The Cool Wife

Phoebe had always had a tough exterior, though nobody who knew her well would have confused toughness with happiness. She was independent in the way some people were religious: she believed in it absolutely, especially when circumstances gave her no particular reason to. She lived in the moment, distrusted schedules, disliked asking permission, and had an almost supernatural ability to walk away from things other people considered permanent. Jobs came and went. Apartments came and went. Friends came and went. She had left cities with half a tank of gas and no plan beyond seeing what happened when the highway forked.

Yet for all her talk about freedom, Phoebe had a curious habit of staying in the situations that hurt her longest. Whenever anyone pointed this out, she had an answer ready. She liked complicated things. She didn’t want an ordinary life. She wasn’t afraid of pain. She was choosing it. This was the sort of distinction that could keep a person from having to admit that sometimes the thing you call a choice is simply the thing you have become accustomed to enduring.

Her marriage to Joey was the finest example. Joey had tried to ruin it almost from the beginning, though he would have been offended by the accusation because, in his mind, trying to ruin something and making it difficult were two entirely different activities. He flirted with women, picked unnecessary fights, disappeared for hours, became obsessed with hobbies he abandoned six weeks later, and periodically announced that they needed to make some enormous change to their lives because he was bored. He bought a motorcycle. He joined a softball league. He decided they should own a boat. He once spent three weeks watching videos about competitive barbecue because he had become convinced that smoking meat was his calling. Phoebe endured all of it with the same amused expression she had worn when they were young and Joey had first discovered that he could make her laugh simply by behaving badly.

The trouble was that Phoebe understood him too well. She knew when he was genuinely angry and when he was performing anger because he wanted attention. She knew when he was flirting because he wanted another woman and when he was flirting because he wanted to make sure Phoebe still wanted him. Most importantly, she kept staying. Joey could never quite understand why that bothered him, but some part of him seemed to need to test the limits of her patience, as though her willingness to remain were proof that he was worth remaining for.

Then there had been the nanny. She was young, beautiful, competent, and irritatingly good at the things Phoebe was supposed to be good at but had never particularly cared about. She remembered appointments, kept the children’s schedules straight, folded laundry without creating a mountain of it, and somehow knew where every missing shoe in the house had gone. Joey noticed her immediately. Phoebe noticed Joey noticing her, and for a while she said nothing. Then one afternoon she came home early and found them together.

Joey froze. The nanny froze. Her bra halfway off. His pants undone. Phoebe stood in the doorway and looked at the two of them, and for a moment she felt the familiar temptation to do what a normal wife would have done: scream, throw something, demand an explanation, and make somebody sleep on the couch. Instead she looked at the nanny and saw something that stopped her. The woman was terrified, not because Phoebe had caught her but because she knew she was about to lose Joey. Phoebe recognized the expression. She had worn it herself.

So she did something nobody expected, least of all Joey. She sat down, poured herself a drink, and asked the woman whether she liked him. The nanny said yes. Phoebe looked at Joey and asked whether he liked her. Joey said yes. Phoebe considered the three of them, the ridiculousness of the situation, and the fact that the conventional solution seemed to involve a great deal of screaming without necessarily making anyone happier. “Okay,” she said. She combed her hair into the nanny’s hair and brought their lips together.

That was how the affair became a throuple. There was no manifesto, no philosophical discussion about the future of marriage, no careful negotiation of boundaries. Phoebe simply refused to let the situation be what it obviously was and gave it another name.

Joey thought it was fantastic. He told people his wife was incredibly cool, that she didn’t get jealous, that she was open-minded in ways most women weren’t. He was proud of her. He thought the whole thing proved how lucky he was. Phoebe played along because playing along was easier than explaining that the arrangement had become something very different from what she had intended. She began dating the nanny, and somewhere along the way the relationship became less about Joey than either of them had expected. The nanny listened to her. She remembered the small things. She noticed when Phoebe was pretending to be fine. She could sit quietly beside her without needing to fill the silence. Joey had always filled silence; the nanny knew how to inhabit it. Phoebe found herself talking to the woman after Joey had gone to bed, then calling her when Joey was away, then looking forward to seeing her even when Joey wasn’t around. The two women began to connect in a way Phoebe had never anticipated, and that frightened her because it meant the arrangement had stopped being a game.

Joey eventually got bored. He did what Joey always did when something became familiar: he found something else to make interesting. The affair ended, or the relationship ended, or whatever word a person uses when one member of a three-person arrangement decides he has moved on. Joey barely noticed the damage. The nanny did. She was heartbroken, and Phoebe tried to comfort her. At first she thought she was simply being kind. Then she realized she was grieving too. She had fallen in love with the woman, though she had never permitted herself to call it that while the relationship was alive. Calling it love would have made it serious, and serious things could be lost. So she had called it fun, an adventure, something unconventional. Then the woman packed her things, cried in the doorway, and drove away, and Phoebe discovered that losing her hurt more than any of Joey’s betrayals ever had.

It was the only breakup that truly broke her. She stopped going out. She stopped laughing. She slept too much and drank too little, which for Phoebe was a reliable indication that something had gone terribly wrong. She moved through the house as though she were visiting it rather than living there. Joey noticed that she was quieter, but he interpreted the quiet as temporary and eventually became distracted by something else. There was always something else with Joey. Phoebe had to send the nanny away herself, packing the woman’s belongings into boxes and carrying them to the car while trying not to cry. When the taillights disappeared, she stood in the driveway for a long time and thought, with an intensity that frightened her, that she could have left with her.

Sometimes she still imagined it. She would have packed two bags, gotten into the car, and driven north toward Longmont. They could have rented a little house. They would have two Subarus because Phoebe suspected that was what lesbians in Longmont did, even though she had never actually verified it. They would grow vegetables badly, drink coffee in the morning, argue about whose turn it was to buy groceries, and eventually become boring. The thought had a strange sweetness to it. Boring, Phoebe sometimes suspected, might have been another word for safe. She just had never been brave enough to find out.

Instead she went back to being the cool wife. That was the exhausting part. Once Joey had decided that Phoebe was the woman who could handle anything, she had to keep proving him right. Whenever his attention wandered, she did something outrageous. She got another tattoo. She suggested a ridiculous trip. She bought a sex swing neither of them could figure out how to install. She became louder, funnier, wilder, more spontaneous. She made herself into an event because she had learned that events were difficult to ignore. Joey would notice, laugh, kiss her, and for a while everything would feel right again. Then his attention would drift, and Phoebe would begin inventing the next thing.

She finished the story and took a drink.

Joey had been listening with a grin. “I forgot about the nanny,” he said. “She was fucking hot.”

“Yeah.”

He laughed. “That was fun.”

Phoebe looked at him. “For you.”

He missed the distinction completely. “I always thought it was hot that my wife dated another woman.”

Phoebe smiled. “Of course you did.”

He leaned back, pleased with himself. To Joey, the story was about having a bisexual wife who was adventurous and unreasonably cool. He did not understand that the woman had mattered to Phoebe. He did not understand that Phoebe had been heartbroken when she left. He did not understand that his wife’s willingness to turn betrayal into an adventure had not been evidence that she was unaffected by betrayal. It had been the mechanism by which she survived it.

Around the fire, nobody laughed. Chandler looked at Monica, Monica looked at Rachel, and Rachel stared at Phoebe with the uncomfortable recognition of someone who had just realized that the story was not about what everyone thought it was about. Joey, meanwhile, seemed entirely satisfied with himself. He had heard the word “nanny,” remembered the sex, and concluded that the important thing was that his wife had been cool about it.

Phoebe watched the fire.

She could have told him.

She could have said that she had loved the woman. She could have said that losing her had hurt. She could have said that sometimes she wondered whether she had chosen the wrong person and then spent years constructing a personality around the choice so she wouldn’t have to admit it. She could have told him about Longmont and the Subarus and the little house and the boring mornings. She could have asked him what would happen if, for once, she stopped performing the woman he wanted her to be.

Instead she reached over and took his hand.

Joey looked at her. “You okay?”

Phoebe smiled. “I’m fine.”

He squeezed her hand and smiled back, reassured because he believed her.

The others said nothing.

The fire burned lower, and Phoebe sat beside her husband with her fingers tangled through his, wondering how many times a person could choose the same life before choosing became indistinguishable from staying. She looked at Joey and saw the man she had loved for years, the man who could make a room feel alive and make a quiet life impossible, and she wondered whether she had stayed because he was the love of her life or because leaving him would mean admitting that all those years of being the cool wife had exhausted her.

She did not know.

That was the trouble with the stories told around a fire.

Sometimes the person telling them did not know what they meant either.