Carpool Confidential (4 page)

“That's just the point, Cass,” he said. “I never even understood the depth of my own enslavement until this came along and saved me.”

“God, Rick”—my voice broke—“the boys.”

“I'm just going away for a while to clear my head. Think of it like an extended business trip,” he said, in those soothing tones he probably used to explain that, yes, I know the investment looks risky but…“I'm not really leaving.”

“Look, Rick.” I got up off my knees, finally, and sat down beside him. “If you're unhappy, isn't there some other solution?”

He reached over and took my hand. I looked at his, with the sure, sturdy fingers and square nails, the gold wedding band that was starting to wear at the edges.
We aren't separate any more
, I thought.
We've been
us
for so long that we're almost one
. If he really was this new—crazy—person, I would have known it. The thought was so comforting, I continued it to its logical conclusion: It was just not possible to live with someone for so long and love them so thoroughly and have no idea they weren't who you believed them to be, so there must be hope.

“We can try counseling.” There was warmth in his eyes now, and I felt a sharp flare of hope that the situation could be salvaged, that I could convince him by having sheer willpower to do it. “We'll figure it out together. And, Rick, I'm sorry about the sarcasm. I never knew it bothered you. I can change.”

“No, Cass.” He shook his head, and the flare of hope died. “I know this sounds ridiculous—” His hair flopped over his forehead. Another time I might have reached up and smoothed it back. “—But it's like I've found my, I don't know, not my destiny exactly, but something like it.”

That's when I realized I was mistaken, that it wasn't warmth in his eyes for me, for the idea of saving his family. It was devotion to this crazy idea. The Rick I knew didn't talk about destinies. He talked about responsible investing and real estate, books, politics, theater and the symphony, laying in a case of 2000 Chateau Petrus.

He shook his head. “I can't tell you how free I feel, Cass. I'm not even bringing a cell phone!”

“But how will we be able to get hold of you?” I asked. Stupidly, I knew.

“Don't worry. I'll get hold of you.”

Again, the room-tilt thing. My heart was churning away, pounding a sick rhythm. It had been a long time since I'd been the recipient of
Don't call me, I'll call you
, but I still knew it when I heard it. And this time it was from my own husband. “But where will you be?” I asked.

“Here and there.” He managed to invest the words with a sense of airiness.

“Surely this production is headquartered somewhere?”

“Don't worry, I'll be in touch,” he said, less airily.

I looked out the window as I struggled to pull in another breath. How odd, I thought dimly, that it's exactly the same out there as it was a few minutes ago, right down to the police boat under the bridge. Those two imaginary cops still in the middle of that exact same imaginary conversation. It's only in here that the landscape is unrecognizable.

“Rick, you can't just go away and leave me no way to contact you. We have young children, responsibilities, a life. This is crazy. People don't do this.” It was like something you'd read in the
New York Post:

“AT THE COPA, THEY FELL IN LOVE: Top Stockbroker Wife in Shock as Hubby Dumps Her for Barry Manilow.” But I had a
New York Times
life. I'd made sure of that. “
You
can't do this.”

“Look,” he said, “that's part of the point, the part where the
doing this for you too
aspect comes back in. You worry way too much. It's neurotic and unhealthy for you, me, and the boys, this always thinking something is going to happen, that you'll need to get hold of me in some imaginary emergency. I'm sick of living with it.”

Some imaginary emergency
. How dare he? “What's the bottom line, as you bankers like to say?” I struggled to get hold of myself. “Do you see yourself coming back here, Rick? To our marriage, to us? Is this a new direction for your career or your life? God, who
are
you?”

“Look, Cass—” He shrugged. “Why don't we decide to take that as it comes?”

“No. You may be the new go-with-the-flow-unenslaved-by-the-tyranny-of-communications-devices, Rick, but I'm the same old lay-it-out-in-advance Cassie, and I need to know: Are you coming back to me?”

“I don't know.” Silence reverberated off of that, like neither of us could believe he'd said it.

At least the cards were on the table now. “When are you going?”

“Tomorrow. Best to make a clean break, don't you think?”

“No.” I stared at him and had a memory of myself pulling a Band-Aid off Jared's elbow.
It'll hurt less if I do it quickly, sweetie
. Who had I been kidding? It had still hurt like hell, it had just gotten the whole business over less painfully for
me
. And now my husband was taking the Band-Aid approach to leaving me.

Somehow the whole aura of premeditation that was permeating this scene made it feel more agonizing. “So you've been planning this. Going on normally, knowing all the while that you were coming home to do this tonight?”

He met my gaze. “I had to take my life back, Cass, and you wouldn't have understood. You'd have tried to talk me out of it.”

“Sounds like that could have been your salvation.”

“I understand you're not interested in discussing it rationally,” he said.

Damned right. “Can I stop you?” I asked. “Is there anything?” In retrospect I'm not proud of that, but at the moment I was desperate. My marriage, my world, was collapsing in front of me, and I'd never even seen it coming. I just desperately wanted to hold on to it and its familiar aura of stability and security.

He shook his head.

“So,” I said. “When and how are you planning to talk to the kids? Assuming you are planning to.”

He looked offended. “Are you implying that I'd take off on them, Cass?”

“Seems to me that's exactly what you're doing.”

“Don't worry, I'll talk to them. And, Cass?” He leaned in closer, putting his other hand over mine to draw me toward him. “Let's spend this last night together.”

“Rick”—I pulled my hand away—“do you mean have sex with you?”

“I'd like to feel a bond with you tonight,” he said, very seriously.

I hoped whoever was writing the Manilow script was making sure it was less clichéd than that. I laughed. “You're sleeping in the guestroom, Rick, so forget about any last conjugal fucking. And if you so much as hum a note of a Manilow song in this apartment—ironic or post-ironic—I'm killing you with my bare hands.”

Then things got worse. I woke up at 4:30, stumbled out of bed, and made my bleary way down the hall to the guestroom, mentally preparing for round two
(surely he will have morphed back into an actual human being with whom one can have an actual exchange of ideas, i.e., that thing we call a conversation)
, only to find him gone. So much for
don't worry. I'll talk to the kids
.

The freedom of the road must have been more alluring than one last espresso from the built-in Miele machine, a leisurely interval under the power shower, and a long, impassioned farewell. I couldn't believe that this was the man whose side I'd slept against for fifteen years, who'd held my hand and cried when our children were born, who had never once given me reason to doubt his love or constancy.

I made coffee. Barry Manilow? Even on three hours' sleep and in the dim half-light of 5 a.m. on an October morning, that one defied belief. Rick wasn't even a music guy. He liked going to the symphony, but other than an occasional wince of distaste for my lowbrow liking for PLJ in the car had never expressed any strong musical feelings.

I also understood, as Rick must have, that unless he'd gone into the Federal Witness Protection Program, it would take me about ten seconds to hire a private detective and about ten more for the PI to track him down and figure out what he was doing and who he was doing it with. So what really was going on?

My hands were shaking so badly that I left a trail of coffee drops between the counter and the table. I looked at the floor and tried to summon the energy to get up, but couldn't. The windows here in the kitchen looked out on the neighboring buildings. I stared out at the rooftops, tried not to hyperventilate, and took stock. It was too early to call friends. And my family? Well, it was too early to call them too, and the fact was that not one of them was any use in a crisis anyway.

Actually, that's not true. My parents are
the
people to know if you chip a bicuspid while eating a bowl of muesli, and my brother, Luke, is brilliant—provided the crisis involves your Internet connection going down. Useful skills, but not applicable here. My mother was un-comforting, singularly un-maternal, and had never made a secret of the fact that she wasn't exactly leading the Go Rick! cheering section. My father was not interested, and my sister was incredibly charming but useless with any practicalities. In other words, if I was harboring half-baked fantasies about one of them rolling up their sleeves and taking over so I could go back to bed, pull the covers over my head, and cry for a month, it was just not going to happen.

I had no choice other than to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Which meant a shower, getting Jared and Noah up and…telling them what? I took a gulp of coffee even though I knew no amount of caffeine was touching this headache. I couldn't
not
tell them. On the other hand—there seemed to be another little voice whispering in my head, the passive-aggressive-conflict-avoiding one—maybe it would be better not to tell them. It really should come from Rick if it came from anyone. Plus, it was perfectly likely that he was going to come to his senses in a few days, and in that case, it made no sense to shatter the boys about nothing.

An unexpected business trip, maybe. Rick had always traveled a lot for work. And somewhere in this, I recognized that trying to slide along in life's ordinary routine as much as possible was my greatest hope of staying sane. The PTA committee meeting I'd been dreading suddenly beckoned like a life raft of normalcy.

Cadbury came wandering into the kitchen on arthritic legs, and I mentally added walking the dog to the list of things it was going to be virtually impossible to do without another functioning adult in the house. She ambled over and was very good about letting me sob into her fur about how sorry I was that Daddy had abandoned her. She put up with it for a few minutes before emitting a huge, I-could-care-less, disgusting dog breath yawn in my face and lying down for a nap.

Technically Cad was Rick's. He'd had her before we'd met— one of the things that had attracted me to him in the first place. Who wouldn't love a single guy with a dog? It was so…solid and responsible. I'd just failed to notice that he'd managed never to be the one who'd walked her. Not that I'd minded doing it. I used to take her running with me, but now she was too old and slow.

This could not be the detail that I made insurmountable, I told myself. I'd manage. I blew my nose, decided to bribe one of the maintenance guys in the building with whatever it took to get them to scoop after Cad, took a quick shower, flinching at the swollen horror of my face—I do not cry well—and hauled the kids out of bed.

Why was it on weekends they were invariably up before first light asking for pancakes and someone to play Monopoly with them
right now this second
but on school mornings it required pleading, threats, and bribes to haul them out of bed? How was that going to be as a single parent?

I watched Noah sleep, terrified by how trusting and defenseless he was, and then bent down and gathered him against me, inhaling the smell of his skin.

“God, Mom, I can't breathe.” He struggled out of bed and glared up at me. “Why are you hugging me so hard?”

I looked down at him, the way his hair stuck straight up on the side he'd been sleeping on, and felt my heart break again. “Just saying good morning, sweetie.”

“Yeah, well, how about letting me get some oxygen next time you say it?” He went into the bathroom.

“What happened to your face?” Jared asked suspiciously (having learned my lesson, I didn't try to hug him), and I knew things must be bad—six-year-old boys are not given to noticing much about the finer points of their mother's appearance.

“Headache,” I told him, wondering if that excuse would fly at the PTA meeting. I was definitely not announcing my change of status there. You know those statistics about how one in two marriages ends in divorce? Well apparently none of them are here in Brooklyn Heights. This is easily the most married place on earth.

“Daddy! Where's Daddy?” Noah demanded, running down the hall from my empty bedroom at a tempo the downstairs neighbors probably didn't much appreciate.

I tensed up and took a breath. I've always hated any situation that requires improvisation—I write drafts of emails before sending them—so lying is up there on my not-good-at list. “He had to leave early this morning for a business trip.”

“I didn't know he was going away.” Jared was hot on Noah's heels.

My stomach clenched at lying to them. “It came up suddenly.”

“When?”

“Last night.” My response took a second too long. It didn't sound natural.

Noah frowned. “Where'd he go?”

I obviously couldn't do internal debate and lie at the same time. “Mexico City” (where had that come from?) “to start, then on to a couple other places.”

“Oh.” He didn't sound suspicious anymore. “What's for breakfast?”

“We can call him on his cell and say good morning, right?” Jared said.

I felt myself flush. How stupid could I have been? “Not right now,” I said. “He's on the plane. Later, though.” No idea how I was going to handle “later,” but I figured I'd get to that when the time came.

Jared nodded and headed toward the kitchen.

“When'll he be back?” Noah asked.

“Soon,” I said vaguely. “Get dressed and come in for breakfast, OK?”

 

“I don't like oatmeal any more.” Jared let his spoon fall back into the bowl. “It's gross.”

I had just put the empty oatmeal packet in his lunchbox and was about to drop his sandwich in the trash. My mind was moving at the speed of lead. “You've refused to eat anything else every morning for the last two years.” I rescued the sandwich.

“Well, I used to like it—”

“Yesterday.” I slid the sandwich into a Ziploc.

“I hate it now. It makes me gag. Can I have Frosted Flakes?”

Doesn't it seem like on the morning your father leaves you should get Frosted Flakes for breakfast? But they didn't know yet. “No,” I said.

“Ben gets Frosted Flakes. And sometimes Lucky Charms.”

The phone rang and my heart thudded. Maybe Rick had already come to his senses.

“The only cool thing about oatmeal is that it looks like barf,” Noah told Jared.

My throat closed in disappointment. It was Sue Moriarty, not Rick.

“Eeuw.” Jared started eating with gusto. “Barf for breakfast. That's sick.”

“Just calling to make sure you got my reminder last night,” Sue chirped.

We hung up, and I started organizing toothbrushing and dressing.

“I can't find my violin,” Noah shouted from down the hall.

“It's in your room,” some still-functioning autopilot part of me said. “On the floor.”

He appeared in the doorway, looking baffled by my lack of comprehension. “That's just the case. I brought
that
home because I needed something to carry Sam's Yugioh cards. We're trading. But I don't remember what I did with the violin. I'm telling you, it's lost.”

Who loses a violin? The son of a man who forgot to mention that he was poised on the high dive over the deep end for six months. That's who.

 

Sue ruffled through a sheaf of papers and put down her bagel. She had apparently fallen off the carb wagon—“Seventeen percent of Harvard's freshman admits in 2003 had seriously started a second language by the time they were four.”

I looked down. How interesting that my legs could shake independently, like they weren't under any actual control of my body at all.

“Surely this proves that it's imperative the school introduces a second language by kindergarten, at the latest,” Ken Ebersole said. Ken was the token male on the committee, a single father who radiated earnestness like George Clooney does testosterone and Ralph Lauren Polo to the point of flammability.

Marriages don't just end like this
, I thought. They fall apart after a slow, damning drip of
Pick up your own shirts at the dry cleaners
and
You're just like your mother after all
eating away at the fabric. We didn't
do
that. We didn't even argue.

Ken blew on his paper cup of coffee. The steam made his glasses fog up.

Ailsa Grandman nodded her agreement so fervently I was afraid one of her giant diamond earrings might fly off and crash through a wall like a meteor.

“Absolutely!” Betsy Strauss chimed in.

“I knew we could count on you both to be on board.” Sue beamed down the table at them.

Why didn't Sue's husband leave
her
? I mean, if there was ever a woman who deserved to be left, trust me, it's her, was my next—particularly mature—thought. After Wharton, Sue had gone to work for a media PR firm, becoming the youngest—and one of the rare female—vice presidents. When she married Tim Stephens, a major intellectual property lawyer at Fitzwilliam & Compton, it was practically like a Kennedy wedding (minus the drugs, lecherous uncles, and general air of tragedy).

The following year, they bought a twenty-five-foot-wide Greek revival townhouse, original detail intact, on Columbia Heights in Brooklyn—the New York real estate equivalent of Buckingham Palace. Rick and I were stuffed into our one bedroom plus den on the upper Upper West Side—the New York real estate equivalent of a walk-in closet anywhere else.

About a year later, I interviewed Sue for a
City Woman
article on women in PR. I was a week away from giving birth to Noah and had arranged to meet over lunch at the Four Seasons, which back then was still considered
the
place to lunch.

“Oh, look at you! You and Rick are having a baby!” Sue had squealed, as I'd aimed myself at my chair and hoped for the best. That was the thing about that particular stage of pregnancy: even the most self-absorbed can't miss the clues. My enormity was particularly surprising to me, since all I'd done for the past thirty-seven weeks was puke. “So, how do you feel?”

“Good,” I'd said. “Great.” Which wasn't true, but nothing is more deadly than pregnant women who catalog their hemorrhoids/ swollen ankles/constipation/cravings for Pepperidge Farm Milanos dipped in tartar sauce to other, non-pregnant people.

Sue leaned closer, across the table. “So did you hear about Ashley Dunow?”

Ashley had been the only woman to finish ahead of Sue at Wharton, so there were a few scores to settle. In fairness, had Ashley been hit by a bus, Sue would not have been alone in cheering. I shook my head.

“Do you remember how she used to do those iron woman triathlons? And how when she broke her leg that time while they were climbing Mt. Cho Oyo she let the guide set it with no anesthetic?”

It was hard not to.

“When she got pregnant she assembled a birthing team, you know, a doula, a midwife team, a masseuse, an acupuncturist, a reiki specialist, three OBs, studied different philosophies of birthing—you know Ashley. She was planning a water birth with dolphins. Are you doing it at Lenox Hill? Because that's the only place in the city that will allow it, apparently.”