by Holly LeCraw
Halfway to the water, Anthony turned. He held his hand to his ear, questioningly.
Or cowardice. Anthony would never hear him. Still Jed took a deep breath and bawled again, “There’s something you don’t know!”
His words were blown away by the wind, bits of wind themselves. Anthony pointed to his ear and shook his head. He waved, turned away, and kept walking.
IT WAS POURING and Marcella was alone in Anthony’s house. She and Toni had made lunch but then Toni had a hair appointment, long prearranged, very important, and had disappeared in Anthony’s car. Marcella knew she should leave, but told herself she would just wait till the rain slacked off a little. She did not want to think about the motel; she would go shopping, go to the beach, sit in the parking lot again. In just a minute. Outside, the rain was coming down in sheets. She wandered into the living room. There was a phone on the end table by the sofa, as there had always been—an old black phone with a cord. Her cell was in her purse, in the kitchen, but suddenly she couldn’t wait one more moment. She sat down and dialed Jed’s number.
When he answered he said, “I thought it would be you.”
“Are—are you glad?”
“Of course. I saw you.”
“I know.”
“I wanted to run after you,” he said, his voice hard. She didn’t answer. “And then I saw Anthony at the beach. In the rain.”
“You did?”
“I wanted to tell him.”
She looked behind her as though she had heard footsteps, but no one had come in the door. She said, “Of course you did not—”
“No. Of course not. It was funny,” he said. Jed’s voice did not make it sound funny. “Funny that the idea came to me,” he said. “Anthony was almost nice. I wished he hadn’t been.”
She made an assenting sound. She did not want to talk about Anthony. She looked around the room, so familiar, but not hers—as if it had ever been! She should not have stayed here, but now that she was on the phone she could not leave until Jed became himself again, until he said something that dispelled this fear.
Jed said, his voice low, “I want to see you.”
She sighed with relief. “I want to see you too.” She huddled into a corner of the sofa.
“I will tell you about it,” he said. “When I see you. What I’m going to do.” His voice was dropping to a singsong but it was still cold, she had never heard it this way. “Your shirt will button down the front,” he said, “and I will unbutton the first one. The second. You’re naked underneath. You’re so high and tight—”
“Jed,” she said, “please.” She felt her nipples hardening. “Don’t—”
“—I will bend my head down. You’ll stay still like I tell you. You’re getting wet,” he murmured.
“Jed.” Her belly swirled. She had never heard him sound so agitated and determined. His eyes would be burning, she felt his tongue on her, felt him deep in the pit of her. She squirmed on the sofa. “Darling,” she said softly, “please, you are scaring me.”
“What’s scary?” he whispered. Then there was a long silence. “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice was his own again. “I just want you. God. When are you going home? I have to see you.”
“Why?” she murmured. It was just love talk, just seduction, but suddenly she wondered what he would say. “Why do you have to see me, caro?”
“I don’t know. When I see you—when I see you—I’ll know.”
“Jed,” she whispered, not caring what he said or didn’t say, wanting only to hear his name. She knew she shouldn’t say it aloud, but it was like a drug, for both of them, she would soothe him, she was the only one who could—
She was nestled on the sofa with her back to the door. All at once, she felt that she should not be sitting this way, exposed. The back of her neck felt so bare. Instead she should turn to the door, ready to ward off—what? She had just said Jed, claiming him, needing to, that need briefly eclipsing all sense, and then almost at the same moment—she was never sure if it happened before or after, if she had been prescient or not—she did feel an odd breeze on her neck and heard footsteps. She twisted around, still gripping the phone, and saw Anthony. He was soaked, his hair and jacket plastered to him. His mouth was open, his face white.
She murmured good-bye, hung up—cut him off, her Jed. Then she looked blankly at the wall. She took that small moment. She felt fear but it was different from what she had felt just a moment ago, when Jed had been speaking to her in that voice that was not his. This was a new fear—that she would cower, that she would not remember what was true. That she would not remember she was now herself, alone, and she alone decided what she did. That, mistake or not, what she did was hers.
She turned and faced Anthony. “How long have you been standing there?” she said.
“Long enough,” he said.
“You have never been an eavesdropper.”
“I’ve come down in the world.” There was a long pause. “Jed?” Anthony asked.
She forced herself to keep looking at him. “Yes.”
She could see he was waiting for denial or explanation. When none came he said in wonder, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“Yes. I think I am. For many things.”
Anthony walked slowly into the room. She held herself straight, though she was trembling. He sat down on the chair facing her. There were beads of rainwater running down his face like sweat. “You’re disgusting,” he said. “I had no idea you could be capable of this.”
“Neither did I.”
“I saw him today on the beach!”
Marcella nodded. “He told me.” Anthony stared and she knew that hearing of this ordinary intimacy had made the truth snap into place for him. He sat back in the chair, his hands on his knees, and his eyes roamed the room as hers had done a few minutes before and it struck her as strange that they saw the same things—the same encyclopedia on the shelves, the same candlesticks and ship in a bottle on the mantel that had been there for years. She wondered if those things gave him comfort, or if they looked as newly foreign to him as they did to her.
He said, “Jed McClatchey. That bastard.” He paused. “Does he know? About his father?”
Marcella felt absurd calm spreading through her, cool water flowing to her fingertips. “Yes.”
“Jesus Christ.”
She looked at her cold hands folded in her lap and realized she did not need to say anything more. “Have you told Toni?” Anthony spat.
The water turned icy. “No,” she said. “But I will if I have to. Maybe that is why I came,” she said. “I have been lying, and maybe I need to tell her the truth.”
“Don’t you dare,” Anthony said.
“Why not?” she said. “She will—” Marcella’s voice broke. “She will hate me. I know that. Hate me … but she will get over it, I suppose, eventually …” She felt her spine wavering, and bowed her head into her clenched fists. She was surrounded by the past, but now the present was worse than the past. She had done this.
Anthony said, “Do not tell her that filth.”
“I would rather tell her before you do.” She was crying now.
“I am not going to tell her. God.” His voice was now a strangled whisper. “You have no idea. You have no idea what I did for you!”
She did not want to look at him but as the silence stretched she finally did. His own fists were clenched at his sides but this was not like the fights they used to have, when he was all cold surety and would hurl his displeasure at her with complete confidence. He sat stiffly, thinner than she remembered, not trim but diminished. The new, or returned, leanness of his face made him look oddly younger. But the Anthony of twenty years before, the healthy, straight-nosed, jut-chinned, good-looking Anthony, with the hard-driving glint in his eyes and aura of unapologetic self-interest, had seemed to her the hallmark of modernity and plenty and uncomplicated ease of spirit. Now there was nothing easeful about him.
“You’re not listening,
” Anthony snapped. “You never listen. Even face-to-face. Even now.”
“I’m listening,” Marcella said, quietly. “What is now, Anthony?”
“You have no idea,” he repeated.
“Then tell me,” she said. “Tell me what I made you do.”
ANTHONY HAD GONE TO MASHANTUM unexpectedly on a weekday afternoon and had convinced himself that Marcella would be happy to see him. He was trying harder lately, had been for a while. He took her out for dinner, noticed what she was wearing. He had offered her vacations—he’d suggested Florida, even Italy. When he had said that, though, she had started to cry, and he had felt both powerless and disgusted, whether at her or himself he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that even when they made love he felt he did not have her. It made him want her desperately. He wanted her now, and wasn’t that what a woman would want too? Romance in the middle of an ordinary day?
But when he got to their driveway he had gone only a few feet up the gentle rise when he saw the car by the barn, a car next to Marcella’s—a car he had seen in the dirt parking lot beside the tennis courts. He couldn’t place it and he knew its presence meant nothing; Marcella was having some girlfriend over for lunch, there was nothing to stop him from pulling in and parking and going in the front door of his own house and calling out to his wife. But he didn’t. He backed down the driveway and parked a little ways up the street. Then he walked back, almost to the base of the driveway, where there was a break in the privet hedge, and stood—not crouched, but stood, that detail was important—and waited. Not long.
When Cecil McClatchey came out of the house and Marcella followed him with that look on her face and her mouth tipped up to meet his at an angle that he knew so well, he watched for a moment, then stepped neatly away from the gap in the hedge. He had seen from their lack of hesitation, their matter-of-fact urgency, that this was not the first time, or the second, or possibly even the third or fourth. He walked back around the bend to his car. When he heard Cecil’s car drive out and away, he followed.
At the stop sign at 6A he saw Cecil turn left, but when Anthony got to the intersection he turned right. He felt only the instinct to go somewhere safe, and that meant back to Boston. It was an hour and more back, but all he did the whole time was drive, and when he got there he parked his car in the garage at Post Office Square as if he were just arriving at work, and it was not until he followed his own steps to the door of his own building that he realized he could not bear to see anyone he knew. If he had had a best friend he might have called him and asked to meet him in a bar, some manly place where he could curse his wife and lick his wounds and find some steady idea of himself to hold on to, but he had no such friend. He turned and walked blindly away from the building.
He realized a block or so later that he was automatically walking to South Station, but he had his car, he couldn’t take the train home. He stopped on the sidewalk and tried to figure out what to do. The problem of his car made him furious. The fact that he had driven it today, that he had gone to Mashantum, that he had not bounded in and beaten Cecil McClatchey until he cried for mercy but had instead driven back like some kind of dumb animal, seared him with shame. He writhed inside to think how long he hadn’t known, what signs he had missed. He was outside a bar, one he had never noticed before, and he walked in, still wrapped in disbelief.
It was not the kind of bar that was trying to attract people like him. His was the only tie in the place. The beery darkness and the murmur of cable news on the suspended TVs was democratic, it didn’t matter, he’d pay for his drink like anyone else. When the man beside him at the bar started talking, he didn’t answer.
“Suit yourself,” the man said.
Anthony finished his drink quickly and ordered another. Without comment the man pushed a bowl of pretzels in his direction. Anthony ignored them, but the silence became more companionable, or would have if Anthony had cared. As Anthony was finishing his second drink, the man spoke again. “You look like shit,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, like he’d known Anthony all his life, and Anthony had no choice but to look at him at least.
“Leave me the hell alone,” he said, but once again the man didn’t seem to take offense. Anthony had never in his life cursed at a stranger in a bar.
The man had a head of thick dark hair, although Anthony guessed from his deeply creased face that he was past fifty. He had the sort of tan that came not from leisure but from working outdoors. He looked as if he might frequently curse at strangers in bars, and Anthony was frankly surprised that the guy had taken it from him.
He was certain that this was a man who would have beaten Cecil McClatchey senseless, or worse.
Anthony Atkinson had never gotten on well with tradespeople. He did not know how to talk to them, nor did he care to. He had never chatted with the mailman or the plumber and he found it cumbersome to have more than a cursory relationship with his secretary. But he had also never been shocked before as he had been that day, and he had never found himself humiliated to his core, and never felt like a coward. His behavior had always followed strict guidelines, most of which he had inherited rather than originated, standards he aggressively approved of. But now he had no code for himself. He had no plan for being both cuckolded and heartbroken. At the time, he didn’t even realize he was the latter. And, later on, he never could remember how he had ended up telling this stranger his most intimate business. Perhaps the man had seemed unreal to him, anonymous, like the bar. Eventually the man had spoken again, as though he had known the part he was supposed to play, and Anthony had told him everything, in a few short sentences. But when the man said he knew someone who could take care of Cecil for him Anthony just laughed, because it was part of this mad nightmare he’d stumbled into.
He left the bar with a phone number in his pocket, a link to a world he had never, ever contemplated entering. “You’re insane,” he had said to the man in the bar. “What the hell do you think I am? I could go to the police right now.”
“You won’t do that.” The man had looked at him levelly.
All those nevers. It felt sickening and thrilling and curiously inevitable, like a free fall—exhilarating in the few seconds one had to enjoy it before smashing to the ground.
When he saw Marcella and then Cecil McClatchey that weekend, he could barely contain himself. He saw no way out of it, no way to confront her and have his dignity remain intact. He would not have her leave him. He looked at Cecil’s ruddy, oval, handsome face and thinning gray-blond hair and felt nauseated. He looked at Betsy McClatchey, her calm confidence—like his had been, he thought, confidence in a well-built life—and felt pity, as for a weaker being. He had the phone number. He carried it for another week and when he could stand it no more he called and then went to a different bar with a check in his pocket made out to an electrical company, a large check that would go to a different man, whom he would never meet, a check that felt like a live grenade. He had never felt this kind of power. It brought a preternatural calm. He was not only solving a problem but jettisoning all his ideas of who he was—though in fact that had already happened, against his will, when he saw another man coming out of his house with his wife.
It was July, and Anthony told the man to wait until fall. God, no, he didn’t want it done at the Cape, near all the people he knew, on a street he knew, in a house he’d entered—with the blue hydrangeas and the sandy soil, the crickets at night, all his things, his—God, no, he didn’t want it done there. It had to be done somewhere unreal, Cecil McClatchey had to simply disappear, become a forgettable story, the gap he would leave filled in and sodded over by the time Anthony would have occasion to even think of him again. “Atlanta,” he said. “In November.” The beginning of the end of the year.
He could sleep now with this solution in the future. If his gaze was sometimes inexorably drawn to that spot of approaching chaos on the horizon, then there arose a stubbornness and fury born of this power he believed he had never had before. Yes, it is unt
hinkable but it is not. Goddamn it. I have never done the unthinkable. A sin a crime and blood on the ground and on my hands, where whatever else I have done blood has never been—but my Marcella, my wife, and goddamn it God damn it God damn it all—
And except for these moments, he felt himself smoothing out. Marcella seemed very far away to him, but now he could look at her and smile and feel no hatred or anger, only a smug satisfaction which he also tried to push away as unnecessary, a blurring of the absolutes he believed he had invoked. And he waited for November.
But as it approached and he was back in Wellesley and his child, his beautiful daughter, got on the school bus every morning and life proceeded and in the midst of it he saw his wife drift about, a sad shade, her tan fading, leaving her smooth olive skin with a gray tinge of longing, November did not seem far enough away. He wanted it always to be in the distance—the shutting of the door, the resolution. Then one day Marcella seemed different. She seemed a resolution herself. Her back was straighter and she was more beautiful than ever to him, and clearer. The clear autumn light was breaking his heart and he felt they were all hurtling far too fast toward November. Along with the beauty of his wife he seemed to see beauty everywhere like a message, beauty that Cecil, far away, could see too, and along with the beauty, Anthony felt his hatred returning. He realized how happy he had been without it. How much he did not want it, that dark disorder. I was only trying to get rid of that. I wanted the shut door.