During the rest of the week he saw her only from afar, wearing revealing dresses and three-inch sandals as she accompanied her husband in the evenings, or hiding behind enormous sunglasses while zipping off to lunch with friends. A bevy of service people came and went from the house— cleaning women, landscapers, carpenters, and pool boys. He knew she spent half her day at a spa.
One afternoon as they were loading the kids in the car to go celebrate their grandfather’s birthday, Christine said, “She’s well maintained,” and he looked up to see Elsa, wearing a filmy white dress and gold sandals, slipping into the Porsche. She glanced over at him and away as if he were of no consequence.
The next day when he fucked her, he took her harder because of it, and when it was over he said, “Don’t ignore me.” She laughed.
He didn’t think of sex with Elsa as making love. He didn’t know her well enough to love her, but he did lust after her. He thought about her constantly, and on the days they didn’t meet he found himself trying to catch glimpses of her. Once he went so far as to walk over to her house and ring the bell. He knew she was home, the BMW was there in the drive, but she didn’t answer the door.
Sometimes she’d talk to him while they recovered in the cavernous bed in the dark master bedroom. He learned about her husband, that he worked in finance, that she’d met him when she was modeling, and found out that she had a German mother and American father.
In her bathroom cabinet were rows of pills, including antidepressants with her name on the bottle. She didn’t appear to have a job or do any meaningful work. He asked her once and she laughed and told him her purpose in life was to look good.
Christine commented on his running so much and he talked about how good it was for him, but when she suggested that they go together in the evenings, he said he preferred to run during the day.
One afternoon, as Andrew pushed his lawn mower around the yard, Elsa’s husband hailed him, coming out of the castle house wearing suit pants and a dress shirt even though it was a Saturday. “Hey there, neighbor,” he said with an affable wave. He stepped gingerly across the freshly mown grass in Italian loafers. “Should have come over earlier and introduced myself. Michael Cantata.” He shook hands, hard, but as Andrew released his grip, the other man’s hold tightened. “I think you’ve met my wife,” he added, looking straight into Andrew’s eyes with a cold little smile.
“Yes.” Andrew met his gaze for a moment, trying to keep his own eyes locked with the gray, predatory ones.
“You trim your own lawn?”
“Yeah.”
“Important to take care of your own lawn. Never want to leave that unattended.” He gave Andrew’s hand one more squeeze and released.
“Does your husband know about us?” he asked the next day when he met Elsa in the woods. She was leaning against an oak tree doing her stretches and seemed annoyed that he’d interrupted her concentration.
“How could he know? He’s at work more than ten hours a day.”
He didn’t believe her. Nobody could be that clueless, but maybe they had an open marriage. Christine now suspected. He caught her checking the pockets of his clothes in the laundry room. “What are you doing?”
“Are you having an affair?”
“What? No! Of course not.” He’d never thought he was particularly good at lying and she stared at him for a long moment, the tension broken when Henry began crying in the other room.
“I’ve been going to the gym,” she said the next morning, barely looking at him, already engrossed in her BlackBerry, so he thought for a moment that she was speaking to someone on the phone. When she glanced up, he realized it was meant for him.
“Great. That’s great.”
“I’ve lost five pounds.”
“Wow! Good for you.” He patted her shoulder as he got up from the kitchen table.
The next time they fucked he told Elsa that they had to end it. She laughed and he realized his timing had been bad, that it would have been believable if he’d said it before having sex instead of after.
He told himself every afternoon that this would be the last time, but promptly forgot his resolve the minute he saw her. He’d known a few addicts—the colleague who really had three-martini lunches and secreted a bottle of scotch in her desk drawer, a former neighbor’s glassy-eyed teenage son who’d been sent to rehab for cocaine addiction, Christine’s roommate from college who threw up in the bathroom after every meal—and he’d pitied them all, never understanding what it meant to have desire consume you like a rash.
One day he found a bruise on Elsa’s arm. He knew her body intimately by then and the spreading purple flower jumped out at him. “How did you get this?”
She moved out of his grasp and he saw, then, that the petals of the flower corresponded to fingers larger than his. “He grabbed you here? Is he hurting you?”
He flashed to a man’s fist wrapped in silver hair at three o’clock in the morning, though he’d never told Elsa about the first time he’d seen her.
“He’s not a happy man,” she said. “He’s not happy if anyone else is happy.”
He fantasized about leaving Christine and marrying Elsa, but these thoughts lasted about as long as his orgasm. She was a kept woman, a trophy wife, and she wouldn’t leave the man who provided for her. And his role in this charade was to be the plaything. He told himself it was a summer fling and it would end before the new semester started.
They were past the two-month mark when Henry came down with a bad chest cold. “We can’t possibly drop him off with my mother,” Christine said. “She’s old and Winnie’s downright elderly.” She glanced at her BlackBerry, then at him. “I’ve got depositions all morning and then I’ve got to be at a hearing in the afternoon, but I can probably take off a little early. Five-thirty maybe? So you can take care of him until then, right?”
He watched over his son, took Henry’s temperature, snuggled with him in the family room while they stared at Sesame Street on the flat screen, and plied him with apple juice, all the while thinking about Elsa waiting for him in the woods. It started to drizzle in the afternoon and he thought of Elsa out in the rain, of her standing on the pathway in a sopping wet T-shirt, of taking her there, under the boughs of a hemlock tree. He left Henry sleeping fitfully and masturbated in the shower.
Three days later Henry’s fever broke, and the next morning he went back to his grandmother’s house. Andrew counted the minutes until he could meet Elsa, driving fast but carefully down hillside roads slick from rain.
Her car was there, but she wasn’t. He walked around it, looking for a note, and pressed his face against the tinted glass to try and see inside, but there was no evidence that she’d thought about him.
Disappointment left him sour and restless. He ran anyway, following their same trail, though it was masochistic in the pouring rain, his legs sprayed with mud, his feet slipping over wet tree roots. He thought he could catch her if he ran faster and pushed his body. When he came to the fork in the trail and had to choose, he thought he saw her imprint in the mud and took the path to the right, which got progressively steeper.
Along a narrow ridge high above the creek he tripped over a rock and fell, scraping his right shin and landing heavily on a knee. He was lucky he didn’t slip over the side, skittering down the hillside with the pebbles he’d kicked loose. He pushed himself up, glancing down at the swollen creek rushing fast some twenty feet below. Among the green and brown, he noticed something pink in the water. He leaned forward, bracing his body against a maple sapling, blinking the water out of his eyes, but he couldn’t tell what it was.
He ran more slowly down the hill, trying to keep the thing in view as he drew closer, ignoring the stinging scrape on his leg and the pain in his knee. When he came to the bank of the creek he could see something resting under the water.
He undid his shoes and slid off the bank, the water frigid despite the heat of the day, his toes sinking in muck, a swirl of silt disturbing his view
. He reached forward blindly, stirred his arm in the soup, and felt rocks and leaves and something harder, heavy, which had settled at the bottom. He tugged and it burst out of the water, spraying him in the face, a woman’s running shoe, white stained brown by the water with pink stripes and pink laces. It was Elsa’s.
For a moment he did nothing but stand there, staring at the dripping shoe dangling from his hand. Then he looked wildly around … expecting what? To see someone in the trees watching him? The rain fell in a steady curtain, but he plunged down the creek anyway, blindly searching, his hair sopping and stringy in his eyes, his feet long since numb.
He could feel his heart thudding in time with the rushing water. He didn’t think about the shoe in his hand, didn’t think about the slender foot it belonged to, didn’t think about what he was really looking for in the creek. Until suddenly he spotted her, lodged in the crux of an oak tree’s roots, which had spread from the eroding bank like fingers raking the water and acted like a sieve, capturing anything solid that came within reach. She was facedown, her head pinned by the tree, arms forward as if she were going for a swim, except one arm was at an odd angle, as if it had been twisted, and her long, bare, muscled legs bobbed uselessly behind her, the other shoe still on its foot.
He fought the current to get to her, sobbing at the sight of her pale, perfect skin and hair laced with flotsam—broken bits of fern, splinters of bark, the single teal claw of a crayfish. He grasped her shoulder, turning her over, and saw a large, gaping wound on one side of her head, a hole really, the hair near it matted and bloody. He thought he caught a glimpse of gray matter underneath that, before he let her flop facedown again in the water.
She was dead. The closest he’d come to a dead person had been a nine-year-old’s view of his grandmother lying heavily powdered and stiff in a shiny box, but he knew Elsa was gone even before he’d seen her eyes clouded over like a dead trout. He pictured her husband waiting along the trail and striking her with a tire iron as she turned the corner.
With shaking hands he pulled his cell phone free of his wet pocket to call 911 but stopped short, suddenly realizing that he had bigger things to fear than Elsa’s body floating in the water.
If he told the police about Michael Cantata’s violence they would ask how he knew and he would have to confess to the affair. And Christine would kill him if she found out about it. Divorce him at the very least. If he survived her wrath he faced a future in which he only got to visit Henry and Sam every other weekend and had to share the title of “Dad” with another man. He knew Christine wouldn’t live alone. She’d find someone just to spite him and someone who made more money or who wasn’t going to lose his hair or who already belonged to the stupid country club.
And this was his future only if the police believed that Michael Cantata and not Andrew had done the killing. Why should they believe him? He was the one standing in the water with the body.
Panicked, Andrew peeled off his soggy T-shirt, swiped roughly at the spot on Elsa’s shoulder that he’d touched, and then backed away from the body before turning and splashing back up the creek, fighting the current to get away. It wasn’t until he’d climbed out on the bank that he realized he was still holding Elsa’s shoe. He wiped it down frantically before hurling it back in the center of the creek where it sank with a horrific splash before bobbing slowly to the surface. He scrambled into his own shoes, fingers fumbling with the laces, feet squelching in the soles. He walked back along the trail, watching the rain eroding his footprints in the mud, until he got to the fork; he took the left path and ran down it fast, so that if someone had seen him, he could say that he’d taken this trail and had never been near the creek.
When Andrew got back to the parking lot there were no cars except his and Elsa’s. They were visible from the road. How many people had passed by and seen his car? His stomach cramped when he remembered that he’d touched the BMW, and he forced himself to walk casually over. When there were no cars whizzing by he rubbed his T-shirt across the windows to smudge any potential prints.
He didn’t remember driving home. He was in the mud room ineffectively drying himself with paper towels while water puddled around him when Christine appeared in the doorway.
He jumped. “Hi!” His voice sounded manic. “I didn’t expect you home so soon. Are the boys with you?”
“My mother’s bringing them home in a little while. They’re enjoying playing in the rain.” She stared at him and he forced his gaze up to her standing there in a terry cloth robe with comb marks visible through her damp hair. “You were out running in this weather?”
He nodded, ducked his head again. “Crazy. This rain is unbelievable.” He was shaking, but she didn’t comment. “Could you get me a towel?”
He stayed in the shower for twenty-five minutes, hoping the noise covered his sobbing. Then he ran his clothes through the washer. Christine joined him in the laundry room and said she would do it with the regular wash, but he insisted. He moved his shoes into the laundry room too, cleaning off every bit of mud before turning them upside down on an old newspaper to dry.
All that long afternoon and evening he expected to hear sirens, but they never came. He wondered if they’d found Elsa’s body yet and watched the evening news braced for an announcement, but there was nothing.
At night the magnitude of what he’d done weighed on him and he couldn’t sleep. He was letting a man get away with murder. He was sure Elsa’s husband had killed her. He thought of writing an anonymous letter to the police to alert them that this was no accidental death, but if he fingered Michael Cantata then that long finger would eventually touch him. They would find out about his affair, and when they found out, so would Christine.
It suddenly occurred to him that this was Michael Cantata’s intent: He’d killed his wife to frame Andrew, who’d been foolish enough to think that washing away his footprints and rubbing off her car windows could erase his presence from Elsa’s life. His fingerprints were all over her house.
What day did her cleaning service come? Did they clean well enough to remove all traces of him from the house? His stomach roiled. He couldn’t sleep until finally he did, only to dream over and over of Elsa’s body floating in the water.
They were eating breakfast at the kitchen table when he heard the faint sound of a siren. He finished chewing his bite of toast, swallowed down a dry throat. The wailing grew louder and louder. He forced himself to take a bite of eggs, but Henry pushed back from the table and ran to the living room window to see. “Henry, come back to the table,” Christine called.
“There’s police at the castle house!”
For one long moment nothing happened. Andrew leaned over to wipe oatmeal off Sam’s face, but he could feel Christine staring at him. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. She abruptly stood up and stalked out of the room.
“The police are at the Cantata’s,” she called, confirming what Henry had said. He got up and unhooked Sam from his highchair, swinging him onto his hip and carrying him into the living room. He watched officers at the door speaking to Michael Cantata and all the while could feel the sound of his own heartbeat. He wondered if anyone else could hear it.
“What do you suppose happened?” Christine said, and her voice sounded odd. She was holding Henry’s hand tightly in her own. Then he heard a faint, familiar tinkling and saw, dangling from her wrist, a silver bracelet with tiny silver bells.
FAR BENEATH
BY CARLOS ANTONIO DELGADO
Morningside
1
Downstairs in the dining room Mami looks at the table, at the big white poster paper she put there, holding a thick black marker to make thick black lines to make our Chores Chart. It is summertime now, she says, so we all have chores: vacuum, mow, Comet, Windex. She’s showing us golden stickers for when we do our chores and blank spaces for when we don’t. Tomorrow, she says, we start.
Tomorrow comes. I am in the upstairs plugging in the vacuum, in the small room Papi made an office
, and Mami all the way in the basement cleans the toilet and the mirror and the sink. Emilio, I don’t know where he is, he’s only seven, so Mami gives him fake chores like separating colors from whites into piles. I am nine, I’ve got the vacuum. The outlets are funny in Papi’s office, small, two holes (not three), both the same size, not one side big and one side little and one on the bottom (like the ends of the plug I’m holding), so I bend down to see can they fit, will they fit, do they fit, bending down then kneeling down, all the way down, leaning and leaning. And this is when I find it: a magazine. A magazine under the bookcase. A magazine I see under the bookcase when I am leaning and leaning and leaning. The one man is wearing a dark coat and a dark hat in the first picture. The other man is wearing no clothes and he has big privates. The one man is opening his dark coat and showing you his big privates. The other man is touching and kissing the one man and licking his privates and putting his privates into his mouth and into his hands and into his butt. Mami is all the way downstairs and Emilio is I don’t know where, and I am right in here, right here with it, here it is, I see it, it is a magazine.
In bed tonight I close my eyes but I see the mayonnaisewater on their faces, on their necks and cheeks and tongues. I see them holding their privates, licking, licking. I see their muscles and their movement. I see their hair brushed perfectly, their white white teeth, their wide-open mouths, their eyes that like me. I see their shining backs, and chests, and legs, and butts, their feeling good touching each other. Inside my body my stomach is flopping again and again and again like water that comes down the rocks. I get hard down there. I do not like it and I do like it. I turn onto my tummy when I am hard down there and I press my face into my bedsheet and I squeeze my pillow between my legs and I press my privates into the mattress. It feels good. I think of the men and their privates and their faces liking me and I do not like it and I do like it and it feels good to feel the mattress.
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