The Adultery Club (45 page)

“Get in line.”

Fifteen
minutes later, I ease my toes from the to-die-in stilettos as the lift grinds its way up to the obstetric floor. There must be another butter-wouldn’t-melt little genome tucked away on that adulterous double-helix to explain my uncontrollable fetish for pretty shoes. How else to explain the purchase of lust-have red Ginas in a size six (the only pair left—and no, they haven’t “stretched with wear” as the commission-only salesgirl promised) when I’ve been a size seven all my adult life?

My mother was always perfectly shod. Even when the French bailiffs evicted us from our little
appartement
on the Rue du Temple because my father had stopped paying the rent, her footwear (if not her reputation) was beyond reproach. We might have starved as a result, but she could no more resist a new pair of polka-dot peep-toe slingbacks than she could him.

She brought her only daughter up in her likeness.

The lift doors open and I hobble toward the delivery suites, uncomfortably aware of the draft beneath my skirt. Lucy is my best friend, and I love her to death, but I really
hope she isn’t on duty tonight. I’m used to moral sermons from my mother; she speaks from fingers-burnt experience, after all. But Lucy and I have been
les soeurs sous la peau
since we crossed scalpels over a half-dissected corpse as medical students at Oxford. I’m the one she comes to for a Xanax scrip before she flies. It’s not like she hasn’t known about my affair for years.

On the other hand, when your husband leaves you for a teenage choreographer (forget semantics: If you’re thirty-six, as we are, twenty-three
is
teenage) I suppose it entitles you to take a more jaundiced than jaunty view of other people’s adultery.

My mobile rings as I reach the labor ward. Peering through the glass porthole, I realize my patient must still be in the back of an ambulance trapped in stubborn traffic somewhere on Fulham Road, and take the call.

“Jackson,” I say, “I’m with a patient.”

“You’re at work?”

“You knew I was on call.”

One of the perks of being a doctor (aside from delightful offers from strangers at parties to allow me to examine their thyroids or anal fissures in the guest bathroom, heedless of both the social niceties and the fact that I am a
neonatologist)
is the ability to stay out all night unquestioned.

As Pediatric Consultant at the Princess Eugenie Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, I owe the hospital six nights on call each month. My husband has always believed it seven.

“You’ve got five minutes,” I tell Jackson.

“That’s not what you said last night,” he teases, his Deep South drawl undiminished by nearly a decade in England.

I’m not having an affair because my sex life with my husband is either infrequent or unsatisfying. On the contrary:
He’s a conscientious lover. Though I have plenty of plausible reasons for my infidelity, I’m not sure that I can actually find an excuse that
excuses
me.

I shrug on my white coat. “What is it?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Now?
Can’t it wait?”

He hesitates. “I just found this neat motorcycle on eBay, an Indian. The bids end at midnight, and I wanted to talk to y’all about it first—”

I can’t help thinking he was going to say something else.

“A motorbike?”

“C’mon, Ell, you know I’ve always wanted one. It’d make it real quick to get to work. It’s all right for you,” he adds, an edge creeping into his voice, “living so close to the hospital.
You’re
not the one gotta sit in traffic for an hour two times a day.”

“I’m sure DuCane would still—”

“For Chrissakes, Ella! How many times?”

“No one’s asking you to raise money for their pharmaceuticals,” I say tightly. “We all know they’re immoral drug-pushing pimps who’ll go straight to hell, yada yada. But the research program is different—”

“Suddenly stem-cell research is OK?”

“Jackson, I’m a doctor. What do you want me to say?”

“You don’t have to leave your conscience at the door when you put on your white coat, Ella,” he says bitterly. “Just your fancy shoes.”

I wish.

“I don’t see what my conscience has to do with—”

“I thought you were supposed to be saving babies, not murdering them.”

“Not that it’s anything to do with neonatology, Jackson,”
I say, stung, “but since when did messing about with zygotes become equivalent to baling infants with a pitchfork?”

“Stupid of me to think you’d care.”

“Stupid of me to think you’d be able to reason like a grown-up.”

Subtext whirls through the ether. We both know what this is
really
about.

I switch my mobile to the other ear, holding on to my temper with difficulty. Now is not the time to call him out for wanting to break our deal—
we agreed from day one: no children
. It’s not as if the subject is going to go away, I think resentfully.

“Look. I only meant—”

“I know what you meant, Ella.”

It’s one of the things I always admired about Jackson (particularly since I lack it myself): his steadfast, unfashionable integrity. A gifted fundraiser, charming, sincere, and articulate, he has the kind of likable persuasiveness that, were he politically minded, could have seen him in the White House (although his incurable honesty might have counted against him, of course). In the past couple of years, headhunters for several prestigious NGOs have offered him six figures and an open-ended expense account to run their capital campaigns or head up their development offices. All have come away disappointed; though only after Jackson has charmed them into donating hefty sums to One World, the lentils-and-hairy-armpit environmental charity for which he works.

It’s one of the things that always irritates me about my husband: his rigid, my-way-or-the-highway Southern sense of honor.

I jam my mobile between chin and shoulder to button
the white coat over my smart crepe skirt. There’s nothing I can do about the fuck-me red shoes. “Fine. If you’ve made up your mind.”

“Think of it as a belated birthday present.”

I close my eyes, suddenly awash with remorse. “Oh, Jackson. I’m sorry.”

“Forget it.”

“I’ve been so busy at the hospital—we’re understaffed—”

“I said forget it.”

The silence lingers. How could I miss his birthday? It’s Valentine’s Day, for God’s sake. You’d think I could manage to remember
that
.

Jackson coughs again. “How’s the cold?” I ask quickly, guiltily.

“Actually, I feel kinda lousy, to be honest. I think I’m spiking a fever.”

I suppress a smile. It’s extraordinary, the way the same bug affects the male and female immune systems. I should write a paper on it: “A virus that will just produce sniffles in the female of the species miraculously becomes an upper respiratory infection the moment it encounters macho Y chromosomes….”

“Look, Jackson, we’ll go out on the weekend, I promise. I’ll make up some excuse—”

“Sure.”

“You choose. Anywhere you like.”

“Yep. Whatever.”

“You’ll enjoy it more when you’re feeling better anyway.” Then, partly to appease my conscience, and partly because, despite William, despite everything, it
is
still true, I add, “I love you.”

“Love you more.”

It’s our catchphrase, one of those couply exchanges you develop in the early months together and then later cling to, like a lifebelt, out of mingled superstition and hope and fear when the going gets rough.

It is also, in six words, a synopsis of our marriage.