Carpool Confidential (38 page)

They mean Joe, not me. He's watching a naked blonde in a cowboy hat with implants the size of Texas and shakes his head. Apparently, he's not all that interested in being flogged by a strange woman while her husband watches. They leave to find another candidate.

“So,” Joe says, “you're not really what I was expecting.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I hope Kevin didn't mislead you.”

“It's not like I asked him if I could do his sister.” He looks at me. “I just figured given the meeting venue there might be more to you than he knew.”

“I see your point.” I'm interrupted by loud groaning from the corner of the room. It sounds more like someone being murdered than someone having sex. All I can see is a big pile of limbs, but I'm guessing there are about ten people involved. There's also a little group watching.

Joe looks at them and then at me. His disappointment is palpable. “It's just that I thought, you know, sometimes older, divorced chicks are up for stuff.”

Ouch. And I'm not divorced. Yet. “A few years ago I might have been into it.” I grab yet another drink. “You know. Before menopause.”

He looks pale. “Oh, God. Sorry. I didn't realize—”

“Yeah. The hot flashes, the mood swings, that greenish blood stuff”—I shrug—“you understand.”

I giggle as I realize that now I have to remember for the rest of the night that I'm post-menopausal. I've had way too much to drink. My gaze brushes past the group watching the groaners, when I see something that makes me swivel my gaze back. My coordination isn't great at this point, so I have to turn my whole head.

“What?” Joe asks.

“It's just,” I giggle again. “I thought I saw a familiar penis.” That strikes me as really funny.

“Really?” Joe asks. “Women can identify penises?”

“I've never tried a police lineup or anything,” I say. “But that one, the average-sized one,” I start to laugh again, “looks a lot like one I've seen before.”

“Figure it out?”

“No.” I'm still looking at the penis. “It's not like I'm familiar with that many.” I look up. “Oh my God.” I reel back, looking for a place to sit.

“So?”

“It's my husband,” I croak.

“Dude! That's your husband?”

I nod. Once again, my world is coming down.

“So what's he doing here? Aren't you divorced or something?”

“No. I don't know.” I'm pretty sure I'd be shocked and horrified if I was capable of feeling anything. The entire top half of my head is numb.

“Do you want me to pretend I'm with you?”

I frown at Joe. “You are with me.”

“No, you know, really with you. Like start doing you or something.”

“No.” I see a pair of female hands come down on Will's shoulders. I know they're moving at normal speed, but it seems to have been slowed down. I look up from the hands and see the face. It's Pauleen. Her middle-aged butt is crammed into some kind of corset thing.

“I hate to say this, but I think he's with someone else, too.” Joe points out. “And I think he likes her more than you like me.”

No shit. “His secretary. Ex-secretary,” I say.

“She has a seriously droopy ass,” Joe says.

“That's only the tip of the iceberg on her unpleasant qualities.”

“Yours is much better,” he says, eyeing me. “Although I might have to squeeze it to be sure.”

“I'm wearing hugely voluminous support panties,” I tell him. “At menopause the whole thing dropped down to the back of my knees.”

“Is it worse than hers?”

I nod. “Way, way worse.”

He laughs. “I don't believe you. I don't even think you're telling the truth about menopause. I don't even think my mom has gone through that yet. And if you ask me, him choosing her ass over yours is seriously random.”

And it's like all the rage about everything comes rushing at me all at once.

“Where are you going?” Joe asks.

I smile at him. “To say hi to my husband. Want to come?”

Sadly, more next time.

The young policeman who gave me back my personal possessions at the first precinct could not have been nicer. “There's an excellent chance of the assault charges being dropped completely,” he said as he handed me my coat and bag over the desk.

“So he's OK?” It was a little after the fact to be worrying about this, but I wasn't looking forward to the day I had to explain my actions to the boys. Whatever else might happen in my life, I was pretty sure I had, in the recent past, ruled out both drugs and alcohol as potential solutions to my problems.

“He'll live. They're resetting it tonight, but from the sound of things, he may be getting his wish, because without some future cosmetic work, he's going to look a lot more like Barry Manilow.”

“I've never bitch slapped anyone before. I don't know what came over me.” Actually, I was afraid I did: the specter of my parents' relationship loomed over me.

“Miz Martin”—he leaned across the counter. His nametag identified him as John Schultz—“not to go professional on you, but what you did, it was more of a pimp slap. A bitch slap, see, is given with warning, like
I'm gonna slap you, bitch
first. If what you did had been delivered with a fist instead of a giant dildo, it would have been known as a good old-fashioned sucker punch.”

It honestly had not occurred to me that a giant dildo would have been so…inflexible—wasn't flexibility part of the point?— until I'd heard the sickening cracking sound Rick's nose had made when they'd connected.

“Apparently your ex isn't such a tough guy. The first thing he wanted to know once they got the bleeding stopped was where that dildo had been.” John Schultz laughed. “And as to that, who can say?”

I was thinking about a nice, boiling, disinfecting shower myself.

“Apparently George,” John Schultz continued, “your arresting officer, took a little dislike to your ex and his friend.” He smiled at me and I smiled back, hoping I wasn't going to hear a police brutality story. “I'm guessing that her husband wasn't too happy when she was brought home in a police cruiser dressed in that Victoria's Secret thing, since as far as he was concerned, she was spending the night with her sick mother.”

“From the bottom of my heart,” I said, “please tell George, thank you.”

“So it turns out she and her husband, they live on one of those blocks that's real quiet. A lot of families.”

“I know,” I told him. “I've been to a barbecue there.”

“And the lights and sirens going for so long like that, they woke a lot of the neighbors up. She might be a little embarrassed this morning. Especially because George said her butt was nothing to be proud of.”

I laughed as Randy came back in. “You're sprung,” she said.

“Well good luck to you,” John said. “And if you want a word of advice? You're very attractive. You don't need to display everything you have like that, if you know what I mean?” His gaze fell to the hem of my skirt.

“Come on,” Randy said, “I'll drop you at home.”

I shook my head. “I think I'll take a walk.”

“Cass”—she looked tired. And worried—“You've been doing really well. You'll get past this too.”

“I know. I'm not going to throw myself in the river, Ran.”

She smiled. “I knew that. You're way too sensible.”

“Or too chicken. It doesn't matter which it is. I'm not about to let Rick be Jared and Noah's only parent.”

“Good thinking. Where are you walking to?”

“I don't know. Down by the river to start. Maybe uptown a bit,” I said vaguely.

“Like maybe to the Upper East Side?” Her face was deadpan, but her voice was smiling.

“I don't know. I've never much liked that part of town. I've always identified with the
Seinfeld
where Kramer tells Jerry that if he can't abide by the rules of society he should just drop out and go to the Upper East Side.”

“I think you're denying in too much detail.”

I laughed. “Maybe. I'll concede that the Upper East Side does have its attractions.”

“The Metropolitan. The rock slide on the east side of the park. Serendipity 3. Daniel. E.A.T. My pediatrician. Kidville. Bonpoint. Aureole. California Pizza Kitchen. Payard. Bergdorf 's—”

“I don't technically consider Bergdorf 's the Upper East Side. And should I be worried about how many of your top attractions are food-related?”

“Probably. Although at least according to your mother-in-law, your attraction sounds pretty edible, too.” We got to her car. “First time I've ever not had trouble finding a parking space down here.” She pressed the button on the keys to unlock it. “I should come over at four in the morning more often.”

“Or maybe not,” I said.

She looked at me, very seriously. “So what are you thinking?”

I leaned against her car. “I'm divorcing him. I don't care about the money or the whys. I've loved him forever, still do in some way, but I'm out. And I'm thinking it might do us all good to make a change.”

“As in Connecticut?”

“How did you know?”

“Jen”—she smiled—“had an inkling. I think her exact words were
drooling on the kitchen floor
.”

I had to laugh. “Sadly, it's pretty much the truth.”

“Can you afford it?”

“No.” I crossed my arms. “But at this point, I think I have leverage to make Rick let me sell the apartment and the house.” Then I told her about the agents.

She said she would keep her fingers crossed. I told her I'd keep mine crossed for her too. “Nothing?”

She shook her head, obviously working on not crying. “Not yet. We're going to try one more cycle.”

“Sensible. Why are we having a conversation that feels like we're saying good-bye?”

“We're not,” she said firmly. “But it somehow has the feel of an ending.”

I looked at her. “But a beginning, too, right?”

“Absolutely a beginning.” She opened the car door and reached into the back. When she straightened, she was holding a pair of running shoes. “I remembered as I was leaving what you had on your feet.”

I took them. “God, Ran, I think I really do love you. I can't believe he was there tonight. It's bound to hit me soon. He had another woman at our Nantucket house, Jordan Hallock our interior designer.” I slipped the stilettos off and laced the sneakers up. “How do I look?”

She cracked up. “Like a commuting prostitute.” She held out her hand for the shoes and, when I handed them to her, tossed them in the back. “I'm sorry, Cass, about Jordan, what does it mean to you?”

“In a larger way, that I never knew him, in a smaller way?”— I shrugged—“At this point, it's just another grain of sand, I guess.”

She hugged me. Hard. “I know I've been preaching
dump him
in one form or another since he left, but I want you to know, in all seriousness, if you decide to work things out with him, I'll support that. I get what's at stake here.”

“Thanks, Ran. I'll call you later.”

She was sliding into the car, which took some maneuvering, because she was so small she had the seat about six inches from the steering wheel. “Be careful.”

“I always have been.” I felt bleak for just a moment. “But it hasn't gotten me far.”

“Then don't.” She was laughing as she drove away.

It was dark and freezing. I was in downtown Manhattan, and it was so deserted I felt like I might be the only person alive. It's not a hundred percent true, the city that never sleeps thing.

I wondered if the true awfulness of all this was going to hit me later, but I almost felt like all these months of ups and downs had thickened my skin. If it wasn't for the boys, I didn't know how much I would have cared. They were going to have some rough times ahead, but they were essentially healthy. They'd been happy and would be again if I had anything to do with it. It was a hard pill to swallow that even if Rick came home tonight, transformed into the perfect husband and father, which was as likely as, I don't know—not likely—the boys would always carry some scars. Their worlds would never feel quite as secure and whole. But they had a mother who loved them more than anything. And I was going to do my absolute best to make sure they came through as unscathed as possible. And for right now, they were safe in their beds, and I trusted M.A. to watch over them.

I felt totally unafraid of New York in the dark. I flagged down an extravagant taxi and asked him to take me to the South Street Seaport. When I got there, I almost kissed the cobblestones in gratitude for Randy's sneakers. It still smelled of rotting fish even though the Fulton Fish Market had moved to Hunts Point. The smell reminded me of summer, and I thought about taking Noah to the beach for the first time, and I remembered Rick, like seeing a snapshot, laughing and trying to keep him from eating sand.

It might not have been as devastating as it could have been, but there was definitely going to be a vein of sadness and fear for a long time to come. A couple of passing workmen gave me the head swivel—a sign that they approved of my outfit. I put my coat on before any of them could offer to employ me and crossed into what's usually the touristy part of the market. It was deserted now, the stores and ticket kiosks shuttered. I walked past the museum, down toward the water.

At the edge, I sat down on a bench and looked across to Brooklyn. I picked out our apartment building and counted up and over until I was pretty sure I'd found our windows (it was kind of hard to be sure in the dark). Soon the sun would be rising, and then high enough to shine straight into my bedroom. I pictured the familiar morning light slanting across the duvet. Then I closed my eyes and imagined the scene with someone else's duvet. It felt sad but didn't hurt particularly.

I probably should have been heading over to St. Vincent's to find out how the nose setting was going, but I thought I'd let Rick call me. Did I owe him an apology over the whole assault-with-a-giant-dildo thing? Surely he owed me a bigger one?

My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Randy. “For God's sake,” I said, “it's five in the morning. What are you doing calling me?”

She laughed. “I had this insane client who apparently mis-took me for a criminal lawyer in the middle of the night. I had to go bail her out of jail.”

“Sounds like a nutjob.”

“Absolutely. But, Cass, I can't believe I forgot to tell you this—Sue and Ken are having an affair!”

I don't know why, but that surprised me more than coming face-to-face (face to penis?) with my own husband at a sex club. “You're kidding me.”

“I walked in on them in the conference room at school.”

“Walked in on them in a definitive position or an ambiguous one? Like he was looking to see if her contact lens had moved?”

“I guess it's possible he was checking something like that”— she was quiet for a minute—“assuming she wears contact lenses on her cervix.”

“That,” I said, when I had stopped gagging, “might be the most disgusting thing you've ever said.”

“You think?” She sounded pleased.

“But Tim is so much better looking and more interesting than Ken.”

“I'm guessing it doesn't have much to do with either Ken or Tim, but a lot to do with Sue,” Randy said gently.

“You really do just never know,” I said, and then we hung up and I sat and watched Brooklyn until the sun came up behind me. My overriding feeling was one of wishing I could see my life this far played out like a movie, to look at my life and my marriage with the remote in hand so I could pause it at crucial moments. Enjoy them more, analyze them more, just be
in
them more. I envisioned it sort of like when you're watching a horror movie and someone screams,
“Look behind you”
at the screen, except in this case it would be,
Look ahead
. But the universal truth is we don't get do-overs on this stuff no matter how much we might like them.