by Megan Abbott
He drove three miles past Mrs. Gower’s house, would not stop pressing until she turned and let a snarl loose like none she knew was in her.
“What kind of husband,” she said, “with an invalid wife at home no less, spends his evenings like this, Mr. Lanigan?”
“What kind of husband is your Dr. Seeley,” he replied, rough as a razor strap, “leaving his wife behind and packing off to savage Mexico?”
And that was a terrible thing for a man to say, for anyone to say, what did he know of her husband’s sorrows and burdens, and Marion felt it like a hot iron to her chest and she hated Joe Lanigan, she did.
IN BED THAT NIGHT, face greasy with cold cream, she recalled the way, after apologizing and apologizing once more for his harsh words, for his poor behavior, he opened the car door and doffed his hat and followed her to the front door and his head, the top of it, brushed the porch lamp and his hair shot through with light and his face so grave, long shadows meeting beneath his chin. “I wish you could see, Mrs. Seeley, what this is. This thing that has happened, that is happening still, that cannot be stopped from happening. I wish you could see what this is.”
“I know what it is, Mr. Lanigan,” she’d said, clipped and abrupt, shutting the door behind her.
THEN NOTHING FOR DAYS and Marion, head down in work and evenings spent writing a long letter to Mazatlán:
Dr. Seeley, please do not forget me here. My lungs breathe free and clear, couldn’t I come to you at last? I know you said it would not be right to have babies until you had beat this thing, but you have and now I have babies to give and everything else too. All the dark snarls in my head are gone and I can be the wife I…
Each day the idea of another evening spent in her room was near too much to bear. And so she threw herself into the girls’ mad embrace and was so grateful for it.
A midweek supper at Louise and Ginny’s, Louise trying out a new dish she’d created called February Surprise and it was canned cream of celery soup and egg noodles with baking-powder biscuits on top and everyone agreed it was wretched and Ginny tried to throw it out the window and there was screaming laughter. Marion was so glad she’d come.
Even still, seeing Louise, she found herself worrying about the party at the El Royale Hotel. Had it been Louise, and had Louise seen her? Somehow, she had come to persuade herself that she had misseen, as distressed as she was.
But then Ginny, breaking a fever and feeling sour, said, “Marion, do you think it’s nice that Louise leaves me alone so often? I wonder if she’ll go out on the town this weekend, like she did last. I had to entertain myself with Chubby Parker and Pie Plant Pete on the radio instead.”
“Poor little baby,” Louise said, singsong. “Did you need me to wash your hair, Princess Virginia?”
And then Ginny broke the onion face and did laugh and Marion said, almost a whisper, “Where did you go, Louise?”
“Birthday party.” Louise smiled, lifting Ginny’s ankles off the sofa, and settled herself beneath them, squeezing Ginny’s pink-slippered feet.
“And my, did she tie one on.” Ginny rolled her eyes. “Came home near three o’clock and drank bicarbonate all Sunday.”
“I’d’ve just as soon stayed in Saturday night, but someone was rattling like a diamondback.”
“So I drove you out, that it? Drove you to ruin.”
“Something like, kitten.”
Marion almost spoke up but didn’t. To say anything would be to admit she was at the party and that she could not do. She could say nothing, not even to her new, her dearest friends. She would have to live with her shame, but she didn’t need to share it with others. Never that.
LATER, LOUISE MADE MARION a bed of the settee, muslin tucked tight.
“You are a lonely girl,” she said. “We won’t let you be lonely.”
Marion smiled.
“It’s funny,” Louise whispered, head tilted confidingly. “For Ginny, men are only to play with.”
“But not for you?” Marion whispered back.
“Not for me,” Louise said, shaking her head. “Sometimes one gets under my skin and poppoppop like a needle.”
“Yes, that’s what it’s like,” Marion admitted, in spite of herself. “That’s just what it’s like, poppoppop.”
DR. SEELEY, you must understand my plight. I am in peril. I am nearly lost.
FRIDAY STRETCHED LONG at the clinic. Six new patients were admitted, papers needed to be put in order for the state inspection on Monday, and two nurses had been dismissed the day before (Louise heard tell and shared with Marion they were caught in the east utility room with a male patient and a jar of corn liquor, not a stitch on and he with hands on them both).
The day never broke and Marion’s stockings itched and her back had a mean twist three notches long and Mr. Joe Lanigan had forgotten her forever, hadn’t he, and Marion had never finished the letter to Dr. Seeley and had torn the half-finished draft into pieces and hidden them in the toe of one of her wedding shoes because she was afraid if she threw it in the wastepaper basket Mrs. Gower might find it.
On the streetcar home, she set her handbag, heavy with the medical histories she had not finished, across her lap so that she might slip her hand underneath and between the buttons on her skirt and scratch her legs, tickling unbearably underneath her stockings, worn and no new funds from Mexico for three weeks. Under her bag, her fingertips found her thighs and she chanced only a few deep scores before lifting her hand away. The man opposite her, standing, looming, hat on, close-set eyes and toothpick prancing between lips, he looked like he could see and there was a nasty flicker in his eyes and something curling, raw, in his lips. Marion’s face fell hot with shame.
TWO HOURS LATER, after a starchy supper with Mrs. Gower and the other two boarders, unmarried girls glum with no dates that night, after helping with the dishes and mouth top still burning with macaroni custard, Marion retired to her room and turned on the radio and opened the window as high as it would go and sat listening to The Misadventures of Si and Elmer and knew she should be doing the work she had brought home, or working on the cross-stitch on the handkerchiefs she would send to her mother for her birthday. But she sat by the window and sat until near nine o’clock and that was when she saw the flash of Joe Lanigan’s oyster-white topcoat under the streetlamp below.
Later, she would try to tell herself the story of that hour as if it were a fairy tale: the knight climbed up the tower clasped in three centuries of black ivy and he cut through the ivy with a mighty sword and found the fair maiden and she was his.
Later, she would see that hour as if it were a motion picture: the leading man, so handsome, and the leading lady, bathed in white light, and he moving toward her and she toward him, jittery and lovely. And they embraced like in all the pictures, and it was filled with all the things—magic, longing—that picture kisses are filled with. And the darkness on the edges spiraled toward the center and swallowed the screen black.
Later, she would recall again and again the events of that hour while coverlet to chin in her bed approaching three o’clock and hidden under the hood of late-night melancholic dark where everything means so much and everything is so raw and tender and open and it would be like this, like this:
He stood in the doorway, his hat in his hand, and he said, “Mrs. Seeley, you are an honorable woman. I would not for all the world’s fortune test your honor. But you must see there are things I have to say to you. Will you let me come inside?”
But she would not. How could she, into her room, the room the good doctor had secured for her. The thought of him in that small space, with only one rose chair, one chair and a bed.
He reached across the threshold and his eyes were on her and wouldn’t let go. His hand went out and she jumped back as though he were made of fire, and wasn’t he?
“Mrs. Seeley, might you step outside with me, then? Might you walk with me a little?”
But she would not. To be seen on the street with a man, this man, a m
an all knew was married, with a stricken wife and—
“Mrs. Seeley, what if you were to take a drive with me? There are things I wish to tell you. Private things.”
She said she would not, but he stood there still. He looked so weary and the things that touched her about him flew forward for her. She liked to think of herself as the kind of person in whom another person might confide. This is what she told herself even as she knew the things he would say would unravel her. She knew that and she agreed anyway. She agreed and soon enough she was in his Packard, the two of them rumbling down the dark streets, turning corners and not speaking and continuing to go forward until they broke free of the snarls of houses and the dots of street-lamps and into the desert.
And he pulled the car on the side of the road and turned to her. She tried to keep her eyes straight ahead, fixed on the velvety black. But of course she could not. And she waited for a speech from him, a declaration, a confession. Maybe, maybe a sad story about the weight of illness in his house and how it twisted his heart and nearly broke him.
But no speech came.
He reached out to her and took her hand.
Then he asked her to move closer to him.
She would not.
Then he moved closer to her and she could feel him everywhere, his linen coat pressed against her. He whispered something in her ear, but she could not hear it, because his hands had started their way, ways she knew they would find, under her dress and buttonholes gaping and the weight of him and she could stop herself no longer. It was all too much. It was all the kinds of things that had never happened to her and now that they were happening she would not stop it. As she felt herself slide flat against the car seat, as she found herself gripping tight the fine linen of his coat in her hands, lashes fluttering against his face and the roughness of his cheek good and hard on hers, very good. It was then she realized what he’d said, what he’d whispered in her ear.
Marion Seeley, you are mine.
THAT WAS HOW IT BEGAN. And the biggest surprise was that there were no tears, no tears at all for her, that night or the following day. And on Tuesday night, when he arrived again at her door, it happened all over again, this time slow and stretched fine and lovely as blown glass, and then he left and when he did he took her close to his chest and kissed her with great force and told her that he had waited life long for something to mean half as much.
“WHEN IT RAINED DOWN sorrow it rained all over me. ’Cause my body rattles like a train on that old SP. I’ve got the T.B. blues….”
This is what the man with the Adam’s apple thick-knotted in his long neck was singing in Ginny’s ear, plucking at a banjo.
“You need a har-monica, Floyd,” Ginny was saying. “That’s the way they do it in the colored joints.”
“What do you know from colored joints, Gin-Gin,” Louise said, running the carpet sweeper by them, trying to pick up this Floyd’s cigarette ashes and the crumbs from the oyster crackers he had brought in a big tin all the way from Green Bay, Wisconsin.
“Why’s Marion standing there in the doorway like the Fuller brush man?” Ginny chirped.
They all looked at Marion, who had just arrived and only stepped a few feet into the room.
“I’d buy a Fuller brush from her anytime,” Floyd said, then dropped his long black-rimmed fingernails across the banjo strings. “I’ve been fighting like a lion, looks like I’m going to lose…”
He did not seem to recall her, but Marion had met Floyd at least twice at the clinic, where he’d come, sick as a dog, from taking gold cyanide given to him by some doctor in Montana.
“Mims looks like she saw a ghost,” Ginny said, talking over Floyd’s snoring croon.
“…’cause there ain’t nobody ever whipped those Fuller brush blues.”
“Likely she wasn’t expecting such a crowd,” someone said, and it was Joe Lanigan, standing by the pullman kitchen, suit jacket off and suspenders twisted, smoking.
Marion stepped in finally, her head jumbled. What was he doing here? This man who had pledged such momentous words to her not two days earlier, now standing in the home of other women in the morning hours as if a dandy bachelor in a red-light bordello?
“We had a late-night gala,” Louise said, tugging at carpet with the sweeper, even as Joe Lanigan was dropping fresh ashes from his cigarette. “Maybe you read about it in the society pages of the morning paper.”
Knowing Joe Lanigan was a regular guest here, was in fact how she had met him, did not change the fumbling horror of the moment. Joe Lanigan here, like this, at 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Was this how it was and would continue to be?
Not twelve hours before, on the telephone in Mrs. Gower’s dark hallway, whispering into the dark slot of the mouthpiece, I cannot see you tonight, Mr. Lanigan. I cannot leave here at this hour. You should not ask me to. You know, oh, you know, it’s not for not wanting. The wanting is a burning in me. I am all wanting.
Talking like a French novel, cover creased, in her brother’s dresser drawer. How could such words slip from Marion Seeley’s lips? And she had naughtier words than that, that was certain. She offered them to Joe Lanigan’s curving, shaving-oil-scented ear, offered them in fast torrents, florid as The Sheik, which Marion’s schoolmates read behind sewing machines in Home Economics, but with words one hundred times as raw. Where did she come to know these words? Had he given them to her secretly in the night as she slept?
“Gent Joe here came over going on midnight,” Louise said, flopping down next to Ginny, who curled up against her, sucking on an oyster cracker, blond curls springing and whirling about.
“We were in our bedclothes counting sheep,” said Ginny, poking a bare toe, painted violent purple, at Floyd, who, prompted, started again.
“Lord, but that graveyard is a lonesome place. They put you on your back, throw that mud down in your face. I’ve got the T.B. blues….”
“We really tied one on.” Louise yawned. “When did Floyd get here? I don’t even remember. Suddenly, he was here.”
“Like a fairy sprite,” Ginny chirped.
Marion’s eyes were still on Joe Lanigan, who was now smiling lightly at her. She did not smile in return.
“Marion, don’t you like Gent Joe?” Ginny cooed, stretching her toes out.
Louise looked over at Marion. “Yes, Marion, for goodness’ sake, sit down. You’re like Sister Abigail over there.”
“My good gal’s trying to make a fool out of me,” Floyd sang. “Trying to make me believe I don’t got that old T.B.”
“He’s back to the beginning again,” Ginny announced.
“I will sit down,” Marion said abruptly. A party, that was all. A party that went on too long, as their parties often did. They never stopped them. They never cared to.
“You should have invited that bright thing last night,” Floyd said. “She could have brought her brushes. I’d’ve bought several myself.”
Sitting closer now, Marion could smell the alcohol wafting from him, from all of them.
“We would have, had we known,” Louise said, looking harder at Marion now. “There was not time enough to issue the engraved invitations.” Something seemed queer in Louise’s tone, but Marion couldn’t stay on it, couldn’t focus. Her thoughts kept caroming back to Joe. When she declined him the night before, she had pictured him wandering despondently in the sickly hallways of his sick house, not here, not here like this. Was it possible he was not her tortured swain?
“Mrs. Seeley is not that sort of woman,” Joe Lanigan said, moving toward them, leaving his perch by the kitchenette. His speaking, moving, broke some awful pressure, scissored it clean. But it also tied new knots.
“Marion likes to have fun,” Louise asserted, straightening up slightly. “She’s always ready for high times.”
“There is a difference, Louise, that may be subtle for you but is actually legions wide and fathoms deep,” Joe said. “Mrs. Seeley may be alone in these parts, left to fend in our wilderness, b
ut she retains her proper bearing, her breeding, her fine womanly ways. She does not degenerate, she is evolved. She does not come here and let herself be transformed into a backward thing. She is Mrs. Seeley from a good family, good and proper still.”
Ginny plucked one of Floyd’s banjo strings with her outstretched finger. “Well,” she said, feigning to scratch her underarm, “guess I’d better twist myself a banana.”
Louise’s face was tight, but Marion was too distracted to pause over it. Instead, Marion felt herself unspool inside and it was lovely and she wanted to touch Joe Lanigan’s arm, lightly, as she wanted to smile to him and even curl herself at his feet.
He knew her, he knew her, he knew even as he dallied and caroused and sauntered through red rooms everywhere. He might let spangles and sin cover his upturned face so handsome, but in his heart…In his heart…
“What are Ginny and I, then, Joe?” said Louise, mouth just a shade hard. “Some Friday-night taxi dancers?”
“I wasn’t speaking of you, Louise. Nor Virginia. I was speaking of Mrs. Seeley, whom we have made uncomfortable, which is the last thing I would want.” He reached for his jacket slung over the back of a chair and put it on.
“Aren’t we talking high tone,” Louise started.
“Don’t fluster, Louise,” Ginny piped. “Gent Joe is just brushing his boots clean on our bosoms to flatter our lady. What’s the harm? Sing us some more, Floyd. Sing us out of our hungover blues.”
“This one’s dedicated to my stalwart former employer, King Copper,” Floyd said, “for whom I toiled the smelter, 1924 until they took my breath away.” With great flourish, he raised his arm and dropped it down fast like a jackhammer on the strings, peeling into a frenzied jazz number.
“That’s the stuff,” Ginny said, and she leapt up from the sofa as if the picture of health and commenced dancing. Marion had never seen her move a hundredth as fast. Her legs kept twisting around each other and kicking backward as she spun so fast, Marion was sure she’d collapse, but Floyd only played faster and faster and Louise was finally laughing. Looking over at Marion, she said, “Get a load of that jig trot. She made us four bits on that once when we were broke outside Albuquerque.”