She could see how it happens, one small decision at a time until self-care is all you do, and all you are, and one day, without even realizing what you’re saying, you find yourself bragging about your achievements in self-objectification, about the Le Cirque chef you import for the summer, about the car and driver who takes you gallery-hopping, the increasingly clever and enviable ways that you invent to spend your husband’s income.
Little by little, Ariel had given up trying to find her own tribe, and instead had simply joined Bucky’s, she’d taken on their stripes, pretended to be one of them, this network that spun out from her husband’s upbringing, his schooling, his professional orbit. His people had become hers, the men from Bucky’s job and the women who married them, bore their children, wore their wealth on their ring fingers, carried it in the crooks of their arms.
This was not who Ariel had ever intended to be. She did not want someone like Tory Wasserman to be one of her closest friends.
“Excuse me,” Ariel muttered to no one, walking away from those people, from everything. She could not allow herself to become one of them. But she was worried that it was already too late.
*
Ariel had always felt like an intruder, like her membership in the club was provisionary. One false move and they’d kick her to the curb, with her unconvincing degree from her unimpressive college, her unsuccessful career as an actor and her unremarkable years afterward, accomplishing nothing much besides staying in peak physically attractive condition and marrying an eligible man, but failing to bear him children. Then she’d be lying in the gutter, thirty-three years old, broke and alone, unemployed and unemployable. Then what?
Walking away from that table, all she’d wanted was to hide for a few minutes, a brief respite from pretending to covet someone else’s red-soled shoes.
The nearest bathroom was just inside the crowded veranda. Ariel couldn’t bear to run into yet someone else who’d be bragging about all the ways that rules did not apply to them—traffic, parking, taxes, waiting lists, sports, all those rules were for other people, people who weren’t smart enough or rich enough to figure out how to cheat. So she headed down a flagstone path lit by tiki torches to the poolhouse, flickering candles and overstuffed couches and a wet bar and a huge-screen TV and a billiards table and a couple of pinball machines.
The bathroom of this fully tricked-out mancave was of course huge; everything was huge, huge was the point—huge furniture, huge windows, huge car, huge bank account. The huger the better. The messaging was not subtle.
Ariel opened the medicine cabinet, shook out and swallowed a couple of Tylenol.
She examined herself in yet another mirror. She cradled her palms around her flat belly, wondering what it would look like, feel like. Wondering if this was part of it, if it had already begun, this moodiness, her sudden nausea a minute ago.
Wondering if she was, in fact, already pregnant.
But no, she scolded herself: Don’t do that. Over the past few months she’d made a deliberate effort to wean herself off the self-defeating habit of premature pregnancy tests, which had accomplished nothing other than making her deeply unhappy. Yes, it was possible that at the moment she was already pregnant; it was also likely that she wasn’t. And if she was, she’d be keeping the pregnancy to herself for a good long while, past the first trimester. Bucky hadn’t reacted well to her miscarriage, in fact he’d been horrid—disappointed in her, angry, accusatory, as if she’d tried to home-cook an important dinner party and everything had turned out inedible, humiliating him, when she should have just hired a caterer like everyone else.
“Have you been exercising too much?” he’d asked. Ariel wished she could pretend that he was joking, but there was nothing remotely funny about it. “Eating shellfish?”
Blame was one thing, she understood blame, everyone always wants to assign the blame for any negative outcome. But this was something beyond blame.
“How much have you been drinking?”
This was pure emotion, and the emotion felt a lot like hate. That conversation should’ve been Ariel’s first clue, but she’d chosen not to see it that way; in truth there’d been other clues. But afterward she made excuses for Bucky: this had been in the depths of winter, and the gloomy season was part of the bad circumstances and bad timing of the bad news, all contributing to her husband’s bad response; maybe he suffered from seasonal affective disorder, which everyone was discovering back then, like ADD a few years later; people were coming out of the woodwork to self-diagnose. Or maybe Bucky’s behavior was not way outside normal parameters; there’s a large segment of the male population whose first instinct, always, is to assign blame to someone else—whoever happens to be nearest, or femalest.
Ariel’s instinct was to shoulder the blame. The longer she failed, the more the concept of failure established residency in her consciousness, and her biological failure expanded into a moral one, as if this were a question of insufficient effort, like getting a C-minus on a math exam, or crashing a car. A thing she failed at because she hadn’t practiced enough, concentrated enough, tried enough. Cared enough.
Maybe, Bucky accused, she didn’t want to have a baby with him after all.
Maybe, Ariel eventually thought, he was right.
*
She adjusted her hair. She touched up her makeup. She practiced her smile in the mirror, for—what?—it might as well have been the millionth time, uncountable. How much of her life had she spent trying to figure out how to make herself more beautiful?
“Bucky,” she said, quietly, to her reflection. “Can we please go home now?”
No. There was no point asking, it would only make him angry.
Ariel sighed, resigned to returning to the party, to grinning and bearing it, to letting it slide. This too was part of her job, letting it slide. This was discussed, the things you had to let slide.
She opened the door—
CHAPTER 35
DAY 2. 8:42 P.M.
Ariel sits on the couch, surreptitiously listening to John leave brief messages for his assistant, his boss, a colleague, all promising to be back in touch tomorrow. His final call is to his client here in Lisbon, explaining, apologizing, and ultimately promising that he’ll be at their offices tomorrow. Ariel doesn’t think he should be promising anything of the sort, but she’s not going to interrupt to tell him so. She doesn’t want him to know that she’s eavesdropping.
She too needs to place a reassuring call, to her mom: problem solved, sorry for the alarm, for the inconvenience, for the panic.
“Please go back to my house as soon as you can,” Ariel says. “I was just being extra-cautious. And maybe a little irrational.”
“Honey, are you sure it’s safe?”
“Yes. And can you put George on for a minute?”
“I’ll go get him.”
“Actually, Mom, wait: Why did you just ask if I’m sure it’s safe?”
“Well, I just got the strangest call.”
Ariel feels her whole body tense. “What was that?”
“From a reporter in Lisbon, a few hours ago. Let me see, I wrote his name somewhere …”
“Was it Pete Wagstaff?”
“That’s it! How did you know?”
“What did he want?”