“Love that guy!” people said when they found out Malcolm Gephardt was her husband, as if she were married to a celebrity, as if they knew him nearly as well as she did. Then they inevitably told some story about Malcolm that she’d never heard, two o’clock in the morning, a packed bar, someone jilted, someone wronged, Malcolm to the rescue. People couldn’t imagine him at home, couldn’t imagine him without a clean shave, a perfectly pressed shirt, sleeves rolled up. They couldn’t imagine the damp towels he always left on the floor, the coins he left in little piles all over the house. They ended up in the dryer, in the vacuum. He used paper towels to blow his nose. When he went to the bathroom upstairs, he always called down to her to “give it a minute,” as if she had any notion of going in after him.
* * *
On the morning Jess had to leave for San Francisco, they were down to three digits in their joint checking account, and off the top of her head she could think of two fairly significant bills that still needed to be paid. Seeing that number sent a shock down her arms to the center of her palms. “There’s a debit from the supply company,” she said, scrolling through their transactions on her phone. She was standing by the front door with her suitcase, looking out for the corporate car service that was picking her up.
“Which one?” Malcolm asked, but with such perfect airiness that Jess knew he knew.
“The one in Jersey,” she said, making her voice even so he couldn’t accuse her of picking a fight. She was merely stating a fact. She waited for him to say that he’d been there, it was his charge, that he knew money was tight but there were things he needed. The bar came fully stocked, but he’d always wanted those oversized wineglasses that looked like fishbowls on stems. Hugh would never agree to them, and Malcolm always said that when he had his own place the first thing he’d do would be to upgrade the wine list and try to attract a clientele that appreciated it. All at once, she knew he bought those dumb glasses. They were the only ones at the supply store not sold by the case.
“Oh. Yeah. That’s right.”
“What’d you get that could’ve cost this much?”
Say it, she encouraged him in her mind. Say it’s none of my business. Say it.
“Because you know those wineglasses you like have no place in a bar like the Half Moon.”
She knew she sounded like the exact kind of wife she swore she’d never be, speaking to him like she was his boss, or his mother. Did she want to speak to her husband like he was a child? Of course not. But when a person dreams of partnering with someone for life, no one ever considers the fact that there’s no dependable way to communicate a thought except to say it.
“Five ounces will look like one sip in those things. Every bartender will overpour. Customers will complain because even a heavy pour will look short.”
She couldn’t stop herself. “People will wrap them in napkins and tuck them into purses. Fine to steal pint glasses if Smithwick’s is supplying them, but these? Mal.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, as if she’d arrived at a party just to knock over the cake.
“What?”
Say it, she thought.
He glared at her.
“Tell me what I’m supposed to do. Keep quiet? Even though we already talked about this? And agreed to the exact opposite of spending a few hundred bucks on glasses? The Half Moon isn’t the Plaza. I’m exhausted, Mal. I’ve been working sixty-hour weeks for fifteen years. And at this moment we have—” She glanced down. “Nine hundred and twenty three dollars in checking.”
“Yeah I know it’s not the Plaza, Jess. I’m working hard, too. Always have. You think you’re the only one who works hard around here?”
“Oh my God that’s not what I’m saying and you know it.”
He was making the face that made him look like his mother. Whenever he made that face, she saw so clearly how he’d look when he was old. Sometimes Gail claimed that Malcolm got his broadness from her, and then she’d roll her shoulders like she was proud to have the build of a man. “A lot of models have broad shoulders if you notice, makes clothes look nicer,” Gail said to Jess once, and Jess almost choked on her sandwich.
“Can you return them?”
“You know, Jess? It’s really none of your business. You mind your career and I’ll mind mine.”
Boom, Jess thought. There we have it. She felt a rich, thick heat rush from her center to every part of her body. “It’s not my business?”
“You don’t believe in me, in the bar, any of it. You’ve made that clear.”
“If that’s how you’re taking this, then we have a serious problem,” she said at the same moment the car pulled up. Instead of kissing her goodbye, he walked through the house and slammed the back door.
* * *
Jess’s only real job at the conference was to show her face at cocktail parties, sit along the back wall during panels. Arguing with Malcolm and then getting immediately into a car and brought to the airport left her feeling off-balance. She wasn’t angry, exactly. Or even hurt. It was more like she felt dazed, like everything she was doing, every part of her life, existed at a greater distance from her real self than she’d previously thought. Standing on the security line, lifting her bag onto the belt, her mind was a complete blank. At least I don’t have to worry about fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of fertility medications getting confiscated, she thought. At least there’s that. She touched her back pocket to check for a hair elastic just as she stepped into the body scanner, so they flagged her, but she didn’t quite tune in to the fact that she was being patted down until it was over, and she was swept up once again into the current of people rushing toward the gates. If she read a magazine or sipped a coffee while she waited to board, she couldn’t remember. On the flight, she pulled up a playlist, put on her headphones, but didn’t notice for a full hour that no music was coming through. When she stepped onto the sidewalk at SFO, she felt a relief that was different from her usual relief at having landed safely, more like a surprise pleasure in glimpsing the true size of the world. Thinking about the distance between where she was standing and home—the fact that Malcolm, the Half Moon, the empty rooms in their house, her mother’s comments, their friends, were all three thousand miles away—felt like something heavy being lifted from her shoulders. She took a deep breath and hailed a cab.
In her hotel lobby she noticed a group of men around her age, not affiliated with the conference. A bachelor party maybe, Jess figured, though they seemed a little too old. They drew her attention at checkin because there were seven of them, and though they weren’t rowdy exactly, she noticed there were no women among them. They were attractive guys, early to mid-forties, all in relatively good shape, all well-dressed, clearly happy to be with each other. They weren’t intimidating, like a group of men can be. She noticed them again when she went down to the hotel bar for a quick drink before the keynote dinner, a moment to gather her thoughts. They were at a table behind her, talking over each other. She eavesdropped and learned they were supposed to have spent the day golfing somewhere in the Presidio but changed plans because of the rain.
Just as she was finishing her drink, one of them came up to the bar and stood next to her, waiting for the bartender. He was close enough for her to notice he smelled good. She was glad she put on a dress for the dinner instead of just changing her blouse.
He nodded at her and put his credit card on the bar. He leaned forward on his elbows. He had nice hands. Where his cuff rode up she could see a scar, right above his wrist. She snuck a glance at his face. A nice face, too. There was no one aside from Jess at the bar, but he stood only two feet away.