Perfection (15 page)

Years earlier, when Liza was a new baby, Henry and I went to a party at Mandy’s uptown Manhattan apartment, where she lived
with her longtime girlfriend, Dinah. At the time, Mandy and Dinah were in that category of “friends of friends.” I sat on their couch, bouncing Liza on my lap, attempting to take sips from a glass without spilling wine everywhere. The loose gray dress I had chosen did not make me feel sleek or urban, but it did hide my soft postpregnancy belly as well as the constant baby mess of spit-ups that were my new life.

Amid the crowd of twenty-odd people, Mandy, Dinah, and Henry clustered intimately across the room at the kitchen counter, laughing and talking. In any other context, where the women identified themselves as heterosexual, I might have wondered if both women were pursuing Henry. Mandy was a tall brunette, thin lipped and mannish looking. Not Henry’s type, I would have guessed. I sat with my baby, feeling bored and boring, a piece of inconvenient baggage in the corner of the room. I desperately wanted to go home.

“Mandy looks great in an Armani suit,” Henry commented when he returned home with trousers and shirts from one of his occasional trips to Neiman Marcus in New Jersey. I thought of Mandy as his gay shopping friend, just as Anna talked about clothes shopping with her “gay husbands.” Shopping trips had seemed harmless enough. I didn’t have to like all his friends, I reasoned, just as Henry didn’t like all mine. He could spend time shopping with his friend and I wouldn’t ever have to deal with her.

I hoped that he was planning to be more aggressive about finding new work so that he might have opportunities to wear the crisply tailored trousers and shirts he happily tried on for me to admire.
When Henry told me that Mandy and Dinah had broken up, I only briefly registered concern. By then, I had a toddler, and not too much penetrated from the world outside motherhood and work.

A few months later Henry mentioned that Mandy had taken a new job in Australia. The other side of the world was far away enough.

Two years later, in 2001, she returned to the United States following another romantic breakup, this time with a man she had planned to marry.

“Hey,” Henry asked, “can I invite Mandy up here for dinner?”

“She’s always completely ignored me. I really don’t like her, and I don’t want her here.”

“Can I tell her that?” He laughed.

“Go right ahead,” I replied stonily.

“Did you have an affair with Henry?”

A moment of silence on the phone line.

The advertising executive searching for workable spin?

“No, I didn’t have an affair with him. We were very close,” she continued. “We were good friends.”

“I remember that you went shopping together. So that’s all it was, then? Just good friends?”

“I was really upset after 9/11. I saw everything right from my kitchen window. It was horrible, and Henry helped me a lot right after they let me move back into my apartment.”

Henry had told me about her apartment in Battery Park with views of the twin towers. As she sat reading the morning
New York Times
and drinking coffee, the planes came in, one after the other.

“It’s terrible that you had to go through that. But now I need to know what happened between you and Henry.”

“I think we shared a bed one night, but we didn’t have sex.”

When does that ever happen?

I didn’t inhale. I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

I couldn’t respond to such a tale. Henry didn’t tell me anything about sharing a bed, just about helping her get back into her apartment and the eerie scene at Ground Zero. He said a friend was staying with her. He called me from the city to say that he was staying in a room at his college club in midtown. I wanted to believe him, so I did.
I was busy, worrying about the important stuff, like earning a living, taking care of our child. Okay, I was an idiot.

During the frantic days and weeks after 9/11, I stayed home, close to my child. I wasn’t able to think about anything except that I needed to be near Liza. When Henry told me about Mandy losing access to her apartment, I did not suggest offering her a room. I felt sorry for her, perhaps a bit guilty that I couldn’t feel welcoming, but I still did not want to have her in my house. I wanted to trust Henry to help her move back into her own apartment, so that Liza and I could be home and safe.

I had overlooked Henry’s ability to make all situations, even a traumatic national tragedy, work to his own advantage.

Several days passed before Christine,
the knitting divorcée in California, returned my call. At last she left a message on my phone. She had been away on a camping trip with her sons, but she wanted to talk to me.

“What the fuck did you think you were doing, getting involved with a married man with a kid?” I demanded. I gripped
the edge of my desk with sweaty fingers, relieved that this woman was many miles away, so that I wasn’t tempted to smack her. “You weren’t really thinking about me, were you? How would you feel if some woman did this to you?” She did not hang up, which impressed me. She apologized, quietly.

She told me how she met Henry at a food event while he was on the West Coast researching his book. At the time, she was recently divorced from the father of her two young boys. Her boyfriend had callously broken up with her as her mother began her final decline from cancer. Henry arrived in her life during that time, offering something that must have felt like real comfort. His wonderful home-cooked meals, which had once wooed me, went a long way with her.

“At first Henry didn’t tell me that he was married. And he wasn’t wearing a ring. When I pressed him, he admitted to being married but claimed that you and he had ‘an arrangement.’”

“I assure you,” I snapped, “there was no such ‘arrangement.’”

“My boyfriend and I had an open relationship at that time, so I accepted Henry’s story at first. But he was so secretive about his home life. I figured out pretty quickly that he hadn’t talked to you about anything. I really only knew Henry for a few months. We met in October, and it was pretty much over as a sexual thing by Christmas.”

Christmas, when Liza and I had flown out to meet Henry in Seattle. Two weeks later, he collapsed on the kitchen floor. His last December seemed a long time ago. As did that entire fall season, when he was seeing Christine.

One morning during that autumn came back to me now, with startling clarity, the morning of November 8, 2002. Henry and I were in the car, traveling up Route 9 to the private school where
we hoped to transfer Liza.

Our local public school wasn’t working out. Liza was being bullied by some girls in her class, and the administration did not handle the issue aggressively or gracefully. I had spoken to the mother of one of the other girls, a conversation that had produced some modest positive effect, but the damage had been done. Liza hated going to school. She was only in first grade. We had eleven years of her education ahead of us.

Now we were driving up the road to look at the only alternative in a one-school town, a private school about forty minutes from our home. Emily’s two daughters went there, as did the children of a few other friends in town. The public-private school issue was controversial in a town already sharply divided between the longtime local families and the recent urban refugees. We felt our share of guilt about our impending defection. When I quietly mentioned our plan to Cathy one afternoon at school pickup, her face crumpled in dismay at the thought that our girls would end up in different schools. Cathy herself had spent years at an elite private day school, followed by an even more elite boarding school. I resented her attitude toward our choice.

I didn’t like thinking about how Henry and I would afford a private school. Paying for babysitters and day care had been hard enough, but I hoped I could scrape money together, with some family help and some scrimping. Henry was certainly no saver, which was a constant source of anxiety. The whole project worried me as I kept my eyes on the crazy Route 9 traffic and Henry’s cell phone rang.

He took the call. I hated when he talked on his cell phone without a headset while speeding up this congested highway, but I was most immediately startled by the intimacy of the call. I could
tell that he was talking to a woman. With hand gestures, I tried to get him to end the conversation. He ignored me.

“Get off the phone, Henry,” I hissed. “This just isn’t the time. It’s dangerous and it’s illegal.”

Enraged, he ended the conversation and swerved the car over to the shoulder of the busy highway with a hasty and violent lurch of the steering wheel.

He shoved my shoulder. “Why are you such a fucking selfish bitch? Why can’t you understand that my friend is upset? She’s calling from California! Her mother is dying! Why can’t you understand that? I hate you when you’re like this!”

His anger terrified me. I thought he was going to hit me. The wind generated by the speeding cars shook our car. My body started shaking, though it was warm inside and I was wearing my newly purchased sheepskin coat.

We were married. We knew, without speaking, that we needed to maintain some pretense of calm for the upcoming school tour. After a minute, during which I felt ashamed but still furious, Henry pulled back onto the highway, and we drove on to the school in stony silence.

Once in the lobby, escorted by the director of admissions, Henry pulled off a theatrical performance that stunned me as much as his earlier anger had. Suddenly he was all warmth and charm, eager and enthusiastic, full of thoughtful questions. We were the perfect dedicated parents looking at a wonderful school for our beloved child.

Now I understood that Christine had been the caller that day.

Christine’s responses to the flattery, his gifts of expensive jewelry, the home-cooked meals, the fact that he cleaned up her kitchen and loaded the dishwasher? As any harassed single mother would confirm, she was near delirium. I would have been thrilled myself, if Henry had returned home from his trips and lavished such attention on me, instead of pleading exhaustion. His returns home were actually the worst parts of that year.

In her e-mails to Henry, Christine mostly sounded tired and drained. Her mother was dying, she had two young boys, her boyfriend was about to dump her, perhaps because he didn’t want to deal with the two young boys, her house was in disarray, and
it looked like she couldn’t afford to keep the house anyway. After returning from a three-hour class for divorced parents, she remarked in an e-mail to Henry that her advice to all was to stay married. Probably not exactly what he had hoped to hear.

When Matthew called Christine the morning after Henry died, she was just another unknown name in an extensive address book.

“I told Matthew about the affairs,” Christine recalled. “I was sure Henry had been careless and had left everything in plain view. I told him that he had to hide everything from you. I knew there was a lot to hide.”

By the end of our first talk, I had the odd feeling that if we had met in some other way, I might have chosen Christine as a friend.

“This was Henry’s nightmare,” she said, “that you and I would meet and get along famously, go off into a corner to talk and knit and forget all about him.”

We both laughed, and I could feel the truth of it. Our laughter softened the space between us.

I asked Christine to send me a photo of herself. She sent a JPEG file via e-mail. Before I opened it up, I thought to myself,
I’m going to find a cute little brunette.

She was, in fact, a petite, sweet-looking woman, about my age, with a toothy smile, short, dark, curly hair, and gentle features. She could have been my cousin—or Cathy’s better-looking sister.

I felt a strange sense of loss. I had to admit that I liked Christine. She had a great sense of humor. She was bright and witty, and of course, I wanted to like anyone who could talk with enthusiasm about knitting.

“Hey, there’s a photo this month of me holding some mittens
in a knitting magazine,” she told me with evident delight. I drove to my local yarn shop, bought a copy, and admired again her appealing, open face. Henry was right about us—we got along just fine. And as I reread Henry’s long, confidential e-mail to her, I envied her ability to draw him out of his life of many secret boxes.

But what happens to you in the moment when you decide that it is okay to have sex with a man who is married and has a child? Christine was never willing or able to explain her thinking about this line-crossing moment.

I had some idea about this experience. Once, years earlier, before I met Henry, I had crossed the line.

Roberto and I had been quietly attracted to each other for years. We saw each other almost every day as part of a postcollege group of Upper West Side friends. We went to parties in smoke-filled apartments on Riverside Drive. We ate in cheap restaurants. We drank beers at The Gold Rail on 110th Street and Broadway, and on weekends we went dancing.