EQMM, January 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The first husband. Here was the first husband. Yardman?—was that the name? Leonard felt a stab of sexual jealousy. Not wanting to think But I am the second husband.

  On the reverse of one of the Polaroids, in Valerie's handwriting, was Oliver & Val, Key West, December 1985.

  Oliver. This was Yardman's first name, Leonard vaguely remembered now. In 1985, Val had been twenty-two, nearly half her lifetime ago, and she hadn't yet married Oliver Yardman, but would be marrying him in another year. At this time they were very possibly new lovers, this trip to Key West had been a kind of honeymoon. Such sensual, unabashed happiness in the lovers’ faces! Leonard was sure that Valerie had told him she hadn't kept any photographs of her first husband.

  "The least we can do with our mistakes,” Valerie had said, with a droll downturn of her mouth, “is not keep a record of them."

  Leonard, who'd met Valerie when she was thirty-one, several years after her divorce from Yardman, had been allowed to think that the first husband had been older than Valerie, not very attractive and not very interesting. Valerie claimed that she'd married “too young” and their divorce just five years later had been “amicable” for they had no children and had not shared much of a past. Yardman's work had been with a family-owned business in a Denver suburb, “dull, money-grubbing work.” Valerie, who'd grown up in Rye, Connecticut, had not liked Colorado and spoke of that part of the country, and of that phase of her life, with an expression of distaste.

  Yet here was glaring evidence that Valerie had been very happy with Oliver Yardman in December 1985. Clearly Yardman was no more than a few years older than Valerie and, far from being unattractive, Yardman was extremely attractive: dark, avid eyes, sharply defined features, something sulky and petulant about the mouth, the mouth of a spoiled child; the kind of child a woman might wish to spoil to see that mouth curve upward in pleasure. There was a revealing Polaroid in which Yardman pulled Valerie playfully toward him, a hand gripping her shoulder and the other hand beneath the table, very likely gripping her thigh. His hair was dark, thick, damply touseled. Faint stubble showed on his jaws. He wore a white T-shirt that fitted his muscled, solid torso tightly, and what appeared to be swimming trunks; his legs were thickly muscled, covered in dark hairs. He was barefoot, his toes curling upward in delight. So this was Oliver Yardman: the first husband. Not at all the man Valerie had suggested to Leonard.

  He'd thought it was strange, but attributed it to Valerie's natural reticence, that in the early months of their relationship Valerie had rarely asked Leonard about his past. She hadn't even asked him if he had been married, Leonard had volunteered the information: No.

  And no children, either. He'd been careful about that.

  It had been something of a relief to meet a woman without a trace of sexual jealousy. Now Leonard saw that Valerie hadn't wanted to be questioned about her own sexual past.

  Leonard stared at the Polaroids. He supposed he should simply laugh and replace them in the drawer where he'd found them, taking care not to snap the frayed rubber band, for certainly he wasn't the kind of man to riffle through his wife's private things. Nor was he the kind of man who is prone to jealousy.

  Of all the ignoble emotions, jealousy had to be the worst! And envy.

  And yet: He brought the photos closer to the window, where a faint November sun glowered behind banks of clouds above the Hudson River, seeing how the table at which the young couple sat was crowded with glasses, a bottle of (red, dark) wine that appeared to be nearly depleted, napkins crumpled onto dirtied plates like discarded clothing. A ring on Valerie's left hand, silver studs glittering in her earlobes that looked flushed, rosy. In several of the photos, Valerie was clutching at her energetic young lover as he was clutching at her, in playful possessiveness. You could see that Valerie was giddy from wine, and love. Here was an amorous couple who'd wakened late after a night of love, this heavy lunch with wine would be their first meal of the day; very likely, they'd return to bed, collapsing in one another's arms for an afternoon siesta. In the most blatant photo, Valerie lay sprawled against Yardman, glossy coppery hair spilling across his chest, one of her arms around his waist and the other part hidden beneath the table, her hand very likely in Yardman's lap. In Yardman's groin. Valerie, who now disliked vulgarity, who stiffened if Leonard swore and claimed to hate “overly explicit” films, had been provocatively touching Yardman in the very presence of the third party with the camera. Her little-girl mock-innocent expression was familiar to Leonard: Not me! Not me! I'm not a naughty girl, not me!

  Leonard stared, his heart beat in resentment. Here was a Valerie he hadn't known: mouth swollen from being kissed, and from kissing; young, full breasts straining against the red fabric of the bikini top and in the crescent of shadowy flesh between her breasts something coin-sized gleaming like oily sweat; her skin suffused with a warm, sensual radiance. Leonard understood that this young woman must be contained within the other, the elder who was his wife: as a secret, rapturous memory, inaccessible to him, the merely second husband.

  Leonard was forty-five. Young for his age, but that age wasn't young.

  When he'd been the age of Yardman in the photos, early or mid twenties, he hadn't been young like Yardman, either. Painful to concede, but it was so.

  If he, Leonard Chase, had approached the young woman in the photos, if he'd managed to enter Valerie's life in 1985, Valerie would not have given him a second glance. Not as a man. Not as a sexual partner. He knew this.

  After lunch, the young couple would return to their hotel room and draw the blinds. Laughing and kissing, stumbling, like drunken dancers. They were naked together, beautiful smooth bodies coiled together, greedily kissing, caressing, thrusting together with the abandon of copulating animals. He saw them sprawled on the bed that would be a large jangly brass bed, and the room dimly lit, a fan turning indolently overhead, through slats in the blinds a glimpse of tropical sky, the graceful curve of a palm tree, a patch of bougainvillea moistly crimson as a woman's mouth.... Leonard felt an unwelcome sexual stirring, in his groin.

  "She lied. That's the insult."

  Misrepresenting the first husband, the first marriage. Why?

  Leonard knew why: Yardman had been Valerie's first serious love. Yardman was the standard of masculine sexuality in Valerie's life. No love like your first. Was this so? (In Leonard's case also, probably it was. But Leonard's first love had not been a sexual love and his memory of the girl, the older sister of a school friend, had long since faded.) The cache of Polaroids was Valerie's secret, a link to her private, erotic life.

  Hurriedly he replaced the Polaroids in the drawer. The frayed rubber band had snapped, Leonard took no notice. He went away shaken, devastated. He thought, I've never existed for her. It has all been a farce.

  * * * *

  In Salthill Landing on the Hudson River. Twenty miles north of New York City. In one of the old stone houses overlooking the river: “historic"—"landmark.” Expensive.

  Early that evening as Valerie was preparing one of her gourmet meals in the kitchen there was Leonard leaning in the doorway, a drink in hand. Asking, “D'you ever hear of him, Val? What was his name, ‘Yardman'...” casually as one who has only been struck by a wayward thought, and Valerie, frowning at a recipe, murmured no, but in so distracted a way Leonard wasn't sure that she'd heard, so he asked again, “D'you ever hear of Yardman? Or from him?” and now Valerie glanced over at Leonard with a faint, perplexed smile, “Yardman? No,” and Leonard said, “Really? Never? In all these years?” and Valerie said, “In all these years, darling, no."

  Valerie was peering at a recipe in a large, sumptuously illustrated cookbook propped up on a counter, pages clipped open. The cookbook was Caribbean Kitchen, an expensive book that had been a Christmas gift from friends in Salthill Landing with whom the Chases often dined, both in their homes and in selected restaurants in Manhattan. Valerie was preparing flank steak, to be marinated and stuffed with sausage, hard-boiled eggs, and vegetab
les, an ambitious meal that would involve an elaborate marinade, and a yet more elaborate stuffing, and at this moment involved the almost surgical “butterflying” of the blood-oozing slab of meat. This was a meal Valerie hoped to prepare for a dinner party later in the month; she was determined to perfect it. A coincidence, Leonard thought, that only a few hours after he'd discovered the secret cache of Polaroids, Valerie was preparing an exotic Caribbean meal of the kind she might have first sampled in Key West with the first husband twenty years ago, but Leonard, who was a reasonable man, a tax lawyer who specialized in litigation in federal appellate courts, knew it could only be a coincidence.

  Asking, in a tone of mild inquiry, “What was Yardman's first name, Val?—I don't think you ever mentioned it,” and Valerie said, with an impatient little laugh, having taken up a steak knife to cut the meat horizontally, “What does it matter what the name is?” Leonard noted that, though he'd said was, Valerie had said is. The first husband was present to her, no time had passed. Leonard recalled an ominous remark of Freud's that, in the unconscious, all time is present-tense and so what has come to dwell most powerfully in the unconscious is felt to be immortal, unkillable. Valerie added, as if in rebuke, “Of course I've mentioned his name, Leonard. Only just not in a long time.” She was having difficulty with the flank steak, skidding about on the wooden block, so Leonard quickly set down his drink and held it secure, while Valerie, biting her lower lip, pursing her face like Caravaggio's Judith sawing off the head of the wicked king Holofernes, managed to insert the sharp blade, make the necessary incisions, complete the cut so that the meat could now be opened like the pages of a book. As Leonard watched, fascinated, yet with a sensation of revulsion, Valerie then covered the meat with a strip of plastic wrap and pounded at it with a meat mallet, short deft blows to reduce it to a uniform quarter-inch thickness. Leonard winced a little with the blows. He said, “Did he—I mean Yardman—ever re-marry?” and Valerie made an impatient gesture to signal that she didn't want to be distracted, not just now. This was important! This was to be their dinner! Carefully she slid the butterflied steak into a large, shallow dish and poured the marinade (sherry vinegar, olive oil, fresh sage, cumin, garlic, salt, and fresh-ground black pepper) over it. Leonard saw that Valerie's face had thickened, since she'd been Oliver Yardman's lover; her body had thickened, gravity was tugging at her breasts, thighs. At the corners of her eyes and mouth were fine white lines and the coppery-red hair had faded, yet still Valerie was a striking woman, a rich man's daughter whose sense of her self-worth shone in her eyes, in her lustrous teeth, in her sharp dismissive laughter like the sheen of the expensive kitchen utensils hanging overhead. There was something sensual and languorous in Valerie's face when she concentrated on food, an almost childlike bliss, an air of happy expectation. Leonard thought, Food is Eros without the risk of heartbreak.Unlike a lover, food will never reject you.

  Leonard asked another time if Yardman had remarried and Valerie said, “How would I know, darling?” in a tone of faint exasperation. Leonard said, “From mutual friends, you might have heard.” Valerie carried the steak in a covered dish to the refrigerator, where it would marinate for two hours. They never ate before 8:30 P.M., and sometimes later; it was the custom of their lives together for they'd never had children to necessitate early meals, the routines of a perfunctory American life. Valerie said, “'Mutual friends.'” She laughed sharply. “We don't have any.” Again Leonard noted the present tense: Don't. “And you've never kept in touch,” he said, and Valerie said, “You know we didn't.” She was frowning, uneasy. Or maybe she was annoyed. To flare up in anger was a sign of weakness; Valerie hid such weaknesses. A sign of vulnerability and Valerie was not vulnerable. Not any longer.

  Leonard said, “Well. That seems rather sad, in a way."

  At the sink, which was designed to resemble a deep, old-fashioned kitchen sink of another era, Valerie vigorously washed her hands, stained with watery blood. She washed the ten-inch gleaming knife with the surgically sharpened blade, each of the utensils she'd been using. It was something of a fetish for Valerie, to keep her beautiful kitchen as spotless as she could while working in it. As she took care to remove her beautiful jewelry to set aside as she worked.

  On her left hand, Valerie wore the diamond engagement ring and the matching wedding band Leonard had given her. On her right hand, Valerie wore a square-cut emerald in an antique setting, she'd said she'd inherited from her grandmother. Only now did Leonard wonder if the emerald ring wasn't the engagement ring her first husband had given her, which she'd shifted to her right hand after their marriage had ended.

  "Sad for who, Leonard? Sad for me? For you?"

  * * * *

  That night, in their bed. A vast tundra of a bed. As if she'd sensed something in his manner, a subtle shift of tone, a quaver in his voice of withheld hurt, or anger, Valerie turned to him with a smile: “I've been missing you, darling.” Her meaning might have been literal, for Leonard had been traveling for his firm lately, working with Atlanta lawyers in preparation for an appeal in the federal court there, but there was another meaning, too. He thought, She wants to make amends. Their lovemaking was calm, measured, methodical, lasting perhaps eight minutes. It was their custom to make love at night, before sleep, the high-ceilinged bedroom lighted by just a single lamp. There was a fragrance here of the lavender sachets Valerie kept in her bureau drawers. Except for the November wind overhead in the trees, it was very quiet. Still as the grave, Leonard thought. He sought his wife's smiling mouth with his mouth but could not find it. Shut his eyes and there suddenly was the brazen coppery-haired girl in the red bikini top waiting for him. Squirming in the darkly handsome young man's arms but glancing at him. Oh! she was a bad girl, look at the bad girl! Her mouth was hungry and sucking as a pike's mouth seeking the young man's mouth, her hand dropped beneath the table top, to burrow in his lap. In his groin. Oh the bad girl!

  Leonard had the idea that Valerie's eyes were shut tight, too. Valerie was seeing the young couple, too.

  * * * *

  "I found your passport, Valerie. I found these Polaroids, too. Recognize them?"

  Spreading them on the table. Better yet, across the bed.

  "Only just curious, Val. Why you lied about him."

  She would stare, her smile fading. Her fleshy lips would go slack as if, taken wholly unaware, she'd been slapped.

  "...why you continue to lie. All these years."

  Of course, Leonard would be laughing. To indicate that he didn't take any of this seriously, why should he? It had happened so long ago, it was past.

  Except: Maybe “lie” was too strong a word. The rich man's daughter wasn't accustomed to being spoken to in such a way, any more than Leonard was. “Lie” would have the force of a physical blow. “Lie” would cause Valerie to flinch as if she'd been struck and the rich man's daughter would file for divorce at once if she were struck.

  Maybe it wasn't a good idea, then. To confront her.

  A litigator is a strategist plotting moves. A skilled litigator always knows how his opponent will respond to a move. Like chess, you must foresee the opponent's moves. Each blow can provoke a counter-blow. Valerie was a woman who disliked weakness in men. A woman with a steely will, yet she presented herself as uncertain, even hesitant, socially; she knew the value of seeming vulnerable. Her sexuality had become a matter of will, she delighted in exerting her will, even as she held herself apart, detached. In all public places as in her beautifully furnished home she was perfectly groomed, not a hair of her sleek razor-cut hair out of place. Her voice was calm, modulated. It was a voice that could provoke others to be cutting but was never less than calm itself. Leonard had witnessed Valerie riling her sister, her mother. She had a way of laughing with her eyes, mocking laughter not uttered aloud. She was a shrewd judge of others. If Leonard confronted her with the Polaroids, the gesture might backfire on him. She might detect in his voice a quaver of hurt, she might detect in his eyes a pang of male anguis
h. He was sometimes impotent, to his chagrin. He blamed distractions: the pressure of his work, which remained, even for those of his generation who had not been winnowed out by competition, competitive. The pressure of a man's expectations to “perform.” The (literal) pressure of his blood, for which he took blood-pressure pills twice daily. And his back, that ached sometimes mysteriously, he'd attribute to tennis, golf. In fact, out of nowhere such phantom aches emerged. And so, in the vigorous act of love, Leonard might begin to lose his concentration, his erection. Like his life's blood leaking out of his veins. And Valerie knew, of course she knew, the terrible intimacy of the act precluded any secrets, yet she never commented, never said a word only just held him, her husband of only nine years, her middle-aged flabby-waisted panting and sweating second husband, held him as if to comfort him, as a mother might hold a stricken child, with sympathy, unless it was with pity.

  Darling, we won't speak of it. Our secret.

  Yet, if Leonard confronted her over the Polaroids that were her cherished sexual secret, she might turn upon him, cruelly. She had that power. She might laugh at him. Valerie's high-pitched mocking laughter like icicles being shattered. She would chide him for looking through her things, what right had he to look through her things, what if she searched through his desk drawers would she discover soft-core porn magazines, ridiculous soft-core videos with titles like Girls’ Night Out, Girls at Play, Sex-Addict Holiday, she would expose him to their friends at the next Salthill Landing dinner party, dryly she would dissect him like an insect wriggling on a pin, at the very least she might slap the Polaroids out of his hand. How ridiculous he was being, over a trifle. How pitiable.