by Mel Bossa
An outside wooden stairway had been recently built up to a little deck on one side of the house. Luckily, it ran past a wall below with sliding glass doors. Inside on the first floor I could see children’s toys and clothing. The other family must live below, although no one seemed to be home.
I ascended the stairs quickly. Only once there did I wonder what to do next. The door was open, and a locked louvered-glass door showed a portion of the upstairs apartment. I saw a neat, small kitchen with breakfast nook and an unexceptional corridor leading off both left and right. I couldn’t see any farther in either direction. I moved aside to lean over the deck railing on the right and made out through a high window a modern Danish furniture set, the living room, and beyond it an archway, leading to other rooms. No way to see into them from the deck, and no need to. No one was at home. Kitty had made a mistake.
Then I saw Karen’s bag. It was hung on the peg of a clothes rack in the hallway between the living room and the arch that led to what probably was a bedroom. Next to it hung a cracked old leather jacket that Chas had been wearing the day he came to see me at the Pritchard place. I could see the volume of Amity’s diary sticking out over the lip of the already overstuffed bag. My heart dropped like a lead weight to my feet, and I almost lost my balance and fell off the deck.
It was more damning than if I’d seen them in bed together. The casual way Karen’s bag was hung there, right next to Chas’s jacket, as though she did it often—“as usual,” Kitty’s words came back to me with an awful and compelling force. For how long, in that intimate relationship to Chas’s jacket? Three months, the plasterer had said without knowing I was listening. Three months. Long enough to be casual.
Afraid that I would be caught by one of them suddenly coming out of the bedroom, I turned and leaped down the stairs, jumped into my car, and drove off.
It was only as I was turning into the driveway to my house that Chas’s last words to me in the turret library came back and made sense. “Suit yourself,” he had said. And I had read malice in those words without knowing how he would get back at me. But now I understood. I had spurned Chas, and like the child he still was, he had struck back at me through my most vulnerable spot—through Karen.
But she couldn’t possibly care for Chas, I told myself. She might be enthralled by him, infatuated by him even, as I had once been so many years ago. But she would be intelligent enough to see Chas as he really was. All I had to do was not do anything stupid or sudden or violent. Of course, I would somehow or another let her know I knew about the affair, then count on her to end it and return to me. I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t return to me.
Chapter 14
Once I’d made that decision, I felt calm. I remained calm and even cheerful when Karen came home that evening. I even managed not to flinch when she produced the volume of Amity’s diaries from her bag with a great flourish. She’d run upstairs as she’d run into the house from her car, and she was still panting with the effort. All I could think of was how unlike an adulterous wife she looked at that moment: more like a schoolgirl with an excellent report card she wished to share. I kissed Karen, kissed the volume of the diaries, then kissed her again.
I suppose Karen expected me to open it and read it right then. But I put it next to its dozen precursor volumes on the shelf next to the big oak table and said it could wait. Meanwhile, we ought to celebrate her finding it. First with a drink in the breakfast room downstairs, then I had an even better idea. There was a new roadhouse in the area with a reputation for excellent Continental cuisine. It would be only an hour’s drive to Point Judith. We’d dine there tonight.
Karen was surprised, also pleased. I tried to treat the book as an excuse for the celebration, rather than as its cause. It wasn’t merely that I hoped to create guilt in Karen, but I did want her to appreciate me more. I don’t know if that was the result that night, but Karen was in one of her brightest moods, and dinner was perfect. Afterward we strolled along the shore. A full moon was rising—almost red it was so orange—out of the south, over the ocean. I felt no qualms about using its romantic effect, taking Karen in my arms and kissing her. She responded instantly, totally, almost with relief, I thought, and we made love right there in the dunes, surrounded by driftwood and dried seaweed thrown up by an earlier tide, with Karen’s dress pushed up and my pants down at my feet, like the forbidden teenage lovers we never were. Both of us were terribly excited, and she was so loud in her pleasure when she began to orgasm that I thought for certain we would draw the attention of some of the night surf fishers we’d seen walking.
If I was to win Karen back, I had to show her not only that I cared for her more than Chas but that I could provide as much interest in her life. I thought that one reason she’d begun seeing him was to counteract the tedium that had set into her life once we’d moved to Nansquett and begun restoring the house. I blamed myself for paying too much attention to restoring the Pritchard house and not enough to making my marriage with Karen a happy, growing one.
Thereafter, acting swiftly and without warning, I spent the next few weeks keeping her interested, amused, busy. I would arrive at the library at 2:30 in the afternoon and ask Karen to come with me to an auction of old furniture I’d read about in Newport. I knew she loved auctions and old furniture. I would have the opportunity of scouting through any book lots for possible missing diary volumes, and Karen could always bid on one or two things, like the lovely bowed-front music-sheet cabinet she picked up, now sitting in the music room next to a huge Boston fern.
Or we would suddenly go to Mystic for the afternoon and wander around the Connecticut seaport, restored to its nineteenth-century state. I took her to the Rocky Point amusement park I recalled my parents taking me to as a boy, and I thrilled her with a ride on the rickety old roller coaster. One afternoon I asked Karen if I could check through the reserves of the Nansquett public library on the off chance she had missed another volume of Amity’s diaries. She couldn’t say no, and she had to remain at the front desk, lest I suddenly came upstairs and found her gone. Another day I insisted that she stay at home when the architect came to discuss our plans for restoring the last few rooms of the house—the bedrooms on the north side of the house. In those weeks we drove over most of the state of Rhode Island and into neighboring states. But we didn’t go out every afternoon, not only because that would be too obviously a demand on her time but because I wanted Karen to have time with Chas so that she could compare our relationships. However, we did make love on almost all of these excursions—and always under what I considered to be unusual circumstances: in the back of my car parked under a train trestle one night; in a motel in a small town in Massachusetts, where the owner eyed us suspiciously even when we showed him credit cards with matching names.
Karen never questioned, hesitated, or failed to agree to one of these suddenly inspirational adventures with me. She would enter into each of them with almost adolescent delight. I had to remind myself on more than one occasion that her girlish delight was indeed girlish—after all she was only twenty-two years old, I almost thirty. I could almost picture her face as she told Chas one day, “What am I supposed to do? Say no? After all, he is my husband.” I remembered how much of a physical narcotic my own time with Chas had been, and I tried to wean her off that by narcotizing her to me instead. The more I experimented with new sexual techniques with Karen, the more she responded and the more interested I became. I even took her to a pornographic movie house in downtown Providence one afternoon, making love to her with my fingers while we sat side by side in the smoky, silent, sleazy theater darkness, broken only by the flickering of the screen and an infrequent and almost inadvertent moan from one of the shadowy figures placed distant from us and each other. And it worked, all of it. We were closer than we’d ever been. True, every once in a while I would catch Karen staring at me obliquely in store window reflections as we window-shopped, in hallway full-length mirrors as we prepared to go out. But she’d always looked at
me that way, in sidelong glances. And being with her so much more made her even more precious to me, if only because of her willingness to allow herself to be won back.
I capped the assault on her with a vacation at Provincetown, where we’d passed our belated honeymoon. If it was only one week long instead of the month of the previous year, it was because I wanted to return to the restoration of the house and to the turret library to check up on some of Amity’s references, not because Karen was rushing back to her paramour.
Coming home, we took the same road we’d taken from the Cape the year before. As we pulled off the highway and onto Atwood Avenue, I slowed down and pulled up opposite our driveway.
“The FOR SALE sign was right there,” I said, pointing. “Do you remember?”
Karen remembered and kissed my neck under my ear. I was certain I’d succeeded in winning her back.
Chapter 15
We had taken my car on the trip to the Cape because Karen had complained of the brakes seeming loose on her MG.
The day after our return to Nansquett, I walked to the library, picked up her car, and drove it to the Scituate auto-repair garage where Chas worked. I had called him up earlier that day to ask if he would look at the MG’s brakes, and he was so surprised to hear from me, he’d done the unforgivable for an auto mechanic: He said he would check them that day.
Chas wasn’t in the garage when I drove in. Another older man named Jake—Chas’s business partner—put the car on the hoist and lifted it almost to the ceiling, telling me that my cousin was at lunch nearby.
I had calculated on being in Scituate for a few hours at least while the brake inspection was going on and had gotten together a list of miscellaneous shopping I’d been putting off for months. When I got most of that done and arrived back at the garage, it was after five. Jake was gone and would be back to take over the evening shift: The trousered legs that stuck out from under the MG turned out to belong to Chas. He’d been lying on his back on a flat dolly and slid out from under the car when he heard me come in. His shirt was off, his torso covered with blond hair and motor oil. He looked up at me, half squinting, as though blinded by the light after the dimness of a small lightbulb under the car’s chassis.
“Hi!” he said. I wasn’t certain he recognized me.
“What’s the verdict?” I asked, nodding at the car.
“I’ll have to get a part for it. I don’t have it. I’ll have to order it from a foreign car dealer in Providence. Jake is going up there tonight. He’ll pick it up. I’ll be ready tomorrow afternoon. Sorry for the delay.”
“Great!” I said. I had been too optimistic. I had three shopping bags full of my day’s purchasing in Scituate. “Is there a cab service I can call to get all this home?”
Chas frowned and stood up. “If you can wait fifteen minutes until Jake gets back, I’ll drive you home. I’m off then.”
“I’ll wait,” I said. I wanted to spend some time with him, to gauge his reactions, to hear what, if anything, he had to say—possibly to hear him foolishly incriminate himself.
He didn’t. He was silent during our drive to Nansquett. I decided that I would bring it all to a head on my own. Not alone, but with Karen. We were having a roast for dinner. There was certainly enough for three. I invited him to dine with us, insisted he dine with us, told him Karen had asked me more than once why my only cousin in the place had never come by for a social evening. I knew he hadn’t seen her in more than a week—all the time we’d been away—and would jump at the chance. But he was clever. He claimed he had studying to be done, and I had to persuade him out of his reluctance. By the time we’d arrived at the Twill Road exit off the highway, he’d accepted, making it seem a favor to me, and said he’d drop me off and then go home to clean up.
I thought that was an excuse to not show up for dinner and told him it was foolish to drive me to my house, then double back and then come back. We were right near where he lived. We could stop off there, and I’d wait until he was ready. Then, too, I believed in that moment that I was the winner, he the loser; and winners can afford to be generous to losers.
Winner or not, I wasn’t prepared for the sudden lack of assurance I experienced ascending those stairs outside his house, unable to forget my first ascent and what I had discovered at the top of the stairs.
Chas left me in the living room with some year-old copies of Playboy and stacks of modern issues of electronics magazines to browse through while he bathed.
I couldn’t remain seated, however, and began to walk around the apartment to dispel my restlessness. I idly inspected every piece of furniture, every one of the few decorations he had, torturing myself with wondering whether it had already been there three and a half months ago or whether Karen had seen it and bought it for the apartment. It was a crazy thing to do but something I couldn’t help. She’d been in these rooms. She’d sat on this chair, probably at this table, having a cup of coffee before coming home to me. She left her bag on that hook next to where he’d tossed his leather jacket when he’d come in with me. She’d probably looked in that small oval mirror, brushing her hair. Under this arch she’d more than likely undressed. She’d lain on that bed, invitingly. How invitingly. Or she’d sat on this low upholstered chair in his bedroom. I sat in it too, looking around, conjuring her presence at the bureau or on the bed—doing what? What had she and Chas done that she and I never did?
I was startled into the present by Chas himself, stepping out of the bathroom that adjoined the bedroom. He was naked and clean, toweling his long wet hair. He stopped at the doorway but kept rubbing his hair dry. Then he smiled at me with that same lopsided grin filled with meaning that I hadn’t seen in years. With his clothing off, Chas looked slighter, fragile, more vulnerable than in the turret library—almost a boy again.
“Comfortable?” he asked with all kinds of innuendo.
“Very,” I answered. My voice had taken on that same tone of secrecy. Thinking of Karen and Chas together in that room had excited me. Looking at Chas’s body now, in the orange glow of the setting sun, I felt a perverse attraction for him.
“C’mere,” I said.
His smile widened. “I thought you didn’t do that anymore,” he said. “It’s unnatural, remember?”
That slight resistance made me want to see him down on me, giving me back what he’d taken from me through Karen.
“C’mere,” I said, holding out my arms to him.
He came slowly, warily to where I sat, and I took his forearms, lightly caressing them, then suddenly pulling them toward me, until he stumbled and fell onto one knee in front of me. I reached over and pressed down on his shoulders, bringing him to both knees.
“Maybe my memory is too short,” I said in a low voice. “Why don’t you remind me of what I’m missing.”
I unzipped and, grabbing his curly drying hair, pressed him down into my lap. He resisted at first, and I jerked his head back and slapped his face once—hard. It was more than enough. His eyes smoked up at me as he pulled my pants down over my knees, and I caressed his golden curls until I began to feel the burning wetness of ejaculation welling up in me. It was intense, perhaps the most intense orgasm of my adulthood.
“You were always the best, Chas,” I told him when he had pulled away and leaned against the side of the bed. His stomach was streaked from his own discharge, and he stared at the floor without speaking.
Now I’m satisfied, I thought, standing up, pulling up my pants, and buckling myself. Now we’re even. But I didn’t say it aloud; I still wanted to be able to lean over the dinner table in front of Karen and show her in some way.
Chas dressed as though for visiting and drove me home. He even helped me take the various bags out of the car. But when I turned around to suggest he park right where he was, he turned his car around in the dirt road and sped off, sending fans of dirt high into the air.
Chapter 16
I had begun to read through the newly found volume of Amity’s diary the day after K
aren brought it home. The earlier dozen or so tomes were filled with domestic incidents, home remedies, and then the swiftly moving, precisely accounted story of the Pritchard sisters and Captain Calder’s triangle with its tragic aftermath, which had made for easy, fast reading. Not this volume. By the time we’d returned to Nansquett from Cape Cod, I’d managed to get through about two thirds of the volume. After that late afternoon with Chas, I finally felt settled down enough about him and Karen and me to involve myself in Amity’s diary once more and read it right to the end.
I had expected to find a different person in her writing than the tormented, passion-driven, and destiny-buffeted Victorian heroine of the earlier volumes I had read and reread so many times, I could probably repeat some entries verbatim. But whatever I had prepared myself for, I was in for a shock.
In the five years since the deaths of Constance and Eugene Calder, Amity Pritchard had become a recluse, never venturing into Nansquett, often sending Saturn, her Negro servant, and finally having deliveries sent to the entranceway of the property from the dry-goods and general stores of the town. That much I already knew from Grandfather’s telling, years before. What I hadn’t known—and really couldn’t have known—was that other deliveries were made to the Pritchard property too: not from Nansquett or even from Scituate but from several of the largest bookstores in the East, in New York, in Providence, and mostly from the flourishing Brattle Book Store in Boston, gathering place of Back Bay bluestockings and the Concord Transcendentalists, Orientalists, and Theosophists.
True to her upbringing and earliest inclinations, once she was thrown on her own again Amity began to delve into philosophy. Like her father—the Reverend Pritchard—she came to all but live in the turret library, where, day by day, again like her father, she sought answers to the curious fate that had befallen her. Unlike the Reverend, however, Amity did not peruse the scriptures and Apocrypha or glosses on these works by learned men of earlier ages. She delved into the esoteric—the Bhagavadgita, the teachings of Lao Tsu and Chuang Tse, and the Hindu texts of the Upanishads—all newly translated and much talked about in the finest intellectual circles of Cambridge, Concord, and New York in her time. How she had come to know of these works, she never wrote. But by the time she came to write her last diary, she had read and reread these works, digested them, cogitated upon them, and was ready to synthesize their wisdom into a meaningful pattern that would explain, if not propitiate.