February 2010
On a cold weekday morning, Mary Ann was puttering at home when she noticed that Bob had forgotten his laptop in the front hall.
She stopped with one foot up on the stair. It was just like Bob to forget something — she was no longer amazed that a man who earned a high six-figure salary and commanded staff could waste ten precious minutes three days out of five looking for his coat, his keys, and his phone — but rarely did he leave the computer behind.
She picked up the laptop case and carried it upstairs. She’d been having trouble with the email program on her desktop and she might be able to fix the problem if she could see the settings Bob was using.
In the study, she turned on Bob’s computer and found that access to his email account was controlled by a password. Not a problem. Mary Ann entered Bobby2728, the same password and PIN he used for everything. He could only remember one four-digit number, he often said. Which usually prompted Mary Ann to say, “And to think I married you anyway.” Haha.
Her eyes ran over the subject headers for the twenty-two new messages in Bob’s inbox: Sanderson Fund Draft Prospectus. Dublin Conference Itinerary. Associate Performance Review Procedures. Minutes of Jan. 11 Management Committee meeting. And so on. Except for the sixteenth message, sent by someone named Zoe Bennett, and titled Last Night. Mary Ann clicked on it before stopping to think about whether she should.
The message was dated that morning at nine a.m — fifteen minutes before. It was accompanied by an instrumental music track of a mellow jazz tune, heavy on the saxophone. It said:
I haven’t texted because my phone died but I had to tell you that just thinking about everything we did last night makes me wet all over again. Can you meet me for lunch?
Dismay surged through Mary Ann’s body. She blinked a few times, swallowed down the rising swell of her breakfast, and read the message over twice more before she thought to turn down the volume on the annoying wail of music. How the hell did one attach music to an email, anyway? She read the message a third time, and a fourth, and tried to remember where Bob had claimed to be the night before. At dinner with clients? At a Knicks game? She didn’t know, hadn’t retained the details of his whereabouts beyond the fact that he’d arrived home around midnight (when she was already in bed) and left that morning at six-thirty, like always. Except without his laptop.
She pushed back her chair, bent over, rested her head between her knees, and attempted to breathe not in gulps and gasps, to stay calm. Maybe this was a joke. Someone like Bob’s golf buddy Ron would think sending a fake email like this would be a hilarious prank. In keeping with the stories he’d told Bob about his own adulterous exploits — weekly escapades, if Ron were to be believed, with any number of willing partners, in the unlikeliest of locations. When Bob had passed the stories on to Mary Ann, she’d said, “I don’t believe a word of it,” or, “What’s with people?” and been glad Bob was not like that. Glad Bob wasn’t the affair type.
Why, Bob had liked to repeat to her — in addition to the bit about remembering one password — that while there might conceivably be some cheap thrills to be found with a stranger, he was content with the tried and true sex he had with Mary Ann, sex honed to his exact specs after years of repetition. And Mary Ann’s take on the subject was more or less the same. There was something to be said for practice making perfect in the orgasm department, for a partner whose frequency and variety of needs had seemed to coincide with her own. Provided she could ignore the way Bob’s hand brushed against the tender spot near her hipbone that she’d always hated having touched. And how he dug his chin into her shoulder when he was on top. And how he — never mind.
She pulled Bob’s laptop toward her, searched his emails for more from Zoe Bennett, found only work-related ones, and determined that Zoe was an attorney working on a deal with Bob. A young, pretty attorney, according to the picture of her that appeared beside her profile on her law firm’s website.
Mary Ann tried to ignore the deafening roar made by the walls of her life crashing around her, closed the computer, and sat, staring out the window and seeing nothing, for some time.
There were scenes. Whispered screaming matches between Mary Ann and Bob after the kids had gone to bed. Suspicions were confirmed, doors slammed, recriminations hurled, tears shed by Mary Ann. Many tears.
The worst part was that Bob wouldn’t stop seeing Zoe after he was found out. Couldn’t stop. “You don’t want to hear this,” he said. “But I love Zoe. She makes me feel alive and young and happy. Happy!”
“You’re right, I don’t want to hear that.”
“I love you and the kids too, though. I don’t want to break up the family. I don’t know what to do.”
She wasn’t stupid. She heard how he’d lumped her in with the kids, that he loved the four of them as a unit, and not her alone. That hurt. But did she love him? There was a question that was hard to answer honestly. In case the answer was no, she didn’t. In case all she’d ever loved was the concept of she and Bob as a couple, the two of them good-looking, popular, and successful, living in their very nice house, on Bob’s very nice income, with their very nice, good-looking, and popular children.
Bob said he needed time to figure things out. Time to keep seeing Zoe in the city, while pretending his marriage was intact in Oakdale. Time to keep their marital strife hidden from the kids, and live the lie.
And Mary Ann had agreed to this mortifying, soul-destroying, eat-out-her-insides plan because it was better than the alternative: to kick him out, start divorce proceedings, become a broke single mom.
Mary Ann had confided her troubles in Alice and no one else, and eventually picked herself up, dusted herself off, and gone to work for Drew. Only to have Bob come home with news one night soon after she’d settled into the job.
The younger kids had gone to bed, and Mary Ann was working on some status reports in the study when Bob came in the front door, ran up the stairs, stood in the doorway, and with great drama, announced that the affair with Zoe had ended, and Zoe had transferred to Chicago.
It took Mary Ann a minute to find the right reply. A minute during which she located the affair topic on the back shelf of her mind, hauled it up front, gave it a cursory examination, and said, “So now what?”
“So now what?” Bob said. “Is that all you have to say? Aren’t you happy? Isn’t this what you wanted?”
“Yes, I wanted you to stop seeing her. But am I happy? I wouldn’t go that far.”
Bob sat down in the visitor’s chair on the other side of her desk. “Don’t you want to know how I feel?”
Did she? “How do you feel?”
He slumped forward, buried his face in his hands. “Like a total douche. I can’t believe what I’ve done. What a jerk I’ve been.” He looked up. “But at the same time — I’m destroyed that it’s over.”
Mary Ann got up from her chair. It wasn’t that late — Josh might hear their voices. She shut the door, sat back down, and waited for Bob to calm himself. Mary Ann would stay with him for now, stay married, until she got her bearings and found her footing. But she would neither forgive nor forget. And when she was ready, she’d get hers.