The Perfect Wife(40)
You go upstairs and lie down, but there are too many thoughts churning through your head to relax. Judy Hersch’s words come back to you. How do you feel about replacing the real Abbie Cullen-Scott?
But I haven’t, you think miserably. Nobody treats you the way they did before. And despite what Tim says, how can this be a real marriage if you can’t make love? You get that he doesn’t want people to look at him and think he’s having sex with a machine, but why hasn’t he considered your emotional needs in all this?
Something else occurs to you. Tim effectively said Sian came onto him last night. But if that was the case, wouldn’t she have gone to his room? When you heard the two of them, they were in hers.
Meaning it was much more likely that he went to her.
Even Tim, you think, for all that he keeps saying he adores you—is it really you he loves? Or is it the idea of you—his creation, this amazing achievement? This extraordinary monument to his pure, enduring love?
If you were better off dead, would he let you go?
And you shiver in the darkness, because you’re fairly sure the answer to that is No.
TEN
Of course, we were all eager to find out how the date at Mavericks had gone. “I am agog,” Alexis declared, first thing Monday morning. “I am literally agog,” and she was not alone.
In the end it was one of the girls who asked Abbie, then reported back to us. “Oh, it was nice,” Abbie had replied. “But it wasn’t really a date. We just hung out and watched the surfing with my friends, then we all went to Jersey Joe’s for some beers.
“Where we had this, like, massive disagreement,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “Someone was talking about how homeopathy had cured their dermatitis, and Tim was kind of dismissive, so—just so my friends didn’t think I was with a total dickhead—I said, ‘But there’s got to be something in it, right?’?” She sighed. “And then Tim started listing all these scientific studies that proved homeopathy was a waste of time. And I told him he was being boring.”
Our admiration for Abbie—which, if we were honest, had taken a knock when she asked Tim out on a date: It seemed a bit obvious somehow, a bit conventional, that she too should be so smitten with our charismatic leader—was instantly restored. She had told him he was boring! She was fearless as well as cool!
No one dared ask Tim for his side of the story, of course. But Tim spoke to Mike, and Mike spoke to Jenny, who reported back that Tim had had a great time.
“She’s amazing,” he’d told Mike, apparently. “Smart, stimulating, and she likes to debate. She won’t let me get away with anything. And she’s drop-dead gorgeous, too. What’s not to like?”
“He’s asked me to go skydiving with him next week,” Abbie told us later. “I’ve always wanted to skydive.”
Someone remembered that, a few years back, one of the psychology journals had published the results of a study into dating: what kind of activity you should schedule for a second and third date and so on. Something physically dangerous is ideal for a second date, apparently, because adrenaline boosts feelings of sexual attraction. The third date should be something like a salsa class—getting close and physical in a nonthreatening environment. The fourth should be something intimate and nurturing, like feeding baby animals at the children’s zoo. That was the best time for the relationship to become sexual, the study suggested—when both parties still had the excitement of novelty, but had acquired the safety of the familiar.
Yes, Tim had researched optimal dating methodology with the same rigor he applied to every other aspect of his life.
He didn’t merely take Abbie skydiving for their next date, we discovered later. He booked a private flight with the Zero-G Corporation on their specially converted Boeing. During the three-hour flight he and Abbie did fifteen parabolas out of the earth’s atmosphere, experiencing weightlessness each time. Pictures on Abbie’s Facebook page showed them turning head over heels in the cabin, catching globules of champagne in their mouths. Then, when the plane was on its way back to base, they stepped out the door for a parachute descent to earth.
Chartering the entire jumbo for a private trip like that cost around two hundred thousand dollars, we noted on Zero-G’s website.
Rather than a salsa class, the up-close-and-physical date was at House of Air, the giant trampoline center near Golden Gate Park. Again, Tim rented out the whole place.
We waited with bated breath for the fourth date. It wasn’t long in coming—just two weeks after that first outing to Mavericks. The next day we scrutinized their faces for any signs as to how the sex had gone.
Nothing.
Tim had taken her to feed the ducks at Stow Lake, Abbie reported. He’d pulled out a loaf of bread and started tearing it into small pellets when she’d stopped him.
“You do know that’ll kill them, right?”
He’d blinked, astonished. “But everyone feeds bread to ducks.”
“Everyone except smart people.”
She explained that, to wild ducks, bread was like junk food—it made their organs engorged and fatty, causing them to die of malnutrition or heart disease. It also made them too weak and bloated to take part in normal migrations.
“Domestic ducks, though, can’t fly in the first place. So sometimes people release them into parks thinking that’ll be a good environment for them. But quite apart from the fact they’ve got no protection against predators, they’ll die of digestive complications if they’re fed on bread. And if there’s so much bread they don’t eat it, that’s even worse. Bread left in water spreads salmonella and botulism, not to mention enteritis and a parasite called swimmer’s itch.”