She paused a moment, raised the glass to her lips, realized it was empty, lowered it. “Anyway. I was closing the door to the bathroom when I saw Adele bend to pick up the pieces of a canapé, a filo dough something-or-other, that someone had ground into the carpet. She looked around for a minute, her head swiveling, searching for a trash can I guess, and then her head dipped and she shrugged and she dropped the pieces back on the floor and walked away.”
Another pause, and then her eyes narrowed. “I’m guessing you want to know about the famous people, right? So many famous people there that night, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you”—a little smile here—“because by this time George was gone. He hadn’t brought his rich friends and Norman had hit him in the head with a rolled-up newspaper and so he’d left. Lillian was gone and Dwight was gone or else they’d never been there. Barney Rosset was gone and Allen Ginsberg was gone and so was Delmore Schwartz. I read all those names later and anyway they would have meant nothing to me at the time. It was three-thirty in the morning, and then it was four. Shel was gone, too. Someone had put a cigarette out on the dark green wall. Meat underfoot. The room wasn’t spinning but it wasn’t staying steady, either. I sat down on a couch, put my head between my knees. Next to me two boys in suits were talking about Norman. Norman was outside, in the street, challenging passersby to boxing matches. He was so original, Norman was. Not only his prose but the way he lived. Uncompromising. A rejection of the editorial impulse, in life as in art. The human mask was itself an editorial impulse! Norman’s acceptance—no, his embrace of man’s animal nature. Violence as natural and therefore erotic, the erotic defined as all that has been prohibited by square society, including, of course, sex and death and fistfights.” Her head had been moving back and forth as she described the boys’ conversation but now it stopped. “Norman had a knife, one of the boys said. Norman was interested in the question of evil. Like Dostoevsky, one of the boys said. Yes, like Dostoevsky. This is what I remember. Or maybe I’m adding the dialogue later. The boys went back and forth. I held my head.”
Here she paused. Silence. Silence for so long I thought maybe the sound had cut out, raised the volume on my computer, paused and unpaused the video, waited. Then shuffling from the other side of the camera, a throat clearing, a voice. “Are you,” the voice began, “can I—”
“Give me,” the woman said, holding up a hand, “a minute. Just give me a minute.” Her other hand, its grip tightening on the empty glass. Then she said, “We were downstairs when it happened. Bill found me and helped me up and made me drink water with just a little bourbon in it and we took the elevator down. I didn’t actually see it. Just to be clear. I didn’t hear a scream or a crash, just the chatter in the lobby, a group had gathered, it was almost December and cold, we were all dreading walking to the subway, trying to hail a cab”—her hand was moving—“I remember honking outside, the sound of brakes. Then the elevator opened and a black man stepped out and he was holding Adele. Her dress was torn but it was dark and because the dress was black velvet it took a second to see the blood, to see that she was bleeding. Someone took her hand. Someone called an ambulance.” Here the woman closed her eyes. And when she spoke she spoke softly but clearly and she kept her eyes closed. “It seems,” she said, “important to mention. The fact that the man who helped Adele was black. I was going to say of course he was, of course the one black man left at this party was the only one who would help”—she paused—“because of course he was an outsider, too, or maybe he had less to lose”—she paused again—“but it all sounds wrong, how it comes out. Like I’m letting us off the hook. Or underestimating the risk he took. Or turning him into,” she sighed. “Adele wrote a memoir, years later, and she called him, the man who helped her, her dark angel. Like he wasn’t a person at all, with his own family, his own problems, someone who just happened, who had the decency—” Another sigh. “Like he was some supernatural manifestation. Like he was just for her. I know she meant it kindly. Still.” Her eyes snapped back open. “Still it seems important to note. The black man, helping her downstairs. All the white people in the lobby, me included, doing nothing. Him gone before we could talk to him or maybe it was us not talking to him and him leaving. I remember it being very silent and then someone, a man, said, She fell on some broken glass, and a different voice, also male, said, You fell on some broken glass, Adele, didn’t you, silence, Didn’t you, silence, Didn’t you, and then something that must have been assent. I was squeezing Bill’s hand hard, too hard, and he said, Ow, and when I didn’t let go he said, Honey, that hurts. I didn’t”—she twisted her mouth—“leave him then, of course I didn’t. No, I saw Adele bleeding and I heard my boyfriend say, Ow, and Honey that hurts, and I think we should go, and I let him lead me out of the lobby and onto the sidewalk.”
The woman poured herself another splash of bourbon. The bottle was maybe a third full now. “We walked home,” she said. “I wouldn’t get into a cab with Bill, wouldn’t go down the subway stairs with him, so we walked, a hundred blocks, more. Freezing, my breath white in the air and I couldn’t feel the cold. All my thoughts were about walking, how to do it. Thinking heel toe, heel toe, heel toe. Thinking now right, now left, now right, now left. Bill pulled his hand out of my hand and after that I wouldn’t touch him. For the first twenty blocks I wouldn’t speak to him. He said, Honey, come here, and Baby, it’s going to be okay, and Look, I don’t know what happened, but we’re fine, we’re going to be fine”—she was speaking more quickly now—“and Man, what a party. I took my heels off, my stocking feet were on the cracked concrete now, and when he tried to put his arms around me I pushed him away, pushed my heels—my shoes had these sharp heels and I pushed them into his chest. He made a sound, a grunt. The noise scared me, I don’t know why but it scared me, and I screamed. Somewhere around block thirty he said, Okay, I give up, what do you think happened, and I stopped and turned toward him and he stopped and turned toward me and I spit in his face. And then we kept walking. At some point I said, Bill, your friend Norman stabbed his wife. And he said, quickly, he said, Did you see a knife, and She said she fell on broken glass, you must have heard that, and I said, No, I heard someone tell her to say that. I said, Bill, if she dies, your friend Norman will have killed her and he will be a murderer, I said, You will be friends with a murderer how do you feel about that, and Bill said nothing. By the end I couldn’t feel my feet. Finally I stopped and tried to put my heels back on but I couldn’t force my toes in so I took my gloves off, white gloves, spotless, elbow-length, and I jammed them onto my feet. I left my shoes on the sidewalk. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat and I walked the last few blocks like that.”
She exhaled and sipped from her glass and I exhaled too, I hadn’t known I’d been holding my breath. “Bill said it one more time, quietly. We were inside our building, walking up the stairs, him in front and me trailing, the gloves on my feet flapping and folding and tripping me up, and because he was in front of me I only barely caught it, he mumbled it under his breath, he said, You don’t know what happened. And then he was turning the lock in the key of our apartment and we were walking in.”
I paused the video. I’d finished my gin and tonic, my second I think, no, it had to have been my third, and I walked to the liquor cabinet to make myself another, stopped, went over to the sink, filled my glass with water and drank it down, filled the glass again. I stood there for a minute, my back against the sink, sipping and thinking. Thinking, Adele, you were such a good girl. Thinking, No one imagined. No one could have imagined what a good girl you would be.
I sat back down, clicked the video. “I didn’t go to sleep that night,” the woman said. “Bill went straight to the bedroom but I wasn’t tired and it was morning already anyway, past six. I poured myself a glass of bourbon, a tall glass, no ice, and drew myself a bath, waited for the feeling to return to my feet, to the tips of my fingers, to the end of my nose. Then I put on a clean white blouse, brushed my hair, tied
it back, slipped on low heels. Bill was lying on top of the sheets, fully clothed. He was snoring. I grabbed gloves, gray cashmere. There was a small hole between the fourth and fifth fingers of the left hand. I remember noticing the hole. I remember thinking, I’ll have to mend these. I crossed the street and bought a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee at the newsstand. I bought copies of the Times, the Daily News, and the Post. In the apartment I read each cover to cover. Not that I expected to find anything, the papers would have already gone to press, just I wanted—now that the sun was up and it wasn’t so cold and outside I’d seen a family, father in a suit and coat and hat and mother in gloves and children in patent leather, it seemed possible I’d gotten carried away, let my emotions get the—But then I remembered the father’s grip on the mother’s wrist, hadn’t it seemed too firm, shouldn’t they have been holding hands, not—Maybe I was becoming hysterical, women are prone to hysterics after all, this is a well-known fact.” She took a breath. “After I read the papers cover to cover I threw them away. Then I found a pair of scissors and cut up the gloves I’d worn the night before, cut them up until they were just small squares of fabric. They were useless now that they were no longer white. I threw the small squares of fabric away. I sat on the couch and smoked. By the time Bill woke up I’d finished the pack.”
The woman cleared her throat. “I bought the papers on Monday, too, but there wasn’t anything until Tuesday. Buried halfway through the Times, a column and a half, barely, plus a half-column-sized picture of Norman. It did make the front page of the Daily News. I remember the headline. Wife Stabbed, Novelist Held. I remember it specifically because I read later that Adele’s father was a typesetter at the Daily News, that that’s how he found out.”
She took a sip from her drink. “Bill apologized to me later. And he broke with Norman. Or he said he did. There were nights, later, nights when I wondered, when he didn’t come home, or came home drunk, nights when I lay, still, waiting, eyes open in the dark.”
She paused. Raised the glass then lowered it. “Years passed,” she said. “Years passed, as they do, and Bill and I got married.” She laughed. “Got married. I want to say that if he hadn’t apologized, if he hadn’t stopped seeing Norman, I wouldn’t—but I can’t because that’s not how it happened. Bill was a copy editor, then he was an assistant editor, then he was an editor, a senior editor, editor in chief. I was a secretary at an ad agency and then I was an assistant copywriter and then for a long time I was a full copywriter and then I was head copywriter and I had my own office. No kids. Bill wanted them and I didn’t care one way or the other but it just never happened. We kept trying, a year, two years, three, and then we stopped trying and then Bill got a twenty-two-year-old pregnant, so I guess the problem was me. There was a quickie divorce, out of state, and then I went back to my office.”
The woman shifted in her seat. “I wasn’t,” she said, “you know, I wasn’t going to do this interview. And then last week, Thursday, I got the paper. The Times. And I read, I was eating my half a grapefruit, drinking my coffee, and I read that the man who hired me, who promoted me, who gave me my office, was a—” She paused. “Was a rapist. That’s what the women say. Four of them. His assistants, assistants I remember, young girls, bright girls. That on business trips he told them to come to his hotel room and that in the hotel room he poured them drinks. That they said no but that it didn’t matter, he didn’t listen. The same story, with slight variations. One of them had bruises. One of them, a different one, went to the police, but it was a couple days later, she’d taken a shower. The detective she talked to said after seventy-two hours there wouldn’t be any evidence left, told her to go home. I read this and thought, I was older when these assistants were hired. I thought, He never tried anything with me. I tried to remember, were there times when he called his assistant into his office, kept the door closed too long. When he asked his assistant to stay late. But I couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember anything I would swear to.
“You know, Adele stuck to the story about falling on glass for the first few days, and then she changed her story and said Norman stabbed her and then, then”—the woman was pointing a finger—“then she changed it back. The grand jury indicted him anyway.” The woman smiled. “Indicted him even though she said she was too drunk to remember what happened, that she and her husband were ‘perfectly happy together.’ ” The woman made air quotes with one hand. “And good for them.” She laughed. “He ended up pleading out, third-degree assault they called it, gave him five years’ probation. He spent a couple weeks in Bellevue, this was before the indictment, but she wouldn’t sign off on shock therapy. Of course she was trying to protect herself but then everyone blamed her anyway. Norman’s mother, his friends, the entire quote-unquote literary establishment. They didn’t divorce, not officially, until sixty-two. I remember knowing this—reading it, or maybe someone told me, you know how gossip gets around—and thinking I should look her up and say something, something like I’m sorry. It’s too late now, of course. I never spoke to her again. Really,” she said, “what I’ve always wondered is whether they got the blood out of that dress. It was a lovely dress, scoop-necked with a plunging back, long and fitted but not tight, like liquid, skimming the surface of her body, and probably ruined, what with it being velvet and velvet being so hard to wash, so hard to mend, at least if you’re trying to do it properly, if you’re trying to do it without leaving a seam.” The woman sighed. “I think that’s all I have to say.”
“Do you want—”
“I think,” she said firmly, “that is all I have to say.” The last twelve seconds of the video were silent, the woman sitting in her chair, fingering her pearl necklace.
I was still at the kitchen table when my mother came home. For the past hour I’d been trying to figure out the woman’s name. Advertising plus executive plus rape had returned some promising results, but it was hard enough to find a list of current employees, never mind headshots. Plus almost certainly she was retired. Possibly she was dead.
My mother was carrying a jade plant and three bouquets, three honest-to-goodness riots of color: orange birds-of-paradise and pink peonies and white anemones, their pistils blue-black and their petals so thin and pale they were almost translucent. “Sweetheart,” she said, turning on a light, “it’s so dark in here.” The names of the flowers coming, by habit, unbidden, unbidden, too, the names of their parts. Though pistil seems too violent a term for eggs and an ovary and in fact I prefer to call this bit, conscious of the error and of my mother’s chagrin, the flower’s nipple. She opened a cabinet, pulled out two vases, fished scissors out of a drawer, turned on the faucet. One vase for the table in the kitchen, one vase for the table in the living room, the ratio of orange to pink to white in each would, I knew, be varied so that their symmetry would seem neither wholly accidental nor exactly planned. In front of my mother, on the kitchen counter, on the windowsill, philodendrons and spider plants, an English ivy, overgrown, a blooming bromeliad. I closed my computer. The plants I don’t mind so much. “Hi, Mom.” She trimmed the stems under the running water. “Productive day, sweetheart?” I shrugged. She takes good care of the plants, never seen one brown on her watch, never seen one die, and if they’re not dying there’s only so much space, only so many she can buy. “Leads on any jobs?” I shrugged again. It’s the flowers I hate, fresh bunches almost every day, tossed, fine, composted, before any hint of wilt, like bright blooms aren’t a luxury, like they’re some kind of need. When we argue about the flowers, the arguments I make are about waste and about money, valid arguments both. Though in fact what I hate about the flowers is that they are, for my mother, a source of pleasure, that my mother believes in allowing herself pleasure, in indulging her various material desires. What I hate about the flowers is that they are an example of the many ways in which my mother extends her kindness also to herself.
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