Slightly Suburban. Wendy Markham

my friend Brenda once told me, love might be blind, but marriage is no eye-opener.

      “I sway-uh, Tracey, no married guy I’ve ever met can find anything around the house,” she said in her thick Jersey accent, “not even when it’s right in front of his face. Scientists should do some kind of study and find out why that is.”

      I figure scientists are still pretty wrapped up in global warming and cancer, but as soon as there’s an opening, I’m sure they’ll get to it. Because it really is strange.

      You know what, though? I don’t really mind Jack’s masculine faults. In fact, I find most of them endearing. Except for the one where he farts under the covers and seals the blankets over my head, laughing hysterically. He calls it the Dutch Oven.

      I figured all guys also do that. But when I asked my friend Kate about it, she reacted like I’d just told her Jack was into golden showers.

      “What? That’s disgusting,” she drawled in her Alabama accent. “Billy would never do that to me!”

      As if Billy—who is a total douche bag—isn’t capable of flatulence, or, for that matter, far worse behavior where Kate is concerned.

      But I won’t get into that at the moment. So far, I haven’t dared get into it with Kate, either. I’m waiting until the time is right to mention that I saw her husband walking down Horatio Street in the Meatpacking District late one night with a woman who wasn’t Kate.

      Granted, I was walking down the same street at the same hour with a guy who wasn’t Jack.

      However, I had just come from my friends Raphael and Donatello’s place, and the guy, Blake, was a friend of theirs and while infinitely gorgeous and masculine, not the least bit threatening to my marriage, if you catch my drift.

      Blake and I were both a little loopy from Bombay Sapphire and tonics and were singing a medley of sitcom theme songs when I spotted Billy and the Brunette.

      They weren’t kissing, or groping, or even holding hands, but there was definitely something intimate about the way they were walking and talking. As in, she might have been a colleague but she definitely wasn’t just a colleague, and they might have been coming from a restaurant but they definitely weren’t coming from a dinner meeting.

      And she definitely, definitely, wasn’t his sister. For one thing, I know—and strongly dislike, but that’s neither here nor there—his sister, Amanda.

      For another, if that woman turned out to be some other unlikable Billy sister I haven’t met, then there’s something distinctly Flowers in the Attic about their relationship.

      How do I know Billy and the woman aren’t platonic? Sometimes I just get a feeling about things for reasons I can quite put my finger on, and that was one of those times.

      Blake—who must have met Billy at Raphael and Donatello’s wedding three years ago but probably wouldn’t know him if he fell over him, which was not unlikely in his Bombay Sapphire-fueled condition—was oblivious to the situation.

      He launched us into the theme song from One Day at a Time as I saw the rest of Kate’s life—as a divorcée—flash before my very eyes.

      Maybe I was jumping the gun. Maybe they really were just colleagues.

      Blake elbowed me as I stopped singing and turned to watch Billy and the woman get into a cab together.

      “Tracey, you’re supposed to back me up. Let’s try it again,” Blake said, and sang, “Thiiiis is it…”

      “Thiiis is it,” I obediently echoed in tune, watching the cab make a right turn onto Hudson, heading downtown, instead of continuing on the next short block, making a right onto West Fourth and heading uptown.

      Billy and Kate, of course, live uptown. Shouldn’t he have been heading home at that hour on a weeknight?

      And even if she lived downtown, if they were going their separate ways, shouldn’t they have gotten separate cabs? There were plenty around. Believe me, I checked.

      I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t get into this whole Billy thing at the moment, but I can’t help it. It’s been weighing me down for weeks now and even though I know it could have been perfectly innocent, I also know that it wasn’t.

      Getting back to Jack—who doesn’t know about Billy on Horatio Street and who, I’m absolutely certain, would never be heading downtown in a cab with a strange woman at that hour of the night—he’s still waiting for my explanation about our diamond anniversary.

      “Twenty-five is the silver anniversary,” I explain to Jack as patiently now as I do when he’s being Ray Charles in front of the fridge, “and fifty is gold, and seventy-five is diamond.”

      “We haven’t even been alive seventy-five years,” he says just as patiently in his reasonable Jack way, and looks longingly at the section of newspaper he was about to unfold.

      “Not years—months. We met at the office Christmas party seventy-five months ago today.”

      “Really?”

      He actually looks moved by this news. The fact that he tends to find me endearing is part of the reason I love him so much—and find him endearing in return. Except when he’s Dutch Ovening my head. But I guess there’s a little leftover frat boy in most grown men, Billy aside.

      (Or maybe not, because Billy’s recent behavior—all right, suspected behavior—strikes me as pretty damn immature and reckless. Not to mention immoral.)

      “So it’s our seventy-five-month anniversary?” asks my endearing Jack. “I can’t believe you actually keep track of these things, Tracey.”

      I’ll admit—but not to him—that I actually don’t. Not until this morning at around 6:00 a.m. when, unable to sleep, I glanced at the kitchen calendar and happened to realize what day it was—right around the time the circus freaks kicked into high gear up in 10J.

      “Well…happy anniversary,” Jack tells me. Then, having concluded being endeared by my observation of our milestone, he goes back to reading the sports section of the New York Times.

      “Wait…Jack?”

      “Mmm.” He turns a page.

      “So it’s been seventy-five months since we met. Wow!” I say brightly. “And almost two and a half years since our wedding.”

      “Yup.” He’s reading the paper.

      “Remember when we didn’t want to come back from our honeymoon?”

      He snorts a little and looks up. “Who does?”

      True. But we really, really, really, so didn’t want to.

      Maybe because we had the most amazing honeymoon ever: we went to Tahiti and stayed in one of those huts on stilts above the perfect, crystalline aqua sea. I had been dreaming of doing that but didn’t think we could afford it. Jack surprised me.

      Naturally, we spent much of that week lolling around that lush paradise scheming ways to escape our dreary workaday life. Anything seemed possible there, thousands of miles from this claustrophobic Upper East Side apartment with its water stains and dismal, concrete view.

      The honeymoon flew by and the next thing we knew, we—and our luggage—were careening home from J.F.K. through cold November rain in an airless Yellow Cab that smelled overpoweringly of wet wool, mildew, chemical vanilla air freshener and exotic B.O.

      “Remember how we both wanted to quit our jobs and move away from the city,” I go on, “but you said one life change per year was your quota?”

      “Yee-eess…”

      I have his full attention now, but he’s not letting on. He’s pretending to be captivated by a story about Yankees spring training. Which, ordinarily, really would captivate him. Except, I know he’s suspicious. He must realize where I’m going with this.