Wishful Thinking (25 page)

“What?” she said, looking up at him and meeting his eyes.

He leaned in, his cheek against hers, his stubble prickling her skin. “I think you
should
go, actually,” he said, his mouth just grazing the rim of her ear.

“Really?” she said.

“With me,” he said.

Leaning back, Owen then took her hand for the second time that night. And with the sure-footed confidence of a man a head taller than just about everybody else in the room, he escorted her to her feet, maneuvered them away from the bar, across the dance floor, past the bowling alley (were all those hipsters bowling ironically too?), and through the people, the crowd, the noise, the bouncers, and the line … until they were on the sidewalk again, safely across the street, alone at last. Outside, a fine-grained snow, cloudy white under the pale green streetlights, had begun to fall.

Owen squinted, snowflakes on his eyelashes. They
looked at each other for a minute. He took both of her hands.

“To answer your question,” he said, “this definitely isn’t a date.” Jennifer waited. “I wasn’t sure if you would go on a date with me,” he went on. “It’s been a little hard to tell. I didn’t know if it was because I’m Julien’s teacher, but sometimes it seemed like you were sort of, I don’t know, avoiding me.”

Jennifer was about to explain, to pour forth with confessions and excuses, but, thinking better of it, she bit her lip and smiled.

“So would you? Go on a date with me?”

She nodded slowly.

“Right now?”

She nodded again, grinning from ear to ear.

“Yes!” he said. “That’s good.” He looked at her again. She loved the way he looked at her. “And now we have to get out of here for real,” he added, laughing, “because I would never ask someone for a first date to see me play a show with my baby sister on New Year’s Eve. That would be the worst!”

But on New Year’s Eve, at this hour, Jennifer thought, where would they go and have any chance of finding a quiet place to talk? “I wish I could ask you to my place … ,” she began, thinking of her cat and her pullout couch.

“How about mine?” he said. “I live in Manhattan, too, not far from you, I don’t think.” At that, Jennifer had to laugh. She’d been so sure he lived in Brooklyn. “And I have wine. Or hot chocolate. Whatever you want. I can make you something to eat. I bet you didn’t eat yet tonight.” Jennifer nodded again, realizing he was right. She was starving. “We can watch a movie. Play cards. Pretend it’s only eight”—he checked his watch—“on any old Thursday.”

“I would love that,” she said. Tipsy and turned on, she brought his hands to her lips and kissed his knuckles, one by one, while looking up at him. “There’s one good thing about it
being New Year’s Eve just before midnight,” she added, smiling.

“What’s that?” he asked her, shuddering a little as she placed each light, barely there kiss, letting her tongue lightly flick the V’s between his fingers.

“Because there is no better time,” she said, pulling away playfully, “to get a cab!”

With that, she dropped his hands and turned toward Wythe Avenue, breaking out her best city-girl cab whistle— perfected after numerous sessions with Julien when he was five and just beginning to learn. Owen whooped, impressed. And as though she had summoned a chariot, a yellow cab arrived just then, depositing a carload of stumbling revelers yelling at one another to hurry up so they wouldn’t miss the countdown, their sloppy bodies the first sign of the least appealing part of New Year’s Eve, when men began to piss on the street and their dates began to puke on it.

Jennifer and Owen slipped inside.

“Suckers,” Jennifer said, throwing a leg over Owen’s lap.

“Big time,” Owen replied, tucking a hand behind the small of her back.

As the cab began to pull away, he leaned over, leaned in, took her face in his hands, and finally, slowly,
finally—
how many times had she imagined it?—kissed her. For a good, long, back-of-a-cab-in–New York time, as the taxi moved through the dark, deserted, snow-softened streets on its way over the bridge and into the sparkling city. And as Jennifer’s hands found their way under and up and beneath Owen’s shirt, causing his stomach muscles to tighten and contract with a shiver from the cold still clinging to her fingertips, and as Owen threaded his fingers through the hair at the base of her skull, pulling her head back to bare her neck and kissing her there, somewhere a crowd cheered, and a ball fell, and Jennifer could feel herself falling too.

S
HOULD IT REALLY HAVE
come as any great surprise that by March, three months into the year and three months after her love affair with Owen had begun, Jennifer, with the help of Wishful Thinking, was living not two lives but three?

In her defense—or at least in the defense she had carefully constructed in the event Dr. Sexton or Vinita ever found out— it didn’t happen right away. At first, in fact, it had been easy to keep her time with Owen to Saturday nights. The Saturday sleepovers that began soon after New Year’s Eve were such an astronomical upgrade from her chaste Friday-guitar-lesson treats that in the beginning, they satisfied. This was not least because, like a virgin touched for the very first time, it was with Owen, and at the age of thirty-nine, no less, that Jennifer felt she had finally discovered what the sex fuss was really all about. Sex with Norman had been short and to the point, and, having met him in college, she’d had little to compare it to. Sex
with Owen, however, awoke in her an appetite for the carnal she’d never known she possessed. She relished every minute of it, from the breathless, fluttery bits at the beginning to the wanton “tell me what you want and I’ll do it” splayed-limb abandon at the end. From the start, however, it was not just the sex that drew her to him. It was his friendship. He was such a good friend, emotionally present, intuitive, funny. He loved to talk, about her boys or her divorce or her job, or his band or his divorce or his job—teaching not just at the West End School, it turned out, but at a public junior high school in Washington Heights too. He was kind, always remembering to stock up on chai tea for her and, one night, sewing a button on her shirt. He loved movies and was giving her an education about the French New Wave on his plump, worn-out couch, nicknamed the Velveteen Sofa because it had been loved threadbare and he couldn’t bear to part with it. Snuggled up there, watching Netflix under a blanket Sarah had knitted for his birthday (so sweet, Jennifer thought, those Brooklyn girls with their rock bands and their knitting), Jennifer felt like she was home.

Not that Owen—or his place—was perfect. That had been amply evident from the first night Jennifer had set foot in his apartment. It was cluttered at best, and showed little evidence of having once been inhabited by a married couple or, for that matter, anyone more than two years out of a dorm. (Jennifer soon found out that it was not the apartment Owen and his ex-wife had shared, which did not surprise her a bit.) There was grime on the bathroom sink and gunk around the shower drain. Owen, lacking the cash for a cleaning lady or the inclination to do much housekeeping, hardly seemed to notice, while Jennifer could not understand how anyone could fail to see the contradiction in showering while standing barefoot in mildew. But things were so good between them, Jennifer
would have relieved herself in an outhouse if she’d had to, and she soon settled for wiping down the bathroom with Clorox every time she came over.

Soon, seeing each other once every seven days—not including Julien’s guitar lesson—was not enough. A few weeks after they began dating, Owen asked her to come to a poetry reading that one of his friends, a fellow teacher, was having on a Tuesday. She couldn’t, she said; she had to work late. (She did not mention that not only would she be working late, but she would also be picking her boys up from school and taking Julien to one of the multiple after-school activities she had enrolled him in in her Wishful Thinking–fueled mother-of-the-year frenzy that fall.) Then he asked her to come to one of his gigs on a Thursday, a benefit for the West End School. She couldn’t, she said; she had to work late again. (She did not mention that she would also be picking her boys up from school that day, or that the boys now believed she was
always
home for homework, dinner, and bath, and became apoplectic at the mere suggestion that she wouldn’t be.) Then he asked her to come to a dinner party that Johnny, the lead singer for the Dimes, was having, because he wanted her to get to know his friends. It was on a Wednesday, and Jennifer could have asked Norman to keep the boys for the night. But he and Dina had been getting so horribly smug, and Dina had been courting the boys’ affections so aggressively, bringing homemade granola to soccer games and coming to Jack’s preschool class to bake cookies, that Jennifer just couldn’t bear to give them (or was it her?) the satisfaction.

So she’d thought,
I could be in three places at once, just once.
Why not?

When it came to Wishful Thinking, of course, it was easy for the exception to become the rule.

And so before she knew it, two Jennifers became three.
Owen thought she had a flexible work schedule and a babysitter who could stay late a few nights a week, and they saw each other at least that often. Norman thought she had accepted a pay cut to do flextime and morphed into the mother of the year. Her boys thought she had gone from harried, I-promise-I’ll-make-it-up-to-you mom to let’s-build-another-skyscraper-out-of-Popsicle-sticks mom practically overnight. And Bill Truitt thought his notion of running a government agency like an investment bank was the best thing since sliced bread, with Jennifer as the evidence that productivity could be increased tenfold and nobody (least of all he) would suffer. For her part, Jennifer felt, at last, that life was the way it should be. Or at least the way everyone she knew advertised his or her life on Facebook.

In all of this, Alicia remained the person Jennifer felt the most guilty about deceiving. They’d gotten closer after Jennifer’s “episode” at Amalia’s, having finally let themselves be a little bit vulnerable in front of each other. They’d become closer still at year’s end, when Jennifer had volunteered to help Alicia meet her milestones in order to get her first bonus check. (It seemed the least Jennifer could do.) But every time Bill, like the stern headmistress of a boarding school, reviewed the reports of the Employee Time Clock and commented on Alicia’s leaving at six thirty on days where there were deadlines (days Jennifer stayed past eight, sometimes), or taking an afternoon off to take her daughter to a doctor’s appointment, or leaving the office for an hour for a parent-teacher conference, he humiliated Alicia by noting that she, unlike Jennifer, was struggling to meet her milestones. Jennifer felt like a traitor.

She also felt, however, like there was no other way. Not only that, but that
this
way was pretty great. True, she was tired a lot, and the solution of using the app to pack in extra
hours of sleep each day didn’t really solve the difficulty of her body’s circadian rhythms being profoundly out of whack. It was also true that she often forgot things and had become more dependent than ever on her phone to remember them, not just recording voice memos but taking photos and videos of things she didn’t want to lose in the increasingly cluttered files of her mind. And yes, it was sometimes hard to transition from one Jennifer to another, from girlfriend to career woman to stay-at-home mom. But, she reasoned, she had been tired and forgetful and somewhat schizophrenic before Wishful Thinking had changed her life. That she was now more tired and forgetful, while able to do three times what she had been able to do when she was somewhat less tired and forgetful but also stressed, guilty, grouchy, and overwhelmed, seemed a small price to pay.

And so it was that when Jennifer woke up on a cold, rainy Saturday at the end of March, which also happened to be her fortieth birthday (she was hoping for a blessedly unremarkable one), she felt, more than she had for many a birthday past, that she had everything she could possibly want, and more.

W
AKING UP THAT MORNING
took some doing, as usual. The day before, she’d worked until seven, picked the boys up from school at three, gone to guitar with Julien (whom she and Owen had thus far managed to keep in the dark about their relationship), and had dinner at Vinita’s, chatting and getting her checkup. Then she’d thrown another couple hours of Wishful Thinking time on top of that to accompany Owen to a dinner party. All of which meant that at 7:00 a.m., when the boys roused her with cries of “Happy birthday!” it was all she could do to hug and kiss them before telling them to put on a movie (“Mama needs
sleep
for her birthday”), stumbling
down the hallway, and collapsing into the warm stuffed-animal burrow that was Jack’s lower bunk. She needed sleep in the worst way, and for a blissful couple of hours, she got it. But then, wafting into her senses even as she was still in a coma-like slumber, came the smell of something unexpected: pancakes.

She willed herself to open her eyes and saw what was simultaneously the cutest and most terrifying thing she’d ever seen in her life: her boys, bringing her freshly cooked pancakes.

“Happy birthday, Mama!” Jack said. “We made you breakfast!”

“You guys are amazing!” she replied. “And you turned on the stove!”

“We turned it
off
, Mom,” Julien said, rolling his eyes but beaming with pride as they presented her with the tray. “Jack got out all the ingredients, and I made the batter, and then I put some butter in the skillet and I poured the batter in. And then,” he continued, pausing for dramatic effect, “I
flipped
it!”

“We even spilled some pancake mix,” Jack said, “but
I
cleaned it up!”

Jennifer tried not to think about what might have happened if something had caught fire. She also tried not to think about what her kitchen probably looked like right now. Instead, she concentrated on sitting up without hitting her head on the upper bunk, and then on thanking them. “I am the luckiest mommy on the planet,” she told them, mugging her insane delight as she took the first bite of slightly chewy pancake. “Thank you so much for making me breakfast. And don’t ever turn on the stove alone again.” Julien had just begun to protest this in his best “Come on, Mom” pretween way when the doorbell rang.