My Father's Wives Read online

  I was going to get home a little before two o’clock. Claire would be at a tennis lesson, then home to meet the school bus, only the kids wouldn’t be on it. I was going to pick them up as a surprise and take them for ice cream, then we’d go home and my son and I would throw a ball around and my daughter would play Taylor Swift songs on her iPod, and it would be just like a Saturday except it was Monday. As I drove myself home from the train I was thinking this was a great idea, one of the best days I could ever imagine.

  I burst through my front door in a hurry; I didn’t want to be in a suit. I bounded up the stairs two at a time, headed to my closet to change. It was when I reached the top step that I first noticed something askew. Everything looked normal, but it didn’t sound normal. There was a noise coming from the opposite end of the hallway that sounded both familiar and completely out of place at the same time. I started down the hall, loosening my tie as I passed the kids’ bedrooms, both empty and quiet. The sound was coming from farther down the hall. There was only one more room on the floor, a guest suite where Claire’s parents stay when they come to visit; they like that it is remote enough within the house to offer a bit of privacy. I don’t know that I’d set foot in that room in a year. As I approached my heart began to slow down, even before there wasn’t any question what I was hearing; my heart figured it out before my ears did. There was a keyhole in the door. I knelt, shut one eye, and when I looked in my heart almost came to a dead stop. What I saw was consistent with what I thought I had heard: a man and woman from behind, naked. He was pulling on a pair of jeans with no underwear beneath, long brown hair in a ponytail; I didn’t recognize him. The woman I only saw for an instant, a flash of dark hair, before she disappeared from sight, headed toward the bathroom. I watched long enough to see the man sit on the edge of the bed, still facing away, putting on his shoes. I don’t know why I didn’t wait to see his face—of course I should have—or, more important, why I didn’t confront them both right then. But I didn’t. Watching him tie his shoelaces was already more than I could bear; I didn’t want to see any more. I just stood up, opened my other eye, and dusted off my pants in the place where I had knelt. My mind was completely blank. My hands were beginning to shake. And my life suddenly didn’t seem so perfect anymore.

  MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS of the sheets.

  I remember vividly the day we bought them. They’re Frette, which is very fancy, and Claire and I got into an argument, first over how expensive they were, then over the pronunciation. Is it “fret”? Or the Frenchified “freh-tay”? I still don’t know the answer. What I do know is the reaction I get from Claire if I approach the sheets while wearing shoes: it’s as though I’m walking toward the Mona Lisa with a pair of scissors. She treats the sheets the same way my mother used to treat the good towels when I was growing up. The better towels were always in the guest bathroom, even though we never had any guests; they were all at my father’s house. But that wasn’t the point. The point is: I might have just witnessed the finish of my wife having sex with another man, and my first thought was of the sheets. The mind is funny that way. Oftentimes, the first thought it has is one that doesn’t do you any good at all.

  My next thought was that I was freezing. It was seventy degrees in the house but I was ice cold, shivering. There were so many things I could have done—should have done—but in that instant I didn’t think of any of them. All I could think was that I needed to get warm. So I turned around and went back the way I’d come, out into the sunshine. I didn’t look to see if Claire’s car was in the garage, or any other car for that matter. Instead I just stood in the driveway and watched the postal truck as it rambled toward my house, paused at my neighbor’s box, dropped off some mail, and rambled on. I don’t know my mailman’s name but he smiled and waved as he rambled toward my mailbox, opened it, dropped off my mail, and rambled on. I’m not sure if I waved back or not. On the lawn across the way, my neighbor’s yappy little Jack Russell terrier was racing about in circles. The circles weren’t consistent; sometimes the dog stopped and changed direction. I thought maybe it was chasing a butterfly. My neighbor’s wife came down her driveway, wearing workout apparel and a pleasant smile. “Hey, Jon!” She looked down at the dog and shook her head; she knows the dog is a pain in the ass. “You’re home early!”

  “Yes,” I said, and watched as she went to her box and fetched her mail, then snapped at the dog to behave and went back inside. The dog paid no attention; it went right on running in circles. I heard the whirring and clicking of a sprinkler kicking on, maybe even mine, I’m not sure. Someone’s grass was being watered; it didn’t really matter whose.

  I was thinking of the day my grandfather died, when I was twelve years old. We were at the hospital, my mother and I, and I remember standing on the sidewalk on a busy street in Manhattan when it was time to leave, staring in amazement at all of the normalcy that surrounded me. How could the garbagemen and the shoemaker and the meter maid and the honking truck driver all be going about their business as though nothing was at all unusual? Didn’t they know it was not a normal day? That’s what I was thinking about while my postman was delivering mail and my neighbor’s dog was chasing a butterfly and my wife and a stranger were getting dressed in my house.

  I wasn’t cold anymore. I just needed to see the kids. I was feeling so far from normal, I desperately needed normalcy; I needed my kids. So, rather than waiting for whomever it was to leave my house—or, better yet, slamming through the door and demanding answers—I did probably the least sensible thing I might have under the circumstances: I got into my car and drove away. I backed slowly out of the driveway, watched the mail truck and the dog running in circles in my rearview mirror until they disappeared from sight, then turned left on the main road and drove toward town.

  The silence in the car was soothing for an instant, then it became deafening. It left me nowhere to go but inside my own head, which just then was not the best place to be, so I turned on the satellite radio, set to the channel that plays eighties music. Howard Jones was singing “Things Can Only Get Better.” Down one notch to the seventies was “Don’t Pull Your Love.” I kept clicking around, trying to find a song that fit my mood, with no success. What I needed was a song that could turn time back ten minutes or so, and since no song can do that I finally just shut off the radio and drove to school.

  I love visiting the school my children attend. I don’t get there often, which may be part of the reason I so enjoy it. I find I feel peaceful and at ease when I am in the building no matter how loud all the children are when the bell rings; even the chaos is therapeutic. It reminds me not at all of the strict, competitive environment in which I was raised. My father insisted I attend the most elite New York prep schools, just as he had, a demand my mother honored even though he went out of our life the day I turned nine. My kids’ school is nothing like that; it is a warm, nurturing place where the emphasis is on sharing and kindness. Claire occasionally voices concern that the school isn’t academic enough, but nothing could worry me less. There will be ample time for all of that—eventually their entire lives will be all of that. Right now they are in fourth and first grades; let them be kids.

  When I pulled into the parking lot I was still more than twenty minutes early. Instinctively, I reached over to the passenger seat, where my iPhone would be in the zippered pocket of my briefcase, only there was no phone. There was also no pocket, and no briefcase. Which meant my credit cards, driver’s license, the New York Times sports section, a tube of Purell hand sanitizer, and a roll of Tums were all gone. I felt my face flush, a moment of panic; this was the last thing I needed. Visions of standing in line at the DMV flashed through my mind. But then, just as quickly, the answer came to me. The briefcase was not lost; in fact it had probably already been found. There was no question I was holding it when I went into the house, and equally little doubt that I wasn’t when I left. I was sure the briefcase was inside, I just wasn’t sure where. Though it didn’t much matter. If it was d
estined to be found then it would be. If Claire stumbled over it she would, no doubt, be surprised and confused, which would make two of us; I’d deal with the briefcase when I got home.

  I got out of the car and walked over to the playground. A few small kids were running around, none that I recognized. One, a little blond boy with too-long hair, was on his tummy on the ground; I think he was licking the grass. I wanted to grab him by the belt—if he was wearing one—and lift him out of the mess. But before I could, I heard a familiar voice.

  “Daddy!”

  There is no other word that sounds like that one does. And it never sounded quite as good as it did right then, on that playground, the sun shining on my face.

  It was Andrew, age six, racing toward me, one shoelace untied, breathless. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you, of course,” I said, and to my surprise my voice cracked.

  I knelt and he ran into me, full speed, almost knocked me over backward. Phoebe was a few steps behind him, also running, though not quite as fast. Excited, though not quite as much. I wrapped my other arm around her and squeezed them both tight, buried my face in Phoebe’s hair so I could smell her shampoo, like raspberries and a rainy day.

  “What are we going to do?” Phoebe asked.

  I cleared my throat. “Well, I had an idea,” I said, my voice returned. “How about if we see if the ice cream shop is open on Mondays?”

  Phoebe threw her arms up in the air and cheered, while Andrew, less certain, wrinkled up his nose as he does when he is thinking especially hard. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think I’ve only ever been there on weekends.”

  “Let’s find out,” I said, and took them each by the hand and walked jauntily toward the car, feeling marginally better. That’s the thing about kids. They can’t make all right a thing that could never be all right, but they can make it as close as it can possibly be. That’s how I felt just then: as close to all right as I possibly could.

  A few minutes later, after the short drive to the ice cream shop, during which Phoebe was ecstatic and Andrew was genuinely nervous that it wouldn’t be open on a Monday, I made a discovery of an entirely different sort: I couldn’t taste anything. I ordered soft-serve vanilla in a waffle cone with chocolate sprinkles and paid with the twenty bucks I keep in the ashtray for emergencies. On the first lick my thought was it didn’t taste right, and on the second I realized it didn’t taste like anything at all. This confused me because in every movie when a woman is wronged she turns to ice cream for consolation, and never once have I heard Sandra Bullock say: “You know, I can’t even taste this.” I tossed most of the cone in the trash. My son was delightedly licking chocolate from between his fingers; my daughter was wearing the contented smile of a nine-year-old who just got ice cream she wasn’t expecting. Then we all piled into the car to drive home. And I assumed my life was about to change forever.

  SO MANY THINGS HAPPEN in my house when I’m at work.

  There are deliverymen with packages and lawn-care professionals with mowers and electric company inspectors with measuring gadgets and pool cleaners with long nets and Girl Scouts with cookies and religious nuts with pamphlets and the cable guy between noon and six and somebody’s mom with a jacket my daughter left at a birthday party. I have always been a bit intimidated by the sheer volume of activity Claire manages around the house, though I suppose I’ll never quite think about it the same way now.

  I turned onto our street and saw Claire at the end of the driveway, poking through a magazine, the day’s mail tucked beneath her arm. She was looking the other way, in the direction the bus would be coming from any minute. I reached in the glove compartment for my glasses, which I ordinarily only use for driving at night. I wanted to see her face as clearly as I could when she turned and saw me coming. Would there be anything there? A tick? A shudder? A moment of panic? I put the glasses on and took a deep breath, then tapped gently on the horn.

  Claire turned, squinted, and stared, shielding her eyes from the sunlight with her hand, looking appropriately surprised. As we approached her face broke into a wide smile, and she began waving goofily at the kids, who both unsnapped their seat belts and leaned into the front seat, shouting.

  “Daddy came home early!”

  “We had ice cream!”

  “Hi,” I said, lowering my window. Claire walked right up alongside the car, looking perfectly normal. I hadn’t any idea what to think. “How was your day?” I asked.

  “My day is still going on,” she said. “Is everything all right?”

  Of course, that was the pertinent question. Is everything all right? I hadn’t any idea what the answer was. My sense was everything was probably as far from all right as it could ever be. But I wasn’t ready to say so. “I just missed everybody,” I said.

  “Now, that is nice,” she said sweetly. And then, with enthusiasm, “Isn’t it nice to have Daddy home?”

  “Oh yeah, oh yeah, ohyeahohyeahohyeah!”

  “It’s lovely to have you home,” she said, and leaned closer to kiss me, but I pulled forward into the garage before she could.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said as the kids rushed for their scooters. “I’m going to run inside and change.”

  I said that staring straight at Claire, certain there would be a signal of something in her face. Surely she would want to beat me inside, to straighten up, something. But there was nothing. She never diverted her gaze from the kids.

  Alone, I went inside and up the stairs. For the second time that afternoon, I turned right instead of left, away from our bedroom and toward the guest room. The door was open, the French sheets in place, normal, crisp; they appeared clean. I couldn’t bring myself to smell them, but there was no indication there would be anything out of the ordinary to smell. It looked the way the room always looks, the sheets looked the way they always do, the family photos on the nightstand in place, the four of us staring at me, smiling.

  I considered, for a moment, that I was losing my mind. I hadn’t experienced a hallucination since my sophomore year in college when I was talked into trying acid and spent three hours hiding under a blanket because I was absolutely certain the poster of Jimi Hendrix was breathing. I remember not knowing what to think back then, and now as I stared at a perfectly normal bed in a perfectly normal room, I didn’t know what to think again.

  I had an hour before a car would arrive to take me to the airport, so I changed out of my suit and into jeans. I was on the stairs headed back down when I heard The Police singing “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” That’s the ringtone on my iPhone, which meant my phone was ringing and I could hear it. I looked downstairs toward where the music was coming from and saw my briefcase right in the center of the living room where I had dropped it an hour before. And, a few feet away, staring at it with a puzzled expression, was Claire. She didn’t see me on the stairs, just heard the music and saw the briefcase, and her head dropped to the side, the way a dog’s might when trying to make a decision. She had to be trying to decide why she hadn’t seen me carry in the briefcase, wondering how it had managed to get from my car to the living room. Maybe she was trying to decide if I had seen her, if I knew. She looked worried. Not enough that anyone else would have noticed, but I know her really well. I know when she is worried, even if it is only a little.

  When she finally shook her head and walked away, backward, into the kitchen, I found myself thinking of Hawaii and the night I proposed to her, both of us tipsy, she especially because the seasickness medication she had taken made her susceptible to the champagne. There came a moment when both of us knew it was time, a momentary silence across a candlelit table when our eyes met and there wasn’t any question about it. Nor was there any question that I was the one obligated to begin, which I did, on my knee in a crowded restaurant. Twelve years later, alone at the top of the stairs, with the kids waiting outside, I decided this time it was Claire who was obligated to begin. Maybe she wouldn’t get on her knee, b
ut she would tell me.

  I ran down the stairs and outside, grabbed a basketball, and shouted for Andrew, who came scootering across the driveway, followed by his sister. We were on the court for almost an hour and I remember none of it; I couldn’t feel the joy of my children any more than I could taste the ice cream. All I could think of, through the yelling and the scootering and the slam-dunking, was my wife staring at the briefcase. Maybe she still was. Suddenly, without a word of explanation, I raced inside, leaving the two children alone. I needed to see if Claire was staring at the briefcase.

  She wasn’t.

  I found the case exactly where I had left it and Claire nowhere near it. Was she upstairs, furiously laundering expensive sheets? Or in the bathroom, cleansing herself of whatever residue remained after an afternoon tryst? Or perhaps she was hidden in the attic where no one would find her, silently crying tears of remorse.

  Then I heard the clatter of pots and pans and realized she was none of those places. She was behind me in the kitchen, rustling about in the drawer where the cookware is kept. It was a startlingly normal place for her to be and a startlingly normal thing for her to be doing; the only thing out of place was the briefcase.

  You see, I know my wife as well as I know anyone. I don’t claim to understand her, but I know her, which means while I cannot analyze most of the things she does, I can usually predict them. There is no way, under normal circumstances, she would ever leave my briefcase in the center of the living room floor. My wife is the sort who reminds you to put things away before you have even removed them from their place. If you say to her: “I think I’m going to watch a little television,” she will reply with: “Sounds good, make sure you leave the remote control where you found it.” She cannot, and does not, tolerate clutter. But now, she had made the conscious decision to leave my briefcase in the center of the floor where my children could trip over it or the dog could chew it up or a neighbor could see it and assume the household was in a state of abject chaos. That wasn’t normal.