When Brian strode into the living room Friday night, Meg saw he had showered before coming home. Comb marks angled through his thinning dark hair. A lightly starched golf shirt – not the same one he would have worn while playing – was tucked into tailored navy shorts. His waistline swelled over his belt like the top of a muffin. She had never thought him unattractive. His style, though, wasn’t her preference. She liked a more rugged look. Less refined, more adventurous. Brian was so … tidy, she thought. Orderly. Like their home, like their life.
She put aside the stack of blue notebooks, which she’d forgotten in the car until this evening. She’d been trying unsuccessfully to free them from the string, wanting to make sure they weren’t anything important before putting them in a box for Goodwill.
‘Been at the club?’ she asked Brian, to snag his attention. She needed to make an effort more often; in two years, Savannah would be off to college, and then where would they be? Familiar but distant occupants of their six-thousand-square-foot, professionally decorated house. A house with too many unused rooms as it was; how hollow things would be with Savannah away.
Brian stopped and set his gym bag on the polished hardwood floor. ‘Yep,’ he said, perching on the side of an armchair opposite her. ‘Got nine holes in, with those clients from Germany I was telling you about the other day. They’re really bad – don’t know a wedge from an iron – but good-natured about it. We stopped keeping score.’
Meg nodded, empathetic to the German men’s plight; she hardly knew the differences between golf clubs herself. She supposed she should know, golf being Brian’s life outside of work. It just didn’t interest her, and her mind was crowded enough with the things she had to know.
Perhaps he understood this; he never bothered to discuss the particulars of his golf games. Their conversations molded around common interests: the house, Savannah, their families, their careers. A movie, if by long odds they’d seen it together – or separately, if one of them was traveling and caught it on the plane or late at night in a hotel.
Sometimes, now that Savannah was watching many of the same movies, she joined the conversation. If they had all seen the movie and were all in one room or one vehicle at the same time, an occurrence about as rare as conjoined twins.
Manisha Patel, Meg’s partner, assured her that her reality was nothing unusual; Manisha’s family’s worked the same way, which was like that of most other families they knew and was often the subject of talk shows Meg came across late at night, times when she couldn’t sleep. She and Brian and Savannah were planets orbiting a common sun, occasionally swinging into close proximity. Held together by the gravitational pull of a shared address, they had little in common with what had once made the ‘traditional’ family. She felt guilty about this as regularly as she felt defensive about it and figured she’d come to terms with the whole muddy issue just about the time Savannah was grown and gone.
‘You look refreshed,’ Meg said. ‘I’m going to hit the shower in a minute myself. But it feels so good to just sit here.’
Brian smiled in that way he had, slightly condescending and self-affirming. He could put in a full, hectic day and still have the energy to entertain clients and play nine holes of golf, that’s what she imagined him thinking. He was never overtly critical, but still, she felt his judgment, felt the comparison – it was his nature to think that way. She half expected him to give her a Team Hamilton pep talk.
‘Was it a busy day?’ he asked – his attempt to connect, she supposed, given that he knew all her days were busy.
She sighed and put her feet up on the sofa, taking up the space that he might have filled if he’d tried a little harder. If he had wanted to try. If she had wanted him to.
‘Yeah, busy, but also taxing,’ she said. ‘I had a pre-eclamptic mother with back labor who dealt with it by screaming, and then a transverse baby I practically had to climb inside with to get out.’ She rubbed her arm, thinking about that one. ‘And two new high-risk patients this afternoon; you probably know the one’s husband: McKinney? Joseph, I think his name is.’ The surname, when she read it on the chart earlier in the day, had made her think of McKay, of Carson, of how she’d learned a week ago that he was planning a May wedding. To a much younger woman, the news website’s headline announced – ‘Musician McKay Robbing the Cradle for a May Bride?’ – and Meg had elected not to click the link to read the details. Since then, even the weakest prompts called him to mind.
‘Yeah, I know him, Joe McKinney,’ Brian nodded. ‘Partner at Decker McKinney Peterson. He’s pretty good – at golf, I mean – though judging from that little black Ferrari I saw him in, likely at law, too. What’s his wife’s trouble?’
‘She’s forty-three.’
‘Ah. It’s good, though, you getting all these new high-risk patients – obviously you’re building quite a reputation as a specialist. You should raise your rates, take space somewhere a little more … upscale, let’s say.’
‘We like where we are,’ Meg said. She and Manisha chose their office location, a modest brick building downtown, precisely because it wasn’t so upscale that they’d price out women less affluent than the Mrs Joseph McKinneys of the world. Or the Mrs Carson McKays, for that matter, she thought, wondering if pregnancy explained his short-notice announcement. Their wealthy patients came to them because they were good doctors, not because their offices looked like a luxury spa.
‘I just don’t see why you’d choose not to take advantage of an opportunity when it’s practically dropped in your lap,’ Brian said, standing up. ‘You’re savvier than that.’
His criticism, delivered beningly, still stung. ‘What does “savvy” have to do with anything? Just because I don’t feel like I need to earn more money, I’m not “savvy”?’
Brian pushed his hands into his shorts pockets, relaxed and confident in his opinions. ‘Look, ever since I’ve known you, whenever you’ve been faced with an opportunity to better yourself or improve your status, you’ve taken it. I don’t see why you’d stop now.’
He was right, and yet his assessment missed seeing her clearly, as though time had made his memory as farsighted as his eyes. Had he forgotten that her first opportunity was one he’d constructed so carefully that there was no way she could turn him down? Once he’d set the wheel in motion, then yes, she’d tried in every way to better herself. She was practical. There were limits, though, to her ambition. Maybe he didn’t want to believe this about her, or maybe he hadn’t noticed. He loved to tell people what a terrific pair they made, how alike they were in temperament and taste, how accomplished she’d become; he had constructed the reality he wanted in their marriage the same way he’d done for his business.
He had her all wrong.
She was not the woman of his tales, would never be that woman, but was there any value in arguing the point? In part, he didn’t know who she really was because she kept pieces of herself hidden from him. Money couldn’t buy everything.
Before she could frame any sort of response, Brian picked up his gym bag, said, ‘I have to make a couple calls,’ and left the room. She let him go.
He didn’t know, either, that she’d thought of leaving him many times, the way a blond woman might think about coloring her hair black: interested in the possibilities but unwilling to take such a drastic step. What if black hair looked awful? Was black an advantage, or was it just different? If she were the ambitious woman he saw, she would have divorced
