When they get outside they cough and rub their stinging eyes and try to get the smoke taste out of their mouths. Patsy is already there, at the end of the driveway, untidy in her old bathrobe. She looks at them briefly when they join her. “Well,” she says. “I guess that’s that.” It strikes all three of them as a strange thing to have said, but no one offers any further comment. They watch the fire poke its way out of the roof in a column of pure flame that rises high into the air. One of the excited neighbors has called the fire department by now and there’s a great commotion of sirens and trucks and hoses as the firemen aim jets of water at the flames, producing angry white steam.
“It must have been the attic fan,” Jack says. “An electrical short.” But none of them can remember turning the fan on. Leslie says something about insurance, about calling her office, making a weak joke of it. The fire keeps finding new ways to burn. It twists and licks and there are small and large explosions as it encounters gas lines, plumbing lines, fuel sources. It is such a transfixing sight that it’s startling to realize the sun is up and if you look in any other direction, it’s a bright day with a hard blue sky. Leslie opens her mouth, she’s about to remark on this, when the roof gives way and the noise of it blots out everything else.
The Woman
Taken in
Adultery
I had two daughters and a husband who didn’t notice things. I was lonesome. Sex isn’t always about sex. Besides, sex was now meant to be the province of my daughters, who were sixteen and fourteen. Their moon waxed while mine waned. Great hormonal waves rippled from them. Their hair shone, their skins were as fresh as the inside of a good apple, and every cell of their bodies was deranged with sex. This wasn’t always obvious; sometimes it took the form of tears, or moping, or playing loud music, but I knew all the symptoms. The boys prowled around them, while sour old Mom tried to keep Ms. Egg and Mr. Sperm from congregating. My daughters flounced and preened and every moment of every day was a drama and they were the stars. Funny old fussbudget Mom! Comic secondary character, equipped with apron and feather duster!
My husband was no trouble. Never had been. I’d grown used to stepping over and around him the way you might a large dog sound asleep in a doorway. You start out being married together and you end up being married apart. I’m convinced that’s the truth for most people, if they were honest about it. “What’s for dinner?” he’d say, and I’d put his plate down, and he’d eat what was set before him. It wasn’t our only conversation, but there were times when it seemed like our most important.
I’d tried to cultivate other interests, like everyone said you were supposed to. I signed up for a symphony series, I took enrichment classes at the community college. These were activities that proved useful later, once I started needing excuses to get out of the house. And I actually did learn how to perform CPR, and a thing or two about investment strategies, and thanks to the art appreciation class, I came to know and admire a number of the major painters, notably Gauguin. Gauguin, who trampled his settled life for the passion of art. Like most people, the tropical paintings were my favorite. All those flat bright pools of color, all those dream beaches and brown-skinned lovers. I liked the whole idea of painting, turning the hidden speech of the heart into a picture in a gold frame, hung on a wall for everybody to see.
Because after a while the thrilling part of secrecy wears off. At the outset of an affair you look at crowds of dreary people, and you know you seem just as ordinary as any of them, and yet you have this whole hidden life blazing up inside you. And maybe they do too, maybe the world is full of jolly secrets, and people are more interesting than you believed. But they aren’t. Artists make you think they are, or maybe they are only interesting once the artists turn them into subjects.
Infidelity became my work of art. I wanted to make myself remarkable. Of course, vanity and spite and other unattractive motives were involved. But what if the sweet and reckless part of life was declared over for you? What if you lived in a house with people who never saw you, what if your skin was dusty from disuse? Wouldn’t you want to hang a gold frame around yourself?
I met his ex-wife before I met him. It was at a happy hour with a few women friends, and the ex had tagged along with someone. She didn’t know anybody else, and her being there made us all polite, at least for the first drink. Then we started talking mean about the husbands.
“He won’t close the bathroom door. It’s like living in a kennel.”
“Is nose hair growth a side effect of Viagra? Anybody know?”
“I work out recipes while we’re having sex. The other night I thought, ’Chicken breasts with gorgonzola and walnuts! Yes! Yes! Yes!’”
The ex-wife had been quiet, listening. She was pretty, I guess. She had a small, sweet face, like a doll’s, but with something lopsided or off-center about it, so you had to keep looking at her, trying to figure out what it was about her that made your eyes cross. She said, “I ran over my husband with the car.”
We all stopped talking. She took another sip of her margarita, put it down again in exactly the same spot. “It was the Subaru.”
When she didn’t say anything more, someone else said, “Those are supposed to be nice cars.”
“I had a Subaru once,” said another woman. “Not a great car, but a good car.”
We all examined, with apparent interest, the surface of the tabletop, the wet circles from our drinks, the drowning cocktail napkins. “So did your husband, you know, die?” someone finally asked.
She looked at us with her flat, doll’s eyes. She seemed to have trouble remembering who we were. I wondered if she should be drinking, if maybe there was medication involved. “We’re divorced now.”
Not dead, then. “Was he, uh, seriously hurt?”
The friend who had brought her jumped in then. “He is such a jerk.” And went on to say how faithless, feckless, and cadlike he’d been, and we all made sympathetic noises about men and their beastliness, hoping all the while we’d hear something really lurid.
Finally the ex roused herself. “I hit a UPS truck first. That slowed me down.”
We wondered if the UPS driver had come out of things all right, but she didn’t say. She finished her drink, tipping it up to drain every last drop. “I don’t drive anymore,” she confided.
She didn’t say anything else, and pretty soon after that her friend took her away.
So when I finally met him, some time later, I remembered the name, made the connection, and the first word out of my mouth was “Subaru.”
“I see you’ve met Marianne.”
“Just in passing.”
“She likes to tell that story. She usually finds some way to work it into the conversation.”
We were at a dinner party. Me with my husband, who I had trained to sit up and beg food from the table. Him with some date, the kind of date you find right after a divorce. She spent the appetizer, entrée, and dessert courses squeezing her boobs together over her plate. I said, “So how bad did she get you?”
“Just winged me. I sort of bounced.”
“She mentioned a UPS truck.”
“Those are solid, solid vehicles. I’m impressed by how well they hold up.”
We stopped speaking for a time as the wine was passed around, and his date claimed his attention. My husband was eating his shrimp cocktail. He finished it, then started in on mine. When we turned back to each other there was already a current of interest between us, that agreeable pelvis-to-pelvis speech that I remembered from so long ago. Yes, he was a good-looking man. But it was probably the car thing that got to me. It was rather thrilling.
He knew I was married. He was sitting on my left, my ring hand, plus there was Old Shep gnawing away on my right. He said, “l suppose people think I deserved to get run over.”
I said I wouldn’t know. That I hadn’t heard even one side of the story, let alone both. “How fast was she going anyway?”
“She floored it, but she didn’t have that m
uch room to get up to speed. So probably not much over forty-five. Then, of course, the UPS truck kind of took the starch out of things.”
“Still…”
He said, “It was a hard one to explain to the insurance people.”
No one was paying much attention to us. My husband was happy with his steak kabobs. His date was flexing her chest muscles in another direction. I said, “Was it any one thing you did, or was she just mad in general?”
He shrugged. He had fine dark eyebrows that knit and unknit in an expressive fashion as he came up with self-serving explanations. “It was a gradual disenchantment on her part.”
When we got home that night, the daughters were having an argument about Diet Coke, who had drunk the last can of Diet Coke when there were clear proprietary rights. “It was mine and you knew it,” said the older. “Mine mine mine.”
“You need it more, that’s for sure,” said the younger.
My husband trudged past them on his way upstairs. It was nothing new, only the girls fighting again.
“You’re always taking my stuff.”
“That’s because you think you own everything in the whole entire house.”
“Mom, tell her to leave my stuff alone.”
“Mom, tell her how big her ass is getting.”
“Jerk!”
“Bitch!”
“Hah! You haven’t even seen bitch yet.”
“Ooh ooh ooh. I’m so scared.”
“Enough,” I said. “Zip it. You got no problems. Neither of you.”
The older daughter swished her hair in contempt. She was a tall girl with a figure like something carved, like one of those majestic painted ladies they used to put on the prows of sailing ships. She always thought she was too big, but everything about her fit together so perfectly. “God. I can’t wait until I’m old enough to get out of this cruddy cruddy house and away from you people.”
“I bet she’s already old enough. Huh? Isn’t she, Mom?” The younger daughter was smaller, and if she wasn’t a serious beauty like her sister, her looks were prettier, more accessible.
“Nobody’s going anywhere,” I said. “I wouldn’t turn either of you depraved hussies loose on an unsuspecting world.”
They looked at me with that dour, suspicious expression they got when I agreed with both of them about how unpleasant the other one was.
“I’m gonna be so out of here,” said the older. “By the time I’m twenty-five, I’m going to have my own magazine, like Oprah.”
“By the time I’m thirty-five, I’ll own the corporation that buys out your stupid magazine.”
“Nice,” I said. “You’ll both go far. But it’s not so great, getting older. It just means your outside dries up while your insides keep boiling away in an unseemly, undignified fashion.”
“You’re weird, Mom.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I called the man I’d met and asked him if he wanted to meet for a drink and he said, Sure, why not. I could think of a lot of different why nots, but I sailed right past them. I dressed up a little. I put on perfume, but not the killer variety. I wanted to keep all my options open. I felt guilty and a little sick, but I set my nervous feelings on a shelf where I wouldn’t have to bump into them at every moment.
“So tell me,” I said, once he and I were twinkling at each other over wineglasses. “How long were you married?”
“I’d say seven or eight years. The exact dates escape me.”
“Any kids?”
“No. Just as well. The divorced dad thing is messed up.”
“I have two daughters. If I ever got divorced they would have the deep satisfaction of hating me forever.”
“That sounds a little harsh.”
“Trust me on this one.”
“You’re a very attractive woman.”
As a compliment, it was about a five on a scale of ten. Maybe that’s what he thought I was, a five. “Hmm,” I said.
“I feel this connection between us. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help it.”
“Oh please,” I said. “Try harder.”
“I don’t usually have to,” he admitted.
I was beginning to think that in spite of my resolve, this was all a bad idea. Or rather, I knew it was a bad idea, but now it was looking shabby and depressing as well. I said, “I’m supposed to be at my art appreciation class. If I hurry, I think I can get there for part of the discussion on Velázquez. I already did the reading.”
“Hey, could I tell you something? There’s times I honestly miss my wife.”
I mistrusted the sadness of men in such instances, although he probably was sad, in a self-absorbed sort of way.
“Sure, things got rocky between us. I guess I could have tried a little harder there too.”
I just looked at him.
“l stayed out late and didn’t call. I screwed around on her. I didn’t show appreciation. I forgot things she told me. I’d see her mouth moving, making shapes, and I knew I should be listening, but it was like hypnosis. This complete out-of-the-body experience. I’d snap out of it and she’d be stamping her little foot and screaming, ’Frank! Frank! You didn’t hear a word I said, did you?’”
“I wonder if the whole business with the car was just to get your attention.”
“That’s possible,” he admitted.
“What is it, exactly, that you miss about being married?”
He pushed a hand through his hair. I liked the way he did it, without vanity. His hair was going thin at the temples and the skin beneath was smooth and worn. It wasn’t at all attractive, but it was a human thing. “I hate coming home to an empty house. I hate having to make all my own noise. My wife, she was always doing something, running the garbage disposal, talking on the phone. Vacuuming. I’m thinking of getting a parrot. Do you know anything about parrots?”
“There’s so much noise where I live, sometimes I pretend it’s all in Italian, like opera, and I only have to focus when somebody screams or falls down.”
“So I guess we have that in common,” he said, brightening.
“No offense, but I’m not sure I want to have anything in common with you.”
“Look,” he said. “I’m that guy. The one they come after with the car, or the gun, or the lawyer. But it’s also true that they never seem to leave me alone. If you like we can try it a time or two, see how it works for you.”
“Try what?” I said. “Oh.”
We tried it a time or two. And then a few times more. It took some getting used to. I don’t mean it wasn’t godalmighty pleasurable. It was, especially after the sleepy routines of married sex. I give the man credit. He could have made love to a potted plant. But there were times I felt strangely disassociated from it all. I could never entirely believe what I was doing, at least not in the exact moment I was doing it. It was a failure of the imagination on my part. You catch a glimpse of yourself in some naked and enthusiastic state, and the believing part of you just shuts down. Maybe that’s what they used to call conscience.
I’d spend a couple of hours with the paramour, then shower, dress, run back home to unload the dishwasher and find the jeans that one or another daughter couldn’t find. My husband would ask me how class was, and I’d say it was OK, or else he’d already be asleep, a familiar lumpy shape beneath the blankets, rather like the famous photograph of the Loch Ness monster, and I wouldn’t have to say anything at all.
I decided that maybe this was a workable solution, sex as a kind of Happy Meal, nicely packaged and available at your convenience. Somebody to look at you with honest, if venal, appreciation. Meanwhile, the rest of your life would stumble along as usual, and nobody would ever be the wiser. But of course that was not what happened.
The instructor for the art appreciation class was one of those women who always look like a graduate student, no matter that they have been out of school for a decade or more. Her name was Leslie Valentine, a lovely name that, sadly, didn’t fit her. Leslie wore droopy cardi
gans and corduroy pants and desert boots. She should have done something to her hair. The black-framed glasses were either meant to be funky, or else they were the same kind she’d been wearing since sixth grade and she saw no reason to change. This is all superficial stuff, and it sounds catty as hell, when in fact I liked Leslie. It just seemed that anyone so involved with aesthetics would think to arrange themselves better.
Leslie worked as an assistant curator at one of the big downtown museums. It was an underpaid job of the sort that dooms you to life in an apartment with a cat. The little bit of money the community college teaching paid her probably came in handy. But she really seemed to love coming in with her trays of slides and showing us how to see the things she saw: the elaborate narrative of a Brueghel, the arching patterns of a Bottiicelli, the delicate locket around the neck of the lady in the Renaissance portrait, its inscription reading “Amor.” The course was titled Masterworks of European Art, which suited us all fine. Leslie was an old-school gal, devoted to her cherubs and frescoes, while the rest of us were just simple enough to want a picture to be about something, something we could recognize.
Even when I started skulking around and living my secret life, I tried to make it to Leslie’s class. She’d rush in with spots on her glasses, and a splash of tomato soup on her front from one of her hurried and inadequate meals, and start talking full-speed about da Vinci’s sketchbooks. She was so enthusiastic, and so convinced that her enthusiasm mattered, it halfway convinced you. Why not spend your life endlessly circling museum corridors like a fish in an aquarium, harmlessly gratified?
It was Rembrandt week. Rembrandt loomed pretty large for Leslie Valentine. Rembrandt, one of the truly masterful Old Masters, a really big dude. Rembrandt, the painter of light, he was called, although you couldn’t help noticing how many of his pictures were all varnishy dark. That class session we’d worked our way through the self-portraits and The Night Watch and The Anatomy Lesson and some others. I was drifting a bit in the pleasant half-dark of the classroom as the slides clicked and the projector emitted its comforting bland whir. I was thinking of the last time I’d seen the paramour, and already looking forward to the next time, when Leslie’s instructive voice reached me. “…typical of his work from the sixteen thirties in the small scale of the figures and the use of dramatic illumination, The Woman Taken in Adultery…”
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