Read Outtakes from a Marriage for Free Online Page A

previous problems with other charities) and offered a set visit instead, I received a gracious thank-you note from one of the auction organizers. But I knew Elaine was miffed, because there were very few bids on it that year at the auction. A parent whose husband’s status as a billionaire had earned them the privilege of being seated at Elaine’s table told me that Elaine had sniped, “This is New York, not Peoria! Who would pay money to walk around a television set all day?”
             
    School starts at eight-thirty at Multi, and Sammy and I, true to form, left our building at eight-forty that Thursday morning after the dinner with the Metzgers. Sammy’s teacher was “concerned” about tardiness. She told me that she had noticed a certain “fragility” when some children arrived at the classroom setting later than the others. It took them longer to begin to focus on their “work.” To me, the kids looked no more or less fragile at eight-thirty than they did at nine o’clock. “They’re four-year-olds,” my one Multi friend, Jennifer Weiss, always scoffed. “Give me a break.”
    When we turned onto the school block, Sammy wriggled his hand from my grasp and ran for the building’s front door.
    “Wait, Sammy,” I called, breaking into a little jog. Ruby had always hated leaving me to go to school when she was young. Separation anxiety, her teacher had called it. “Totally normal,” she had said as I peeled my weeping daughter from my knees every morning. Sammy was different. He liked to separate.
    “Wait, Sammy,” I called again, but the wind was blowing and Sammy had his hat pulled tight down over his ears. “Wait,” I said, my eyes inexplicably filling with tears. I watched my son run up the steps to the brick-faced schoolhouse. “Wait, Sammy,” I called, one last time, trotting after him, but I was calling into the wind and he was already gone.

[ four ]
    J ust calm down,” said Beth. “I think you might be making a big deal about nothing.”
    Beth and I were sitting at a window table in Starbucks where the morning sun was streaming fierce and blinding through the grimy plate-glass window. We both wore sunglasses and sat facing out toward Broadway. I didn’t think I was making a big deal. It didn’t even look like I had been crying. Beth didn’t even know I had been crying.
    Beth wore a gray wool skirt, skinny black boots, and a long black trench coat that would have looked frumpy and staid on me but made her look like she was going off to snub Humphrey Bogart someplace. I wore sweats and those hideous, shapeless tan winter boots that were trendy several years ago. “Fug Boots” Beth called them. Even when supermodels wore those boots, Beth wouldn’t have been caught dead in them. “They look like they were designed to be worn on paws, not feet,” she had scoffed the first time she saw me wearing mine. Today, though, she wasn’t looking at my clothes. She was staring out the window, shaking her head slowly, trying to sort it all out in her mind.
    “Start over. Tell me everything,” she said. “Tell me everything again.”
    “All right, but first promise you won’t say anything to Alison.”
    “I already said I wouldn’t.”
    “Promise, though.”
    “I promise. Now tell me everything about the message from the beginning.”
    “Well, it began with the thing about her being happy. She said, ‘Of course I’m happy, you know I am,’ like he had asked her if she was happy.”
    “So what do you think she could be so happy about?”
    “Who knows. Maybe it’s the first time they’ve talked since his nomination. He’s been with us almost nonstop over the holidays. Maybe it’s the first time he got a chance to ask her if she was happy that he was nominated.”
    “But why would he ask her if she was happy about
his
nomination?”
    I peered over my sunglasses at Beth. She had known Joe for twenty years. She was always the one who felt compelled to say to him, in