* * *
Brady’s apartment didn’t feel like another woman’s apartment. The first time Georgiana went over she was nervous, sure there would be a dresser covered in perfume bottles, framed photos on a shelf, tampons and makeup in the bathroom. And while there were tampons under the sink, it was not the home of a woman. It was Brady’s. Full of maps and thick rugs that he bought in Morocco, a brass Buddha from Cambodia, a neat row of basketball sneakers and running shoes by the door. His refrigerator was full of beer and hot sauce, a bicycle hung from the wall, his bed was made with a neat blue coverlet, and his bedside table was stacked with biographies. Georgiana wondered how it had looked before Amina moved out. Did they have wedding china she took to Seattle? A set of champagne flutes? A crystal cake stand that no single, takeout-eating man would ever think to buy for himself? She wondered if the apartment in Seattle bore traces of Brady, if there was a stick of Old Spice, a razor, a box of condoms.
She couldn’t bring herself to think about that part. The fact that the person she loved was also having sex with someone else. They knew better than to discuss it, but it was a certainty she lived with. When Brady came home from a weekend in Seattle, she had to bite her tongue, had to pinch herself to keep from thinking about him lying on top of his wife, kissing her face and holding her hand, both of them slick with sweat.
Sometimes Georgiana felt she was trying to memorize Brady, preparing for him to disappear and leave her dreaming about the small freckles on his back. But other times it felt like their future together stretched out before them, and she saw Brady trying it out and flirting with that vision of life. They had discovered that they both liked to sleep the same way, with the big and second toe of one foot locked around the Achilles above the other foot’s heel. “If we had babies I bet they’d like to sleep that way too,” Brady said.
“If we had babies they would be pretty great athletes.” Georgiana smiled.
“I’d want them to have your hair.”
“I’d want them to have your face.”
“I’d want them to have your breasts.”
“That might be awkward if they were boys. Tiny little baby boys with a woman’s breasts.”
“I would love them anyway,” Brady promised solemnly. “Our tiny little baby boys with beautiful breasts and long brown hair and man faces with five o’clock shadows.”
* * *
—
When Amina came to visit, and Georgiana couldn’t spend the weekend with Brady, her entire body thrummed with misery. She went to dinner with Kristin and Lena and tried to listen as they discussed Kristin’s boss, who was always wearing AirPods in meetings; she played tennis with her mother at the Casino and they had lunch afterward at the apartment, sitting silently as her mother read Cord’s Yale alumni magazine with a highlighter, looking for the offspring of social acquaintances. When Darley asked about Brady, Georgiana shrugged, mumbling something about things petering out. She couldn’t tell her sister that Brady was married, couldn’t tell her that she was knowingly sleeping with someone’s husband.
* * *
On Monday Georgiana awoke happy: Amina was leaving and Brady belonged to her again. When she passed him in the hall on the way to the library, he reached out and squeezed her arm and they grinned at each other like idiots before swiftly scurrying along in opposite directions.
Now that Georgiana was listening, Amina was everywhere. At lunch Brady’s friends from the first floor mentioned Seattle all the time in conversation; they referred to him in the second person plural, asking, “Are you guys going back to Maine for Memorial Day?” or “Are you guys leasing that Prius?” Their colleagues knew Brady so well, while Georgiana felt they barely even knew her name.
Nobody at the office ever asked Georgiana’s weekend plans or even commented on a new sweater. They were friendly, but they weren’t her friends. It was mind-boggling in some ways. She had grown up in Brooklyn, in this very neighborhood, and yet the men and women in her office barely resembled those she knew in her real life. While her parents played golf, her coworkers did yoga. While her parents and their friends vacationed in Florida, her coworkers vacationed in Ecuador and Costa Rica. It was BMW versus Subaru, Whole Foods versus farmers market, shiny wingtips versus Birkenstocks with socks. There was one woman named Sharon, who worked on the first floor. Sharon had short gray hair—not fashionable icy gray but the yellowish gray of the unkempt; she wore linen that always seemed to be wrinkled and creased around her waist and armpits; and she was frequently coming up and giving people unsolicited back rubs. Georgiana knew she was a nice person, and yet she found herself waiting with vague horror for Sharon to finish rubbing her shoulders and move on to someone else. There was another woman, Mary, who had a glossy blond bob and always smelled of French perfume but exclusively wore clothing she had bought in Nepal—silk harem pants with a dropped crotch and embroidered tops. She wore a pin on her jacket that said free tibet and had a small plastic Buddha with a cell phone on her desk. There were men with long, gray ponytails and small John Lennon glasses. There were women Georgiana’s age with pierced septums and astrological tattoos. Georgiana would no sooner get a tattoo than shave her head.
While it would be easy to attribute her lack of work friends to cultural difference, it was also because of Brady. How could she entertain a real friendship when her entire work life was a charade, the exact place she needed to be most careful, the nexus of her and Brady’s terrible secret? Ever since the conference in D.C. she felt that Meg on the grant-writing team was trying to befriend her. When Meg saw her at the lunch table, she sat next to her; they chatted amiably about Meg’s deadlines, about Meg’s schedule, about Meg’s upcoming trip to Pakistan. Typically, only project managers were on-site, but they were competing for a massive new ten-year grant in women’s health from USAID, so Meg was going along to get a leg up on the proposal. It would be her first time in-country, her first time in the Middle East, a huge step for her career. It did not go unnoticed by Georgiana that they only talked about Meg at these lunches, but in some ways that made the friendship easier. Georgiana didn’t have to squirm when discussing her weekend plans （“Oh, I plan to have sex four times and eat Thai food naked with our colleague, Brady, remember him?”）。 Georgiana knew that her relationship with Brady was creating little barriers between her and her other friends too. Lena and Kristin thought she’d broken up with him when she found out about his wife. She lied when she was spending Saturday nights with him, claiming that she was helping babysit Poppy and Hatcher, that she was tired, that she was not in the mood to go out. They worried she was depressed and tried to talk her into joining them, but she closed them out and silenced her phone. Lying to Darley was logistically easier, since Darley was too busy with her kids to beg her to go to any parties on weekends, but the shame she felt knowing how much Darley would disapprove made her preemptively annoyed at her sister. Just because Darley was lucky enough to have met the love of her life in business school didn’t mean it was that simple for the rest of the world. It was easy to feel high and mighty about the sanctity of marriage when you’d never fallen deeply and painfully in love with the wrong person.