The Secret Lives of Married Women (5 page)

“Why not? You’d be unstoppable, a star. I knew it the moment you stepped over the threshold.”

“I don’t know anything about computer networks.”

“That’s perfect! That’s the best part. I don’t want some tech-head going around for me. You don’t have to know anything. You just need a few buzz words to throw at these people and you need to understand the business model. These guys are lawyers, accountants, realtors...they don’t know the first thing, don’t even know what questions to ask. You’ll be with me the first twenty times; you’ll listen, absorb the drill, learn your lines. You’re an actress, for Christ’s sake. It’ll be the most natural thing in the world for you.”

“Well, but that’s the thing, Bryce. I do like to think of myself as an actress. I have to go to auditions and if I’m offered work, I need to be able to take it.” This was something I was still telling myself, though I hadn’t been to an audition in weeks.

“Fine. So stay an actress. No one’s asking you to give up your ...career. I’m just saying, why don’t you take a break? Take three months. What’s three months in the big picture? Make some money, take the pressure off. Think of it like an acting exercise.”

“Bryce. I’m flattered—”

“Stop. Save it. Don’t answer right now—just think about it. Think about giving me three short months. No, forget that: give me
one
month. If you hate it after a month, you’ll quit. No hard feelings. In the meantime, you’ll make a pile of cash.”

Before I left for the day, he gave me the outline of a payment plan. “First, I’ll give you three thousand as a base, just for going out there every day. On top of that, you’ll make fifty bucks for each appointment you set. That’s not the real money, but even that’ll add up. Make two appointments a day—you’ve got eight hours to do it, so how can you fail?—and that’s another two grand a month. But where you’ll make a killing is the five hundred I’ll pay you for every customer you find who ends up signing.

“So let’s do a little math, shall we? Two appointments a day is ten a week, right? So let’s say I can only sign one client out of five. That’s an
extremely conservative
estimate, my track record is way better than that, but I’m low-balling it right now so you don’t think I’m leading you down some fantasy path. If I can’t sign one in five, I’m not Bryce Kaiser. Stas? Marcus? You guys are my witnesses. If I can’t sign one in five, I’ll eat my shorts. So that’s two signed clients a week, which would yield, altogether...we’re talking the
worst-ca.se scenario
here...a total of nine thousand a month for you. Have you ever made nine thousand dollars a month? That’s more than a hundred grand a year. Not bad for a temp receptionist, right?”

None of Bryce’s other employees ever experienced this kind of largesse. Bryce believed in stopping at nothing to motivate his sales force. Otherwise he liked his workers marginal and desperate. He wanted them to need their jobs more than they did their sanity or pride. He hired immigrants awaiting their visas, middle-aged men languishing in the wake of layoffs, even an ex-convict or two. Stas fit this profile perfectly at first, and Bryce started him off at seven dollars an hour, twelve to twenty hours a day, six to seven days a week. His hourly wage was not adjusted in any way for overtime.

During the four-day transit strike that year, Stas didn’t go home at night. He slept in his office chair and shaved in the men’s room. He pretended to consider joining the gym across the street to get a free trial membership. He showered there and marveled that Americans paid money to run on treadmills like rats on a wheel.

I got to know Stas slowly, and over time I learned his history. He’d come to America seven years earlier, in June of 1998, at the age of seventeen. His plan was to study English all summer at SUNY Purchase, then stay on for the academic year as an exchange student. But by August, the Russian economy had collapsed and his parents could no longer afford his tuition.

Stas never once considered going home.

He moved into the local YMCA and got a job as a busboy at the local diner. The free meal employees were allowed to eat before each shift was his one meal of the day. He filled his pockets with the thimble-sized creamers served with the coffee. Every few hours, he went to the men’s room and knocked them back like shots. Sometimes he wrapped half-eaten steaks and brought them back to his room.

Once, friendless and flat broke between jobs, he went a full week without eating at all: seven days of taking in nothing but water. On the eighth day, in a jacket he unearthed from the bottom of his duffel bag, he found a five dollar bill. He walked out of the hostel and across the street to the little Chinese takeout joint, where he ordered a whole chicken and devoured it within minutes. Then he wrapped up the stripped carcass, brought it back to the Y, boiled the bones and ate those too.

Afterward, still ravenous, he could not stop himself from considering all the better ways he might have used those five dollars. He might have bought several boxes of pasta, or a few dozen eggs, or a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter—sustenance that could be stretched over several days rather than wolfed down in one sitting. But by the time this occurred to him, it was too late. The money had been spent.

* * *

I gave Rae these details during our second round at the bar.

“That takes a pair of
balls,”
she said. “To just come over by himself like that, and make his own way. Has he seen his parents since?”

“No,” I said. “Never. Not for ten years.”

“That’s
incredible
.”

“Yes.”

It was in fact the aspect of my husband I found most fasci-nating—the account of his early days in America with no English, no money, no contacts, no help, and then his eventual migration to Manhattan, to real opportunity. Stas said the word
opportunity
with something like reverence. He named it as the reason he came to America in the first place.

When he reached the big city, he took a cheap apartment share in Inwood. His roommate was Dmitri, a young man from Moscow. The two made a pact that was never violated: a pact not to speak Russian to each other.

“How did you do it?” It was a question I asked over and over.

“Well, we had a Russian-English dictionary, so we could look up words we didn’t know. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to be understood.”

“No, I mean, how could you stand it? If I had to work in another country and I had an American roommate, I’d be so relieved to talk freely at the end of the day.”

“We wanted to forget Russian altogether,” he said quietly. “We wanted to speak English.”

* * *

“That’s intense,” Rae said. “Something must have happened to him there.”

“I think so too,” I told her. “But I don’t really know.” Beyond the bare outline of his survival in the U.S., Stas didn’t talk about his past.

“So,” she said. “How did you two go from being co-workers to hooking up?”

I glanced at the clock above the bar, which revealed that it was almost Clara’s bedtime. I always nursed her to sleep.

“Oh Rae, I can’t believe it’s nine o’clock already,” I said. “I’d love to tell you that story, but I have to wait till next time.”

“Here’s what I’ll do,” she told me. “I can’t believe I forgot your receipts. But tomorrow I’m showing a house in your neighborhood—late in the day, like at four or five. I’ll bring you the receipts when I’m done. If you’re not home, I’ll just leave them in your mailbox. But if you’re around and you feel like it, you can tell me more.”

The following morning, after dropping Clara off at preschool, I knew Jack would show up the moment I returned to the house. In the parking lot, at the classroom door, at the wheel of my car, I felt him waiting for me. It felt personal, as if I had revealed myself as his rightful quarry. This thought kept me at the nearest coffeehouse for an hour, lingering over a local newspaper, but there was no way to avoid going home all day.

Sure enough, a minute or so after I stepped into the house, there was a hearty knock at the door. My car was in the driveway and he’d probably seen me as well. It didn’t matter; I wouldn’t answer.
I can say the baby kept me up all night and I fell back to sleep,
I thought.
Or I can say I was in the shower.
He rang the doorbell, knocked some more, then rang again. After many long minutes, he seemed to give up. But now it was dangerous to go downstairs, where I could be seen through several windows. The curtains were open and I’d have to step into plain sight to close them. I was avoiding my own living room, my own kitchen, afraid to get a glass of water or unload the dishwasher. I was hiding in my own house.

I busied myself with chores I might not ordinarily have bothered with, like making the beds and sorting out a large plastic bag of Clara’s toys: puzzle pieces, doll house furniture, magnetic letters, plastic blocks. An image came to me: myself in third grade, reading in the library during recess rather than brave the blacktop where certain girls were likely to torment me. I didn’t mind being inside with a good book; it might even be fair to say I preferred it. But sitting alone at the table, brow furrowed in a show of concentration, I felt secretly compromised, impotent.

At noon, I resolved to go out for groceries. Jack materialized the moment I stepped onto the side porch. He was holding a stack of little cardboard boxes.

“Hey, I knocked on your door earlier with these, but no one answered,” he said.

“Really? I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t hear anything. I must have been in the shower.”

“Your husband mentioned your rodent problem in the garage. I had a bunch of these left over from a job last year, so I thought I’d bring ’em by,” he said. “Your garage was open, so I scattered a few of ’em around to get you started.” He held out the boxes and I saw that they were glue traps.

It took all my self-control not to recoil. I managed to smile at Jack, and thank him, and endure several more minutes of small talk about the progress on the house next door. I did not betray my horror of glue traps or the fact that the ones he’d just given me were going straight into the kitchen trash compactor. As soon as he was out of sight, I stepped into the garage for the ones he’d already left there. I was holding my breath as I scanned the dim interior.
Please, they haven’t been here for more than a few hours; please let all of them be empty.

The one in the near corner was untouched, as were the two along the opposite wall. I went around the periphery picking them up, being careful not to touch the glue pads. I’d heard stories of people losing skin to the sticky part, and once in a veterinarian’s office, I’d seen a dog with a trap glued to its paw.

There were two more along the back wall. The first was empty, but the struggling form of a mouse was flattened against the other one.

I stood very still, knuckles pressed to my mouth.

Nausea came easily to me throughout my pregnancies, and a wave of it broke over me then. My objection to mouse traps in the garage—for that matter, my objection to killing just about anything (I would coax a spider onto a piece of paper and set it outside rather than step on it)—was an ongoing source of amusement and annoyance to Stas. I wouldn’t let him sprinkle weed killer in the yard for fear of poisoning a squirrel or bird, and I cringed at every instance of road kill we saw from the car. I couldn’t bring myself now to really look at this mouse, any more than I could bear to really think about glue traps. What could be worse than stepping onto a surface that held you fast at every point of contact? I knew how glue traps worked: the more the mouse twisted in an effort to escape, the more contorted and stuck it would become. Finally it would lie there panting, its body rippling in panic. The worst part was, the trap would hold it in place but death might not come for days. There was nothing to finish it off besides slow starvation.

I’m sorry,
I whispered to the mouse. Tears came into my eyes.
Oh you poor little thing, I’m so sorry.
If only I’d come to the door when Jack knocked: then this never would have happened.

* * *

When I called Stas at work, it was quarter to noon. I was so distraught he could barely make out what I was saying, but gradually he understood that if he left the office that minute and drove straight home, he would have just enough time to put the mouse out of its misery and still make his one o’clock meeting. It would mean sacrificing his lunch hour.

“This can wait until I get home,” he told me.

“No, it can’t! Stas,
please.
If you never do another thing for me. That poor mouse is
suffering.”

“It’s vermin. It’s probably carrying all kinds of diseases.”

“It’s an innocent animal!
Glue traps are torture.”

“This is crazy. Woman,” he said. No one besides my husband had ever called me “woman” without irony. “Why are you so crazy about every filthy creature?”

“Stas, please,” I sobbed.

“All
right
. All right! Listen to me, don’t touch the mouse or the trap. Leave it where it is and go to the store. You were going to the store, right?”

“Yes,” I sniffled.

“So go away while I kill the mouse. It will be better for you this way,” he said. “And listen, while you are there, get me some smoked fish.”

* * *

“Oh, honey,” Rae said. “This sounds bad.” She was here with our fuel receipts and I was desperate for her counsel.

“What I can’t tell is whether he was taking revenge. Against me. For not answering the door. Maybe that sounds paranoid, but—”

“It doesn’t at all,” Rae interrupted. “The man is harassing you, and I’m sure he’s getting off on it. I know that type. They can smell your fear.”

“That’s how I feel—like he’s toying with me.” Walking a deliberate line between neighborly solicitude and ruthless intrusion.

“What does Stas say about all this?”

“He has no idea, really. I mean, he thinks Jack’s a nuisance and a pain in the ass. But I haven’t told him the half of it. And at this point, if I go there, I’ll have to admit that I’ve kept it from him all this time.”