The Wife Between Us(62)

Except for one thing.

At the exact same moment that I said, “Family Sociology,” Daniel said, “Senior Seminar.”

His wife didn’t react immediately.

“That’s right!” Daniel snapped his fingers theatrically. Overcompensating. “I’m teaching five classes this semester. It’s nutty! Anyway, it’s late. Let’s let this poor girl go home. We’ll sort it out tomorrow. Don’t worry about the paper, it happens all the time.”

“Daniel!”

At his wife’s shout, he fell silent.

She jabbed a finger at me. “Stay away from my husband.” Her lower lip quivered.

“Sweetie,” Daniel pleaded. He wasn’t looking at me; he didn’t see me at all. Two broken women stood in front of him. But he only cared about one.

“I am so sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t know.”

The door slammed and I could hear her yell something. As I walked down the front steps, I had to grip the railing to keep from stumbling when I saw a yellow tricycle in the grass. A tree had hidden it from my view when I approached the house. Near it was a pink jump rope.

Daniel already had children.

Much later, after I’d returned to the sorority house and cursed Daniel and sobbed and raged; after Daniel had brought me a bouquet of inexpensive carnations and an equally cheap apology, saying he loved his family and that he couldn’t start a new one with me; after I’d gone alone to a clinic an hour away, an experience so wrenching I was never able to talk about it with anyone; after I’d completed my senior year with honors and had set out for New York, desperate to put Florida behind me—even after all that, whenever my mind returns to that warm October night, the moment I always remember the most vividly is this:

When the pledges returned from the ocean, Maggie was missing.

Maggie and Emma have nothing in common. Except for me. These two young women have forever changed the course of my existence. But one is now gone from my life, and the other is ever present.

I used to spend as much time thinking about Maggie as I now do Emma. Maybe that is why they are beginning to blur together in my mind.

But Emma is not like Maggie, I remind myself.

My replacement is stunning and confident. Her radiance draws the eye.

The first time I saw her, she rose from behind her desk to greet me in a fluid, elegant motion. “Mrs. Thompson! I’m so happy to finally meet you!”

We’d spoken on the phone, but her throaty voice hadn’t prepared me for her youth and beauty.

“Oh, call me Vanessa.” I felt ancient even though I was only in my mid-thirties.

It was December, the night of Richard’s office holiday party. We’d been married seven years by then. I wore a black A-line dress in an attempt to hide my extra pounds. It looked funereal next to Emma’s poppy-red jumpsuit.

Richard came out of his office and kissed me on the cheek.

“Are you heading upstairs?” he asked Emma.

“If my boss says it’s okay!”

“Your boss says it’s an order,” Richard joked. So the three of us rode the elevator together to the forty-fifth floor.

“I love your dress, Mrs.—I mean Vanessa.” Emma gave me a toothpaste-ad smile.

I looked down at my plain outfit. “Thank you.”

A lot of women might have been threatened by the possibilities of an Emma: those late nights at the office when Chinese food was ordered in and bottles of vodka pulled from a partner’s bar, the overnight trips to see clients, her daily proximity to my husband’s corner office.

But I never was. Not even when Richard called me to say he was working late and would crash in the city apartment.

Back when we were first dating—back when I was Richard’s Nellie—I remember wondering about the sterile quality of that apartment. Another woman had lived there with Richard before he met me. All he told me about her was that she still resided in the city and was perpetually late. I stopped worrying she was somehow a threat to me once Richard and I were married; she was never an intrusion in our lives, even though I became more curious about her as the years went by.

But I never made a mark on the apartment, either. It remained much as it had during Richard’s bachelor days, with the brown suede sofa and complicated lighting system and tidy row of family photographs lining the hallway, plus one of me and Richard on our wedding day, in a simple black frame that matched those of the other images.

During those months when Richard and Emma thought they were having a secret affair—when he took her to the apartment or visited hers—I actually relished his being gone. It meant I didn’t have to change out of my sweats. I could empty a bottle of wine and not worry about where to hide the evidence. I didn’t have to concoct a story about what I’d done that day or come up with a new way to avoid having sex with my husband.

His affair was a reprieve. A vacation, really.

If only it had remained just that—an affair.


I’ve spent most of the morning talking with Aunt Charlotte. She has agreed to allow me to accompany her to the doctor to learn more about how I can help her, but she insisted on going to meet a friend for a lecture at MoMA, as she’d planned.

“My life isn’t going to stop,” Aunt Charlotte had said, brushing off my offer to skip work and go with her or, at the very least, call her a cab.