When It Happens to You (15 page)

 

During his rapid ascent up the ladder to managing partner at Connelly Consulting, Phillip traveled nearly every week. Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Atlanta, New York, Miami, Minneapolis, Dallas . . . Each assignment lasted anywhere from two weeks to six months, and for almost the entire duration, Phillip would fly out of LAX on Sunday night (to be there for eight a.m. meetings) and return to LAX on Friday afternoon. Every Monday morning, he would wake up and stumble to the door of the hotel to find the morning paper just so he could remind himself what city he was in. The first year alone he racked up so many frequent flier miles, he had enough to surprise Greta with a weekend getaway to Cabo San Lucas for her birthday.

The irony did not escape him that in all of those early years of incessant travel, layovers, hotel brunches and bars, Phillip had avoided the lure of an affair. His resistance had less to do with personal integrity than the fact that in those lean, magical years his desire for Greta had been stronger. The sweet moments at the end of the day when he would hear her voice from a great distance reminded him of how good their lives were, how different from their parents', making him long to be back home tangled up in her in their tiny rented house in the canyons.

One year, after spending forty-eight hours in JFK over Christmas, Phillip arrived home and climbed onto the mattress on the floor where she slept. She was naked under the covers with one slim pale leg draped over the top like a comma. He started at her bare ankle and kissed his way up her leg until he found the sweet and damp center of her. She stirred and murmured his name in her sleep.

“You're home . . .”

Her compliance in those days was intoxicating to him. After what seemed to be a lifetime of Tony's hand-me-downs, at last there was something he desired that was his and his alone. Would it have been so exciting had she not been so full of promise herself? The fact that Greta gave up her own career for him made her acquiescence that much sweeter. She wasn't like the other girls—the Jennifers and Caitlyns who went to university, majoring in communications as a ruse to meet a successful husband. Greta was driven to succeed herself. When she inexplicably gave it up for him, he had never felt so important in his life. He knew even then that it was probably unwise not to encourage her to continue. Her mother actually called him on the phone, unbeknownst to Greta, asking him to convince Greta not to give up her studies; Phillip lied and told her that he had tried but Greta's decision was final, and he was powerless to dissuade her.

And so while Phillip put himself on the career fast-track, scrambling to rise from associate to consultant to project leader and all the way up to the holy grail of managing partner, Greta put all of her focus on their domestic life. While Phillip made spreadsheets at work to restructure divisions and companies, Greta applied the same single-mindedness to building their home and family. They agreed that they would wait to have kids until he at least became a project leader, but Greta's determination to create the perfect life for them became all-consuming. It seemed that one day, he wasn't sure when exactly, Phillip felt like an outsider in his own marriage. The “family” loomed as a rival for her attention, a separate entity that dwarfed and overwhelmed him.

There was a brief spell just after the birth of Charlotte when the mutual enchantment of their daughter mimicked the intensity of their early years together, but this fleeting magical period was followed by years of frustration as they attempted to make a sibling for her. Charlotte's brother was supposed to be born exactly two years later, according to Greta's strict timeline, and when they missed this deadline, Greta's resolve for a larger family only intensified. As time passed, Greta became more and more preoccupied with a second child. Phillip would return home from work to find her in bed with the computer on her lap, reading fertility websites while their four-year-old daughter circled around her like a jackal, vying for her attention. He arranged lavish weekends for them to spend together as romantic distractions, but Greta seemed removed and distant. Every conversation seemed to revolve around the same cringe-inducing subjects: sperm motility and ovulatory dysfunction. One night, after he had stayed up until four thirty in the morning to complete a presentation, Greta nudged him awake to get his opinion on her cervical fluid.

“Is it copious and thinner than usual?” she asked, lying before him, legs spread.

He rubbed his eyes and tried to reconcile this view of his wife. The suggestive position completely devoid of all sexuality.

“Thinner than what exactly?” he asked. “I don't know what to compare it to.”

“Go ahead, check,” she insisted. She backed up onto her elbows. “They say it's supposed to be like rubber cement.” He reluctantly dipped his fingers in and tried to ascertain if it was the correct consistency.

“Yeah, I guess it's rubber cement-ish,” he offered. “Can I go back to sleep now?”

“After,” she said, pulling him on top of her. But he wasn't ready, and her impatience only served to deflate him further.

“I'm really tired, honey,” he said, shifting himself away from her. “I'm sorry.”

“The chances are better in the morning,” she reminded him, grasping him in her fist and handling his penis as if it were a switch connected to a lightbulb that had recently burned out. Up, down. Up, down.

He closed his eyes, resigned, and pictured the caramel-skinned waitress at the pool with the pretty gap between her two front teeth. Smiling, she had leaned over him that afternoon as she delivered his vodka tonic, her skin smelling of cocoa butter and salt, the scent lingering after she had moved on to another table. It might have been the sun or the vodka or possibly a combination of both, but in her smile Phillip had imagined a whisper of invitation.

 

By the time Theresa had arrived in their life, he was starving. Despite what he had told Gerald, he had already had affairs, but they were confined to a weekend here and there. He could barely remember their names or any distinguishing features. As soon as the hunger was satiated, the memory of them went into a box deep in the recesses of his mind and disappeared. Each time he swore was the last, and it conversely gave him the impetus and determination to try harder in his marriage. Each time he found that his love for Greta was enflamed just a little bit, and it made all of the little resentments he was harboring seem less important, almost trivial. He was so relieved and thankful every time he strayed to find that he had not been caught, that his marriage was still intact, that Greta's good qualities came into focus again, the snap of her sharp analytical mind mixed with her unexpected easy laugh. Suddenly, his heart gladdened to watch her doing something as simple as reading a book, stirring a sauce, or washing their daughter's hair. But soon, against his own volition, he found himself resenting her for his getting away with it. It seemed like further proof of how removed from him she was. If she didn't notice that, then what was she seeing at all? And in this state of self-delusion and justification, the little resentments piled up again, one after the other, brick after brick, until a wall of grievances stood between them, and the only way to break through it was to have another something else on the side.

Theresa had been coming to teach Charlotte for four months before Phillip said much of anything to her. He barely even registered her presence except for the occasional “Sounds good” or “Good job.” She always seemed vaguely startled whenever he spoke to her, and when she answered, he often had to ask her to repeat herself. Her voice was tremulous and she blushed easily.

It was just after a year that Theresa had been teaching Charlotte that he found himself alone with her. Greta had gone to her parents' in Washington to help them with her nephew who was detoxing for the first time. Phillip arrived home and relieved the Venezuelan sitter, and then Theresa and his daughter emerged from her room laughing as Charlotte imitated a girl from school singing a song from
Mamma Mia
.

He realized that he was going to have to pay her, but he was embarrassed that he had given all his cash to the sitter.

“If you don't have to go anywhere in a hurry, I can run to the ATM,” he said.

Theresa smiled and waved her hand “I don't care. Really. You can pay me next time.”

He noticed that her hair was shorter than it had been the last time he had seen her. Her shiny dark hair was just under her chin rather than at her shoulders.

“Did you cut your hair?” he asked her on impulse.

She reached up and ran a hand through her hair, pulling on the ends as if she could lengthen it.

“She looks like my American Girl doll!” Charlotte squealed.

“Mistake,” Theresa said. “I wasn't thinking.”

“I like it,” he told her.

He wasn't exactly sure why he told her this since he had vaguely preferred her hair the other way, but immediately Theresa blushed and the color spread across her cheeks and the pale skin on her chest. When he saw the flush, he realized that of course that was why he told her.

Even though he had work to complete that night after putting Charlotte to bed, he asked Theresa if she was hungry; when she solemnly nodded, he asked if she was okay with Chinese. He rarely ever ate Chinese food anymore, usually bowing to Greta's preference for Italian or French, so he was extravagant and over-ordered for the two of them. While waiting for the food to arrive, Phillip began to get Charlotte ready for bed. Since he was rarely alone with Charlotte, Theresa correctly intuited his need and offered to help. They sat on his daughter's bed, on either side of her, and read the children's encyclopedia on animals. Even then, he should have seen that the betrayal had begun. The ease with which they play-parented together was actually more disarming, in retrospect, than the sex, which didn't occur until days later. She returned on Thursday for Charlotte's next lesson, and when he invited her over the following night, after Charlotte had gone to bed, on some slim pretext (a book on Stravinsky?), there was more Chinese, more blushing. Theresa's voice became stronger, her gaze more direct. By the time they fell into each other, panting and wordless, it seemed preordained, as most affairs are wont to. She came to see him every night after that first time, except for the night when he had a group dinner with his team on the Kaiser Pharmaceutical case. If she had anything else to do at all, she canceled it. The night before Greta returned, he walked Theresa out to her car and asked when he would see her again.

“Whenever you want to,” she told him.

They resorted to invented business trips and hotels after that. One night, when Theresa's sister and her boyfriend were out of town, he slept over on the fold-out couch in their Venice house. It was teenaged squalor and brought him back to the dizzying days and nights of undergrad life, when he and Greta still lived in different houses, shared with numerous roommates. Even though most of their classmates came from moneyed families, the families had all adopted a Horatio Alger work ethic when it came to their living conditions, and the students lived in a pleasant, self-imposed shabbiness.

At Theresa's sister's house, Phillip observed it all with nostalgia. The vintage rock posters, the wallpaper curled in the corners, the air-conditioner leaking fluid in a dark trickle along the wall. An Obama Chia pet with a dead afro languishing on a windowsill.

“Pass me the bong?” Phillip joked.

Theresa was flustered and on the verge of tears. She seemed so self-conscious and uncomfortable that he booked a room the following night at Shutters on the Beach, an upscale resort hotel nearby. They spent the weekend shut up in the room together, ordering in room service and watching pay-per-view films. He had told Greta that he was in Detroit.

Looking back, those two days were essentially the apogee of his relationship, affair, transgression—whatever one wanted to call what he had with Theresa. After that, she took possession of him like a virus that he couldn't shake. She became increasingly demanding about when she would see him next. Where would the next hotel rendezvous be? How long could he spend with her? Could she tell her sister about him? If she felt him retreating from her, she became sullen and punitive. At the end of every interaction they had, Phillip was left with the queasy, uneasy sense that she was a firearm waiting to go off. At any moment, she might lose control and tell Greta the truth. He hastened to placate Theresa, taking ridiculous risks—leaving work in the middle of the day, sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night, doing everything to buy himself one more day of keeping his marriage intact.

In the first weeks of their affair, Phillip had provided her with a work e-mail address that Greta never had the access nor the inclination to check, but on that one horrible day Theresa accidentally—or perhaps purposefully—chose to write Phillip an e-mail and send it to his home Gmail account. This was the account reserved for scheduling family outings, Charlotte's doctor's appointments, fertility meetings, anniversaries, car repairs, and swimming lessons. It was to this address that Theresa wrote the words “i don't get what i am to you” in twenty lowercase letters. Had Theresa not pushed Send after the two bottles of wine that she drank before writing this, or had Greta not happened to have woken up in the morning to her own frozen MacBook and needed to sign out of Phillip's e-mail account before accessing hers; had he ended it when he should have or, better yet, never even started it—Phillip's mind reeled imagining how different his life would be now had the series of events failed to occur in just the order that they had. But they hadn't, and the convergence of these eight simple words with Greta's chance discovery brought down the life they built together as swiftly as a structure made of Tinkertoys kicked over by an impetuous two-year-old child.

Marital therapy was briskly arranged, and in the days leading up to the appointment, Phillip attempted to invent lies upon lies, fearing that if he admitted to even
one
indiscretion, it would all be over.