Eve Marx

For reasons largely unfathomable to me, I’ve always been a person others want to confide in. I’m the person you tell you’re having an affair, an abortion, that you killed your sick cat dosing it with aspirin because you were too skint and filled with despair to take it to the veterinarian for proper euthanizing. (Even small amounts of aspirin will poison the average cat.) I’m the person to whom you reveal your old history of addiction, your compulsion to shoplift, the time you spent behind bars.

Generally speaking, I am a safe bet to tell your secrets to because normally mum’s the word. While I am a world-class eavesdropper, I’m stellar at hearing something and doing nothing. But then there’s that admittedly shitty part where I am a writer and there’s a chance I will take your secret and, at some point, if it’s interesting enough, use it for my own narrative purposes.

On the other hand, I have a history of spilling secrets that, at the time of the spill, I didn’t know were secret. This has caused no end of trouble in my personal life.

The first horrible secret I spilled happened in San Francisco. A childhood friend, we’ll call her M, asked me to be in her wedding. I should have said no but I was an idiot and hadn’t learned to say no yet. Three days before the ceremony, which took place at the Fairmont Hotel, I flew out from the east coast to stay at the bride’s Russian Hill apartment where I was held captive hand-wrapping truffles in gilt paper for wedding table favors. The dressmaker who made my bridesmaid gown took pity on me at my last-minute fitting and spirited me off to a boozy lunch on Fisherman’s Wharf where I threw back Bloody Marys.

When I returned to the apartment, M was reaming out her cleaning lady, a woman old enough to be her mom. I pulled M aside to ask if she couldn’t take it down a notch and she replied in an exasperated voice, “Evie, you’ve never understood how to speak to servants.” A couple of hours later, at the rehearsal dinner, I was seated next to M’s future sister-in-law, a bony, birdy woman called Wren, a pet name derived from her actual name which was haute white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

“How long have you known M?” this sister-in-law-to-be queried.

“Oh, since grade school,” I said, dipping my spoon into the consommé. I loathe consommé. “We lost track of each other for years until we turned up at the same university in New York, but in a different program. I thought it was funny how two Jewish girls from the same neighborhood could wind up at the same school."

Wren was looking a little pale.

“Did you say ‘Jewish’? she said. “We had no idea M is Jewish. Please excuse me.”

She put down her spoon and got out of her seat to cross the room to whisper something to her mother.

Back on Russian Hill when we were alone, M went nuts. She’d never revealed to her fiancé or his family her cultural heritage.

The next day she was married but the marriage didn’t last. She calls me on the phone once a year to bust my chops and, apparently, it’s still a secret she’s Jewish.

Another slip of the tongue, if you will, happened at an Italian restaurant in Greenwich, CT called Mediterraneo. We were guests at a dinner hosted by my husband’s first wife, G, in celebration of the opening of a show she was featured in at the Samuel Owen Gallery. The show was great and the gallery served wine and by the time we were seated at a long table with a dozen of G’s friends, I was likely a little loaded. Alcohol, you may have noticed, is a tongue-loosener. I was seated far away from my husband, which was probably a bad idea as he is good at censoring me or at least kicking me under the table in warning. A man seated beside me inquired how I knew G. I’m seeing a pattern here as I write this, that this is the root of so much of my trouble, people wanting to know how I know other people.

See, I knew G rather well because after she and my husband divorced, she was a visitor at our home. She had a secret and that secret was that she loved getting stoned, but her life was such that she never wanted anyone to know. She would come over once a month or so with a bottle of champagne and we’d drink and smoke some weed. My husband would fall asleep and G and I would sit up for hours discussing her love life. She loved to be in love but she was a lousy picker of husbands. After my husband, she got married two more times. Her marriages never lasted, but she did produce a beautiful daughter from the second one, so I thought it didn’t matter. That we became friends at all is fairly remarkable since I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m the one who broke up her first marriage.

Ok, back to the man seated to my right.

“Well, G was married to the man I’m married to, a long time ago,” I said.

“So is your husband the father of G’s daughter?” he asked. “Does that make you her daughter’s stepmother?”

“Oh, no,” I replied. “We have our own child. G and my husband were married a year, they didn’t have any children. G’s daughter’s father is G’s second husband.”

“You mean the pilot,” the guy said.

“No, the pilot was Husband Number Three,” I replied.

“We all thought G was married twice,” he said, surprised. At this point I began to feel queasy. I realized G told all these nice or maybe not so nice people she’d been married two times, not thrice. I had a flashback of the many times she introduced us to people, always describing us only as “RJ and Eve,” never alluding to her previous relationship with RJ. In fact, she seemed to go out of her way sometimes to keep us from knowing her friends. Now, here at this table, where we were meant to be celebrating her artistic success, I’d blown her cover. She was going to be very sorry she’d ever invited us.

Days later, she called our house and screamed down the phone what a horrible person I was and how could I have shared that with that viciously gossipy man whose wife was a good friend of hers from her daughter’s fancy school. Gossip would blow around town like wildfire, she said. They’d all be talking about her at the nail salon. Her life and her daughter’s life were ruined all because of my big mouth.

“Hold on,” I said. “What’s the big deal? Plenty of people are married three times. My own mother was married three times. And I promise you, if she hadn’t died, there would have been a fourth.”

G maintained a stony silence for approximately a minute before asking me to put RJ on the phone. He closed his eyes and let her shout for a few more minutes and then he hung up.

“She’s done,” he said. “She’s never going to be friends with you anymore.”

“I didn’t realize her year of being married to you was a secret,” I said. “And I still don’t get why it’s such a big deal.”

That was a while ago. My husband calls G on her birthday and sometimes Christmas. She calls him on his birthday. I joke occasionally if something happened to me, they could always get back together. He could be her first husband and her last. When I’m in a ruminative mood, I ask myself if what happened at that table was parapraxis, a so-called Freudian slip, that my words were an expression of my unconscious desire for G and my husband to be together again.

Or maybe it was just my way of giving her the shiv. It's no secret I stole her husband.