The Secret Lives of Married Women by Elissa Wald Page A

the material is very nice.” He paused. “Leda, is something the matter?”
    Overcome with self-consciousness, I spoke in a rush. “I just— listening to Bryce, I thought—well, I was sure she was going to invite you home with her.”
    “Oh yes. She did invite me,” Stas said.
    “She did?”
    “Yes. But I apologized and told her I was tired.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Well. Was she upset?” It seemed I was compelled to pepper him with senseless questions. As though maybe—if I didn’t allow the slightest lull in the conversation, if I created a distracting enough barrage—he’d forget to wonder what this was all about.
    “It is possible,” he told me. “But how could I spend the night with a woman I have only just met?”
    I closed my eyes and felt myself smiling. “Maybe she thought that if you felt that way, you shouldn’t have accepted the shirt,” I told him.
    “The shirt?” He sounded surprised. “With the shirt she did not leave me a choice.”
    * * *
    “What an innocent.” Rae was laughing.
    “Guileless. Yes.”
    “So then what? Did you ever tell him why you were calling?
    “All I said was that I needed to tell him something. He was flying back on a Friday evening. So I asked if we could have dinner at some point during the weekend. I named a pizza place we liked on the upper west side.”
    “Ah,” said Rae. “And he said yes?”
    He came straight from the airport, his duffel bag on his shoulder.

9
    After Rae left, I cleared the teacups from the table. A light rain was falling outside and the radio was playing low. I was clench-jawed and awash with all the nostalgia I’d dredged up over the past hour, newly bewildered by the sight of our front lawn through the kitchen window. What were we doing here?
    When we left Kaiser Tech to come west, Bryce told us that we’d regret it—that we were making the biggest mistake of our lives. That if it weren’t for him, I’d still be answering the phone somewhere; that Stas would still be a busboy. He said that within a year or two, he—Bryce—would be on the cover of Fortune magazine, and we would be nowhere. He told us we were ingrates and losers. We still missed him sometimes.
    Bryce had been right about one thing—I made a lot of money at Kaiser Tech. Eventually even Stas made a fair amount of money. Once we had a captive client base, Stas came up with the idea of providing whatever peripheral equipment our customers wanted. If a client was in need of a printer, an extra monitor, a fax modem, Stas would order and install it and keep half of the fee. By the time we left the company, we had enough to live on for a few years.
    This was fortunate, since I was visibly pregnant and therefore unemployable when we arrived in Portland. I didn’t work during my third trimester and I stayed home with Clara throughout the first year of her life. I walked around the neighborhood with the baby in a stroller or a sling. I was slow to lose the baby weight and wore maternity clothes for many months after giving birth.
    In self-imposed exile from the world of theater and film, I had no life to inhabit but my own. It was like walking around in an invisible straitjacket. Was this how other people felt all the time?
    Acting had made life so much more exciting. It was a chance to be other people and at the same time a way to access facets of myself I’d find hard to confront head-on. As Blanche DuBois, I could be aging, desperate and pathetic; it was safe to let myself feel those emotions beneath the cover of a role.
    Having a very young child was both a distraction from, and a constant reminder of, the fact that my career was hopelessly derailed. There was at once no time and nothing but time. Nearly every waking moment was taken by the baby: by the need to feed or change or soothe or amuse her. I took her to a music class and an infant massage class and the children’s museum and the zoo. I took her to play spaces and our neighborhood Mommy and Me sessions