I’m standing on the front porch of Trish’s house, Savory Mew, debating what to do. Located in the same Georgetown neighborhood as Dumbarton Oaks, the historic mansion where delegates from five nations hatched out plans to create the United Nations, the house has belonged to her family for four generations. And it’s gorgeous, an ostentatious twelve-room Georgian brick manor house with a portico entrance, lead glass windows, molded ceilings, a tall slate roof, and the kind of storied past that lends itself to magazine feature stories. How can one walk away from such a home?
I fumble through my pockets for my house key, thankful Trish hasn’t changed the locks on me yet. The house is dark. Trish must be asleep, meaning that for the moment I’ll avoid the horrendous argument I know we’re going to have in the not-too-distant future. I’m in it over my head with Trish and Laurel. There’s a black stain on my conscience, a growing guilt that’s getting harder to suppress, a sorrow that consumes me nightly before I drift off to sleep. I’ve got no good way of making right this situation. What does one do when one’s screwed up as bad as I have? I let Trish down. I should never have stumbled into an affair, but in the months after Jack Riggs served up the idea of surrogacy, the idea that another woman might bear me a child gnawed on me. Having felt the sting of abandonment myself while growing up, I can’t just walk out on Trish. Or Laurel. Or my newborn daughter.
At the hospital, I wanted Trish to yell at me, scream and shout, tell me how horrible I am. Last week, Laurel said she’d make sure I’d play no role in our baby’s life if I didn’t divorce Trish. A baby needs a daddy. I can’t risk Laurel taking our baby away from me. I knew Trish would never divorce me because of the financial implications, but I needed to show Laurel I was doing what I could. Trish was going to find out about Laurel soon enough even if I didn’t bring her to the hospital. Laurel’s been tightening the screws on me to be done with Trish ASAP. Lately, she’s been threatening to mail photographs of us together to Trish as a means of hastening our separation. Although I do wonder how Trish found out about Laurel, I was almost relieved when she told me on our drive to the hospital that she knew, because it meant I no longer had to live with that secret hanging over my head.
As strange as it sounds, I don’t want Trish to eject me from her life. She’s not the easiest person to be married to, but I love her. I really do. She’s erratic, often acting on rash impulses or a logic that’s near impossible to divine. At times, I’ve worried about her mental health, but I’ve not been able to convince her to see a psychologist. Like every other wealthy person I’ve met, she’s uncommonly stubborn. Once she latches on to an idea, regardless how ridiculous or demonstrably false it may be, she’ll never shake it out of her head. But I love her.
“James? Is that you?” Trish calls downstairs from the bedroom. “Are you home for the night?”
The question silences me.
Trish pads down the stairs, and in the dark, she sniffs the air, searching for me. Though I can’t see her, I can tell she’s cross at me by how she taps her foot on the marble floor.
“James. Have you been drinking?”
“Not drinking,” I say, trying to put the best foot forward. “Contemplating.”
Flipping on the light, I stumble forward and wrap my arms around Trish. She stands at the base of the grand staircase in her full-length cherry-blossom-print pink kimono. She used to cook incredible dinners: hollandaise sauce that was to die for, herbed lamb roasts, fresh-baked croissants. Every meal was spectacular. Years ago, upon arriving home, I’d grab her hand and twirl her around on the pink marble floors as if we were ballroom dancers. As newlyweds, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Through her, a brand-new world opened up for me, a moneyed extravaganza I never quite believed actually existed beyond the pages of Vanity Fair and the Washingtonian.
Coming from a long line of bankers, Trish’s father served in Nixon’s Treasury Department and, thereafter, in executive positions with the bank that bore his family name and controlled the commerce of this capital city for generations. Trish and her twin sister, Julie, seventeen years deceased due to a ruptured splenic artery aneurysm, were named after Nixon’s daughters. An oil portrait of her father hangs above the fireplace in the living room. He was a dapper man who strolled the city with a silver-handled walking stick and top hat long after it had been fashionable to do so, and through these Gilded Age eccentricities and his financial muscle, he carved out a revered position for himself in Washington’s social milieu. He possessed a patrician’s jaunty chin, discerning eyes, and a smooth, chiseled, haughty nose. All children bear the scars and blessings of their parents. Sometimes, I doubt Trish realizes how much she resembles her father.
Growing up, I was never in Trish’s league. Extravagance for me used to mean nothing grander than an extra scoop of ice cream or a new winter coat at Christmastime. But as a young man, in college, I fell under the thrall of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Like all strivers, I took the novel to heart, appreciating it as a manual for how to get ahead in life rather than for its substantial literary merits. Having grown up in Buffalo (coincidentally, the city where Fitzgerald spent much of his early years), I snagged a half scholarship to a private DC university that billed itself as “the Harvard on the Potomac.” I wanted to be rich. I was a Gatsby-in-training, an aspiring parvenu, a man on the make. Through Fitzgerald, I learned all men of consequence were either on the make, like Gatsby and myself, or, like Tom Buchanan, wealthy but careless people who relied on others to clean up their messes. A frequent though private game of mine was to walk into a party and assess everyone in the room—were they Gatsbys or Buchanans? Even before I met Jack Riggs, I pegged him, rightly, as a Buchanan. And he probably knew I was a Gatsby.
“I don’t care if you were out ‘contemplating.’ Or whatever it was that you were doing. You shouldn’t be driving after you’ve been drinking.” Trish takes another exaggerated sniff of my alcohol-soused breath and flutters her hand, clearing the air of the odor. “Why don’t you go to bed and sleep off whatever you’ve been ‘contemplating’?”
“Did I ever tell you why I love you?”
Trish tilts her head, her eyes narrowing as if she’s wary of being outsmarted. “Why?”
“Darling, I love the way you care for me. Even if I arrive at your staircase less than sober, you are compassionate and kind, gentle and sweet,” I say, hoping against hope that a few generous compliments might temporarily erase the sins of my inebriation. “Beautiful. Silky. Sexy. You’re everything a man could want in a wife.”
Trish flicks the back of her hand at me, catching me on the shoulder. “You’re impossible.”
I kiss Trish’s dry lips, trying to amuse her, but she leans away from my kisses, arching her back against the hand-carved wooden pineapple adorning the head of the staircase newel post.
“Hey? What gives?”
“Tomorrow. When you’re sober. We’re going to have a talk.”