to live in Asia; we were in a water taxi in Venice at the time.

  We lived together for just over a year before she moved away, leaving me in her apartment, where I stayed until the lease expired. It was a damn nice place to live and a constant reminder of the great lesson of my youth: Lightning strikes are what they are, brilliant and flashy and electric, but also immediate, gone before the echo fades. To live in the reflection of the light seems exciting but ultimately is not a good idea. You’re much better off finding a safe place and watching the storm through a window.

  That’s how I met Claire: Watching a storm through a window.

  We were both leaving lunch in the same coffee shop when a sudden rainstorm took us by surprise; we found ourselves together under the awning, staring helplessly into the street. I was about to put my folded newspaper over my head and run three block
s to my office when she caught my eye, long and lean and elegant, hair darker than the black coffee in her Styrofoam cup. I wasn’t struck by lightning. I just knew I wanted to talk to her.

  She went back inside the coffee shop to wait out the rain so I did too, took the seat next to her at the counter and ordered coffee. I was trying to think of a witty way to introduce myself when her mobile rang.

  “Yes, Liz,” she said in an authoritative tone. “No, I haven’t seen Mandy. I haven’t seen her all week.”

  I couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation. Behind the counter was a lot of shouting in Greek, and behind us waitresses snapped at customers to clear the way so they could deliver the omelets and grilled cheese sandwiches people were waiting for impatiently in crowded booths.

  “I would love to help you, Liz,” the classy brunette was saying, sounding exasperated, “but I haven’t seen Mandy all week.”

  There was a bit more back-and-forth about Mandy, which seemed to make the attractive brunette increasingly annoyed, until she finally just said, “Okay!” and then abruptly hit off on her mobile without saying good-bye. She shook her head and then turned to find me staring at her, completely busting me; in the commotion I had forgotten we didn’t know each other.

  She didn’t look put off, though. She just smiled. “I’m sorry if I was talking loudly, it’s so noisy in here. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Mandy, have you?”

  “Actually,” I said, “she came and she gave without taking, so I sent her away.”

  Her smile grew wider. She had very pretty teeth. “You don’t hear people quote Barry Manilow every day,” she said, and extended her hand. “My name’s Claire.”

  We sat at that counter for three hours, long after the rain had faded and the lunch rush waned and all the tables turned over time and again; we sat and chatted and drank the cups of coffee the counterman kept refilling. There was no lightning. Just the opposite; it was as though we had known each other all our lives, two kids who’d grown up together and now met for lunch once a month to catch up. When she finally looked at her watch and said she needed to go, she jotted her phone number on the back of the check and shook my hand. I went to the window and watched her hail a cab. There was something very elegant in the way she moved, the cut of her tan raincoat, the way she slid into the back of the taxi. Clean and classy; as I went back to the counter to grab my briefcase, the sound of her voice echoed in my mind.

  I smiled at the counterman. “Guess what, my friend,” I said. “I just met the girl I’m going to marry.”

  He didn’t congratulate me, or even smile. He just looked angry. Which I didn’t understand until I looked at the check and saw that it was for one dollar; we had sat for three hours and ordered nothing but coffee. I folded a fifty-dollar bill into the palm of my hand and stuck it out over the counter. “Thanks very much,” I said as we shook hands, “and guess what: you’re going to forget me the minute I walk out that door, but I am going to remember you for the rest of my life.”

  It would have made a great line in a movie. Actually, if it had been a movie things would have progressed almost exactly as they did. We had a few dinner dates, she met my mother, I met her parents, then we went to Hawaii and I proposed over a candlelit dinner in a romantic restaurant while she struggled to stay awake, drowsy from anti-seasickness medication. It would have made the perfect cinematic montage, little snippets of a relationship growing and marching forward: the dates, the families, the wedding, the children being born. Then, when the credits finished rolling, the next scene would show the husband boarding a private jet. Just before takeoff, he would take out his iPhone and compose a very brief e-mail.

  I came home early. I saw you.

  As the jet picked up speed he would sit with his thumb hovering over the send icon. And as the plane lifted off the ground you would hear a voice-over, the husband narrating in a dispassionate voice.

  “When I woke up that morning,” he would begin, “my life was perfect.”

  MONDAY

  WHEN I WOKE UP that morning, my life was perfect.

  My alarm went off at 5:40; I was in my car ten minutes later and drove two miles to the train station, where I have the primo parking space that took years on a waiting list to acquire. It is not a primo parking space, it is the primo parking space; people in this town will be killing each other over it when I die. I got to the gym in Manhattan at quarter past seven and spent forty minutes on an Arc Trainer, watching Angelina Jolie talk about homeless children on the Today show. Then I went up to my office, still in sweat-soaked Under Armour. When my assistant saw me she picked up her phone and ten minutes later there was a toasted bagel, side of low-fat cream cheese, banana, and grande latte on my desk. I didn’t see who delivered it. I was flat on the floor, stretching my lower back, reading the Wall Street Journal.

  By nine I was through with the paper, my breakfast, and seventy-three e-mails that required immediate attention. I had also fired off a note to our IT staff to complain about the advertisements for penile enlargement kits that continued to sneak past our firewalls and into my mailbox. “Honestly,” I wrote, “my six-year-old sent me an e-mail in which he said I stink like farts and that got rebuffed, but suggestions for becoming king of my bed by adding inches to my love life seem to be welcome. Can we do something about this?”

  Bruce, the CEO of our firm, popped his head in the door just before ten. “What time today?” he asked.

  “I’m ready now.”

  “Meet you there,” he said, looking down at his tie. “I need to change.”

  Five minutes later I was in the elevator. My office is on the sixth floor; the basketball court is on nineteen. It’s a terrific court: an abbreviated full court with regulation baskets on both ends and a three-point arc that stretches over the half-court line. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen where you can play one-on-one on a full court, shooting at different baskets. Bruce designed it himself.

  Bruce grew up playing ball in the city, just like I did. We figured that out in China the beginning of last year. Michael Jordan happened to be there at the same time, and his picture was on the cover of every newspaper. On the third day of our trip, Bruce looked at me and said: “I really feel like playing ball.” We went out, bought sneakers, and asked the concierge to find us a court; we played two hours of one-on-one in a dusty elementary school gymnasium in Shanghai. It was a great day, for two reasons. First, it got me motivated to get back into shape. Second, and I guess more important, from that day on Bruce never went anywhere without me.

  Since China we’ve played nearly every day that we are both in the office. Bruce is eleven years older than I am but he’s still quick, and stronger than me and about four inches taller. But I can shoot the ball. Always could. Wake me up from a dead sleep and I can drain a sixteen-foot jump shot. When they tell you they can teach you to shoot they are lying; they can teach you the proper form, but either you can shoot or you can’t, and if you can’t then LeBron James could coach you and you’d never get really good. Bruce is a lousy shooter but he goes hard on the court; playing with him is about the best workout you’ll ever have.

  When we were done I went into the men’s room, pulled my top over my head, and wrung it out into the sink. I loved the way I looked in the mirror. I hadn’t been in this kind of shape since college. I took a shower and put on a navy suit, blue shirt, and lavender tie, then I went back to my office to talk to my kids. My daughter is nine, my son six. I have pictures of each of them facing me at my desk and almost every day I chat with them. I often don’t see them at all during the week, even though we all sleep in the same house, because I leave too early and get home too late. Sometimes I catch Phoebe still stirring, so I kick off my shoes and get into her bed and she tells me stories about her day and her friends and her dance class and the tooth she is on the verge of losing and the type of dog she’s decided she wants and the funny thing Drake said to Josh on television. Then she falls asleep on me, and I stroke her hair and watch he
r lips shudder and part, shudder and part. I seldom catch Andrew awake, but I love to go into his room and marvel at the impossible positions he manages to twist his body into beneath the covers. I swear, the child has never once slept a night vertically in his bed; he is always at some varying degree of diagonal, his arms splayed in one direction and his legs another. It always makes me laugh, no matter how long my day has been.

  I miss them terribly during the week and I find that talking to them on the phone only makes it worse, so most days I speak to their photographs. That day, for instance, I recall saying something to Phoebe about how much I liked the dance number she was working on for the talent show, and I told Andrew how proud I was that he had dropped the bat halfway to first base in his T-ball game, which was a marked improvement from the previous time when he nearly decapitated an umpire. They are perfect, my kids. At least I think they are.

  Now it was noon and the distant ache that talking to the pictures usually soothes was instead growing. I had been traveling too much of late; that goes along with being hoops buddies with the CEO. And we were going back to San Francisco that night, another night away, without even the pictures to talk to. So I decided to go home early, which I never do, but the hell with it; I needed to see the kids.

  I had to sprint through Grand Central Station to catch the 12:37. I made my way to the bar car and ordered two beers, then stretched out and popped one open. I was unaccustomed to all the free space; coming home at rush hour the train is always SRO. Now I had it almost all to myself. On the other end of the car was a college girl drinking coffee, all spread out with books and bags and scarves. Midway between us were two blue-collar fellows with construction boots up on seats, talking too loudly about the Yankees. Aside from the bartender and me, that was it. The beer was crisp and tasted sweet. A calm feeling spread from my brain into my throat, down my chest, and all the way to my gut.