Chapter 4: Where The Hell Is My Husband? (With Audio)
It’s 11pm on a Friday, and I don’t know where Lincoln is. He told me that he’d be home by dinner. Then he told me that he had to go on a last minute business trip, but he’d try to FaceTime me. Now he’s not answering any of my calls or messages. I feel like the lowest of the low. How long do you let yourself be stupid for the only person who knows how to light you up from the inside out?
I look out of my bedroom window onto the expanse of Broadway. Even at this hour, there’s a decent amount of traffic. For a moment, I forget that I am 34 years old and this is a normal time to be finishing up a meal or even heading out to dinner. I remember that tonight in the greater metropolis of New York City, there are hundreds of thousands of people out and milling about. At any given moment there are tens of thousands of people laughing, flirting, fucking on their Friday night. Then there’s me.
I think about Sylvia Plath and how she stuck her generationally beautiful head in an oven. I think about Kate Spade and how she hung herself with her own scarf. I think about Marie Antoinette who apologized to the executioner for stepping on his foot, before he removed her head from her neck in one fell swoop.
I don’t want to be here anymore, trapped in a job and a marriage and a life that I hate. But I also don’t want to think about my ugly, lifeless body mouldering and decaying. It seems like pure vanity will keep me from killing myself, the fear of being a rotting and revolting corpse, brains spilling out and half eaten by maggots. Women almost never choose the gun, but I would. I want certainty, not a trip to Bellevue.
But no, I don’t choose death today. I will harm myself in a different way. For now, I will choose the knife, not the gun. I will cut myself into pieces that will then heal and make me even more beautiful. Armor against this nasty, cruel world, the one barrier that can be a balm. Pretty privilege.
I know I am already pretty, I was a model signed to the top agency in New York for years. But there’s an endless well inside me that perpetually seeks to be just a little bit better.
I still remember sitting at the lunchroom table alone. I remember boys in middle school laughing at me when I looked at them too long, back when I was decidedly unpretty. What a joke, to be wanted by me.
The rejection of my husband feels similar to this, but worse. He was supposed to be my greatest ally. Instead he has me constantly picking up my phone to see if there’s a notification, dialing him over and over like a desperate weirdo.
I go into our primary bathroom, a place where we’ve fucked in the shower or against the vanity dozens of times. I run through the memories briefly which makes me lightly turned on but mostly stung by how it used to be. My tears tonight have removed most of my makeup, but a cleansing balm and a makeup remover wipe does the rest.
My nerves are shot, and I can’t spend more hours alone in the dark, flipping my phone back and forth in my hand, checking every other minute for a missive from him.
I rummage through bottles of pills. Tonight will be an Ativan night. Tiny pills in my mouth and towering transvestites on the street. Valley of The Dolls, remix. I snort at my own stupid and possibly cancel-worthy joke as I lull myself into a warm, pharmaceutical slumber.
My last thought before I am fully pulled under the tide is a frisson of hatred toward myself. I know when I wake up to some implausible text tomorrow, I will forgive him.
He wakes me up the next morning with half a dozen bagels and a new phone, claiming he had to go meet a different client in Greenwich, and then just slept there. I want to probe further but I elect not to. I don’t want to ruin my mood.
I almost forgot that tonight is one of my favorite nights of the year, the Lincoln Center Spring Gala. Globecor, Lincoln’s company, always buys a table.
I got my dress weeks ago at Bergdorf’s, and it’s a stunning gold Jenny Packham gown, fit for a queen. In fact, I am pretty sure that Kate Middleton has the same one.
Lincoln’s mom lets me put things on her account at Bergdorfs whenever there is a gala. But normally, I can’t just buy a $10,000 gown that I will wear once. In fact, I will probably re-sell this on TheRealReal after, so I can buy myself something more timeless. Maybe the Bulgari ring I’ve been eyeing for months.
Lincoln’s parents are funny about money, as most hyper-rich people are. Lincoln makes a very generous high 6-figure salary, especially given how few hours a day he actually works. They occasionally top up his account with sizable cash gifts, for his birthday or Christmas or just because. He has an emergency credit card linked to one of their accounts.
But he does not have access to their level of fuck you money. No planes, no yachts, nothing like that. Not unless he proves himself worthy of taking the helm himself at Globecor. His dad has set it up so he and his brother are constantly butting heads trying to grasp the brass ring. He thinks this will make them both better. I think it makes everyone act far worse.
Who am I to complain though? Before I met Lincoln, I lived in a Brooklyn walk-up, with mold in the shower and neighbors who routinely stole our packages. Now I live in a Tribeca loft with multiple $10,000 toilets and a Cy Twombly painting over the fireplace. It’s not my home though, not really. I always feel I am just a few wrong moves away from losing it all, then being back to calculating whether I can afford subway fare comfortably or need to jump the turnstile.
Lincoln thinks it’s stupid that I still work at my $160,000 a year job, when I don’t even really like it. But he forgets that I went to Wellesley, not Liberty University. I wasn’t groomed to be a trad wife, but rather to make an impact, or at very least, to have an active LinkedIn. I’m sure my classmates already judge me enough for being in Martha Stewart Weddings (the elopement issue!) and for having a father-in-law who goes golfing with Ted Cruz.
Probably I will quit working when we have a baby, if we ever do. God knows that the New York City private school and extracurriculars scene can be a job enough for one to manage. But to quit now, with no kid to fret over, that would make me feel useless. I have acquaintances here in the city, but my very best girlfriend lives in Paris now, and most of my other friends have already decamped for Connecticut or northern New Jersey.
My other very best friend is Lincoln, or at least it was. Now I don’t feel certain of anything between us.
Work is mad at me because I took today off, even though we have a new product feature launching this week. We launch features every other week though, at a dazzling pace that none of our customers really care about, but it gives our Chief Product Officer a hard-on to post about on LinkedIn.
I’ve noticed something about Chief Product Officers. They are never men like my husband, who effortlessly turn every woman’s head when they walk into a room. They’re always the 5’8” beta males who have to squawk the loudest and cruelest to establish their place in the eco-system.
Sam Macallister, my boss, always goes out of his way to talk down to me and deny my promotions. I’ve never been anything but hardworking and helpful, especially compared to the idiotic University of Michigan and Arizona State bros that he promotes instead, every other quarter. The ones who binge-drink with him and sports bet with him after work every night, doing anything to avoid going home. They all have dull wives that they hate, but were too weak to not marry.
I swore to myself that Lincoln and I would never be like this, never let that sort of distance grow between us. But now, I am not sure where we stand. Something has changed and I don’t know how to fix it.
This evening, we will mask it though. We will glow and beam in front of the cameras, and especially in front of Lincoln’s parents. Lincoln’s parents are dying for another grandchild, to play with the three young boys that his brother dutifully sired.
No one dreams more of a daughter for me and a granddaughter for them. But they will know that I am not pregnant, the second we get on the step-and-repeat. My dress is like a second skin, one that shows off my protruding hipbones and the flat plain of my stomach. I usually don’t drink at these events, but I plan to have many flutes of Bollinger, to help me forget whatever the fuck last night was, along with a series of other strange oddities.
Maybe Lincoln will get drunk with me and we can leave early to have sloppy, delicious sex in our marital bed. That would make me so happy. I can’t remember the last time we did that.
We had maintenance sex a few weeks ago, but it made me feel like a hole. He barely looked at me, didn’t even seem to really care. I think he came, I definitely did not.
The Lincoln Center galas are special because they are my husband’s namesake. His parents went on their first date to see Swan Lake at Lincoln Center, and there’s always an aura around them being there. They are all a little lighter, a little less steeped in propriety. It seems like maybe we might actually be a fully enmeshed, carefree and fun family, at least for one night of the year.
My father-in-law reminds me of the race horses that he keeps at his Texas ranch. Blinders on, singularly focused, in hot pursuit of whatever it is he wants. Lincoln’s mom is more flighty and off-the-cuff. Don’t let it disarm you, because she will turn like a knife, the moment you start to relax.
Lincoln and her are close though. Everything he does is perfect, according to Marilyn, my mother-in-law. I wonder what it’s like to grow up with a parent like that, a parent who puts you on a pedestal. I certainly will never know.
I have so many tasks to do tonight before the party. First I go to Gina, who waxes my underarms and undercarriage to unrealistic smoothness. Ideally I should’ve done this a few days before, but I had other things on my mind, like stalking my own husband. Then I head uptown to my favorite nail salon to get a fresh acrylic set. Right now my finger nails are covered in upside-down chrome crosses and shiny gemstones. I think it looks cool as fuck, but it will make Marilyn and her friends nauseous. I settle for the mundane acceptability of three coats of Bubble Bath.
While I’m uptown, I pop into a nearby spot for a spray tan. My usual spray tan girl is out sick, and so I strip down for a total stranger, a Brighton Beach sugar baby type. I am confident in my body, I was usually the first girl to get naked at a go-see or behind the scenes of a shoot. But there’s always that slight weirdness, especially when it’s a random, new woman appraising your body, trying to decide what flaws to help conceal with her tanning gun. I go for the lightest possible tan option, just a slight shade about my natural color, to again appease the judgmental sexagenarian crowd that we will be sitting with tonight.
Last on my to-do list is hair and makeup, but luckily they will be coming to my house a bit later. I take the Q home and then marinate in front of the TV, in a baggy pair of Lincoln’s sweatpants and one of his half marathon tee shirts. He sometimes runs them for fun, without even training. When four hours are up, I go into the shower to quickly rinse off the initial spray tan and wash my hair, just in time for glam to arrive.
Marilyn has sent over her own glam, as a mea culpa for snapping at me over nothing during Easter brunch. This is a nice gift, but they are obviously Team Her. They are emissaries spying and perhaps prying, so I keep my mouth shut and blast Cardi B, as they blowdry my hair and contour my cheekbones.
People think that being pretty is one’s birthright and to some degree, it’s true. Look at brides. Many of them spend tens of thousands of dollars on their appearance, with varying results. But, even with some natural advantage, it still requires a lot of effort and time to be this kind of pretty. Photoshoot pretty, Mrs. Lincoln Holst pretty.
“I’m running late at work. Go to the gala on time without me and take photos with my parents. I’ll meet you there when I can.”
My stomach sinks. I was so excited to walk in together, beaming on his arm in my golden gown, with my freshest makeup and not a hair out of place.
He’s just working hard, and he’s keeping you informed. I try to gaslight myself, so I don’t ruin my false lashes and artfully applied eyeshadow. I can push off confronting things for now, so that I can stay Camelot-perfect for tonight’s gala but I know the truth. My husband is lying to me.