The Marriage Pact Page 8

  Finally, it dawned on me what she was saying. I reached for Alice’s hand, taking a closer look at the bracelet. It was warm and smooth to the touch. When I looked closely, I saw that the underside had a ring of tiny green lights embedded in the plastic, tracing a circle around Alice’s wrist. On the front, where the face of a watch would be, was an arrangement of tiny holes in the shape of the letter P. “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “No.” She seemed so calm, almost content. I realized that she hadn’t mentioned work even once since she got home, except in the context of The Pact’s concern that she was devoting too much time to it.

  “How do you take it off?”

  “I don’t. Vivian said we would meet again in two weeks. Most likely it can come off then.”

  “What does it do, Alice?”

  “Don’t know. It monitors me somehow. Vivian said it’s an opportunity for me to prove how focused I am on our marriage.”

  “GPS? Audio monitoring? Video? Christ! What do they mean, exactly, by monitoring?”

  “Not video,” Alice said. “She was clear about that. But GPS, yes, and maybe audio too. Vivian said she’d never worn one and that she wasn’t certain what happens to it once it’s removed. The instructions she received were simply to put the bracelet on me, explain why I was wearing it, and then remove and return it to headquarters after fourteen days.”

  I fiddled with the bracelet but couldn’t figure out a way to get it off.

  “Don’t bother,” Alice said. “There’s a key. Vivian has it.”

  “Call her,” I said angrily. “Tonight. I don’t care if it’s Christmas Eve. Tell her it has to come off. This is absurd.”

  But then Alice surprised me. She rubbed her fingers lightly across the bracelet. “Do you think I’m too focused on work?”

  “Everyone’s focused on work. You wouldn’t be a good lawyer if you weren’t. Just like I wouldn’t be a good therapist if I didn’t focus on work.” But even as I said it, I did a quick calculation in my mind of the hours I’d worked that week versus the hours Alice had worked. I thought about how many times I hadn’t made it home for dinner since we’d been married—exactly zero times—and how many times Alice hadn’t made it home for dinner: I’d lost count. I thought about her early mornings in the kitchen, going over cases and making calls to the East Coast while I was still in bed. I thought about how, during those increasingly rare moments when we were alone together, she was always glancing at her phone, always somewhere else. Whatever observations were made by the informant at the party, they weren’t entirely wrong.

  “I guess what I’m saying is, I want to try this,” Alice said. “I want our marriage to work, and I want to try out The Pact, and if this is part of it I’m willing to go there.” She gripped my hand tightly. “Are you?”

  I looked into her eyes, searching for some sign that she was just performing for the bracelet. But there was no such indication. If there’s one thing I know about my wife, it’s that she’s always up for something new, always keen for the next great experiment in health or science or social engineering. Having survived her dysfunctional family, she believes she can survive just about anything. She even applied to go to Mars, back when Elon Musk put out the call for layperson explorers to take the first manned spaceship. Thank God they didn’t pick her, but the point is, she made her audition video, filled out the paperwork, and actually applied to get her ass off Earth and into space and quite possibly die in the process. That’s just how she is. One thing I love about Alice is that she’s so insanely open to new experiences. Risk doesn’t scare her; it excites her. The Pact is weird, sure, but compared to a one-way ticket to Mars, how scary could it be?

  That night, in the bedroom, on our large, high bed with its small but beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean, Alice and I made love. She moved with an intensity of passion and desire that, to be honest, I hadn’t seen in a while, though neither of us said a word before or after. It was really amazing.

  Later, after she’d fallen asleep, I lay awake, unable to shut off my brain. Was the performance for the bracelet or for me? Nonetheless, I felt grateful—for our marriage, for Alice, and even for this strange new thing we’d gotten ourselves involved in. This Pact seemed to be doing exactly what it was designed to do: bring us closer.

  20

  Christmas and the days that followed were oddly blissful. My partners and I had shut down the office for the week. It was something of an acknowledgment of the difficult but very successful year we had enjoyed.

  We had expanded our visibility and improved our bottom line. In August, we completed the purchase of our building, a charming two-bedroom Victorian that had been turned into commercial space. Our practice had somehow managed to get over the hump and now seemed to be here to stay.

  Five days after Christmas, however, my good luck streak came to an end. At five-thirty in the morning, I woke to find Alice standing beside the bed, holding my phone. She wore a towel knotted at her chest, a smaller towel wrapped turban-style around her head. She smelled like lemons and vanilla, this lotion she wore that she knew drove me crazy. I desperately wanted to pull her into bed with me, but the alarmed look on her face told me that wasn’t going to happen. “It rang four times, so I answered,” she said. “There’s a problem.”

  As I reached for the phone, I ran through my client list in my mind, bracing for news.

  “Jake?”

  It was the mother of a girl from my Tuesday group—teenagers whose parents had recently divorced or were in the process of doing so. The woman was talking so fast that I didn’t get her name or her kid’s name. Her daughter had run away, she said. Without asking her name again, I quickly tried to figure out who it was. The previous week I had six teenagers in the group. Three girls, three boys. I immediately eliminated Emily, a sixteen-year-old who’d been coming to the meetings for a year and was about to quit, feeling that she’d finally come to terms with her parents’ divorce. Mandy seemed unlikely too—she was looking forward to a ski week trip to Park City to help her father with his charity. That left Isobel, who was really shaken up about her parents’ recent divorce. I worried that our week off for Christmas would affect her the most, after Dylan.

  “Have you spoken with your husband?” I asked.

  “Yes. She was supposed to take the Muni train to his place yesterday, but she never arrived,” the woman said frantically. “We didn’t realize it until this morning—my husband thought Isobel was with me. Have you heard from her?” Her voice was shaky with hope.

  “I’m sorry, I haven’t.”

  “We’ve left a hundred messages and texts.”

  “Would you mind if I call her?”

  “Please do.”

  The mother gave me Isobel’s cell number, as well as her email address, Twitter handle, and Snapchat name. I was impressed that she knew so much about her daughter’s social media presence; most parents don’t, even though social media is where a lot of kids face the most trouble. Isobel’s mother told me they had already called the police but were informed that, at Isobel’s age, she needed to be gone for twenty-four hours before they could open an investigation. Alice stood by the bed the whole time, in her flimsy towel and her turbaned head. When I hung up, she wanted to hear the story.

  “Do you think she’s in trouble?” Alice asked, pulling her serious blue suit out of the closet.

  “Isobel has a head on her shoulders,” I said. “She probably just spent the night with a friend. She’s angry with her parents right now. She told me that she needed time away from their immature behavior.”

  Alice stepped into her skirt. “She said that?”

  I nodded.

  “Yikes. Did you tell the parents?”

  “No. Patient-client confidentiality. But I told her not to do anything stupid. I said even if her parents have been acting like kids, they love her and have been pretty good parents, and they deserve to always know where she is.”

  Alice slipped a camisole over her head. “Doesn’t
really sound like you got through to her.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No offense,” Alice said, pulling on her navy blue tights, shimmying them up under her skirt. “You should text instead of call.”

  I pulled up Isobel’s number and texted, Isobel, it’s Jake Cassidy. There’s a coffee shop just down from my office, at 38th and Balboa. Z Café. Can we meet today at noon? I’ll buy you a hot chocolate. It will only be me, I promise. People are worried about you.

  I intentionally didn’t use the word parents. Kids whose parents are going through a divorce feel all sorts of anger and guilt and love and pity toward their parents, tangled emotions that are difficult to unravel.

  No response.

  21

  Before noon, I walked over to Z Café. I got a table in the corner. Because of the mediocre coffee and overpriced pastries, the place was always empty. I set up my laptop on the table, a newspaper laid out beside it. If Isobel did show up, I wanted to look relaxed, not threatening.

  In my job, with adult clients, it’s sometimes best to hit a problem directly and with force. But with kids, it’s best to approach things from the side. Teenagers brace themselves for confrontation, always. Most of the kids I see have learned how to build quick and impenetrable walls.

  At noon, I heard the door swing open. I looked up, hoping to see Isobel, but instead it was a hipster couple, decked out head to toe in expensive clothes made to look cheap, artfully torn to show their tattoos, both carrying the latest MacBook Air.

  By twelve-thirty, I was beginning to worry. What if something had really happened to Isobel? What if she wasn’t just taking some time off from her terribly immature, self-centered parents? I was about to give up, go to the office, and call her mother, when she slid into the seat across from me. Her brown hair was a tangled mess, her jeans were dirty, and she had dark circles under her eyes. “You didn’t think I’d show up, did you?”

  I’d already rehearsed my greeting, or part of it. “I actually kind of did. You strike me as someone who doesn’t leave a friend hanging.”

  “True dat,” Isobel agreed. Then, when I stood up, “Hey, where are you going?”

  “I owe you a big hot chocolate. Whipped cream?”

  “I think I need coffee.”

  While I was at the counter, I texted her mom. Isobel’s OK. I’m with her right now.

  Thank God, her mother texted back. Where are you?

  Near my office. Give us a few minutes. I don’t want to scare her off.

  I waited for the frantic email demanding to know more, but to Isobel’s mother’s credit, she seemed to understand that, for the moment, delicacy was called for. Thank you so much. I’ll wait to hear from you.

  I went back to the table with the coffee.

  “Thank you,” Isobel said, dumping a sugar packet into her coffee. She looked like she hadn’t slept.

  “So,” I said, folding the paper in front of us. “Some serious drama at home?”

  “Yep.”

  “I told your mother that you’re okay, and that you’re with me.”

  Isobel blushed and refused to meet my eyes. I could tell she was wavering between anger and relief. “Okay. That’s good, I guess.”

  “You want some food, a burrito, maybe? You know Chino’s up the block? My treat.”

  “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  “Seriously.” I shut my laptop and slid it into my messenger bag. “I feel bad for not feeding you. You’re obviously starving.” I stood and started walking to the door. Isobel followed.

  I gave myself a silent high five for getting her out of the café, moving. Talking while walking is always more effective than the artificial constraints of sitting in a room, in a circle with a peer group. As we walked, Isobel seemed to loosen up. She’s sixteen, but in some ways she seems younger. Unlike the other kids in the group, her parents’ divorce surprised her. Usually, the kids see it coming for months. Many are actually kind of relieved when the parents finally break the news. Not Isobel. According to her, things were really great, their family was happy. She thought her parents had a good marriage, until the day her mother told her that she was moving out in order to be “true to herself.”

  “I know I’m not supposed to care that she moved out to be with a woman”—Isobel tossed her cup into a trash can—“but it really pisses me off. It’s so unfair to my dad. And at least if she’d been with another man, there’d be, I don’t know, maybe this slim possibility of them getting back together.”

  “If she’d moved out to be with another man,” I asked gently, “would that be equally unfair?”

  “I don’t know,” Isobel said, growing angry—not at me, I sensed, but at the world. At this wrench her mother had thrown into their previously happy life. “I mean, how could she not know? Why did she marry my dad in the first place? I have gay friends, and they’re only in high school, but they already know. I don’t understand how a person wakes up one day, forty-three years into her totally hetero life, and changes her mind.”

  “It was different for your mom’s generation.”

  We walked a block in silence. Something was weighing on her, and finally she said it. “I can see how, for my dad, it really would have been better if she had known. I keep imagining this alternate life for him, where he gets to fulfill his dream of growing old with the same person. Can you believe he’s been putting away a little money every single week since the day they were married for the beach house he planned to buy after they retired? My mom loves the beach, and the house was going to be his big gift to her, his grand gesture. For twenty years, he’s nursed this stupid dream of surprising her with a beach house. But all along that dream has been false, and he never knew.”

  “Sad,” I said.

  Isobel glanced at me. “What I’m saying is this: My very existence is predicated on my father’s eventual unhappiness. But I’d still choose my existence over his happiness. Does that make me a bad person?”

  “It’s a false choice. You’re here because your parents got married and had you. Nothing you think or feel could change that. One thing I know for certain is that your parents love you very much. Neither of them, I guarantee it, would trade you in for a different life.”

  We passed by the Balboa Theatre, which was having a special showing of The Matrix trilogy, so we talked about that for a few minutes. As a project for her textiles class, Isobel said, she once designed a long black coat based on the one Neo wears. I was struck by the incongruity of Isobel; she seemed to have the knowledge and vocabulary and abilities of a person twice her age, but her understanding of human behavior, the real world, basic interactions, seemed to be somewhere slightly below her age range. I’ve seen this a lot lately. Kids are learning faster and faster about more and more, but their understanding of themselves and those around them seems to be developing even slower than when I was a kid. My colleagues often blame this on smartphones and videogames, but I’m not sure that’s it.

  “Here we are,” I announced. “Chino’s. Best burritos in the Richmond. What’ll you have?”

  “I’ll order,” she decided, and she stepped up to the counter and confidently ordered a burrito with carne asada, rice, no beans, and salsa verde—all in Spanish, like a true San Francisco kid. I ordered the same, plus chips and guacamole, and grabbed a couple of Fantas from the fridge.

  “I looked up your wife on YouTube,” Isobel said, twisting the top off her Fanta. “I watched like four entire concerts from ten years ago. She is so freaking cool.”

  “Yes,” I said, “she is.” I like to be reminded of this. I didn’t know Alice ten years ago, when she was making her way up in the music world, playing shows most nights of the week, touring all over the West Coast. She wasn’t huge, she wasn’t famous in the traditional sense, but she did have a following, people who couldn’t wait for her next album, who’d drop whatever was on their schedule to go see her band play at Bottom of the Hill or open up for someone bigger at the Fillmore. She even had groupies—guys, mostly�
�who’d follow her from show to show and make a point of talking to her afterward, so nervous in her presence that they’d start to sweat and stutter. She’s told me she doesn’t miss the groupies, who always scared her a little, but she misses some of the other stuff. Mostly the music itself. These days, I worry that part of her is slowly getting buried under endless days and nights of legal work and corporate conversations.

  “Her lyrics are brilliant,” Isobel said. “Everything about her is brilliant. I was looking at her makeup, and all I was thinking was, why am I such a loser? Why can’t I do my makeup like that?”

  “A: You most definitely are not a loser. B: I’m sure you could if you wanted to.”

  Isobel was staring at me. “If I come over this weekend and make breakfast for you and your wife, do you think she’d teach me some of her makeup tricks?”

  “Sure,” I said, surprised.

  The guy called our number and I grabbed our burritos. We took a seat by the window.

  “I’m a really good cook,” Isobel said, folding back the foil on her burrito. “I make some seriously great French toast.”

  I scooped up some guacamole with a chip. “Alice does love French toast.”

  Between bites of her burrito, she told me she’d spent the previous night on Ocean Beach with a surfer named Goofy and a bunch of people from Bakersfield. “It was freezing. I curled up with some smelly guy named DK. He was wearing stupid puka shells, but I was just so freaking cold.”

  “That doesn’t sound like fun to me,” I said. “And it doesn’t sound particularly safe.”

  “It was fun at first, and then it wasn’t. Everybody was stoned except me. But my phone was dead. My mom recently switched us to a new cell plan, we got new numbers. I haven’t memorized them yet, so I couldn’t even borrow someone’s phone and call my parents. I even thought about walking to the Safeway, but that seemed really dangerous. A lot of creeps hang out around Ocean Beach at night. When I found a coffee shop this morning to plug in my phone, there were a bunch of messages, and I didn’t know what to do.”