From the doorway, the coordinated flurry in the dining room looked like an ant colony. Clad in black button-downs, the staff busied around the long oak table, smoothing silk runners, adjusting lily petals, unstacking bone-china plates, arranging salad forks and soup spoons, and placing ivory sateen napkins into ivory napkin holders, the latter sure to land me on the PETA hit list. It was a wonderful scene: the half-rendered tablescape was already exquisite, and the workers were moving with the deliberateness of Balanchine choreography, mesmerizing as a flickering flame. And yet, I felt absolutely nothing, a hollowness that of late had been impossible to ignore. I did not become hollow overnight. Rather, this vacancy had been expanding in me for years. Perhaps if I were younger and stupider, I’d have tried to fill it with another child, but that moment has passed. Now, I’m simply left wondering how many of the women I admired in my youth were just as fucking miserable as I am now.
I became Mrs. Davis twenty five years ago. Collin, my husband, is tall, with a strong set of shoulders and legs, a full head of once-blonde hair, and a pair of rather striking eyes. They’re a greyish blue, about the shade of the Hudson and, similar to the river, can appear clear or murky depending on the moment you catch them. Collin is extremely sharp, and generally friendly unless provoked. He is a senior partner at Bernstein and Fitch and makes a dizzying amount of money, a number I will not reveal to avoid being gauche. Collin and I despise gaucheness.
We have three wonderful children: Charlie, Ethan, and Hailey. Charlie, the oldest, lives in the West Village and works at a private equity firm. He resembles his father greatly, both in his physical characteristics and mannerisms—when Charlie laughs, it is as if Collin were lodged between his son’s ribs. Ethan works at Bain Capital, though sadly in the Boston office. Our beautiful Hailey is a junior at Dartmouth, Collin’s and my alma mater (Charlie too, while Ethan went to Brown). Whenever a friend remarks on one of our children, Collin never misses the chance to use the classic, self-effacing, “Well, we know our children didn’t get their good looks and smarts from me” line that men find endlessly gratifying. Collin and I, now empty nesters, still live in the same apartment we raised our children, on the corner of 85th and Park.
The two of us very much used to be in love. I, at the least, was utterly enamored with Collin, with an intensity that at times worried me, for fear that it could never be adequately reciprocated. In the current iteration of our relationship I feel a tepid attachment, interspersed with stabs of regret. Collin and I haven’t had sex in a year and four months, nor have we had dinner together in the past three weeks. He mainly eats out with clients and other partners; I dine with fellow board members, at charity fundraisers, or, on occasion, by myself. It’s been sixteen years since I found out that Collin was having an affair. Ever since Hailey was a toddler, I had suspected infidelity: he was either conspicuously affectionate, bringing home chocolates from Neuhaus and roses tied with yellow twine, or he would act dismissive and snarly, like an overstuffed cat unabashed when caught digging through the trash. Collin still doesn’t know that I know, or perhaps he does and simply doesn’t feel the need to broach the subject. And while the discovery of his affair devastated me, it didn’t materially change much about my life. Collin would not be loyal, but he would never divorce me either. Unlike other men of his ilk, he still believed the age-appropriate, well-educated, insider-approved wife to be indispensable, and if he could do what he pleased either way, why traumatize the children? I had long ago accepted a contract of captivity, indefinitely bound in a pair of Swarovski handcuffs. And I, as a noble captive, was committed as he was to maintaining our façade.
Which brings me back to today. I’d planned a fabulous dinner party to celebrate Collin’s fiftieth birthday. The guest list, of around thirty, was a mixture of Collin’s colleagues, friends from Dartmouth, and our family (Ethan would be coming in from Boston), along with a cast of unfortunately unneglectables: high-powered and powdered men and women crawling in from Wall Street, City Hall, and the suffocating white cubes of Chelsea. I’d outsourced the floral and table arrangements to the coveted Upper East Side party planner, Jenny Campbell, who, in a shrill voice, organized everything from the immaculate martini-shaking bar service to the place cards penned in Japanese sumi ink. The cooking, however, I had graciously insisted on doing myself, a choice that Collin had begun to take for granted in the past decade, though he put on an exorbitant display of gratitude in the presence of our guests, a tendency I despised. To be clear, I never cook with the aim of praise: I find an unparalleled catharsis in the melodic movement of my knife, rocking back and forth like a cradle in the wind, and in the sight of a waste bin growing full of fat trimmings, pepper seeds, and the butts of garlic bulbs and onions. And though I would never admit it, I always raise an eyebrow at the women who neither work nor cook, as though they considered themselves above the indignities of being useful.
I had already raided the farmer’s market and was staring at the kitchen island brimming with glistening produce, parcels of fowl, sacks of grain, and several containers of spices. As I began preparing the harvest salad, it occurred to me that I would have to give a birthday toast at dinner. I was once again overwhelmed by how stale my affection for Collin had turned, as if the doughy center that had once warmed our relationship had been scraped out, leaving me only with an inedible crust.
But oh, how ambrosial that bread had once been.
Collin and I met on the third day of junior year. We were in the same seminar, “The Renaissance Mind,” taught by a visiting professor from Rome with a penchant for brightly colored pocket squares, a detail I recalled while staring at the heap of squash before me. I immediately noticed Collin’s notebook, a brown leather-bound Moleskin, which he placed on his desk alongside a black Montblanc pen with the initials CD engraved on its side. We went around introducing ourselves.
“Hello. My name is Ellen Price, and I am an art history major from Connecticut.”
I felt Collin’s gaze twist and sharpen into a tip directed at me. He went next, and when he opened his mouth I saw his teeth, pearl-white and strong, and I imagined them sinking into a thick steak. And when he spoke, with that same gleaming strength cutting through the room, it felt as though a ribbon had tightened around my waist, making it pleasantly hard to breathe. His name was Collin Davis, and he was an economics major from New York. We began to exchange pleasantries before and after class, and a few weeks in, he asked me out to ice cream.
I thought that was the perfect first date suggestion, and I wore a pink cashmere tank top, the strap three fingers thick. At the parlor, I ordered a strawberry cone because I knew that the matching pinks would be adorable, despite the fact that I found strawberry ice cream to taste like cheap perfume. Collin did, in fact, find it adorable and commented on the symmetry immediately. The date went wonderfully. We had compatible political beliefs, Collin a step to the right of me, and both enjoyed discussing Neoclassical art, thanks to the education his mother had given him. I was acutely aware of the demeanor Collin elicited from me, witty yet controlled, warm but not gushy. When I got a spot of ice cream on the tip of my nose, I let him wipe it off with a napkin, which was the extent of our physical interaction. I went to bed that night praying that the evening would be the first of many. It was.
The sweetness of then and the lack of it now propelled me towards the fridge, where I pulled out a chilled riesling and the duck I would soon marinate. I poured myself a tall glass and stared at the duck’s pale, textured skin. It reminded me of Stephen. I took a large sip of my wine, put the glass on the counter, and then picked it back up to take another gulp.
Stephen is Collin’s best friend, whom he met on the lacrosse team at Dartmouth when he walked on as a freshman. Junior year, I went to every home game with my two best friends, Trish and Elizabeth. I adored those games, and would bring Collin the same snack after every one: pastrami on rye and green grapes. And while I enjoyed the parties at the lacrosse house, where Trish, Elizabeth, and I always received preferential treatment, I could not stand being around Stephen, whom I found to be nothing short of repugnant. His lecherous gaze would leave paw prints up and down Elizabeth and Trish, and occasionally me, when Collin was off getting us drinks or using the restroom. He was condescending, sarcastic, and entitled as Satan is red. While their closeness worried me, it made me even more enamored with Collin, for he could spend so much time with Stephen and remain untainted, as though cast in a waxy goodness.
I poured myself a second glass of wine and squeezed navel and blood oranges onto the duck. Then a lemon, whose acidity seeped into my nail bed. It stung as I thought about my final spring at Dartmouth. Trish, Elizabeth, and I had made a pact to spend the year after graduation at Oxford. It was something we’d planned since sophomore year, but as we crept closer to the finish line, I felt a growing anxiety about separating from Collin, who would be moving back to Manhattan to begin at NYU Law and, much to my dismay, would be moving into an apartment with Stephen. Collin, however, was confident that our relationship could survive a stint of distance and assured me that he would be working so hard as a 1L, that perhaps it would be for the best. While I admired his rational approach, I longed for him to insist I move back to New York with him.
I downed my second glass.
Raindrops hurled themselves against Oxford’s grounds for months, and I could not think of a thing but Collin. I found it uncharacteristically impossible to complete the little schoolwork I had and spent much of my time alone in my room, or forcing myself to accompany Elizabeth and Trish on their social escapades, ones I consistently abandoned early. Collin and I would speak on the phone at least twice a week, and those conversations alone pleased me, leaving me in tears once we hung up, quickly back in my state of ravenous depression. With three months left in the school year, I decided to flee England and return to the States, where I would move in with Collin for the two remaining months of his lease. Stephen was working like a dog at Goldman and hardly spent any time at home anyway, and Collin’s mother had generously arranged a job for me in the Sotheby’s prints department. My decision to leave Oxford precipitated a friendship-terminating argument with Elizabeth and Trish, their months of pent up frustration overflowing while I sat there, cold, immune to the heat. I knew it was sad, and I wanted to feel sadder than I did, but I could only focus on my tingling eagerness to reunite with Collin.
From the first night Collin and I were together again, I could tell that something in his make-up had changed, as though his emotional fat had been rendered, leaving him lean in spirit. He was louder, more intense, puffing his feathers in a manner I hadn’t seen before, and expressed an acute physical hunger for me. I wondered if it was the heightened proximity to Stephen, my absence, the pressures of law school, or the grit of Manhattan, and decided it was likely an amalgamation of them all. I also decided that I did not mind the change, and enjoyed this undiscovered reservoir of power within him.
Now, nursing my third pour, I found it nearly impossible to distinguish between the three years separating that night and our engagement. I enjoyed my work, my social life, my morning routine, and my frequent bouts of unrestrained shopping, all with equal satisfaction; but I relished most of all my perfect, perfect Collin. In the months leading up to the wedding, I peeled off a significant number of my hours at Sotheby’s to properly immerse myself in deliberations between dove-white versus eggshell napkins, Swiss meringue weighed against mascarpone buttercream. In a sheepish fashion, I was also eager to lose seven pounds, the lucky number for a bride to drop on the scale, according to the trainer my mother-in-law had eagerly offered to pay for. I found myself in a constant state of giddy delirium, as if I were being pumped with helium betwixt my veggie-heavy meals.
I moved to cutting tomatoes for my soon-to-be bruschetta and kept wiping my juice-stained hands against my apron, producing long, wet streaks across my torso. They reminded me of the sweat that had gathered beneath my Oscar de la Renta gown as I strode towards Collin under the lights in the Waldorf Astoria ballroom, being observed by what felt like half of Manhattan and a drop of Connecticut. My eyelids were heavy with bronze eyeshadow, which I worried tackified my otherwise flawless look. The officiant’s words gurgled between my ears as I stared into Collin’s eyes, eager to find his soul in them. I said “I do” before I could. I was suddenly submerged underwater in a desirous kiss, and when I came back up my ears popped. We were dancing euphorically and being congratulated, and I welcomed a hard drink for the first time in weeks. Hours later, once the guests had finally exhausted themselves and the band started packing up their instruments, Collin and I headed towards our suite. Alone at last, we uncorked a bottle of champagne that neither of us needed and began to embrace. Like a skilled ventriloquist, he manipulated my movements with his strong hands and we swayed, rocked, and rubbed against each other. His touch was tender as he positioned himself above me on the bed, as I lay flat, reverberating with anticipation.
I’d just finished dicing the tomatoes and walked, serrated knife in hand, to preheat the oven for my duck. But I could hardly see in front of me—my vision was singularly focused on the projected image of us in that bed, in that position, and his first thrust, harder than I’d expected, causing me to gasp. Again his sex pierced me, and again, but the pain I was experiencing in the projection was layered with a new hurt, as I’d rammed myself into the island on my way to the oven, the area above hip where I’d made impact now throbbing. I watched blood cluster from the fresh cut on my finger, claimed victim of the tomato knife. The last thing I saw on the projection, now split with my current surroundings, was the image of the blood that gathered against my thighs as I retreated to the bathroom post-consumation, a shallow pool of tears welling in my eyes, trying to forget the introduction I’d just received to my new life.
The projection cut off and I threw the knife into the sink, turning my head away to avoid seeing the blood. I rinsed my finger and wrapped it tightly with gauze from the makeshift first aid kit that I keep in the kitchen. My recently bashed abdomen was still hurting, and while I was grabbing the gauze, I decided to pull down a neighboring bottle of gin for pain-relieving purposes.
I got drunker. I am skilled at cooking while drunk and moved routinely through the citrus and barley salad. I drank gin with nothing and kneaded focaccia dough while thinking about how horrible my first pregnancy had been, how fat and vein-laced my ankles had grown, like two pomelos scribbled on with blue Sharpies. I didn’t take my socks off in Collin’s presence once throughout that period, though Collin worked so much in those months that it hardly mattered. I made lemon-dill vinaigrette and remembered the nanny that Collin wanted to hire when Hailey was born, a Scandinavian beauty with large breasts and long blonde hair who had just graduated from NYU. That was the first time in our relationship that I yelled at him, yet I was the one who ended up crying and apologizing profusely for my behavior. The gin started tasting like water, so I had some more to hydrate myself as I relived the scorching heat of the early summers in East Hampton, the horrible boredom I suffered when the kids were at camp and Collin was playing golf with Stephen or whoever else. The water in my glass then morphed to tears, the ones I cried after the affair, the affair with that Scandinavian slut we ended up hiring who I’d taken in like family. I cried for the betrayal, but also for how disgustingly clichéd it all was.
The doorbell rang and I nearly dropped my glass. From the other side of the apartment I heard Collin emerge from our bedroom, and I screamed into the air that I needed a minute, so loudly and shrilly that even in my drunkenness my own voice annoyed me, and despite getting no response I knew Collin had heard me and would entertain them in the study for at least a few minutes. He would probably gush over all my hard work in the kitchen, never mind that he hadn’t so much as poked his head in once all day. I slipped on some gin that had dribbled onto the floor and just barely caught my balance before I began frantically plating the food, and though my final presentation was sloppy, I couldn’t bring myself to care the way I would have if I’d been sober. I heard the patter of footsteps approaching and faint bits of small talk growing louder until our quaffed mob of guests was in sight. I smoothed my hair and chirped, “Hello everyone, we’re so glad you could join us,” putting one hand on the counter to prevent the room from swaying. But no one responded. Instead they stared at me like a pack of ghosts, eyes wide and pulsing, some with their hands pressed tightly over their lips, others letting the horror escape. Collin, standing in the front, was the palest, pale like the raw duck’s skin. He directed one wobbling finger at my torso and said, “Ellen, what in G-d’s name happened?”
I looked down and saw that my apron was soaked in blood. A few stray tomato seeds floated in the blackish-red pond located above my hip, right where I had collided with the island, knife in hand. Right where I had felt a throbbing strangely intense for a bruise, that I washed away with the watery, teary, terrible gin. It dawned on me then that my finger had been a mere stop on the knife’s journey on its way to my gut. Perhaps if I hadn’t turned my head away while tossing the knife into the sink, I would have realized. I don’t recall what I said out loud, but I remember thinking it was ironic that a hollow woman could be storing so much blood.
