The Perfect Marriage(10)

“Or until you decide to fuck someone else behind her back, you mean, don’t you, James?”

Haley watched James’s eyes search the room, looking for her. He clearly recognized her voice. Finally, he spotted her. She could tell by the look in his eyes.

“Really, everyone, you do all know that is the genesis of this great love story you’re all toasting, don’t you?” Haley shouted, loud enough that she was certain everyone could hear. That point was further driven home by the slack-jawed expression of the guests around her.

Out of her peripheral vision, she saw Malik looking as dumbfounded as anyone. She hadn’t told him about her connection to the happy couple, for fear that even the promise of sex wouldn’t be enough for him to join her if he knew her intentions. Poor guy . . . he thought they were making a courtesy visit to an old friend’s party, then going back to her place for the night. He hadn’t realized that the arrangement was more transactional than that: sex in exchange for being something of a human shield.

Now that she had the floor, Haley was not about to yield. “James and Jessica, the patron saints of romance, thought the vows from their first marriages were shit, and decided that fucking each other behind their spouses’ backs was a good thing. So long as they were happy, they didn’t give a fuck about anyone else. Let’s all drink to that, shall we?”

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not a party until your ex-wife breaks the terms of her restraining order to shout profanity at you,” said James. “Am I right?”

Haley heard zero laughter in response to James’s retort. She had won.

“Fuck you all, and fuck you the most, James,” Haley shouted. “And you too, Jessica, you slut whore,” she added for good measure.

With that said, Haley took Malik’s hand and led him to the door. When she opened it, she turned back to James and flashed her best fuck-you smile before exiting.





4

“Who was the blonde?” Jessica called out to James, who was in the bathroom with the door open.

It was 2:00 a.m. The caterers had just left, and she was in bed.

“What blonde?” he asked.

“What blonde,” she repeated, all sarcasm.

“Oh,” he said, a chuckle in his voice. “Sarah Roth. She owns a gallery in Chelsea. Don’t worry, she’s harmless. Her bark is much worse than her bite.”

“It wasn’t her bark that caught my attention, my dear.”

Plenty of people had questioned how Jessica could trust James after he cheated on his first wife. Some said it without even the slightest sense that James should be wondering the same thing about her.

Jessica had been propositioned before. Men never tired of trying to seduce married women, and real estate agents were a particularly inviting target. But she had never thought twice about any of these overtures. And not because the men weren’t interesting or attractive—often they were both. Instead, she thought of herself as a good person, a moral person, and her marriage vows meant something.

Why did she break those vows for James? That was a question that she had never fully been able to answer. A part of her liked to believe she had simply been overwhelmed by their connection and rendered incapable of resistance.

James enabled this narrative by saying that it was precisely what had compelled him.

“I was brought up a Catholic,” he told her once, after their affair had begun. “I was an altar boy, the whole thing. But I never believed. Not the way some people claimed that they did. But I wished that I had faith that there was something out there that powerful. Something that made you feel safe, that banished all your fears and made you feel loved. And then I met you, and suddenly, I believed.”

James said that he had not been tested in that faith since. In fact, he sometimes joked that he was Jessica’s disciple. Like the original twelve, he would follow her anywhere.

“You know what happened to their leader,” she said once. “And then they all turned. Some of them thrice.”

“Not me,” he said. “Never. I promise you that.”

Did that mean that James would never stray? Jessica didn’t know, of course. No spouse ever knew that for sure. They might assume they knew. Oh, my husband, he’s not that kind. But Wayne would have said the same about her, once upon a time. The truth was that all you could ever know for sure about your spouse was that you never really knew what they were capable of.

The one thing she did know, however, was that she was a different person from the woman who’d been with Wayne. She was happy now, and in love. Why would such a fortunate woman ever be unfaithful? And if that was true of her, she had every reason to believe it applied equally to her husband.

James stepped out of the bathroom wearing only pajama bottoms. He looked good. Too good, Jessica sometimes thought.

His smile made clear he was thinking exactly the same thing about her.

“You like?” she asked, referring to the lingerie she had purchased for tonight—black lace and hardly there.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Enough that I’ll be very careful taking it off you.”



After the fireworks created by James’s ex-wife, Owen’s mother had tried to talk to him, but all he’d wanted to do was go back into his room, shut the door, put on his headphones, and escape into the world of his computer. She let him go, but James came into his room a few minutes later. He told him that what Haley said wasn’t true. That she would say anything to hurt James, and he was sorry if Owen had been upset by her lies.