by Julie Metz
Henry and I had eaten lunch at this particular restaurant ten years earlier, and now Liza and I were here at last. I’d gotten us lost in the narrow streets as I tried to find the place from memory. Liza was complaining, a rarity for a kid who so far had been a trouper. I had dragged her all over Florence to museums and chapels to look at art, plying her with frequent stops for gelati.
“Mama, when are we getting there?” she whined wearily.
“It’s worth it, Lizzie, I promise, you’ll see.” I didn’t blame her, we were both fading, the promise of a cold drink and a memorable meal the only thing that kept me from ducking into the nearest pizzeria and calling off the search. Finally, the small square I remembered appeared, and Liza and I found shelter from the sun at a little table under the restaurant awning.
On the previous occasion, Henry had ordered colli di pollo ripieni. Each stuffed chicken neck was presented in the vertical position, the head and coxcomb centered in a ruffled collar of sautéed vegetables, as if the chicken’s head and feathered shoulder had pierced through the white plate. The effect was macabre, and the horror on the faces of our vegetarian lunch companions must have exceeded Henry’s expectations. I had laughed heartily, despite feeling repulsed, with wifely pride—Henry had outdone himself. He had great fun moving the heads around on the plate, making squawking noises, while the vegetarian friends recoiled in their seats.
No chicken necks today.
“We’ll both have the pomodoro in gelatina and then the polpettone.” The tomato gelatin was a specialty of this restaurant. Our white plates arrived with the upturned, flat-ended cones of car-mine red gelatin quivering in pools of bright green olive oil. Liza and I had fun jiggling the gelatin with a fork, playing with one’s food being just one of the many delights of eating a meal with a six-year-old epicure. White, unsalted Tuscan bread absorbed the tomato and oil; we squished it all between our fingers before popping the sodden sponge into our mouths.
Polpettone, the next course, might be translated as meat loaf. This was not American diner meat loaf (which I love, with a big dollop of mustard). This dish was more like a pâté. We ate the rich slabs silently and reverently.
Fully satiated, Liza made a still life drawing of the remains of her lunch, complete with her glass of Coke, a rare treat, in colored pencils on the paper table covering.
While we forked up mouthfuls of our dessert, a light but intense chocolate cake, a man wearing elegant tan suede, tasseled loafers seduced a woman at the next table. The suede loafers reminded me of a pair Henry had owned.
“We never ate the wild boar sausages!”
As Liza and I left the restaurant, I remembered this line, Henry’s frequently quoted favorite, from the Japanese film Tampopo. The gangster of several of the film’s vignettes utters these dying words to his weeping lover. They are both dressed in white, his jacket stained with the fresh blood of many gunshot wounds.
I felt a sudden pang of sorrow for Henry, who never got to eat this meal, sweep his tasting pointer finger through the sauces, or pick at the leftovers on my plate.
A week later, Stefano drove us back to the airport. At the gate we said our good-byes. “Allora ciao, Giuliettina,” he said, embracing me forcefully and kissing me on both cheeks. He seized Liza and raised her up high, which she loved. I thanked him for having us and gave him some last-minute girlfriend advice. Any delay in boarding our plane was welcome—I was dreading the return home.
My refrigerator was empty except for a bowl of fruit salad with a note from Cathy, welcoming us home and thanking me for letting her family use the swimming pool during our absence. I filled a small bowl and nibbled at it while reacquainting myself with our house and sifting through piles of mail.
I called Tomas the next day, and we made plans to get together. I felt peaceful, tired from the journey but restored in other ways. Neither Tanya nor Emily could take Liza for a sleepover, so I called Cathy. I figured she owed me one, fruit salad aside, after using the pool for three weeks.
She was reading a book on her porch hammock when I arrived. She came over and embraced me as I walked up the steps to her house carrying Liza’s sleepover bag. Cathy’s hugs had always made me uncomfortable. At that moment, however, she was a most convenient babysitter. I wasn’t interested in lingering long on her porch.
“I’m off to see Tomas. Let’s hope that absence makes the heart grow fonder,” I joked. Cathy gave me another hug before I walked back to my car.
I felt cheerful driving up the road, beside the railroad tracks, enjoying the view of the mountains and river, listening to the All-man Brothers. I hummed along to “Stormy Monday,” reliving my adolescence of the mid-1970s, when young Tomas was just a newborn. While listening to Duane’s guitar licks, as heartbreaking as the song lyrics, I reminded myself of the futility of unreasonable expectations, while there was still time.
Later, we were lying in the dark. An ambulance passed by on the main road a half mile away, audible but invisible through the trees. For me, the sound of an ambulance siren immediately brought back the afternoon of Henry’s death.
“I still miss him so much, I can’t bear it. How long is this going to go on?”
Tomas replied softly, “Do you miss everything about him?”
I paused. The man asked me an honest question. I should give him an honest answer. “No, I don’t, but when I think that way I feel very guilty.”
“You shouldn’t feel guilty.”
“What do you mean?”
Tomas stared at the ceiling. A crack was forming in my brain. He had something to tell me.
“Tomas, please, I want you to tell me. Please tell me.”
“There was a woman in California,” Tomas said. “I thought you knew. One time I was in the kitchen with Henry, he was telling me about her. You came in, and the expression on your face made me think that you knew, that it was something you two were working out. But now I see that you didn’t know anything.”
But I knew just who the woman was. Henry had come home from one of his trips out West. While unpacking his suitcase, he told me about meals he had eaten and people he had met.
“I met this woman, you’ll love her. She lives in Portland with her two kids. She’s petite, just like you. She even likes knitting. Her place is a complete mess. I guess that’s what happens when you get divorced.”
“Is anything going on between you?” I asked Henry, feeling chilled. Even allowing myself to ask the question felt shocking.
“No, nothing,” he replied.
“Is there more I need to know?” I asked Tomas as the darkness of his room gathered about us.
“Yes, there is,” he said, “but I think you need to speak to other people. I don’t know everything, but there is more.”
A few more quiet moments passed. “Tomas, I feel like I’m going to find out some very dark things, is that right?”
“Yes.”
Amazingly, we slept.
In the morning, I slipped out of Tomas’s bed and retreated with my cell phone to the bathroom. Cool morning light filtered through the outsize green leaves of a tropical potted plant. I sat on the closed toilet seat and called Emily. I sensed now that the tension I’d felt these last months might be related to some burden she’d been carrying, greater even than witnessing Henry’s last moments with me. She started crying when I told her what I knew. I had caught her unprepared, but it took little coaxing to get the truth out of her. She must have been feeling like a corked bottle full of secrets.
“It’s Cathy,” she said, her voice choked. “Cathy and Henry were having an affair, for two years at least. We found all their e-mails on his computer the morning after he died.”
I listened as Emily described the panicked decisions made the morning after Henry’s death—that morning in his office when I heard a woman cry out. Whose voice had screamed? Matthew had hidden the evidence on Henry’s computer so that I would not find it during such a vulnerable time. In the midst of everything, Cathy had come over. Sh
e wanted to help with funeral arrangements, she said. Matthew confronted her, and she left. Later she was summoned over to delete her correspondence from Henry’s e-mail.
I listened; my brain was a wide-open portal; I felt calm. There was me, listening, and the inner caretaker of me thinking about how I should feel about what I was hearing.
My first thought: I have to go pick up my child. Liza was in the home of a woman who had been involved in a long affair with my now dead husband, who had used her own daughter to gain daily entry to my home, who had insinuated herself into my life, eaten my food, preened by my swimming pool, pretended to be a friend. A woman who had left a fucking fruit salad in my refrigerator.
A gun was too swift, too merciful. I wanted a sword to slit her end to end and then, with one hundred more cuts, dice her body into small pieces and leave the bloodied, quivering remains of skin, muscle, and soulless guts on her front lawn, arranged in a gruesome scarlet letter.
I couldn’t kill Henry anymore, since he was, conveniently enough, dead.
part two
storm
…I can’t escape from that unsettling sense of recognition that accompanies Jane Eyre (which must be shared by innumerable other readers)—and I don’t mean that I recognize myself in the novel, but I recognize something else in it, the secrets and the madness and the heroine who must learn to uncover her true self, as well as several others’.
—JUSTINE PICARDIE,
My Mother’s Wedding Dress
five
July 2003
When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
—SHERLOCK HOLMES
Heat rose in waves from the asphalt road ahead of me.
Jesusfuckingchrist
I gripped the steering wheel so hard that I veered off course.
I want to fucking kill that woman.
The road was arrow straight, alongside the railroad tracks. slit her from her head to her fucking
Vertigo overtook me as I stared at the perfect receding vanishing point.
A summer day, two years earlier.
I had stopped by to visit Cathy’s next-door neighbor, Jenny. I drooped into one of her Adirondack chairs and gratefully accepted a glass of lemonade. Her younger children ran around the yard, supervised by their older brother. I was amazed they had the energy in the stifling heat. The rose petals were wilting on the bushes, and the lawn was turning brown. I wiped sweat from my forehead, though we sat in the shade.
“You know, he’s over there all the time,” Jenny said, nudging her chin in the direction of Cathy’s house, whose gingerbread roof peeked over the dividing fence. She settled into another chair with her lemonade. “You don’t think there’s anything going on, do you?” She looked at me, as if embarrassed to present such an idea.
Cathy? The woman Henry had called “a gaunt hag, with oversize boobs and sloped shoulders”? These defects were severe aesthetic sins in his beauty standard book, just one level above thick ankles. Not to mention the fact that Cathy could be just plain weird and chilly. My face registered surprise.
Jenny, allegedly Cathy’s close friend, answered herself. “Yeah, ewww. Couldn’t be, right?”
But then again.
A year ago, six months before his death.
I had passed in and out of Henry’s office several times that evening, to find him involved in a lengthy phone discussion. He addressed Cathy by name in a soothing manner that signaled this was an Important Talk. At last he hung up.
“Why do you have to fix all her stupid problems?” I asked with irritation. “You should be spending time with your family, not talking to her.”
He and I never had Important Talks anymore. We talked about whether we should call the electrician to fix the ancient exposed wiring in the back hall, whether he or I would be picking Liza up from day camp that day, who was coming to dinner that weekend, what the menu would be, what we would eat that night. Food, our final connection to intimacy.
I paused, glaring at Henry as thoughts coalesced in my brain. Words came out of my mouth that shocked me.
“Are you having an affair with Cathy?”
Henry smiled gently and after a beat replied, “No, I am not.”
He was a fucking liar. I was a fucking idiot.
The back of my neck prickled, in spite of the car air-conditioning. I had allowed this ugliness to happen, right under my nose. I hadn’t wanted to see it, but it was always there. Now I understood her personality and my feelings of unease around her. Some part of me had never trusted her. Why hadn’t I listened?
Her sudden religiosity made sense—some kind of advance penitence. I smiled—darkly—at the twisted logic. Attend church, suck up to well-meaning minister, sing in choir, sign child up for Sunday school now, and perhaps things won’t go so wretchedly later, when everyone finds out about your adultery and what a lying fucking cunt you really are. Hypocrisy has its own elegant symmetry.
Excruciating—like sunburn searing my brain—to consider the many meals we had shared while their affair went on secretly. Henry proudly presiding over the steak on the barbecue while we four had conversations that felt authentic about our hopes for our daughters, our work, books and music we loved, our plans for the future.
On a few rare occasions Cathy and I had even spent time together away from our husbands. There was the time she had insisted on taking me out for my birthday along with her neighbor, Jenny. I still had the Polaroid in my office taken by the waiter in the Mexican restaurant—the three of us in an embrace, I in the center, wearing an enormous and ridiculous sombrero hat.
Cathy and I had gone clothes shopping together on one idle weekday afternoon, a trip to the Old Navy at the mall, where we bought T-shirts and jeans. It was supposed to be fun, but in the end, I had anguished, noting that she wore a smaller size than I did. It was like a bad day in high school when what you remember most is that you felt fat. I never went shopping with her again.
And all that exercising might have been not for herself but to please Henry, who liked his women slender. How often I had felt fat and full of self-loathing during our marriage—wishing I could perform self-surgery on my offending blobby bits—a feeling in no way softened by my observation of Henry’s own slowly inflating midlife paunch.
He was a piece of shit bastard making me feel like a crazy person. Insisting that we invite them over all the time, every goddamned weekend, the way she sat like a queen by the pool and wore those super-low-cut bikini tops with her tits hanging out, like a fucking porn star.
There was that day when I peeked into Henry’s office and noticed that the sheets on the twin guest bed looked rumpled. I saw a small damp spot—it looked like middle-aged nap drool. I offered to wash the sheets with that day’s laundry. No, Henry insisted, he would wash them. What an idiot. At least it was in his office, not in our bed. I wondered if I had been in the house at the time, working in my office downstairs. Anything was possible.
She has been so fucking nice to me since January.
Cathy and I had shared meals in these last months since Henry’s death. I had listened to her book recommendations while eating her serviceable meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and oversteamed broccoli. We had watched movies afterward while sipping cups of tea on her couch. That couch—the silent witness—had undoubtedly seen a lot of action.
I found myself on Cathy’s quiet street, parked in front of her house, a sweet, gingerbread-trimmed Victorian. I could see her, relaxed, reading in her hammock on the porch. He’s over there all the time. With dumbfounded disgust I realized that I must have provided child care for Amy after school, while Steve was at work and Cathy and Henry fucked on her couch, or in her spare bedroom, or wherever they did their fucking.
My car door slammed with a satisfying, German-engineered thunk. I walked up to her porch steps. She put her book down, smiled, then the corners of her mouth dropped, her expression changed to concern; my face felt like stone.
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“Get over here,” I said between gritted teeth. “We are going to talk now.” She rose from the hammock, and I walked her to the vacant dirt parking lot of a nearby building, where we stood next to each other for a silent moment as I tried to focus my thoughts. She looked at me expectantly.
“I have been told about your affair with Henry.”
“Julie, I need to sit down.” She slumped onto a rotting tree stump, her already pale face immediately drained of remaining color.
Fuckingcuntbitch. My hand twitched, it wanted to smack her face. But the thought of touching her skin felt toxic. I never wanted to touch her again. Standing so close was more than I wanted, but I would have to endure this, what I hoped would be our last time in such an intimate situation.
“What,” I asked, tensed with bewildered anger, “what did you think you were doing?”
She murmured her response. She had been weak, Henry had been so persuasive, she was so sorry, so sorry.
Blame the dead guy. That’s nice. That’s easy.
“That fucking fruit salad you left in my refrigerator. Did you think that if you were really, really nice to me that when I found out I would forgive you?”