I'm So Happy for You (2 page)

From what Wendy suspected, in two months, Adam had failed to complete a first sentence. The evidence: the triple-digit iTunes
charges on their joint credit card bill, the fact that he changed the subject every time she asked to read something, the
pervasive smell of marijuana on his jackets and sweaters, the random afternoon sightings of him and Polly, his beloved geriatric
Doberman pinscher, meandering through Prospect Park. In that moment, however, Wendy’s frustration with Adam’s lack of a career
was tempered by the recollection that she’d rejected his advances in order to take Daphne’s call. No doubt he’d be feeling
hurt. He was apparently curious, too. “So, what’s the latest in Daphne-ville?” he asked as she climbed back under the comforter
next to him. “Any thwarted carjackings? Accidental crack binges?”

“Oh, just the usual,” said Wendy. “Mitch still isn’t leaving the weatherwoman. Plus now Daphne’s threatening to light herself
on fire. Which is why I was on the phone so long.”

“Now she’s threatening to burn herself alive?!” Adam looked up, his brow knit to convey horror and fascination in one. “You’ve
gotta be kidding.”

It had occurred to Wendy on more than one occasion that it was their mutual love of stories that connected her and Adam above
all else: gossip, literature, comedy, tragedy, political plots, plots of old TV shows; it was all the same to them; it was
all titillating. “I don’t think she was being any more serious than usual,” she said, feeling guilty but maybe not that guilty
for using Daphne’s misery as a marital healer. “But I guess you never know for sure.”

Adam slowly shook his head and laughed. “Can you explain to me why it’s always the most beautiful women who end up so completely
fucked up?”

“Do you really think she’s still that beautiful?” asked Wendy. Because it was one thing for her to admit that Daphne was gorgeous,
and another for her husband to confirm it. “I mean, she obviously was ten years ago.”

Adam shrugged. “Well, maybe she’s not as beautiful as she used to be. But she’s still about two hundred times more attractive
than that nightly-news weenie she’s screwing.”

“Tell me about it,” said Wendy, relieved by her husband’s retreat but still feeling insecure. “Will you kiss me again?” she
said, sidling back up to him with a scrunched face.

“I tried to kiss you before,” he said, his eyes back on his newspaper. “But apparently you had more important business to
attend to.” It was as if Adam had suddenly remembered that he was miffed. At the pained expression on Wendy’s face, however,
a sly smile took hold of his own. He placed his paper on his bedside table. Then he said, “All right, you have one final chance
to experience the great gift of my body.” Then he reached for Wendy, and she melted into his mouth and into his embrace. Even
after seven years together, she still relished the plumlike taste of Adam’s lips, as well as the ropy feel of his surprisingly
muscular arms—surprising because he was so slight.

“I love you,” she mumbled into his chest.

“I love you, too,” he said. “Even though you’re obsessed with another woman.”

“You’re so funny,” she said, nestling even closer.

But as Adam took her hand and placed it on his crotch, once again Wendy had to fight the urge to recoil. Only there was no
way out this time, no needy friend to save her from her own arousal. So she relented. And in the end, she was glad that she
had, glad to think she’d made Adam glad; glad in the way that, at a certain age and a certain number of years into marriage,
unplanned sexual activity rewards its participants with a real sense of accomplishment.

Or maybe just the conviction that their marriage is likely to last another year.

The next morning, as Wendy made her way up Broadway to her office, she was aware of her stride being longer than usual. For
the first time in weeks, she wasn’t about to be late for work. It wasn’t the thought of editing angry diatribes on the Guantánamo
Bay prison camp or the lack of federally guaranteed health insurance that spurred her forward, however; it was the prospect
of sending two emails, both of which she’d carefully composed in her head on the subway ride from Brooklyn.

Arriving at her cubicle—only senior staff had offices—Wendy switched on her ancient PC, which took six minutes to load (
Barricade
was perpetually short on funds). After establishing a weak Internet connection, she opened her email program, whereupon the
usual hodgepodge of absurdist pornography (“XXX Girl Scouts $3.99”), unsolicited pitches (“Like Gandhi before him, Hugo Chavez…”),
and left-leaning political missives (“Sign This Urgent Petition to Stop Bush’s Illegal…”) trickled in. Generally speaking,
Wendy believed that adding her name to a document, even if it was never read by anyone with any power, was the least she could
do to better the world. But at that moment, the least she could do seemed like too much. She was more concerned with solidifying
her position as Daphne Uberoff’s best friend, even though she knew it was juvenile and possibly even pathetic of her to care
about such designations. She opened a new message and began to type:

Hi sweets. I just wanted to see if you were feeling any better?? Call any time and/or if you need ANYTHING. At the office
all day. I know you’re going to get through this. Thinking of u, W.

Wendy addressed her second message to her and Daphne’s mutual friend—or, really, Daphne’s friend and Wendy’s longtime nemesis—Paige
Ryan, a six-feet-tall senior analyst for a Manhattan-based hedge fund, where she researched overvalued stocks that the fund
then sold short with the aim of making a killing when the price subsequently fell. (At the moment, she was concentrating on
the retail sector.) But Paige made a great show of giving a large percentage of her salary to worthy causes, thereby making
herself beyond reproach. She was also always mailing Wendy and Adam invitations to benefit parties they couldn’t afford to
attend, then calling attention to their absence.

Paige had been a college classmate of Wendy’s, as well. Back then, she’d been best known for launching SAD, a nationwide advocacy
group for college students suffering from depression and anxiety. Despite her lifelong commitment to battling mental illness,
however—and while there was every reason to believe that Paige herself was perpetually despondent—she’d never admitted to
feeling anything less than peachy. What’s more, those who made the mistake of suggesting otherwise risked being subjected
to a fusillade of vituperation—those, for instance, who expressed sympathy over Paige’s recent divorce, as Wendy had. (“What
do you mean you’re sorry?” Paige had snapped at her. “Sorry for what? Antoine and I came to a mutual decision we were both
happy with. Case closed. Maybe you’re sorry about your own marriage. But I’m not about mine.”)

Wendy essentially loathed the woman. But she was Daphne’s “other best friend.” In some bizarre way, Wendy felt sorry for her.
It was also common knowledge that Paige was an excellent point person to have during a crisis, if only because grappling with
other people’s distress and dysfunction was as close as she came to having a hobby. Not that Daphne’s phone call from the
night before necessarily constituted a crisis. Even so, Wendy felt compelled to keep Paige abreast of the situation:

P. Not to be alarmist—I think/hope she was just being dramatic—but Daphne called late last night and threatened to kill herself
again. (Mitch, of course.) She promised me she’d call Carol in the morning, but it probably wouldn’t hurt if her friends checked
up on her, too—hence, my email to you. Anyway, hope things are well on your end. (I’m sure they are.) Yrs, W.

Both emails sent, Wendy turned her attention to her editorial assignment for the day: an opinion piece arguing that the Medicare
prescription drug benefit had been a cynical giveaway to “Big Pharm,” with the secret purpose of bankrupting the federal government,
thus leading to a permanent down-sizing of the social safety net.
Barricade
had published a nearly identical piece just the month before. But it was rhetoric, not repetition, that concerned the magazine’s
top brass. Wendy’s initial editorial move was to cross out the first sentence, which referred to the Republicans as “avaricious
profiteers.” (The phrase seemed redundant, not to mention a little heavy-handed.) “Let’s start here,” she wrote in the margin
next to sentence two. She’d only just begun to get her head around sentence three—“While the military-industrial-pharmaceutical
complex siphons billions off the slumped backs of the elderly and the incapacitated…”—when Paige’s name came blinking into
her in-box.

To Wendy’s secret shame, the sight of it filled her chest cavity with what felt like a fresh burst of oxygen. Though she mostly
believed she’d reached out to Paige on Daphne’s behalf, Wendy was also aware of being a horrible gossip. Moreover, gossip
didn’t fully exist for her in all of its nuance-laden splendor until she’d shared and parsed it with someone else, preferably
someone who knew all the parties implicated. Abandoning her editorial assignment, Wendy opened Paige’s message and began to
read:

Wendy,

Please understand that I am AT WORK RIGHT NOW—and therefore NOT AT LIBERTY TO DISCUSS THESE SORTS OF PRIVATE MATTERS IN DETAIL.
That said, the news is indeed distressing, and I will of course call Daphne at the first opportunity that presents itself.
In the meantime, I think it would be prudent for one of us to contact Richard and Claire (Daphne’s parents) and let them know
what has transpired. In the bigger picture, I think it may also be time to confront Mitchell himself—not my first choice,
obviously. But, then, Carol seems to be of limited help, and, quite frankly, I’ve run out of other ideas.

As for Daphne just being “melodramatic”—until the veracity of that statement is proven, Wendy, I don’t think this is the time
for us to be closing our eyes and hoping for the best.

As for me, I’m quite well, thank you—just sorry to have missed you at my multiple sclerosis benefit last night! We raised
325K, a record for the organization. I guess you’ve been busy. Perhaps there’s reproductive news of which I’m unaware?

Paige

“Wendy,” someone was saying behind her head in a gravelly voice. “Do you have Leslie’s copy yet?” (Leslie, whose full name
was Leslie Fletcher—and who, for the record, was a man—was the writer of the Medicare piece.) Quickly down-sizing Paige’s
email, Wendy swiveled around in her desk chair, only to find herself staring into the pockmarked face of
Barricade’
s executive editor, Lincoln Goldstein.

Ordinarily, Wendy would have felt compassion for someone who had such a glaring cosmetic defect as Lincoln’s. But “Missing
Linc”—as Adam had nicknamed him—had a way of squinting as he spoke, one side of his mouth raised in a half smile, as if he
were “in” on the fact that she spent a good portion of her workday emailing friends, playing solitaire, shopping online for
furniture and clothes, perusing soul-deadening celebrity gossip Web sites, and generally pursuing cheap thrills that had nothing
to do with fighting the forces of fascism in Washington and elsewhere.

But then, considering the paltry salary she was paid, Wendy didn’t see how she wasn’t entitled to a certain amount of personal
time. Not to mention the occasional white lie. “I just got the piece this morning,” she told Lincoln. (In fact, it had come
in on Friday.) “I should have something for you to look at by this afternoon.” With that, she straightened her spine against
the back of her chair, the better to block her computer screen, which was currently blank.

She watched Lincoln’s eyes case her cubicle and linger on the Duane Reade pharmacy shopping bag that sat on her desktop, as
if it surely contained goatskin condoms for her lunchtime pleasure, when, in fact, it contained an ovulation predictor kit,
an antiperspirant, and a three-pack of Hanes Her Way cotton briefs, because wearing nice underwear had come to seem as superfluous
as having sex during the “wrong” time of the month. (It was rare for Wendy to buy new underwear at all; she tended to wear
hers until their crotch panels were discolored and their waistbands had begun to sprout threads in the manner of carrots and
potatoes left too long in the bin. It wasn’t clear if Adam noticed, or minded.)

“Please forward it to me as soon as you finish,” said Lincoln.

“Will do,” said Wendy with a perky smile intended to combat his mocking and mistrustful one.

He probably stood there for only forty seconds. To Wendy, it felt like an eternity. Finally, he disappeared. Then Wendy reopened
Paige’s email, her anger metastasizing with each sentence she reread.

She found the opening one, with its gratuitous caps and simultaneously self-aggrandizing and punitive tone, possibly the most
egregious. (While Paige was essentially adding zeros to the stock portfolios of rich guys in Connecticut, she apparently imagined
herself to be running the World Bank.) Though Wendy’s blood boiled with near-equal vigor as she reviewed the fifth:
I’ve run out of other ideas
? As if it were Paige’s problem to solve! (And as if Daphne had called
her
the night before.) It was so typical of Paige to claim Daphne’s unhappiness for herself, Wendy thought. She was further enraged
by the parenthesis containing the words
Daphne’s parents.
(As if, after sixteen years of friendship, Wendy didn’t know the first names of Daphne’s family members.) Clearly, Paige
was trying to prove that she was better friends with Daphne than Wendy was. Never mind the chastising tone of “I don’t think
this is the time…”

As for the implication that Wendy had been too busy having sex with her husband to attend Paige’s MS benefit, the charge was
so risible that Wendy had trouble feeling offended.

The real question, Wendy thought as she closed Paige’s email, was why she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She knew this was
what Adam would say if she told him what had happened. She could already hear him going off:
Paige Ryan is a shrew and a control freak. Why can’t you accept that? Just because Daphne is friends with her doesn’t mean
you have to be. Also, why are you going around talking to other people about Daphne’s private business? She called you—not
the
New York Post.