All This Could Be Yours

by Jami Attenberg

  A year passed, another room redone, then another after that. There she was in the sunshine, reading her magazines. The occasional touch of Victor. If I could just keep this going forever I might be happy, she thought. Or close enough. What is happy anyway, she asked no one.

  * * *

  The old man was gone, wheeled away, hidden now, she supposed, in a room, away from the view of those who were healthy. He would die soon, surely, she thought.

  * * *

  When she was sixty-two, her life changed, bent and reconfigured in a surprising way. It began in the grocery store. She was there in an act of boredom and necessity. She needed toilet paper. A task the housekeeper should have done, but hadn’t, and then she was gone for the weekend. Barbra could have complained. (She would, in fact, complain on Monday.) But here she was, with this banal need. Victor was in the city. There was no one else but her. If she could spend hours (days, weeks, months, years, if you added it all up) at estate sales perusing furniture, she could go to the grocery store for some toilet paper.

  She wore sunglasses inside: not out of snobbery or subterfuge, but rather disinterest. This kind of shopping and these kinds of objects held no allure for her. They were basic: mass-produced and prepackaged and not mysterious in the slightest. She wanted the unfindable. She desired the treasures. But, treasures or not, she still had to wipe her ass like everyone else.

  In the grocery store, dangling a small basket over her arm as if it were a designer bag, she struggled to find the paper goods aisle. The sunglasses, it turned out, were a good idea. She passed by the beauty aisle, caught a glance of herself in a plastic, handheld mirror dangling in a row. How bright and unfriendly the lighting was. The whole experience felt terribly cruel. Who needs to know their flaws like that?

  She noticed another woman wearing heels and sunglasses, and they nodded at each other as they crossed paths. When she neared the end of the aisle, the two sets of heels clicking on the hard floor, she heard her name called out. “Barbra, it’s me, Elena.”

  Barbra lifted up her sunglasses.

  “Portia’s mother. She and Gary went to school together.” Elena smiled, her lipstick evenly applied, her forehead glossy with the familiar faux-silky sheen of laser therapy. “I know it’s been a while.” Portia she didn’t remember, but Elena she knew. Elena beamed at her. “Love the shoes,” she said.

  “Love your shoes,” said Barbra, because she did.

  Elena said, “You should come by the shop sometime.”

  That was right, Elena owned a consignment shop, a hobby more than a business, she had told her once; she barely broke even, but it got her out of the house. Barbra preferred to shop in Manhattan, and to pay full price, using her husband’s credit card, so he would know that she was spending his money. The idea of buying someone’s used clothes distressed her, although she had no problem with sitting on an antique couch. “We get a lot of new stuff in,” said Elena. “Not even worn, tags still on. Everything’s thirty percent off on Tuesdays. Just come by and say hi. You might find something you like.” Elena rested her hand on Barbra’s arm and squeezed it, which surprised Barbra, and she didn’t know why, and then she realized it was because someone was actually touching her.

  A few days later, Barbra went to the shop. Elena clapped her hands together and skipped off to the back room, returning with a bottle of champagne in her hands. An hour later, no customers in sight, Elena sat on an overstuffed leather chair, while Barbra was sprawled on a dark violet velvet settee. They were discussing their husbands. Barbra asked Elena if she still loved hers.

  “I did love him. I do love him. I loved him more when I was younger. He still surprises me sometimes.” Elena turned and thrust her trim legs over one arm of the chair. “He’s not perfect. He’s deeply, gorgeously imperfect.” She laughed, a tinkling, feminine laugh. “I mean, he’s a criminal, darling,” she whispered.

  “So is my husband,” Barbra whispered back, and Elena widened her eyes delightedly.

  “Isn’t there something so sexy about being married to a criminal?” said Elena.

  “I never thought of it that way, but I suppose,” said Barbra. Although she knew instantly it was true, she’d never put it into words before. But what did that make her?

  “Of course, I’d leave him in a second if I had to,” said Elena. “My time is valuable.”

  “I don’t know if I could do that,” Barbra said.

  “You love him,” Elena said.

  “I don’t know. I suppose so. I just don’t know what else I’d do at this point.”

  “Oh, you’d find something,” said Elena.

  On Fridays, when Elena had wine tastings at the shop, Barbra lingered there for hours. She found herself frequenting the grocery store, too. Even if she didn’t need anything. Just to wander the aisles. Boredom again. And loneliness, a word she never thought she’d use. Could a misanthrope change her stripes? But then there was Jeannie Parsley—no sunglasses, wide-eyed, aging beautifully even under bright light, no work done, just smiles and lines and sunspots—inviting her to join her book club, and also the horticulture society. (Only the horticulture society sounded of interest to Barbra, but would it kill her to read a book?) “Let me get your number,” said Jeannie. “Are you on Facebook?” Should she get on Facebook? She got on Facebook.

  “The kids are gone,” said Barbra, out of nowhere, surprising herself.

  “But they have been for a while, haven’t they?” Jeannie gave her a quizzical look.

  It had been six years since Alex had gotten married, another dozen since she had gone to college.

  “Yes, I suppose . . .” Barbra drifted off.

  “Time flies,” said Jeannie, and she touched Barbra’s hand. More touching. Who were all these people doing all this touching?

  She joined the horticulture society and the book club. (Actually, she joined three book clubs.) She found herself running errands more often during the day, in the spaces where other women went. Almost immediately she had more friends. Wives in the suburbs, the same as herself, the kids gone, the husband doing whatever he did. Clubs and groups. Wine. Why had it taken her this long? Because she’d had her mother. Because of Victor.

  And it was within these moments of connection—meetings, she thought of them as, and would have them marked in her calendar as such—that she began to experience something she now would have called pleasure, though at the time she was unable to define the feeling. If she added up all the pleasurable feelings from this period, which lasted from age sixty-two to age sixty-six, when her husband was slapped with eleven sexual harassment suits at once, her collective sensation was happiness. It was not the grim satisfaction she had when she finished another room in the house, knowing only that she would undo it soon enough and begin anew, though both were temporary sensations. Instead, it was a light, pleasant, unfiltered state of being. She was occupied with people, who were less terrible than she had presumed all these years. She was not joyful, but she was close. And she felt free.

  This lasted until two years ago. Barbra in Connecticut, being happy. Victor in New York, doing whatever the hell he was doing. Weekends in the house together, steak dinners in silence. The occasional business associate, the office enveloped in smoke afterward. Barbra snapping photos of his files when she felt like it. Always good to have some security. She filled in her blanks.

  * * *

  Up ahead, she saw one nurse call out to another, a ripple across the serenity of the floor, waves washing ashore as if from nowhere. They both ran.

  * * *

  It was late spring. She wore a cornflower-blue silk trench coat, a simple gold chain around her neck, and a diamond on her finger. A fresh French manicure. Eighteen thousand steps that day. She’d been at the book club, one glass of wine in her, and, scandalously, a brownie, too. They’d had a deep conversation about a postapocalyptic novel that followed a brave man and his sad son down a lonely road. She’d tried to clear everyone’s dishes at the end of the night, but Sally Mart
inelli had beat her to the punch while she used the restroom, and she was still furious. As she parked in front of her house, she said to herself, Let it go already.

  Inside, she heard men, and followed the sound of their voices, through the freshly painted living room to her husband’s office, and this time it was serious, because no one was smoking, there was no pleasure, no camaraderie, no mastering of the universe. And when she put her head in the doorway to see if they needed anything, a polite and insincere gesture on her part at this point in her life, her husband was seated and pale on an ottoman, as if he had collapsed before he could make it all the way to its corresponding chair. Around him were the men, with their rolled-up sleeves, pit stains, and grim gray skin. Everyone got old, she thought.

  “You gentlemen want a snack?” she said.

  The men stopped talking immediately, looked up at her with vague recognition. Still here after all this time. Victor clutched a hand to his chest. Not a heart attack, not like it was now, but a fissure within him nonetheless. She thought for a moment he was dying before her eyes.

  * * *

  “We are all dying, every last one of us,” he had said on the beach the day they met. “Every day we are dying.” He had brushed his hand against her hip, held it there. “Which is why it is our job to live.”

  * * *

  “What is it?” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine! I’m fine.” He caught his breath. “I’m not fine.”

  “Tell me now,” she said.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, “we’re being sued.”

  “I am being sued?” she said.

  “All right, fine, just me, but what’s mine is yours,” he said.

  The men began to file out of the room, taking their jackets with them, flung over shoulders, folded across arms, full snifters in their hands, marching out to the patio, where they sat in recliners near the pool. Someone flipped a switch and the pool lit up blue, brief streaks of gold flickering on the surface.

  Then he had to tell her everything, about all the women over the years, the ones she knew were there but had chosen to ignore. None of it surprised her. In her mind, she screamed, I know! Nevertheless she found herself calmly stopping him with her hand while he spoke, walking to the side of his desk, vomiting into the wastebasket, and wiping her mouth daintily on her sleeve.

  “Go on,” she said.

  But it wasn’t just the harassment, the administrative assistants, the sales reps, an office manager, promises being made and rescinded, demands, firings, all of that—although of course that was terrible. It was even worse: there was physical abuse.

  “I slapped some of them,” he said. “Not too hard. But, you know.” She nodded. “And there was some documentation here and there,” he said.

  She thought of the times he had struck her or had been physically aggressive, particularly when they were younger and it was more frequent: his forearm against her neck when he wanted her to be quiet, his hands gripping her shoulders when he wanted her to sit still. For years she had remembered each act of violence distinctly, but they blurred over the decades. There had been a threat, and it had passed. When she found out he had struck others along the way, her first instinct was not one of disbelief—of course he could have done it, he had done it to her, it was absolutely believable—but of a strange strain of jealousy. How could he have done that to anyone but her? She was the one who kept his secrets safe, and that was one of them, that he was a monster. But there he was, being a monster to any old woman who crossed his path. This, for some reason, wounded her most of all.

  She had thought he struck her because he cared. Because she had wound her way so thoroughly under his skin, into his system, that he had been left with no option but to strike out in anger. It turned out, though, he was angry at everyone. Was I ever special at all? She could not bear to say that out loud. And there was guilt within her, too. She let him hurt her, that was one thing. But not to stop him was to let him hurt other women. She would never forgive herself. She was not responsible for his actions, but of course she was completely to blame. She felt shame coming from every direction. Hot, burning rays of shame.

  “It’ll cost a lot to make it go away,” he said. “Not everything, but a lot.”

  She put her fists up to her eyes. She thought of how far she’d come, and how humiliated she’d be, either way. It was one thing to steal money; it was another to hit a woman. The way these court cases would linger even if he was found innocent. And he was not innocent. They’d all know. I am shamed no matter what. No more book club, she thought. “Pay them,” she said. “Pay them and make it go away.”

  “We could fight this,” he said, and he suddenly became more arrogant. Infuriated by the bother. She could see his ego was still intact. But there were eleven cases. Maybe more would surface. Maybe they would have to fight it forever.

  “They’re all lying, of course,” he said. “They were lovers, that’s all. Sluts, a lot of them. Not like you. Not like my Barbie.” He stared out the window, toward the pool, beyond it.

  He’s calculating the battle, she thought. Well, I’m not fighting it.

  She told him he would pay the women. That she had ways to make him pay. All those pictures of his files. (This shocked him, that she had them, and she felt triumphant.) They would wipe the lawsuits away and then they would figure out what to do next. He had no choice but to agree.

  Things moved quickly after that, life happening all at once. And indeed, more women surfaced. He had some money hidden, and so did she. Still, they knew they would have to sell the house. They agreed to tell their children nothing. Let’s not give them another reason to hate us, he said. Hate you, she said, not me. But she could see how she would be blamed, too. She was staying with him after all.

  She would miss her friends in Connecticut, although they had chilled toward her when they found out about everything. He had been corrupt for so long, what did it matter the flavor? But it had. In a rare expression of openness—weakness, she thought later, bitterly—she had told Elena about her husband while sitting on the store settee on a boozy Friday. Elena, open-mouthed, and then shaking her head, sad, swirling her wine, sipping it all down, and then finally pouring them both another.

  “I know we like criminals, but not that kind of criminal,” said Elena. “You’re leaving him, right?”

  “It’s not that simple,” said Barbra.

  “Take him for everything,” Elena said.

  “There’s not going to be a lot of ‘everything’ anymore.”

  “Then take him for whatever’s left.”

  She couldn’t quite explain it to Elena, and maybe not even to herself, why she wouldn’t leave him, except for this: he was all she had in the world. The next time Barbra visited Elena, she didn’t offer her a glass of wine or a seat. She just pointed out a new pair of Chanel boots on sale. As if Barbra would be buying Chanel anymore.

  They closed up the house. She cherry-picked her favorite pieces and sent them ahead. Many more objects she couldn’t part with, but there wouldn’t be room for them in their new home. Some things that had belonged to her mother, tchotchkes, all worthless, but she could not bring herself to throw them away, for that would be the end of Anya entirely. Maybe Alex would want them someday. And there were family albums, for Anya had been the recordkeeper. Who had known these existed? she thought as she flipped through them. Probably the children. So many pictures of the children as babies. Barbra tried to recall her mother with a camera. But these photos were of Anya holding Alex and Gary. Had Victor taken the photos? She pictured him behind the camera and felt a tinge of love, even after all this time. No one could possibly understand it, but there had been moments when it was easy to love him for the last fifty years. Any small act of kindness, any surprise gesture, made her feel that it was all worth it. And here was a shot she remembered Anya taking: Alex’s graduation from kindergarten. Gary holding her hand, still a toddler. There they all were together, mother and father, sist
er and brother, Barbra standing between the children and Victor, Victor towering over them, Victor never smiling, with his off-kilter nose and grim face and powerful body, those arms were weapons, and his cufflinks, and his rough thick lips, always swollen. A small wife, two children, a big man. She could not throw these photos away, but she could not bear to have them in her life. They, too, went into the storage unit. Four hundred dollars a month to keep her memories tucked away. It was worth it.

  * * *

  Up ahead, nurses convened and then scattered. If only you had died two years ago in your office, Victor, she thought. That would have been better for everyone. Most of all for me.

  * * *

  And then there was an estate sale at their house on a winter’s day, blazing bright skies, but the snow had turned to ice, impenetrable. She watched as strangers walked through the rooms and sat on her objects and squinted and imagined what this chair or couch or chaise would look like in their home. She fixed her view to the sun in the windows. All the trees were dead, and that’s how she would remember her home. She would forget about the lushness of the trees in the summer. In her mind’s eye she would see them as barren forever.