Beautiful Day(31)

Still, Ann felt like the runner-up in this particular beauty pageant, and it brought out the worst in her—much the way a nasty campaign did. During her third term, when the scandal with Jim was breaking at home, Ann had battled against the reprehensible Donald Morganblue. She had been sure she was going to lose. The race was close, Morganblue had gone after Ann about a certain failed development project near Northgate Park that had cost Durham County millions of dollars and nearly five hundred promised jobs, and Ann had spent a string of months convinced that both her personal life and her professional life were going to go up in flames. She had, very nearly, become addicted to Quaaludes. The pills were the only way she had made it through that period in her life—the victory by the narrowest margin in the state history of the Carolinas (requiring two recounts) and her divorce from Jim. Ann remembered how the pills had made her feel like a dragonfly skimming over the surface of these troubles. She remembered more than one occasion when she had held the pill bottle in her sweating palm and visualized an easy descent into sweet eternity.

She told herself now that she had never seriously considered suicide back then. Stuart had been ten years old, the twins barely six, Jim had moved to the loft in Brightleaf Square; the boys needed Ann to pack their lunches and transport them to the Little League fields. At night that year, Ann had read the boys Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Their addiction to that book (at the kids’ behest, Ann had ended up reading it three times in a row) was the only outward reaction they had to their father’s departure. Or possibly they were addicted to the quiet minutes with her, curled up on the sofa, her voice always evenly modulated despite her inner turmoil.

There could be no killing herself. Plus, Ann was Catholic, and suicide was a sin for which there was no repenting.

Every once in a while, however, she still yearned for a Quaalude.

Now, for instance. She could use one right now.

She let Jim kiss the side of her neck, a move that always preceded sex. What if they did just as he suggested? What if they ordered up champagne, and strawberries and cream? What if they slipped on the white waffled robes and tore open the scrumptious bed and laid across the ten-thousand-count sheets and enjoyed each other’s bodies? Even now, fifteen years after their reconciliation, Jim’s sexual attention felt precious, like something that could be, and had been, stolen away from her. What if they drank champagne—the more expensive, the better—then ordered another bottle? What if they found themselves giddily drunk by noon, then fell into a languorous sleep with the balcony doors open, sunlight streaming over them in bed? What if they treated this not like their eldest son’s wedding weekend but like a romantic getaway?

“Let’s do it,” Ann said, pivoting to kiss her husband full on the lips. “Call for the champagne.”

“Really?” he said, his eyebrows lifting. He was fifty-six years old, a senior vice president at GlaxoSmithKline but just under the surface was the boy Ann had first married—president of Beta at Duke, the ultimate bad boy, for whom fun would trump responsibility whenever possible.

She was surprising him. He thought she would be in anal-Ann mode, spinning with the hundred things she thought she had to do, the thousand thoughts whirling through her mind. But instead she unbuttoned her crisp white blouse, bought at Belk’s for her arrival on Nantucket. She slid off her navy-and-white gingham Tory Burch capri pants. In just her bra and panties, Ann threw herself across the bed.

“Wow!” Jim said.

“Call!” Ann said.

She was surprising herself.

It was only later, after they had enjoyed the kind of sex particular to really good hotel rooms—Jim had actually clamped his hand over her mouth to stifle her cries—that Ann let herself admit the real reason for her anxiety. She didn’t care about the wedding hierarchy or her position in it; she was too big and too busy a woman to worry about such things. She was only concerned about how she appeared, about how she and Jim appeared as a couple, because Helen was coming.

Helen Oppenheimer—who had, for a period of twenty-nine months, been Jim’s wife.

Ann’s best friend, Olivia Lewis, had nearly inhaled her cell phone when Ann informed her that Helen was on the invite list.

“But why?” Olivia said. “Why why why? Why did you let Jim talk you into it? You’re a strong woman, Ann. Why didn’t you stand your ground?”

“Jim was dead set against it,” Ann said. “It was my idea.”

“What?” Olivia said.

“Stuart asked Chance to be a groomsman,” Ann said.

“So?” Olivia said. “That does not require you to invite Helen to the wedding.”