Alternate Side(49)

“You need to work on your husband’s knife skills,” Jim said, pointing his fork at her. Knife skills: this was a new badge of honor, a status symbol for guys who had finally—finally!—become tired of talking about wine. The slightly aberrational spouse was a status symbol, too. The husband who cooked. The wife who played golf. The husband who took his children to school. The wife who ran her own business. Of course, it was chancier with the women than with the men. You couldn’t push it too far. The marathoner wife who made partner—perhaps. The wife who could bench-press her own weight and made the cover of Fortune—too emasculating. The men, on the other hand, got unlimited mileage out of performing so-called women’s tasks as long as they also had substantial disposable income and significant business cards. Occasionally a woman would say of her husband, “He’s a stay-at-home dad,” and everyone would smile and think, He doesn’t have a job.

Jim’s wife had been a significant woman, a doctor who treated people with addiction issues, which probably explained why he was a wine aficionado. Nora could hear Polly now, saying to her husband, “Nora might have better things to do than work on her husband’s knife skills.” Charlie and Nora had been close friends with Jim and Polly, once upon a time. They had lived in similar three-bedroom apartments, not far from each other, and had children around the same age. There had been a couple of years there, when, one Sunday a month, they had had takeout dinners in each other’s places, the children throwing Lego blocks around in the next room while the grown-ups ate Peking duck or sashimi. Jim and Polly had nothing that Charlie and Nora wanted except for a wood-burning fireplace, which Polly said was more trouble than it was worth. “We have to start a fire hours before anyone arrives because the room fills with smoke,” she said. “Can’t you smell it?”

By the look on Jim’s face when she said this Nora could tell it was one of those low-level arguments that married couples had frequently. “What good is a wood-burning fireplace if you don’t have a fire?” Jim said.

Nora had enjoyed those evenings. The men would talk across the table to each other about work, and the women about their children. Then someone had canceled, and someone else had canceled, and Jim had become a bigger deal than Charlie, which Nora only figured out at the cocktail party Jim and Polly had had as a housewarming for their new place, which no amount of partying could warm, with its marble entrance foyer and elaborate window treatments. She and Polly agreed, when the Nolans were leaving the party, Charlie impatiently holding the elevator, that they would schedule lunch, they would, and then they never did. And now Nora never could. Having lunch with the estranged wife of a man your husband wanted to think well of him was a no-go.

Charlie had never liked Polly. He had always said he thought she was difficult. Also not sexy. He was seated now with the thin blonde on one side. Alison? Alyssa? The conversation was a hubbub, like modern music, discordant, with odd bleats and no melody. People in New York never really listened to anyone else; they just waited for a break in the action so they could start to speak, push off with their own boat into the slipstream of talk.

“Your wife is in the jewelry business?” Nora heard the blonde ask Charlie.

“How large is your endowment?” said young Jason, who obviously knew precisely what Nora did, the kind of man who researched his fellow guests before a dinner party.

“Substantial for the size of the museum,” she said. “Plus we own the building free and clear, which is certainly an advantage.”

“And your annual budget?”

Nora tapped the table with her dessert fork and laughed. “Are you really interested?”

“I’m interested in board service. I’m trying to decide where.”

“That’s interesting. People are usually much cagier about that than you are.”

“Should I be cagier?”

She laughed again and saw Charlie narrow his eyes across the table. She realized she had to hit some sweet spot between being nice to Jason and appearing to be too cozy with him.

“I’ll be candid with you,” she said. “Our board is largely decorative. The founder of the museum picks its members for optimal society traction. She makes all the decisions herself.”

“I’ll be candid right back,” Jason said. “I’d be interested in being involved with Bob Harris’s foundation.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Nora said.

“Really? Because he talks as though he’s certain you’ll be running it.”

“Running what?” Charlie said from across the table. Luckily dessert was served, lemon tart and raspberries, and Jim tapped her arm, so she turned from Jason. “I want to hear all about this crazy thing on your block,” he said. “I don’t know Jack Fisk, but I know lots of people who do, and they say he must have lost his mind. I told them, Well, I know someone who will be able to give me all the details.”

Later, as she pulled her nightgown over her head, Nora said to Charlie, “Did Jim ask you about Jack Fisk?”

“It’s all he wanted to talk about,” Charlie said sourly. “It’s the same deal in the office. Someone comes in and I think they want me for a meeting or on a call, and instead it’s all, What the hell happened there? Plus they all think it was a tire iron. Why the hell would Jack swing a tire iron?”