“My station,” I say, and feel a genuine pang of regret that this encounter is coming to an end.
“Well, it was very nice talking with you, Mark.”
“Likewise, Fiona.” I offer my hand and the New Zealander’s equivalent of aloha. “Kia ora.”
She glances at my wedding band, then locks up my eyes with hers. “And what about tonight?”
Flustered, I manage: “Tonight? What about it?”
“We were planning to have a piss-up at Chez Ranieri, but now it looks like it’s moving to the beach. You ought to pop on by.”
“A piss-up?” I stand immobilized as other commuters pour around us to the platform. Pressed up against me, her breath is warm on my cheek, and sweet with the tang of lager. One Night Only — The Nanny’s Ball — Live at Greenwich Point Beach. The thought of me in the midst of a gaggle of out-of-control drunken au pairs? Tempting, but a tad self-destructive. “That’s not in the cards, Fiona. I’ve got a dinner party I’m obligated to attend.”
She rolls her eyes in a deliciously feminine way. “Oh, I’m that will be loads more fun than our ten-kegger.”
“Ten-kegger, huh?”
“Anyway, you change your mind, come by the beach?”
“Yeah. I’ll keep it in mind.” I walk off the train backwards, nearly stumbling into a heap on the platform. They say crack cocaine is instantly addictive. I totally get the concept.
Okay, I know this is sick, but I’m in tell-all mode, so here goes: My BlackBerry has been programmed to tally up the number of days Susan and I have gone without having sex.
It tells me we’re at seventy-eight days and counting.
Wait, there’s more: Just recently, I have discovered that my wife is also surreptitiously keeping track of this ignoble hitless streak. She pencils tick marks into the kitchen calendar, and by her count, we’ve been on the sex wagon for seventy-seven days straight.
I own up to it: The demise of our relationship is mostly my fault. My struggle with Ranieri over the last months has turned me into someone other than the person she wed in sickness and health so many years ago. And her infertility problems have weighed heavily on us for even longer. In our calibrated attempts to conceive, we’ve followed to the letter the clinical manner in which teams of doctors have instructed us to copulate, and have spent the last thirty-six months not so much making love, as conducting laboratory experiments.
It’s taken its toll.
To wit, I’m convinced that Susan no longer loves me. I suspect she is in love with at least one, if not two others in the Greenwich vicinity, and I often lay awake nights going over likely candidates. Is it Adam, the wacky New Age martial arts expert at her yoga center on the Post Road, the kid with bad teeth who teaches her Tae Bo and promises to launch her on a spiritual journey to discover her inner self? Is it Dr. Lauren, the collagen-lipped lesbian physician who wears no undergarments when she prescribes migraine treatments at Norwalk Hospital? It could be both, I suppose, or neither. Maybe we’ve just encountered one of those rough patches that couples therapists are always going on about. One of those things we’re supposed to traverse together, before the next phase of our lifelong partnership.
The appearance of Peter I. Tortola’s name in my check-book register suggests otherwise.
This Friday night, I find my wife in the small childless bedroom designated as the Quiet Room. My wife is strikingly pretty, even as the chiseled angles of her face are softening with time, but just now she’s an unsettling sight in the darkened room. Susan has an ice pack swirled over her forehead and eyes. On the bureau next to the trundle bed, a spent Epi-Pen and bottles of migraine medication are arranged in a neat row. Susan — God help her — is in full-blown aura mode with bursts of colors. With her head tilted back and her arms along the armrests of the recliner, she appears to be clamped in an electric chair.
“Susan, you all right?”
“Migraine,” she murmurs tonelessly.
“Need anything?”
“Solitude.”
Though she can’t see me, I nod in the darkness. I realize how my Friday night will play out, and it ain’t a pretty picture. But I can’t hold myself back.
“Susan?” My tone is the most delicate I can manage.
“Mm?”
“We need to talk about something — but only when you’re up for it.”
“What is it?”
“It can wait.”
“If it can wait, why bring it up? Just tell me, Mark.”
I sigh. “A canceled check came in from Citibank. Made out to Peter Tortola.”
Susan has no immediate response to this.
I push. “We need to talk about your intentions, Susan. I need to know what that check means.”
All is silence. I’m aware of my own labored breathing. Peter I. Tortola? He’s Greenwich’s most obnoxious pit bull, a vulture, a shark, the lowest of snakes — a high-powered divorce attorney who specializes in going after Wall Street husbands, with the tenacity and teeth of a moray eel. His quarter-page ad is a weekly fixture in the otherwise-good-news pages of the Greenwich Time community newspaper. IT HAPPENS TO THE BEST OF US: D-I–V-O-R-C-E.
“Susan, we can talk about this later if—”
“You heartless bastard!” Her voice soars to a blood-chilling volume, and I am transfixed by the fury. “You sadistic son of a bitch. Why would you torture me when I’m in this condition? What’s the matter with you? Get the hell away from me!”
I dutifully comply. There is little doubt, after this exchange, that we will be more than a little unfashionably late to the Honeywells’ dinner party.
Wealth whispers.
For generations past, this was an unspoken code in Greenwich, the humility of old money. After all, darling, living in this town, how shall we say? Res ipsa loquitur. But the relentless tsunami of urban barbarians descending upon the Connecticut Gold Coast with fat Wall Street bonuses has killed off any vestige of subtlety here. Now Greenwich is just another brand name to accumulate.
The McMansions roll past as Susan and I wind our way along treelined Round Hill Road. It’s nearly 8:30 and we have not said a word to each other since our chat in the Quiet Room. I now believe that our conversations are inexorably headed for the same fate as our sex life.
My Aston Martin approaches the Honeywells’ seven-bedroom mansion on Larkspur Lane. Rich Honeywell is yet another Greenwich hedge fund asshole, one of those Wall Street guys with marginal talent and a nine-figure chunk of someone else’s family money behind him. A once-in-a-life-time fluke — a federal deregulation of pension plans — has made him obscenely wealthy in his own right, and kept an endless convoy of Brinks trucks dumping mountains of money on the doorstep of his Steamboat Road office.
Rich’s house is an eat-your-heart-out monument to his new wealth, a dramatic custard-yellow contemporary with Hudson Valley stone veneer set on five acres of what was once a fertile onion farm. And it’s equipped with all the usual accoutrements: four-car garage, tennis court, THX-certified home theater, mahogany wine cellar, and an Olympic-sized pool. There are two backhoes in the front yard, suggesting further expansion is imminent.
The Honeywells’ Belgian-bricked drive is jammed with probably $3 million worth of luxury automobiles, and I wedge my convertible into a space between a Porsche Cayenne and a yellow Hummer with personalized plates: 183 IQ. I turn off the car, and the ensuing silence is deafening. I crave a talk before we go in, a clearing of the air. Perhaps it’s naïve, but I still hope that we can turn this around before we pass the point of no return and head down the path of mutually assured destruction. As a prelude, I clear my throat — and get no further.