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WE WERE AT A COCKTAIL PARTY for incoming parents at our daughter's school when I spied my ex-husband amid a sea of ophthalmologic surgeons and hedge fund guys. He was wearing handmade Italian loafers. How could this be? My ex was a bum.
Mike and I, we'd met in a bar in rural Oregon but spent most of our time together fighting, having sex, and doing drugs. None of that has anything to do with who I am now—it's ancient history! I work in a Chelsea art gallery. I wear good boots and short skirts. I am married to an arbitrageur of French descent. Armand. His name sounds like what he is, jewelry you can wear.
Over the years, I forgot about Mike and sometimes I thought about him. Now here he was, at an exclusive girls' school on the Upper East Side, sitting under a banner that said welcome class of 2020. Still good-looking, maybe, but thicker. Like someone had put his handsome face on the copier and pressed Enlarge. What was in my warm white wine?
“Pardon me,” I said to my husband, whose silvering head was leaning down toward a rather elegant Japanese woman. They were discussing the cafeteria lunches, which, from what I could glean, needed improvement. Too much fat. I rested my hand on Armand's arm, the left one, with the circle of diamonds—Mike and I hadn't even bothered with rings. We'd gone to a justice of the peace in Jacksonville, and had then thrown a party with all our trailer trash pals. After, we went on a camping trip for a honeymoon, and ate so many magic mushrooms I barfed up my stomach lining. “Honey, I see an old friend,” I said, and my kind, smart, successful husband nodded me off.
I walked up to Mike. He had just turned away from a cute little blonde who was apparently his wife. She wore a pink Chanel suit, pink. She was Waspy and thinner and younger than I was.
“Mike,” I said.
He looked surprised, but not surprised, to see me.
“Baby,” he said, and didn't my same stupid knees grow weak.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I said. It had been fifteen years, but it could have as easily been a day.
I had walked out on Mike with a swollen lip, thinking, If I don't get out of here, I'll die. I'd assumed he'd gone on to nothing. I'd assumed he'd ended up in rehab somewhere, if he was lucky. Maybe he was dead. Someone said they'd heard he'd gone to Alaska. Alaska, fishing. Maybe he'd drowned.
“Our daughter, Shelby, is entering the first grade,” Mike said.
Shelby?
“How can you afford all this, Mike?” I asked. To illustrate my point, I pointed to the state-of-the-art school auditorium with the Dolby flat-screen liquid-crystal Sensurround whatever that justified the thirty grand we were all shelling out in tuition.
“I'm in shipping,” said Mike, with a sly little grin. “My wife's brother and I, we're partners. Alaska-based. Nicole wanted to move back East so that Shelby could get the same caliber of education that she had.” He sipped his brown liquor from its plastic cup. (Some things don't change.) He said “caliber” like he had a hard-on.
“Nicole's a Nightingale legacy,” said Mike. “Me and my Nightingales.”
He was supposed to be the disaster. Now a blonde in pink, a good suit, a Shelby. Two Nightingales.
“You are my husband,” I said. I blurted it out. But it was true. He still was my husband. I'd never told anybody in my real life about him and I'd never bothered to divorce him. My secret secret. Even though Armand and I had married in a synagogue and had hosted a reception at his parents' club, we were living in sin. Which was sort of dangerous, right? A lie like that? But it was so hard for me to be good for long.
“I was your husband,” said Mike. “Then I saved my life.
“I saved my life,” I said. “You were the one . . . I needed to be rescued from you.”
Mike looked at me. His eyes. They were the same kind of fucked-up sick black they'd always been, so dark the pupils melted into the iris, everything melted in those eyes, you kind of got swallowed up and maybe you choked a little. The rest of him was as polished and slightly aged as some prefabricated antique.
“It was us together,” said Mike. “The combo was a killer. You were the worst drug of my life.”
Wasn't that the truth? I looked at him now. I felt such a hunger, it reminded me of how I'd felt six years prior, in London, when my husband had had some business there, and I'd gone along for the ride. We were walking down one of those windy streets in the financial district, no food shops, no restaurants, just banks and office buildings. I was six months pregnant with Lucy. And I was starving. Out of nowhere, that animal hunger of pregnancy. When down the street came some poor guy chewing on a roll and I thought, I'm going to leap on top of you and rip that roll right out of your mouth.
“Introduce me to your wife,” I said.
“Okay,” said Mike. “But first, let's go out on the play terrace and smoke a cigarette.”
“Sure,” I said. I was a secret smoker too. Me and my secrets. Like the joint rolled up in my lipstick case that I'd scored from the pizza guy on Madison just in case the reception got too hard. Like the thousand-dollar bake sale check I kept forgetting to turn over to the PTA. Like the fact that I knew that the play-terrace door automatically locked from the inside at night.
“Let's go,” I said.
“You're on,” he said.
There was no turning back, after that. |
