The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) (8 page)

After we’d been seeing each other for around a month, I was even more surprised when he told me that he was in love with me. I was the wittiest woman he’d ever met. He adored my ‘zero tolerance for bullshit’. He respected my ‘strong sense of personal autonomy’, my ‘smarts’, my ‘canny self-assurance’ (ha!). Game, set and match - he’d collided with the woman he’d always envisaged marrying.

Naturally, I didn’t capitulate on the spot. On the contrary, I was deeply confused by this sudden confession of love. Yeah, I liked the guy. He was smart, ambitious, knowing. I was attracted to his metropolitan acumen … and to the fact that he seemed to get me - because, of course, we were both cut from the same urban cloth. A fellow native Manhattanite. A fellow preppy (Collegiate, then Wesleyan). A fellow wise-aleck - and, in true New York style, a possessor of a world-class entitlement complex.

They say that character is destiny. Perhaps - but timing plays one hell of a big role too. We were both thirty-six. He had just been evicted from a five-year relationship with an uber-ambitious CNN correspondent named Kate Brymer (she dumped him for some big network talking head) - so we both knew a thing or two about romantic car crashes. Like me, he hated that inane neurotic dance called dating. Like me, he dreaded the idea of flying solo into forty. He even wanted kids - which made his attractiveness increase one hundred fold, as I was beginning to hear predictably ominous ticking noises from my biological clock.

On paper, we must have looked great. An ideal meeting of worldly equals. The perfect New York professional couple.

There was just one problem: I wasn’t in love with him. I knew that. But I convinced myself otherwise. Part of this self-deception was brought about by Matt’s persistent entreaties to marry him. He was persuasive without being gauche - and I guess I eventually bought his flattery. Because, after the Peter business, I needed to be flattered, adulated, wanted. And because I was secretly scared of ending up alone and childless in middle age.

‘A lovely young man,’ my mother said after first meeting Matt. ‘I think he’d make you very happy’ … which was her way of saying that she approved of his WASP credentials, his preppy sheen. Meg was a little less effusive.

‘He’s a very nice guy,’ she said.

‘You don’t exactly seem overwhelmed,’ I said.

‘That’s because
you
don’t seem exactly overwhelmed.’

I paused, then said, ‘I am very happy.’

‘Yeah - and love is a wonderful thing. You are in love, aren’t you?’

‘Sure,’ I said tonelessly.

‘You sound very convincing.’

Meg’s sour comment returned to rattle around my head four months later. I was in a hotel room on the Caribbean island of Nevis. It was three in the morning. My husband of thirty-six hours was asleep beside me in bed. It was the night after our wedding. I found myself staring at the ceiling, thinking,
what am I doing here?

Then my mind was flooded with thoughts of Peter. Tears started streaming down my face. And I castigated myself for being the most absurd idiot imaginable.

We usually mastermind our own predicament, don’t we?

I tried to make it work. Matt
seriously
tried to make it work. We cohabited badly. Endless petty arguments about endless petty things. We instantly made up, then started squabbling again. Marriage, I discovered, doesn’t coalesce unless the two parties involved figure out how to establish a domestic detente between themselves. The will needed is huge. We both lacked it.

Instead, we dodged the growing realization: we are a bad match. On the morning after fights, we bought each other expensive presents. Or flowers would arrive at my office, accompanied by a witty, conciliatory message:

They say the first ten years are the hardest.

I love you.

Matt

There were a couple of let’s-rekindle-the-spark weekends away in the Berkshires, or Western Connecticut, or Montauk. During one of these, Matt drunkenly convinced me to dispense with my diaphragm for the night. I was seriously loaded too - so I agreed. And that is how Ethan came into our lives.

He was, without question, the best drunken accident imaginable. Love at first gasp. But after the initial post-natal euphoria, the usual domestic discontentment reappeared. Ethan didn’t believe in the restorative virtues of sleep. For the first six months of his life, he refused to conk out for more than two hours at a time - which quickly rendered us both quasi-catatonic. Unless you have the disposition of Mary Poppins, exhaustion leads to excessive crankiness. Which - in the case of Matt and myself - turned into open warfare. As soon as Ethan was weaned, I wanted us to establish a rota for night feeds. Matt refused, saying that his high-pressure job demanded eight full hours of sleep. This was battle music to my ears - as I accused him of putting his own career above mine. Which, in turn, sparked further confrontations about parental responsibility, and acting like a grown-up, and why we always seemed to fight about everything.

Inevitably, when it comes to kids, it’s the woman who ends up carrying the can - so when Matt arrived home one night and said that he’d just accepted a three-month transfer to PBS’s Washington bureau, all I could say was:

‘How convenient for you.’

He did promise to hire (and pay for) a full-time nanny - as I was now back at work. He did promise to come home every weekend. And he hoped that the time apart might do us some good - lessening the bellicose atmosphere between us.

So I was left holding the baby. Which actually pleased me hugely - not simply because I couldn’t get enough of Ethan (especially as my time with him was limited to after-work late evenings), but also because I too was debilitated by all the constant bush-fighting with Matt.

Intriguingly enough, as soon as he moved to Washington, two things happened: (a) Ethan began to sleep through the night, and (b) Matt and I began to get along again. No - this wasn’t an ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ situation; rather, a mutual lightening of tone. Freed from each other’s constant presence, our ongoing antagonisms de-escalated. We actually started talking again - talking, as in: being able to have a conversation which did not eventually veer into angry exchanges. When he returned home at weekends, the fact that we only had forty-eight hours together kept us on good behavior. Gradually, a certain collegial rapport was reestablished - a sense that we could get along together; that we did enjoy each other’s company; that there was a future for us.

Or, at least, that’s what I thought. During the final month of Matt’s Washington bureau stint, a breaking story (the early days of the Whitewater scandal) kept him in DC for three straight weeks. When he finally made it back to Manhattan, I sensed that something was seriously askew as soon as he walked through the door. Though he strived to act naturally in my presence, he became cagey and vague when I asked a couple of innocent questions about the long hours he was working in Washington. Then he nervously changed the subject. That’s when I knew. Men always think they can mask these things - but, when it comes to infidelity, they’re as transparent as Saran Wrap.

After we got Ethan to bed and collapsed in the living room with a bottle of wine, I decided to risk bluntness.

‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

Matt turned the sort of chalky color I associate with Kaopektate.

‘I’m not following you …’ he said.

‘Then I’ll repeat the question slowly:
What … is … her … name?’

‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Yes you do,’ I said, my tone still mild. ‘I simply want to know the name of the woman you’ve been seeing.’

‘Kate …’

‘That’s my name. I want to know
her
name. Please.’

He exhaled loudly.

‘Blair Bentley.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, sounding totally reasonable.

‘Can I explain … ?’

‘Explain what? That it was “just one of those things”? Or that you got drunk one night, and the next thing you knew, you tripped and found this woman on the end of your penis? Or maybe it’s love …’

‘It is love.’

That shut me up. It took me a moment or so to regain the power of speech. ‘You’re not serious?’ I finally said.

‘Completely serious,’ he said.

‘You asshole.’

He left the apartment late that night. He never slept there again. And I became bitter. Maybe he wasn’t the love of my life - but there was a child involved. He should have considered Ethan’s stability. Just like he should have recognized that the separation had actually done us some good - that we had laid down our weapons of mass destruction and established an armistice with each other. An affectionate armistice - to the point where I had actually started to miss Matt. They always say the first year or two of marriage is hell. But, damn it, we’d turned the corner. We had started to become a common cause.

When I discovered that Ms Blair Bentley was twenty-six - and a leggy cropped blonde with perfect skin and a cliff of capped white teeth (not to mention a local news anchor on the leading NBC-affiliate station in DC, about to be transferred to big-time New York) - my bitterness quadrupled. Matt had found himself a trophy wife.

But, of course, the real bitterness I felt was toward myself. I had blown it. I had done everything I vowed never to do - from falling for a married man, to obeying the imperatives of my goddamn biological clock. We all talk about ‘building a life’ - finding the fulfilling career, the fulfilling relationship, the fulfilling balance between the professional and the personal. Glossy magazines are full of spurious strategies for
constructing
this perfectly synchronized, made-to-measure existence. But the fact is, when it comes to the big stuff (the man who breaks your heart, the man with whom you end up having children), you’re just a hostage to fortune like the next jerk. Say I’d never joined Harding, Tyrell and Barney? Say I hadn’t agreed to that after-work drink with Peter? Say I’d never changed agencies, and Matt had never walked into our office? A chance meeting here, a hasty decision there … then one morning you wake up in early middle age, a divorced single parent. And you find yourself wondering: how the hell did I ever end up in this life?

The phone began to ring, jolting me out of my extended reverie. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly nine a.m. How had I managed to lose so much track of time?

‘Is that you, Kate?’

The voice surprised me. It was my brother. It was the first time he’d phoned my home in years.

‘Charlie?’

‘Yeah, it’s me.’

‘You’re up early.’

‘Couldn’t sleep. Uh, I just wanted to, uh … it was good seeing you, Kate.’

‘I see.’

‘And I don’t want another seven years to go by …’

‘As I said yesterday, that’s up to you, Charlie.’

‘I know, I know.’

He fell silent.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you know my number. So call me, if you like. And if you don’t like, I’ll live. You broke off communication. If you want to get it started again, it’s over to you. Fair enough?’

‘Uh, yeah, sure.’

‘Good.’

Another of his damn nervous silences.

‘Well then … I’d better be going, Charlie. See you …’

He interrupted my goodbye by blurting out, ‘Can you lend me five thousand dollars?’

‘What?’

His voice became shaky. ‘I’m, uh, real sorry … I know you probably hate me for asking, but … you know that I mentioned I was up for a job … sales rep for Pacific Floral Service. Biggest flower delivery company on the West Coast. Only thing I could find out here where they’d even consider a guy in his mid-fifties … that’s how bad things are in the job market these days, if you’re well into middle age.’

‘Don’t remind me. Isn’t the job interview today?’

‘It was supposed to be. But when I got back home last night, there was a message from someone at Pacific Floral’s Human Resources department. Telling me they’d decided to fill the post internally, so the interview was off.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not as sorry as me. Not as goddamn sorry as me, because … because … it wasn’t even a managerial job … it was a fucking sales rep … it was …’

He broke off.

‘Are you all right, Charlie?’

I could hear him take a deep steadying breath. ‘No. I am not all right. Because if I don’t find five thousand dollars by Friday, the bank is threatening to take my house.’

‘Will the five grand solve the problem?’

‘Not really … because I actually owe the bank another seven.’

‘Jesus, Charlie.’

‘I know, I know - but you start building up those kind of debts when you’re out of work for six months. And, believe me, I’ve tried borrowing money everywhere. But there are already two mortgages on the house to begin with …’