Class(98)
Like running away in middle age with a hedge-fund billionaire.
Karen never really spoke to Clay again. Nor did he wind up joining HK’s board of directors. Though his LLC did donate another fifty grand at the end of the year. And the two made loaded eye contact across a crowded ballroom during their twenty-fifth college reunion the following June. Karen still found him alluring. But she had no desire to renew their liaison. She couldn’t think what to say to him either. She wondered if he felt the same. Several times throughout the evening, she saw him looking over at her table. Though it was hard to tell if he was looking at Karen or checking out Lydia Glenn, his long-lost crush/red herring (it was never clear which). In any case, Karen had a great time catching up with her old roommate, who—it turned out—was about to direct her first off-Broadway play.
Karen had come to the reunion unaccompanied. But Clay was with his wife, Verdun. There was also a small crowd of people waiting to talk to him at all moments throughout the evening. Even if Karen had hoped to have a private chat, it was unlikely there would have been an opportunity for one. Apparently, all of Karen’s former classmates wanted to be near the Class of ’91’s most successful graduate. In fact, Clay had recently promised to endow his alma mater with a new student center. Karen had read about it in her monthly alumni magazine.
A week after the reunion, Karen had a similarly wordless if far more uncomfortable encounter with her erstwhile Mather friend Liz Chang. By coincidence, they were both in the fruit aisle of Whole Foods, examining organic white peaches—Liz with her adorable toddler in the front seat of her shopping cart, Karen alone. Liz shot Karen a quizzical look and opened her mouth, apparently about to speak. Panicking, Karen fled down the aisle and disappeared into the next one, her heart in her throat.
Karen knew she was lucky not to have been prosecuted for siphoning off PTA funds, and if Regina was to be believed, some of the credit was due to Liz. But ever since a neighborhood mommy blog had published an anonymous account, four months after the fact, of a certain “wannabe Mather Mommy/impostor/swine” who had “lied about where her trough was” and then “helped herself to the PTA teat to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars,” Karen’s embarrassment over the circumstances surrounding Ruby’s departure from the school had only grown. The final indignity: the article quoted one Mather parent, identified simply as Laura, as saying that it was “past time the school investigate families who don’t belong there and who are ruining it for everyone else.” That line in particular had made Karen’s entire body smart and suffer. What’s more, according to the article, on account of both the overcrowding issue and the embezzlement scandal, Mather administrators had recently introduced “far more stringent address-verifying measures” and were now considering “door-to-door checks for the incoming kindergarten class.” Little wonder that Karen lived in terror of running into anyone from that tumultuous two-month period of her life—anyone except for Ruby and, more recently, Matt.
In the first month or two after her affair with Clay came to light, Karen had felt ambivalent about her marriage. She was tired of saying she was sorry, tired of being on the receiving end of Matt’s hostile and contemptuous gaze. And when Matt moved out of their condo and into his friend Rick’s spare room—at the time, it had seemed, for good—a part of her had felt relieved. She hadn’t missed coming home from work to find dirty socks and empty coffee cups scattered around the house. She didn’t miss Matt passing judgment on her career either.
But over time, she came to miss even the ubiquitous sound of the game, whichever one he happened to be watching. The apartment felt empty without him. Ruby seemed so forlorn about his departure. And Karen felt so helpless in the face of her daughter’s melancholy. If only for Ruby’s sake, Karen wanted them to be a happy family again—or at least happy enough, the way they’d once been. Karen also found she missed having someone to talk to about her day and discuss Ruby with and also complain about her friends and job to. She even found herself pining for Matt’s bad puns. And divorce loomed in the back of her mind as, above all, a financial disaster. Plus, the thought of dating again filled her with dread.
Karen reached out to Matt and suggested couples counseling as a precondition to any separation agreement. At first, he refused to go, claiming to find the very concept onerously “middle class,” as he put it, in its treatment of relationships as skills that, like tennis or cooking, could be improved. But eventually she talked him into a few sessions. It was there—on the beige, wool-bouclé sofa of a certain Dr. Krantz—that he’d confessed to a platonic flirtation he’d been carrying on with a college intern named Kiley who’d been hired to help with Poor-coran. This, it turned out, partly explained his long workdays the year before. Though as he was fond of pointing out, unlike Karen, he hadn’t acted on the attraction. Nonetheless, Karen had been disappointed to hear that, in the end, her tirelessly upstanding, ethical-to-a-fault husband was just another middle-aged cliché. But, really, what right did she have to object? At least everything was out in the open now—or at least, almost everything.
Karen still hadn’t told Matt how relieved she’d been to see a telltale dumpster outside Miguel’s apartment a few months before.
But she’d told Matt that she wished he’d come back—it was true, more or less—and he’d finally admitted that he missed her too. Slowly, he began to transfer himself and then his possessions back to Macaroni-Land. And now Karen and Matt were officially trying to make it work again. With the encouragement of Dr. Krantz, they’d also decided to take a proper family vacation for the first time in five years. Karen had found a package deal on the Internet to a boutique resort on a relatively undeveloped part of the Dominican Republic. The only question was how to pay for it. Their savings had taken a serious hit after Karen repaid the Mather PTA, and the one-way tickets back from Mustique hadn’t helped. Their checking account was lower than ever. And the cost of therapy was only adding to the problem. Karen had only 50 percent reimbursement after a high deductible.