He still loved Penelope, although her sickness—there, he had said it—made that love a burden rather than a joy. Couldn't Ginny be his antidote? Maybe the affair would actually help keep his marriage together rather than pull it apart. Gabriel knew that this was an indefensible rationalization. But he couldn't help making it all the same.
Pulling the key from the ignition, he checked his appearance in the rearview mirror for any telltale sign of betrayal. There was none—he looked the same as always. Penelope would have scarcely noticed that he was gone. She was so wrapped up in the baby, she wouldn't even have missed him.
Once the car was parked, he picked up the small bag he brought with him and walked to the elevator. The ascent was slow—this was an older building, after all—but steady and quiet. He took this as a good omen as he set down his bag.
“Nel?” he called out tentatively, trying to open the door. “Nel, I'm home.” Why wouldn't the door open? He manipulated the key around in the lock and then realized the lock was fine, its brass tumbler smooth and fluid. There was something blocking the door, that was all, though he wondered what it could be.
“Penelope,” he called again, beginning to feel annoyed. “Let me in.” He kept pushing, first with his hands and then harder, with his shoulder. There. The door finally gave way, at least a bit, so he could peer inside to see what in fact was obstructing his entry. At first, he couldn't see anything, but as he looked down, he noticed it. The pile of straw? Fabric? No—paper. There were mounds and mounds of shredded paper wedged under and around the doorjamb—that was why it wouldn't open.
“Shit,” he said softly as he dropped to his knees. He slipped an arm through the door's small aperture and began digging, like a rodent, through the mess. He thought he could recognize some of the fragments. Wasn't that a page from this week's New Yorker? Who had done this? And why?
He began to feel frightened. Was there someone here, a burglar, a rapist, a killer? Could someone have broken in, hurt Penelope and Isobel, and then left this pile of debris as a cryptic message for whoever found them?
Gabriel could feel his heart beating heavy and hard in his chest. He kept digging, clawing really, and found more glossy magazine pages that had all been neatly and methodically shredded. “Penelope!” he called, louder now, an urgent note rising in his voice. “Penelope, are you all right?” Stupid question, but he could think of no other. There was no response. Gabriel kept working, grabbing bits of paper, pulling them through so that they littered the clean, polished floor of the hallway, or stuffing them back into the apartment, far enough away from the door to prevent its remaining stuck. He was sweating with exertion now, for he worked quickly, and with mounting panic. Finally, there was enough space cleared so that he could push the door open to get inside.
“PENELOPE!” he shouted and went tearing through the hall, scraps of paper like mounds of snow gathered around his ankles, impeding his motion. Gabriel could see that the paper filled the entire hallway, and much of the living room. He kicked at it clumsily as he made his way toward the bedroom, in search of his wife and child. He saw more pictures from architectural magazines, the ones that were usually stacked neatly on a nightstand by their bed, but then he saw something else too: smaller pages from what appeared to be books. He reached down to pick up a crumpled sheet from the floor and smoothed it out. It was a page from a now out-of-print volume by the architectural historian Vincent Scully, one that Scully autographed and gave to Gabriel when he guest-taught a course at Yale. Gabriel put a hand up to his eyes, feeling momentarily sick. When he took the hand away, there was Penelope.
“Welcome home,” she said.
“Penelope! What happened? Where's Isobel?” he demanded.
“She's asleep. Unless your yelling woke her up.”
“What happened here?” he asked, but as he looked at her calm face, it was suddenly clear. “You did this,” he said, in a voice filled with amazement.
“I did it,” she repeated in a flat, dead tone. The sound of her voice scared him. He looked around at this sea of paper, paper that she had carefully ripped, crumpled and left, like a sacrificial offering at his feet. He didn't ask her why because he already knew. Silently, he sunk down to the floor, where the paper covered his feet and knees.
“I didn't go to Santa Barbara,” he began.
“I know that,” she said, still in the same dead voice.
“I went to New York. To see a woman,” he said. “I made love to her,” he continued, eyes lifted to her face now, “but it was you I thought of the entire time.” Gabriel was amazed at how easily this lie slipped out of him, and how easily Penelope seemed to accept it. Her eyes suddenly lost that opaque flatness and he could see something register in her face.
“You did?” she asked, and her voice was no longer dead, but small and childlike now, infused with something like hope. He nodded, and reached out his hand to her. She waded across the paper that separated them and took his outstretched palm in hers. The paper rustled as she dropped down beside him. “Why?”
“I missed you,” he said simply. “You're never here for me anymore. Everything is the baby, always the baby. This woman that I met—”
“Who is she?” Penelope asked quickly, ready to pounce.
“Her name is Solange. Solange Roussel.”
“She's French?”
“Canadian. From Quebec.”
“You met her when you went there for that conference?” Gabriel nodded, and it all came together in his mind, this imaginary woman he had never met, her imaginary problems with her imaginary husband, their imaginary plans to meet in New York for a very real tryst. During the recitation of all this, he was both grave and humble, the very model of a repentant husband asking his forebearing wife for another chance. He kept her hand tightly clasped in his, hypnotically caressing the space above her wrist over and over again as he talked.
“It was a huge mistake,” he told her. “I never should have lied to you, never should have gone there.”
“Maybe I drove you to it,” said Penelope, leaning her head against his chest.
“Do you think you can forgive me?” he asked. Her mouth quivered but she nodded. Gabriel tilted her face toward his and kissed her. “Isobel is . . .?” he murmured.
“Sleeping,” she said. “Really.” They made love there on the floor, with the torn paper beneath them as a mattress.
“It's been too long . . .” he said softly, but although he could still be aroused by Penelope's dairy-fresh skin and abundant dark hair, these things no longer bound him. His senses had been altered—tainted, even—by Ginny's heated and intoxicating touch, and it was her image that burned in his mind, even as he gripped Penelope's lovely shoulders. Later on, they found scraps of paper stuck to Penelope's back and legs, and as he helped her peel it off, they actually managed to laugh. Then Isobel awoke and Penelope went in to nurse her, so Gabriel was left with the job of cleaning up.
He found a box of large plastic garbage bags and began, slowly, to fill them full of paper. Magazines, books, many of them out-of-print and hard to come by, had been destroyed, but still their loss caused little pain compared to his sense of relief, of elation, at not having really been found out. The fictive Solange had served her purpose and could be deposited, like the shredded paper he now handled, in the trash. His true secret was safe and he intended to keep it that way. He had been sloppy, thinking Penelope was too absorbed by Isobel to notice. Next time—and Gabriel had no doubt there would be a next time—he would be more careful.
After he had filled all the available garbage bags with paper, the floor was still covered with it, so Gabriel decided to go out and get another box. Or two. On his way out, he hauled some of the paper-filled bags with him, because there were too many to leave in the incinerator room. He ran into the superintendent of the building, who eyed his massive load with a smile.
“Spring cleaning?” he asked.
“Something like that,” said Gabriel, returning the smile.
/> After this, Gabriel experienced a halcyon period of calm with his wife and daughter. Penelope was, of course, overwhelmingly involved with Isobel, but she now sometimes allowed Gabriel to enter the charmed circle as well. There were family baths in the scooped-out melon of a Jacuzzi tub Gabriel had installed for her when they first moved into the apartment; there were shared outings to the playground, where he stood behind Isobel in the black, hard rubber baby swing and Penelope stood in front, and together they pushed her back and forth, back and forth, while she opened her baby mouth in a wide O of delight. And if Isobel was sleeping soundly enough, there were moments when Penelope shimmied out of the soft white cotton nightgown she wore and turned to him in the night.
Gabriel was grateful for all of this, basking in the newly restored attention of his wife, but all the while he knew it was too late: something had changed in him that was beyond mending, and the something was Ginny. The memory of their night together was like a bright secret hidden deep in his pocket: the way she laughed out loud when he repeated a dirty joke he'd heard (he would not even have tried it on Penelope), the way she listened so avidly to everything he said, the way she touched him, held him, the glorious way that she ate. She couldn't have been more different from Penelope, whose various and ever-multiplying anxieties had slowly permeated their life together. Penelope was the moon—remote, distant, beautiful—while Ginny was a star—a supernova, exploding again and again with a white, fiery heat.
Gabriel knew she would be in San Francisco that summer; she told him that when they were together. That was months away, he realized, but he could wait. Wait and plan. It would be easy enough to get a schedule for the ballet; perhaps he would suggest to Penelope that they get tickets, or even a subscription. He had told her how much he loved going to the ballet when he was young. She might remember that, and like the idea.
Carefully, slowly, he made his preparations. He phoned his mother again, managing to make her believe that he told Penelope about his indiscretion. He didn't mention that Penelope believed he came to New York to see a French-Canadian woman named Solange Roussel, not the ballet dancer Virginia Valentine. There was no reason to. Ruth was very relieved to hear this, though she had trouble believing Penelope had really and truly forgiven him.
He hung up the phone and fairly panted with relief. He had been so stupid, such a fucking self-centered teenager about all this—kissing Ginny in his parents' apartment, flying off to see her with such a pathetic alibi—and look what pain it caused. Penelope, his parents—each of them had been hurt by his behavior, although Gabriel had no desire to hurt anyone. This feeling he had for Ginny was his alone. If he could keep it that way, no one need be hurt again.
Lying in bed with Penelope beside him, he stared at the mute, white curve of her shoulder. Was she dreaming? He remembered a recurring nightmare she used to have, one that always made her wake in tears. He couldn't recall the substance really, only that she seemed so grateful for his comfort. She never told him about her dreams anymore. Maybe she no longer believed he could comfort her. Maybe she was right.
PENELOPE
Penelope had obsessive-compulsive disorder—OCD for short. She knew this because she had been reading about it on the Internet. When Gabriel was at work and Isobel slept, she logged on and clicked her way to the chat rooms that had become a major sustaining force in her life. Once there, she traded stories and advice with other people like her, people whose need to control the way they lived overshadowed the substance of the lives themselves. She didn't tell Gabriel, or anyone else in the family, about what she had learned.
Just discovering that what she had was a known syndrome, with recognizable features and traits, was reassuring to her. OCD was like a box into which Penelope could put so many of the things that had troubled her since childhood. She remembered the many rituals required to soothe herself: tapping three times on the headboard before she got into bed, and another three times before she left it. There were a certain number of taps on the door when she wanted to leave her room, and another number when she wanted to enter it. Different foods on her plate couldn't touch each other. She worried, even then, about the germs she might catch from holding her partner's hand as the class filed out to recess.
The rituals seemed to get worse after her father died, but her mother didn't give them much credence. “It's just a phase” was Caroline's assessment.
By the time Penelope reached Barnard, the rituals governed much of her life. She couldn't go out when it rained because umbrellas upset her. She couldn't wear a scarf around her neck for fear of being choked. Certain small, sharp objects like tweezers and manicure scissors filled her with an ugly and palpable terror. She suffered from what she called “contamination attacks,” when she was convinced that something she loved had been dirtied or poisoned. The need to tap before leaving and entering a room intensified, though to avoid being detected, she was able to quiet herself by tapping on the square wooden block she carried—in a pocket or a handbag—with her everywhere.
Then she met Gabriel, and some of the fears seemed to subside, at least for a while. When they returned, it was in a new guise: she became obsessively neat and devoted much of her energy to cleaning and organizing their apartment. Funneling all that anxiety into the apartment was a good thing, Penelope decided. It made her seem less odd, less troubled. Lots of people dreamed of having their homes be picture-perfect; look at all the magazines devoted to just that goal.
Moving to San Francisco gave her an even grander outlet for her obsessions. And having an architect for a husband didn't hurt. He cared about the way things looked, and so did many of the people he knew, people who came to visit and exclaimed about what a restful oasis the apartment was.
“Look at what you've done with the place,” said the wife of the senior partner in Gabriel's office. “It's fabulous.”
“Thank you,” murmured Penelope, glancing at Gabriel. “White is such a restful color. It helps me stay focused, you know?”
“Absolutely,” agreed the other woman. “Gabriel,” she said, turning to him, “why have you been hiding Penelope from us all this time? I think she has a lot to offer. Maybe she could come over to our apartment some time. Give me some ideas.”
“I'd love to,” Penelope said, trying to read Gabriel's face as if it were a book. She knew how he felt about all the white; she had seen his office after all, seen it and been personally affronted by the hideous colors of the rug and the vases he had chosen. But Gabriel just smiled at her as if he had never found fault with Penelope's craving for the solace of white.
After the company had left, Penelope turned to Gabriel. “Other people like it here,” she said, gesturing around the white room. “They think it feels peaceful. You're the only one who objects.”
“Who said I object?”
“You've complained about it often enough.”
“Once. I complained once. That hardly qualifies as often.”
“Still, I know how much it irritates you. I can tell.” Penelope flipped her sleek, dark hair away from her face in an impatient gesture.
“Look, Nel, do you really want to start a fight?” asked Gabriel. He sat down on the sofa, his shoulders slumped. In his arms, he clutched one of the white pillows.
“No, I guess not,” Penelope said, not at all sure of what she wanted. But the answer came to her soon enough. She wanted a baby.
Penelope got pregnant almost at once. Being pregnant made her feel happier than she had at any time in her whole life. Although she quickly gained ten pounds, her body felt buoyant, and weightless. Suddenly she had the kind of energy she never had before: for the apartment, yes, but also for the baby. Everything now was directed toward the baby. Gabriel didn't seem to mind. In fact, he seemed pleased by her renewed interest in things, by her zeal.
The only clash came over the issue of the baby's name. Once Isobel was born, though, Penelope felt so bonded to her that the name ceased to matter. Their two souls were inextricably intertwined; what dif
ference did it make what she was called?
“Baby girl,” she crooned over and over again to the newborn in her arms. “Baby love.” Her mother and Gabriel's both came to help out in the beginning. Penelope felt she could manage perfectly well on her own; still, she wasn't all that unhappy to have them there. Later on, Penelope's bad feelings resurfaced again, when her mother-in-law insisted on remaining clueless about how Penelope wished to care for Isobel. The awful, tacky clothes the older woman sent. And the things she would have fed Isobel if she had the chance. Penelope could feel the start of a contamination attack when she thought about it.
Through all this, Gabriel seemed superfluous. Not that this would always be the case, because Penelope knew that once Isobel grew a little older, she would want another child, and another one after that. For now, though, he ought to understand how engrossed she had become. Understand and approve. When he told her he was going to Santa Barbara, she was actually grateful. She didn't have to pretend to include him. She and the baby could exist, a perfect unit, all by themselves.
Which they would have done, had it not been for that phone call. The call that came from Austin and Janice Levy, the couple whose house Gabriel was supposedly on his way to see. After that conversation, Penelope went to Gabriel's desk and turned on the computer. Without fully knowing why, she didn't log on to the familiar OCD sites; not yet. Instead, she scrolled through the recent history and found the airline booking to New York. New York. Why was he going there without telling her? Even without knowing the reason, Penelope was already furious.
The Four Temperaments Page 14