Their union was nothing like the one Janey had grown up watching. She loved Lorna and Reginald’s love story. They were completely captivated by each other from the day they met at the Charleston country club, where Lorna was wearing a near-skin-colored one-piece working as the lifeguard. A practically nude bathing suit was acceptable to Lorna even though a bikini would have been unheard-of. Reginald, home from Vanderbilt for the weekend, pretended to drown in order to receive mouth-to-mouth from the buxom blonde. The Sweets were conservative in everything except showing affection. From that day forward her parents were constantly cuddling, kissing, and holding hands.
Lorna worked as the communications director for the Charleston mayor for the first three years after the wedding and then decided she would do much better in the position of CHO, chief household officer. And that’s what she called herself. She even had custom stationery drawn up with the title, and she never let Reginald forget that she ran things at home. She also practically ran Sweet Chocolate from their marital bedroom, since he asked her for advice on every major decision he ever made for the company. Lorna never accepted computers, email, or smartphones, preferring instead to complete all her correspondence in handwriting on Smythson stationery. In a single week Lorna could pen ten separate notes to her daughter, varying in length from a couple of lines to several pages.
Her first year working at B, Janey had dragged Lorna’s wedding dress out of mothballs and begged Beau to re-create it for their line. It became an instant best seller. She’d never believed someone could die of a broken heart until her mother passed away last year from fast-moving colon cancer. Just a month later, behind the wheel of his fifteen-year-old Mercedes during the ten-minute drive from his office to their now empty house, Reginald slumped over the steering wheel, dead of a heart attack. The death of both her parents so close to each other shook her to her core. Since Beau knew Lorna and Reginald better than anyone, she’d moved into his loft and curled up on his couch. Beau bought a giant screen and a projector on which he looped old photographs and home movies of Janey’s parents. The two of them cooked their way through Lorna’s handwritten cookbook. Janey devoured giant platters of shrimp and grits, buttered honey-glazed biscuits, fried okra, and blueberry cobbler. Beau watched.
Janey believed she gave her marriage the old college try, but Michael didn’t agree. “You’re married to Beau,” he’d say to her. For the first few years she’d laugh it off, but truthfully, she was much more attracted to Beau’s ridiculous humor and charisma. Michael had tried and failed to join their little world of two. He accepted Beau’s joining them on long weekends out to the Hamptons. He never complained about their regular slumber parties, where he’d come home to find his wife and her business partner sitting up side by side in his marital bed wearing matching sleep masks and rewatching a DVRed version of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding. He even tried to cultivate his own inside jokes with Beau, testing out a few affectionate nicknames and inviting him on long-distance bike rides out to the North Fork, but Beau rebuffed her husband’s friendship.
She remembered being in therapy around that time.
“Tell me why you hate your husband,” the analyst asked her.
“I don’t hate my husband,” Janey replied evenly, telling the truth. She didn’t hate her husband. She didn’t hate anyone. Of course the shrink did the shrink thing and just stopped talking, leaving Janey’s last words lingering in the air in one of those little word clouds, so that she eventually had no choice but to fill the space.
“I’m just bored with my husband,” Janey finally admitted. She had no interest in his new plans to launch a website that would predict what was missing in your pantry using some kind of bar code technology and automatically deliver it to your door with a drone.
Michael sensed it of course.
“We could leave New York,” he’d say sometimes without prompting, desperate to find a way to please her. Sometimes he mentioned the possibility of moving to San Francisco, which she silenced with a single look. They didn’t wear high heels or mascara there. Other times, he concocted wilder schemes, clearly just meant to get her attention. “Why don’t we quit our jobs and open a hotel on the beach in Zanzibar?” Janey would force herself to smile at him and avoid mentioning the small fact that he didn’t have a proper job to quit. Besides, Michael would never live at the beach. His mother was a ginger, and he sunburned too easily. She could, however, imagine running a hotel with Beau in Zanzibar. It would be all whitewashed walls and Byzantine blue tiles. They’d start serving ginger lime cocktails at sunset and bring in the most fabulous DJs who would play until the sun came up. Everything was more fun, more real, better than real, when Beau was there. Despite his drawbacks, Beau had the ability to make any situation a dozen times better. But with her husband, she knew she would just continue to be bored on another continent.
Janey wasn’t one of those hard-core “childless by choice” chicks, the ones who told anyone who would listen that their uterus was not open for business. In her thirties she just didn’t feel she had the time for kids, kept telling Michael they would wait until B had expanded to China and then until they hired a new marketing officer to take some of the pressure off her. After that she worried their apartment wasn’t big enough for three of them. They should wait until the housing market slumped again. In their last uncomfortable year of marriage she’d promised to go off the pill. She did for six months, and for six months she didn’t get pregnant. Every time her period came she felt like a failure.
She started taking birth control again without telling her husband. Michael found the pack of pills where she’d hidden them, in an empty quart of Sweet chocolate ice cream in the back of the freezer. He left the empty ice cream container on the counter with the pills sitting on the bottom when he moved out of the apartment.
She knew, from Facebook, that his new girlfriend was due to give birth any day now. All she felt was relief that he was with someone else. And soon enough, after she wrote a large enough check, they wouldn’t have any connection at all.
Ivy continued her diatribe against modern dating. “It just sucks. Everyone lies on his or her dating profile. Not a single person has any basic communication skills. It’s all texts and emojis and abbreviations. Tinder is truly the worst. The worst! One time I thought I was going on a date with this hot yoga instructor and I got there and it was his dad. His dad was there to go on the date with me. And then when you finally find someone you like, you go out once or twice and they just ghost. They disappear without a word as if you never existed. Dating is impossible for me and I’m young. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I were fifty.”