“I wrote about the president, too,” I said. “I said to myself, Frankie, you are too drunk to write about Bob, put your pen down, but I didn't. I wrote pages and pages: about his optimism for this new venture, which was contagious; about his insistence that computers would soon be as small as a few chips you could hold in your hand; about the look on Danny's face when he introduced me to this man who had started the company, like a son bringing his girl home to meet his father. Then I just kept writing, spilling into my journal what happened after Bob had poured me yet another glass of that punch.
“He's got these eyes that are, I don't know,” I told Kath and Linda and Brett. “It was like he was stripping me of my clothes and my skin, too, like he could see everything about me—”
“Lord a'mercy, you didn't sleep with this fella and then write about it for Danny to find!” Kath said.
“No! For goodness sakes! Of course not!” I leaned back from the idea so sharply I nearly fell backward off the picnic-table bench.
Linda tipped her Stanford cap lower, shading her eyes. “I nearly slept with someone else not long before Jeff and I were married,” she said. “After we'd already picked silver and china and table linens. My wedding dress. Our rings.” She looked to Kath, her pale lashes blinking apologetically. “My creative-writing professor,” she said. “He invited me to discuss a story I'd written over coffee one afternoon. Except we . . . we ordered drinks instead. It was almost like we were both writers that afternoon, not just him. Then drinks turned into dinner and somehow I wound up sitting in the passenger seat of his car, pulling into his garage.”
“His place,” Kath said. “So at least the fella wasn't married.”
Linda looked to the old mansion, the panes of its tall, rectangular windows reflecting the slanted morning light. “I don't know,” she said quietly. “I think maybe his wife was out of town.”
I tried not to frown, waiting for the end of the story, how she'd extricated herself. But she kept her gaze fixed on the mansion, and in the silence I wondered if she hadn't slept with him after all, if she wasn't just too ashamed to tell us. I imagined her basking in that professor's confidence the same way I had in Bob's.
I was returning from the bathroom at the party—all that scientist punch—scanning the place for Danny, facing rooms full of people I didn't really know at all: people laughing at raucous retellings of mishaps at work or discussing other people they knew in the valley or talking technical in a way I couldn't begin to understand. Even the other wives seemed to know everyone, to understand everything. And without Danny—where was he?—I was feeling insecure and lonely and a little drunk. Then Bob—this man Danny talked about like he sat at the right hand of the Lord Himself—was standing beside me, handing me a glass of punch I really didn't need and asking how I liked Palo Alto, whether I was settling in and finding friends.
I started talking about Danny, saying how much he was enjoying his job and how sure he was that the company would be a big success.
Bob looked straight into me with those eyes of his. Intense. Hopeful. Encouraging.
“But what about you, Frankie?” he asked. “How are you?”
He set his hand on my shoulder, and in that one gesture I split open, my insides came tumbling out. Talking to him, I felt I could do things I might never have imagined I could. I felt like I did sometimes when I pushed back from the typewriter after I'd been writing particularly well—or after I thought I had been. And when I walked away from that conversation, I felt wrung out like a sad old rag and unbelievably energized at the same time. I felt like I'd been given a new start—or not given, but found. A start I'd thought I would have when I married Danny. A start I thought I did have after we were first married, but that had somehow slipped from my grasp.
“What were you and Bob talking so intently about?” Danny asked the moment I joined him, stopping the conversation in the group around him, leaving everyone else staring at us and then turning to the buffet table, pretending great interest in the cheese ball. Even as I flushed, I reached down and pulled up that feeling, that new start, and I kissed Danny on the cheek, a kiss that surprised him and made him blush, and made him stand up straighter.
I adjusted my glasses, smoothed my hair, looked back across the room. “Who is that woman talking to Bob now?” I asked, addressing everyone, ducking Danny's question, enjoying my husband's suspicion that the head of the company he worked for might be attracted to me. I wondered if he realized as surely as I did that the woman's arrival at Bob's side had marked the end of his conversation with me, if he'd seen how reluctantly I'd stepped away from Bob's warm encouragement.