The Startup Wife(35)



“I don’t know,” Cyrus counters. “I’m thinking brother and sister.”

I sit up, peer between the seats. “They’re having an affair.”

“The brother and sister?”

“No, you sicko, just a regular affair. Her actual husband is nerdy and into Pokémon Go. Either way she doesn’t have kids.”

“How do you know that?” Jules asks.

“On the highway at midnight on a Friday? Where would she leave them?”

“That’s what I said, just plain old divorce, which is what my parents should’ve done twenty years ago.”

It takes three hours to get to Sagaponack, where the Cabots have a family home they call the Farmhouse. We go up a long driveway. Even in the dark, I can tell the house extends in all directions and that there is nothing farmlike about it. Jules hands his car keys to a man who takes our bags and gives us directions to our room. Two flights up a wood-paneled staircase, down a hallway with tiny brass lamps illuminating our way, we find a sparsely furnished room wallpapered in tiny pink flowers. There is a bookshelf crammed with paperbacks, and a window seat overlooking the garden, which leads directly to the beach. Crickets and the circular hum of the sea are audible in the background.

I flop onto the bed. “Air-conditioning!”

There’s a soft knock on the door, and Jules comes in with a tray, puts it down on the window seat, and silently shuts the door behind him. Under a white napkin there are oatmeal raisin cookies and two glasses of pink lemonade. I take a sip of lemonade, thinking this is a place where Jules might have been happy, where he might have spent summers in shorts, learning to swim, catching the eye of a cute guy in the house next door. I sense the possibility of happiness, and I feel sad for Jules that this possibility has never materialized.



* * *



In the morning, we sit down at a long rectangular table and eat breakfast with Jules, his parents, his brother and sister, and their husbands and wives and kids. They are all beautiful in a leggy pink kind of way. I try to remember to chew with my mouth closed, and after every bite I run my tongue carefully over my teeth to make sure I don’t have a wedge of brioche stuck somewhere. I make polite conversation with Jules’s sister, Brittany, whose twin daughters, Paige and Peggy, are in matching jumpsuits and pigtails, silently spooning oatmeal into their mouths.

Jules’s father leans forward in his seat and calls down to us from the head of the table: “How’s business, son?”

“Great, Dad,” Jules replies, nudging his scrambled eggs.

“Jules is keeping the ship afloat,” Cyrus volunteers.

“That’s weird, because he couldn’t even keep his pants up in high school,” his brother, a total asshole, barks.

“He got us our funding,” Cyrus says. “We’re launching in three months because of him.”

“That’s wonderful, dear,” his mother murmurs.

“What is it again?” his brother asks. “Facebook for people who want to go to church?”

“Yeah, Don, something like that,” Jules says, pushing his chair back.

“Mommy says you spend your allowance on hanging on,” one of the twins says. Her mother shushes her.

“Hangers-on,” the other twin says. “Peggy always gets it wrong.”

All the blood rushes to my face. It occurs to me that for most of my life, I have shared this island with the Cabots. Merrick is only an hour away, yet it never would have occurred to my parents to drive over to East Hampton, park their car, and unload their Bengali picnic on the beach. The summers of my childhood were spent in the homes of friends in Hunters Point or Astoria; someone might stray into the backyard for a chicken kebab barbecue, but mostly they stayed inside and sang Tagore songs, recited poetry, and talked about how terrible yet still wonderful things were back home. Summers were not for sunbathing, they were for singing and homework and waitressing at the nearest IHOP.

I’m ashamed of taking money from Jules, which is, in fact, money from his dad. There’s a detailed internal monologue in my head about how I’m just another immigrant leech, another drain on the system, the system in this case being the Cabot family trust fund.

“Do you want to leave, Jules?” Cyrus says, whispering but loud enough for everyone to hear.

I lean across the table. “Come on, Jules.” I am ready for us to storm out of there in a blaze of fuck-yous.

“Oh, don’t go,” Jules’s sister says with a light laugh. “They’re just kids, they don’t know what they’re saying.”

Jules looks back and forth between Cyrus and his father. He puts his fork down. He mouths something to Cyrus. Cyrus nods to me. I retreat and stuff the last of the French toast into my mouth.

“Pass the butter,” Jules’s mother says brightly.

“Well,” his father bellows, “whatever makes you happy, son. As long as you’re not taking drugs or getting the HIV, right?” He looks around the table, and a few other people laugh.



* * *



We spend the day between the pool and the beach. At the pool we are given towels and more pink lemonade. Someone has taken the trouble of inflating the various plastic items that we drift around on. At the beach there are deck chairs and umbrellas, a wide stretch of sand leading to a cloudy, very cold sea. At four p.m. there are martinis. At five p.m. there are finger sandwiches. Jules tells us there is no dinner, just these sandwiches, and that we are barred from entering the kitchen and foraging for ourselves. I stuff a few extra sandwiches into the pocket of my sweatpants. The children occasionally allow themselves to shriek in delight at, say, the appearance of a hermit crab on the beach, but otherwise the silence is uninterrupted and nearly deafening, and there is the sense that the same routine has gone on in this house since the day it was built, that the rituals were enshrined even before that, brought into being by a tribe of people who say little and eat even less.

Tahmima Anam's Books