The Swipe

How do I answer a call on my new phone? Art asked. It's not like my old phone.

Have Maggie call you and we can try to figure it out, I suggested. The phone rang. Maggie Leonard came on the screen. Who's that? I asked.

Joe's name, she said.

Joe Leonard is Maggie's boss. Why would Maggie Freed take her boss's last name when she is already married to Blaine Freed? Was she secretly married to Joe the 98 year old oil tycoon? Is that why she sleeps on the couch at home? Is she pretending to be married to Joe? Is she lining herself up to inherit his company? My brain was spinning. So many questions, none of which were my business.

We were able to show Art how to swipe the green icon and answer the call. And I guess that's all that mattered.

*****

Maggie had said we have multiple properties when speaking of Joe Leonard's Fifth Avenue apartment and his huge house in Marblehead situated at a famous golf club. It was Maggie's job to drive out there and meet contractors when things needed fixing which they always did. Was Maggie leading a double life? It appeared that way.

I knew Maggie from the local swimming pool and only caught snippets of her life from little negative comments she'd make about her husband and her boss. Recently I accepted an invitation to lunch at Maggie's home with two other women who swim. That was when I saw Maggie's life up close. Her home was a stage set. There was a designer kitchen with a restaurant stove and built-in fridge that is never used except to hold a few condiments. We sat at the kitchen island eating macaroni salad off of paper plates. Off in the distance was a dining room table set with china. After lunch Maggie wanted to give us a tour. I hate house tours, like I hate weddings, but I went along.

There was a magnificent master bedroom with small bronze cannons throughout the room. "Cannons!" How Freudian, I thought. "My husband collects them," Maggie said. She showed us the master bathroom. A cobalt blue Jacuzzi surrounded by cedar walls that her husband had built himself. "I never use this, I don't have time," she said. "I sleep downstairs on the couch in my office." I had noticed the rumpled sheets on the big bed where her husband sleeps alone.

Every weekend and holiday and at any time night or day Maggie receives calls from her boss and has to drop everything and go to work. Even Easter weekend she was driving to and sleeping over at Joe Leonard's apartment in the ultra posh retirement community. Was she pretending to be married to Joe for the sake of the gossiping folks who live there? Maggie told me Joe has a wife 40 years younger who lives in the Fifth Avenue apartment in NYC. Apparently she has a rare disease that requires her to stay in NYC to be near her doctors. The whole thing is so confusing and strange.