The Marriage Pact Read online

  Before we have time to talk, Vivian pulls me away. “We have more people to meet,” she insists, guiding me over to where our host Kate is standing. Next to her, on the lawn, a plastic tarp is nailed down with stakes. Kate is toeing the tarp with her shoe, seemingly troubled by it.

  “Do you need help?” I ask.

  “No, no,” she replies, “stupid mushrooms. Just when I had the yard looking so perfect, they popped up today. It’s quite the blemish.”

  “Nonsense,” Vivian says. “Everything looks marvelous.”

  Kate’s still frowning. “I was about to pull them up and toss them into the compost this afternoon when Roger came running out of the house to stop me. Apparently, they’re a rare, poisonous type. Could’ve killed me. Roger would know; he was a botanist before he went into banking. Anyway, we just threw a tarp over it. The guy’s coming on Thursday.”

  “At our farm in Wisconsin when I was a child,” Vivian says, “we had a nine-hundred-pound mushroom. It had grown underground to the size of a truck before we even realized it was there.”

  Vivian doesn’t strike me as a farm girl from Wisconsin. That’s the thing about Silicon Valley. Give anyone a couple of decades here, and the rough edges and distinguishing characteristics of their native states give way to a telltale Northern California glow. “Healthy with a side of stock options,” Alice calls it.

  Kate excuses herself to finish preparing the food, and Vivian ushers me into another group. Roger walks up with a bottle of wine and a fresh glass. “Thirsty?”

  “Yes, please.” I nod. He fills my glass halfway before the bottle runs out. “Hold on,” he says, grabbing an identical bottle from the makeshift bar on the patio table. From his back pocket he pulls out an oval-shaped stainless-steel object, and with a flick of his wrist it is transformed from a strange piece of modern art into a plain corkscrew. “I’ve had this for nearly twenty years,” he says. “Kate and I brought it home from our honeymoon in Hungary.”

  “Adventurous,” Vivian remarks. “Jeremy and I just went to Hawaii.”

  “We were the only tourists around for miles,” Roger says. “I’d taken a month off work, and we rented a car to drive around the country. We were living in New York City then, and Hungary was the least New York thing we could think of. Anyway, we were driving our Lancia outside the town of Eger when we threw a piston and the whole thing froze up. We pushed the car to the side of the road and started to walk. There was a light on in a small house. We knocked on the door. The owner invited us in. Long story short, we spent the next few days in his guesthouse. He had a side business making corkscrews, and he gave us this one as a parting gift.

  “It’s just a simple object,” Roger says, “but I love it. It reminds me of the best time of my life.” I’ve never heard a man talking so wistfully about his honeymoon. It makes me think that maybe this Pact thing is something special.

  The night is a blur. The food is terrific, especially dessert, an impressively large stack of profiteroles; I’m not sure how Kate managed it all on her own. Unfortunately, I’m too nervous to really enjoy it. All night, I keep feeling as though I’m in the midst of one of those unorthodox Silicon Valley job interviews—endless odd questions disguised as small talk, though you know it’s really a well-crafted conversation designed to elicit your very soul.

  On the way home, Alice and I compare notes. I worry that I talked too little and probably bored everyone. Alice worries that she talked too much. She does that when she’s nervous. It’s a dangerous habit that has gotten her into trouble at social events. Winding down the driveway, along the circuitous roads and back onto the freeway, we’re both buzzing with nervous energy. Alice is optimistic, even giddy.

  “I’m looking forward to the next one,” she says.

  And at that moment, I decide not to tell her about my second encounter with JoAnne. It was later in the evening, when everyone had gathered by the fire pit. It seemed to be an organized sharing time, where couples related what gifts they’d given each other and what travel they’d done since the last quarterly party. Uncomfortable and a little bored, I slipped off to the bathroom. After washing my hands and taking a few minutes to gather my wits about me, enjoying the silence after a night of small talk, I opened the door to find JoAnne standing there. At first, I thought that she too had just come upstairs to use the restroom, but then I realized she had followed me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She glanced nervously down the hallway in both directions before whispering, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” I asked, surprised.

  “You shouldn’t be here. I didn’t see your name on the list. The email must have gone out when we were on vacation. I would’ve stopped it, Jake. I could’ve saved you. Now it’s too late. I’m sorry.” She looked up at me with those earthy brown eyes I remembered so well. “Really, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s a nice group,” I said, confused. “Certainly nothing to apologize for.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder and seemed about to say something, but then she just sighed. “You better get back to the others.”

  The day after the party, I arrive home from work to find a heavy box on our front porch. Inside, there’s a case of Hungarian wine and a white card. Welcome, Friends, it reads in gold cursive letters. Looking forward to seeing you again.

  18

  Although we were deep into the Christmas season, Alice was still seriously busy at work. Impressed with the way she attacked the new intellectual property case, the partners had given her additional responsibilities.

  I dove headlong into my own work. Through a contact at his church, Ian had started funneling more marriage counseling clients my way. Most were struggling with the usual things—the arrival of children, an affair, a downturn in financial fortunes.

  It ran about seventy-thirty in terms of those who were headed for divorce, but I was determined to flip the ratio. It had gotten to the point where I could predict the couple’s prospects of marital survival within the first ten minutes. Not to boast, but I’m good at reading people. It’s a gift I have—a natural talent honed by years of practice. Sometimes, I could tell before we even got ourselves situated in my office. The couples who sat on the couch together were still trying to make it work, while those who went for the chairs had already—at least subconsciously—accepted an eventual divorce or separation. Of course, there were other telltale signs: the way they sat, feet turned toward or away from each other, arms open or folded, coats on or off. Each couple sent a hundred little signals about the direction their marriage was headed.

  Winston and Bella—both Asian and in their thirties—were my favorite couple. He was in biopharmaceuticals, and she was an IT professional. They had a good sense of humor about their issues, and for the most part they were mature enough to rise above the petty back-and-forth that had begun to bother me with some of the others. That said, Bella’s breakup with her previous boyfriend, Anders, had bled a little too far into the beginning of her relationship with Winston. This had all happened nearly ten years earlier, but it remained a regular obstacle to their progress. If it weren’t for Winston’s jealousy and insecurities, Bella insisted, she wouldn’t have even thought of Anders at all during the intervening years. Unfortunately, Winston seemed unable to get over the details of their messy start.

  That Thursday, while Bella was in the restroom, Winston asked me if I thought a relationship could overcome a rocky beginning. “Of course,” I said.

  But then Winston asked me, “Didn’t you tell us during our first meeting that the seed of a relationship’s end can always be found in its beginning?”

  “True.”

  “My fear is that the seed was planted during our first month together, when she was still secretly seeing Anders, and now the tree has grown too large to eradicate.”

  “The fact that you’re here means there’s a strong chance of a positive outcome.” I wanted it to be true, but I also knew that Winston, whether he realized it or not, was sti
ll nurturing that seed, watering it, allowing the tree to thrive despite his best intentions. I told him as much.

  “But how do I get past it?” he pleaded. I could tell his heart was breaking. “She still sees Anders for lunch, you know. And she never tells me. I always find out secondhand, from some friend of a friend, and when I ask her about it she gets so defensive. How can I ever trust her, when she proves, every time she meets him in secret, that her past with him is so important it’s worth risking our future?”

  When Bella came back into the room, I decided to confront head-on the seed that had grown into a tree. “Bella,” I said, “why do you think you still maintain a friendship with Anders?”

  “Because I shouldn’t have to give up my friends.”

  “Okay, I see where you’re coming from. But knowing that this continued relationship is having a negative effect on your marriage, would you consider being more open with Winston about it? For example, could you tell Winston when you’re going to have lunch with Anders? Maybe you could even invite him along.”

  “It’s not that simple. If I told him, it would turn into a fight.”

  “When you keep it a secret, that too turns into a fight, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  “Often, if one spouse feels compelled to keep something from the other spouse, there is an underlying reason that goes beyond the deceived spouse’s likely reaction. Can you think of an underlying reason?”

  “There’s just a lot of history,” she conceded. “A lot of baggage. That’s why I don’t tell Winston.”

  I saw Winston’s shoulders drop, I saw Bella’s feet turn away from him, toward the wall, saw her arms cross over her chest—and I realized this was going to be more difficult than I had imagined.

  19

  “Did Vivian call you?” Alice asked over the phone. It was morning, the day before Christmas.

  “No,” I said, distracted. I was at work, going over a patient’s folder, preparing for what promised to be a difficult session. The patient, Dylan, was a bright, often funny fourteen-year-old who’d been struggling with depression. His sadness, and my inability to cure it, weighed heavily on me.

  “She wants to see me for lunch.” Alice sounded agitated. “I told her I’m swamped, but she said it was important, and I didn’t know how to say no, after she was so nice to us at the party and I never sent her a proper thank-you note.”

  I closed the folder, using my index finger to mark the page. “What do you think she wants?”

  “I don’t know. We have reservations for noon at Fog City.”

  “I was hoping you’d be home early.”

  “Doubtful. But I’ll try.”

  When I got home at two, the house was cold, so I made a fire and started wrapping Alice’s Christmas gifts. It was mostly books and albums she’d mentioned over the past few months, and a couple of shirts from her favorite store. Still, I wanted to make them look good. The main item was a silver necklace with a pendant crafted of a single, beautiful black pearl.

  For Alice and me, as for many couples, Christmas plans are tricky. When I was growing up, my family always celebrated in a strange way. When my father came home from work on Christmas Eve, my parents would load us kids into the car, then my dad would disappear inside for a few minutes, claiming to have forgotten his wallet. By the time he came back, my mom would have the radio tuned to Christmas carols, and we’d all be singing along. Then my dad would climb behind the wheel and the search for pizza would begin, on a night when most of the pizza joints were closed. When we got back to our house, Santa would have come. The presents, never wrapped, would be scattered under the tree, and pandemonium would ensue.

  Alice’s childhood Christmases were more traditional. Early to bed on Christmas Eve, cookies left out for Santa, wrapped presents discovered under the tree on Christmas morning, followed by a long service at a Baptist church.

  Our first Christmas together, we decided that it was only fair to split the holiday calendar. On odd years, we would celebrate my way, and on the even years we’d honor Alice’s family traditions. But the nice thing about Alice was that she always conceded to me on the matter of Christmas Eve dinner; she loves pizza just as much as I do. This happened to be an even year, which was why I was wrapping everything.

  I wandered around the house all afternoon, waiting for Alice. I cleaned and watched A Christmas Story. By seven o’clock, Alice still wasn’t home.

  Just as I was becoming a little annoyed that we’d probably missed our chance to get pizza, I heard the garage door open and her car pull in. I heard her shoes on the back stairs and, before I even saw her, I smelled pizza. She was holding a large pepperoni. She even had a few wrapped presents stacked on top of the pizza for me.

  “Those look nice,” I said, noticing the shiny plaid wrapping paper, the intricate green bows, the telltale gold SFMOMA sticker. I imagined that Alice had totally forgotten until this morning that it was Christmas Eve and probably stopped by the museum store on her way to lunch.

  As Alice opened the pizza box and slid a slice onto my plate, I noticed that she was wearing a cuff bracelet that I hadn’t seen before. It was modern, silver, some sort of hard molded plastic or maybe aluminum or fiberglass. It was two inches wide and very snug. I didn’t see a clasp, or even how it was attached, or more important, how it might be detached. It was a cool piece of jewelry, but I was surprised that she would have bothered to shop for herself with everything she had going on.

  “Nice bracelet,” I said. “MOMA?”

  “Nope,” she said, folding her pizza in half lengthwise. “Gift.”

  “From whom?” My first thought was that guy at her firm’s party, Derek Snow, the one with the curly hair.

  “From our friend Vivian.”

  “Oh,” I said, relieved, “that was nice of her.”

  “No, not really.”

  “What?”

  She took a moment to eat her pizza. “Lunch was weird. Beyond weird. I’m not even supposed to talk about it—I don’t want to get you into trouble.”

  That made me laugh. “Vivian is hardly the Gestapo. I’m sure I’ll be fine. What did she say?”

  Alice frowned, fidgeting with her new bracelet. “Apparently, at the party, I really did talk too much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Vivian said that someone at the party had concerns about me. They were worried that I am not as focused on our marriage as I should be. They filed something with The Pact.”

  I stopped midchew. “Filed something? What does that mean?”

  “A friend-of-the-court brief.” Alice was twisting the bracelet. “Basically, somebody ratted me out—wrote some complaint and sent it in.”

  “In where?” I asked, incredulous.

  “To ‘headquarters,’ whatever that means.”

  “What? Surely it’s a joke.”

  Alice shook her head. “That’s what I thought at first, that Vivian was just having a laugh at my expense. But it wasn’t a joke. The Pact has a court that decides matters among members, even meting out fines and punishments.”

  “Punishments? For real? I assumed that part of The Manual was just symbolic.”

  “Apparently not. They use all of the jargon and methods of the regular court.”

  “But who would tattle on you?”

  “I don’t know. It’s anonymous. Vivian pointed out that if I’d read the entire manual, I would understand. Everyone in the group is responsible to report anything of concern that might reflect negatively on another member and their marriage. She kept saying that the person filed it ‘because they are our friends.’ ”

  “But who do you think it was?”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated. “I keep thinking of this one conversation I had. The guy with the French accent.”

  “Guy?”

  “Yes, I can’t recall his name.”

  “No, that is his name,” I clarified. “Guy. His wife was Elodie. He’s an attorney. International law. Elodie i
s a vice something at the French consulate.”

  “Exactly. He kept asking questions about my firm, my cases, the workload. I remember going on and on about all the hours I’d been working, and how I hadn’t been sleeping. He gave me a disapproving look when I mentioned that we often don’t sit down to eat dinner until super-late. It caught me off guard. He’s a lawyer—how could he not work those hours sometimes?”

  Alice was pale. I could tell she was exhausted from too little sleep and too much work. I put another slice of pizza on her plate and nudged it toward her. “This is weird, right?”

  “The friend-of-the-court brief said that they liked both of us, that we both seemed committed to our marriage, but they were concerned that I spend too much of my energy and time on my work. According to Vivian, it’s a common issue.”

  “I hope you told her it’s nobody’s business how much you work.”

  But from the look on Alice’s face, I could tell she didn’t say any such thing. “Vivian brought her copy of The Manual, and she’d bookmarked the page. Apparently, I might be headed toward a violation of Section 3.7.65, Primacy of Focus. The complaint wasn’t that I had violated any of the rules, but the informant was concerned that if there was no intervention, I’d be likely to commit such a violation in the future.”

  “Informant? Jesus! I take back what I said about the Gestapo.”

  But then I realized that something else was bothering me—the calmness in Alice’s expression, the resigned and nonchalant way she relayed all of this to me. “You don’t seem angry,” I said. “How can you not be angry?”

  Alice touched the bracelet again. “To be honest, I guess I’m intrigued. All that stuff about The Manual, Jake, they take it very seriously. I need to reread it.”

  “So what’s the penalty, then? A nice lunch with Vivian? I guess it could be worse.”

  Alice held up her arm, drawing my attention to the bracelet. “This is the penalty.”

  “I don’t get it,” I insisted.

  “Vivian said that headquarters had decided I was a candidate for further observation.”