The Idea of Him. Holly Peterson

so I waited down the hall in a hidden corner and stared at the light under the laundry room door. If my husband and the girl came out together, I couldn’t yell at him in front of her and all the guests. Or could I? I had to think of some approach that would give me the advantage and find an unflappable new personality inside me to fuel it. If I didn’t persevere, I would never be able to maintain that I “had the goods” on him. It would only be hearsay and innuendo that could be easily refuted. Then I wondered: Why should I be waffling if I’m catching him in the act? Easy answer: because I didn’t want it to be true.

      Just when I’d decided (correctly) that nothing else would do but to knock, the knuckles on my tightly clenched hand mere inches from the laundry room door, a groggy Lucy appeared in the kitchen in the lint-balled, pink Disney princess nightgown she’d insisted, going on two years now, she could not fall asleep without. “Where’s Daddy?” she murmured while rubbing her left eye. “I’m ready for my story.”

      “Honey, you need to get back in bed. If you walk around and get all excited, you’re going to get overtired and …” And witness me catching your father in flagrante.

      Blake suddenly appeared behind his sister. This was getting dangerous. “Mom,” he said. “I tried to tell her to get into her bunk, but she wouldn’t listen. She had to find Dad.”

      “It’s okay, Blake. Tell you what. If you read her the Angelina Ballerina, that will count as the rest of the reading you need to do.” I kissed the top of Lucy’s head, turned her around, and watched Blake shepherd her back to their room. If this laundry room situation was as bad as it looked, I worried, how would I mitigate the damage on them?

      “Allie!” Murray yelled next, gesticulating with his muscular arms in huge circles around my kitchen. I noticed a gold watch the size of a hockey puck on his trunklike limb. I looked past him to give Caitlin the “WTF” for letting him back here, but she was nowhere to be found.

      Murray’s thinning comb-over looked slightly askew as he stopped to catch his breath. “Allie,” he wheezed, picking up a cheese stick and pointing it at my heart before he mashed it down his throat with the center of his palm. “Where the fuck is your husband?”

      I shrugged. Murray rested his elbow on the island counter, displaying sweat stains across the creases of his dark blue shirt. The Columbia server couldn’t place the last phyllo spinach pies or the new fried wontons on the tray in front of him fast enough to beat Murray’s rapid-fire arm movements from tray to mouth, tray to mouth, quicker than a real toad would catch a fly with his tongue.

      Murray spat the following in my ear as he scarfed down a few more. “Delsie thinks you’re fantastic! Your pitch worked and she is so happy to have you handling her writing for the big media pitch we’d put—”

      “Thanks, Murray, but I need to deal with the party.” At that I left and hid down the hall to witness how Wade would exit the room now.

      Then the unimaginable happened. My boss eyed the laundry room door, saw the light on underneath, and strode over to the room where my husband was possibly shagging his mistress. He banged on the door with the back of his fist. Murray made my day, and my soft spot for him grew.

      “Wade, you crazy schmuck! You in there?! You got me wanting to toast your fabulous ass.” He rattled the locked doorknob.

      “Right out, Murray. Just gotta finish one, more, thing, here …” Wade yelled nonchalantly from the inside as if he wasn’t about to explode into a young woman’s voluptuous mouth.

      A full, long twenty-two seconds later—I know, because I counted—Wade appeared with his nose high, as if he wasn’t ever going to be accountable to Murray, or his ball-and-chain, for his bizarre shenanigans. Only I detected a hint of anger in his posture. It couldn’t have thrilled him to find the irascible Murray on the other side of the door—or to have to rush his eruption in there.

      “You good?” Murray then smacked his back even harder, leaving flecks of phyllo and finger grease stains on Wade’s shirt.

      From twenty feet down the hall, I tried to peek around them into the laundry room, but Wade gingerly closed the door and steered Murray in the direction of the party.

      Wade didn’t see me watching him. “Yeah, just a loose … I had to go get a … ah, doesn’t matter, what the hell’s going on with you, Murray?” He turned to the waiter a lot more aggressively than appropriate. “How does a guy get a drink around here?” I could see beads of sweat forming on his slightly receded hairline. He was definitely pissed off.

      “Right on it, sir,” Jim answered, straightening the bottom hem of his rumpled black jacket. That’s what was missing: Wade’s jacket.

      Without waiting for his drink, or witnessing my presence, Wade put his arm around Murray’s shoulder and started recounting one of his half-fictional exploits. Murray guffawed as Wade turned on his conversational charm amid the adjacent living room chatter, which had reached a thousand-decibel pitch.

       7

       Wifely Conundrums

      I was left drumming the wall behind me with my fingers while waiting for Ms. Reptile Shoes to exit my laundry room. Bile inched up in my throat as I tried to decide how to handle this. What was I supposed to do, march into our living room and ask Wade right then and there what it all meant? Was his telling me I was so hot all the time when we barely had sex anymore a clear sign that he loved someone else?

      I got up the guts to walk back down to the laundry room door, but she opened it herself just as I arrived. There stood the Tudor Room woman with her hair perfectly coiffed, and her full lips smothered with gloss, lavishly but accurately, without the remotest hint that she’d been performing sexual tongue gymnastics minutes before. She returned my stare with simple, elegant composure.

      Though fuming, I was also heartbroken by her beauty and what it must mean to my husband. “What the hell was going on in here?!”

      She then did the unthinkable—she held out her hand. “Jackie Malone.”

      “What the …” My eyes darted to the vacant scene behind her.

      “Look, he’s all yours.” She stared straight at me. “It’s not what you think. You may not believe me now, but I was in there on your behalf. I was looking for something and he caught me.”

      I studied her clothes for signs they’d just had mad groping sex. I had to admit that she did look completely unruffled. All I could see behind her was laundry neatly folded, and all I could smell was powder detergent—no scent of lust, no mess. “You’re telling me you were alone, locked in a room with my husband, and I’m supposed to believe nothing was going on in here?!!”

      “Yes. Nothing. And more important …” She paused and held my arm. Then she said, “This is going to sound extremely improbable, but you are actually going to need to trust me.”

      I yanked out of her grasp and whispered through clenched teeth. “Trust you? You just spent the last ten minutes locked in the laundry room with my husband who just walked out of here.”

      “I told you. I was looking for something having to do with the men in your living room that you know nothing about. What they are doing is going to sap your finances, any stability you have, probably deplete everything you have saved. It’s not safe in any way. Nothing sexual was going on here. He came in and caught me looking for something in his jacket.” She pulled me into the laundry room.

      “What were you looking for? And tell me about the casino chips you both seem to have,” I demanded, keeping one eye on the hall in case Wade returned.

      “The casino chips mean nothing.” Jackie looked vulnerable for a moment and I took it as