The Perfect Wife(83)
For a moment you consider how strange it is that she trusts you. But then, she’d assume you share the same maternal instincts—that at some level, her feelings are your feelings.
And of course she’s desperate. Just as, for a different reason, you are, too.
TWENTY-TWO
We didn’t see so much of Abbie after Danny was born. She’d come into the office sometimes, pushing a high-end Stokke stroller and greeting old friends. The women cuddled the baby with a mixture of delight and envy. The men did the same, but more briefly, and principally because Abbie might be a mother now but she was still really hot. Generally, though, these visits occurred because she was en route to Tim’s office to collect him for some function or other, so there was never much time to chat. Occasionally someone would ask about her art, and she’d say it was difficult with a little one, so she was effectively on a career break.
Still, she seemed happy enough. And Tim—whom none of us would have considered a natural father—seemed happy, too. When Danny started walking, Tim even brought him to work on family days, proudly going from meeting to meeting with Danny’s little hand in his. There were pictures of Danny and Abbie on his office wall. His assistant, Morag, said he even remembered their birthdays.
Which was why, when the Jaki thing happened, many of us were surprised. Jaki was a curvy blonde with a nose piercing and short bleached hair. She wore tight dresses that emphasized her figure, and it was rumored she had a social media account on some obscure platform that showed a great deal more. Her weekends were spent clubbing and partying, and she never missed Coachella or Joshua Tree or any of the other big festivals; they were as fixed in her calendar as Thanksgiving or Christmas were in ours. And she was fun. Right from the start, if there was a birthday or a promotion to celebrate, Jaki was there at the center of things, ordering rounds of drinks, announcing shots, planning where we were going next, and talking nineteen to the dozen. She was very easy to talk to, or rather to listen to, because she leapt from subject to subject in a torrent of thoughts, opinions, reactions.
Tim seemed to like chatting to Jaki. We thought maybe that was because he didn’t really enjoy socializing, and being around her meant he’d never be stuck for small talk. But gradually we noticed it wasn’t just at the big social events. They hung out in the bagel room together. They chatted in the parking lot. And then there was the night of the Crunchies, the annual awards show run by the website TechCrunch at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House. A resurgent Scott Robotics was up for several accolades, including Best Technology Achievement, while Tim was nominated for Founder of the Year. The firm booked out three large circular tables, eight to a table. Tim, Mike, and Elijah wore tuxedos. The women wore cocktail dresses—even Jenny, whom no one had ever seen in any kind of dress before. The invitees were a mixed bunch. The men were Tim’s favorites, or those who had contributed most and worked the hardest (three categories that, it had to be said, were almost indistinguishable), while the women had possibly been selected with more of an eye as to how stunning they would look in those dresses.
Abbie wasn’t there that night. She was looking after Danny, and besides, with the obvious exception of Mike and Jenny, wives and husbands weren’t invited.
The evening was pretty successful. Against competition like that, to get two runner-up awards was incredible. Tim didn’t see it that way, of course. Tim liked to win. It particularly rankled with him that Microsoft’s HoloLens had beaten us to Best Achievement.
“It’s a game system,” he kept repeating. “It’s a fucking toy. How is that going to change the fucking world?”
By the time we’d moved on to the after-party, though, he was feeling more cheerful. Senior people from Silicon Valley’s most successful companies—Apple, SpaceX, Google—kept coming over to congratulate him. When the after-party closed at eleven-thirty, Tim was ready to go on somewhere else.
What happened next remains a matter of conjecture, even to those in HR who might be assumed to know the whole story. What was not in dispute was that something happened between Tim and Jaki in a hotel room, a hotel room that both parties entered consensually, but that the way it happened left Jaki feeling cheap and used and taken advantage of.
As ever in these situations, a general view emerged, but it was fluid. Many of us were shocked, or pretended to be, that Tim had been in a hotel room with a woman who was not his wife, although those who remembered pre-Abbie days—Drunk Karen and, it now seemed from the rumor mill, quite a few others—were not entirely surprised. But within a few hours, lurid—and quite possibly fictitious—rumors began to circulate. Jaki had initiated oral sex, with certain conditions, and these Tim had ignored. Or: Jaki had initiated oral sex, and Tim had taken that to mean consent to various other acts, too, some of them demeaning. Or: They’d had intercourse, during which Tim had taken off the condom she had asked him to wear. Or: After they slept together, Jaki had cried, and Tim had called her a slut. The euphemism disrespectful was increasingly being used, although, frustratingly, it was hard to pin down just what it was a euphemism for.
Our own moral judgments fluctuated somewhat, depending on who we were talking to and how passionately they had taken up a position on the matter. That is to say, of course Jaki had a right to have her boundaries respected. But still, those were some pretty startling boundaries. And no, this was surely not about shaming women for being sexual, or saying that whatever happened between two adults was always the woman’s responsibility. Unless, of course, you happened to feel strongly that it was, in which case maybe you had a point.