A Circle of Wives

A
CIRCLE
OF
WIVES

Fiction by Alice LaPlante

Turn of Mind

A
CIRCLE
OF
WIVES

Alice LaPlante

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2014 by Alice LaPlante

Jacket design by Royce M. Becker

Jacket photograph © Ayal Ardon/Trevillion Images

Author photograph © Anne Knudsen

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Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011
or
[email protected]
.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents
portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or localities is entirely coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2234-6

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9274-5

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

To David, with much love

Alas! the love of women! it is known
to be a lovely and a fearful thing.

—Don Juan,
Lord Byron

1
Samantha

I AM NOTHING IF NOT
irresolute. Excuse the double negative. What I mean to say is that there is little I won’t waver over. You know how squirrels flirt with death by the roadside, and how some actually lose their heads and rush into traffic to their doom? I had to give up riding my bike around campus as an undergraduate because of those damn squirrels. They’d make a dash for my tires, and if I would just hold firm and keep going, chances were good they’d scamper back to safety. But if they’d freak, I’d freak, and the result was too many crashes, too many injuries. I walked everywhere my junior and senior years. So. A waverer I am.

Peter and I are at Cook’s Seafood Store on El Camino. We’re warmly greeted as we walk in. I love this place because the men behind the counter—all men, a variety of ages between twenty and seventy—look so happy to be there. I believe the word to describe them is
fishmongers
. Such a lovely word. And apparently a lovely place to work, as most of them have been there for decades. I like the way they closely attend to customers describing their dinner plans, how they take the time to think before suggesting the exact number of shrimp for a party of four, the precise weight of ahi tuna for six. No, they can’t recommend the mackerel; it’s a bit spongy today. Then, after placing the slabs of raw fish or the handfuls of shellfish on the scale, they wrap the purchases in crisp white paper as carefully as if they were the most special of birthday gifts. The taking of money appears a casual afterthought; the real business of the place is in the human interactions. If I were lonely, here is where I would come for solace.

The store is crowded, but we’re patient. They know what we want, and sure enough, there’s a wink and a broad smile from Eddie today, and out comes a beautiful specimen of smelt, Hypomesus transpacificus, that Peter has been seeking for quite some time. The fact that I use the words
beautiful
and
smelt
together in a sentence shows what living with Peter has done to me. As usual, Peter jingles the coins in his pocket and as usual Eddie waves him off. Peter is a scientist, an anthropologist, or, to be strictly honest, an academic wannabe. His doctoral dissertation involves researching the diets of the indigenous peoples of the San Francisco Bay area. He spent all last summer across the bay at the Emeryville Shellmound, wallowing thigh deep in what they now know is a toxic swamp. He will take this tiny smelt home and dehydrate it, carefully preserving the skeleton, and use it as a model to draw in his workbook. I’m wild about his meticulous sketches of these dried carcasses. For pleasure I often go leafing through the pages of his dissertation notes, and for my birthday I requested to have two of my favorites copied and framed. He thought I was kidding. But no. The delicate renderings of the fragile structures truly delight me. God is in those bones.

So here’s where we are: Together almost ten years after we met in freshman rhetoric and I helped him understand the difference between
its
and
it’s
and
which
and
that.
We became instantly inseparable, although I hesitated to call myself
committed.
It’s not a word I would use, ever, to describe myself. Now, a decade later, Peter is still in school, and I’m still wavering. I wavered my way from an undergraduate degree in history into a quickly terminated semester of law school, then into a master’s program in education and then less than a full term teaching eighth-grade social studies in nearby Portola Valley, recently rated the second richest town in America by
Time
magazine.

And here’s something else you should know about me. In addition to being irresolute, I’m also a quitter. I’m not ashamed. I find that it often takes more courage to stop doing something you despise than to continue blindly along the wrong path. You usually save yourself, and others, a lot of grief by acknowledging your failure and moving on. But walking out on those kids—entitled spawn of venture capitalists and software magnates that they were—in the middle of the day, in the middle of the term was wrong. Plain wrong. The thing was, I couldn’t have
not
done it. Another double negative. But seriously. If I’d had to spend another minute in that beautifully appointed classroom overlooking the rolling hills of the San Francisco Peninsula’s richest real estate, I would have slit my wrists. Peter, reasonably enough, asked me whether I’d feel more . . . useful . . . teaching inner city kids. But the point wasn’t that I felt
useless
. I’m not sure what the point was, except I got the same kind of choked-up-difficult-to-breathe feeling that had been the breaking point in Sam Adams’s (yours truly) legal career misadventure. No beer jokes, please, I’ve heard them all.

I stumbled into my current situation, like I stumble into everything. About four years ago, Peter and I were living on Curtner in a dismal two-bedroom apartment. I’d just quit teaching. Peter was finishing up his master’s. Palo Alto doesn’t have many streets that aren’t safe, but Curtner is one of them. Do a search of the California Sexual Predator’s online database, and all the little red dots congregate around Curtner—about the only area in town where a sexual predator wouldn’t be kicked out five minutes after he moved in. I’ll say this about Curtner: People were tolerant. Well, I was back to using my bike after a four-year hiatus—depended on it, in fact, to get around as my car had died and I didn’t have the money to fix it—and so was mad as hell when someone sawed through the heavy chain I’d specially purchased and made off with my ride. I loved that bike, had viewed it as my vehicle of liberation. An antidote to my stint as a teacher of the privileged.

My fit of rage over the theft propelled me onto a bus downtown and into police headquarters. I was given a form by a bored clerk and began filling it out despite the fact that my bike was probably worth less than two hundred dollars and therefore the report wouldn’t be considered worth anyone’s time. Then I saw the notice, tacked on the bulletin board. The police department was hiring. All that was required was an undergraduate degree and a clean record.

As it turned out, they mainly needed bodies to patrol the Stanford campus and try to prevent the kids from doing anything too dangerous. I tend to interview well, so that part was easy. They also gave me an aptitude test, and I passed with flying colors. Apparently my whole life I’ve been aching to lay down the law—not in the courtroom, but in the streets. It figures. I tend to be a little prissy about rules.

I know about as much as anyone what kind of bad things good kids can get up to, and I have a lot of tolerance for the undergraduate age group. This made me fairly popular on campus, and I gained a reputation as a trustworthy person among all parties. Surprisingly, the work suited me. I liked the camaraderie at the station house. I wasn’t scared of drunk freshmen, even if they were bigger than me. I didn’t mind getting yelled at or wept on. I had more trouble coping with the suicide-minded kids and the violent crimes—we generally had one or two sexual assaults on campus per quarter. But I found I had a cool head and sufficient authority to handle even these difficult cases, and so the first year passed rather quickly and satisfactorily. After that, three more years whooshed by. Then, just when I was beginning to think I had gotten into a rut, a detective position opened up. It offered a bigger paycheck, which sounded pretty good to me. But it was also a chance to get out of the itchy uniform into some comfortable clothes and use my brain. I’d begun to stagnate, to stink, even, with what was getting dangerously close to boredom. Again interviews. Again the aptitude test. A bunch of tedious training. And I got the promotion. Detective Samantha Adams. But everyone calls me Sam.

So it’s about 1
PM
on a sunny May day. We’ve just gotten home from Cook’s—home being the smallest rental house in Palo Alto—and kick off our shoes. Peter is about to make a pot of his world-famous veggie chili when I get a call.

I put my shoes back on.

“What’s up?” Peter comes out of the kitchen. He looks sad. Our schedules don’t always sync, and Saturdays are supposed to be sacred.

“Someone croaked over at the Westin,” I say. I’m still in a bit of shock.

Peter groans. “Can’t it wait?”

“No. This is serious. I need to meet Jake and the county’s CSI team there.” Jake is the Santa Clara County medical examiner. “Mollie says it looks suspicious.”