The Perfect Wife

You shake your head.

“I think that’s the right decision. We’ll keep this between ourselves.” Mike starts winding up his computer cable. “This is something you’ll soon learn, Abbie. With Tim, honesty is not always the best policy. The secret to managing him successfully is to be selective.”

“I’m not trying to manage him at all. He’s my husband.”

Mike doesn’t reply for a moment. Then he says, “You know, we have something in common, you and I. We both want what’s best for Tim. Just remember how fragile he still is, would you? The very last thing he needs is any more emotional upheaval. Any more hurt. Right now, that could destroy him.”

His eyes hold yours. You realize he isn’t talking about the tests he just carried out—in fact, you’re pretty sure those were simply a pretext, an excuse to come here and have this conversation.

Mike’s warning you about something. Something you don’t even know yourself yet. But whatever it is, he wants you to keep it a secret.

13

When Mike’s gone you go and look at the iPad. Thirteen percent charged now. You thumb the switch. The Apple logo appears, followed by a message saying the operating system needs to check for updates.

Finally, a keypad appears. iPad requires passcode after restart.

You search your memory for numbers that might have some significance for you. You try your birthday, then your year of birth. Each time the iPad shakes the screen. Wrong.

You grimace, frustrated.

The simplest thing, of course, would be to tell Tim. He could give the iPad to his tech people to unlock. You put it on the table, where he’ll see it when he returns. But then you stop.

If there are secrets on that iPad, they’re your secrets. You didn’t want Tim to know about them back then. Until you know what they are, isn’t it best to play it safe and say nothing, at least for now?

And then there’s Mike’s warning. If whatever’s on the iPad will cause Tim grief, it might be better for him not to know about it.

You try not to listen to the small voice inside you that’s saying, You’re worried it’s something that’ll make him think less of you.

Because the thought has crossed your mind: What if, before you died, you were having an affair? You have no memory of that, obviously. But from what you’ve understood of Tim’s explanations, your memories were constructed from your digital footprint—social media, texts, emails, videos, and so on. By definition, anything you kept hidden from the world would be a blank.

You don’t think you’re the sort of woman who would ever be unfaithful to her husband. You love him. But if you can’t remember, how can you completely rule it out?

And then there’s that book. Who was it you were infatuated with, exactly? Tim? It seems unlikely, somehow, after so many years of marriage. And if it was him, why hide the book away?

How horribly ironic it would be if, after he’d spent five years obsessively re-creating his perfect wife, Tim discovered within a few weeks that she wasn’t so perfect after all.

You stare at the front door, thinking.

There’s a tiny phone shop near the corner of Mission and Cesar Chavez that does iPad repairs; or used to, five years ago. You remember there was a handwritten sign in the window: SMARTPHONES/TABLETS UNLOCKED.

It’s time to leave the house.

FOUR

Who was the first to add her on Facebook? It was probably Bethany or Jen; it would have looked creepy if it had been one of the guys. But because we had pretty much all friended one another anyway, one day there she was, showing up in our “People You May Know” feeds, initially with one friend in common, then two, then twenty. Abbie Cullen was accepting us!

So now we knew not only what she was like in the office, but also what she did with her weekends, what her family looked like at their last Thanksgiving, and what her political opinions were. (Not that they had been hard to guess.) She “liked” other artists, mostly, supporting their shows and openings, but there was enough detail on her timeline to satisfy our curiosity in other areas, too.

We learned that she had started off as part of an all-female collective that built surreal metal sculptures at rock festivals. We learned that her parents were divorced, and that her father was a minor celebrity, an East Coast academic who had fronted several thoughtful TV documentaries. We learned what she looked like on a surfboard (impressive), on vacation in a swimsuit (stunning), and which college she had attended. (That she’d gone to Stanford was both a surprise and a cause for delight: Many of us were graduates of that institution, although we had majored in subjects like mathematics and symbolic systems rather than art.) We learned—and this caused a minor flurry of excitement, or would have if we had not been carrying out these researches privately, covertly, each on his or her own initiative—that according to Google’s image-recognition app, the heavily tattooed young man in many of her timeline photographs was Rick Powell, frontman of the Purple Fireflies, who—again according to Google—was now in a relationship with Heidi Joekker, the Victoria’s Secret model.

Was Abbie newly single? We wondered, but Facebook wasn’t saying. One of us would ask her eventually, though. We were sure of that.

We didn’t expect it to be Megan Meyer. Megan was not one of us. She was a Silicon Valley dating coach whose company, Meyer Matching, specialized in pairing high-net-worth executives. Her website made no secret of her fees, which were—frankly—astronomical: fifteen hundred dollars for the initial interview, twenty-five thousand for entry-level membership, which guaranteed at least one date a month, and five thousand for a one-to-one coaching session, which might encompass anything from a fashion consultation to practice dates. Oh, and if you settled into an exclusive relationship with one of your Meyer Matches—each of whom was personally vetted by Megan herself—you coughed up a bonus of fifty thousand. For the big triple M—a Meyer Match Marriage—you were talking $250K, payable every five years, for as long as the marriage continued. Given those kind of charges, it was no surprise that her clientele came almost exclusively from the C class—CEOs, CFOs, CTOs.

The first time we spotted Megan in Tim’s office, a few years back, it caused a ripple of interest. But on reflection, we felt almost sorry for her. The very fact that Tim had summoned her to his workplace for the initial interview suggested she’d bitten off more than any matchmaker could reasonably be expected to chew.

Shortly after, a profile appeared on her website, under the heading BACHELOR #4:

ARE YOU A MATCH FOR BACHELOR #4?

Our bachelor is an extremely successful entrepreneur; passionate, dynamic, and motivated.

As CEO of his own highly successful start-up, he has many demands on his time. But he is also someone who thinks deeply about the future, and is now fully committed to finding the right person to share his own future with.

A man of extremely high standards, used to making far-reaching decisions on a daily basis, he believes he would know within minutes whether he had met his lifelong partner.

His perfect match is 22–25 years old, petite, brilliant, and ambitious. She has feminine curves, unfussy hair, and a natural, healthy appearance without heavy makeup, tattoos, or colored nail polish. She will likely have a background in molecular biology or calculus. She is smart, poised, loving, family-oriented, nurturing, altruistic, and a nonsmoker. She is excited to forge a remarkable future with a world-class partner.

Candidates should apply, in writing, here, with a CV and six recent photographs.

That had been a while ago now, and if Tim had been dating since, we certainly weren’t aware of it. (There was that thing with Drunk Karen at the summer party: No one was surprised when, a few weeks later, now-sober Karen quietly moved on.) Megan strode into the office from time to time on her three-inch Manolo Blahniks, showed Tim some headshots on her iPad, then went away again, shaking her head. One time she was heard to sigh loudly as she climbed into her top-of-the-line convertible Jaguar.

About three weeks after Abbie started her residency, Megan came in for one of her usual sessions with Tim. But afterward, instead of leaving, she followed Abbie into the break room. Sol Ayode was in there, assembling a bagel, so he heard it all.