Point, Click, Love (3 page)

So she had to wonder: Was there somebody else out there who was even better for Jake than she was? Or perhaps there was somebody out there for her who was better than Jake. Maxine was never a grass-is-always-greener kind of woman, but lately she couldn’t help thinking that maybe things could be better.

And that was her biggest secret of all. Her marriage wasn’t as great as everyone thought it was.

Maxine met Jake when she was traveling around Europe after graduating from Wesleyan. None of Maxine’s friends were interested in going with her, since they all had secured high-powered jobs or artsy internships, so she decided to go it alone. She would head from north to south, beginning in Amsterdam and ending in Sicily.

Amsterdam was the perfect place to start, full of beautiful young people who were eager to make new friends and show off their town. Her first day there, she met a bunch of college students at a coffee bar who invited her to a party that night. The moment she walked into the cramped apartment, she was blown away by all the men, one more handsome than the next, and she resolved to meet a boy and sleep with him that night.

It had been a while for Maxine. Although she had spent her first two years of college skipping from one boy to the next, her second two years were completely sexless. Maybe she was burned
out, maybe she was too busy with her double major in painting and religious studies, or maybe she was just looking for something different.

She zeroed in on a tall boy with deep blue eyes and jet-black hair; his name was Maximilian. They immediately hit it off, calling each other Max and discovering their mutual love of art. Maximilian tried to teach Maxine how to properly pronounce van Gogh. Maxine told Maximilian she wanted him to take her to his place, and he readily agreed.

Maxine stayed in Amsterdam an extra week to be with Maximilian but decided that she still wanted to see the rest of Europe. So she boarded a train for Paris and spent the long journey convincing herself that she had made the right decision. But once she settled into her cheap Parisian hotel, she knew she had made a mistake. Paris was a terrible place to be alone and an even worse place to be while missing a gorgeous Dutch boy with blue eyes and black hair. The people were cold and they made fun of her accent, and everything around her—the intimate bistros, the parks, the fountains—seemed to be built for couples.

After a few days, she hopped a train for Zurich, then Munich, then Salzburg, and in each place she searched the faces of the people for some kind of recognition, some acknowledgment of her existence, but everyone seemed indifferent.

Once across the Italian border, everything changed.

“Ciao, bella!”
a man in a white apron shouted at Maxine the moment she walked into a coffee bar in Genoa, as if she were an old friend he hadn’t seen in years. It was like that everywhere she went—restaurants, bakeries, stores, and newsstands. And as she worked her way south, people only got more welcoming, as if friendliness increased in direct proportion to the warmth of the sun and the decay of the buildings.

Rome is where she met Jake. They were staying at the same hostel, but he was with a group of college friends. Each night,
Jake’s group would head out to one of the Irish pubs near the train station and get drunk on Guinness, while Maxine spent the night roaming the streets, hanging out at little wine bars, and eating hunks of pizza on the cement benches of the piazzas.

One evening, Jake and his friends were standing outside the door of the hostel, trying to figure out which pub to go to, when Maxine walked out. She ignored the group, as she had for the past three days, and headed confidently down the street, even though she had no idea where she was going. A few seconds later, she felt a tap on her shoulder.

“Hi!” said Jake.

“Hi,” answered Maxine, stopping abruptly. She was surprised to have been followed but pretended it was the most normal thing in the world.

“Sorry to bother you, but my friends can’t seem to get it together and I’ve noticed you going out every night by yourself.”

“How do you know I’m not meeting someone?” Maxine said, resuming her walk as if she was rushing to an appointment.

“Oh, yeah, sure. You could be,” said Jake nervously, struggling to keep up as he searched for the right words. “I mean, you probably are. But on the off chance that you’re not …”

“I’m not,” she said, slowing down the pace a bit so he could catch his breath.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to butt in. It’s just that you seem to know what you’re doing, and my friends—”

“Getting a little tired of the Irish pubs?” asked Maxine.

“How did you know?”

“It’s all your friends ever talk about. You’d think all Rome had to offer was beer, and not even Italian beer!”

“I know, I know. It’s mortifying.”

“So why do you go with them?”

“I guess I’m not as self-assured as you.”

“I guess you’re not.”

“But we go to museums and churches and stuff during the day,” said Jake, trying to convince Maxine of his worthiness, following her like an eager, unwanted puppy.

“Yeah, when you finally get up around noon, because you’re so hungover. The museums and churches close by then for the lunch break.”

“So we go eat at a restaurant, and by the time we’re done, it’s three o’clock!”

“You eat in restaurants?” she asked, stopping once again, surprised that someone her age would have the means to eat in a real restaurant. The one time Maxine tried doing that, she was horrified by the extra charges for bread and water and angry that the waiter guilted her into ordering three courses and a dessert. The whole experience made her feel powerless, so she vowed never to do it again.

“Um, yeah. Where else would I eat?”

“I’ve eaten so much bread and cheese over the past month, I think I may be getting scurvy,” said Maxine, putting her hand on her forehead like she was taking her temperature.

Jake smiled. “How about I buy you an orange, then?”

Maxine looked at him. “So, what? You want to tag along with me now?” Maxine wasn’t sure why she was being so bitchy to this poor guy. He seemed sweet and was actually nice looking, for an American guy. Maybe he just paled in comparison to Maximilian.

“Yes, I do!” said Jake confidently, as if he needed more of a backbone to get anywhere with this girl.

Maxine had planned to check out some new places that evening but decided that she’d take Jake to some of her favorite spots instead. Rather than going down the busy Corso, where cars whizzed by and tourists jammed the sidewalks, Maxine led Jake down a series of narrow, winding roads, where housewives carried the ingredients of their evening meals in blue plastic bags, men stood in wine shops drinking a glass before heading home,
and young lovers held hands, stopping every now and then to look in the windows of shoe stores.

When they arrived at Piazza Navona, they were greeted by a vast open space with three fountains lit up, the water sparkling in the moonlight.

“Wow,” said Jake.

“You haven’t been here yet?” asked Maxine in disbelief.

“No, I have. But not at night.”

“Yeah, Rome is totally different at night. You’ve got to see everything at night.”

And so they proceeded to see everything—or almost everything. The Pantheon, the Coliseum, the Tiber—walking the whole way. At the Forum they hopped a fence and sat on a rock that was probably the base of a column thousands of years old.

“Aren’t you glad I came along with you tonight?” asked Jake, taking Maxine’s hand.

“Maybe.”

“Oh, come on. I know you’ve been checking me out ever since you saw me.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“My friends noticed too. ‘What’s the deal with that loner girl?’ they said. ‘Does she have a thing for you?’ ”

“That’s very funny, because, actually, you and your friends have been annoying the hell out of me.”

“But now you see how wrong you were. Right?”

“Right,” said Maxine. “Very wrong.”

Maxine thought back to Maximilian, how attracted she was to him from the moment she saw him and how they shared the same passions. Yet there was something so distant about him, like he was an alien from another planet whom she could never truly know.

With Jake it was different. She hadn’t been attracted to him right away, and on the face of it they had little in common. He was
starting medical school in Boston in the fall, and she had no idea what she wanted to do. But already she felt safe and comfortable with Jake. Already she felt like he was someone she could spend the rest of her life with.

Jake had planned to leave with his friends the next day and head to Brindisi, where they would take a boat to Greece. Instead, he asked Maxine if he could stay with her in Rome and then head south to Sicily. Far from being taken aback by Jake’s forwardness, Maxine was impressed with his spontaneity and his certainty that he wanted to be with her.

From that night on, Maxine and Jake never lived apart again.

Maxine had planned on going back to Cleveland and staying with her parents until she figured out what to do, but instead she went to Boston with Jake. From his first year in medical school, Jake was a star, so he was always getting exciting opportunities to study and work in the best hospitals in the country. Maxine was excited to be able to live in so many great places—from San Francisco to New Orleans—but it was impossible for her to hold on to a job for more than a year, making it hard to establish herself and her own career. When she thought about it, she realized that summer in Europe was the first and last time Jake followed her instead of the other way around.

After they got married and Jake finished school, Maxine hoped they’d settle on one of the coasts. But Jake’s best offer was at a teaching hospital in Kansas City, so Maxine agreed that’s where they should go. She knew not to complain. How many struggling artists had rich husbands to support them? She could take classes, build a studio, and have plenty of time to paint without having to worry about getting a job.

Not only that, Jake started to get invitations from around the world to speak at conferences and seminars, and he always brought Maxine along. Sometimes they would take months off at a time to do charity work in Africa or Southeast Asia.

Yes, it was all pretty spectacular. So what was the problem? The problem was that, at a certain point, they stopped having sex.

Literally—no sex. None.

When Maxine allowed herself to think about when and how this could have happened, she knew the answer right away. It was when she got pregnant with her first child, Matthew.

Jake was a doctor, and he always said how beautiful women were when they were pregnant. But when it happened to Maxine—when her belly ballooned and her ankles swelled and her ass widened and her face got plump and she was constantly chewing on Tums to relieve her indigestion and little patches of brown formed on her face—it all seemed less beautiful to Jake. By the fifth month, he barely touched her, which was fine with Maxine, who felt miserable, ugly, and not at all sexual. Then came breastfeeding. When the weight came off, Jake was ready to go, but Maxine was dry as a bone, so she held him off for six months until she decided to stop, partly because she worried her marriage wouldn’t survive.

But while the sex resumed, it wasn’t quite the same. Maxine wondered if it had something to do with childbirth, with Jake standing over her as she lay sprawled on a hospital bed, her legs spread and a variety of multicolored tubes hanging out of her. Yes, seeing their son’s head emerge from her vagina must have been an amazing experience, but wouldn’t that vision change the way he saw that particular body part—no longer a locus of pleasure but now simply a component of a larger baby-making machine?

It was subtle, but Maxine detected the difference right away. Jake kissed her less when they had sex. He avoided looking into her eyes. He developed a preference for doggy style. Maxine thought about saying something to Jake, but they had never been a couple who talked about sex. And what would be the point anyway? Maxine hoped it was only a phase.

Then she got pregnant two years later with Abby. This time during pregnancy, she felt more horny than she ever had in her life, but Jake’s abstinence started even sooner—at four months. So she satisfied herself with Jackie Collins’s entire oeuvre and a few early-morning sessions on her own when she had the chance.

Maxine breastfed Abby for only three months, figuring it was better to get back to having sex with Jake sooner rather than later. But this time he was even more distant, and they were doing it less and less. Then came baby number three, Suzanne, two years later. By that time, their sex life had become so erratic, so detached, so unsatisfying, that the gradual progression to no sex at all was practically a relief. Besides, they were both too tired to even think about doing it, and it seemed that there was always at least one kid in their bed almost every night.

So there they were, the perfect couple, without the sex. Jake made up for it by jacking up his public displays of affection, as if he wanted the rest of the world to believe they had a loving, healthy physical relationship. He held her hand, rubbed her shoulders, gave her long soft kisses. Maxine’s friends would comment on how amazing it was, how Jake was so clearly still madly in love with her, and Maxine would just smile and shrug her shoulders. How lucky she was!

She couldn’t bring herself to talk about it with her friends, not even her best friend, Katie, to whom she had always told everything. Maxine couldn’t let herself think about it too long either, so she threw herself into parenthood and painting, determined to not only be a great mother but also to find real success as an artist.

And she did.

It started with shows in the best local galleries. Then she began showing in galleries in New York and L.A. Soon, invitations from contemporary museums all over the country started coming in. There were talks with visiting artists and fancy dinners with collectors
and glowing reviews in newspapers and art magazines. Finally she had achieved a success in her world that Jake had achieved in the world of medicine.