Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  It wasn’t even eight o’clock when she arrived at Sigelman’s house, a square white clapboard colonial in need of a coat of paint. Overhead the wind swept the clouds through the sky so that the sun’s brightness came and went in patches, the snow lightening and darkening, Jane’s shadow appearing and disappearing in front of her as she stood, looking at the house. No path had been cleared yet from the street to the front door, and the newspaper still lay in its orange plastic wrapper in the melting snow. Jane did not so much gather her courage as realize she had nothing to lose, and then she picked her way carefully to the house, trying not to get her shoes too wet, and rang the bell.

  For a while nothing happened. Jane could hear the wind in the high branches of the trees and the shouts of the children from the nearby elementary school. What was Maisie doing? Watching cartoons on the couch, her finger in her mouth? Self-comforting, they called it, and thank god for it. Maisie would need as many kinds of comforting as she could get. Jane swiped at her tears and brought her mind to focus again on the glowing orange circle of the doorbell. She rang it again, holding her finger on the button. She didn’t care if he was still in bed. She didn’t care if she frightened him. So much the better.

  At last she heard sounds from inside the house: footsteps, a door creaking. “I’m coming!” Sigelman grumbled loudly enough for her to hear. “Who the hell is it?” He opened the door. He wore a maroon silk bathrobe over sky blue pajamas, his feet jammed into scuffed leather slippers, his wisps of hair sticking out in all directions. He held up his hand to shield his eyes from the light. “Jane?” he said.

  “Can I come in?” Jane said.

  His eyebrows lowered and the edges of his mouth turned down, and Jane was sure he was going to shut the door in her face, but she couldn’t let that happen.

  “Otto,” she said, “let me in!” As though she, not Sigelman, were the big bad wolf.

  “Jesus Christ—do you know what time it is?” he said. But he stepped back so she could enter.

  The hall was dark, with worn carpeting and stained wallpaper, a staircase going up. Sigelman led her through the doorway into the long living room in which a couch and a couple of leather armchairs sat opposite a big table covered with papers. On the floor was a spectacular blue-and-yellow silk kilim rug, and the walls were lined with books, most properly upright but some sideways or backward, the ragged edges of their pages showing. There was, as well, a vast, dusty clutter of old objects: amber eggs, crystal vases, Russian icons, cloisonné candlesticks. Books and papers overflowed onto end tables, onto the straight-backed chairs and the ottomans, onto the beautiful rug. “Forgive the disorder,” Sigelman said. “I seem to have accumulated enough artifacts to fill the tomb of a minor pharaoh.”

  “You’re expecting to be mummified, then,” Jane said.

  “Oh, I’m mummified already,” Sigelman said. “Embalmed in flattery.”

  He sat in an armchair, and she sat on the navy blue sofa that exuded the odor of cigars. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so,” he said, “but you look awful. Nobody died, did they?”

  Jane pushed her hair back out of her face. Tell him, she told herself. The words stood on her tongue, waiting to be spoken: You took the letter, I know you did. Instead she said, “You don’t look so great yourself.”

  Sigelman shrugged. “That’s just how it is with me,” he said. “I’m old. But you—what happened to you?” He sat forward, legs apart, elbows on his knees. He looked like he really wanted to know.

  Now, in the face of his nonchalance, the words marched out of their own accord. “You took the letter,” Jane said. She leaned toward him, fingers laced together, feet in damp shoes set firmly on the rug. “My letter.”

  For an instant Sigelman’s face went hard, the muscles tightening under the loose skin, and she might have been afraid of him if she’d had any emotions left. Then he shook his head. “Jane,” he said. “Surely you didn’t come to my house at the crack of dawn, wearing the same clothes you were wearing yesterday, to make that ludicrous accusation. You should see yourself!” His gravelly voice was oddly soothing, and suddenly Jane began to cry.

  “Oh, come on now,” Sigelman said. “Don’t do that.” He rubbed his big hands together and sighed, and Jane wondered how many women he had watched cry over the course of his lifetime. Dozens, probably. Scores. She tried to stop. Any respect he might have had for her would be dissolving, sinking into nothing like the melting snow, but the tears kept welling and falling, welling and falling.

  Sigelman got up from the chair and shuffled across the rug. Jane reached into her bag and felt around for a tissue but couldn’t find one, so she sniffed hard and wiped her cheeks with her hands. Sigelman sat on the sofa beside her. She could feel the heat of him, heat radiating off him as though he’d just gotten out of the steam room. Then his hand was on her shoulder, and he pulled her into him and held her against his chest, against the maroon silk and the pale blue cotton. She could feel the strong, fleshy body beneath the fabric, the hardness of his breastbone, and the rolls of fat at the top of his stomach. “Come on,” he said, his hand lightly patting her back. “What could be so terrible?”

  Jane curled her feet, still in their shoes, up onto the couch. She sobbed into his chest. Tears and snot seeped into his bathrobe, which smelled of smoke and sweat, a sour smell, but not one that bothered her. She could feel how powerful he still was, and she could feel his confidence in that power. She knew it would do her no good in the long run, but right now being here in his arms was extraordinarily comforting, like being held by a god. “It’s all right,” he said, the words vibrating in his broad chest, the breath moving through him, in and out, with a catch and a rumble deep in his lungs. “It’s all right. Things happen! You’re a strong woman. Whatever it is, you’ll survive it. You wouldn’t believe, now, all the things you’re going to survive.”

  When she was finally done crying, she sat for a long moment, her head aching, a dull lump in her chest, her nose dripping, not wanting to move. But it didn’t feel natural anymore. She needed to pull the fig leaf of her dignity around her. She sat up. Sigelman looked at her with a half-amused expression. “Well,” he said, “are you going to tell me?”

  “My husband, Billy—he’s having an affair.” Her voice sounded small and petulant, full of phlegm.

  Sigelman pulled a handkerchief out of his bathrobe pocket and passed it over. “Men do that sometimes,” he said. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”

  She stared at him. “Not take it personally?” she repeated, wiping her face.

  “Look at you! You’re young, you’re beautiful. You could have any man you wanted.” He smiled, confident in his own good advice.

  Jane blew her nose and sat up straight. “You stole that letter!” she said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t, because I know you did.”

  For half a moment he looked taken aback, but then he laughed, a loud, deep laugh that filled the room. “Listen to you!” he hooted. “The husband is fucking some floozy, and she’s thinking about Karkov! Very good, Jane, really. I’m impressed.”

  “Why did you take it?” she demanded. “What did it say?”

  “Enough!” He waved her words away. “I admire your persistence, okay? But enough.”

  She sat up straighter. “Answer my fucking question!” She thought if she spoke to him in his own language maybe he would answer her, but he just looked pleased, as though she were a dog he’d trained to perform a favorite trick.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jane,” he said. “I’ve told you before I’m not interested in minor figures. Why would I even want Maria Petrovna’s letter?”

  “I don’t know why,” Jane said. “You tell me.”

  “I don’t need to tell you anything,” Sigelman said. “I could use some coffee, though. You want something to eat?”

  “Don’t change the subject!”

  “I’m going to make some anyway. I get migraines otherwise.” He got up with a grunt and lumbered out
of the room.

  When he was gone, Jane shut her eyes and put her head in her hands, every ounce of energy used up. She lay down on the sofa. He was like a brick wall. He was like a mountain, and she was like a moth fluttering in the wind. She was more sure than ever that he had taken the letter, but she didn’t see how she was ever going to get him to admit it. She should get up, she thought, leave the house—flee before he came back. But where would she go? Not home. She couldn’t go home. There wasn’t anywhere she could go, and anyhow she was so tired.

  After a while he came back into the room carrying a tray with two steaming mugs of coffee, cream and sugar, spoons, and a plate full of supermarket cinnamon buns he had heated in the microwave.

  “Come on,” he said. “Sit up. You have to eat.”

  Jane sat up and leaned wearily against the back of the couch. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Come on!” he repeated impatiently. He pushed one of the mugs toward her. “A little nosh,” he said. “A little sweetness to counteract the bitterness of life.” He took a bun in his big hand and bit half of it off, slurped down coffee, made noises of pleasure in his throat. He ate the rest of the bun in two more bites, all the time eyeing her with those bland gray eyes, eyes the color of tap water. He drank some more coffee and sighed. “Jane,” he said. “You know what? You’re not the first person in the history of the world whose husband has thought the grass was greener, and you sure as hell won’t be the last. You want to do something about it, do something! Go out and get the bastard back if you want him, or say good riddance and find yourself someone new. Life is cruel—people are cruel. Terrible things happen. When I was a boy in Hungary, people were starving. Those who had food died of influenza or pneumonia. My older brother, Georg, died of tuberculosis when I was ten. And then the Nazis on top of all that! I learned early that you have to find your own pleasures. Why pass up a pretty girl or a cinnamon bun when you might die tomorrow? So do me a favor and don’t take yourself so seriously for five minutes, okay? Eat!” He pushed the plate toward her.

  Jane took a cinnamon bun. It was sickly sweet, gooey on the outside and dry in the middle, but she ate the whole thing and washed it down with coffee. She licked her fingers. Suddenly she was ravenous. She took another bun from the plate.

  “Good,” Sigelman said gruffly. “Good.” Then he took another bun, and they sat and ate without talking, the only sounds the plate sliding on the tray, the chewing and swallowing, and the water rushing in the gutters as the snow melted off the roof.

  When the plate was empty, Sigelman said, “There. That’s a little better, isn’t it?”

  Jane did feel a little better, but at the same time she felt worse. She was bloated and sticky, jittery from the caffeine on top of the lack of sleep. Her head ached and her stomach ached and she had no idea what to do.

  “I’m so tired,” she said.

  “Come on,” Sigelman said. He stood beside her, holding out his hand. “You can sleep in the guest room.”

  She looked up into his inscrutable face, all sagging skin and red-veined eyes. “Thank you,” she said. She took his hand. It was rough and dry like a stone, and so big her own hand disappeared inside it. He led her up the stairs to a small room at the back of the house with a window overlooking the yard, where the snow was already slumped and puddling on the grass. There was a single bed with a green quilted spread, and a picture of a horse over the bureau.

  “Sleep as long as you want,” he said.

  When he was gone, Jane pulled down the shade, kicked off her shoes, and crawled under the spread with her clothes on. Her head pounded. Billy had fucked Felicia, and Sigelman had stolen her letter, and at the same time he had comforted her and given her refuge. Her hands and face were sticky, and she thought about looking for the bathroom, but the spread was heavy and warm and her mind was beginning to drift and she felt nauseated from all the sugar, and she wanted only to lie still. So she lay in the bed that was too soft and smelled faintly musty, and she tried to sleep. She missed Maisie. She wondered how she was ever going to be able to take care of her again, where she would find the strength. She wondered how what was happening now would shape Maisie’s life—scar her, perhaps, as Jane’s own parents’ divorce had perhaps shaped or scarred her. Had Saul leaving Pamela set in motion a chain of events that ended here in this unfamiliar bed? Or no—that might not end here at all but years from now, when Maisie chose the wrong man or no man, left a marriage or was herself left. Jane began to cry again. People said children were resilient, but she didn’t know. The only thing she knew was that she couldn’t spend another night under the same roof as Billy. Her life was a train wreck and bodies lay scattered everywhere. She thought of Sigelman, who had grown up with people starving and dying of tuberculosis, and then the Nazis. She knew her own problems paled to nothing when viewed historically, but the thought only made her feel worse. The world was so full of horrors, it was a wonder anyone was ever happy for ten minutes at a time. Happiness seemed beyond her now or behind her, something that required far too much energy to sustain. She couldn’t imagine how people managed it.

  …

  Sometime later Jane woke up feeling terrible. Thinking she was home in her own bed, she sat up and swung her feet, but unexpectedly there was a wall there and she hit it hard. A wave of nausea surged through her again, and she lay down to wait it out, then realized she couldn’t and sat up again too fast, remembering at last where she was. She was dizzy and a loud buzzing filled her ears and everything started to go black, and then she vomited all over the bed.

  Immediately she felt better physically, although the unpleasantness of her situation was strikingly clear. She had managed to miss the blankets, and she got quickly out of the bed and stripped it before the vomit could soak through to the mattress. Bright light streamed in around the curled edges of the shade, and when she looked at the clock on the bedside table, she saw that it was almost noon. The house was quiet. Jane opened the shade halfway and looked out. The snow was already patchy, revealing glimpses of yellow-green lawn, a thick hedge of scraggly, leafless branches, and the narrow driveway with a car-sized patch of bare pavement, two ruts in the slush leading away from it down to the street.

  Still, she called Sigelman’s name when she stuck her head out into the hall, just to be sure. No answer. She found the bathroom, washed up as well as she could, rinsed her mouth, brushed her teeth with her finger. She looked terrible in the medicine chest mirror, her face gray, her eyes bloodshot, her hair greasy and matted. She looked quickly away and sat on the edge of the bathtub, thinking how lovely a bath would feel. But first she had to do something about the sheets and the mattress pad (thank god he had a mattress pad). Gingerly she picked up the bundle and carried it down the stairs. She went through the dining room, which looked like it was never used, into the kitchen: worn linoleum, an old gas stove with crud baked onto the burners, a sticky-looking square wooden table piled with dirty plates and glasses. She stared for a moment in confusion into the broom closet before she found the door she was looking for.

  The steps led down to a large, low-ceilinged room carpeted in dull beige and lit with fluorescent bulbs. It had a huge oak desk covered with papers, and a new computer with a flat-panel monitor, and piles of computer disks and music CDs and an out-of-date calendar, and a blue china bowl holding paper clips and bits of lint, a large roll of clear pink packing tape perched on top of everything. Along the back wall was a row of gray metal filing cabinets and unvarnished wooden bookshelves stacked with journals and unlabeled file folders and half-used reams of computer paper and a few plates covered with crumbs and jam. Jane wondered why, having the whole house to himself, Sigelman would put his office down here. She wondered whether the letter would be somewhere in one of those many drawers or file folders, or secreted away between the pages of a book, or even hidden in a locked safe behind one of the reproductions of Russian icon paintings that hung on the paneled walls—Christ on the cross, the Virgin with her head bowed, a saint
she didn’t recognize in a blue robe, everyone with divine light springing in gilt needles from their heads. Or maybe they weren’t reproductions at all, but real.

  There was a door in one wall of the room, and Jane opened it and found herself, as she had hoped, in the unfinished part of the basement: concrete floors, dusty pipes, furnace rumbling in the corner. An old bicycle, an ancient freezer, cardboard boxes marked, in faded letters, with words in a language she took to be Hungarian. Under the small window she was relieved to see a washer and dryer connected to a stained slate laundry sink. She carried the sheets over and started the washer, got the load going. Water poured in through the pipes in a great gurgling roar. It made her think of the sound she’d heard yesterday, water rushing in the pipes in the wall of her house, and what it had signified. She felt ill again. She shut her eyes and sat down on the dirty concrete floor, rested her cheek against the metal of the washer, but Billy and Felicia cavorted naked behind her lids, entwined in each other’s arms, so she opened them again. It was hot in the basement, and the cold metal felt good against her skin. In a minute she would get up and do something—take that bath or lie down and sleep some more so she didn’t have to think. She listened to the water and looked around her at the various pipes, enumerating them to herself. That one brought cold water in from the street; that one carried hot water up from the heater; that big waste pipe went down into the sewer system. There was a strange metal box tucked up against the sewer pipe, reflecting the fluorescent light. It was the kind of box her mother used to keep on the front stoop of the house on Euclid Avenue for the egg man, back in Jane’s early childhood. Amazing to think there had been egg men once, even within the span of Jane’s own lifetime! He had brought, not just eggs, she remembered, but bacon, too, and breakfast sausages, which her mother had fried up in those long-ago days before people had heard of cholesterol. The days when her parents’ marriage had seemed as solid and permanent as the house itself, as the Berkeley Hills it was nestled in—though of course the hills lay directly on the Hayward fault and were as fragile as anything in the world.