“Sad for who, Leonard? Sad for me? For you?”
That night, in their bed. A vast tundra of a bed. As if she’d sensed something in his manner, a subtle shift of tone, a quaver in his voice of withheld hurt, or anger, Valerie turned to him with a smile: “I’ve been missing you, darling.” Her meaning might have been literal, for Leonard had been traveling for his firm lately, working with Atlanta lawyers in preparation for an appeal in the federal court there, but there was another meaning too. He thought, She wants to make amends. Their lovemaking was calm, measured, methodical, lasting perhaps eight minutes. It was their custom to make love at night, before sleep, the high-ceilinged bedroom lit by just a single lamp. There was a fragrance here of the lavender sachets Valerie kept in her bureau drawers. Except for the November wind overhead in the trees, it was very quiet. Still as the grave, Leonard thought. He sought his wife’s smiling mouth with his mouth but could not find it. Shut his eyes, and there suddenly was the brazen coppery-haired girl in the red bikini top, waiting for him. Squirming in the darkly handsome young man’s arms but glancing at him. Oh! she was a bad girl, look at the bad girl! Her mouth was hungry and sucking as a pike’s mouth seeking the young man’s mouth, her hand dropped beneath the tabletop to burrow in his lap. In his groin. Oh, the bad girl!
Leonard had the idea that Valerie’s eyes were shut tight too. Valerie was seeing the young couple too.
“I found your passport, Valerie. I found these Polaroids too. Recognize them?”
Spreading them on the table. Better yet, across the bed.
“Only just curious, Val. Why you lied about him.”
She would stare, her smile fading. Her lips would go slack as if, taken wholly unaware, she’d been slapped.
“. . . why you continue to lie. All these years.”
Of course, Leonard would be laughing. To indicate that he didn’t take any of this seriously—why should he? It had happened so long ago, it was past.
Except: maybe “lie” was too strong a word. The rich man’s daughter wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to in such a way, any more than Leonard was. “Lie” would have the force of a physical blow. “Lie” would cause Valerie to flinch as if she’d been struck, and the rich man’s daughter would file for divorce at once if she were struck.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea, then. To confront her.
A litigator is a strategist plotting moves. A skilled litigator always knows how his opponent will respond to a move. As in chess, you must foresee the opponent’s moves. Each blow can provoke a counterblow. If Leonard confronted her with the Polaroids, the gesture might backfire on him. She might detect in his voice a quaver of hurt, she might detect in his eyes a pang of male anguish. He was sometimes impotent, to his chagrin. He blamed distractions: the pressure of his work, which remained, even for those of his generation who had not been winnowed out by competition, competitive. The pressure of a man’s expectations to “perform.” The (literal) pressure of his blood, for which he took blood-pressure pills twice daily. And his back, which ached sometimes mysteriously, he’d attribute to tennis, golf. In fact, out of nowhere such phantom aches emerged. And so, in the vigorous act of love, Leonard might begin to lose his concentration, his erection. Like his life’s blood leaking out of his veins. And Valerie knew—of course she knew, the terrible intimacy of the act precluded any secrets—yet she never commented, never said a word, only held him, her husband of nine years, her middle-aged flabby-waisted panting and sweating second husband, held him as if to comfort him, as a mother might hold a stricken child, with sympathy, unless it was with pity.
Darling, we won’t speak of it. Our secret.
Yet if Leonard confronted her over the Polaroids, which were her cherished sexual secret, she might turn upon him, cruelly. She had that power. She might laugh at him. She would chide him for looking through her things—what right had he to look through her things, what if she searched through his desk drawers, would she discover soft-core porn magazines, ridiculous videos with titles like Girls’ Night Out, Girls at Play, Sex Addict Holiday? She would expose him to their friends at the next Salthill Landing dinner party; dryly she would dissect him like an insect wriggling on a pin; at the very least she might slap the Polaroids out of his hand. How ridiculous he was being, over a trifle. How pitiable.
Leonard shuddered. A rivulet of icy sweat ran down the side of his cheek like a tear.
So, no. He would not confront her. Not just yet. For the fact was, Leonard had the advantage: he knew of Valerie’s secret attachment to the first husband, and Valerie had no idea he knew.
Smiling to think: like a boa constrictor swallowing its living prey paralyzed by terror, his secret would encompass Valerie’s secret and would, in time, digest it.
The anniversary trip to Italy, scheduled for March, was to be postponed.
“It isn’t a practical time after all. My work . . .”
And this was true. The Atlanta case had swerved in an unforeseen and perilous direction. There were obligations in Valerie’s life too. “. . . not a practical time. But later . . .”
He saw in her eyes regret, yet also relief.
Doesn’t want to be alone with me. Comparing me with him, isn’t she!
• • •
“. . . a reservation for four, at L’Heure Bleu. If we arrive by six, maybe a little before six, we won’t have to leave until quarter to eight, Lincoln Center is just across the street. But if you and Harold prefer the Tokyo Pavilion, I know you’ve been wanting to check it out after the review in the Times, and Leonard and I have too . . .”
In fact, Leonard disliked Japanese food. Hated sushi, which was so much raw flesh, inedible.
Where love has gone, he thought bitterly.
Listening to Valerie’s maddeningly calm voice as she descended the stairs speaking on a cordless phone to a friend. It was nearly two weeks since he’d discovered the Polaroids; he’d vowed not to look at them again. Yet he was approaching the cherrywood table, pulling open the drawer that stuck a little, groping another time for the packet of Polaroids, which seemed to be in exactly the place he’d left it, and he cursed his wife for being so careless, for not having taken time to hide her secret more securely.
“‘Oliver and Val, Key West, December 1985.’”
With that childish pride, Valerie had felt the need to identify the lovers!
At a window overlooking a snowy slope to the river and the glowering winter sky, he examined the photographs eagerly. He had seen them several times by now and had more or less memorized them, and so they were both familiar and yet retained an air of the exotic and treacherous. One of the less faded Polaroids he brought close to his face, that he might squint at the ring worn by the coppery-haired girl—was it the emerald? Valerie was wearing it on her right hand even then, which might only mean that though Oliver Yardman had given it to her, it hadn’t yet acquired the status of an engagement ring. In another photo, Leonard discovered what he’d somehow overlooked, the faintest suggestion of a bruise on Valerie’s neck, or a shadow that very much resembled a bruise. And Oliver Yardman’s smooth-skinned face wasn’t really so smooth; in fact it looked coarse in certain of the photos. And that smug, petulant mouth Leonard would have liked to smash with his fist. And there was Yardman wriggling his long toes—wasn’t there a correlation between the size of a man’s toes and the size of . . .
Hurriedly Leonard shoved the Polaroids into the drawer and fled the room.
“The time for children is past.”
Years ago. Should have known the woman hadn’t loved him, if she had not wanted children with him.
“. . . a kind of madness has come over parents today. Not just the expense: private schools, private tutors, college. Therapists! But you must subordinate your life to your children. My husband”—Valerie’s voice dipped; this was a hypothetical, it was Leonard to whom she spoke so earnestly—“would be working in the city five days a week and wouldn’t be home until evening, and can you see me as a soccer mom
, driving children to—wherever! Living through it all again and this time knowing what’s to come? My God, it would be so raw.‘”
Valerie laughed; there was fear in her eyes.
Leonard was astonished; this poised, beautiful woman was speaking so intimately to him! Of course he comforted her, gripping her cold hands. Kissed her hair where she’d leaned toward him, trembling.
“Valerie, of course. I feel the same way.”
He did! In that instant, Leonard did.
They’d been introduced by mutual friends. Leonard was a highly paid litigator attached to the legal department of the most distinguished architectural firm in New York City, its headquarters in lower Manhattan on Rector Street. Leonard’s specialty was tax law, and within that specialty he prepared and argued cases in federal appeals courts. He was one of a team. There were enormous penalties for missteps, sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And there were enormous rewards when things went well.
“A litigator goes for the jugular.”
Valerie wasn’t one to flatter, you could see. Her admiration was sincere.
Leonard had laughed, blushing with pleasure. In his heart thinking he was one in a frantic swarm of piranha fish and not the swiftest, most deadly, or even, at thirty-four, as he’d been at the time, among the youngest.
The poised, beautiful young woman was Valerie Fairfax. Her maiden name: crisp, clear, Anglo, unambiguous. (Not a hint of Yardman.) At Citibank headquarters in Manhattan, Valerie had the title of vice president of human resources. How serious she was about her work! She wore Armani suits in subdued tones: oatmeal, powder gray, charcoal. She wore pencil-thin skirts and she wore trousers with sharp creases. She wore trim little jackets with slightly padded shoulders. Her hair was stylishly razor-cut to frame her face, to suggest delicacy where there was in fact solidity. Her fragrance was discreet, faintly astringent. Her handshake was firm and yet, in certain circumstances, yielding. She displayed little interest in speaking of the past, though she spoke animatedly on a variety of subjects. She thought well of herself and wished to think well of Leonard and so had a way of making Leonard more interesting to himself, more mysterious.
The first full night they spent together, in the apartment on East 79th Street where Leonard was living at the time, a flush of excitement had come into Valerie’s face as, after several glasses of wine, she confessed how at Citibank she was the vice president of her department elected to fire people because she was so good at it.
“I never let sentiment interfere with my sense of justice. It’s in my genes, I think.”
• • •
Now you didn’t say fired. You said downsized.
You might say dismissed, terminated. You might say, of vanished colleagues, gone.
Leonard typed into his laptop a private message to himself:
Not me. Not this season. They can’t!
Another time, in fact many times, he’d typed Yardman into his computer. (At the office, not at home. He and Valerie shared a computer at home. Leonard knew that in cyberspace, nothing is ever erased, though it might be subsequently regretted, and so at home he never typed into the computer anything he might not wish his wife to discover in some ghost-remnant way.) Hundreds of citations for Yardman, but none for Oliver Yardman so far. He meant to keep looking.
“. . . first husband.”
Like an abscessed tooth secretly rotting in his jaw.
In his office on the twenty-ninth floor at Rector Street. On the 7:10 A.M. Amtrak into Grand Central Station and on the 6:55 P.M. Amtrak out of Grand Central returning to Salthill Landing. In the interstices of his relations with others: colleagues, clients, fellow commuters, social acquaintances, friends. In the cracks of a densely scheduled life, the obsession with Oliver Yardman grew the way the hardiest weeds will flourish in soil scarcely hospitable to plant life.
Sure he knows. Knows of me: second husband. What he must remember! Of her.
Had to wonder how often Valerie glanced through the Polaroids in the desk drawer. How frequently, even when they’d been newly lovers, she’d shut her eyes to summon back the first husband, the sulky spoiled mouth, the brazen hands, the hard stiff penis thrumming with blood that would never flag, even as she was breathless and panting in Leonard’s arms declaring she loved him.
Since the discovery weeks ago in November, he’d looked for other photos. Not in the photo album Valerie maintained with seeming sincerity and wifely pride but in Valerie’s drawers, closets. In the most remote regions of the large house, where things were stored away in boxes. Shrewdly thinking that because he hadn’t found anything did not mean there was nothing to be found.
“Len Chase!”
A bright female voice, a Salthill Landing neighbor leaning over his seat. (Where was he? On the Amtrak? Headed home? Judging by the murky haze above the river, early evening, had to be headed home.) Leonard’s laptop was open before him and his fingers were poised over the flat keyboard, but he’d been staring out the window for some minutes without moving. “. . . thought that was you, Len, and how is Valerie? Haven’t seen you since, has it been Christmas, or . . .”
Leonard smiled politely at the woman. His open laptop, his document bag and overcoat on the seat beside him—these were clear signals he didn’t want to be interrupted, which the woman surely knew, but she had come to an age when she’d decided not to see such signals in cheerful denial of their meaning: Please leave me alone, you are not of interest to me, not as a woman, not as an individual, you are nothing but a minor annoyance. Melanie Roberts was Valerie’s age, and her frosted hair was razor-cut in Valerie’s style. Very likely Melanie was a rich man’s daughter as well as a rich man’s wife, but the advantage she’d held as a younger woman had mysteriously faded, even so. Melanie seemed to think that her neighbor Leonard Chase might wish to know that she’d had lunch with friends in the city and gone to see the Rauschenberg exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum and then she’d dropped by to visit her niece at Barnard. Melanie was watching Leonard with sparkly expectant eyes in which dwelled some uneasiness, a fear of seeing in Leonard’s face exactly what he was thinking. He had to concede, he saw in Melanie Roberts’s face that he might still be perceived as an attractive man; in his seated position he appeared moderately tall, with a head of moderately thick hair, graying, but attractively graying; his skin tone was slightly sallow, but perhaps that was just the flickering Amtrak lighting; his face was dented in odd places, and loosely jowly in others; his nostrils looked enlarged, like pits opening into his skull; his eyes behind wire-rimmed bifocal glasses were shadowed and smudged; yet he would seem to this yearning woman more attractive than paunchy near-bald Sam Roberts, as others’ spouses invariably seem more attractive, since more mysterious, than our own. For intimacy is the enemy of romance. The dailiness of marriage is the enemy of immortality. Who would wish to be immortal if it’s a matter of reliving just the past week?
Melanie Roberts’s smile was fading. Amid her chatter, Leonard must have interrupted. “. . . hear you, Len? It’s so noisy in this . . .”
The car was swaying drunkenly. The lights flickered. With a nervous laugh Melanie gripped the back of the seat to steady herself. Another eight minutes to Salthill Landing—why was the woman hanging over his seat! He yearned to be touched, his numbed body caressed in love, so desperately he yearned for this touch that would be the awakening from a curse, but he shrank from intimacy with this woman who was his neighbor in Salthill Landing. On his open laptop screen was a column of e-mail messages he hadn’t answered, in fact hadn’t read, as he hadn’t for most of that day returned phone messages, for a terrible gravity pulled his mind elsewhere. The first husband. You cannot be first. Melanie was saying brightly that she would call Valerie and maybe this weekend they could go out together to dinner, that new seafood restaurant in Nyack everyone has been talking about, and Leonard laughed, with a nod toward the window beside his seat where some distance below the oily dark sprawl of the Hudson River was lapsing into dusk: �
��Ever think, Melanie, that river is like a gigantic boa constrictor? It’s like time, eventually to swallow and digest us all?”
Melanie laughed sharply as if not hearing this, or hearing enough to know that she didn’t really want to hear more of it. Promising she’d tell Sam hello from him and she’d call Valerie very soon, with a faint, forced smile lurching away somewhere behind Leonard Chase to her seat.
He would track down the first husband, he would erase the man from consciousness. He would erase the man’s memory, in which his own wife existed. Except he was a civilized human being, a decent human being, except he feared being apprehended and punished, that was what he would do.
Early November when he’d discovered the Key West photos. Late February when his CEO called him into his office in the tower.
The meeting was brief. One or two others had been taken to lunch first, which had not been a good idea; Leonard was grateful to be spared lunch. Through a roaring in his ears he heard. Watched the man’s piranha mouth. Steely eyes through bifocal glasses like his own.
Downsized. Stock options. Severance pay. Any questions?
He had no legal grounds to object. Possibly he had moral grounds, but he wouldn’t contest it. He knew the company’s financial situation. Since 9/11 they’d been in a tailspin. These were facts you might read in the Wall Street Journal. Then came the terrible blow, unexpected—at least, Leonard believed it to be unexpected—the ruling in Atlanta: a federal court judge upheld a crushing $33 million award to a hotel-chain plaintiff plus $8 million in punitive damages. The architectural firm for which he’d worked for the past seven years was hard hit. Conceding yes, he understood. Failure was a sickness that burned like fever in the eyes of the afflicted. No disguising that fever, like jaundice-yellow eyes.
Soon to be forty-six. Burned out. The battlefield is strewn with burned-out litigators. His fingers shook, cold as a corpse’s, yet he would shake the CEO’s hand in parting, he would meet the man’s gaze with something like dignity.
Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense Page 4