The Perfect Wife(32)

Then one day Megan Meyer turned up in her convertible Jaguar, closely followed by a couple of employees in a white van. From the back of the van they—the employees, anyway—unloaded a rack of clothes. Men’s clothes, we noticed as they wheeled it behind Megan’s elegant kitten heels to Tim’s office: sports jackets, merino knitwear, tan slacks.

So we gathered that Tim was having a style consult. That was something Megan regularly did for her clients. It wasn’t just about finding them dates: In Silicon Valley, where some of the wealthiest individuals were also the most socially dysfunctional, it was about teaching them how to date.

Later, after Megan had gone, Tim came out of his office. He was wearing a navy-blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt, chinos, and brogues. No one said anything, of course. But for those of us who’d never seen him in anything except black jeans, a gray T-shirt, and a white baseball cap, the effect was strange; almost startling.

We noted that by the end of the day, he’d put the baseball cap back on.

The following morning, he came into work wearing black jeans and a gray T-shirt again. We breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Mike, ever loyal, told us the style consult had been because Tim wanted to smarten himself up for an important meet-and-greet with some potential investors. Nobody really bought that, of course. But out of respect for Mike, we pretended we did.

That day Tim left the office at five o’clock. No one knew where he was. He’d stopped working early, Morag, his assistant, explained.

Again, we were confused. The whole idea that Tim might actually “stop working” was problematic. Tim sent us emails at three, four in the morning. He would call us on Sundays to yell at us for some tiny glitch he’d just spotted in our coding. He once famously phoned Gabriella Pisano while she was in the early stages of labor to locate a file he needed, having forgotten she was on maternity leave. Even when she told him that’s what she was doing, he didn’t hang up.

Abbie, meanwhile, was working on a new art piece. But we noticed she was also talking a lot to Rajesh. Rajesh was one of the developers, a quiet vegetarian in his mid-twenties no one knew a lot about. But when we saw the warmth blossoming between him and Abbie, we realized something we hadn’t noticed before: Rajesh was a very beautiful young man. And cool. Rajesh was one of those people whose quietness masked a deep inner confidence. Someone looked up his personnel record and discovered he’d received the Dean’s Award at Stanford.

Abbie’s new piece, when she unveiled it, was an installation of three leather punching bags suspended by thick ropes from the ceiling of one of the conference rooms. At first, no one knew what to make of it. Unlike the firebot, she didn’t present it to us. She simply left it there, along with three beaten-up pairs of boxing gloves. A small card on the wall said: GOLDILOCKS. LEATHER, ROPE, ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS.

It wasn’t long before someone pulled on the gloves and started hitting the larger of the punching bags. Then they stopped, surprised. The punching bag had cried out, as if in pain.

The puncher hit the punching bag again. “Ow!” the punching bag yelled. The puncher laughed, and rained a series of blows, Rocky-style, left-right-left. Each time, the punching bag yelled and hollered.

Someone else joined in on the next punching bag. But they only landed one blow before they stopped, embarrassed. The second punching bag had also yelled out, but in a woman’s voice.

So we tried the third punching bag. This time it was a child who screamed.

No one wanted to go near the punching bags after that. We all agreed it was a much less successful art piece than the firebot. That had been fun, we decided. This one was making some kind of statement. It felt na?ve and mean-spirited and a little bit obvious.





25


You stumble out of the beach house blindly, almost tripping over yourself in your haste to get away. You have no idea where you’re going. You just know you can’t stay there, in your house—the place where you got married—while your husband has sex with another woman.

Questions tumble through your mind. When did this start? Is Sian his girlfriend? His mistress? Have there been others?

How long was he even celibate for, after your death?

When you get to the security barrier and the fork in the drive, there’s only one way you can go. Turning right would take you to the highway. You have to go left, down toward the ocean.

Unlike the drive leading to your house, this road is old and potholed, zigzagging down a steep incline. You pass houses—not grand, ultramodern properties like yours, but smaller, older vacation homes. Most are in darkness. At the bottom, overlooking a rocky beach, is a ramshackle old diner. The windows are boarded up, their frames corroded from salt water.

You go and stand on the boardwalk, holding on to the rusty rail for support, staring miserably out to sea. Not for the first time, you find yourself wishing you could cry: anything to release these pent-up emotions. Instead you yell, something shapeless and wordless, your agony and despair flung out at the endless ocean, the wind ripping the sound from your mouth almost before it’s formed.

The waves churn and roil, their crests collapsing onto the sand in a crash of phosphorescence, only for that to be swept away in turn. Even through your misery—perhaps because of your misery—you can appreciate how beautiful that motion is. It feels like the waves must have a pattern to their endless movement; something almost unfathomable but deeply harmonious—