Amanda was a lot like Harvey. The two of us could be standing in front of a restaurant, examining the menu posted on a window. I could say, “This is a great restaurant. I’ve had delicious meals here.” She wouldn’t go in before she looked up the place on Chowhound. The opinion of a hundred strangers without taste buds was more reliable than a five-star review from her mother.
“I can stop in town. No problem,” Harvey said.
He was so agreeable. It was startling. Before our separation, he wouldn’t have left his office to meet me in the middle of the day if I were pinned under a school bus. “Should we call your husband?” the ambulance driver would ask. “Not unless your wife needs a few minimizers,” I would answer as I bled to death.
Harvey is a workaholic—and a late-blooming moron. But I’m past all that. I refuse to think about him anymore. I’ve moved on, as they say. On occasion, I do think of that line “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Not in my house. In my house, love means never having to say, “I’m having a baby with another woman.”
“Thanks, Harvey,” I said.
“I am glad to hear from you,” he said.
He had been trying to get back together with me. My kids were all for it. But I just couldn’t do it—there was too much baby under the bridge. I was revved enough without caffeine, so I simply took a seat by a window. Another table abutted mine. I didn’t want anyone to sit close to us, listening in, so I pushed the table and chairs further away.
I remembered when Harvey and I had found our house, and how much he had wanted it way back then. He had wanted it so much that he put a deposit on it after I told him I did not want it and that I wasn’t leaving Manhattan, that Connecticut was just a nice place for trees.
Ten minutes after I sat down in Starbucks, someone tapped my shoulder.
I looked up. It was Harvey. “Get off my shoulder,” I almost blurted. But I didn’t say it, because I wanted to maintain the peace. He was holding a box.
“I brought you something,” he said.
He really was trying to get back in my good graces. The week before, he had sent my favorite cake from Sweet Heaven Bakery.
I untied the ribbon and opened the gift. There were three cream-colored lace bras and matching underpants, very similar in color to the ones he had given me decades ago when he was apologizing for waiting weeks to call me after we had met at my cousin Leona’s engagement party.
“What do they remind you of?” He showed his pride, like a man who finally remembered an anniversary and bought carnations.
“You know that I know,” I said, unwilling to relive old times with him. I folded the tissue papers back over the lingerie. He was disappointed.
“What’s going on, Marcy?” he said.
I decided to pepper him with talk about our kids before throwing my H-as-in-house bomb.
“Ben called,” I said, smiling at the thought of our youngest child.
“What’s up?”
“He’s working very hard. He says a lot of people don’t make it through the first year of law school.”
“What, was he going to be a waiter until he was too old to carry a tray? Law school was the obvious decision.”
“Our son, the attorney,” I said, hopeful Ben would start to enjoy studying law. But I didn’t want to ruin the mood of the moment by discussing the fact that Ben already thought law school was as tedious as ditch digging and that it gave him no time for anything else, including his new boyfriend, Jordan.
“Our son, the Supreme Court justice,” Harvey exclaimed.
No one could ever accuse Harvey of thinking small.
I looked around at the pounds of coffee on the wall dividing the room; at the signage for this and that; at the woman in a white shirt and green apron behind the counter; at a man with his laptop, iPad, and phone in front of him at once. It all felt just as familiar as Harvey.
“Did you see Amanda?” I asked.
“She stopped in at Bountiful. We went for lunch. I gave her a carton of brassieres to bring to her friends in Seattle. In fact, Elisabeth came to lunch too. We were celebrating.”
Great. Now my family celebrated without me. What were they celebrating? It wasn’t anyone’s birthday.
“I have amazing news,” he said.
Amazing news to Harvey was something related to his business—like his sports bra was going to be the official undergarment of the US Olympic women’s archery team. Once, that would have made me proud, but now I just wanted one of the team members to pick up a bow and shoot him with an arrow.
“We’re expanding. We’re starting production on men’s underwear and briefs, then boxers.”
“That’s huge,” I said. “Bountiful Briefs. I like the promise of that, Harvey.”
His grin reached from Starbucks to the Panera Bread on the next corner.
“I have some news too,” I said.
“Wait a moment. I want to get coffee. You?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
Harvey went to the line, then returned with a Frappuccino. He was a diabetic, and he was about to drink a six-hundred-calorie frozen drink with whipped cream on top.
“Watching your blood sugar, I see.”
“You won’t take me back. All I have left is food.”
Boohoo, I thought. Impatient, I waited for him to sit down.
“There’s a house I want to rent,” I said.
I felt “rent” was less inflammatory than “buy.” “Buy” was permanent. “Rent” was “I’m thinking about it.”
“Rent? Why would you rent a house?”
“To live in?”
“I repeat, why would you rent a house? We have a house.” With the end of the straw, he spooned some whipped cream into his mouth. “Want a taste?”
I shook my head.
I thought it would be in my own best interest not to remind him that he had left the house “we” had, a house I came to find out was actually in my name. A little something Harvey had done in case anyone ever sued him personally. If we were held up at gunpoint in a dark alley and the thief told me to hand over my necklace and rings or die, all Harvey would think about was how glad he was we were insured.
“Harvey, why do you care what I do? You’re living in the Presidential Suite at Five Swallows.”
He leaned forward. “Marcy, it’s simple. If you leave our house, I’ll move back in.”
“What?” I was stunned. I thought I would move. Sell the house. Take anything I wanted from it.
“You can’t live in the house,” I said, my voice rising. I looked around. Two middle-aged women in turtlenecks, tweed shirts, and corduroy pants were staring at us. Go order some more clothes from L.L.Bean and mind your own business, I thought. They must have had telepathy, because they turned away from me and back to their conversation.
“Why can’t I live there?” he said with a laugh I could have done without.
“Harvey, you don’t even know where the washing machine is.”
“I’ll hire a search party. I love that house and everything in it,” he said. “My garbage can from Paris is there.”
Harvey had traveled a lot for Bountiful, and he had always brought home some treasure. Like the garbage pail in the shape of the Eiffel Tower and the hand-carved end table from Switzerland shaped like a wheel of Swiss cheese.
No problem. Take your tower and your cheesy end table and move into a condominium like all men in your situation do. Haven’t you ever seen one of those movies where the blond bimbos in bikinis lounge in the courtyard around a bean-shaped pool—and everyone has cheap towels?
But I knew Harvey hated condominiums. Fine. He could buy a house we hadn’t raised our children in, a house devoid of great memories. He was not going to keep our memories.
“You can’t move back into the house,” I said again, drumming my square-tip fingernails on the table.
“Why not?”
“It’s my house. You put it in my name.”
Customers on their way out o
f Starbucks were glancing at me. People in Connecticut do not stare. They glance—and I was speaking loudly and way too aggressively for the Constitution State. I definitely had my New York City voice on. The difference was several octaves and the pronunciation of the word “coffee.”
“What did you think would happen to the house?” he said as he stationed his cup on the table. He must have been very upset, because it appeared he wasn’t going to suck down his Frappuccino. Usually, he finished everything.
“We’d sell it,” I said.
“Sell it? It’s our home.” He is so damn nuts, I thought, he shouldn’t be allowed within ten feet of a child with an allergy.
“Our? Our? There is no ‘our.’ You made sure of that.”
Temper yourself, Marcy. Inciting him never accomplished anything.
He got louder. He realized it, and he lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’m telling you now, Marcy, that I am perfectly happy with you living in the house. Forever.” He said the word “forever” like it was longer than forever. Like it was forever and a half. “But if you move out, I am moving in.”
Maybe I was being petty. But this scenario had never occurred to me, and I am a person who always wants everything to go just the way I planned it. There are a lot of people like me. We are disappointed most of the time. Many of us are very depressed. Fortunately, I take an antidepressant—quite liberally at that.
Suddenly, Harvey stood up. He swiped the Frappuccino from the table and headed toward the door. For a moment, he looked back.
I held the lingerie box in the air. “You forgot your underwear!”
As I sat alone, Dana happened to walk into Starbucks. I stewed until she got a coffee and joined me for a moment. Before I could say a word, she rattled on about her vacation plans. She was thinking of going to Cape Cod, but there was too much traffic on Route 6. She was considering Paris, but she hated the French.
“Harvey just left.”
“I knew I’d smelled a rat.”
“So do you want to know what happened when I took your advice and told him I was thinking of moving?”
“You just told him? Here? Now? What did he say?”
“He said if I move out, he’s moving in.”
“Whoa. I didn’t think of that.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“Now, listen. You don’t want him moving into the house. Do you have any idea how bizarre that would be? He might move a woman in. Can you imagine his girlfriend living in your house, sleeping on your bed, setting your table with your silverware, inviting your kids for the holidays? It’s a total yuck.”
I could feel my face turning white, but before I could respond to Dana, she stood up again. “I’ve got to go, but I have to say that I wouldn’t move. I’d sit in that house until Harvey was too old to use the staircase.”
Chapter 5
Mad Maestro was a traditional steak house. A twenty-four-ounce dry-aged porterhouse was the most popular entrée. It came rare, medium—or on the installment plan. A side of asparagus or a baked potato was about the same price as a car payment. The restaurant was in downtown Stamford, off jam-packed I-95. It was in the neighborhood where young New Yorkers settled when they had a baby and no longer wanted to live in a walk-in closet on the Upper West Side. As I pulled up to the restaurant, which was on the first floor of an elite office building, it occurred to me that I had never arrived at Mad Maestro alone. I had always been with Harvey.
A valet, about the age of the new dress I was wearing, took my car. Strawberry-blonds, like me, look great in green. I had chosen the crisp shirtdress because I had no idea what Jake’s mother was like, and I didn’t want to be too fancy. I wore a jade necklace, jade and gold earrings, and silver shoes.
Mad Maestro was as noisy as an echo chamber, a tough place to have a meaningful conversation. Of course, as was my habit, I arrived early. I knew Harvey would be late, as usual, and then excuse himself to chat about business on his phone. I passed the hostess and headed directly to the ladies’ room.
The bathroom attendant welcomed me from her chair. She had sunken eyes and a thick, crocheted net restraining her hair. When I finished rinsing my hands, the attendant offered me a paper hand towel and a spritz of perfume.
At the sink next to mine was a little woman with curly gray-blue hair. Her eyeglasses, on a plastic beaded chain around her neck, hung to her bosom. I wondered if her breasts were nearsighted or farsighted. She dawdled with her lipstick and seemed to be killing time. She poked through the wicker convenience basket on the shelf above the sinks. When the attendant went to clean a stall, the woman grabbed several Tampax Pearl tampons. She placed the tampons into her purse, which featured silver studs spelling “Paris” but screamed Target.
She reached for a fistful of peppermint candies. I watched, entertained, as she dropped the loot into her bag. I understood her pilfering the hard candies, but I was puzzled about why a woman my age—maybe older—needed tampons. Did she know many teenage girls? I pretended I hadn’t seen a thing and deposited a dollar in an otherwise empty tumbler for tips.
I turned to check the mirror one more time, and I saw the little woman take my George Washington. I didn’t say a word. I hated confrontation. If she needed the cash that bad, she could have it. I decided I would tip the attendant again on a return trip to the bathroom before I left Mad Maestro.
I proceeded to the cocktail lounge. It was dark, and all the windows were covered with wooden blinds. There were round, high tables and a long bar. The place was packed. There was no walking through it; there was only squeezing by.
Amanda waved. After I kissed her hello, she introduced me to Jake’s parents. I couldn’t take my eyes off his mother. She was the tampon thief. Jake didn’t look like either parent. I hoped he was adopted. I didn’t need Amanda involved with a man who was genetically predisposed to thievery.
Amanda was wearing a white dress and an ingratiating smile. The last time Harvey and I had gotten a smile like that out of her, it was because we’d agreed that she could go to the Atherton High School prom with Mother’s Hell.
“Mom, Mrs. Berger couldn’t wait to meet you.”
Mrs. Burglar, I thought.
“Call us Mug and Bernie,” Mrs. Burglar said to me.
Apparently, she didn’t remember me from the crime scene.
“Marcy,” I said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Can I have the tip back?
“Dad called. He’ll be a few minutes late. Let’s order drinks,” Amanda said.
“Two whiskey sours,” Bernie said. I hadn’t heard the words “whiskey sour” since I was at a bar mitzvah in 1978.
“Chardonnay,” I said.
Jake made his way to the bar. We sat at the high-top table on backless swivel stools. There was an awkward silence, so I said, “How long will you be in Connecticut?”
“Just tonight,” Bernie said.
Silence again.
“So, Mug,” I asked, “how did you get such a great nickname?”
“When my brother was a baby, he called me Mug. My real name is Maud.”
If I had to choose between Mug and Maud, I’d ask people to refer to me as “Hey, you.”
Jake returned with the drinks just as Harvey entered. He was heavier than when he’d moved out of our house. Even a bit heavier than when I had seen him in Starbucks a week before. Or was that just wishful thinking? Was there anything better than your husband leaving you and then becoming as big as a house? When he first moved out, I had a nightmare in which he had taken up exercising and gotten in dating shape. Apparently, the only thing he had taken up was drinking six-hundred-calorie Frappuccinos with whipped cream.
Harvey grabbed Amanda like he hadn’t seen her for years. Like she had left our shtetl barefoot, wrapped in a blanket, with one frying pan. He kissed me on the cheek. Get off my cheek, I thought. He shook Jake’s hand, and Jake introduced him to Bernie and Mug.
“What a pleasure,” Harvey said with gusto, shaking Bernie’s hand so hea
rtily that Bernie’s cap fell off. Jake caught it and adjusted the hat so it sat perfectly on the old man’s head. It was easy to see that Jake loved his dad. My heart went to mush whenever I saw a grown man being kind to his parents.
“Just let me make one call,” Harvey said.
“Your table is ready, Mr. Hammer,” the maître d’ said.
“You go ahead,” Harvey said, scrolling through his phone.
We followed the maître d’ to a table near the back of the dining room. Jake seemed jumpy and, beside his tiny parents, ridiculously tall. I cased the table to make sure I did not sit next to Mrs. Burglar. I liked my jade necklace too much.
The round table had a crimson tablecloth, white dishes, and white napkins. Mrs. Burglar left a seat free next to me for Harvey, and I wondered whether she knew we were separated. In any case, Harvey and I were separated, and I felt uncomfortable having a seat saved for him next to me. Wasn’t there anything available in the coat check?
Mug scanned the menu and then reached into her vinyl Paris bag for a tissue. As she took out the pink tissue, a sole tampon fell to the floor. Nonchalantly, she placed it back into her bag.
Bernie Burglar, who seemed to be the weak, silent type, said nothing. Squinting at the menu as though he had seen a ghost, he rolled his eyes and sniffed as though his nose was about to run. I was so uncomfortable about bringing Jake’s parents to this expensive steak house that when Harvey returned, I nudged him with my knee. Speak up already, I thought. Say you are treating. Say it now, before I have to say it.
“I’ll have a baked potato,” Mug told the waiter before he asked for her order.
“Two,” her husband said, squeezing his red nostrils. Apparently, he was now allergic to the prices.
Finally, Harvey spoke up. “I’m happy you could join us. In Connecticut, dinner is always on me. Do you like steak? If you’re a meat eater, go for the rib eye.”
Mug smiled. “Two rib eyes. Medium.”
“Do you still want the potatoes?” the waiter asked.
Husbands and Other Sharp Objects Page 5