Who Do You Love(109)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

“Sorry if I’m interrupting,” I said. Then I looked down and saw that his dinner companion was Amy, unrecognizable out of her work uniform of a crisp white shirt and trousers.

“Oh, thank God!” Weak with relief, I almost collapsed into the third chair that a waiter had whisked over. “Do you know that for ten seconds I thought Jay was having an affair?”

Jay just stared at me, mouth open, eyes bulging slightly, like a fish. Amy bent her head, staring down at the gold-rimmed charger. And then I knew. “Oh,” I said, feeling so faint that if I hadn’t been sitting I would have collapsed. “Oh, no.”

I should have noticed, I told myself when I was in a cab, heading home alone. In September, when Delaney had started full-day kindergarten, we’d cut back our sitter’s hours, and had a little more money and a little more free time. Jay joined a gym and began exercising five days a week, after he’d walked the girls to school. In a depressingly short amount of time he’d shed twenty pounds and an absurd percentage of his body fat. He bought a fancy bike with a titanium frame and joined a cycling club, coming home late three nights a week freshly showered, glowing with exertion and good cheer. He’d hoist Delaney up over his head as she shrieked in mock terror, and listen patiently to Adele’s lengthy recounting of her day at school, and who’d snubbed her in the lunchroom. I hadn’t paid much attention when he’d bought new suits and shirts and even new ­underpants—boxer-briefs, Calvin Klein, not the stodgy baggy cotton boxer shorts that I’d been getting him for years. He was thinner; of course he’d needed new clothes, and if he wanted to buy them instead of texting me a shopping list, that was just fine.

Three months went by; three months of me noticing nothing. Three months of doing the laundry and helping with homework and making beds and making dinner; three months of doing the dishes and sweeping the floors, so busy that it didn’t seem to matter that Jay and I hadn’t really kissed, let alone said “I love you,” in a long time and that when we had sex it was predictable and fast. We’d send each other texts during the day, mostly about the girls’ schedules or whether we’d left money for the cleaning lady, and adding an ILY to the message seemed meaningless, like a waste of time. When we finally did get to bed, we were both too exhausted to even touch each other. Sleep was all we longed for; the voluptuous embrace of linen and down the only touch we craved.

Amy and Jay. Of course we’d all spent time together over the years—Amy and her husband had been guests at the girls’ naming ceremonies, and at every one of their birthday parties, and we’d gone to their house for the elaborate feasts that Leonard would prepare after he took up cooking as a hobby. There’d been impromptu get-togethers, summer afternoons in our little backyard, where we’d downed pitchers of sangria and watched the girls run through the sprinklers as Jay tried manfully to light the grill—but, as far as I knew, Jay and Amy had never had much of a connection. They’d dated for just six weeks in college, and Jay had been typically vague when I’d asked why they’d ended things. “She’s a little pushy,” he’d say, and all my boss ever said about my husband was “He’s a great guy.”

“We never meant for this to happen,” Amy finally managed.

“Few do,” I said. Then Jay had stammered out some nonsense about how now he finally knew what people meant when they talked about soul mates, the coup de foudre, except his French accent was so terrible that I didn’t know what he was talking about and made him repeat it twice. Soul mates! Had I ever imagined my sensible, lawyerly husband, with his monogrammed briefcase and receding hairline, using a phrase like that?

“Could you excuse us for a moment?” I asked Amy politely. “I need to speak to my husband alone.”

She’d at least had the grace to look pained by the word husband as she’d slunk toward the door. I took the seat she’d left empty—metaphor!—and stared at my husband, whose brow was furrowed and eyes were soft, like some director had told him, “Do contrition,” and he was trying his very hardest to look sorry.

“Why?” I asked him. Waiters passed the table, bearing trays of delicious-smelling dinners. Somewhere in the restaurant, I could hear people singing “Happy Birthday.” Outside, it had started to rain.

Jay sighed. It was the same sigh I’d heard thousands of times during our marriage, a sigh as familiar to me as my own. Then I watched his face transform, lighting up like someone had lit a match inside a carved pumpkin. His eyes were shining as he described his beloved. “I’m not saying this to hurt you, but I want to be honest. What I feel with Amy, that’s what love is supposed to be. Real love.”