As for me, I’d not only maximized every bonus since starting at the agency, I’d received promotions as well, and by 2014, I was heading up some of the agency’s major accounts. Vivian and I had been married for seven years, London had recently turned five, and I was thirty-four years old. We’d not only remodeled the kitchen of our home, but we also had plans to remodel the master bathroom as well. The stock market had been kind to our investments – especially Apple, our largest holding – and aside from the mortgage we had no debts. I adored my wife and child, my parents lived nearby and my sister and Liz were my best friends in the world. From the outside, my life seemed charmed, and I would say as much to anyone who asked.
And yet deep down, part of me would also have known that I was lying.
As well as things had been going at work, no one who reported to Jesse Peters ever felt comfortable or secure in their job. Peters had started the agency twenty years earlier and with offices in Charlotte, Atlanta, Tampa, Nashville, and New York, it was far and away the most prominent agency headquartered in the Southeast. Peters, with blue eyes and hair that had gone silver in his twenties, was legendary for being both shrewd and ruthless; his modus operandi had been to run other agencies out of business either by poaching clients or undercutting fees; when those strategies didn’t work, he’d simply buy out his competitors. His successes further inflated his already massive ego to megalomaniacal proportions, and his management style fully reflected his personality. He was certain that his opinions were always correct, and he played favorites among the employees, frequently pitting one executive against the other, effectively keeping everyone on edge. He fostered a climate in which most employees attempted to claim more credit on successes than they deserved, while hinting that any failures or mistakes were the other guy’s fault. It was a brutal form of social Darwinism, in which only a select few had any chance for long-term survival.
Fortunately, for more than a decade I’d been relatively spared the savage rounds of office politics that had caused more than one nervous breakdown among the executive staff; early on because I was too subordinate to care about, and later on because I brought in clients who appreciated my work and paid the firm accordingly. Over time, I suppose I convinced myself that because I made Peters a lot of money, he considered me too valuable to torment. After all, Peters wasn’t nearly as hard on me as he’d been on others in the agency. While he’d chat with me in the hallway, other executives – some with more experience than I – would often emerge from Peters’s office appearing shell-shocked. When I’d see them, I couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief – and maybe even feel a little smug – that such a thing had never happened to me.
But assumptions are only as accurate as the person who makes them, and I was wrong about virtually everything. My first major promotion had somewhat coincided with my marriage to Vivian; my second promotion had occurred two weeks after Vivian had come to the office to drop off my car after it had been in the shop, one of those drop-ins that could go catastrophically wrong but in this case had caused the boss to join us in my office before eventually taking us to lunch. The third promotion came less than a week after Peters and Vivian spent three hours talking at a client’s dinner party. Only in retrospect did it become clear that Peters was less interested in my work performance than he was in Vivian, and it was that simple truth that had kept him from zeroing in on me all along. Vivian, I should note, bore a striking resemblance to both of Peters’s former wives, and Peters, I suspected, wanted nothing more than to keep her happy… or if possible, marry wife number three, even if it cost me my own marriage.
I’m not kidding. Nor am I exaggerating. Whenever Peters spoke to me, he never failed to ask me how Vivian was doing, or comment on what a beautiful woman she was, or ask how we were doing. At client dinners – three or four times a year – Peters always found a way to sit beside my wife, and every Christmas party included the sight of them, heads together in a corner. I probably could have ignored all of this, if not for Vivian’s response to his obvious attraction. Though she didn’t do anything to encourage Peters, she didn’t do anything to discourage his attention either. As terrible as he was as a boss, Peters could be quite charming around women, especially beautiful ones like Vivian. He would listen and laugh and offer just the right compliment at exactly the right time, and because he was also as rich as Midas, it struck me as possible – even likely – that Vivian was flattered by his interest. His attraction toward her was, for her, par for the course. Guys had been vying for her attention ever since she’d been in elementary school and she’d come to expect it; what she didn’t like, however, was the fact that it sometimes made me jealous.
In December 2014 – the month before the most fateful year of my life – we were getting ready for the agency’s annual office Christmas party. When I expressed my concerns about the situation, she heaved an aggravated sigh.
“Get over it,” she said and I turned away, wondering why it was my wife seemed so dismissive of my feelings.
To rewind a bit on Vivian and me:
As rewarding as motherhood had been for Vivian, marriage to me seemed to have dimmed in its appeal. I can remember thinking that Vivian had changed in the years we’d been married, but lately, I’ve come to believe that Vivian didn’t change so much as simply evolve, becoming more of the person she’d always been – a person who gradually felt to me like a stranger.