The Invisibles

The Tea Party

43 the tea party— He fell in love, briefly, with a younger woman. They met on project and hit it off one morning in the coffee line, making small talk to ward off a panhandler. Turned out they both loved movies . He wrote screenplays in his free time—scenes, really, which he showed no one—and she had been to film school in North Carolina. Now they both traveled around teaching older people how to use auditing software. They passed hours in unfamiliar offices, explaining keystroke combinations to resistant workers and reading about industry advances, and when it was over they escaped, usually to the art cinema or the place that showed pictures by Antonioni and Godard. As the dark theater brightened around them, something changed. She laced her arm through his, he went tight in the throat, and they would say things he blushed to recall later. There were nights in her hotel room, perhaps many, but the affair went no further than that. Maybe it was because he returned to his bed while it was still dark and the halls were empty, and when he saw her back at the office, she wore a fresh mask of makeup and acted like a stranger, not coldly, but like the friendly stranger he had met that morning in the coffee line. Maybe she had never loved him; maybe he scared her. She was twenty-four, he thirty-seven, married, with twin girls who fought over the phone when he called. He did not know what made her end it, only that he had been preparing to leave his family without telling her. Being with her had dominated his thoughts as he held filthy rails in trains and sat amid the babble in airports and took long morning swims at 44 — the tea party the ymca near the hotel. More than anything else, he thought, his wife’s pride would be hurt. Cindy had gotten what she wanted from him in their daughters, twins with fiery red hair and a penchant for singing together and losing clothes in the yard. After a while, she might even forgive him. A small, energetic woman who had not been without a network of friends since college, she had been his ally for years, and then she had become a mother and forgotten him. Perhaps it was unfair to put it like that, but he sensed she had lost her interest in being his wife, and he did not hold it against her. They had known each other too long, and the basis of their marriage had been friendship. He now saw the mistake they had made, but there was no taking back lost years and no use in pointing fingers. He tried to imagine explaining it to Lindsay, the young woman from work. Sometimes he looked at her and thought, She’s just a girl, I’m too old, and I’m doing something very wrong here. But other times he saw her deflect another consultant’s advance or stand up for herself to their manager, and she seemed more than a match for him. She knew he was married and a father, and she still went to the movies with him and let him put his hand on her waist and climbed on top of him in the stiff hotel bed. Sometimes when he thought about it he was startled by her forwardness. Maybe she was the stronger one. It was in the midst of this bittersweet confusion, as he sat one morning with his laptop deleting e-mails he had barely read, that he finally understood he was in love. He resolved to tell her. He had to. He owed it to himself, and to Lindsay. In a way, he owed it to his wife. She was getting older, too; she might want to remarry, and there was no denying that finding someone was harder for a woman in her late thirties , even a woman as attractive and charming as Cindy. It was right to give her as much time as possible. And so, armed with the tea party — 45 this reasoning and the half belief he was doing the right thing, he went to Lindsay’s hotel room that evening. He should have called, but he was feeling anxious to see her. She had not been around the office that day, and he had not found an opportunity to...