The boys were both sleeping in the back seat, and if she closed her eyes, Mary-Beth could almost believe that she was ten years in the past, ferrying twin kindergartners to see their grandparents in the country. They had a smaller car in those days, and there was hardly room enough for the dog between them in the back seat. The Subaru had almost two hundred thousand miles on it by the time they finally traded it in. Barry (the dog) died a few days after that. It’s possible Mary-Beth and JJ hadn’t worn anything out to its natural end since then. The Subaru and Barry were their last old things.
The boys were bigger now. So, too, were the cars, the house, the needs and wants, and the can’t-live-withouts.
It was almost exactly ten years ago that JJ left the environmental nonprofit he’d been working for to join a lobbying firm. He became a director within a year, and then a managing partner a few years after that. The trajectory of their finances changed so abruptly that they never had time to think about who they wanted to be in their well-funded life.
They moved from DC out to the suburbs after JJ’s job change, to a big house in Bethesda. Then, of course, they needed all the stuff to furnish the big house. After that came the second car, the pool, the marble countertops and radiant heating. Somewhere along the way, they became people with real art hanging on their walls—not decorative impostors of art, but works with actual value. By then, of course, it didn’t seem incredible to Mary-Beth, but rather overdue. And she didn’t care about art, either way.
JJ raked a hand through his hair as he steered the SUV off the main road, toward the first of several quaint New England villages they would drive through on their way to the lake house. He was missing his regular haircut with Julio that day, and his hair looked shaggy. Mary-Beth considered scolding him for not rescheduling and getting an early cut—on account of the cameras—but she said nothing.
JJ’s haircuts cost $140, which was still only a third of what she spent at the salon these days. She had forgotten to be appalled by it all. Ten years ago, when the boys were such a handful and every day a battle of wits, Mary-Beth didn’t know people could spend so much money at a salon. She was blissfully ignorant of the multitude of treatments that fashionable Washington wives were expected to undergo in the interest of holding back time. There were so many things she hadn’t known about in those days.
They drove slowly through a picture-perfect downtown, and JJ pointed at a cluster of families waiting in line outside a shop. “Good to see the gelato place is still there.”
Mary-Beth smiled at her husband and he smiled back.
He should have gotten the haircut. God knows what kind of cut you’d get out here in the country. Once she knew what a $140 men’s haircut looked like, she was pretty sure she could spot a cheap one. Not certain, but fairly sure. So much of their life together now was dictated by the demands of this lifestyle. They couldn’t imagine living any other way, but they had lived another way, once. It was possible.
When Mary-Beth and JJ first started acquiring all the stuff, it wasn’t about the stuff at all. The stuff was a proxy for their unbridled optimism for a future together. Buying a mattress, then an espresso machine and eventually a six-hundred-square-foot condo in DC’s Columbia Heights. The condo overlooked a parking lot where homeless men congregated, and it was the most extravagant thing she had ever owned. It was wonderful. The condo and its furnishings were just projects into which Mary-Beth and JJ could pour all their excitement about their life together. And every new trip to Target was actually another proposal, a rededication of their love and hope. It was a sacrament, for a while.
Eventually, though, the sacramental vibes faded and the trips to Target together became solo trips to high-end stores. The condo became a house, and the futon became upholstered living room sets. They became trips of necessity, to fill in all the holes of their enormous life and demanding lifestyle.
And after a while, those gilded shopping trips become simply habit, a sort of occupation for Mary-Beth as the children grew older and needed less of her time. They produced neither pleasure nor sadness, just busy filler. JJ had no relationship to those trips anymore.
But at the start, it really wasn’t about the stuff.
“I hope you take this time to relax,” Mary-Beth said to JJ.
He flashed a small smile at her, then turned back to the road. “I hope you relax.”
“You both need to chill out,” Lucas said from the back seat, ever listening.
And then all four of them laughed, at exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time. A person could live forever on that feeling.
Mary-Beth and JJ were still very much in love, but they were somewhat estranged from each other now. It was as if they were standing at opposite ends of a deep hole, still seeing each other, still wanting each other. But now they had to shout to be heard over all the complications of their life, and sometimes it felt like too much work to communicate across the distance.
The stuff hadn’t done this to them, though Mary-Beth sometimes wished it had. A better person would have recognized the folly of her greed and the toll it would take on a pure life. But that’s not how Mary-Beth felt about the stuff. It wasn’t responsible for their estrangement. No, it was their anxiety about the possibility of losing all the stuff that was driving them apart. Insecurity about the precariousness of this lifestyle was keeping them from happiness and corrupting their marriage.
Did that mean the stuff was intrinsically evil? No, Mary-Beth would argue, if asked by her guilty conscience. Things are just things, and four-hundred-dollar trips to the salon are just that. Good people can have beautiful lives. They can wear designer pajamas, and bathe in Japanese soaking tubs, and still be moral humans. She was sure that hers was not an existential problem, but an easy, shallow, fixable one. If only she—they—could be assured that this lifestyle would always be there for them, then they could relax and come together. Their marriage wouldn’t feel so fraught without the weight of their new worries.
JJ scratched his head again through thick hair, fingernails scraping audibly against his scalp. JJ’s quiet anxiety was her own, though hers was even quieter.
Mary-Beth said a silent prayer for this trip: Please let this documentary be the thing JJ needs. Please let this trip be the thing.
JJ needed a boost. The lobbying firm that employed him had recently merged with another, and they were looking for redundancies, deadweight to cut across the company. Suddenly, everyone needed a new edge—especially the expensive people. JJ hadn’t delivered any wins in a while, no legislative victories or measurable evidence of his political influence in months. There were discussions of buyouts for other managing directors, fat severances for people who left without making a stink. It was the kind of money JJ couldn’t have dreamed of ten years ago, but now it would be barely enough for them to live on for six months. Most of all, JJ didn’t want to get laid off in such a mealymouthed fashion. He didn’t want to audition for new roles around town, knowing that everyone would know why he left. JJ needed to find his edge, reassert his juice and keep this lobbying job.
The documentary, Mary-Beth had suggested, might offer an opportunity to raise his profile a little and remind the world that he’s political royalty. She imagined there’d be a Washington screening for it one day, and a round of press coverage. Something like this could give him a bump in name recognition and really secure his place in the ranks of Washington movers and shakers. She had seen this sort of thing happen to their friends. When their neighbor, a hack political strategist, appeared on an HBO series about the last presidential election, he landed a column in the Washington Post soon after. And then there was the time JJ’s colleague—a subordinate!—was spotted by a gossip columnist at a Clinton fund-raiser and got promoted just days later. It was all a bit of a shell game, but you had to play it to win. And the thing about Washington is that the illusion of power and influence is the same thing as power and influence. JJ could at least create the illusion. Mary-Beth hated to be so crass about it all, but that was the truth of it.
Confidence was everything in this work, and JJ suffered from a secret lack of confidence that only Mary-Beth could see. They both knew—though they had never explicitly acknowledged it—that much of his professional success could be attributed to his last name as the son of a US senator. Because of this, JJ had never quite developed the confidence to match the job titles. He had ascended the ranks too fast to feel deserving of them. It wasn’t a sad story, Mary-Beth knew, but it was the situation they were faced with.
Please, please let this trip be the thing, she prayed again.