The Comfort of Lies: A Novel Read online

  Lucas slid into the kitchen moments before the last bit of egg transformed from liquid to solid. Juliette sprinkled in shredded cheddar and then scrambled the last bits.

  “Juice is on the table,” she said even as Lucas picked up his glass. He grabbed a handful of raspberries from a dish on the table.

  “Sit when you eat,” Juliette ordered. Motherhood was little more than a series of repetitive commands and tasks these days. She remembered the moments when Max switched from holding her finger, to slipping his hand into hers, and then to rejecting her touch.

  “Why are mothers so keen on these things?” Nathan walked in carrying their three newspapers. Oh, he was so important, the sociology professor—of course he must have the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal.

  Lucas surprised Juliette by picking up the slack when she didn’t answer Nathan, perhaps discomforted by her unusual reticence. “What things?” he asked.

  “Things like requiring sons to sit when eating, as though vitamins and minerals can be fully absorbed only when they’re in proscribed positions.” Nathan grinned at his all-American athletic blond son, at Juliette. He swiveled, seeking the missing Max.

  Nathan held out his arms for an embrace. Juliette held the blistering frying pan between them.

  “Hot. Watch out,” she warned. “This is heavy.”

  Nathan looked puzzled. He leveled hurt eyes at her. They were close in height. His mournful dark eyes, refugee eyes, velvety full-of-shit eyes, met hers. “Is something wrong?”

  She slammed the pan on the wooden block protecting their table, their precious Fairfield Antique Show table. She slid his portion of eggs onto his plate.

  “Whole wheat toast,” she said. “I protect your heart, Nathan. No seeds; you don’t like seeds.” She slammed a platter on the table. “And I warm the toast plate each morning. Did you know that, Nathan?”

  “Umm, it’s great, Mom.” Lucas, her poor, confused boy. “Thanks.”

  Nathan, apparently stunned into silence, reached for the pitcher of juice.

  “Put the dishes in the sink when you’re done,” she said. “Make sure Max eats his eggs. Tell him I didn’t have time for waffles.”

  “Aren’t you eating?” Nathan asked. “Where are you going so early?”

  “I lost my appetite. Work.” She began walking out and then turned. “I love you guys.” She couldn’t confuse Lucas by making her love sound specific to him and not their father. Besides, she did love them all; she just prayed that love didn’t damn her to a life of turning a blind eye.

  Juliette climbed the stairs to her bedroom, grabbed clothes, and brought them into the bathroom. After locking the door, she turned on the faucet, fell on the rug, and wrapped her arms around herself tight and rocked. She gripped her upper arms hard enough to leave red marks.

  She’d thought it was over: the heartache, the mistrust, watching him for signs of deceit each time he walked in the house. For such a long time, she’d wondered if he was simply riding the comfort of his own lies when he’d promise the bad times were all behind them.

  There had been too many threads she hadn’t wanted to cut: children, the world they’d built together, and, of course, love. She never stopped loving him. Forgiving him became her best choice.

  She’d finally let go and believed him.

  Now Juliette spun right back to asking herself why. Why had he slept with another woman? She’d revered him for the judgement and rectitude she’d believed he possessed.

  Tia’s huge orphan eyes had probably begged her husband for love and protection. She must have been exactly the right ticket when Nathan tired of his über-competent wife, good at so many things. Perfect Juliette: providing gourmet meals and mother-of-the-year nurturing, spicking-and-spanning his house. She even brought in more money than he did these days. The idea that he’d turned to that girl because his ego needed lifting drove Juliette insane. She’d always thought so much more of Nathan.

  How dare that woman spread her name, cool as aloe, right across the envelope for the world and Juliette to see, as though Juliette didn’t know who she was. As though Juliette hadn’t once followed her for five shameful nights.

  Tia Genevieve Adagio. Silky girl, sliding over Juliette’s husband like Salome. Slippery like a baby seal, all dark and tiny, fragile, needy girl, looking up at Juliette’s husband as though Nathan supplied the oxygen she breathed.

  And now they had a daughter? More than anything else, this knowledge shut out Juliette. Suddenly Tia and Nathan were the couple, while Juliette pressed herself up to the glass of their secret family.

  • • •

  Juliette drove up Central Street and parked in the small lot behind the shop. The back as well as the front entrance was marked with their full name: juliette&gwynne//flush de la beauté. They’d wanted to open their shop on a street rife with beauty and flush with money. Gwynne chose the moneyed zip code of Wellesley’s suburban main street for their location, and Juliette had come up with the name, confident that women would fling money at anything French. Juliette created products. Gwynne managed the business. They were synchronized as friends and business partners. When Gwynne sneezed, Juliette grabbed a tissue.

  That’s why she had to stay in the car for a few minutes. Juliette was transparent to Gwynne, and Juliette didn’t want her friend reading her mind.

  Gwynne would scare the shit out of Juliette if they weren’t best friends. Besides having four daughters ages six to thirteen, a solid marriage, and the dancer’s body that Juliette’s mother wanted for Juliette, Gwynne was smart and funny. Thankfully, she had a wide streak of neurotic self-doubt and anxiety that required a steady diet of predawn runs, Effexor, and an occasional sleeping pill, enabling Juliette to keep her envy in check.

  Juliette, privy to the secrets of the privileged, wondered why so many lovely women thought they were garbage. She slipped the envelope from her purse. A light rain fell, pleasing Juliette, offering safety in the confines of her car, hiding her from the world for at least that moment.

  She fingered the cheap paper.

  The cheap envelope.

  Stationery and matching envelopes waited in Juliette’s desk, something to suit any mood. Thick paper so rich it caressed the ink. Ivory. Dove grey. Palest blue. None right for the letter she’d send to Tia. For that, Juliette would go to Walgreens and buy ninety-nine-cent crap in blaring white.

  Juliette skimmed the letter again, unable to concentrate on words, feeling only Tia’s contamination.

  “Our daughter,” she’d written to Nathan.

  “She resembles you.”

  Juliette took the pictures from her lap, where they’d dropped. Her fingers shook. This child would wreck their life.

  The resemblance to Max astonished Juliette. Like this child, her boy had been fat legged and adamant. The photo marked Savannah as Max’s sister. Lucas’s also, but that wasn’t as screamingly obvious. Savannah? An unlikely name for this solemn-looking child.

  She flipped through the pictures, one for each year of the child’s life and one as a newborn. The child’s serious expressions, more intent each year, tapped open Juliette’s heart. Warmth toward the girl, so unexpected that Juliette almost cried, trickled in. Nathan’s mother showed in the child; Nathan’s mother, who still wore the sober face of an immigrant. Nathan’s parents were fifty years in New York but still expected the real Americans to send them back to Hungary. They carried a fearful gratitude for having escaped the Communist noose around the neck of the Hungarian Jews. Nathan, their only child, born eleven years later, accepted the dreams his parents fed him, along with rich milk, red meat, and their veneration of education.

  Nathan’s parents still gasped in joy each time they saw their strong, good-looking American son; Juliette, their szép—beautiful—daughter-in-law; and their handsome grandsons.

  Shouldn’t they know they had a granddaughter?

  Juliette examined Savannah’s face. She brought the photo closer. Even as she w
anted to shred it, she recognized that the child looked like family.

  But Nathan’s, not hers. Not theirs together.

  Gwynne knocked on the car window. Rain dripped in as Juliette rolled it down.

  “What are you doing out here?” Gwynne held the Boston Globe over her head with one hand and pointed at the pictures with the other. “Who’s that?”

  Juliette shoved the pictures and letter into her large leather bag. “One of those Sally Struthers kids.”

  “The Christian Children’s Fund?” Gwynne twisted a corner of her mouth up. “Are you sure that’s the best place to give?”

  No doubt Gwynne had a list of better charities in her purse, ready to be whipped out and given as a guideline for giving. If she didn’t love hot showers and air-conditioning so much, Gwynne would be in some jungle saving the planet, bringing her kids with her. She was big on exposing her kids to the right thing to do, often saying she prayed that didn’t backfire and lead to raising four nihilistic ladies who lunched.

  “It’s called the ChildFund International now.” Actually, Juliette had sponsored a child and was embarrassed that she’d pulled it out as a cover. Somehow that seemed so wrong.

  “When did you start that?” Gwen asked.

  “I don’t brag,” Juliette said. “One is supposed to give quietly.”

  “Give quietly to Christian funds?” Gwynne and Juliette were both married to Jewish men. Two blondes with dark men; they were quite the clichés. Juliette’s father was nominally Jewish, but her parents didn’t pay religion or culture much attention past the annual Christmas party.

  “Are we going in?” Juliette asked.

  Gwynne moved back from the door, arms up. “I wasn’t the one out here mooning over little Christian babies.”

  Who adopted Nathan’s daughter? Who were these good people, this doctor-woman and computer-man from Dover, a town so old money, it made the town of Wellesley appear nouveau riche?

  • • •

  Their shop still held the cool basil-lemon scent they sprayed each night before leaving. Minimalist displays were in the same perfect order in which Gwynne and Juliette left them each evening. Outside, engraved into a steel plate in flowing black lines, the shop’s name topped the large glass window, the same simple logo used in every brochure, card, and advertisement—all designed to capture the taste of the women of Wellesley and the surrounding circle of the wealthiest towns in Massachusetts.

  Since they’d opened five years ago, they’d done everything possible to build a loyal customer base, from hiring top designers for their packaging, to using the highest-grade organic ingredients. Even when euros sped past dollars, they’d continued using expensive oils pressed from flowers grown in the soil of Ireland’s Burren. Child care was provided in a big, bright room carpeted in sunshine yellow. Juliette and Gwynne cut no corners in building their premium brand.

  Juliette’s experience at Emerson doing theatrical makeup, plus the fashion column she’d once written for Boston magazine, combined with Gwynne’s eye for art and head for business, had come together in such a perfect storm of success that they’d recently moved from selling their products only at their shop to selling the juliette&gwynne makeup and skin care line regionally.

  In the last three years, they’d both purchased homes in the town where they’d opened their shop, the town they’d originally chosen because it was so far above their economic stations. Juliette had made their first skin creams in her Waltham kitchen; now a small manufacturing plant produced their products. Recently, every exclusive women’s store that Juliette visited displayed the matte black slashed with deep pansy-purple that signified a juliette&gwynne product.

  That letter threatened every bit of the happiness Juliette had earned.

  Leaving Gwynne to deal with the shop, Juliette slipped into the bathroom and locked the door. She sat on the black restroom chair and again slid out the photos and letter. She studied the child’s face and memorized the adoptive mother’s name before zipping them into the deepest compartment of her purse. Then she stood before the mirror, applied another coat of lipstick, and readied to give her usual morning greeting to the staff as they arrived.

  Helena and Jai were first to show up after Juliette and Gwynne. Not only did they work together, they were roommates who drove in together, left together, and spent the weekends together at bars made for women wrapped in dresses as tight as bandages and the men who wanted them.

  The two young women were the juliette&gwynne brow specialists. Brows, the women of Boston’s western suburbs knew, could make or break your face, so there were definite Helena and Jai camps.

  Helena, the designated sophisticate, arched women into minor-league versions of Catherine Zeta-Jones. She could thin a brow into submission, dye it to resemble mink, or teach a client how to make her anemic brow resemble Brooke Shields wings if she so wished.

  Juliette preferred Jai’s minimalist approach, making a woman’s brows just clean enough to pop her eyes. One time she’d made the mistake of saying this at dinner, which sent Lucas, Max, and Nathan into hysteria. Max, then eight, took to telling gory stories of women’s eyes popping out, strings of eyeballs hanging from bloody sockets.

  As she went from room to room, Juliette considered her options. The plans she’d begun formulating would sound crazy if she gave them voice—not that she intended to talk about them. But she needed information. Acting in a play where she didn’t know the lines would never happen to her again.

  Six years ago, after Nathan engraved the words I had an affair on her, she hadn’t known how to look at him. For too long, she hadn’t been able to ask anything except why.

  “Why, Nathan? Were you unsatisfied?” she’d ask. “Bored? Tired of me? What did you need that I didn’t provide?”

  Those questions never elicited a satisfying answer. What could he say that would help her understand? “I was restless”? “Being around the kids and you bored me”? “I missed your adoration”?

  At some point, she accepted that it was all that and more, and that it didn’t matter why he did it, but that he’d done it.

  It wasn’t his answer that mattered, but hers.

  She had to find out not only if she could stay with him but also how to do it without punishing him every day. He implored her to go to couples therapy with him, but she refused. Every time she pictured herself sitting with Nathan and some faceless shrink, she panicked. In these imaginary sessions, she was picked over, criticized, analyzed, and found wanting.

  For weeks she’d shut herself away with the computer. One site, complete with audio, screamed Heal Yourself! The next began with a warning that their chances of staying together were fifty-fifty, and did she know this was also painful for the cheater and his lover? That they suffered from depression and contemplated suicide? Further into the site, she learned she could affair-proof her marriage, but only by sending $79.99 for the books and tapes. Sent in discreet packaging.

  After the panic elicited by that site, she found one promising that many couples emerged from their affairs stronger than ever, but, it warned, they had to assess their relationship: Were they committed to healing? Were they willing to talk to each other? Then she wondered if she should be going to therapy with Nathan.

  At times she’d felt as though she did only two things: care for the children and read about infidelity online. During one sleepless three-o’clock-in-the-morning session, she read that marriages were “far less likely to recover from serial cheating than a single affair.” Juliette marched into the bedroom demanding to know if there had been anyone else. If she’d had a flashlight, she would have shined it in Nathan’s eyes.

  Even after he swore to his fidelity to his one secret lover, intent on his claim that he’d never been with any other woman during their marriage—as though he should get a medal—Juliette studied the characteristics of cheaters, finding an online test that promised to determine how likely a spouse was to cheat. She flipped out when Nathan’s score showed moderate r
isk. She wanted him to test at an impossible zero. Of the seven indicators of likelihood for cheating, Nathan had three risk factors: he was attractive, he had opportunity—wasn’t a college simply fishing grounds for affairs?—and he had a high sex drive. Thankfully, she could truthfully mark “No” for his being a risk taker, being entitled, seeing love as a game, and having relationship problems.

  Except, of course, that he slept with someone for a year.

  Juliette took her cold comfort from the fact that they were under the 50 percent mark for “Yes” answers.

  After searching for solutions in books, online, and couples therapy, and finding no respite from pain in her rush to bludgeon herself into recovering, she finally discovered her own best answers. Three things were true: She loved Nathan and didn’t want to leave him. The thought of raising her sons alone terrified her, and it would hurt them. And as with any grief, she needed time to pass before she could find her way back to her marriage.

  Juliette held closely to the belief that it wasn’t her fault. Nathan assured her repeatedly that it wasn’t her fault, apparently doing his own online searches. He printed out a consoling list of why men and women had affairs:

  • For the ego stroking you get when someone pays attention

  • For the selfish desire of a temporary pleasure

  • For confirmation of your attractiveness or worth

  • To get adoration

  Juliette’s volcano of righteous anger churned with hurt until the day it miraculously began receding a bit at a time, and then shrank into a small lump sitting on her chest, eventually hardened, and became a tiny but sharp pebble that she could tuck away until a reminder tripped her up.

  Now he’d brought that rock right back up to the surface, and once again she could barely breathe without feeling that goddamned so-called buried pain.

  • • •

  Once in her office, a cool-blue-and-white escape from the ubiquitous pansy and black throughout the shop, Juliette turned on her computer, readying to Google “Caroline Hollister Fitzgerald.” Like Juliette Silver Soros, Caroline used her maiden name as a middle name. Already Juliette knew something about her.