She knew she’d fallen for all the wrong things in Ben — his confidence, his ease in social situations, the way she’d catch him staring at her, the life free from want that seemed like a lock in the company of the kind of man who knew exactly where he was headed. He was so smart. His mind was always going. He treated her more gently than any man, in her admittedly thin experience, had ever treated her. She used to ask him to tell her what to read, what to wear, what to order; if, later in life, she found this same sort of input from him invasive or condescending, that wasn’t really his fault — the change was in her. She had come to the city after college with the money left to her by her father when he passed away her senior year, money that would not last long, no matter how frugal she was with it. He was in his third year of law school, with a job offer already in hand, and she was working for Ralph Lauren. It seemed as decent a job as any other. She was not a shallow person by any means, but she had no sense of a calling. He was in the city for the weekend, and a friend of Helen’s fixed them up. The friend had been out with Ben once herself. “You will love him,” she said. “Personally I like them a little more malleable.” Helen did love him, and he found her worth loving too, and as clear and shameful as it seemed in retrospect that what had drawn them together was his self-regard and her naïveté, still, even on that foundation, they had been happy for many years.
They had even stayed happy, and boundlessly supportive, through the sad struggle to conceive a child, the three miscarriages, the last of which changed the tone of her doctor’s voice dramatically. She had never been told that she was barren — no woman under sixty was ever told that nowadays, it seemed — but faced with the obstacles involved, the drugs and the nine months lying in bed and the long odds against ending up anywhere other than where they had ended up three times already, they decided to adopt. That way they could still be parents at what seemed like a reasonable age. Thirteen months and two trips to China and a move to the suburbs and a lot of Ben’s money later, they brought home Sara, eleven months old, the best day of all their lives. One child seemed like such a blessing at that point that two was something they had never even discussed.
She stopped working, while Ben of course still put in long days in the city, and somewhere in those years, static though they seemed in every respect other than the growth of Sara herself, the great drift took place. His life and her life were shaped like parentheses that came closest to touching at the very beginning and the very end of every day. Sex, when they had it, became for Helen a form of denial, the way some couples will point to their children’s good report cards as evidence that everything at home is actually okay. They didn’t fight about anything — it wasn’t really their nature; instead she just watched her husband’s face turn slowly blank, and decided to attribute it to the demands of his job. He made partner, and Sara grew into a child with no hidden developmental surprises other than an extraordinary gift for sports, and Helen, at some point, forgot to find anything else to want from life, and this had turned her into a boring person, a burden, a part of the upkeep, and she might have floated along mindlessly like that forever, or at least until Sara went off to college, were it not for the fact that her lack of inner resources had driven her husband insane. She drank off the last of her wine, signed her name to the divorce papers, stuffed them back into her purse, and walked unsteadily down the hall to bed.
The next morning she found a message on her office desk, left there the night before by Michaeclass="underline" “A Congressman called,” it said. That didn’t seem right, particularly when accompanied by a 718 phone number. Helen dialed it. “Councilman Bratkowski’s office,” a woman’s voice answered. Councilman, congressman, whatever, Helen laughed to herself as she sat on hold; but something about the name rang a bell. Holding the phone with her shoulder, she Googled his name and hit Return, and she saw what it was just at the moment the councilman’s voice boomed over the line.
“So you are still in business?” he said jovially. “The guy I talked to last night told me Harvey Aaron was dead, which my condolences. You’re the folks who handled the Peking Grill strike, right?”
An hour later, Helen was on the subway out to Elmhurst, a ride long enough to give her time to read through that day’s Post and Daily News, much of which was devoted to the reason she’d been called. Doug Bratkowski, a two-term councilman with a wife and three teenage children, had been caught on a building surveillance camera in the Bronx, beating a young woman purported to be his mistress. Helen had seen the silent, fifteen-second clip online as she pulled her coat on: first an empty hallway, then a large figure in an overcoat pulling a much smaller woman into the frame by her long hair; she pushes away from him, hits him weakly in the chest, and then he punches her in the face. Prodding her down the stairs ahead of him, he turns to scan the hallway behind them, and at that point his face, though bloated with anger, is clearly identifiable.
“Please have a seat,” the councilman said, closing the door behind them. His office might have belonged to a storefront lawyer, with fake white paneling and a breakfront that looked like it was made of particleboard. On his desk, facing outward, were framed photos of his family, and one of himself shaking hands with Mayor Bloomberg, both men facing the camera rather than each other.
“Will anyone else be joining us?” Helen asked.
Even his smile was like a hand on her shoulder. “Best to keep the loop as small as possible in times like these, I think. Here is where we stand. The young woman in question is not pressing any charges. She has been publicly named, though, and I’m sure the tabloids have all got their checkbooks out. At some point she may crack, I don’t know. So what I need is to figure out how to limit my exposure, not legally, but … well, you’re the pro, you must know what I’m talking about.”
He was a bear of a man, red-faced even when calm, with the tracks of a comb clearly visible in his hair. Helen fought down her fear of him. “Were you having an affair with this woman, Councilman?” she asked.
He affected surprise and smiled again. “Call me Doug,” he said. “Is that strictly relevant to what you need to do?”
She wasn’t sure it was. But she found herself needing to know it anyway. “Think of me as you would think of a lawyer,” Helen said. “I cannot be in a position where I am taken by surprise by information the other side has and I don’t.”
He nodded. “Well then, yes,” he said. “Assuming we have the seal of the confessional here, I was, and am, having an affair with the young woman on the tape. For about two years now. My wife, who is currently not speaking to me, did not know about it until the day before yesterday. There’s no love child or anything like that. I never spent any public money on her, I never hired her for any phony campaign job. She is,” he said, “just this smoking hot Latina chick I have been banging on the side, just like millions of people do all over the world every day. Does that give you everything you need to work with?”
She recrossed her legs and resmoothed her skirt, just to give herself a few seconds. Then, with great effort, she stared back right into his eyes. “The way I see it, there’s really only one way for you to go,” she said. “You tell the woman who answers the phone out there that all media inquiries are to be forwarded to me. I will announce that you’ll be delivering a statement tonight at, let’s say, eight-thirty, plenty of time for the late news and for tomorrow’s papers. I don’t know what your home looks like, but if the optics are right, we can do it there — outside, not inside — and if not, we can do it here, I suppose. Little cramped, though.”