1. August
August
Ican afford to buy a Ferrari, but I still banged the blonde—and torched my marriage of twenty years.
But calling my transgression a mid-life crisis is a major cop out—a rationalization that is as weak as, I have only just discovered, I am.
I stare out at Honolulu City, in my bathrobe, after a shower, during which I demanded housekeeping come and change the sheets.
But the stench of what I did remains.
I love my wife.
Hell, every man who has cheated on his spouse probably says that and means it just as much as I do.
How meaningless are the words, though?
I run a hand through my damp hair.
What the fuck was I thinking?
I know exactly what I was thinking—and that is the saddest and most egregious part.
I was thinking that I am now forty-seven.
The magic number.
The age my father made it to before a man in a wool coat raised a pistol outside a rally in Hartford and ended him, before being shot down by secret service, and their blood mingled on the asphalt of a parking lot two blocks from the State Capitol.
Henrik, my brother and current governor of the state of Connecticut, and I watched it on live television because the networks didn’t cut away fast enough.
I was twelve. He was sixteen. My mother screamed, and I don’t think she ever stopped—even if she didn’t make the sound out loud.
Dad had been a hundred thousand votes ahead in the gubernatorial polls.
The morning after, every newspaper in Connecticut ran the same photograph: my father at a podium with one fist raised, taken six minutes before he died.
Senator Prescott Jacobsen, 1942–1989.
I turned forty-seven six weeks ago.
You don’t think about death every day at forty-seven, the way they say when you think about mortality as you age. You think about it the way you think about a tide. Always coming. Pulling at the edges of everything.
I’d been thinking about it since my forty-fifth birthday—the slow, sick arithmetic of how few years my father had been a father in the first place.
By forty-six, I was waking up at four in the morning, checking my pulse against the second hand of my watch.
By forty-seven, I had a younger associate from the firm in my Honolulu hotel room telling me she was a good idea.
I close my eyes, and I can almost smell the home of my childhood as I process the trauma I have just inflicted on my life.
I learned to read in a country that called my father a martyr and my brother and me the Jacobsen boys for a decade, like we were a single grieving organism.
I went to the schools my father and my brother went to and the law firm he would have wanted me to go to.
Then, I married the first woman who looked at me like I was a person and not the son of an obituary, and I built a life so carefully constructed against the specter of his death that I didn’t even notice I’d done that.
And then I turned forty-seven, and the specter is now inside of me, percolating into my life insidiously.
Her name is Chloe.
She’s twenty-nine.
She was in the elevator at the firm three months ago, wearing a blazer the color of a campaign yard sign, and I made a joke about it that she laughed at too long.
That’s how it starts.
A blazer.
A laugh.
A business trip for the Masterston deal. She wasn’t even supposed to be here. We don’t usually work together, but the universe maneuvered her to Honolulu and then….
She came to my room last night with a bottle of Champagne, a Krug, and a look that wasn’t a question.
I should have made it a question. I should have said no. I said other things instead. I said yes in the only way that counts—with my body. And for the first time in more than two decades I had sex with a woman who isn’t my wife.
Sela.
Her name is the first thing my heart learned to say clearly after my father died.
Sela Harrison, twenty-one years old, standing in the back of a Friday night Noam Chomsky reading at a bookstore on West Fourth in a cream-colored sweater that swallowed her hands.
I was twenty-five and two years out of Yale Law, and so emptied out by my first year at Drexel that I couldn’t tell anymore if I was a person or a billable hour.
But I used to be a fan of Noam Chomsky, when I had time to read, so I’d come—just to have something to do that had nothing to do with the law firm I’d sold my soul to.
She came up to me, cocked her head, and said, “I think you’re in my seat.”
I wasn’t, but I wanted to be, so I let the lie stand. The bookstore was suffocatingly full, every square inch of the floor claimed. I remained tucked into my cramped corner chair, completely boxed in as a dense wall of people crowded right behind us for standing room only.
“Would you like me to give you my seat?”
She licked her lips. “Would you?”
“Yes.”
I stood up. I could smell her.
Jasmine.
She laughed. It was a glorious, wonderful sound. “I was just….” She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Well, I was hoping because I’m exhausted and need to sit.”
I held my hand to my chair. “Please.”
She sat, and luckily, the man on her other side left after fifteen minutes of the talk, so we could sit together.
I fell in love with her then—love at first sight.
She was engaged and interested.
Up at the podium, Chomsky was meticulously dismantling the grand strategies of American unilateralism, drawing straight lines from the early Cold War doctrines to the current justifications for pre-emptive strikes.
He was essentially reading the blueprint in Hegemony or Survival, arguing that the pursuit of global dominance risked human extinction.
While the rest of the crowded bookstore just nodded along to the anti-war rhetoric, she leaned closer to me, her voice a sharp, whispered contrast to the hum of the air conditioner.
“It’s brilliant how he uses the term ‘grand strategy’,” she murmured, her eyes locked on the podium.
“He’s treating American foreign policy like an inherited grammar the state can’t stop speaking—and the market can’t price an apocalypse. ”
A few minutes later, as Chomsky began taking questions about the impending climate crisis and nuclear proliferation, she turned her head slightly toward me again.
“Most people think his thesis is hyperbole,” she whispered, her brow furrowing with genuine intellectual urgency.
“But he’s right. The choice really is a stark binary.
If the state continues to prioritize absolute hegemony over international law, it inherently chooses survival as a secondary concern.
It’s a mathematical certainty of self-destruction. ”
Hearing her synthesize geopolitics and cognitive structuralism in thirty seconds made my chest ache. I felt an old part of my brain—the part Drexel hadn’t managed to commodify yet—suddenly spark back to life.
Later on, I learned she worked as a social worker at the public defender’s office in Manhattan, having just completed her bachelor’s degree in social work.
Afterward, she said, “Can I buy you a drink to say thank you?”
“No.” I grinned at the disappointment that flashed in her eyes. “But I would be honored if you’d let me buy you one.”
I bought her the drink.
I’ve been buying her drinks since.
We married twelve months later in a courthouse in Lower Manhattan because neither of us wanted any wedding hoopla.
The only people we invited were Henrik and Caro—his fiancée then, his wife now—Sela’s parents, who fought before and after the ceremony (thankfully, not during), and Sela’s sister, who flew in from Stockholm.
My mother, who was invited, didn’t attend—because she didn’t approve of Sela, but her excuse was a Mediterranean sailing trip with friends. We were all grateful for her absence.
Sela wore a gorgeous non-wedding white dress she bought on Madison Avenue. It wasn’t designer.
I wore the only suit of my father’s that fit me.
Magnus came the first year. Liv came eleven months later. Sela gave up her job at the public defender’s office.
So, there she was, twenty-five with two babies and a husband on partner track, and she did it the way she did everything: with her teeth in it, refusing to let anyone help, getting more competent by the month.
I told her once, in the kitchen at three in the morning while Liv was screaming and Magnus was sleeping through it somehow, “I don’t know how you’re doing this.”
She looked at me over our daughter’s head and said, “I’m doing it because if I stop, you’ll have to. And one of us has to make partner.”
I made partner.
Life went on—birthdays, anniversaries, milestones.
You don’t notice how time flies, how it frays a relationship at the edges.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about a long marriage—it doesn’t break, it thins.
The conversations get shorter, the kisses get drier, and you stop telling each other the small things—the joke from the deli, the dream you had about your dead father, the song that came on in the cab—because you’ve been telling each other the small things for twenty years.
You start saving your breath for the big things, and then the big things stop happening because you stopped tending the small ones.
We had a big fight three years ago. I don’t remember how it started. It ended with her crying.
“I feel invisible to you, August.”
“My love, I see you all the time.”
“You do?”
“Yes.” I was baffled that she couldn’t see that all I saw was her. She was all the bright moments in my life.
I bought her flowers the next day—and took her away for the weekend to Martha’s Vineyard.
We made up. Life went on.
Magnus is now a sophomore at Bowdoin.
He calls his mother every Sunday and forwards me articles about the firm he pretends to understand.
Liv is a freshman at Wesleyan. She FaceTimes from her dorm room, letting us see her roommate’s posters in the background.
They are the best things I have ever done with my life.
Even before the kids were completely gone and we became empty nesters, Sela decided she needed more in her life. She started working at Bridgeline, a non-profit for women coming out of shelters, a sort of continuation of the social work she did all those years ago at the public defender’s office.
A few months in, she was busier than I was—unavailable, never around. But she was happier than she’d been in a decade. I should be happy for her.
I was. I am.
I was also, in some part of myself I couldn’t even admit to in the dark of my own kitchen at three in the morning, jealous of her, of the work, of the women who got the version of her I used to have.
I’d thought, maliciously, she’s like a woman setting her own house on fire to stay warm.
I reigned that in. I wasn’t going to be that man—or at least I was going to try hard to not be the man I unfortunately realized, only right then, that I am. The man who wants his wife’s life to revolve around him and the family.
So, now as I sit on a bed where I fucked up my life, I can blame jealousy, use it as an excuse.
But because I try hard to be honest—at least with myself—I know that jealousy is only a small part of it.
What I am is scared.
I’m forty-seven, and my father was dead at forty-seven, and I have a wife who doesn’t need me and two children who don’t need me, a brother on the cover of Time magazine, and I am looking for a single piece of evidence that I’m still a man and not a column of statistics waiting to be tallied.
Chloe became that evidence.
She was, and is, a bad piece of evidence.
I stand, walk up to the wall-to-ceiling window, and press my forehead against the cold glass.
Honolulu at midnight is the most beautiful city in the world, and I can’t see any of it.
My phone buzzes behind me.
I know who it is before I look.
Sela wakes up at five in New York. She makes coffee. She reads three newspapers. She texts me good morning at five-oh-three because she knows I’m somewhere behind her in time while she’s already somewhere in tomorrow, and she wants to be the first thing in my tomorrow.
She has been the first thing in my tomorrow for over two decades.
I walk to the bedside table. I pick up the phone.
Sela: Good morning, skat. Hope Honolulu is treating you well. Jonie and Allan invited us over on Friday for drinks before the awards. I’m not sure I’ll have the time. I miss you. Come home to me.
She calls me skat, darling in Danish, because she found it adorable that it’s the same word for both darling and taxes. It started as a joke and now has become who I am to her—skat, darling, and, thanks to how I just transgressed, a tax on her emotional well-being.
I sit down on the edge of the bed in my hotel bathrobe, five thousand miles from my wife, and I do something I haven’t done since I was twelve years old in a kitchen in Greenwich, seeing my father die and my mother scream.
I cry.
And then, with my hands still wet, I do the only thing left to do. I email my assistant and ask her to move up my flight.
I’m going home to confess my sins to my wife.