Mary-Beth cried when she heard. She was at brunch the next morning with her family—her family: JJ, Lucas and Cameron—when JJ told them that his father had admitted to having an affair with a woman who worked for him years ago.
John had explained it all the night before, when the guys got back from the bar. He’d been waiting for them with a neat Scotch and bloodshot eyes at the kitchen table. Her name was Lisa, and she was his secretary in the early 2000s. By his account, the affair had been brief, consensual and the biggest regret of his life. John Senior reportedly cried when he told his sons, which Mary-Beth couldn’t picture. JJ and his brothers cried, which Mary-Beth could. Patty knew about the affair, and they had since done couples counseling. He could never make it right, he’d told his sons, but they were in a good place now. It didn’t need to be a “liability.”
That’s when Mary-Beth started crying at the Pink Radish Café, over lobster eggs Benedict with her family. “He said that? A liability?”
JJ slumped. “He is who he is.”
“Jesus,” Lucas mumbled.
“Watch it, Luke.” JJ straightened up and turned to his sons. “I want to be clear here. What your grandfather did is inexcusable. It’s not the way for a man to behave. I have never, and will never, do something like that to this family. And I will not make excuses for your grandfather. But we’re running a campaign now and we need to handle this strategically. It doesn’t mean I endorse any of this. I don’t want to hear any jokes or innuendo of any kind on the matter. No mention of this—or anything at all having to do with the campaign—on your little internet videos.”
“We know, Dad.”
“We wouldn’t, anyway.”
Cameron and Lucas were mostly preoccupied with hash browns at that moment, looking away to take furtive glances at the smartphones in their palms. Ever since their national TV appearance, the boys were experiencing their own flash of fame on various social media platforms. Mary-Beth kept meaning to crack down on that.
“Good.”
Mary-Beth dabbed beneath her eyes where mascara was starting to run. “I’m glad your mom already knows and they’ve had counseling. This would be worse if she was just learning about it.”
Mary-Beth was sickened by it all. It was as if a thread had come loose in the weave of everything, and now it was just hanging out there, daring someone to pull harder, to see how much more could unravel. She felt this way not because she’d thought John Senior was incapable of infidelity but rather because she always suspected he was. And now that it was known and public, his tawdry story was theirs, too. She had to discuss it with her children and watch her husband strategize around it. And she had to wonder—she really didn’t want to wonder this—how alike were JJ and his father? How badly did JJ want to emulate him? With this thread loose, so many other aspects of her life were subject to the unraveling.
“I’ll take your mom out,” she announced. “Shopping or antiquing or something. She deserves at least that today.”
JJ nodded. “That would be nice. Actually, we’re making a formal announcement of the campaign this afternoon, in an effort to get out ahead of the gossip, so maybe you guys should be out of the house for that. The press calls will start pouring in immediately.”
“You’re announcing today? Isn’t that early? You guys don’t have anything in place. There’s no staff. Have you even submitted anything to the campaign finance office?”
“It’s not ideal. But we can’t hang back any longer. This information changes everything. Better to just make the announcement, offer an explanation and apology and stay in control of the narrative. It’s actually better that this is coming out now and not two months before election day. This timing is... I don’t want to say good, but it could be worse. You know what I mean.”
Regretfully, Mary-Beth did. “How are you going to do it?”
“We’re going to release a video, with Dad and Mom, where he makes a very apologetic statement and they hold hands and reaffirm their commitment to each other and Massachusetts...that sort of thing. Spencer’s writing it now. Mom will probably need a little escape after that. She’s a trouper for going along with it.”
Mary-Beth nodded. She understood. This affair was years ago, and John Senior had atoned for it, so she supposed that it was possible for a marriage to recover from things like this. God forbid, of course. But she understood the world these men operated in. She knew Washington by now, and though she hated this sort of moral relativism, she’d grown surprisingly numb to revelations of powerful men and their sexual indiscretions. She was no longer capable of horror at the men nor disappointment in the women who forgave them. Everyone’s home life is an unknowable balance of things sacrificed and permission granted. Marriages are mysteries.
“Brian’s dad had an affair,” Cameron offered.
Lucas nodded. “Liam’s, too, I think. That’s why his mom got the house in the Outer Banks.”
The idea that her children saw it, too—the ubiquity—chilled Mary-Beth.
“That doesn’t make it right,” JJ said.
Cameron dropped his napkin onto his plate. “Got it, Dad. Can we go?”
They paid and left the restaurant, walking out into the scorching summer sun toward their car. As they drove home, Mary-Beth went around and around in her head about how to protect her own family from this contagion. She didn’t think JJ would ever cheat on her; that wasn’t her (primary) concern. But she didn’t like how flip her sons had been in discussing their friends’ parents’ affairs. The crassness of who did what to whom is exactly the sort of thing that she could usually rely on the Bright family to avoid. John and Patty’s world had always been a sanctuary of civility. But now the ugliness was on the inside, infecting them all.
As they drove through the gates at the lake house, Mary-Beth made an announcement to her children. “Hey guys, looks like we’re going to be here for a few more weeks. Let’s find you a summer camp. I think there’s a volleyball one at the park. You need more to do.”
Lucas looked up from his phone. “I don’t even like volleyball.”
Cameron didn’t look up. “We’re too old for camp, Mom.”
“Fine, then maybe you can be camp counselors!” She was shouting suddenly. “You’re doing something for the rest of our time here. No more lying around and looking at your phones. You’re doing something, for godssakes!”
The house was clean and quiet when Mary-Beth and family returned. Spencer was working in the study with his father and Charlie; Farah was nearby with cameras rolling. Patty was clipping herbs in her garden. Chelsea, in a teeny bikini, was floating on a raft on the lake with a magazine in her hand. There was a note from Ian on the counter—he had gone to the library to do some work. Philip was reading under his tree. It was like nothing had happened at all. Mary-Beth didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it.
“You guys have two days to make a plan,” JJ said to his sons. “Mom’s right. Find something to do.”
Lucas and Cameron retrieved the puppy from the couch and took her upstairs to their room.
JJ joined his brothers in the study.
Mary-Beth went outside in search of Patty. Their yard was unbearably hot all of a sudden. The water was so still that you could see reflections of the puffy clouds on its surface. The only movement around them now came from the fat bees in the garden.
When Mary-Beth approached, Patty was bent over chives in an enormous straw hat.
“Hey there.”
Patty stood primly. “Hello, Mary-Beth. What can I do for you?”
She wiped her palms on her shorts. “I was wondering if maybe you wanted to check out that antiques shop in Lenox with me later.”
“Thank you. But no, I have too many things to do today.” Patty plucked her gardening glove off her hand, one finger after another. “Listen, I know what you’re doing, Mary-Beth, and you don’t have to. This doesn’t need to be a tragedy. John and I have worked through our troubles, and we’re just fine now.”
“Of course! I just... I just wanted you to know that if you ever want to talk about anything, I’m here.”
Patty knelt back down and began pulling clovers of wood sorrel from the soil. “Well, thank you. But I highly doubt that day will ever come. Marriages are long and complicated. You forget that I predate the modern ethos of oversharing—a trend with few benefits, as I see it. The world could use more secrets.”
Mary-Beth nodded. This had gone precisely as she should have expected. The only thing to do now was return to the original script. “Well, then, how about I make dinner tonight? Something light in all this heat?”
“That would be great. I have salmon in the freezer if you want to defrost that. Thank you.” She didn’t look up from her weeding.
And that was it. The entirety of their heart-to-heart in the wake of her father-in-law’s affair revelations had unfolded as a brief exchange about salmon.
Mary-Beth wandered away from the garden and toward the water. She had that familiar feeling of floating away that sometimes set in on these long visits with her in-laws. With no house to clean, groceries to purchase or laundry to fold, her day was a formless sprawl. The scaffolding of responsibility that measured time in her real life wasn’t there, and so she wasn’t really there, either. Even Patty’s silent misery refused to become a chore for Mary-Beth.
She looked toward the lake. A cloud passed in front of the sun, putting Chelsea in a pocket of shade on the water’s surface. The curve of her perfect and substantial behind didn’t bother Mary-Beth as it had before. Ever since their impromptu skinny-dipping, a door of understanding had opened between the two women. Their lives were profoundly dissimilar. But at the lake house, they were both just extras.
And anyway, Mary-Beth didn’t want to waste any more time envying the parts of Chelsea’s body that were smooth and pert. Rather, she wanted to emulate her ability to relax and surrender, to just float. There may be no other way to survive the summer.
Philip stirred beneath his tree nearby, and she wandered toward him.
“Hey, Phil. How’s it going?”
He closed his book and looked up at her from the grass where he sat cross-legged. “It’s going okay. Do you want to sit?”
“Thanks.” She slipped out of her sandals and found a soft place nearby.
“So you talked to JJ about my father?”
Mary-Beth nodded. “Yeah. I’m so sorry. This is hard on you guys.”
“It is.” Philip squinted into the sun and thought for a moment. “And surprisingly, it also is not. You know what I mean?”
“I guess. I don’t know. It’s not like I expected this from your dad.”
“No, maybe I didn’t expect this exactly. But something was always amiss.”
“With your dad?”
“With all of us. It’s hard to be disappointed when I’ve always been aware of a... I don’t know, a dissonance among us. Don’t you think so?”
Mary-Beth didn’t think so. For her, the Brights had always been a model of the great American family, the kind of family she wished she’d been born into and hoped to make for herself. They avoided uncomfortable topics and kept things fairly shallow, perhaps, but she figured it felt different if you were a real Bright.
Philip picked up his book and began to open it, then set it in his lap again. “Maybe that’s what I’m doing right now, with the church. Maybe this is a search for closeness.”
“I have to say, Phil, celibacy seems counterproductive to that.”
“Forget that part for a second. I’m talking about family. Maybe I’m looking for a new one, or a closer one. Is that a bad motivation?”
“I don’t think so.” Mary-Beth watched Patty pull weeds at the other end of the yard. Pluck, pluck, pluck. What had she said? The world could use more secrets. “No, I don’t think it’s bad, Philip. Isn’t that what we all do in adulthood? It’s the same reason most of us get married and have children, I suppose. To start anew.”
Neither of them spoke. Because it was true, Mary-Beth thought, that most of us do look for a new family in adulthood. Most, but not Bright men. Bright men branch out, but they don’t start anew. Their mandate had always been about carrying on, not starting over.
“Imagine how devastating this must be for my brothers,” Philip said. “To have to see my father as he really is.”
Mary-Beth didn’t know what to say.
“Of course, they’ve always had the choice to see Dad—and all of us—with clear eyes. They just didn’t choose it.”
Mary-Beth reached out for Philip’s hand and gave a quick squeeze. “You’re a good brother, Phil. I know they don’t say it much, but your brothers love you.”
“I know they do. Thanks.”
They sat for a moment in silence. (Philip was the only person she could do that with, without the nagging urge to make small talk.) Mary-Beth didn’t really know what had happened last night when the brothers went out for drinks; JJ hadn’t told her much. But she knew that something had changed among them. The brothers had woken up that morning as more serious men, less eager to please their father.
“I think I’m going for a swim,” she said finally.
Philip smiled. “Good day for it.”
Mary-Beth stood up and walked away from the oak tree toward the house. She held her sandals in her hand as her feet stepped through the dense grass. Inside, she went past the study filled with buzzing Bright men, up the stairs and past the closed door of the bedroom where her sons were playing with the puppy.
In her own room, Mary-Beth fished around in the drawer that held all her modest, tummy-firming bathing suits in slimming colors. She searched for the floral bikini she’d been bringing with her to the lake house year after year, the one she’d bought in a delusional wave of hopefulness and never once worn.
She put it on and looked in the mirror. Clusters of rosebuds met at the knotted center of her chest, pushing her breasts up into pleasing little hills. Mary-Beth sucked her tummy in and let it fall out again. She pulled the bottoms down beneath the softest part of her stomach and over it again. The skin was loose and puckered, still shocking to acknowledge despite the fact that it had been that way for years. But two humans had grown beneath that skin, and the corporeal price for that marvel seemed smaller and smaller as time passed. It was possible that she no longer had any opinions about her soft stomach at all, only the shadows of past opinions.
Mary-Beth walked back downstairs like that, in nothing more than her never-worn rosebud bikini. She went through the kitchen and out the back door. The day was hot and heavy, but also pleasant for the way it seemed to press down on them, forcing slowness.
She took a floating raft from the grass and carried it to the lake. Chelsea looked up at the sound of splashing and gave a little wave. Mary-Beth smiled and waved back as she climbed aboard her raft.
She let the sun bake her skin as her fingers dragged through the cool water. In its stillness, she could see right to the bottom of the lake.
Everything was becoming clear.