live with the big kahuna of facetious.”
“I sense you’re not taking me seriously.”
“What was your first clue?”
“You don’t think I can leave New York, do you?”
“Honey, you’ve spent most of your life living in a ten-block radius. Being one of the Bayside Boys defines you. Nothing wrong with that.”
“I could leave, you know.” He turned away from me, staring at the television screen. “I’d do it for the kids. To be around for them. I mean, years down the road, do we want them in therapy talking about how their old man was never around? When the girls are sixteen they’ll be dating men in their thirties, searching for a father figure. And Dylan…You know, last time I was home I caught him playing with your blush.”
“My Estée Lauder? I’ve been looking all over for that.”
“Is that the kind of son we’re raising?”
“Blush without foundation? Appalling!”
“Rubes, you know what I’m saying.” He tucked the blanket around my feet and reached for my left hand. “I’ve been thinking about this, really. With my job, and traveling, well, I don’t want to screw the kids up. I could leave New York if it meant something better for the kids, for our family.”
I swallowed back a giggle, trying to take him seriously. “Honey, it’s too late for that. Between the two of us I’m sure we’ve already screwed those kids up for life. Damage done. Moving now isn’t going to change that.” And he was full of shit if he thought he could leave the Big Apple behind. Jack wouldn’t be Jack without his New York persona, and as for me, I couldn’t imagine leaving New York and relocating to some godforsaken place like…Texas. I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes, giving myself a second to imagine driving around in a shiny minivan with a Texas license plate, my skin tanned, fingernails manicured, my kids answering a polite but twangy “yes, ma’am!” when I yelled at them to pick up their dirty clothes. An odd fantasy, but it wasn’t me. Partly because I doubted my kids would ever pick up their clothes; I’d started warning the girls that they’d better pursue big-money careers so they could afford a housecleaning staff. And more to the point, I couldn’t imagine living in a foreign land like Texas or Wyoming. Leaving noisy, cantankerous, pricey New York was out of the question. “Look,” I said, “this place might be a looney bin, but it’s home.”
“Isn’t home anyplace we’re together?” he asked.
“That is just so sweet!” I gushed, squeezing his hand. “Sweet, but I’m not biting.”
He shook his head and sighed. “This is what I get for marrying a woman who’s smarter than I am.”
I moved the tips of my toes along the top of his thigh. “Flattery will get you nowhere. I’m too tired for reunion sex.”
“You can’t be too tired for reunion sex.” He grinned, a winning smile with straight, square teeth that I can only pray our children will inherit when their permanent teeth come in. “That’s against the rules. There’s no crying in baseball, and no calling off reunion sex.”
Reunion sex had begun as one of those spontaneous “Gee, honey, I’m glad to see ya!” things and quickly solidified itself as a ritual. Not to be outdone by make-up sex, birthday sex or your-mom’s-got-the-kids-overnight sex. I was, indeed, glad to have Jack home, but I’d been up late last night dealing with Becca’s tearful insomnia, then Dylan had wrenched me from sleep twice with pain in his jaws that was either teething or a new ear infection or both. “I’d like to, but I feel like my body was hit by a Mack truck,” I said in a fuzzy voice.
“Come on, Rubes. You’re the Can Do! girl.”
“I’m afraid my Can Do! is all done.”
“Maybe I can help.” He separated my legs at the ankles and leaned in between, massaging my inner thighs under the blanket.
I let out a muffled whoop as his hands moved up my legs. “That tickles.” I caught his hands under the blanket, clamping down. “And you know it’s been crazy around here with me trying to finish my book and write more of Chocolate, and Dylan being sick and Oscar going psycho.” I didn’t mention the fact that I’d had to cancel on Gracie twice, how I’d missed seeing Wicked with Harrison when two free tickets landed in his lap. I didn’t mention the pressure I was feeling to get onboard for Christmas. When I wasn’t stressed out it was one of my favorite times of year. I enjoyed all the trimmings, the decorated cookies, the familiar carols, the sparkling lights and packages wrapped in gold with fat bows. The spirit of the season made New Yorkers a little nicer, a little less likely to steal your cab or lunge for that last seat on a subway train. The kids had forced me to pull the boxes of bulbs and lights from the cobwebs of the crawl space in my closet, but we had saved the tree-buying ritual for Jack. “Give me a few days and we can combine it with Under-the-Tree sex. We’ve got to get a tree up, Jack.”
“You can’t combine two events.” He leaned back. “I call foul.”
I felt tempted to reply that right now there was nothing fouler than his wife who hadn’t managed to squeeze a shower into her schedule that morning, but I wanted to defer the mood, not kill it. Tomorrow I would shower and exfoliate. At the moment, nothing could beat the irresistible lure of sliding under the comforter and burrowing my face into my pillow.
“The rain date is tomorrow,” I said, thinking that I’d even slip on that red bustier that Jack so enjoyed peeling off. I pushed off the blanket, slid my feet down to the floor, leaned over and kissed my husband’s beautiful hard jaw. “Good to have you back, Jack. Are you coming to bed?”
He reached for the remote. “I’m still on Texas time. Do you want me to do the morning run?”
Meaning, get up at seven, corral the kids out of bed for breakfast. Pack the girls’ lunches, get them dressed and out the door. Although Jack had spent the entire evening with the kids, the morning run usually belonged to him. “That would be heaven,” I said without a trace of guilt. Hey, I’d been doing the single-parent thing for the past two weeks.
I dragged myself up the stairs, heading for my stash of PM Sleep in the bathroom medicine cabinet and fantasizing about the warm glow of a good solid seven hours. If Dylan woke up, Jack would hear him.
My honey was home; I could dance in a field of poppies. Deedle-deedle-dee!
4
Tidings of Conflict and Joy
The first twenty minutes of Jack’s company Christmas party reminded me of the receiving line of a wedding. As Jack called out names and shared warm shoulder claps with his colleagues, I was stuck as the outsider waiting to be introduced, smiling, nodding. How do you do? Nice to meet you. Heard so much about you. It’s a little worse for women because some men don’t think it appropriate to shake a woman’s hand—especially a woman like me, the accessory, the wife of a corporate cheese. I hate that.
As if it isn’t bad enough that I have to suck it all up and play Mrs. Jack. I don’t know why, but somehow Jack’s professional life sops up the bulk of our conversation, while mine is never discussed. Not that Jack doesn’t value what I do; often he’ll step up behind me while I’m whaling away on the keyboard and shake his head, saying: “I don’t know how you do that, pull a story out of the air.” I’ve given up explaining to him that it starts with an idea, then moves onto a three-page concept that gets banged out into a chapter-by-chapter outline that is the blueprint for each book. Each stage is reviewed by my editor, who guides me along the way, so I never experience that feeling of alienation or loss of direction, never that artistic panic of jumping off a cliff: “Here goes!” But writing is just that thing that I do. Jack’s job at Corstar, well, it’s like the path of our family’s starship, the great shaman that sustains and guides our spirits.
With Jack’s networking and the line for the coat check, we still hadn’t gotten past the lobby of the Gorham Hotel,