AHMM, June 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  At the baggage claim in Buffalo, Thea's sister waited with her fiancé and two cousins. They had balloons and a pink and purple welcome sign; when they spotted Thea, Ginny and the cousins made a run for her, shrieking, and enveloped her in hugs. The fiancé, whom Thea hadn't met before, held his hand out awkwardly; but when Ginny slapped him between the shoulders and called him an idiot, he grinned, embracing Thea quickly and kissing her cheek. He was a mechanic; Ginny had told her that he'd been saving his money, that he'd made the first payment on his own shop. Ginny would manage the convenience store attached to it, making the coffee and doing the books.

  They scooped Thea up and took her to her parents’ house, where her mother was frantically making potato salad for the rehearsal dinner but paused to take Thea in her arms, look deep into her eyes, and say she looked too thin. Her father came in from raking the backyard and insisted on carrying her suitcases up to her old bedroom, where a cot was crammed against the wall. She'd have to share her room with Aunt Maria from Rochester, he said; more aunts and uncles and cousins would be sleeping in the den, the basement, even the dining room. Everything was crowded and crazy and loud and lovely; Thea breathed it in like life. She hung her expensive dresses in her cramped old closet and unpacked her lingerie and jewelry into the beat-up bureau under the mirror, still studded with cut-out magazine pictures of actors and singers she'd once adored.

  At the rehearsal, everything went wrong: People argued and yelled and stamped in and out of rooms, and in the end it was fine. When they left the church, Thea thought she caught a glimpse of Paul in a car parked down the street, but she couldn't be sure. The rehearsal dinner was, of course, held at her parents’ restaurant. Wearing the red silk dress special-ordered from the designer in Hong Kong, Thea tended bar, chatting with old friends, flirting openly with one of the high-school sweethearts who had inspired her husband to hire a private detective. By ten o'clock, she'd kicked off her high heels and put on one of the pairs of the slippers her mother always kept stowed behind the bar. By midnight, almost everyone had gone, and Thea sat at a back table with Ginny, eating beef on weck and drinking Bud Lite, confessing how miserable she was.

  “Then end it,” Ginny said. “My God, Thea! You're only thirty-two. That's way too young to give up on love, to give up on happiness. Just come home. You don't have to move in with Mom and Dad if you don't want. Wayne and I have an extra room. You can stay there until you find a job and can afford a place of your own. Maybe you could go back to school.”

  Thea shook her head. “Too boring. Too embarrassing. Too hard.”

  “Fine,” Ginny said. “No school. But you can't just keep drifting. Not this time. You can't just let things happen and hope they'll be okay. For once, you have to actually do something. Do it, Thea. Walk away and start over.”

  Could she really do that? Maybe. But something nagged at her. It was much too late, but she went to the ladies’ room, pulled out her cell phone, and called Edward.

  “Good heavens, Thea,” he said. “It's almost one o'clock in the morning. Why are you calling so late?”

  “Because I want you to come here,” she said. “I want you to come to Ginny's wedding. You can find a flight that leaves in time. Or you can leave right now; you can drive here. That'd be better. Please, Edward. I really, really need you to come to Buffalo. I don't want you to stay in Cleveland, not even for the rest of the night.”

  “That's ridiculous,” he said. “Why is this so important to you all of a sudden?”

  Because the private detective you hired has been flirting with me, she thought. Because I told him the keypad code, and I think he's going to come into the house while I'm out of town and kill you. But explaining all that would be so hard, and Edward would be so mad. “I miss you,” she said.

  “You must be drunk,” he said. “Go to bed. I'll see you Sunday night.”

  He hung up. She held her cell phone in her hand and gazed at it. I tried, she thought. I really, really tried.

  She slept in late the next morning, shutting out Aunt Maria's snores, then went downstairs in her bathrobe to linger at the kitchen table, indulging in a makeshift brunch of eggs and chicken wings, potato salad and bratwurst. Aunts and uncles and old friends came and went; she chatted with them lazily and allowed herself an occasional half glass of wine. Finally, she went upstairs and showered, blow-drying her hair expertly, slipping into her pale green matron-of-honor dress. She reached into her top bureau drawer and took out the cloth jewelry case.

  The emerald earrings weren't there. She stared at the case, picked it up and shook it, probed it with her fingers. Then she grabbed her purse and emptied it out on the bed, shaking it, pulling out the lining. No. The earrings hadn't fallen out of the case; they weren't hiding in her purse; they simply weren't there. All her other jewelry, yes—but the emerald earrings were gone. She looked down at the bed where Aunt Maria from Rochester had slept after Thea had insisted on taking the cot herself; she thought of the aunts and uncles and cousins crowded into every spare space in the house. One of them, she thought. But which one? She couldn't say anything to any of them, not without accusing all of them; she couldn't say anything without ruining Ginny's wedding. She'd just have to let it go. When Edward realized the earrings were gone, he'd be mad. She'd have to weather that.

  Or maybe not, she thought for an instant; but she shut the thought out, put on her pearl earrings, and got to work on her makeup.

  The wedding made her weep with happiness, and with envy. Thea had always been the beautiful sister, and Ginny had always been the plain one; everybody had always said that, and Thea had always denied it but known it was true. Today, seeing Ginny in her long white dress and lacy veil, holding Wayne's hands and looking so happy, Thea felt Ginny was the beautiful one. I want that, Thea thought. I want to be happy like that. When I get to Cleveland, I'll tell Edward, and I'll pack whatever he'll let me keep and come back here. I'll stay with my parents until Ginny and Wayne get back from the Finger Lakes, and then I'll move into their spare room and find a job. When they left the church, she looked for Paul again, for the parked car where she might have seen him yesterday, but the car wasn't there.

  Wayne's parents had insisted on splitting the costs for the reception. It was a grand affair at a downtown hotel, with a lavish buffet and a live band. Once, after dinner, Thea thought of calling Edward again. I could tell him about Paul, she thought, and say I want a divorce; those two things together might make him come here, or at least put him on his guard. But he'd probably just say that she was being ridiculous, that she must be drunk; he'd definitely be mad. It's fine, Thea told herself. Nothing's going to happen. Edward's fine. She danced until two o'clock in the morning, kept dancing until long after Ginny and Wayne had driven away for their three-day honeymoon.

  On Sunday morning, Thea ate half a pancake, packed, and flew to Cleveland. She took a cab to the house, called out to Edward as she opened the door, and heard no response. She lugged her suitcases upstairs, called out to him again, and heard nothing. She drew her breath in sharply and sat on the bed for five minutes, her hands clasped. Then she walked down to the basement. He lay on the smooth, sloped wooden bench, the steel bar holding the free weights crushed down on his throat. His pale, dead eyes stared up at her.

  She looked at him for a long moment. He actually did it, she thought. My God. She didn't know how to feel. Slowly, she walked upstairs and dialed 911.

  That wasn't the end of it. After the funeral, the police came back so often that she decided she needed a lawyer. She thought it over for ten minutes before calling Scott Crawford. Yes, he said. He didn't usually handle this sort of case, but he'd take this one if she wanted him to, if the police were making her uncomfortable.

  From then on, Scott was with her every time she met with the two detectives who didn't seem to like her very much. Edward had died not long after midnight on Saturday. Yes, the detectives knew she'd been in Buffalo then; they didn't need to see the pictures of her dancing at the wedding r
eception. But the detectives also knew other things. They knew about the prenup. They'd talked to Andre, and they knew how often he'd warned Edward about never using the free weights unless Andre was there to spot for him. The detectives knew about Tony too. They'd talked to several people who worked at Thea's old club, and they'd gossiped about Tony's reputation, about how she and Tony had worked out in a private room with the door closed, about how she'd shown up one day in a leotard before dropping out of the club abruptly.

  The detectives had also talked to Tony, and they hadn't been impressed. He'd been at a bar that Saturday night, he'd said, until he'd gotten a cell phone call around eleven o'clock, from a man claiming to know what he'd been up to with an ophthalmologist's wife, threatening to tell the husband unless Tony met him at midnight in a park near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Tony had driven there and waited nearly an hour before going back to the bar. The detectives traced the call to a phone booth in Beachwood but couldn't find anyone to confirm that Tony had been anywhere near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that night.

  The detectives also knew Edward had joked about being Thea's first husband, and they knew how upset she'd seemed after people laughed at her at Marty Thompson's retirement dinner. And, somehow, they knew about the emerald earrings. They'd spoken to the jeweler; they knew how expensive the earrings were, and they found it odd that Thea couldn't account for them, that she'd never reported the theft. Thea explained about the house being full of relatives, about not wanting to ruin Ginny's wedding by accusing people. The detectives took notes but didn't seem to understand. Scott understood. He understood everything. He shot sharp challenges back to the detectives during all the interrogations, defusing their questions with sarcastic incredulity. After they left, he patted her hand and told her not to worry.

  Finally, after nearly two months, the detectives stopped coming; after another month, Scott asked her out to dinner, and they had a wonderful time. He asked her out again, and again; once, they had dinner at his mother's beautiful house, and Scott's sister was there and was very nice to Thea. Often, Thea and Scott met for lunch; sometimes, they went to plays or concerts; once, he made dinner for her at his penthouse apartment overlooking the lake, and she stayed for the night. After that, they often spent the night together, either at his apartment or at her big house with all the expensive paintings. She started volunteering at Music Matters on Saturdays again, and she and Scott laughed and talked and had a nice time.

  Always, every time her phone rang, she flinched, expecting it to be Paul; but he never called. Another three months went by. Maybe Paul got scared off when he saw the police come back so often; maybe he'd decided it would be too dangerous to try to make contact with her. She stopped flinching when the phone rang. She thought she was probably in love with Scott, and that he probably loved her. She was very happy, just waiting for the question. We'll get married in Buffalo, she thought. We'll have the rehearsal dinner at my parents’ restaurant.

  And then her phone rang, and this time it was Paul. “Hello, Thea,” he said. “I've been thinking about you. I've been thinking we should get together.”

  She was sitting down, but even so she had to grip the edge of the desk to steady herself, to keep the room from crashing down around her. “Hello, Paul,” she said. “Actually, I don't think that would be a good idea. I'm seeing someone else, and—”

  “Oh, I know about Scott Crawford. I don't think he's the right man for you. Say, did the police ever track down those emerald earrings? The ones Edward gave you, the ones you lost in Buffalo?”

  Any private detective worth his salt can get past pretty much any lock, she remembered. Friday night, when we were at the rehearsal dinner, when Paul had been in Buffalo watching her. “No. The police never tracked them down.”

  “That's good,” Paul said. “If they ever showed up in Tony's possession—under a loose floorboard in his apartment, say, or under a tomato plant in the garden at his parents’ house, or in a pawnshop where the sale could be traced to him—that'd be awkward. And I'm sure Tony was smart enough not to keep any pictures of you two together, of you in that leotard and him with his hands all over you. It'd be awkward if pictures like that showed up too. So, let's have dinner tonight. We can meet in that bar where we first had drinks, after I saved you from that man who attacked you.”

  You set that up, she thought, realizing it for the first time. You set everything up. “I'm having dinner with Scott tonight,” she said.

  “Break it off.” It wasn't a suggestion. “I'll see you at six, Thea.”

  She never had dinner with Scott again. But it wasn't too bad. Edward had thought movies were stupid, but Thea enjoyed them, and Paul did too; they went to many movies. Even when they weren't movies she'd have picked, it was better than going to dinners where people spoke to her only because she was Edward's wife. They also went to Cavaliers games, and Paul talked about getting season tickets for the Indians next summer. Edward hadn't let her cook for him, but Paul did, and he said her lasagna was the best he'd ever had. He decided to open his own private detective agency and needed two hundred thousand dollars. She thought that maybe that was what he really wanted, that he'd leave her alone now. After she gave him the money, though, he moved his clothes into the house. Everything seemed settled. It'll be all right, she told herself. He's nicer to me than Edward was—and if he decides I need to be watched, he'll just do it himself.

  He offered to have the wedding in Buffalo, but that didn't feel right to her, not with Paul. They'd do it in City Hall, they decided, just the two of them, and then they'd fly to Florida and go on a cruise. Paul had always wanted to go on a cruise. She thought about buying a new dress for the wedding but decided her light blue suit looked good enough.

  On the first night of the cruise, they found themselves seated at a small, round table with a middle-aged couple from Atlanta. Paul reached across the table to shake the man's hand. “I'm Paul Addison,” he said, “and this is the lovely Thea Addison.” He paused for three seconds, turned to Thea, and smiled. “Thea's my first wife.”

  Copyright © 2012 B.K. Stevens

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Fiction: CUPS AND VARLETS

  by Kenneth Wishnia

  * * * *

  Art by Hank Blaustein

  * * * *

  We have a tradition that only he who lacks knowledge is poor.

  —Talmud (Nedarim 14a)

  * * * *

  When the Angel of Death darkens your doorway with his icy shadow, you must take great care to cover all the mirrors with heavy cloth or turn them to the wall, or else the dead man's spirit might mistake one of the mirrors for a window and end up lost in an endless hall of mirrors and wander it forever, trapped in a left-handed world of everlasting confusion where it will be easy prey for the spiteful demons of Gehenem. Or so I am told.

  And because the malekhamoves marks off a man's last moments on Earth by letting a drop of bitter gall fall from the point of his sword into the dying man's mouth, you must also make sure to empty out all the pitchers and basins with any water left in them, because a wayward drop of the deadly gall might have fallen into the water.

  And that's the origin of the expression, To kick the bucket.

  So it was a very serious matter indeed when a careless housemaid tossed a washbasin full of dirty water out a second-floor window and nearly soaked us with God knows what foul and offensive liquid.

  My Christian companion jumped back, raising the hem of her cloak just in time to keep it from being ruined. My boots weren't as lucky.

  I was accompanying my partner-in-exile down the ulica Zydowska, the Jewish Street—or in common speech, Jew Street—to her rooms near the tannery on Kleine Gerberstrasse, a fetid alley nearby that was all she could afford at the moment. We had just come from the services for Shvues, and she was bombarding me with her usual array of questions about our beliefs and customs, especially the untranslated portions of the mystical Zohar, and why it comp
ares the seven weeks from Pesach to Shvues to the seven days that a menstruating woman must wait before she can purify herself in a ritual bath. Not an easy subject to talk about with a foreign woman in the divided Polish-German city of Poznan. So I told her that the Shvues services she had just witnessed form the annual celebration of the Giving of the Torah, when the shul is filled with early spring flowers and, like a young wife preparing herself for her husband's embrace, we celebrate our immersion in the cleansing “waters of Torah.”

  “So why do you read from the Book of Ruth on this day?”

  “For the same reason.”

  My master and teacher, Rabbi Judah Loew, would probably say that the seven-week period marked the beginning of our exodus from slavery just as Ruth made a spiritual exodus from idolatry to monotheism as she crossed the wilderness from her native land of Moab to her future home—and her future husband—in Judea.

  But before I could answer more fully, my boots got soaked with what I sincerely hoped was merely the refuse from someone's piss pot.

  The maid disappeared from the window. But we could hear a company of servants running from room to room, slamming doors, gathering crockery, and clomping up and down the stairs. This time I stepped back as the front door flew open and the housemaid flung a bucket of filthy water into the gutter running down the middle of the street.

  I stopped the door with my arm before she could slam it in my face.

  “What do you think you're doing?” she asked. A life of hard labor had carved deep lines in her face, which was flushed red with exertion.