The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (32 page)

“Open it,” he ordered, a smile lifting his face.

I quickly untied its bow and peeked. Catching the candlelight were lilac-blue gemstones, small and round, framed in warm matte gold and dangling from delicate gold threads. The earrings suited me. I might have chosen them myself.

“With your blue eyes,” he said, looking for a sign that he’d picked well. “They’re Victorian. I bought them at auction.”

Luke, you’re making this too hard
, I thought. “They’re perfect,” I said. This was true. “But such an extravagance …”

“You deserve them.” He pulled me to him and we kissed, once for each earring, and I slowly replaced my prim pearl studs with the antique treasures, which Barry surely would not notice. “Thank you. You shouldn’t have.”
I wish you hadn’t
.

“They’re for Christmas,” he said. “But you know me—zero impulse control.”

Which goes for both of us
, I thought.
And do I know you?
I didn’t even know myself.
Don’t be a wuss. Don’t waste time. Whatever the protocol might be for what you plan to do, this isn’t it. Start talking
. But first I dressed, taking time to wash carefully, including the streaks of mascara that had migrated beyond my lashes, making me look as if I’d lost a fight. By the time I left the bathroom, Luke was back in his jeans, still shirtless, and had moved into the living room.

“What’ll it be?” he asked, combing through CDs. “Django Reinhardt? Josephine Baker?”

“You pick,” I said. I wondered if a country and western star had written a twangy ballad about a cosmetic surgeon’s wife breaking up with her lovable photographer boyfriend. If nobody has, somebody should. But moments later, Edith Piaf’s voice began “Les Amants de Paris.”

Luke sank into one of his couches and motioned me toward the space beside him. The opened bottle of wine was on the table next to our glasses, which he’d refilled. “Wouldn’t it be great to go to Paris?” he said. “Maybe I can cook up a trip. It’s corny, but what do you say to April? I know this place near Montparnasse, twice as romantic and half the price of Shutters.” Shutters was the exceedingly charming hotel where we’d stayed in Santa Monica. We’d gotten up early each morning to take long windy walks by the Pacific.

“I think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves,” I said as I pulled out the camera.

“Oh, man,” he said. “There it is. Thanks—I’ve been missing that sucker. Want to take some shots now?” he said. “Hand her over and give me a big Molly smile. Too bad you have all your clothes on.” I believe he winked.

“Luke, I don’t think so.”

“Not in the mood?” he said. “You look so good right now I’d like to go right back into the bedroom.”

“Luke, I can’t.”

He put the camera on the table, brushed away a lock of hair from my forehead, and cradled my face in his hands. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I closed my eyes to stanch the tears I knew would come. My effort didn’t work.

“Please don’t tell me we have a problem. Did Barry find out about us?”

I was sorry I was wearing the new earrings—I never should have opened the box, never should have let myself do a lot of things. But I refused to be one orgasm short of rational thought. I was glad I’d prepared a speech.

“Luke,” I started. “I can’t do this anymore, and it’s not because Barry knows about us, because I don’t think he does. It’s that every minute of every day I feel as if I’m in an opera that keeps getting louder and louder. I can’t hear my own voice anymore. I can’t think. This feels wrong. I love you, but—”

He put a finger on my lips. “‘I love you, but.’” Luke stood, crossed his arms, and walked a few steps away from me. Tension ironed horizontal lines in his forehead. “But you’re going to break my heart?”

“But I do love you. That’s not it.”

He started talking as if he were slicing off each sentence with a knife. “Excuse me, Mrs. Marx, but weren’t you more than happy to be all over me fifteen minutes ago? When did you make up your mind about this? Have you spent the last few weeks planning how to break things off or did the idea just occur to you?”

I was despising myself for being the sort of spineless, duplicitous woman who had chosen to have this conversation after I went to bed with him. I looked at Luke miserably, hopelessly. I wished I could go into the bathroom and start banging my head against the tile floor.

“I thought our feelings were based on love and kindness and respect,” he said. “I guess I’m the fool here.”

He looked angry but he sounded sad, and that made it worse. I’d come here to unload everything I’d been thinking for the last few weeks, to take each particle of doubt and build it into the Great Wall of China, to separate us, and now it was coming out wrong. “We’re not together all the time,” I added, as if that needed to be pointed out. “We’ve never discussed that this would last forever, that you wouldn’t—couldn’t—be with other people.”

“I don’t want to ‘be with other people.’ Don’t you get that? You’re making me feel like a fool, used and deceived.”

“How have I deceived you?” I heard my voice rising. “I’ve no more deceived you than you’ve deceived me.”

“Look who’s on her high horse,” Luke said quietly. “The doctor’s wife.” He stared at me. “And by the way, I don’t buy that your marriage is one coast-to-coast crap storm. You’re never going to leave him, never, not in my lifetime.”

I’d hoped for poignant eloquence and gotten a cheesy daytime drama.
But you and I have never even talked about being together
, I thought, and hissed, “Well, I certainly won’t leave Barry now.” I snatched my bag and walked toward the front hall. I took the time to remove the earrings and place them on a table, then grabbed my jacket and slammed the door behind me, breathing heavily as I ran down the stairs, not bothering to wait for the elevator.

As I reached the second-floor landing, Luke shouted at me, running down two steps at a time, “Molly, come back. I don’t want to fight. You’ve blown everything out of proportion. This is idiotic.”

When I shot out the front door, one of his neighbors was exiting a taxi, which I took as a sign. I mumbled apologies as I bumped the woman and catapulted myself into the cab. It tore away as Luke reached the sidewalk. In the rearview mirror, I saw him, still shirtless, growing smaller and smaller.

“Where to, lady?” the driver said.

Good question
, I thought.

When did marriage counselors convene and decide this was the word to kick off deep introspection? What did Felicia Stafford, M.D., expect me to say, that Barry and I were here to discover, on a scale of 1 to 10, if our conjugal discord was off the charts or merely and pitifully average?

Never had I felt more cynical. I hadn’t entered into matrimony a skeptic, but my own behavior and seventy-two questionable charges to Dr. Barry Schtup’s credit cards had turned me into one. If I, Molly Divine Marx, could have morphed into a cheater and believed that my husband was unfailingly unfaithful for—basically—always, then couldn’t every other wife be in the same stinking, sinking lifeboat?

Snap out of it, Molly
, I told myself.
Grow up. You can make this right. Isn’t that the reason we’re sitting in this tastefully furnished Fifth Avenue office at three o’clock on a glum Tuesday?
I had parked myself across from Dr. Stafford in the middle of a couch upholstered in the orange of a deer hunter’s jacket. I wondered if she’d chosen the fabric for its happiness quotient or to remind patients not to pull out a shotgun. There was ample room next to me, but Barry had chosen a stiff Windsor armchair
at a right angle to both of us. On the end table separating us was a large box of tissues.

“So, we hoped you could help us,” I said, shifting in place, trying to get comfortable. I’d obsessed about what to wear. My version of a mini? Well-worn three-inch ankle boots? Even a hint of cleavage? Bimbo, bimbo, bimbo. Jeans, a cotton T-shirt, or cargo pants? Juvenile. I settled on flat leather boots, a black cashmere turtleneck, and a long black skirt, although God only knows what Dr. Stafford would read into its schitzy diagonal hem.

“And you, Dr. Marx?” Dr. Stafford said.

Barry’s voice was even and soothing, waves at the beach. “Things haven’t been right for a while.”

Or ever
, I thought. I glanced at the doctor’s hands. Wedding ring. Check. I looked at my own. Yup, still there. As married as yesterday.

“Why do you think that is?” Dr. Stafford asked.

She wasn’t the sturdy Margaret Thatcher I’d expected. I asked myself if I could stand to have a psychiatrist this attractive. The doctor was tall and slim as a bread knife, no more than forty-five, and wore a crisp Katharine Hepburn-esque white shirt and trousers of driftwood gray, which sat on the hips she barely had.

Barry gave the doctor his patient-seducing grin and it brought me back to Fifth Avenue. I knew this smile well. Its subliminal message was,
You can rely on me—I reek of integrity. I’m a heck of a plastic surgeon, and an even nicer guy I would never screw up—at golf, at work, at anything
.

Dr. Stafford, I decided, was going to like him best.

“We haven’t taken our vows seriously enough,” Barry said in the earnest tone of the Rhodes Scholar he’d missed becoming, he claimed, by
this
much.

Our vows?
Could my husband have heard them at all when his mind was on a mission to meet up with another woman during our wedding reception? Dr. Stafford said … nothing, her silence an ellipsis that beckoned Barry or me to jump right in and spout whole paragraphs of well-constructed prose explaining why our marriage stopped short of bliss.

“Molly, do you want to weigh in?” she asked.

The session cost two hundred dollars an hour. I thought I’d better speak. “Barry’s right. We probably haven’t approached our relationship
with enough …” I fished. Gusto? Sincerity? “Gravitas.”
Gravitas?
What kind of an op-ed word was that? I never remembered saying it, ever.

“Do you want to continue to be married to—may I call you Barry?” Dr. Stafford said, looking quickly at Barry and then again at me. “That’s one of the initial questions I like to ask in a first session.”

But why did you have to start with me?
I wondered, although lately I’d asked myself the identical question at least once a week. “Yes, I do, definitely,” I said.

I did not want a divorce. Was my impulse due to the lack of an exit strategy—with or without Luke—or actual, albeit conflicted, love in which Annabel played no small part? More the latter. I did not want my daughter to suffer. That sentence sounded meager, but I hated to think that Annabel might ever be in pain, especially if I was the cause of it, and there was something we—Barry and I, together, her parents—could do to give her the childhood she deserved.

“And?” Dr. Stafford asked.

I assumed “and” meant “why.” Two pairs of arched eyebrows faced me.

“Barry’s essentially a good person,” I began. “He adores Annabel-she’s our daughter. Three and a half. He’s smart. He’s funny. We have a history.” As Nana Phyllis would say, he’s also a great provider, which I both took for granted and thought it was crass to point out. There were also, of course, Barry’s looks, which I’d stopped noticing, but were high in the plus column. “He makes me laugh.” Sometimes. “Oh, I already said that.”

I decided not to add,
I haven’t been the best wife. I’ve screwed things up grandly all on my own, whether Barry knows it or not
.

“Molly,” she said, “you could be describing a friend.”

“Actually, Dr. Stafford,” I said, focusing on a silky cord around her neck—which was easier than looking into her eyes—“that’s the thing Barry isn’t. I don’t think he even likes me much, and he definitely doesn’t get me, and so …” I felt I might have to live or die by these words; how to say it? “I don’t really trust him. I don’t think I ever could or have. In the most basic way, I don’t feel protected by him.” Which has nothing to do with the handsome income he generates, I realized.
“I don’t feel safe around Barry, and that’s a bigger problem than anything.”

The room grew as quiet as Manhattan after a heavy snowfall. Dr. Stafford swiveled her chair to the left. Was she delighted that it hadn’t taken us even ten minutes to hit nasty?

“Barry?” she asked. As we both waited, my eyes wandered to an abstract oil painting hanging over my husband’s head. The scrambled rainbow colors could be a diagram of my emotions.

“I see where Molly would think that,” he said at last. “I can get very caught up in my work, with my hobbies.”

I tried not to roll my eyes. Hobbies? “
I live for visits to small, out-of-the-way hotels and to explore the city’s finer cigar bars. You: available on nights when I’m ‘working,’ and for long walks on white-sand beaches near conferences in sunny locales
.”

“And Barry, do you want to be married to Molly?” Dr. Stafford asked.

Barry leaned forward. “Unequivocally,” he said, looking only at her. “My wife’s beautiful, sensual, talented, a great mom, but none of that’s as important as the simple fact that”—he leaned to reach for my hand, a foot away from him—“I love her.” I jolted slightly at his touch.