Dorrie sits in the restaurant at the hotel. She’s chosen the bench side, where she feels less exposed, and she fluffs the bright, orangey pillows at her back. Across the table, Viv fidgets with her silverware, moves her glass, twirls up the edges of the tablecloth. She glances around the room as if she’s looking for a sniper.
“So?” Dorrie leans back. She feels safe in the warmth sipping wine, surrounded by odors from the hotel kitchen—relaxed here in the plush Copley, at a cozy table with her best friend in the world. “Thanks for getting together tonight,” Dorrie says. “I don’t think I could have waited until tomorrow. I really had to get out of the house.”
Viv shrugs. “My schedule’s pretty free for the moment,” she says. “Work starts next Tuesday, but until then I’m totally— Oh,” she says. “I’m auditioning for a play at the Huntington next Thursday. Why don’t you come? You could try out for—”
“I might. I saw it online actually.” Dorrie takes a swallow of wine. “So that guy? Ralph, was it? The guy whose den you updated.”
Viv waves her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Yeah. Good old Ralph. Good old Ralph and Janice.”
“He was married?”
“Who knew?” Viv says. She takes a drink of wine, but she does it with such drama, it could be hemlock.
“Well,” Dorrie says. “He knew. I mean he could have mentioned it.” This isn’t really a topic she wants to pursue. “Speaking of marriage,” she says, “husbands and such . . .”
“What?” Viv fusses with the placemat, lines it up exactly with the edge of the tabletop.
“Samuel.” Dorrie sighs. “He’s acting so—I don’t know—weird, so estranged or something. It’s a little scary.”
Viv leans forward. She looks frantic. Dorrie takes a sip of wine. “There’s something I have to tell you.” Viv’s face is so much paler than when Dorrie first saw her in the lobby, her hair almost black against the pastiness of her skin.
“Are you sick?” Dorrie leans forward “Are you—?”
“No,” she says. “But I do have to tell you something about Samuel.”
“Samuel?”
“Sometimes I wish I still smoked,” Viv says. She tosses her head. Ever the diva. “Don’t you?”
“Well, no, actually,” Dorrie says, “but I never really smoked.”
Viv nods. She glances at the waiter, who’s just bounced out from the kitchen.
“So?”
“Samuel and I,” she says. “We had this—”
“Oh my God!”
“Just hold on,” Viv says, but she edges her chair back from the table.
“What?”
“Samuel called me one night. Weeks ago when I was in Boston for a few days, a couple days. It was a night or two after you and I got together. Remember? We went to the—what?—that play over in Cambridge. We talked about trying out for a part there—can’t remember what the part was—were. There were two that we—”
Dorrie squints across the table at her friend and suddenly she notices how beautiful Viv is. She looks at her from Samuel’s perspective, with her perfect alabaster skin. The dark curls. The violet eyes. “I had a contract in town, or, no. It wasn’t in town. It was Dedham. Drapes. A short job, a few days.”
Dorrie gazes out the window, looking for the health food store where she and Samuel used to buy vitamins and bulk oats and dried apricots the summer he made shelves out of old discarded boards that ran the length of the kitchen. They filled the shelves with large glass jars of rice and barley, beans of every hue, that year—their vegan year.
The waiter swoops back to their table and takes their orders, reaches for their menus, which he snaps shut and sticks under his arm as he hurries to the kitchen. Dorrie takes another sip of wine, tries to focus on Viv’s prattling, tries to rein her in. “So? You and Samuel?”
“He said you weren’t home. ‘I never know where Dorrie is these days,’ he said. He sounded—I don’t know—frustrated, I guess. Kind of pissed, but something else, too. Kind of—”
“Drunk?”
“Huh.” Viv looks at her, raises one eyebrow. “Yeah. Probably. I didn’t actually think about it at the time, but, now that you mention it . . . Anyway, he insisted I meet him downstairs. ‘It’s important,’ he said. ‘It’s about Dorrie.’ ” The waiter comes back with their salads and Viv pauses while he sets them down. For a minute they both pick at the smattering of greens, tossed like a Pollock painting across the plain white, understated plates.
Dorrie chews. Lettuce sticks in her throat; she reaches for her water glass. “And you told him . . . What exactly did you tell him, Viv?”
“He said it was about you, so I told him yes, of course. I told him I’d meet him in the lobby. ‘One drink. That’s it,’ I said.”
“Was it here?” Dorrie wonders out loud. “Did you meet him here?”
Viv looks around, as if she’s just parachuted into the middle of the dining room—as if she’s amazed to be here. “Actually,” she says, “it was.”
“Huh.” Dorrie tries to picture Samuel leaning over the spotless tablecloth, drawing a linen napkin across his bourbony lips. “So cut to the chase, Viv. What is it you feel compelled to tell me right now as opposed to when it might have been a little more—um—appropriate? Relevant?”
Viv shrugs. “I wasn’t in good shape at that point. Jacques and I had just recently split up. And I was drinking way too much.”
“Ah, yes. Jacques. Husband number what? Three? Four? So back to my husband . . .”
“Well . . .” Viv’s eyes shift away from Dorrie’s face. “We chatted for a while.”
“And drank for a while?”
“Yes. It got late. One thing led to another . . . He asked me if he could come upstairs for a minute. Just to get himself together.”
“And you, being the gracious hostess you are . . .”
“He was really a mess. I tried to send him home, but he had his car and he wouldn’t let me call a cab. Plus, he still hadn’t told me whatever he was supposedly there to tell me about you.”
The waiter brings their food, but Dorrie isn’t very hungry. She stabs at her pasta, twirls the vermicelli around her fork.
“So did you bring him upstairs?”
“I didn’t bring him upstairs. I let him use my bathroom, Dorrie. I let him lie down for a minute, get himself together. That’s all.”
“Did he come on to you?”
Viv shrugs again. “In a bumbling sort of way, I guess. There were a few ‘I always thought you were so gorgeous’ comments—‘Independent women are so interesting’—some of that, but he wasn’t serious. He was just trying to—”
“Seduce you?”
“No. Trying to be macho, or something. He was really upset about that guy you were seeing—forgot his name. The one who just—”
“Wait. So he knew about Joe?”
Viv nods. “I think so. Not who it was, but that there was someone. Yeah.”
“How? How would he know?”
Viv shakes her head. “I thought maybe you told him.”
“No. I had no idea Samuel knew about— You didn’t tell him anything, did you?”
“Not a word. I acted like the whole idea was ridiculous. And, Dorrie I am so so sorry about the accident. I know you must be—”
Dorrie waves her hand in the air. “Go on,” she says.
“He just really didn’t seem like Samuel that night. Maybe it was the booze, but he seemed really—I don’t know—like not who I thought he was.” Viv stops eating and stares across the table.
“And who exactly was he, Viv?”
“Well,” she says, totally unfazed, Dorrie thinks, considering they’re discussing what her best friend’s husband said while stretched out across Viv’s bed in a hotel room. “He just seemed really angry, like I said. Reckless.”
“I always knew you liked Samuel,” Dorrie says. “Since the first time you met him, I knew you—”
“No I didn’t, Dorrie. To be honest,” Viv says, and
Dorrie holds up her hand like a traffic cop, but Viv bulldozes right along. “To be honest, I always envied you. You seemed to have everything—a daughter, a house, a husband who adores y—”
“Oh for—don’t even think of going there.”
“Okay.” She chews some more. “But he does.”
“Husbands who adore their wives don’t try to seduce their wives’ best friends,” Dorrie says. She wonders fleetingly if Jerry Springer is still on the air.
Viv scoots her chair a little closer to the table. “He said you didn’t love him anymore. ‘She can’t even bring herself to look at me half the time,’ he said, and then he passed out cold. When he woke up an hour or so later, he seemed like Samuel again. I mean, he was still drunk, but not as drunk. He phoned for a cab and took off. ‘I’m really sorry, Viv,’ he told me. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’ ”
“And it didn’t occur to you to call me at that exact second he left the hotel to tell me what happened?”
“I did, actually. I called your cell, but you didn’t answer and I just hung up. I didn’t want to take a chance on Samuel getting the message instead of you.”
Dorrie doesn’t say anything. There actually were a couple of missed calls from Viv awhile back. She just hadn’t bothered to return them. And then Joe . . .
“Of course by then I had a different—I had to change my number. But that’s a whole other story.”
“You could have called the house. You could have texted me a message. You could have—hell—you could have sent me a message on Facebook,” Dorrie says, even though they both know she never even looks at Facebook; she’s quit and rejoined several times in the last year.
“Really, I didn’t want to face you after that. Not that anything happened. It was just that I hadn’t told you at the time, so then it kind of became a bigger deal than it actually was. And then there was the whole Samuel part of the thing—I didn’t want to make things worse between you two.” She sighs. “But I couldn’t keep not telling you. Anyway, he was— when we were still downstairs, before he got really drunk, he said something about how he didn’t know what was going on, but that he’d find out. ‘She’s never even home,’ he told me. ‘This has gotta stop.’ So, really, I had to tell you. Eventually. When I got back to town, I called you up first thing.” Viv wipes her mouth daintily on a flowered napkin and turns her violet eyes on Dorrie. “Can you forgive me?”
“I don’t know.” Dorrie stares at her friend across the table. “I mean, how could you just not tell me something like this?” But then, for a second, she thinks about everything she’s kept from Samuel. From Lily. From everyone. She sighs.
“So,” Viv says after a minute or two. “This accident you mentioned. Your boss and everything. What happened?”
Dorrie shakes her head. “It can wait.”
“Next time, then.”
Dorrie doesn’t answer. She isn’t sure there’ll be a next time.
They say good-bye in the lobby. Dorrie doesn’t move away when Viv leans forward to give her a little hug, but she doesn’t really return the hug, either. She fumbles through her purse for her wallet, drops a five-dollar bill in the guitar case of a kid who’s singing on a freezing, treeless spot of ground across the street. “Plaisir d’Amour.” Appropriate.
She walks quickly to the train, her breath sharp and shallow. Again she’s careful to look around as she heads into the station. She takes a window seat in the nearly empty car and thinks about Samuel. It was so totally out of character for him to go to Viv’s hotel the way he did, but Viv did say he wasn’t acting like himself that night—not until he woke up and apologized and left. Thank God, he left. She’s never home, he’d whined to Viv, even though it wasn’t true at all, even though it was Samuel who was rarely home. And then there was his insistence, upsetting, in light of recent events that this has gotta stop, and Dorrie shivers in the overheated subway car because she suddenly has no idea who her husband really is. Or Viv, or, really, who she is. Now. She feels wispy. Stuck. She feels like a question mark that she yearns to pound out straight and flat and strong, into an exclamation point.
XIV
DORRIE
Dorrie takes a taxi from the train station and makes it home before Samuel. Sliding through the kitchen door into the garage, she averts her eyes, ignores the lone glove, peeking out like a thick black sin. She walks back to Samuel’s shelves of toxins, to the ziplock bag she’d spotted earlier. She tugs it out from its hiding spot and stares at three neatly rolled joints inside. Shit. She plunks down on a wooden stool Samuel’s pulled up to the workbench. Lily. She grapples through her bag and pulls out her phone.
Where are you?
Library, Lily texts her back. I told you. Question mark. Confused face.
Come home NOW. Dorrie throws her cell back in her purse and sighs. Is it this new kid? This boy? The science nerd? Mia? No. Mia’s totally focused on school and college and—God. Is Lily really even at the library, or are she and this stupid pothead guy swerving around stoned? She should have told her daughter to stay there, right where she was—told her not to move an inch, that she’d come pick her up. She still can. She reaches for her phone. But what if Lily isn’t really at the library? What if they get in a wreck trying to make it there before Dorrie? No. She won’t go. She’ll wait.
She closes her eyes in the cold of the garage, remembers acting out the casts of characters in Lily’s bedtime stories all those years ago. For a while, Samuel would join them, walking over to the little wooden bed he made for Lily that always looked to Dorrie like a box of forty-eight crayons, covered in quilts, Lily in her blue nightgown. All the colors.
“Gonna have a story tonight?” Samuel might ask, and Lily would clap her little hands in delight, scooting over so he could squeeze himself onto the tiny, sloping mattress, flop his legs over the footboard, cross his arms under his head as Dorrie conjured princesses and genies and lamps, flinging them into the room to escort Lily off to sleep. She sighs, wishing she could take a magic carpet ride back there for just a day. A night. An hour, even, that she could shrink her daughter back into that crayon bed, the blue nightgown with the cat embroidered on the pocket.
She fiddles with a box of matches on the scarred wood of the workbench, pulls her coat tightly around her as she props open a small window. Music drifts from a neighbor’s house, a clarinet and something else. A trombone, maybe. She strikes a match and sticks one of the joints between her lips, inhales deeply as the sound of the horns merge and blend and dance across the night.
At some point Dorrie hears a car pull up in the driveway, but it takes off too quickly for her to see if it was actually Mia in her little butter-colored car. She slips into the house as Lily storms through the front door. So embarrassing, she hurls back over her shoulder. Her heavy boots thump loudly on the stairs.
“Wait,” Dorrie calls. “We need to talk,” but Lily keeps going. “I can’t! I have hours more work to do. On my own now, since you don’t trust me to be at the library with a study group! Since you forced me to come home! What more do you want?”
“Tomorrow then.” Dorrie decides not to press the point. She feels a little spacey anyway, standing there in the living room in her coat. She tries to remember the last time she smoked pot. Fifteen years ago? Twenty?
Samuel’s car pauses in the driveway and then, a moment later, pulls into the garage. Dorrie sighs. Samuel is the last person in the world she wants to see, especially now, after she’s just learned he spewed out their life problems, stretched across Viv’s hotel bed in a room the size of a postage stamp. Still. Lily is his daughter, too.
She meets him in the doorway. The garage is freezing, but she steps across the threshold and eases the door closed behind her. “Lily’s smoking pot,” she announces in a stage whisper even before he’s all the way out of his car. “I found it. It’s probably that guy she likes. The science nerd. Or at least that’s what she and Mia call—”
“Found what?” he says, but Dorrie is alr
eady squeezing between Samuel’s car and several piles of junk. She grabs the baggie from behind the box of nails.
“This,” she says. “Lily’s stash. Do they still call it that? Stash or—”
“Oh.” He stands in the icy garage and stares down at the baggie Dorrie’s plunked into his palm.
“Oh? Our daughter’s smoking weed here at the house and all you can come up with is oh?” Her teeth chatter and she clomps them together.
“It isn’t Lily’s.”
“Huh? Well then who . . . ? Oh.” She giggles.
Samuel flips the baggie back and forth in his hands and it makes a thin, slithery sound, like a fish. “Wait.” He looks at her, his eyebrows knotting in a frown. “I guess she is smoking pot.”
“Why? I thought you just said it was—well, implied it was your—”
“Yeah,” Samuel says. “It is, but there were—there’s a joint missing. I don’t know—should we—maybe we should wake her up, give her the whole Say-No-To-Drugs talk right now. But with me being the one who— Of course, I am an adult, so really . . .”
“Which makes it legal for you, right?”
“Yeah. That’s right.” Samuel looks around. He looks trapped. Since his daughter thinks he’s basically infallible, Dorrie almost feels sorry for him until she remembers the whole Viv thing.
“Why’s the window open? It’s cold as a— Wait!” Samuel moves a little closer, sniffing like a bloodhound. “Hey! Jesus, Dorrie!”
She giggles again, relieved. With Lily, there will be a ton of other issues, now that she’s tumbled into that dark terrain of adolescence. Still, it won’t be this particular one. Not tonight.
“Why?” she says when Samuel’s forced the sticky window closed and locked the kitchen door behind them.
He shrugs. “It helps. It takes the edge off.”
She doesn’t ask him what kind of edge. She doesn’t want to know. “Beautiful,” she says instead.
“What?”
“The horns.”
Samuel shakes his head. “I’ll drive Lily to school tomorrow.” He doesn’t look at her. “A little father-daughter time,” he mumbles. “Comin’ up?” He tosses his coat over a chair in the living room and starts upstairs.
The Other Widow Page 10