“I don’t know. What do you say in situations like this?” This had never happened to her before.
“Maybe as little as possible until we figure it out ourselves.”
“It sounds like you already have,” she said in a dead voice.
“I told you, it was a mistake.” But he didn’t sound sorry. He was oddly matter-of-fact, even relieved.
“But you continued it anyway. Are you willing to end it?” she asked him about the affair. That was the key question. Would he give the woman up to save their marriage? It didn’t sound like it.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I wanted to several times, but the time never seemed right. I need to figure it out,” he said sadly when he saw the look in Eileen’s eyes. She looked broken in half by what he was doing to her. He felt better being honest now. Living a lie had been killing him. Now he felt free to make some decisions and some moves, no matter how painful it might be for both of them in the end. He was tired of living a lie, torn between two women and two lives. “Could you hold off telling the kids about her until I know what I’m doing?” It was a lot to ask, but she was an honorable woman, and he trusted her not to try and destroy his relationship with his children. She wouldn’t do that.
“It depends what they ask me. I don’t want to lie to them.” He nodded and walked out of the office, without trying to go near her. He turned and looked at her again. “I’m sorry,” was all he said, and then he hurried down the stairs and opened the front door. She heard him drive away a few minutes later, without saying goodbye to his children. He had left her to explain his disappearance.
She walked into their bedroom and lay down on their bed and stared up at the ceiling. She had no idea where to go from here, or what would happen next. She wondered what the other woman looked like and who she was. He was obviously in love with her if he was willing to leave their home for her. She had no idea if Paul would ever come back, or if she even wanted him to. She was still lying there when Pennie came to ask her a question an hour later and was surprised to find her lying down.
“Are you sick, Mom?” she asked, worried. Eileen never lay down except to go to sleep at night.
“No, just resting,” she said, sat up, and swung her legs over the side of the bed.
“Where’s Dad?”
“He had to go back to the city.”
Pennie nodded, and handed her the draft of an essay for an application. “Could you read this for me and tell me what you think?”
“Sure.”
All the children had plans for dinner that night, and she was grateful that she’d be alone to absorb what had happened. She had a lot to think about. None of it seemed real. She wondered if she should have demanded to know the woman’s identity, but it was obvious Paul wasn’t going to tell her and she was too stunned to force the issue. She shuffled around the house after that, with no idea what she was doing, until they left. Her life had become a shambles in an instant, and she had to try and make sense of it. Not only did she have to figure out who he was, but she had to figure out who she was, without him. What if he never came back? And did she want him now? She didn’t know the answer to that either. His departure had seemed so unemotional and so bloodless. But maybe there was no blood left in the marriage. Maybe it had been dead for years and she hadn’t noticed. She felt dead as she walked back up the stairs to her bedroom, trying not to wonder about where he was, and who he was with. He was a ghost in her life now, and she felt like one too.
* * *
—
Olivia Page was a beautiful, fiery, petite redhead, with long, luscious curly hair, big green eyes, full of energy and always in motion. She had a constant flow of exciting ideas. She was twenty-seven years old and had just started her own business. She had established an art gallery online that everyone was talking about. She represented a number of important artists, and lesser ones, and she had the connections to sell to major clients. She had worked in the contemporary art department at Christie’s after she’d graduated from Yale, with a major in fine arts and a minor in art history. She had left Christie’s after a year to work for a well-known gallery, and had now just started her own business.
She was the daughter of a famous Hollywood producer who had died when she was seven. He had been thirty years older than her mother, and he had been Olivia’s hero until his death and long after. He was a Hollywood legend, and so was her mother, Gwen Waters. She was a major Hollywood actress, winner of two Academy Awards. She had made a slew of well-known movies, although recently she’d been working less. Olivia worshipped her mother, but she didn’t envy her career. Olivia had no interest in Hollywood. The art world was her passion, and it seemed a better choice to her. Her mother was currently suffering from a lack of roles for women in their fifties, no matter how big a star she was.
She was both her parents’ only child, although her mother had been married several times. She and Olivia’s father had divorced before he died, but remained close, and her father had left his entire fortune to Olivia. She had a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue that looked like a Hollywood movie set, filled with the kind of art she sold. She had two Picassos in the living room, and a Jackson Pollock in the dining room that she had inherited from her father, and an entire wall of Andy Warhols of her mother in various hues and poses early in her career. Olivia had met countless famous people because of who her mother was, but she managed to be a real person in spite of it. She was honest and straightforward and outspoken, and had all the confidence of beauty, youth, brains, and famous parents. She was fearless and exciting and her taste in men leaned to those old enough to be her father, probably because hers had died when she was seven. She always said that men her age bored her.
The doorman buzzed her to tell her that Mr. Jackson was on his way up. She opened the door and Paul came out of the elevator looking beaten, but he came alive the moment he saw her. He felt reborn whenever he was with her. She made him feel young and daring, infused with her energy and youth. They had met in May at an event given by one of his clients at the agency, and they had been attracted to each other immediately. She didn’t mind the fact that he was fourteen years older, which was younger than many men she had dated, or even that he was married. He told her that his marriage had been dead for years, and they just went through the motions for their kids. She had believed him, and didn’t like the fact that he was still more engaged in it than he had led her to believe in the beginning. She felt sorry for him when his seventeen-year-old daughter told him she was pregnant. But she expected him to get out of his marriage as he had said he would. She loved older men, but not married ones. She’d made an exception for him. Their affair had gone on for five months, and she wasn’t going to wait much longer. The role of the other woman in the shadows didn’t suit her. The sex between them was fabulous, but she wasn’t going to stay with him forever if he stayed married, and he knew it. Knowing how she felt about it had been putting tremendous pressure on him to figure things out.