Confidential(6)

It was easier to fool Jeanie, in that she was gullible in the kindest sense. She wanted to believe me. But it was harder in that I felt much guiltier misleading her. Nat and I were more after-work cocktail pals, while Jeanie had cried on my shoulder many times during the IVF process that ultimately culminated in her having twins, now almost three years old. If she found it suspicious how little I’d cried over Young, she never said it to me. She’d also never protested about the downgrade in our intimacy, that we had lunch these days rather than dinner, that it was more laughs than heart-to-hearts, but she must have felt it. Michael was so consuming that I didn’t have the bandwidth to miss her like I should have.

“You make my dates look good,” Nat said. She was around my age, early thirties; never married; and had a profile on four different dating apps. Attractive as she was with her long blonde hair and mint-green eyes, it had been hard for her to find men who wanted to get serious. She’d sworn off casual sex. They had to buy the cow. She seemed envious that I didn’t seem to mind giving the milk away for free. If she only knew.

Jeanie was older, in her early forties. She always laughed the hardest at my tales, and while there was nothing condescending in it, I had the impression that it validated the benign and mundane domesticity of her marriage. She was attractive, too. It was a job requirement, as we were all pharmaceutical reps.

“Which restaurant?” Jeanie asked.

She wasn’t trying to catch me in a lie; there was no suspicion in her tone. But it occurred to me that I should have worked out all the details. Before I could even think, it was out: “Zuni Café.”

“Zuni Café?” Jeanie and Nat responded in unison.

“He’s spending two hundred dollars on dinner and then yanking his wank at the table?” Nat said with a touch of incredulity.

“That just made it even weirder,” I answered, though I’d averted my eyes, presumably to sip my champagne. “He ordered the sixty-minute chicken for two . . . Wait, that must have been why he ordered it! I couldn’t walk out when the world’s best roasted chicken was still to come.”

“Speaking of coming,” Jeanie said, and then they were both laughing again, and I thought, Whew, I got away with it.

But I felt this twinge of sadness at the reminder of how distant I’d become from my own friends. I’d been trying to enjoy my double life, I really had, and sometimes I succeeded. Clandestine sex can be hot. Yet at some point, it stopped feeling like our secret and instead, I just became his. Two years was a long time, and lately I’d just been running out the clock.

Only the buzzer had gone off, and he was still stalling. I could share my frustration only with Kate, because she was family, and because she’d never judge. She heard the story of Michael and me the way I wanted her to: like it was a great romance. Nat wouldn’t, and I couldn’t be sure about Jeanie. So Kate it was.

“I can’t believe that in all this time, you haven’t found anyone who deserves a second date,” Jeanie said. “You must have terrible radar. Show me your phone. I need to do your swiping for you.”

“I’m not trying to get serious,” I said. When I finally introduced them to Michael, I’d have to pretend that we just met at a grocery store or somewhere serendipitous, and it was love at first sight. He’d made me change my whole way of thinking. It was true; only the timeline was a fabrication.

“Maybe you’re more hurt about Young than you’ve admitted to yourself,” Jeanie said. “Maybe you could use therapy. You thought your couples therapist was awesome. You could go back to him.”

“I should get his name,” Nat said. “Maybe if I got rid of my baggage, I could finally find someone decent.”

The last thing I wanted was Nat seeing Michael. It would practically be incest. “You don’t want to go all the way to the East Bay for therapy. There are a million good therapists in San Francisco.”

“A million therapists,” Nat corrected. “Not a million good ones. You’ve vetted him for me.”

That was one way to put it. “I’ll reach out and see if he’s taking new clients,” I said. “He’s very in demand.” I swigged the rest of my champagne, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Nat was giving me a strange look.

“Let me see your phone,” she said, and was I imagining it or was her tone ominous?

“Why?” I tried to keep mine light by comparison, helium to her lead.

“Isn’t he in your contacts? I can just call him myself.”

The moment was fraught. We’d entered a standoff. Jeanie must have felt it, because she interceded, her maternal instincts kicking in. “If you go to him,” she told Nat, “then Flora might feel less comfortable going back. And she had him first, right?”

How I loved Jeanie. She could finesse any situation. It’s why she was the best sales rep on the team, even though she was the oldest.

Nat saw Jeanie’s wisdom and nodded slowly. Then she brightened. “I have a great idea! We should both pull up our apps and then Jeanie can do the swiping for both of us. She can show us the error of our ways.”

Jeanie clapped her hands, no longer the truce-brokering mom but instead, a giggly twelve-year-old. “Tin-der! Tin-der! Tin-der!” she chanted. Her impeccable auburn bob was percussive, swaying to and fro.