by Kim Wright
“We could drive over to the hotel now.”
He shakes his head. “You got the movie. Let’s watch it.”
“There’s not a happy ending. The lovers don’t end up together.”
He sighs. “I can take it if you can.”
We go into the den, start the DVD player. We sit on the couch and I put my feet in his lap. The Nazis threaten Paris. Ingrid walks into a bar. Things there are quite shadowy. Sam plays the piano. Gerry lifts my foot and kisses the arch. Thirty minutes into the movie the phone rings. Nancy. She asks me if I’ve had time to get lonely yet, and before I can tell her no, not really, she starts describing the new curtains she’s putting up in the living room. She hasn’t really called about the curtains. She’s called to get a read on the situation, to see if I want her to sit in on the next counseling session, if indeed Phil and I are coming back to counseling at all. She’s called to show she’s forgiven me for causing so much trouble. She’s forgiven me for being a nutcase and a malcontent. She doesn’t know that I’m a slut but if she knew, she might forgive me for that too. Nancy says perhaps I’d like to ride to the outlets with her sometime next week and look at material. She values my sense of color. This is what she says to me, that she likes my sense of color and that we never seem to do anything together, just she and I. We could make a day trip out of it.
Ingrid Bergman is leaving Humphrey Bogart and I know enough about the movie to know that she’s going to have to leave him at least twice, maybe more. Leaving a man is so hard that it doesn’t always take the first time, not even in the movies. Gerry is absorbed by their story, and he holds my feet tenderly, one in each hand, while Nancy talks about valences and cornices and how much it’s all going to cost. She says no matter how carefully you plan, it always ends up costing more than you think.
It’s not necessary to answer her, never has been, just to murmur once in a while, and I love Gerry for not asking who’s on the phone, for not ever asking, even later when we have to go back and replay the parts I missed. Ingrid is crying. She cries so beautifully. Perhaps almost as beautifully as Elizabeth Taylor, although it makes me feel disloyal to even think this thought. Nancy says she likes a soft green, that color between moss and sage, but maybe green is too much, maybe it will exhaust her over time, and she might be happier staying with blue, moving from periwinkle into more of a cobalt. “Jeff would think I’m crazy,” she says, “replacing blue with blue. But you know how men are. You can’t make them understand that there are lots of kinds of blue.”
“Right,” I say. “Lots of kinds of blue.”
By the time she hangs up I’m not mad at her anymore.
* * *
Exactly one hour and twenty minutes later, although we mustn’t measure and we mustn’t count… Exactly one hour and twenty minutes later, after I have leaned back against Gerry in the shower and let him wash my hair… after I have pressed my palms against the tile wall and bent forward so that he could soap my legs, first one and then the other, saying “Change” as I shifted back and forth, the gentleness in his voice reminding me that he is a father… Exactly one hour and twenty minutes later, after we’ve found the remote under one of the couch pillows and watched the first round of Jeopardy!… after he has called his office to check messages… after I have shown him the two boxes I already have packed and hidden in the guest room closet…
Exactly one hour and twenty minutes later I pull a pair of handcuffs out of a drawer and hold them up.
“Hey Pepé,” I say. “Do these look familiar?”
When I was a child I read the superhero comics, just like everyone else, and I decided—living as I was in my small country town with my sweet anxious parents—that the power I’d most like to have was invisibility. This would have to be the ultimate freedom, I thought, far greater than the ability to fly. This power that would let me walk through the world unjudged and unseen.
What I couldn’t have predicted was that someday I would have that power. It’s easy. It works like this. Get married, give birth, put on certain clothes and drive a certain kind of car, and then, somewhere just before the age of forty, you awaken one morning to discover that your childhood wish has been granted. You’ve become invisible. You can walk down the street holding hands with your lover and no one notices the handcuffs at your wrists. But then no one really ever notices anything, do they? The last nine months have taught you that if nothing else.
* * *
We decide to just pick up food. We leave my house and drive to the shopping center where Belinda and I saw Lynn eating scones. In the parking lot he connects his left wrist to my right wrist and we struggle out the same door of the car, and then we walk, unnaturally joined, toward the Dean & Deluca.
“I’m starving,” Gerry says and he pulls back the wax on a puck of Gouda so that we can eat it as we shop. It feels like we’re doing something very bad, very outlaw, although he carries the price sticker to the cashier when we check out and says, “This too.” We have bought too much, like people who will never eat again. Two small meatloafs, a piece of grilled salmon, a carton of four-pepper salad, and another of stir-fried pea pods. A baguette, a jar of olives, an oversized cream cheese brownie, a large bottled water, a split of champagne, and a banana. Food designed to be eaten with one hand.
Gerry and I take the bag outside to the fountain across from the store and begin to spread it out along a table. I must remember this for the next time I try to lose weight, that if I eat with my left hand it slows everything down and I find that I am not nearly as hungry as I first thought myself to be. I find that I can make do with a little less, that it does not vex me when a bite of salmon or a triangle of red pepper slides through my fork. He feeds me at some point, and I imagine a woman across the courtyard watching us, watching him lift his fork to my mouth. It is clumsy, not like a movie. His tine jabs the corner of my lip, the rim of his plastic champagne flute clicks against my teeth. Beneath the table he runs his hand inside my thigh, dragging my hand along with it. The logistics of collectively unpeeling the banana almost undo us. We are giggling, enjoying the latest in our silly, giddy secrets.
I am so preoccupied that for a moment I don’t see the homeless woman who is approaching us.
“Do you want some candy?” she says. She is selling candy.
Gerry seems similarly confused. “No,” he says, “no, thank you, we’re fine,” as if she were a waitress. There are so many cartons and bags on our table. The woman keeps standing there. She is wearing a trenchcoat and she looks as if she’s pregnant. The tie of the coat is stretched across her hard belly, but she is much too old to be pregnant. I put my free hand on Gerry’s arm.
But he is already reaching for the money in his back pocket. Gerry carries his bills with a rubber band wrapped around them and the woman notices this and says, “Do you want a wallet?” Evidently she sells wallets too. Wallets and candy. With my right hand and his left, we peel the rubber band off the wad of money and it pops open before us like a flower. Ones surrounded by twenties, twenties surrounded by fifties. He hesitates. If the homeless lady thinks it is odd that a man and woman are handcuffed together outside of a Dean & Deluca she makes no comment. The events of her life have evidently taught her a great tolerance.
I reach into the side pocket of my purse and pull out the little filigreed key.
“I’ll do it,” Gerry says, but I have already released him.
He fishes two fifties out of the pile of money. “I don’t need a wallet, ma’am,” he says. “But take this and thank you very much.”
The woman shuffles away. She does not stop to talk to any of the other people at the other tables, who’ve been watching the whole scene with casual alarm. You don’t see many homeless people in this part of town.
“You’re a sweet man,” I say.
He flushes. He doesn’t want me to think he’s sweet.
“No, really,” I say. “You’ve got a pure heart.”
He shakes the cuff off and it falls to the ground.
Neither of us picks it up. Gerry begins to collect the bills from the tabletop. “Blessed are the pure of heart,” he says, and his voice isn’t quite steady. “For theirs… theirs is what? What do the pure of heart get?”
They get the kingdom of heaven, I tell him. They get it three or four times a day.
Chapter Forty-one
On the morning of the cookout Phil takes Tory over an hour early so they can help set up the yard sale. I stay home and make cupcakes, seventy-two of them, all individually wrapped and priced, and then I load them into the car and drive to the church.
The parking lot is already packed and the lawn is full of people. I have to ease my car in behind the Dumpster. I’m heading toward the kitchen door to get someone to help me with the boxes when I see Belinda walking down the sidewalk toward me. Walking fast.
“You’ve got to get out of here,” she says. “He knows, he knows everything.”
“What do you mean? He knows what?”
“Don’t go inside. It’s not safe.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Where’s Tory?”
“She’s fine, she’s fine, but don’t go in there, Elyse. He’s really upset. Just get in the car.”
“I’m not going anywhere without Tory.”
I start toward the front door and Belinda lunges forward and catches my arm. “I’ll get her,” she says. “I’ll take her to Kelly’s house. You go there too, go right now. Nancy said she felt like she had to tell him. You know how she is. She felt like she had to tell him, but he’s very upset, Elyse, and you just need to get in the car and go.” I am on the first step leading up to the sanctuary when the door flies open and Phil walks out.
His hands are full of letters, and I can see at a glance they’re Kelly’s, the ones I told her I would burn. He is walking down the steps, the letters in his hands, and behind him I can see Nancy at the church door holding a bright pink bag. It all comes to me. She went into my closet, just as I told her to, to get the clothes for the yard sale. She grabbed all the bags, including a bright pink one from Frederica’s holding a camisole and pull-up hose and high heels that I bought months ago in a botched effort to seduce my own husband. Why would she think I was donating lingerie to the church? But of course she didn’t—she realized her mistake the minute she opened the bag, but then she saw the letters inside. Nancy’s human. She read them. Those letters, those careful letters with no names and no dates. Of course she assumed they were written to me. And then—you know how she is—she felt she had to tell my husband. How could any of this have ended any differently? I look at her and the expression on her face is one of raw envy, the same expression that doubtless was on my face the first time I read those letters, the same expression that comes to any woman’s face when she witnesses—or thinks she has witnessed—the love story of another. She read the letters and then she gave them to the man who is coming toward me now, the man who failed to recognize the camisole and hose I was wearing on that pivotal night when he smirked and asked me just what I was trying to be. His face is ashen and he is taking the steps two at a time, almost running. The evidence against me is in his hands, another woman’s love letters and a pile of tangled underwear I’ve worn only once. I look at the three of them, Belinda with her arm still extended between us as if she can somehow hold Phil back, Nancy, clutching the pink bag, her face ablaze with triumph, and Phil, who thinks he has lost something that he never had, and then I hear myself do the worst thing I could possibly do. I hear myself begin to laugh.
The letters flutter from Phil’s hands.
I say, “I can explain,” and Phil pulls back his fist and hits me.
Here is what I understand. This is the day I will pay for what I’ve done. Not for the silly stuff like the handcuffs, but for the big stuff, like trying to be happy. Phil pulls back his fist and Belinda’s husband is on my right, tossing a Nerf football to the kids, the kind that makes a siren sound when you release it, and I think Tory might be with them. I say, “I can explain,” and Phil says, “Not this time.” He opens his palm, shakes his hand as if he has lost circulation, and then he reforms the fist and pulls it back and he hits me, so hard that I am spinning.
I hover on the edge of the church steps. I have never been struck before, never been in a fight. Two days from now Kelly will take pictures of my face, three of them to send to my lawyer and put in my file. She will be crying as she looks through the lens of the camera, she will tell me over and over that she can’t believe this has happened and I will end up fixing her a drink. She will stand in the middle of her guest bedroom and whisper that the bruises look so much worse in person than they do in the picture and maybe we should use makeup. A bit of dark eyeshadow to bring out the color and it wouldn’t be lying, not lying at all. She will lean toward me and ask why didn’t I burn those letters, why didn’t I, why? As soon as I get on my feet I must call Kelly. I must call Kelly, she will come and get Tory. Where is Tory? Is she over with the kids chasing the football or is she inside? Please God let her be inside.
Someone is screaming. I see Nancy’s face frozen as I spin past her and I know what went through her mind when she found the letters, because I’ve felt it too. She thought, just for a minute, “Why her and not me?” And I know how it feels to give yourself up to this envy, to hold in your hands the evidence that another woman has been loved in a way that you have not. Is this all we want in the end? Are we really so shallow and stupid that our need to be loved overrides everything else, that it can make our work and our homes and our god and even our children just seem like ways to kill time? Nancy’s face is very pale and she puts her hands to her jaw and leans back slightly, almost as if she is the one who has been punched. She felt like she had to tell him, that’s what she felt, because you know how she is, and I am almost righted. I almost catch my balance. I stand for a moment wavering, and then Phil’s form comes closer, falling over me like a shadow, and he hits me again.
Here, on the lowest step of the church I have attended for eight years, I give my body up to the air like a diver. In the moment of impact, in this moment where his fist meets my cheek, I know exactly what to do. I am not willing to fall flat and risk hurting my back so I turn, stretching my arms out in front to brace myself, and in the moment of the turn I look into Phil’s eyes and I know this is the worst thing I have ever done to him, striking his hand with my face like I have. Later he will run into the wooded area behind the fellowship hall, crying, because he was not raised to hit a woman any more than I was raised to be hit. I should have burned the letters. How cruel of me to keep them, how cruel of me to fall and pull him down with me, to take a man who never wanted to be anything but ordinary and turn him into a man who beats his wife. Tomorrow, from Kelly’s guest bedroom, I will call a lawyer, and I will tell this lawyer that I want to take the high road. I will tell this lawyer that there’s no need to be vindictive, and I turn just enough, because I was a cheerleader once—on the bottom, yes, but still a cheerleader—and I know how to correct a position in motion. I know how to flex my knees and tuck, tuck just enough so that when I hit the ground I will roll onto my shoulder, protecting my face but landing just hard enough to make the bruise I must have. I will fall hard enough to do what I have to do but not hard enough to render myself seriously hurt. Because this is what I have come to understand, that I do not intend to be seriously hurt. Years from now Phil and I will sit side by side at graduations and weddings and the baptisms of our grandchildren and it will be okay in that way that things that are over always are okay, so I throw out my arms and reach forward to whatever future lies on the other side of this ground.
There are three reasons a woman can leave a man. He must hit her or drink or run around, and Phil does not drink or run around so my head snaps back as his fist meets my jaw, makes the sharp pop of a starting pistol, the familiar sound of something breaking, and the only horror is that Tory is seeing it all. Because she is there, yes, standing beside Belinda’s husband. She is frowning, as if over a hard m
ath problem, her mind furiously working, trying to make it all right. She thinks she does not see what she’s seeing. She is already rewriting it in her mind. She does not want to stand witness to the sight of her father hitting her mother and even before I reach the ground she will have decided that she must have seen something else. And Belinda has moved beside her, she is pulling Tory back, and in her other hand she already has her phone. In three years, maybe four, it will be okay. Phil will be remarried and I will have a lover—someone undoubtedly black or female or younger or older or married or Muslim or somehow wildly inappropriate, for that is my karma, and they will all shrug and say, “Well, you know how Elyse is. Can’t be settled, never could.” In two years, maybe three, it will be okay, and that is why I stretch toward the future as if it were like the surface of water and I must enter it with the smallest splash possible. I am sorry Tory is here but Belinda seems to be handling it. She seems calm. She seems, in fact, the calmest I have ever seen her. She is pulling Tory back, turning her head away from us. I should have burned the letters, I should have gotten in the car and left, but here I am, falling, and the ground is rushing toward me, rising up to meet me like an old friend. Somewhere someone is screaming, or perhaps it is just the football.
And Jeff. Jeff is here, moving across the lawn. Once he and I had an argument about whether or not women belong in military school. Once we had an argument about whether a clue was acceptable in Charades. Jeff and I have often quarreled but today he will be the first one to reach me. He is already starting to run. He will yank me to my feet with one swift movement, a gesture more violent and surprising than the one that knocked me down in the first place. That will be the pain I feel first tomorrow morning. When I roll over in the bed in Kelly’s guest room, this is what will make me wince, this arm he nearly dislocates in his eagerness to get me back on my feet. There is a certain irony when the man who comes to save you hurts you more than the man he was saving you from, but I will not contemplate this for weeks or months or years. Not until I am a much older woman, living out west with my best friend. Jeff will pull me up in one strong gesture as if by getting me upright he can erase everything that has just happened, as if he can make all these witnesses forget what they’ve seen, and then he will reach toward Phil, to pull him away. This last will be a somewhat empty gesture, for Phil is turning even as I am, he is getting ready to run into the woods. It is Jeff who will go into the kitchen for ice. He will wrap it in a paper towel and hold it to my face. It is Jeff who will say, repeatedly, that he is sorry.