The Perfect Marriage(27)

Yet, away from the concert stage, Owen ran on a completely even keel. Today was a perfect example: his calm, considered reaction to what would be the scariest time in most people’s lives.

In this way, Wayne understood his son perfectly. For Owen had undoubtedly learned from him how to hide his anger from the world.



Jessica’s mother had been a high school teacher. She always said she taught history, but the curriculum called it social studies and included things like geography and basic economics. She claimed that as a girl, she had wanted to be a lawyer or a college professor but had to put aside such ambitions because those opportunities were not available to girls of her generation. Jessica knew that wasn’t entirely true. Two of the women on the Supreme Court were younger than Linda Terry, as had been many of Jessica’s college professors.

But in her mother’s telling of her life, her options were limited by her gender, the times in which she lived, and her own mother’s low expectations. “My mother—your grandmother—made it very clear to me that finding a husband was my only real job,” she’d told Jessica more times than she could count. “Anything else I wanted to do ended when I got married, which meant pursuing something that required a long-term payoff made no sense. Thank God women today have more choices.”

Many of Jessica’s classmates ended up in high-powered fields, but those women weren’t reared by Linda Terry. While Jessica’s mother claimed to be an equal-rights disciple, the subtext of everything she had ever told Jessica was no different from the pearls of wisdom her own mother had imparted a generation earlier—that you were nothing unless you had a man. Over and over again, Linda Terry made clear to her daughter that women were divided into two categories: those who were able to attract men—life’s winners—and those who, in her mother’s words, “never had a date in their lives.”

Jessica had been determined not to be a loser in her mother’s eyes. So she made sure that she had plenty of boyfriends. Even if it required she barely eat a meal for ten years after she got her period. Even if it meant not pursuing a JD or MD or PhD because by the time she got out of school, she’d be too old to attract a man.

Wayne was the first of those men who asked her to marry him. She said yes because she feared that there would never be another one who would ask.

Linda Terry died two years before Jessica’s marriage did. Wayne always said the two were connected. That so long as her mother was alive, Jessica would have stayed married, but the moment she didn’t have to face Linda’s disapproval, she could have the rebellious adolescence she’d denied herself back when it was age appropriate.

Jessica knew that explanation was too pat. Her mother had died six months after Owen’s diagnosis, and Jessica saw the potential loss of her son as a far greater proximate cause of her need to rethink her life choices than the subsequent death of her mother.

But this much was true: Jessica had wanted a brand-new life. Not just wanted. Had to have.

The first step in that renaissance was to be with a man she loved and not the one she had accepted out of fear that no one else would have her. And then, while that thought was beginning to take root, fate handed her James.

In the last months that she was living with Wayne, when her affair with James was all-consuming, Jessica sometimes heard her mother’s voice in her head, trying to talk her out of the path she had begun to think of as inevitable.

Think about Owen, Linda Terry’s voice would say.

“I am, Mom,” Jessica would say back. “This will be good for him too.”

You know that’s not true, her mother would answer. Divorce is never good for kids. It teaches them that love can end, and they fear that might be true of your love for them too. Why do you think I stayed with your father all those years?

“Hopefully, by leaving an unhappy marriage, I’ll teach Owen that he has the power to make himself happy. To show him what a loving marriage looks like,” she answered.

Jessica never for a second believed that she’d persuaded her mother in this imaginary debate. But the rightness of leaving Wayne for James was reinforced every time she saw James, including early that afternoon when she paid him a visit at his office.

“What a pleasant surprise,” he said. “And your timing is impeccable. My last appointment just left, and it ended very well.”

“Is that so? Well, I was, as they say, in the neighborhood. I thought we could get lunch. And now there seems to be something to celebrate.”

“Sadly, I’m not hungry,” he said with a smile that told her exactly what he meant.

“Then how will we ever fill the time?”





8

Allison Longley called James later that afternoon, while he and Jessica were in flagrante delicto in the bedroom in James’s office. He phoned her back after Jessica had left and he’d showered.

“I think there are some real opportunities for you and me,” Allison said, sounding much more like a character out of a 1940s femme fatale movie than an art expert.

“Is that right?”

“I have clients. You have access to Pollocks. What’s the phrase? This sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“Like I told you, your client bought our entire inventory of the Pollocks.”

She laughed. “Yes. That’s what you told me. What kind of an art person would I be if I believed that? But, look, if you have the other Pollocks earmarked for other buyers, then there’s no need for me to take you for drinks so we can talk further about making some serious money.”