The Witch

by Jean Thompson

  Milo made the “Mnn” noise that meant he was too deep in the pages to respond further.

  “Okay, well, I’ll be back in just a bit,” Edie said, stepping out of the door and closing it behind her. She hadn’t gone ten steps before she heard Milo scrabbling to get the door open.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going for a walk.” She guessed he had been too occupied with his reading to hear what she’d said before.

  “What are you thinking, heading out there by yourself? Good Lord.”

  He looked both anxious and indignant. Perhaps he’d thought she’d announced she was going to peel off her clothes and go for a naked swim. Although there wasn’t any real harm in that either, was there?

  “It’s not safe. I really can’t allow it.”

  Edie began to explain that she didn’t intend to go in the water, if that was what he was so worried about, trying to ignore the word “allow,” which was not something she was used to hearing, either from Milo or anyone else. Milo said that there were criminals, organized gangs who preyed on unsuspecting tourists. She could not be expected to know this since she had never been to the islands before, but he had, he’d heard the stories. “I’m sorry to sound so alarmist, but please understand, I feel responsible for you, making you give up so much, dragging you all the way here . . .”

  Edie said that she had not given up anything she missed, and she hardly considered herself dragged anywhere. “Come on out with me, then,” she coaxed, and Milo did so, although with a backward glance at his book.

  They walked down to the edge of the water, which at that point was an almost equal mingling of Atlantic and Caribbean, and Edie thought she could stand there forever, watching the frill of breaking waves and the vastness of sky and water, and Milo said, “Whatever would I do if anything happened to you? How could I go on?” Edie considered that he must be especially sensitive to the prospect of loss, given his marital history. “Humor an old man,” he murmured, reaching for her hand. For the rest of their trip she made sure to complete her beach walks by sunset.

  Back in New York, they had a spur-of-the-moment civil wedding, witnessed by two of Milo’s friends who were classical musicians and who serenaded them with violin and oboe. They had a merry wedding brunch at the neighborhood deli, with champagne brought in from around the corner. Edie’s ring was an emerald set between two diamonds, and it was a little large for her finger but Milo said it could be sized. Since Milo did not wear rings, Edie’s wedding gift to him was an old-fashioned pearl-headed stickpin for his tie. It seemed to Edie the very best way of getting married: charming, unfussy, making it up as you went along.

  Edie’s parents were hurt, of course, that she had “eloped,” as her mother put it, and with this much older man who wrote the kind of books they got along very well without reading. Who knew what dire things Anne had already told them. “Baranoff. That sounds Jewish. Is he Jewish? Honey, it all seems so sudden. How many times has he been married before?”

  “That doesn’t matter. It’s just something that happens to people, all right? Milo’s really looking forward to meeting you,” Edie said, although that was just a way of speaking. Milo had not gotten around to expressing such anticipation.

  “Edie, honey? Now, I don’t want to offend you, but it’s possible to get an annulment within the Church if there’s what they call lack of due discretion, or psychological incapacitation, or some other things the priest will ask you about. I’m going to put your father on—”

  Edie hung up the phone. Everyone in her family was a very conventional person. They already thought of her as peculiar and overeducated, lonely and unwomanly. Well, they could add Milo to the list of her disappointing accomplishments.

  Meanwhile, she had this whole new life to get under way. She arranged her little shelf of books in one of the many spare rooms. It was understood that she would take up some serious writing of her own, once she had a chance to knock a few ideas around. Edie mentioned, shyly, that she might like to find herself some sort of job, something that took advantage of her extensive and prolonged training in the language arts, and Milo said he would ask around among people he knew. Meanwhile, he encouraged Edie to let him know if she wanted to “fuss with the curtains, anything like that around the place.” Edie had not yet decided. The apartment needed updating, surely, but it was so ornate and oversized and dowdy, you couldn’t just tackle a little piece of it, as witness the room with the peculiar modern furniture. She hesitated to start in just anywhere.

  As for Amparo, the near-invisible maid? Edie got used to seeing her slipping in and out of rooms, a small, wizened Filipina of indeterminate age. Her face was brown and folded in on itself, her hair, where it slipped out of its kerchief, a coarse and patchy gray. It was Milo’s habit to leave Amparo’s paycheck in the kitchen on Fridays, along with a note indicating any requests for the coming week. She understood English, then, although Edie seldom heard her speak. Was she exploited, should Edie feel any sort of useless guilt in her presence? Or was Amparo grateful for the work? Edie didn’t know. There was so much that she did not know, and about so many people.

  When Edie offered, as a wifely gesture, to take over some of the cooking from Amparo, Milo asked her why she would want to do such a thing, and Edie had no very good answer.

  Milo worked mornings in his study, then went out to clubby, man-about-town luncheons. Edie attended some of these, but it was a strain to keep up with so much conversation by and about people whom she had never heard of although it was assumed she had, authors and columnists and producers and writers of art reviews. In the evenings she and Milo either stayed home for quiet dinners or else went out to receptions or parties with the same sort-of-famous people, as well as some alarmingly decorative young women whom Edie studied for clues as to how she should (or should not) dress. Everyone knew Milo, of course, and everyone was anxious to claim his attention, chat him up, ask him for favors, which he parried with polished ease. There was a reason he made his living by talking. Edie stood next to him and practiced smiling out at the room in an unfocused way. She was not beautiful enough for people to pay her court in her own right. She had an unhappy vision of the fashion-model ex-wife at similar parties, maybe even in the same rooms, every lovely inch of her drawing attention and admiration.

  In the cab on their way home that night, Edie asked, “Did Ondaate like going to parties?”

  Milo turned to look at her, although in the patchy darkness she could not see his face. “Why do you ask about her?”

  “No real reason, never mind,” Edie said, backpedaling. “Just wondering.”

  “You need to understand, I have a great many painful memories.”

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  “You are my fresh start. My way of putting certain things behind me.”

  “Of course,” she said again, feeling bad because she had made him unhappy. Still, it would have been a good thing to know what the problems between them had been, if only so that she could avoid repeating the same mistakes. As if Edie would have ever been able to imitate, either by accident or intention, such an exotic creature. Ondaate, or her image, was always turning up somewhere, in the way that people did when you wished to avoid them. In a billboard perfume advertisement, or dressed as a cowgirl in a fashion magazine, or gracing a charity event to promote reforestation. Did she still live in New York? Paris? Africa? It didn’t seem to matter. High-visibility people like her were everywhere and nowhere, like the deity.

  Edie begged off going to Milo’s lunches, saying that she wanted to get her own work done, although she spent most of her time writing amusing e-mails to her old friends back at the university. The rambling, spooky apartment depressed her. Often she went out and just walked, or sat in coffee shops so she could see the sidewalk stream of people coming and going in all their unimaginable richness and oddity. It was like the ocean, she could watch forever. She had only just b
egun to stick her toes in it.

  Edie couldn’t help notice that, although when he was home, Milo kept his study door open and she was free to look in and chat with him, when he left the house, the door was always closed and locked. She couldn’t decide if she should be offended by this, if it had anything to do with her at all. Maybe it was just habit, the way some people locked their cars no matter where they were. She asked Amparo—that is, she pointed to the locked door and made infantile, encouraging faces. Amparo just shook her head. “Secret,” she said.

  Edie didn’t think she could ask Milo about it. He wasn’t a man who liked questions. She’d hoped to learn a little about his two sons, the grown men who were now, technically and ludicrously, her stepsons. A couple of times she’d mentioned them on the borders of conversations, as in, she supposed his sons were every bit as smart as he was. Or, she knew it was early to be making plans for the holidays, but maybe he and his boys were in the habit of spending them together, and he should just let her know.

  Milo, of course, saw right through her inexpert fishing. They were eating breakfast in the dining room. One of the mild domestic reforms Edie had instituted was sitting at an actual dining table for meals. Milo put down the knife he was using to spread jam on his croissant. Surely he would be better served by healthier eating habits, Grape-Nuts, say, but she was saving that suggestion for later.

  “I’ve told you I was not the best sort of parent. It was a difficult time for us all.”

  Edie began to say how she certainly understood this, but Milo held up one hand, silencing her. She had seen him make the same magisterial gesture on the television shows, to good effect. “My sons and I are, for most intents and purposes, estranged. They chose different paths in life, mostly to show their contempt for me. Benjamin is a karate instructor and lives in California with his wife. Jacob joined the military. I don’t know if you’ll have any occasion to meet them.”

  Edie would have said how unfortunate this was, how she hoped that in time the breach would be healed, but Milo’s traffic-cop hand still silenced her. “The truth is, my dear, that you have a tendency to pry, with all your oh-so-innocent questions. It’s not an attractive habit. I don’t wish to keep bringing it up, so I hope you will do your best to control it.”

  Edie said nothing. She felt her face flame with heat. Milo was being unfair. As if it was her fault that he’d done a bad job at fatherhood. She was only asking the most ordinary questions, the kind of thing people asked when they first met you. And she was so very much on his side, so well disposed toward him! So anxious to help, to be of use, to soothe!

  Milo must have realized that he’d gone too far. That evening he brought her an intricate braided bracelet made of opals and gold, in its own little red leather case. Edie exclaimed over it and put it on, and their dinner that night was an exceptionally fine one that Milo had delivered from an Indonesian restaurant that had recently opened to great acclaim.

  But Edie still felt the sting of her grievance. It nagged and nudged at her. She should have said something, argued back instead of sulking. She knew better. She knew all about cultural conditioning and the danger of female passivity; she’d read all the books. If she had been a bit starstruck by Milo, if marrying him had been entering into a more traditional relationship than she might have imagined—she had even changed her name to Baranoff—it was because women now had a multitude of options. No longer trammeled by expectations or judgments, they could follow their own road. Like those young women who wrote freely about behaviors that might be regarded as degrading if they had not been matters of personal choice.

  This line of reasoning did not entirely console her.

  The next day she did Internet searches for Benjamin and Jacob and found nothing. She took what inventory she could of Milo’s shelves and closets, looking for . . . she wasn’t even certain, but she didn’t find it. Some remnant of the personal history that he excised from his book jackets—even, it seemed, from websites. She found any number of online pictures of him and Ondaate, of course, gleaned from different publications. What an odd pair they made, Milo stout and bearded, like a bear turned into a professor. Ondaate in a tangerine-hued halter dress, taller than Milo by a head, her long arms draped around his shoulders, her amazing hair glowing like a moon wrapped in clouds.

  Edie shut her computer off and went out into the hallway. The weather had turned hot and the building’s air conditioner was on, though it labored and fretted and didn’t quite keep up with the heat. It made her feel headachy, out of sorts. Milo had left for the afternoon. He was taping an interview for National Public Radio about the cultural history of leprosy. Some of the things he knew about, the things he wrote about, simply confounded her. The distant mutter of the vacuum cleaner told her that Amparo was busy elsewhere in the apartment.

  Edie stood at the door of Milo’s study and tested the doorknob. It was locked, as she expected, but it had a little bit of give in it. She’d locked herself out of enough apartments to know a trick or two. She went back to her study and extracted a credit card from her wallet. She worked the card between the latch and the door frame until the latch slipped and the door nudged open. If Milo already thought of her as someone who pried, well, what did she have to lose?

  Nothing in the room looked that remarkable to her, nothing out of the ordinary, certainly nothing worth locking up. Only Milo’s usual mess of books and papers, as if genius and creativity required disorder. Edie took a few steps inside, careful not to touch anything. On the desk’s surface was a yellow pad scribbled with Milo’s notes, his thicket of pen marks. She bent over it and read what seemed to be a denunciation of someone Milo took issue with: “absolutely puerile thought process,” “pitiful need for validation,” “lack of any real rigor or discipline.” Edie was familiar with this sort of diatribe. Intellectuals of Milo’s caliber seemed to engage in regular public blood feuds, defending and attacking, choosing words as if they were pins in a voodoo doll.

  Edie made a slow circuit around the room. Books and more books, like every room in the apartment. Many of the ones here were copies of books Milo had written himself. Edie felt her headache tighten. What a strange sort of life it was, this production of ideas, this herd of words. You respected it, of course, as you respected any sort of accomplishment, but there was something wearying in it also, something deadening and futile.

  With great caution and delicacy, she teased open the drawers of Milo’s desk and found nothing more interesting than bundles of old canceled checks. All this while she tried to avoid the computer’s black and silent screen, but finally she pressed one finger to the on button, and it chimed and glowed.

  Of course he used a password. The screen presented her with the blank window and waited, with mechanical patience, for her to type it in. She had no idea what it might be. She realized that she no longer heard the noise of the vacuum cleaner. Hastily, she shut the computer off and left the room, pulling the door shut, the lock tight, behind her.

  The next day, Milo announced he had to make an unexpected trip to Australia, a last-minute opportunity to speak at a seminar on the workings of the International Criminal Court. Unfortunately, they were only able to extend the invitation to Milo. He’d inquired, of course, but the cost of airfare, of the accommodations . . .

  Edie said she understood, although she didn’t entirely. She thought that Milo might have paid for her airfare himself. Milo was excited at the prospect of the trip, and Edie told herself not to make such a big deal of it. This was what Milo did, after all, travel from one plummy opportunity to another, arranged by people who paid him to lend star power to their enterprises. She’d go with him next time. Milo said, “It’s only for a week. Amparo will take care of the house, no worries. And we can talk on the phone, just like old times!”

  There was a great deal of dry cleaning and packing and arranging of itineraries, and Edie was “invaluable,” Milo said, in helping him. They were espe
cially fond with each other, as if the idea of separation was restoring some of the energy of their original courtship. And maybe, although you might not want to think it, there were people who managed better if they did not contend with the daily fact of each other at close quarters.

  On the morning he left, Edie went downstairs with him, helped supervise the loading of his carefully prepared suitcases, kissed Milo goodbye, waved until he was out of sight, then went back to the huge, empty apartment. There was really nothing here for her to do. Although she had reminded him of it a time or two, Milo had not yet called any of his notable friends who might have provided her with employment. She took inventory of how she felt. Forlorn. Restless. The life she’d imagined for herself had not yet begun. She was at low tide.

  Milo would be on a plane for hours and hours. Edie went out for a walk to try to lift herself out of her discontented state. When she came back, Amparo was waiting for her just inside the apartment door—she had never done such a thing before—her face knotted and furrowed even more than usual. She plucked at Edie’s sleeve. “Missy, Missy!”

  “What? What’s the matter?” Edie pushed past her. A man stood in the main room, hands behind his back, examining the bookshelves. He was wearing a blue military uniform, his hat on a chair. His dark hair was cut short. He turned toward Edie and she had the sensation of recognizing him without knowing him. Surely this was one of Milo’s sons.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

  “And who are you?” He had Milo’s voice, but a couple of tones lighter. Milo’s big forehead and dark eyebrows, but with everything smoothed and straightened.

  “I live here. You don’t. I’m Edie Baranoff.”

  He looked her up and down. “You’re kidding.”