Secret Lives of Second Wives
By Catherine Todd
(William Morrow, 2004 — 226 pages, $24.95)
Reviewed by Ina R. Bort
From the New York Law Journal
May 7, 2004
You just can't open a newspaper these days without reading something about marriage. People are arguing endlessly about who is entitled to it, whether to amend the United States Constitution for it, whether to throw $1.5 billion of federal funds to protect it. It would seem that there can never be peace between the adversaries in this culture war. Until now.
If folks would get off their soap boxes for the hour or so it takes to read Catherine Todd's Secret Lives of Second Wives, they'll find their differences miraculously resolved, and see the truth, once and for all. Marriage, it turns out, is neither a civil right worth fighting for, nor, as our esteemed President recently stated, "the most fundamental institution of civilization" that can exist only between a man and a woman. It's a nightmare. And as bad as it is the first time around, it only gets worse the next.
The novel tells the very sad tale of the marriage of Lynn Bartlett and Jack Hughes. As the cleverly rhyming title suggests, Jack has indeed been married once before (to the Devil, but more on that later). We learn in later chapters, though, that Lynn has also been married once before. But unlike Jack, whose every move seems designed to remind Lynn that she is his "second wife," Lynn is considerate enough to prevent her selfish spouse from feeling like her "second husband." (Which is a good thing anyway, because there aren't so many words that rhyme with husband).
When the book opens, Lynn and Jack have been married for about a year and are living in the Bay Area. To the extent that there ever was a honeymoon period for these two, it has already come to a crashing halt. Lynn is a bright, well-read, personable, attractive, very accomplished immigration lawyer who, at least at some point in her life, had a strong, independent spirit. Bravely, she left her first husband and her life with him in New York at a young age and relocated to California on her own. She divorced her then-husband, also an attorney, when she could no longer tolerate his utter lack of respect for the immigration law career path that she was determined to follow.
This independence and strong will has, however, evaporated in the context of her second marriage, a relationship that has transformed Lynn into an insecure mess. Consider her description of what it's like to be Jack's second wife, a description prompted by his moody refusal to tell her what's bothering him one evening: "I sounded, even to myself, like the perfect Second Wife. Never be importunate. Don't push. Don't cling. Do not, in short, remind him of her."
Her, in this case, is Janet Katera Hughes Vivendi, Jack's first wife, a manipulative and unhappy woman who is bent on keeping her claws in Jack's life, given that her own marriage (her third — or is it her fourth?) to a mysterious Italian fellow is going down the tubes. Unfortunately for Lynn, Jack does nothing to protect them against Janet's onslaught. To the contrary, he wonders why they can't all get along like one big happy family. He goes so far as to "allow" Janet, as she has insisted, to come to his 50th birthday party — a party that Lynn has spent many months and dollars to plan — without telling Lynn. When Janet makes a dramatic surprise entrance, scoffing at Lynn all the while, Jack becomes frustrated when Lynn fails to welcome Janet with open arms. If this is what the most "fundamental institution of our civilization" looks like from the inside, I'm boarding the express bus to the Wilderness.
Also part of the lovely dowry that Lynn has inherited are the two miserable products of Jack's first conjugal experiment, Meredith and Patrick. Unless something has gone terribly wrong in your life, you've never encountered creatures as vile as these. Meredith is one of those self-righteous vegan types who, when you sit down to dinner with her, says things like, "You're not really going to eat that, are you?" then proceeds to list all of the reasons why your entree will kill you. Lynn's earnest efforts to ingratiate herself to Meredith go nowhere. Meredith is selfish, immature, and consistently cold towards Lynn at every family gathering. Jack stands by to watch as Lynn squirms. What was that you were saying, President Bush, about the "sanctity of marriage"?
There is, actually, one very good thing about Meredith: she has her own apartment. In stark contrast, her good-for-nothing brother, Patrick, can't hold down a job or a place to live. Jack announces one evening, in cavalier fashion, that Patrick, as a result, is going to have to move in with him and Lynn. When Lynn dares to ask how long this new arrangement is going to last, Jack becomes annoyed, and makes her feel guilty for, in essence, asking him to throw his own child out on the street.
By now you're probably asking why Lynn doesn't do what any reasonable woman would do in this situation: hire a divorce lawyer ASAP. Indeed, Lynn does escape from the Marriage From Hell, albeit temporarily, in a somewhat more romantic, if less ethical, fashion: she has an affair with one of her clients. Dr. Alexei Strela, a brilliant Russian nuclear physicist, comes to Lynn for help with becoming an American citizen. Lynn, a specialist in "extraordinary ability" green cards, issued by the INS to extremely accomplished immigrants, helps him prepare his application, then proceeds to learn the full extent of Alexei's extraordinary abilities. The passages describing their relationship are neither credible nor particularly well written, but the affair adds depth to Lynn, who might otherwise have been an absurdly saintly character.
Todd's novel is, for the most part, highly entertaining. The story moves at a good clip and the dialogue is often witty. Todd also deserves extra points for her portrayal of the difficulties associated with being a second wife — an issue that is very rarely, if ever, explored in fiction, at least from the perspective of the second wife herself. Todd does a good job of describing the hardships that a second wife can experience, even when not married to an insensitive fellow like Jack Hughes, in passages like this one: "Second wives, contrary to the popular stereotype of the buxom bimbo stealing away the man of some poor female more endowed with virtue than with appetite, do not have it easy. There are so many players from the past imposing on the future. You imagine spending your life together as something new, but instead it becomes a series of linked vignettes that are something to be compared to. Every word, every gesture, has a history. Or not. You can't know — that's the problem. It's like walking onto the stage in the middle of the play, when all the other actors know their lines except you."
A play that, after reading Todd's book, few would dare audition for.
