Secrets
Cindy Henderson didn’t want to go to the Lomax party. She hated parties in general, with their pointless social requirements. You had to smile at people you disliked and make conversation with bores. Invariably you would run into someone whom you’d been successfully avoiding for weeks. And of course, after fifteen minutes of small talk, you’d wind up inviting them over for dinner, or planning a two-family vacation, backpacking in Zion National Park—anything to end the conversation. It would be funny, if it were happening to someone else.
Mike had suggested she stay near, to use him as a human shield. It sounded good, but then she would be exposed to the supernaturally tedious conversation of his tradesmen friends. Who bid what on which job, how many board feet of lumber someone got how much cheaper in Vermont, which builder was struggling with the HDC over the pitch of his roof; which plumbers cleaned up after themselves. It was better to just stay home.
For once, Mike didn’t seem to mind. “Don’t bother,” he’d said that morning at breakfast. “I’m not going to stay long. The last thing I want to do is spend more time in that mausoleum.”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t worry about it. Take the night off.”
He was so accommodating and thoughtful, she became instantly suspicious. Did he not want her there for some reason? Was there someone he was afraid to have her meet? He had spoken so quickly, jumping right in after her comment, as if it was rehearsed. Over-rehearsed, actually: he needed to take a beat, relax and at least appear to consider what Cindy had said, before starting his prepared remarks.
“I think I will go after all.” She carried her coffee cup to the sink. “I got a new dress from the J. Jill catalogue and I’ve been wanting to wear it someplace.”
“Are you sure? Because it’s really—”
“I’m positive, Mike. This will be fun.”
He shrugged. “Great. Just let me know when you want to leave and we’re out of there.”
She kissed him on his way out the door, and held him for an extra second or two, to show that everything was fine between them, precisely because it wasn’t. He sensed something off-kilter in the gesture.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Go to work.”
She kissed him again and pushed him out the door. She was sure he had secrets; but she had her secrets, too. She wondered if there were any marriages without them, where everyone told the truth and had nothing to hide. Maybe that was what the storybooks meant by “happily ever after.” Or maybe happy was just an average, drawn between the rages and the joy, the sum of the constant struggle to stay close when everything inside and outside you seemed to be pulling you apart.
It was so much easier to lie.
It was comfortable to have a little private place for yourself, like a daybed where you could snuggle under a quilt for an afternoon nap. Like the fact of her pregnancy. Until she told Mike about it, or started to show, the baby was hers and hers alone. She could feel and do about it precisely what she wanted, without having to consult anyone, without taking anyone else’s feelings or advice or demands into account. It was none of anyone else’s business right now, not even Mike’s.
But there were other things she was happy to keep private. The principal one was named Mark Toland.
When they were seniors in high school, he had swept her up into a brief affair and then casually dumped her. Two years later, he had come to visit her at college, to apologize and win her back. But she had been seeing someone else. The other boy had walked in on them. He’d heard all her one-sided stories about Mark, and instantly recognized the gloating sexual predator she had described in her acid post-coital monologues. There had been a brief shoving match, but Mark was no fighter. His parting words were “Keep your alpha dog on the leash. Before he bites someone and they put him to sleep.”
She had written to Mark occasionally, after that. She felt bad about the way she had described him to the now-defunct boyfriend. She had left out a few essential items: his brilliance and talent, his wit, and energy. And his heavy-lidded, dark-haired good looks. He was tall, with the lean muscles of the Olympic swimmer he had almost become. Of course, the boyfriend had noticed that part. And Mark was rich. He came from six generations of family money; they had begun as cotton and lumber brokers for paper companies. Now they were the single largest manufacturer of notebooks and loose-leaf paper in the world. Mark’s older brother Alex was doing most of the grunt work running the business and Mark was free to take his huge trust fund and do whatever he pleased.
As it turned out, what pleased him was making movies. After putting in five years of work and hustle in Los Angeles, he was finally doing it. His family frowned on the business from a distance, but didn’t interfere. As they saw it, if he chose to do contemptible cheesy things like flattering scoundrels, compromising his integrity, and—worst of all—spending his capital pursuing an odious fantasy, it was all right with them. As long as he didn’t come back after he had burned through his inheritance, looking for handouts.
It was a workable truce.
And now he was going to have the satisfaction of rubbing their aristocratic noses in his implausible success. He had been gloating about that on the phone a few days ago. They had been chatting for several weeks, since he was back East scouting locations for his first feature film, and a mutual friend had given him Cindy’s number. He always called her at the store now, so the only interruptions were from customers—rich ladies with rich husbands, buying party dresses with corporate credit cards, comparing Mevlana handbags from the sale rack, laughing together. Maybe money did buy happiness. Maybe it really was that simple. You could certainly lease something pretty close to it. These women were certainly enjoying themselves. They didn’t need to flirt with old boyfriends on the telephone
Still, the only thing Cindy enjoyed now was a phone call from Mark Toland. The mornings when she didn’t hear from him seemed poisonously drab; grim stretches of time like Selectmen’s meetings or the eight-hour childhood ferry trips when the harbor was frozen.
“Listen, I’m in New York for two weeks,” he had said suddenly, the other day. “Come down here. We can see each other and neither of us will have to say a word.”
The boldness of the invitation shocked her. “I couldn’t.”
“Sure you could. It’s easy. You show your ID at the ticket counter and they look up the round-trip ticket I’m going to buy you. Then you get on the plane, eat peanuts, and read. Next thing you know, you’re here.”
“No, Mike would never…I mean, I don’t know what I could possibly tell him, that would—”
“You have family in the city. Say you’re visiting them. Hell—visit them. It won’t even be a lie.”
“I have to think about it.”
“Okay, but you can always think of fifty good reasons not to do anything if you think about it long enough.”
Then they had hung up and she hadn’t heard from him since.
The conversation seemed a little crazy to her now. She hadn’t actually seen Mark since the afternoon he had shown up at her dorm room, all those years ago. She had no business flirting with him over the telephone at this late date. Even daydreaming about meeting him in New York made her feel sleazy and cheap. She had really only let it start because she felt Mike was hiding something from her, which probably wasn’t even true in the first place.
She was married, she was six weeks pregnant, and she was going to a fabulous party with her handsome husband in a killer backless silk dress that would get everyone talking about her the way she wanted them to. She crumpled up the slip of paper with Mark Toland’s numbers, threw it away and started running herself a bath.
It was like her mother always said: “Life is good if you let it be.”