The Perfect Marriage(14)

“Quite the party the other night,” Reid said. “That Sarah Ross is insatiable.”

“Roth,” James said.

“What?”

“The insatiable woman to whom you’re referring is actually named Sarah Roth.”

Reid shrugged. “I can only imagine Jessica was none too pleased with Haley’s one-woman show.”

“No, she was not. At least she didn’t blame me for it. But that reminds me, I do need to call my divorce lawyer and see if there’s anything that can be done to prevent another such performance in the future, although I highly doubt there is. Short of murder, of course.”

Reid laughed. “That, my friend, is why I’ve never married.”

“And here I thought it was because no woman would have you.”

“Sarah Roth had me. Twice, in fact,” Reid said, taking his eyes off the road to smirk at James.

“It’s easy to get into a woman’s bed for a night. It’s being allowed to stay that’s the challenge.”

“Not a challenge I plan on taking up in this lifetime.”

“You’ll be missing out then. I can tell you that there’s nothing like being married to someone you truly love.”

“Aww,” Reid said. “Check back with me in ten years and see if you still feel that way. Meanwhile, the woman I’ll be with then is in elementary school now.”

“You are truly disgusting.”

“Just speaking my truth.”



David Kaplan called a few minutes before noon. Haley was in her apartment, more or less waiting for her divorce lawyer’s call.

Even though it had been less than two years, she could no longer recall how she had come to retain her attorney. He must have been a referral from someone. She hadn’t found him on the internet, that she knew, although when she did google David’s name, she was pleasantly surprised to find that he was a Super Lawyer, whatever that meant. Then again, so was James’s mouthpiece, a woman whose name Haley tried to banish from all recesses of her brain, though occasionally it came through like scratches on a chalkboard—Angela or Andrea or Abigail. Some A name.

That was the way it went in divorce these days; the men hired women to make them seem more understanding, and the women hired men to make them stronger.

Then she remembered who’d made the introduction to David. It was her financial adviser, Arthur Cochrane. Of course, she’d asked him for the referral. The symmetry to it all had been weirdly pleasing, as it was Arthur who’d introduced her to James.

Four years before, her financial adviser had suggested that Haley spend some of her recent bonus money on artwork. “Even though I won’t see a penny on commissions for it, you might get some psychic satisfaction at seeing your bonus money hanging on your walls, as opposed to being digits in a brokerage account.”

He’d recommended James Sommers, claiming that he was one of the best art dealers in the city. “Trust me,” she remembered Arthur saying, “you’ll be in excellent hands.”

She met James at his office, which was actually an apartment that he worked out of on Madison in the seventies, a few streets north of the Met Breuer museum, which most New Yorkers still referred to as the Whitney, and a few blocks south of the Met and the Guggenheim. She had expected James to show her some pieces to choose from. But he told her that was how people bought furniture; buying art was more akin to falling in love.

“You need to date a little bit, see what you like, what you don’t,” he said. “Then, when you come upon that piece that you just know you can’t live without, then, and only then, are you ready to buy art.”

It felt a bit like a come-on, but Haley didn’t mind. She hadn’t had much time to date since joining Maeve Grant, the investment bank that employed her in its mergers and acquisition department. The men she did make time to go out with quickly proved that they weren’t worth it: man-boys who spent most of their time bragging about the things they owned and fretting about losing their hair. She could envision worse ways to spend an evening than in James’s company, looking at beautiful objets d’art.

He took her to a downtown gallery that specialized in photography. The show on display contained a lot of staged pieces, most of which struck Haley as contrived.

“I gather you’re not falling in love with anything here,” he said after they had taken their first lap around the room.

“A few I might fuck, but none I’d marry,” she said.

“Well put. Because something you’re going to look at every day has to justify its existence every day. It’s easy to like something for a while just because it fills a blank wall, but over time, you’re going to resent paying so much for it if you’re not in love with it.”

“How can someone who knows so much about love still be single?”

“Precisely,” James answered.

“So you’re a cynic, are you?”

“Let’s just say that I’ve found my share that I’d fuck, but none that I’d marry.”

“Well said, James,” she replied.

That night, they fucked. Slightly less than a year later, they married.

She was twenty-seven when they tied the knot. James was forty-one. That should have been a red flag. Her mother made no pretense about expressing such concerns, wondering aloud how a man who was as successful and handsome as James had managed to stay single for all these years, then suddenly became eager to marry.