Dolci di Love

Daniel’s other woman and two bright-eyed beautiful children were sitting under the insole of his left golf shoe when Lily first found them. They were laminated.

Despite the shock of finding the photo and the immediate awful certainty deep in her bones that these children were indeed her husband’s, this most practical of details struck her. They were laminated, which made a point all by itself.

The layers of Lily’s life-as-she-knew-it might be flying off into the ether, helplessly transparent, never to be seen together again, but the layers of this other life she knew nothing about were fixed sturdily right there in her hand, bonded for eternity.

Lamination was forever, after all. That was what it was for. You didn’t laminate things that didn’t matter or that you weren’t sure about; things like your Fairway shopping list or the Italian heels clipped out of the latest Vogue.

You only laminated absolute necessities, sureties; things that you needed to last longer than they were meant to when they were printed on paper that could be spattered by ketchup or yellowed by the sun.

The surprise woman and two children were accordingly announced to Lily as a trio in need of top-level maintenance. So important were they to Daniel, her husband, that he wanted to protect them forever against all the foot rot, shoe sweat, and whatever other peril the Manhattan Woods Golf Club held for them. So important were they that he wanted to keep them close to him for time immemorial, or however long plastic lasted, which Lily happened to know was about five hundred years. Long after Daniel was dead and buried, after she was, after everyone in the photo was, after the golf shoe—save, perhaps, the two brown aglets from the tips of the laces—had decomposed, this snapshot of a happy “family” would remain.

Daniel’s foot fungus of the year before, Lily thought, as she put the shoe back in its place. Was this picture-perfect threesome responsible for that? Could they have created extra moisture under his sole? Produced a perfect breeding ground for rogue spores after eighteen holes in the Hudson Valley? He’d spent a fortune at the podiatrist; she knew, because she paid the bills.

She straightened both the golf shoes on their shelf, although she didn’t know why. Surely there was something else she should be doing. Her life had just been turned upside down. She should have thought to laminate that, to preserve that forever just the way she liked it.

The annoying thing was, if she’d known she had to, she would have. Lily was by nature a laminator. She was famous for dotting i’s and crossing t’s, but a person had to know that an i needed dotting or a t crossing in the first place. If they were sitting there looking to all intents and purposes already dotted and crossed then there were usually a million other things to be getting on with in the meantime.

Was it so he could take the little family out of his sports bag when he drove to the club with Jordie and Dave, gazing at those beautiful childish faces in the back of Jordie’s SUV while up front they talked about real estate and the Knicks?

That didn’t seem private enough, somehow. Unless Jordie and Dave knew about it, which she doubted because Jordie actually only talked about real estate and the Knicks and Dave didn’t talk at all. She couldn’t see the three of them analyzing the perils of a bent tee, let alone infidelity.

She looked around her husband’s closet. The rest of his shoes were neatly laid side by side across three shelves: all black and nearly identical. Why, he had the most boring taste in shoes of any man alive. How could she never have noticed that before?

Obviously, he couldn’t hide anything in any of these lookalike shoes because he would waste too much time trying to find it. He had a pair of gray running shoes, but she supposed they would be too sweaty to house the little plastic family (the resulting foot fungus would likely kill him), and his one pair of loafers—she picked them up and had a close look—had a glued-on insole.

The brown and white golf shoes with their flirty leather fringe were really the obvious choice, she reasoned. He could slip into his closet and easily snatch a few private moments to gaze at his secret photo. Also, Lily did not play golf. She’d tried it years before but considered it a waste of time. She could burn calories more efficiently a dozen other ways so had left Daniel to his golfing years before. He knew she would never have anything to do with those shoes.

In fact, normally she wouldn’t have anything to do with his closet. She had one of her own on the other side of the wall from where his suits hung three inches apart from each other. Her closet was the same size, but there was no space between her clothes, and her shoes were all completely different plus, as far as she knew, held no secrets, apart from the cost of one particular pair about which she lied for no reason other than it seemed ridiculous to pay that much.

It was Pearl, her assistant at Heigelmann’s, who was to blame for her being in there. It was Daniel’s birthday Saturday and Lily had been going to get him a polo shirt, a good one, but had been surprised at the response from Pearl when asked to organize this.

“Oh, really? And why is that?” she asked, curious because Daniel suited both those colors. Green brought out his eyes and blue the shots of silver that were further claiming his thick blond hair. He was a handsome man and only improving with age but seemed not to notice this himself. She loved that about him. That and his kindness. His smile. His no-fuss way of handling things. No fuss? She had that right.

“Because you gave him a blue shirt for his last birthday and a green one at Christmas,” Pearl informed her, with one of her special disapproving head waggles. She was really a very good assistant but at times like this Lily wanted to pull on one of her shiny black ringlets. Lily could remember how many product units were transported in any given week from Virginia to Vermont and how much it cost, down to the penny, so why couldn’t she remember what gifts she’d given her husband?

“Oh, well, Daniel doesn’t really wear ties,” Lily said although of course he did and what’s more Pearl had probably seen him in one at least a dozen times. “Not that much,” she added limply. “Anymore, that is.” Pearl pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows so high it was a miracle they didn’t shoot right off of her head.

“Actually, you know what?” Lily pressed a finger to her lips, feigning a sudden inspiration. “I’ve just had another idea. Thanks, Pearl, but I think I’ll take care of this myself.”

She racked her brains for the rest of the day trying to come up with an alternative gift, finally remembering that Daniel had complained in recent weeks, in as much as he ever really complained, that the sprigs on his golf shoes were loose, or old, or tired, or something.

She hadn’t paid much attention when he mentioned it but in light of the shirt situation, she decided she would break the tradition she’d unwittingly embraced and would replace his golf shoes instead. She just couldn’t remember what size he took.

Should she have known? she wondered, again looking around his closet. Would a wife who remembered previous gifts and knew her husband’s shoe size be less likely to find a laminated photo of a beautiful woman and two children hidden under his insole?

It was searching for his size that had brought her into his closet. She’d picked up the shoe, turned it upside down, and dislodged his secret spotless-forever family. If she’d known his shoe size, or even reached for the other shoe, the spotless-forever family would have remained a secret.

Looking down at the laminated picture she was still clutching, Lily felt the need to sit. Were she prone to explosive displays of emotion she would be indulging in one right now, she knew that, but she was not. Her emotions—a neat, controlled collection as a rule—seemed bewildered, with her body not far behind. Her legs were trembling, she realized. That was why she needed to sit. This was a normal reflex. This was good.

She stared at the woman in the picture, running her thumb along the sharp edge of the hard plastic. She wasn’t exactly pretty, the woman, not in the all-American way that Lily was, but she had that wild, defiant sort of beauty that “other” women often seemed to possess; not dangerous exactly, but close. Her lips were thin, her cheekbones sharp, her dark unruly hair was being blown across her face in the wind, and she was smiling, sort of, at the photographer, who was no doubt Daniel, Lily’s husband, to whom Lily had been married for sixteen years and who formed one half of the perfect couple everyone said they were.

Another choked gargle escaped her as she ran her fingers over the little girl. She had her mother’s hair, long and dark, and that same defiant wildness, but she had Daniel’s eyes, his dimpled chin. She stood slightly in front of her mother, not touching her, and looked boldly at the camera as if challenging Daniel to even take the photo.

The baby was the happiest of them all, his face turned toward his mamma as he laughed at what the wind was doing to her hair. He was wearing a T-shirt and something stripy on his bottom half, which didn’t really match. Lily had drawers full of clothes that this baby would look better in. One sausage arm was raised in the air as his fat round hand with its tiny plump fingers snatched at a glossy black tendril the wind was whisking just out of his reach. He looked exactly like Daniel did in all his baby photos. Exactly.

She should be crying, she knew that. Howling even. But crying seemed too insignificant a response, howling an insult. Tears and moans were for everyday heartbreak. This was something else. Again, she felt it, in the quiver in her arm, in the light bead of sweat on her forehead: bewilderment.

Lily had built a career on not being bewildered. Indeed, she was famous for her certainty. It had got her as far as being VP of a Fortune 500 company—one of the country’s biggest—this unwavering natural instinct. It had brought her wealth and success. It had become her most prized possession and she trusted it.

Yet right now as she confronted what was undoubtedly the biggest crisis of her personal life, her ability to know what to do lay huddled in a distant cave, licking its wounds, shunning the light, leaving her all on her own.

The thing was that Lily considered her marriage to Daniel, indeed Daniel himself now she came to think about it, as the pin in the grenade of her life: not the most exciting feature, perhaps, but pull it out and everything would explode. The bits would fly as far as the sun and she would never reclaim them.

So what if she focused more on her job these days than on her husband—what woman in her situation wouldn’t? She could hardly take a few years off to stare at an empty crib. Married women without children had no choice but to concentrate on their careers and it happened almost naturally that they climbed the ladder more quickly. It was no problem for Lily to stay later in the office, after all, because she had no blond-haired boy to pick up from nursery school, no green-eyed girl’s ballet performance to dash off to.

And at forty-four there was never going to be a blond-haired boy or a green-eyed girl for Lily. She knew that, she had been through all that; she had accepted it years ago.

Absentmindedly, she turned the picture over and to her further shock there was half a photo of Daniel and the woman and baby on the other side. Well, there was a whole photo but only half of Daniel was in it. The little girl must have taken the picture and it was on a crazy angle, with just the bottom parts of the two adults and one fat striped leg of the baby.

Daniel was wearing the Prada belt Lily had given him for an earlier birthday. (Always polo shirts indeed!) His thirty-fifth, maybe? She’d bought it herself, at Bergdorf Goodman, after a particularly promising OB-GYN appointment. She remembered wafting through the store feeling as if she were floating on a river of champagne. This time, she’d almost sung to herself, this time. The belt had cost her nearly $300, but she wouldn’t have cared if it was $3,000. And in the end, there was no this time.

Daniel’s arms were not in the picture so she couldn’t tell if they were around the woman, but their hips were touching, hers slightly in front. Take away the fact that the children looked so much like Daniel, could these be the hips of two mere acquaintances? Lily looked closer, the whole photo was only the size of a playing card and the hips were all in one triangular half. Still, the woman appeared to be pressing into her husband’s groin. She was quite curvy, or hippy, really, if you were going to be critical. She would have trouble finding jeans to fit properly, which was maybe why she went for the wraparound dress—a paisley pattern the green of Daniel’s eyes—that showed off her impressive cleavage and small waist, but made less of her bottom half.

In the triangular part of the photo that didn’t contain her husband and the woman and baby, a soft light was setting on distant golden hills dotted with pencil-like pine trees. Straight rows of cascading greenery, grapes no doubt, ran in stripes toward the plump weathered dome of a honey-colored church with a bell tower tucked in behind it.

She thought she knew where the photo had been taken. And knowing that made her even more certain that there was no mistake, that her life as she knew it was over.

Daniel was mad about Italy, always had been. When they’d first met, he’d told her about the elderly Italian neighbors who had adopted him as an honorary grandson when he was just a little boy and added him to their rough-and-tumble extended family. An only child whose own home life was far from a barrel of laughs, these neighbors—oh, why could she not think of their names?—had provided him with some sort of happy refuge when he most needed it.

Daniel had wanted to go to Italy for their honeymoon, even, but Lily felt it was too far and too hard after the exhausting exercise of organizing a wedding.

When Lily had woken the first morning there, her new husband’s warm body pressed against her, snoring politely, the stress of the nuptials over and done with, she had experienced her first ever wave of complete and utter happiness.

Even sitting there, staring at the photo of Daniel’s love children all these years later, she could recall it as though it were yesterday. The sensation had overwhelmed her, brought gooseflesh to her skin, tears to her eyes, a contentment to her heart that she had not even dreamed was possible.

She remembered lying there, naked, as the rain danced on the roof above her, watching Daniel sleep and reveling in the promise of their wonderful future together.

They’d been so in love then, so happy. She had thought they still were. Compared with many of their divorced or miserably still-married friends, Lily and Daniel were paragons of good old-fashioned stability despite the unspoken heartbreak that blossomed between them. Daniel never treated her with anything other than respect and devotion. He was kind, considerate, loving. And she was too. Or so she thought. Their commitment to each other was often remarked upon and, so she had been told, envied. She was proud of their marriage, of him, of herself.

She stood up, still clutching the photo, and walked to their bedroom window, gazing out at the view. If she leaned against the right hand pane, she could see down West Seventy-second Street to Central Park. The trees this morning were shimmering in the gentle summer breeze. Normally she loved those trees. She loved the park. She loved her apartment, her life.

She wondered how long it had been since she had actually considered whether she was truly still in love with Daniel. After sixteen years of marriage it just wasn’t something she thought about that often. There were so many other things to think about. She had a full schedule and an all-consuming job. Who had time to sit around and ponder the state of their marriage, especially when it showed all the vital signs of being perfectly secure?

She had tolerated, if not entirely shared, Daniel’s passion for Italy, especially the food and wine, and supported him wholeheartedly when he worked out a way to manipulate his amateur enthusiasm into something resembling a career, chiseling out a niche for himself as a buyer of Italian wines, importing ballsy brunellos and rich vino nobiles for sommeliers to dispense at Manhattan’s favorite eating and drinking haunts.

And she was busy at Heigelmann’s so it had never worried her that he spent one week out of every four in Tuscany. He had done it for the past ten years. He was there right now, quite possibly in the company of this exotic looking creature and her children.

She felt a physical ache in her chest that she assumed was her heart in the process of breaking, but the surprising thing was the ache didn’t feel entirely new. In fact, it felt all too familiar. Perhaps a person could only take so much hurt and disappointment. Perhaps a person reached a point where anything else, anything worse, would just ricochet off without leaving a dent.

All these years she had tortured her body, her mind, and that poor aching heart—not to mention her bank account—trying for a baby. And failing. She wasn’t used to failure, she struggled to deal with it, but what had kept her going through the dark days had been her obvious success at work and her quiet assumption at home that Daniel loved her no matter what, that it was she who mattered most to him, not these wisps of the future that she couldn’t manage to conjure into being.

She slipped the photo into the pocket of her silk robe, walked down the hallway into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator door. A bottle of crisp white pinot grigio stood there boldly, unopened. She’d been trying to cut down; wine played havoc with her waistline now her thirties had marched into history, and in the past few years she’d gotten in the habit of drinking alone in the weeks when Daniel was away.

She had never smoked, didn’t care for recreational drugs, and had long resisted the lure of chocolate. The odd glass of wine, she supposed, had become her chosen vice. And somewhere along the line one glass in the evening after work had perhaps turned into two, then three until some nights she had been getting through a bottle.

She loved the warm, floaty cushion of well-being that each mouthful brought with it, but did not appreciate the puffy eyes and dull head the next morning. And the calories!