Chapter 3: A Year After the Night of Bliss

LINDA

I feel like the star of a movie set, standing outside a magnificent southern mansion wearing crinolines. It looks magnificent, but when I open the door, there will be nothing behind it but dust. The interior shots will be filmed in the studio. Henry has certainly provided me with the life of a star but there is no substance to it. I attend gala balls and I love it, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help feeling I’ve been conned.

I still don’t understand why Jim went nuclear over my one night of indifferent sex. I had been a wonderful wife and mother, and I simply needed my spirits lifted at the end of a long boring winter. If he had kept quiet and sucked it up like a man, the whole thing would have been forgotten about in a couple of days. But he had to tell the world about his so-called humiliation. Temporary insanity, perhaps, although I must admit I would take him back in a heartbeat.

I talked to his friend Phoebe after he got custody of the children. She reckons that it was the cold-blooded planning that really upset Jim. I tried to tell her that nothing was planned but she just gave me a skeptical look. I’ll admit that we did know that Marc trawled Morrison’s for married women on a Friday, but we had no idea he would pick one of us. Jim should have been flattered that his wife was selected.

It was a bit like buying a lottery ticket – you don’t expect to win but you have hope. I often pick up a ticket when I’m shopping, and I never dreamt of telling Jim although I would have shared it with him if I had won. Marc was the prize that night and I won. Why couldn’t you have been happy for me, Jim? How could I have guessed that my whole world would fall apart over one stupid night?

Phoebe laughed when I told her Marc was an awful lover. “What did you expect,” She chortled. “All his life women have been throwing themselves at him. He had no need for foreplay to win them or get them ready. They did all the work for him. By your own admission you were wet and willing from the moment he asked you to dance. And if you hadn’t been, so what? Next Friday there would have been another woman waiting for the hint of an invitation.” That’s when I remembered Ann when we were planning the ambush. “He gets a new woman every week, but she has to be married or he’s not interested. Do you think he does it just to humiliate the husbands?”

When Marc brought me home on the Saturday afternoon, I entered an empty building. Jim wouldn’t answer his phone and I didn’t know where my kids were. After I got them home things went from bad to much worse. Timmy was tearful and Emily blamed me because her wonderful daddy was not there. I had not realized how much of the parenting Jim did until he wasn’t there.

I’m not sure I would have survived if it hadn’t been for Henry – Mr. D, as I called him then. He had called me his daughter because I stood by him when his wife was terminally ill. Now he stepped in to play the role of daddy. He called me into his office on the Monday after the disaster and got the whole story out of me. It took hours and a full box of Kleenex. He supported me without reservation, which made me feel so much better.

From that moment on, he became my mentor, taking me to lunch to ensure I ate properly, checking my finances to make sure the bills were paid. But, above all, he got me out of myself, taking me to the theatre and opera, or to gala openings of galleries and boutiques. He bought me wonderful dresses. “When you’re on my arm, you represent the company so it’s important that you look your best,” he would insist. He found Rose, who was about to graduate as a nanny, to babysit.