“Yet you found me.”
“I can play hard ball when I have to—but I didn’t find you through Phil. In fact, I have no plans to tell him about this.” When they reached the cab Gerri said, “Recommend the closest place that’s fairly quiet and has good wine. Consider this a special occasion, the cost doesn’t matter.”
Elizabeth directed the cabdriver to a small Italian bistro. It was only a matter of six or seven blocks and while it didn’t take them out of that poor section of town, it was charming and comfortable. There were quite a few people already dining who were far better dressed than the clientele in Elizabeth’s office, but it was quiet enough that they could talk freely without being overheard. The waiter was at their table when they were barely settled and Gerri quickly ordered wine, hoping she wouldn’t guzzle it desperately.
“So,” Gerri opened. “Did you have any warning I was coming?”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I wouldn’t have looked so shocked had I known. You took me by surprise. Well—it’s finally happening. He’s running?”
“He is. And I’m afraid the election committee has some nerves about you and your...relationship. They’ll probably be in touch. They might be invasive and rude. I’m sorry—I can’t do anything about that.”
“I know. I always knew,” she said. “It was an issue.”
“It was?”
“Of course. Your husband has a public life. It comes with the territory.”
“Right,” Gerri said. “I thought it best, the warning coming from me. At some point I’m going to be asked about you.”
She shook her head. “There shouldn’t be any panic there. I can honestly say he was my boss for a while and we eventually became friends, but I haven’t spoken to him in years.”
“He told me everything,” Gerri said.
The wine arrived, as if it had been an emergency order. Gerri quickly and perfunctorily ordered an Italian salad without even glancing at a menu and Elizabeth did the same. This meeting wasn’t about food. And then, cautiously Elizabeth said, “I think you’d better be more specific.”
Gerri took a calming breath. “I’m not trying to trick you into telling me secret things. I heard about it accidentally. I confronted him and he told me he’d had an affair, on and off for two years. That it had been over for five. Does that mesh with your memory?”
Elizabeth sipped her wine. “Perfectly,” she said. “He said he’d do that. That if it got out, he wouldn’t lie to you. He’s a terrible liar. Oh, he can evade and hedge and redirect, he’s brilliant at it in court, but when confronted with an absolute, he just can’t lie. He’s been pursuing the truth for too long. I guess it’s his destiny.” She put the glass down. “How’d it get out? I never told anyone. And I can’t believe he did.”
“Someone in the office made an assumption, not based on actual knowledge,” Gerri said. “Really, if he’d exerted the slightest effort, he could have talked his way out of it.” She took a big gulp of wine. “Listen,” she said. “I was unprepared for you. I was looking for a young, sexy, big-breasted nymphomaniac who held the delusion that prosecutors actually made money....”
This time the laugh that escaped through Elizabeth’s bright smile was spontaneous. “Are you saying I’m a disappointment?”
Gerri thought this might be a two-glass lunch. “Yes, actually. You’re much too real. Much too competitive.”
“There was never any competition,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head. “I had an affair with a tortured man. He hated himself the whole time. That’s not exactly flattering.”
“Are you making excuses? Lying to make me feel better?”
She picked up her glass and looked into it. “I wish,” she said, without lifting her gaze.
“You must have been drawn to him for a reason.”
“Wait a minute,” Elizabeth said. “I was drawn to him for many reasons, but I don’t care what he might’ve said, I didn’t make a move. I swear to you. I probably sent out signals because I couldn’t help it, but I never...”
“Relax,” Gerri said. “He said that, too. He made the pass.”
“And I apologize,” Elizabeth said. “I was so enamored of him. I admired him. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s handsome and very, very smart. He has that power aura, yet he’s kind and humble. It was lethal for me. But I never thought I would get in another woman’s territory.”
“Then why?” Gerri asked, leaning forward.
“Put simply, I hadn’t had a man in my life for years. Literally, years. I married young, had children young, got a divorce young and my degree came late. My kids are now twenty-four and twenty-six. I was alone—the kids were with their dad or in college while I was finishing school—I’d been completely uninvolved for a long time. And Phil is a wonderful guy. Surely you know that—you’re still together.”
“We’re barely back together. Both still trying to understand what happened”
“There’s not much to understand,” Elizabeth said. “He loved you so much, I couldn’t even put a dent in the armor around your marriage. I’m not proud of it, but I tried, believe me. I’d have taken him with all the baggage in a heartbeat. But he was committed, which put curious doubt on what was happening with us.”
No, it doesn’t, Gerri thought. And then she strangely found herself wearing this woman’s shoes for a moment. She felt terrible knowing he’d have sex with her and talk about Gerri and how devoted he was. “How do you know all that? About his commitment? About me?”
“We did more talking than anything else,” Elizabeth said with a shrug. She took a sip of her wine. “I asked him questions about you— You aren’t the only one trying to understand. He’d answer superficially, giving very little information, but the real stuff came out when he was explaining, numerous times, why we could only be casual friends or not at all because he’d never leave you, he couldn’t make it without you. He was in awe of you, your strength, how you managed your clientele, your family, your kids, him. He said that you could do your job without him but he could never keep up his position in the office without your support, without your input. He said you were the most amazing woman he’d ever known. I kept trying to get him to level with me—you couldn’t be that perfect and have him fooling around with me. Couldn’t! I kept searching for a crack in the porcelain. Instead, I had a man in my life—the first man in years—who loved someone else. It was a very lonely, hopeless time for me.” She took another sip of wine. “I met you once in the office—I think one of the young A.D.A.’s introduced us and you were nice but—”
“Just a regular person?”
She sighed. “I hated you, but I was sorry I’d never get a chance to find out just how incredible you are.”
“It’s all bullshit,” Gerri said. “The only thing incredible about me is that I hung in there with a man who worked horrible hours under ever worse pressure for miserable pay—and I was interested enough in his work to be his best audience. There was no discipline involved. I was really interested. His caseload mirrored mine in many ways.”
With precision timing their salads arrived. Gerri took one small bite. “Where are you in your life now? With work? With men?” she asked.
Elizabeth smiled. “I’m seeing someone. I don’t know where it’s going, but he’s a good man and I admire him. I’m happy with him. And as for work, I do what I love to do.”
“And what do you do?”
“You don’t know?”
“I know nothing but your phone number and business address. Trust me.”
“I’m an attorney. I was doing an internship at the prosecutor’s office while waiting to take the bar exam, then briefly after passing the bar. I specialize in guardian ad litem for children without representation. There’s not much money in it, but it’s my calling.”
Children at risk, Gerri thought. Then she took another look at Elizabeth and thought, Oh, my God, she’s me! Phil had an affair with a woman enough like Gerri to be her sister—same height, approximate weight, age,
short hair, career field.
“We have a lot in common,” Gerri said. She tried to sound casual.
“You’re just getting that?”
“I’m just getting that,” Gerri said a little weakly. “God.” She concentrated on her salad for a moment, thinking. She looked up. “Do people call you Elizabeth?”
“No. Liz. My dad still calls me Lizzy. Only Phil called me Elizabeth.”
Gerri smiled, took another bite of salad. “You’re under no obligation to answer this,” she said with great trepidation, “but if I’d come here to tell you we were divorcing, would you get back in touch with him?”
“No,” Elizabeth said easily. “He made it pretty clear he doesn’t want to hear from me. And if he did want to reach me, he could find a way. I think I’ve finally passed that place in my life. I realized I’d never be what he wanted, but was as close as he could get, and to my utter embarrassment, that was good enough for me. Listen,” she said, “you’re asking all the personal questions here. Do you have any idea why your husband had an affair?”
“I’m starting to, yes,” Gerri said. She felt her eyes begin to mist and willed herself not to get emotional. “Neither of us is quite sure what changed or exactly when, but there are certain events, some markers that—” She took another sip of wine before continuing. “Well, nine years ago both my parents died in the same year. Long, slow, painful deaths ending with hospice care. I’m sure I was depressed for at least a year after that. It took a toll on our lives.” Suddenly Gerri could see how their drifting apart started. Phil was exhausted from carrying almost the whole load for a couple of years. Gerri was whipped by personal tragedy, weak and dysfunctional.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth said. “I’d be lost without my mom and dad.”
“Well, I think I came out of the depression, but I might not have come all the way back,” Gerri said. Life held less joy, less spontaneity, less sexual hunger. “I had no idea, of course,” she said, smiling at Elizabeth, who seemed oddly like a friend. “As Phil puts it—everything about us became keeping the boat afloat. We’ve always been a functional team—we could really get the job done. That’s the beauty and the problem. So much about us has always worked. I had no idea there were gaping holes. I thought we were doing so well under the circumstances. Better than most couples. If I had no idea things were missing, I guess it’s reasonable that he didn’t understand it, either.”
“I think you can rest easy on that,” Elizabeth said. She reached across the table and covered Gerri’s hand with hers. “I don’t think Phil had the first idea why he was involved with me. And his involvement was not as physical as you might think. But, he was like a man who couldn’t help himself, a man confused by his own actions. I loved him, but he loved you and only you. The whole time. And yet, he was searching for something.”
Gerri could have explained it to her, but she demurred. Phil was looking for intimacy with someone to whom he’d been deeply bonded, his best friend for over twenty years. He wanted to reconnect, to be as one with his mate. It wasn’t just the sex, she thought with some relief, some sadness. Gerri had been emotionally unavailable, not just sexually unavailable. She couldn’t have gotten through those two years without him and she was unsure how much longer she’d been numbed by loneliness—she was an only child who missed her parents so much. Phil had been completely there for her, but the truth was, she hadn’t been there for him at all. She couldn’t because she was worn-out and empty inside. He might’ve wanted the sex at that time in his life, but what he needed was his partner back, all of her. He wanted to give her all of himself, but she just hadn’t been present.
She wouldn’t ask, but she was sure he couldn’t stand in the bathroom naked with Elizabeth and talk about the stock market, or the carpool schedule, or the op-ed columns. You have to be best friends and lovers. He couldn’t give up the friendship any more than she could. He thought he could fill the gap, but it didn’t work for him.
“God, I’m almost sorry for you,” Gerri said. “Shouldn’t I hate you for taking advantage of our problems?”
“You should probably hate me for hoping he’d find what he was searching for with me. But I guess we were all subject to circumstances we didn’t understand. In my defense, I knew so much about you, yet he never mentioned your parents’ deaths. I don’t think either you or Phil put all those things together, so how could I?” She was becoming a little emotional. “Oh, how I wished I could have what you had—a man that committed. I know,” she said with a wave of her hand, “you could argue he wasn’t that committed, given the events. But he was. Which is why I moved on and you’re trying to put things together.”
“But was he at least good to you?” Gerri asked.
“He’s a remarkable man. I considered him good to me, and then he tried very hard to let me down easy.” She smiled warmly. “In case you’re concerned, he never bought me gifts or—”
“I’m not worried,” Gerri said, suddenly feeling irrationally sorry that Phil hadn’t done anything special for Elizabeth.
“And you’re not going to tell him we met?” Elizabeth asked.
“I’m going to do exactly as Phil has done,” Gerri said. “I’m going to be honest with him. If he asks me, I’ll tell him the truth. But if I know Phil, he won’t ask.” She shook her head and laughed lightly. “This is very bad,” she said. “I think you’re a good person. I think we could be good friends. Of course, it can’t happen. We have to move on, but—”
“But in my life,” Elizabeth said, smiling almost shyly, “I’ve never been paid a higher compliment.”
* * *
Gerri Gilbert always thought the worst thing that could happen to her marriage was an affair, because she and Phil were different from other couples. Their bond went so deep that when friends and acquaintances went through marital rifts, they couldn’t relate. And they’d seen some ugly ones.
One of the first was Andy and Rick. Their split had been both difficult and mystifying. Suddenly, Rick was unhappy. The testy arguments escalated, grew vicious. Gerri and Phil got right in there, got their hands dirty, tried to mediate from positions of professional skills and a solid marriage of their own. It seemed to come down to Rick being unhappy as a married man. He cited Andy as controlling and demanding, which certainly hadn’t been the case until Rick became absent, distant, irritable, uninterested in sex. Gerri and Phil counseled, argued, begged them to get professional help—but it was clearly over. Rick moved out. He filed for divorce. He got engaged to the school nurse.
The stunning clarity of what had really happened hit Gerri almost as hard as it hit Andy—Rick had been unhappy in his marriage because he’d found someone new, someone he liked better. He stopped making love to his wife because another woman had already become his partner. The fights were a ruse, the dissatisfactions and shortcomings were all a spin on the facts. At the end of the day it had all come down to infidelity. In Rick’s case, the other woman won.
“That gutless wonder!” Phil had stormed when he learned the truth. “If he’d been honest for one goddamn second, Andy would have known what she was fighting for! You know—I always knew that whole thing about freedom and space was a crock of shit! Men don’t want space—they want to get laid!”
Was that when Phil decided that if it ever happened to him, he’d tell the truth? Give his marriage a fighting chance?
Now that the facts were in, years later, Rick had no regrets. And Andy was shed of a cheating husband and father who would abandon his own son. The years after Rick had been hard for Andy, but in the end she was finally with a man who loved her unselfishly and embraced with genuine acceptance and affection the boy who was suddenly fatherless. What would Andy say now about regrets?
There had been quite a few other nasty splits. People did unconscionable things to each other. One of Gerri’s coworkers had come home from a business trip to find her house bare and her bank accounts empty, spouse missing. There was a couple in the neighborhood who had
thundering fights and frequent separations, having actually been divorced and remarried to each other twice. Phil worked with a couple of men who had cheated, one had a child with another woman.
Sonja came to Gerri’s mind. Her meltdown brought out an entirely new human being, stronger and healthier than the one before. But it was BJ who tipped the scales to the side of the truly catastrophic. She was the poster child for the worst-case scenario. The best that small family could hope for was survival, coping in the face of tragedy.
Relationships floundered—it was the rule rather than the exception. Some kicked and squirmed and fought right up to the death, some recovered. It was all in what you did, whether you created a break in the rope or a knot to hang on to.
Gerri actually enjoyed her long and revealing lunch with Elizabeth. It was a pity they couldn’t do it again, but they both knew they couldn’t. It would be their one and only meeting. Though she couldn’t think of anything else she wanted to know from Elizabeth, certainly something would come to mind later, and she’d have to let it go. That part of their lives was now complete. Gerri was certain that even if she dropped dead that very evening, Phil wasn’t ever going back to Elizabeth. He’d tried to fill the festering hole inside him, but it hadn’t worked. It hadn’t made him happy. No, if Gerri suddenly fell off the planet, Phil would carry on. But the next woman in his life would not be Elizabeth. Gerri had suffered pretty dramatically for a few months, but she now knew Phil had been torn up about what he’d done for a few years. The meeting with Elizabeth verified it. It wasn’t exactly flattering.
* * *
On her way home, Gerri stopped off to see Joyce Arnold in her clinic.
“What are you doing here?” Joyce asked.
“I’m not sure about the hormones,” Gerri whispered. “Can we talk somewhere private?”
“Sure,” Joyce said, leaving her scheduled patients for a quick consult, leading the way to her office. “What’s up?” she asked, sitting behind her cluttered desk.
“I wonder—is it possible I’m getting too much?”