That was nearly three years earlier, and while he had just a handful of bylined stories, things were looking up in terms of the number of assignments he received.
But as he’d gotten increasingly engrossed in his writing, my husband had become markedly less involved in our household. I had waited so long for him to find something to replace what would have been his medical career that I didn’t want to dissuade him from sticking to his Official Career Plan—even if I wished I, too, could stay home to write all day. I didn’t want a sink full of dishes to be the reason he didn’t land a feature in, say, the New York Times .
I loved Sanjay. I felt fortunate to have a husband who was happy to be home with his wife and kids. And maybe that’s why, while I was happy to complain and yes, occasionally nitpick, I never said the truth outright, even to Jenny: Sometimes I deeply resented him. Sometimes I wondered if I had it in me to maintain our status quo for even one more year, say nothing of a lifetime.
But even more than I wanted my husband to chip in, both financially and around the house, I wanted a peaceful home for my family. (And let’s face it—for myself.) So instead of yelling, I rolled up my sleeves and finished the pots and pans and then ran to the market to buy eggs and milk. I kept my lips zipped about just how heavily life had been weighing on me lately.
I had told Jenny almost everything. But maybe if I had skipped the almost part of that statement and said, “My marriage is drowning me,” she would have opened up fully and completely to me, too.
Then maybe I could have saved her.
A few minutes later, the rhythm of Sanjay’s breathing slowed and his leg began to twitch.
I stared at our lumpy ceiling, half wishing to be crushed by falling plaster. Sometime later I was still alive and awake, so I got out of bed, went downstairs, and poured myself another glass of wine.
Then I sat on the counter in my bra and underwear, drinking in the dark and thinking about the last time I had seen Jenny.
It had been a Sunday afternoon, just four days earlier, and I was there to pick Miles up from his playdate with Cecily. I had knocked, and Jenny, as usual, had hollered for me to come in.
I found her in the kitchen, dropping raw chicken thighs into a large ceramic glazed pot. Like the rest of her kitchen, the pot was white.
“Sorry. I’m a disaster,” she said, looking over her shoulder from the stove.
I laughed. “You look great.”
“I don’t. But can you do me the biggest favor?”
“Anything.”
“My phone is next to the bread bin. Will you grab it and get a few shots of me? I’m attempting a chicken and shallots dish that I want to run as a feature. But as Tiana reminded me this morning, she doesn’t do Sundays,” she said, referring to her assistant, who had a minor in photography and usually played paparazzi while Jenny went about the parts of her life that she chronicled on her website.
“Easy,” I said. Jenny was more cute than beautiful—she had glossy brown hair that she had recently cut just so at her shoulders, and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose that made you look right at her bright-brown eyes—and if anything, this made her especially photogenic. (Approachable was the term people often used to describe her particular brand of pretty.) Though I was no photography wiz, she had taught me enough about composition that I knew one of the images I snapped would work.
“You’re the best,” she said. “Don’t zoom in on my face. Do we need to move anything?”
The kitchen island was a mess: shallot skins discarded at random, a splatter of tomato paste not yet wiped from the marble, sprigs of an herb I couldn’t identify strewn about. It was unlike Jenny to leave even a few grains of salt in her wake, but I didn’t think anything of it then. No one could be perfect all the time, and anyway, the other counters were pristine.
“We’re good,” I said as I unlocked her phone by pressing the number seven until the screen changed. I opened the camera and directed it at the pot; Jenny had taught me that pictures looked more authentic when the person being photographed was slightly off to one side. On Jenny’s site, only Cecily was allowed to serve as the visual center of photos because Jenny took those herself, and as she said, what mother would fail to home in on her own child?
“Smile with your eyes,” I said, and then she laughed because that was what she always said when she took pictures of me. I pressed the photo button again and again, moving from one end of the kitchen island to the other in an attempt to capture a deliberate moment in a whimsical and unscripted way.
“There’s a nice Sancerre in the fridge if you want some,” she said when I was done. She had left the stove and was washing her hands in the sink. “The recipe called for some white. I would hate to waste the rest of a decent bottle.”
“Like I can say no to that.” Sanjay had taken Stevie out grocery shopping. I still needed to get the kids ready for their first week of camp, check our bank account balance, go through my inbox, and get a head start on a memo for a midday meeting the following day. But it had been a while since I’d had a glass of good wine, and I wasn’t ready to deal with the fit Miles would probably throw when I tried to pull him away from Cecily and her Legos.
The scent of a meadow wafted up at me as I poured the straw-colored wine into a glass. “Mmm,” I said as I took a sip. “This is nice. Thank you.”
Jenny pulled a wooden spoon from a drawer and began pushing the chicken around in its sauce. “My pleasure.”
“What’s Matt up to?”
“Oh,” she said, peering into the pot. She sniffed at the chicken and then said, “He’s home this week.”
“That’s good.”
She put a lid on the pot. “Did I tell you Sonia asked me to sit on the board of the Children’s Literacy Society?”
“No. Huh.” Sonia had recently come into money—so much money that even Jenny’s eyes grew wide when we discussed it, and she had been raised to want for nothing. Sonia’s grandfather had accumulated a great fortune, and she and her brother were his only surviving heirs. Sonia claimed the inheritance wouldn’t change anything, but she had quietly stopped working and joined a tennis league as well as the boards of what seemed to be every other charity in town. I hadn’t seen much of her lately. “Will you do it?” I asked Jenny.
“It’s important work.”
“Kids do need to read,” I quipped, though Stevie’s struggles had been anything but funny.
Jenny had begun cleaning off the island. “They have a really lovely signature event in the fall—Matt and I attended a few years ago. So that would be nice. But Sonia warned that it’s a major time commitment. I need to find out how much time exactly.”
“Are there ways to get involved that don’t involve sitting on the board?” I asked, as much for myself as for Jenny. Dipping a toe into children’s literature—in some capacity, even if I couldn’t find the energy to actually write out my ideas—had been one of my New Year’s resolutions. The year was closing in fast and I had not taken a single step toward my goal. But maybe volunteering would be a good way to make progress, and reconnect with Sonia in the process.
“I’m going to look into that.” She stopped wiping the counter, cocked her head, and looked at me. “Why, you want to join me?”
“Maybe,” I said.
She went back to sponging the marble. “You’re so lucky, you know.”
I was sitting on a barstool that I happened to know cost more than every single item I was wearing as well as the purse I had left on a hook in the foyer, and sipping fine wine out of an expensive glass that was part of a set that one of Jenny’s sponsors had sent her as a thank-you for allowing them to advertise on her website. (That the company thanked her for letting them pay her still boggled my mind.) “And how’s that?”
She tossed the crumbs in her hand into the garbage and put the sponge in the dishwasher. “Never mind.”
“No, spill it,” I pressed. “I could use a refresher on the perks of being Penelope.”
“Well . . .” She scrunched up her nose for a split second. “It’s just nice that if you want to volunteer, Sanjay will support you.” She quickly added, “Not that I’m at all trying to minimize your issues.”
One of these issues was that while Sanjay would support the idea of me volunteering, when I got home from having done so, the kids’ lunches would not be made, and though I had asked him to pay the water bill, I would sort through the mail that had been left in the mailbox and find a notice informing us that our repeat delinquency would cost an additional twenty-five dollars—and that was provided we sent payment within the next two business days.
There was a reason that instead of daydreaming about my husband taking me passionately against a wall, I fantasized about replacing him with a wife.
I looked at Jenny, and over at the pot, which had the kitchen smelling like a French bistro, and then back at her. Matt was nothing if not supportive. Jenny said he was overly tied to the idea of coming home to a clean house and a hot meal—but I could barely fault him. After a long day at the office, I yearned for the same things, though I would have made do with someone (it didn’t necessarily have to be Sanjay) greeting me at the door with a just-shaken martini.