“—and if he's a philanderer, well, a lot of women have lived with worse.”
Maybe this was just a thing Lee needed to get out of his system. Maybe it wouldn't last. Lord knew, there were enough wives in the Bay Area who looked the other way while their husbands ran around with their mistresses but never did leave their wives.
“Not that many people will know,” Ally said.
“Everyone at the hospital,” Brett said.
“They're pretty discreet,” Linda said.
“But she came to the party as Myrtle Wilson,” Brett said. “The mistress.”
“I didn't know that was who she was,” Linda said. “Who would ever guess Myrtle Wilson?”
“Kath did.”
Linda shrugged. “Maybe Kath just saw Myrtle Wilson because that's who she was looking for. Maybe she was wrong.”
“And what?” Brett said. “This girl is a nice girl, just like us only better, gutsier, because she went to medical school?”
“Lee doesn't wear a wedding ring,” I said.
“She must know he's married by now,” Brett said.
“But maybe not when she fell in love with him,” Ally said.
“Time out!” Linda interrupted. “Which Kath is our friend?”
We all fell quiet.
“Maybe she was supposed to be Myrtle,” Linda said. “Maybe it was some kind of bad-girl joke. I could see that. I could see Lee being attracted to a bad girl, someone he's not quite sure he can control. But even if she was, no one knew.”
“People will know,” Brett said. “People will talk behind their backs.” And the rapid blinking of her eyes—very un-Brett—left me imaging her as a young woman, beginning to date her professor or her lab teacher's assistant or whatever Chip had been, someone she knew she ought not to date because he would be grading her. She'd have been sure she was being discreet, that she would have time to figure out if she even really liked him before the whole world knew. Then she'd have realized—words overheard, maybe, or the sudden stop of hushed conversation—that everyone knew. That everyone talked.
“People will talk,” I agreed. Even when there was nothing wrong with people seeing each other, people talked. Danny and I had seen that.
Ally cleared her throat. “Like we are?”
“But we're trying to help,” Brett said.
“Her mother won't know,” I said. “Her father and her sisters. All her friends back in Kentucky.”
Everyone nodded, thinking about that, thinking how awful it would be to have your parents know that your husband had a girl on the side.
OUR FIRST REACTION to Jim being Indian was somehow well behind us after that Halloween party, maybe as a result of the profuse apologies we'd all offered after our blowup, or because Ally was right about Jim: you couldn't know him and not love him.
“Strangers—people who don't know him and never will—there isn't anything you can do about them,” she told us that first Wednesday in November. “You just have to shrug them off as best you can. The problem for us is our families. Jim's parents—don't tell him I said this, but sometimes I think maybe it's a blessing that phone calls to India are so expensive. They call Jim or Jim calls them once every three months, and they talk for three minutes, it's this limit they've set, as if four minutes would be an unforgivable extravagance. And of course he talks to them, I don't, I've only spoken to his mother once, right after we were married, just long enough to hear the disappointment in her voice. I've never even heard his father's voice. But Jim reads me their letters. They want to know when Jim is going to come home. They remind him it's his job as eldest son to care for them when they're old.
“It's not so much that they care that I'm not Indian. It's more that they can't get over the fact that Jim chose a wife without them. That's something his whole family was supposed to be involved in. Not just his parents but his grandparents and his aunts and uncles, they were all supposed to have a say in choosing a bride for him. Did we even know if our horoscopes matched? That's what they wanted to know. Which, no, we didn't. They were horrified. And his mom, you can tell she worries that I won't know how to wrap a sari and I'll be an embarrassment with visitors when we move to India—”
“You're moving to India?” Brett and I said in unison.
“Of course not. But try convincing them of that. Try convincing them of anything, like even that Jim was already eating meat and drinking alcohol long before I met him. His mother—it's pretty funny, really. Every time she writes, she asks all about our trees. Have we planted a coconut tree yet? Jim had her send his favorite recipes and he translated them into English, but I didn't even know what half the ingredients were, and when I asked for them at the grocery they looked at me like I was loony. But half the recipes call for coconut.