The Perfect Marriage(11)

Owen said he understood. No big deal.

The truth was that he had long known about his mother’s affair. They’d all tried to keep it from him, even his father. After his mother moved out, she went so far as to rent a small apartment in Forest Hills for three months as part of the subterfuge. She claimed she’d met James during that summer.

Sometimes they slipped up. His mother would mention some interaction she had with James that winter, which could not have happened if they’d met in June, as she claimed.

Even though his mother was the unfaithful one, Owen blamed his father for the divorce. To his way of thinking, his father should have done more to keep his mother happy. Owen recalled their fights, which, more often than not, were over nonsense: his mother’s desire to see her siblings, not his, over the holidays; his father’s refusal to close the kitchen cabinet doors after opening them; or his father’s failure to buy her a birthday or Valentine’s Day gift because, according to his stupid joke, he treated her specially every day.

Why couldn’t Wayne have made Owen’s mother happier? Done the things she wanted?

That was part of the reason that Owen had decided to go with his mother when the choice was presented. He simply couldn’t imagine living with a man as weak as his father.



Reid hated fake tits. He had decided to overlook it because Sarah was so very willing, and he thought that there might be some business upside in it for him. (She claimed she was involved in the art world somehow, although he couldn’t remember how, exactly.)

As soon as he unhooked her bra, he began having a serious case of buyer’s remorse. Let that be a lesson to you, his mind (okay, maybe not his mind) told him. Never go for the sure deal when there’s a better transaction that requires more work to close. In this case, he was kicking himself for not making a play for the hot young caterer.

At least Sarah got the hint that his place wasn’t a bed-and-breakfast. After they were done, she gathered up her clothes and did the walk of shame. He told her that he’d call, but she looked like she knew he wouldn’t, which was just as well because he had no intention to.

All in all, he had been right to attend the party. The evening’s carnal activity had been a bonus, but the primary objective had been to whet James’s appetite for the Pollocks. On that score he could declare mission accomplished.

He had expected James to hem and haw a bit. James was that way. Like a woman needing to put on a show of resistance so you wouldn’t think she was too easy. That kind of performance had never made any sense to Reid. Everybody wanted the same things—sex and money. Why not embrace it?



“Was it everything you had hoped for and more?” James asked.

They were basking in the afterglow. Still a bit sweaty.

Jessica looked at him with a sly smile. He got the joke without her having to say a word.

“I meant the party. I could tell that you enjoyed the other thing quite a bit.”

“Oh, the party,” she said with an exaggerated laugh. “To be honest, when I imagined it in my mind, it didn’t include your ex-wife calling me an adulteress in front of my seventeen-year-old son and all of my friends.”

James had wanted to be a good and faithful husband to Haley. Truly he had. And he could recite chapter and verse why he had failed in the objective, a litany of complaints about Haley—how she wasn’t exactly who he thought she was when he proposed; her workaholism; her anger issues. Or he could turn it around and argue that their split had nothing to do with her at all. Excuses ranging from his own miscalculation about his readiness for marriage to his simply being unable to resist his attraction to Jessica.

In the end, however, he knew that all these things were just that—excuses. He had consciously decided to cheat on Haley with Jessica, while a more honorable man would have found a way to refrain. In other words, Haley was right: he’d made a vow to be faithful to her, then treated that vow like shit.

“I’m so sorry about that,” James said for about the millionth time this evening.

“And you thought my inviting Wayne was going to be the low point. But you know what they say—if the second marriage is successful, the first one wasn’t a failure.”

“I actually didn’t know that’s what they say.”

“Well, they do.”

James reflected on whether there was any truth to what they apparently said. “I prefer the Hemingway approach.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“That the first draft is always shit.”

“That’s certainly the better quote,” Jessica said, laughing.

“I talked to Owen about it afterward. I think he’s okay with it all.”

James had initially expected nothing but hostility from Owen. Even though Jessica did her best to pretend that James’s arrival into his life had nothing to do with Owen’s parents’ divorce, James assumed that Owen knew better. Still, and much to James’s surprise, he and his stepson had quickly formed a bond of their own. Not like father and son, because Wayne filled that space. Fun uncle and nephew, perhaps. The guy who’ll slide a fifty to the youngest server at the party to be extra nice to his stepson.

“I talked to him a little bit too,” Jessica said. “Maybe I should just tell him the truth. He’s almost eighteen. I think he’ll understand.”