Lisa rolled over on her side, propping her head up. “So, am I your first?”
Anton looked at her quizzically.
“I mean, stepping out on Gwen.”
He rolled onto his back, looked at the ceiling, and sighed. “No. But I haven’t done anything like this in a long time.”
Lisa winced. His words hurt. It wasn’t jealousy, not exactly. She didn’t feel possessive about Anton. But she wanted to be special enough that he had crossed a line just for her. It wasn’t a win for her if his marital vows meant nothing to him and he was a serial cheater. She wanted the pain Gwen would feel to be fresh.
She stared at a painting on the wall, an abstract swirl of blue and cream that looked like a first grader could have made, but knowing Gwen, probably cost thousands, and waited for the sick feeling to pass. It felt like a black hole had opened in her soul. The same gnawing emptiness she had felt in college, when Ruth pulled away, made new friends. Lisa had acted rashly then. She had seduced Ruth’s boyfriend one night when he stopped by the room, drunk, looking for Ruth, who was out at the movies. Lisa had done itforRuth, to show what an asshole her boyfriend was. It was obvious he would screw anything that moved. And yes, a part of her did it so Ruth could taste the poison she had forced Lisa to drink—abandonment. It was the worst feeling in the world.
What she hadn’t foreseen was that Ruth would not just end the friendship but move out of the dorm room they shared. Coming back to the room and seeing Ruth’s things gone, her bed stripped, her poster that listed all of Jane Austen’s books taken down, had activated something in her.
She’d always been prone to rage-tinged loneliness—like when her father left when she was in preschool, or when her mother doted on her younger brothers while turning her into an unpaid servant, making Lisa iron their school uniforms. It arose when girls didn’t invite her to sit with them in the cafeteria, or to come to their parties. It braided itself alongside the shame she felt when the boys she let touch her pretended not to know her when they passed her in the school hallways.
That feeling had soured into something very ugly with Ruth. She had tracked Ruth down in her new dorm room, and, feral with vengeance, had banged on the door, screaming to be let in. The fire she had set outside Ruth’s door was small, but it was enough to set off the sprinklers. Ruth had barricaded herself inside and called campus security.
The police, the lawyer, the quiet transfer out of the school. It had all been so humiliating.
If she wanted to succeed this time, she needed to keep her emotions under control. Lisa reached out a hand and laid it on Anton, twirling her fingers through the curls on his chest. “What would Gwen do if she found out?”
Anton let out a low whistle. “I don’t even want to think about it. That would be the end. I promised I would never do something like this again, and I kept that promise, I really did.”
“Until I came along?”
He turned to face her and smiled. “Until you came along.”
A warm feeling spread in her chest, the feeling of being wanted and desired. Was there any better feeling in the world? This man was willing to risk his wife’s wrath, his standing in this neighborhood, his relationship with his children, all to be withher. His validation made her as giddy as when she crested the top of the Galaxi rollercoaster for the first time when she was twelve.
“Well then,” she said, giggling, “we’ll have to be very, very careful, won’t we?”
Tuesdays and Thursdays became the highlights of the following weeks. She had long grown tired of listening to her coaching clients complain about their lives and had winnowed down her roster to about a half-dozen people. They paid several hundred dollars a phone session, but she had begun to feel like one of those therapists whose patients never make any improvement year after year. She knew she could get more certifications, segue into corporate coaching—there was real money there—but she couldn’t be bothered. Marcus was making so much money now, it was highly demotivating.
Her real passion became getting even with Gwen.
An unexpected side effect of sleeping with Anton was that being around Gwen became more tolerable, fun, even.
Those long games of Pitch, which used to bore Lisa, now thrilled her. Instead of focusing on the cards, her attention was on how she might slip her stockinged foot out of her shoe and rub it up and down Anton’s inner thigh without anyone else noticing.
It was a challenge to keep herself from laughing out loud when he shifted in his seat and closed his eyes in ecstasy while everyone else droned on about the card game or neighborhood gossip.
The clandestine aspect was exciting, but the real kick was knowing how it would destroy Gwen. Having an enemy was like drinking from the fountain of youth. Enemies, after all, were a hallmark of childhood. She remembered how classmates would flit from friend to enemy and back again, sometimes the result of a slow cooling, other times suddenly after a nasty cutting remark.
But most adults didn’t have enemies, did they? And why not? There was something so clarifying about it. Sure, countries hadenemies, and so did characters in books and movies. But not individuals, at least not people like her, not upper-middle-class women who drove BMWs and had their roots done every six weeks.
But it energized her.
She found it easier to fake being nice to Gwen now that she knew intimate details about her life. Anton was terrible at keeping secrets. He told her about Gwen’s college battle with bulimia, how she bombed in her creative writing class and was excluded from the social clique of wannabe writers at her college, so she turned to public relations. She made him recount every rejection, hurt, or failure that Gwen had endured, and she held them tight, turning them over in her mind at night in the dark, like little luminescent stones. Knowing Gwen’s perfect façade was an act bolstered her own self-worth.
Anton also started telling her about his marriage problems, how Gwen controlled the finances, poring over every purchase, and how a monthly infusion of cash from her parents was what kept the family going.
In the spring, he became incensed about Scott’s new grill, which Aimee bought him for Father’s Day. At first, Lisa had thought he was joking, but the subject made him furious. Gwen had overridden a grill on safety grounds.We don’t need our own.He recounted her words to Lisa, mocking her.You don’t even like to cook.
“Why should Scott get a grill and I don’t? He doesn’t cook, either. He just wants to flaunt his wealth.”
Anton reminded her of a petulant child, a little boy, irrationally angry when someone else received birthday gifts.
She loved when he was like this. Nasty and petty. She enjoyed nourishing his hate toward others. It made her feel as though they were a team, united against the world. Marcus exhausted her with his self-help optimism and positive psychology. The only person Lisa wouldn’t let Anton criticize was Aimee. Shewas off-limits. Sometimes after they had sex in his and Gwen’s bed, Lisa would go into the bathroom and lock the door, taking in the luxury of it. A soaking tub, a separate shower, a door that led to an outside deck. She and Marcus had never gotten around to updating their bathroom, which still had the original seafoam-green tiles from the 1930s. Even Gwen’s medicine cabinet was Instagram-ready, with dust-free mirrored shelves laden with only a few bespoke glass bottles that Lisa knew cost a fortune.