Hurriedly, I texted back a simple Yes.
So overjoyed was I that I wrapped my arms around James and kissed him, hungrily, digging my fingers into the lush fabric of his suit jacket and feeling the muscular flesh of his shoulders beneath the fabric. His mouth tasted of chewing gum, and his cheeks smelled of Acqua di Giò cologne, a combination of innocence and sophistication that drove me wild with desire. My need for him was animal-like and desperate. People in our midst were looking at us, pointing at us, and I had it in my mind we were reliving some kind of celebrated scene and that, like the famous Times Square photograph of an uninhibited sailor kissing a nurse on V-J Day, our kiss would take on talismanic proportions in the popular imagination.
James straightened his jacket, straightened his tie. He could’ve been forgiven for thinking me unhinged or, at the least, a bit too forward, and yet, as he turned to face me, I sensed again his unflappable calm, his supreme confidence. He held out his hand and introduced himself, prim and proper. He told me his name. Wainsborough. It sounded English. The name of a duke or a lord, someone of consequence I’d feel confident introducing to those in my social circle. He kissed my hand, an over-the-top gesture that, compared to my passionate embrace, seemed positively restrained. My heart raced. I stuttered.
“The pleasure of meeting you is entirely mine,” James said, letting go of my hand. “It’s a pity it takes a national disaster for me to meet someone as charming as you.”
Now, showered, dressed, and having spooned down a bowl of blueberries and instant oatmeal, James plants a kiss on my cheek. Back when we first dated, we talked without words, letting our eyes do the talking as we stared at each other across restaurant tables. Though he won’t call in sick to spend the day rekindling our love with a winter’s stroll through Rock Creek Park, I’m determined to hang on to him. He is my husband. I bat my eyelashes, and he raises an eyebrow.
“Do you want to know what I dreamed last night? I dreamed I was pregnant,” I say, and as I tell James about the dream, he slips his hand over mine. Though he asked me to divorce him yesterday, I look into his eyes, yearning to see that divorce isn’t what he really wants. I tell him about the bloating I felt in the dream, how I thought I’d burst out of my skin. “It was simply the most exciting dream I ever had. Would you like it if I were pregnant?”
James glances at the kitchen clock. The clock is plastic and black and shaped like an elegant cat, and with each passing second, the cat’s tail swishes from one side to the other.
“Would you like it?” I ask again, but I already know from his reluctance to answer that he thinks it impossible I’ll ever get pregnant. He doesn’t want me to get my hopes up. Plus there’s Laurel, his fertile young mistress who apparently doesn’t share my difficulties with conception.
“Hey, I forgot to compliment you on how well your shoes match your camisole. It looks lovely. What do you call the color?”
Both items are new, bought the previous week while boutique hopping, but rattled with the feeling he’s slipping out of my life, I can’t remember the details. Reds, greens, and blues no longer exist in couture. Instead, we have shades like bruised plum, rosemary sorbet, and smudged banana, monikers deriving from produce aisles and fanciful imaginations. My friends are always amazed at how attentive James is of me, how he notices the little things—the accessories, the color coordination—that their own lackadaisical husbands overlook.
“Hey, why so glum?” James asks.
I shrug. In my heart, I know unless I do something, James will eventually leave me. None of this would have happened if I’d been able to become pregnant. Fundamentally, he’s a good man. I doubt he’s ever dallied with another woman before Laurel dug her claws into him. Now that he’s a father, he will endeavor to be a good father. For the sake of his baby, he will eventually commit himself to Laurel, tossing me aside. How is it supposed to feel when a marriage dissolves? I’m overwhelmed by the mawkish sentimentality for this shared life that’s rushing away from me. Back when we dated, I deduced that his love for my money helped cement his love for me, which was why I consented to his marriage proposal only on the condition he sign the prenup. As long as it was clear he’d never get a penny if he divorced me, I figured he’d be mine for life. Sooner or later, his love for Anne Elise will outweigh his love for my money. Eventually, he will leave me for Laurel. But I won’t make it easy for him.
“Are you coming home tonight?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” James says, opening the front door. Over his shoulder, beyond the circular driveway and the snowed-over front lawn, I make out the cobblestone street in front of the house. “Why wouldn’t I want to come home to the most wonderful wife in the city? Please don’t think a little tiff or two will make me run away.”
A little tiff? He’s trying to downplay his affair and all that’s come between us, but I’m not going to let him distract me. “So what time are you coming home?”
James squints at me. It’s not like me to pester him about his comings and goings, for I’m not one of those henpecking wives who feels incomplete if she doesn’t know where her husband is every time the cat’s tail on her kitchen clock swishes another second or two. “I’ll be home. Just like I always am.”
“At what time? I need to plan something. How about seven o’clock? Is that good enough? Do you think you can be home by seven?”
James shrugs. “Sure.”
A moment later, James snaps his fingers. “Crushed raspberry.”
“Huh?”
“Crushed raspberry. That’s what they should name the color of your shoes and top. It’s the perfect name for a color. Don’t you think, darling?”
My father had multiple affairs during the course of his marriage. A woman internalizes these things. A father’s infidelity teaches a girl that, ultimately, as a woman, she’s disposable. A mother’s silence about her husband’s infidelities teaches acceptance. Yes, I was affected by it. My mother, who traced her ancestry to the Mayflower, was the most generous person I’d ever known. Each night, instead of reading bedtime stories to my sister, Julie, and me, she recited poems by the American fireside poets of the nineteenth century. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell. Her delicate voice lilted with the rhythms of each verse. She was a porcelain flower, fine and fragile and utterly unable to withstand the fissures my father’s affairs introduced into her marriage. She took to bed for months on end. In the mornings, Julie and I dove through the heavy curtains that surrounded her four-poster canopy bed, trying to cheer her up. We’d brush her brittle hair, pretend she was our fairy queen and we her fair handmaidens. We’d lay out the elegant pleated skirts and silk blouses we’d hope she’d wear, but rarely could we coax her downstairs for breakfast or outside for a rambunctious hide-and-go-seek game like we once enjoyed.
“What do you do all day?” my sister and I asked her one morning four months after she first retreated into her bedroom. We were trying to figure out why she no longer played with us or even asked after our school activities. During the months she’d become bedbound, winter had turned into an unseasonably warm spring, and now it was nearly summer, the twittering of songbirds in the air whenever we galloped outside. Julie and I had somehow discovered a passion for badminton. We wanted her to come outside and watch us volley birdies over a net we’d strung up between two maple trees.