“I left my Kindle in Elliot and I don’t have anything to…” My daughter does a pathetic voice for the benefit of the adults.
“Matilde?” Charles says. “You must have some other books in your bag, I know you. Mom mentioned that you’re enjoying A Separate Peace.”
“Enjoying it?”
“I know you’re fine with handing over The Hunger Games to Liza for a few days,” Charles says, mostly to please my daughter, which would please me. Matilde walks to Liza and gives her the book. The message in her action is that she is not only fine with this gesture, but that Liza can’t be responsible for her wretched mother. It is an act of sympathy.
While we are closing up the house for the night, Charles presses me to the wall beneath the floating staircase and starts kissing my neck.
“We can’t do this,” I whisper.
“Why not?”
“You know why not. We have six children in the house and only two are asleep.”
“All the more exciting.” Charles rubs his groin against mine and slips his hands under my sweater. He unsnaps my bra. “All the better to eat you, my dear.”
“Charles! We can’t.”
“So you’ve said.” He takes my hand in his. “Unzip my pants. Who will ever know? Then I’ll lead you upstairs and we’ll lock the bedroom door.”
We lock the tall, eight-inch-thick oak door of the master suite and I lie on my back while he undresses me. Through the window the stars are lost tonight in the black sky. “Just a quickie, Charles.”
He laughs. “High school in reverse, Jess. Those days we sneaked around our parents for sex, and now we sneak around our children.”
The pirouette of sex begins. “Nothing heightens you but you,” I say. “Wherever we are, whatever the risks, or better still, no risks … I could touch you endlessly.…”
At midnight I unlock the door. Matilde, in her Ugg boots, is halfway down the hall, padding away from the master suite as if she’s on the SWAT team for an important mission. Has she been standing outside the room while I sighed and moaned, while Charles grunted and our bodies heaved together? I follow her as she sprints back to the girls’ bathroom, where I hear her throw up. Twice. Next she cries, most likely in front of the mirror, her eyes swelling from the entire experience.
* * *
The third day I corner Matilde in the mudroom, where she’s pulling out ski boots and poles for Claire and Jack. Tom should be helping her; instead he’s with Charles watching CNN in the library. Matilde, meanwhile, is appraising me, in my anti–Lainie garb, leggings, a plum-colored V-neck sweater with some cleavage sneaking out, leopard scarf twisted twice then knotted at my neck. We are in close proximity.
“I never realized that you have brown eyes, Jess. I thought most blondes have blue eyes.”
“An unusual combination, I suppose.”
Matilde edges back and drops her hand to her side. She’s in a hurry to get the ski equipment.
“The ski conditions have been fine, don’t you think, Matilde? I don’t delude myself that we’re in Vail—short of that everyone is having a good time and that’s no easy feat. And today you have two solid hours on the slopes once the twins are at ski school. If you pick them up, I’ll be down by lunchtime and you can ski all afternoon.”
“Okay,” says Matilde.
“You like to ski, don’t you, Matilde? It might not beat swimming the Raritan River at the Y, but there is the rush down the mountain, how your breath vaporizes into the clear air…”
“Claire and Jack are waiting.”
“They are eating chocolate chip pancakes with local maple syrup. Norine is at breakfast today. There’s time,” I say.
“They have to get ready to get to the slopes.” Matilde tries to move past me with the poles. I place my hand on her shoulder.
“I said there is no hurry.”
“I have to go.”
I put my hand on her shoulder again. “Matilde, your mother doesn’t want your father to be available. I do.”
She steadies herself. “I don’t feel sorry for you, Jess.”
“She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want him,” I say.
“Yes—she does. What do you know about her?”
“I’ve known your mother since summers in Cape May.… I’ve known your mother since she had her first crush.…”
“You are deluded, Jess.”
“You, of the entire family, Matilde. You know how it is with your mother, her art, her love of water, her…” I clench my teeth. I try to be calm.
“Cut it out, Jess. Please just cut it out. You’ve made a big mistake. You’ve no idea about my mother and you’re supposed to be her friend! She breathes like a fish, not a mammal bitch mother from Elliot.”
Matilde tightens her entire body and, stumbling at the mudroom door, she takes one more look at me.
“Maybe you dreamed up the whole episode, Matilde. Maybe not. Maybe you should hate me, yet I doubt that you do.”
THIRTY-ONE
As a spouse I’ve got my own gig. I’m slipping away quietly and the advent of William, my repugnant husband, and Lainie, Charles’s dolphinesque wife, is a form of being cut open. These past few days playing house with Charles and the late nights in bed have washed over me and rendered me fresh, mysterious. Tonight the moon shines through the blinds to the north and Charles and I are kissing, high school style again.
“Your kisses have changed, Jess.”
“How?” I’m so locked into him that every time we make love, we share the ether. Sentimental and gushy, yet what I’ve become.
“Better, more erotic. Your lips, your tongue.”
I’m not sure what he means, but I hold on to it, kissing back with fervor while he tugs off my La Perla finest, a sheer black nightie that was once purchased in hope of seducing William and never worn in reality. Maybe I bought it in anticipation of Charles in the sublime fantasy where dreams are realized and prayers answered. Then he is inside me, filling me up. I have never known the sensation. I cling to him afterward, part of me unable to let go.
When I awake in Charles’s arms early, before the sun is up, he announces, “Today we’ll take the kids to the slopes early and have lunch together.”
“And pack sandwiches? Or at the restaurant?” The chaos of it and beyond that our togetherness—an amazing concept. I sit up straight, trying out life as the Brady Bunch.
“Either way. Whatever is easier for you, Jess.”
Then we are at it again in that hunger we have for each other. A poem by Christina Rossetti, “Twice,” which I’ve not thought of in years enters my consciousness. A poem about giving yourself utterly to the one you love. I fear for my soul; I’ve fallen for Charles.
* * *
By early evening Lainie and William amble into the main hall and stand under the double-vaulted ceiling. I don’t know how to greet them; my skill set has diminished. Yesterday I was looking at stars and today I’m following splintered light. And it’s New Year’s Eve; we’re close to the fragility of a new year while the shit of the last is not yet fading. Nor does Lainie appear any happier than I am, both of us tossed into one more round in Vermont after four days of chance. I ignore William and focus on Lainie.
“Lainie! How is your work going?”
“All good, truly. The time was … quiet, easy to paint, to think.…”
“And you, William? Was it fruitful?” I sound tinny and loud, my voice lilting to compensate for his flatliner mode. If your partner is the mirror and you are looking into his eyes for a reflection, the news here is that there is no reflection, there is nothing to get from William, he is one long well-educated grunt. Until Charles entered my life, I did the best I could to break free of William without searching for anything more. These wifely duties are a camouflage—none of it quite compensating for a twisted life with William. Thanks to Charles, William has become invisible to me whether he is in the room or not, on the phone, texting, e-mailing, sitting at my side. I am, at last, delivered from his pu
blic figure, his private hell.
* * *
I’m guiding Mrs. Higgins and Norine in their final hour in the kitchen before they are officially dismissed. I don’t know what’s come over me that I’ve conceded that they do not need to work through the dinner this evening. I’m sure that if we fast-forward to midnight when the kitchen is piled high with dishes, I’ll be contrite, but for the moment I appreciate the plan, it feels homey and sophisticated at once. Not to mention generous.
“What’s for dinner?” William asks in his immense commonness. He sniffs at Mrs. Higgins’s station. Norine is counting plates for the dining table. “Simple dishes.” Mrs. Higgins shrugs. “Mrs. Howard told me to leave it at that.”
“At what? Meatloaf and mashed potatoes?” William is rooting around in the refrigerator. He pulls out the hors d’ouevres that I bought yesterday with Charles, the king of male food shoppers, for tonight. Why is he contaminating everything? In his arms he has guacamole, hummus, wedges of cheese, country pâté. Fry in hell, William.
“That’s more like it.” He dumps the food onto the counter.
“Mrs. Howard?” Mrs. Higgins says. “The roast is perfectly timed, the side dishes are in order, but I’m wondering about the pasta. I have stirred the tomato sauce.…”
“No worries, Mrs. Higgins. Lainie and I will do the rest.” Why not the two women in the room? This sexist comment comes out of my mouth too fast to censor it. Mrs. Higgins’s skepticism arises.
“Who is cooking the angel hair?”
“I will,” I assure her. “The one pasta I do to perfection.”
Behind me is Charles, who might be the only less capable cook, after Lainie.
“Are you certain?” Mrs. Higgins wipes her glasses with a dish towel.
“I’m on! No worries,” I say.
Mrs. Higgins and Norine, her new sidekick, mosey out of the kitchen.
I take the largest pot in the kitchen and fill it up with water. Charles helps me carry it to the stove. He toys with the burner to adjust the flame. I miss yesterday, when Charles and I were alone together and the only pretense was that we were both devoted to our spouses. An old story if ever there was one. I quickly drop fistfuls of angel hair that look like straw into the boiling water.
“Al dente?” I ask.
“Al dente. What else?” William says. What is he still doing here? Sitting at the island, stuffing his face with pâté and lacerating the French bread. I’d rather starve than watch William eat. I take two potholders and carry the giant iron pot to the sink. Charles is suspended, not exactly sure if he should help again. My body language tells him to stand aside as I splash the entire contents into the colander in the sink. I wash the angel hair in cold water, as even the most feeble of cooks have been taught, to remove the starch. The steam rises, ruining my hair. Lainie is stirring the tomato sauce with a certain precision.
“Charles? Could you please check the tomato sauce? Am I forgetting an ingredient?” Lainie asks. To my surprise, Charles has already positioned himself on the couch in the family corner of our eat-in kitchen, glued to the Georgia Tech–USC game. He claps his hands and jumps up and down when they score a touchdown.
“Charles?” Lainie holds on to a large saucepan. She shakes her head at me to convey that Charles is entrenched in the game.
My attachment to Charles makes me root for Georgia Tech too. As I recall, William prefers the opponent and is terribly glum, still gorging on the country pâté.
I slide the angel hair into the Crock-Pot and Lainie pours the tomato sauce over it. That’s when William turns away since his team is tanking, William of the living dead and disenfranchised, William of the lost-husband brigade.
“What the fuck, girls!” he screams at Lainie and at me. “What is going on?”
Lainie and I lock glances. I try to stop Lainie by putting my hand on her arm. “Lainie, let me do the sauce.”
“I made it, Jess, let’s finish this dish and move on.”
What I needed to have whispered in her ear earlier—an hour ago—is that she mustn’t pour all of the tomato sauce into the bowl.
Lainie, unaware of her foible, is folding the entire bowl of sauce into the pasta. William is stomping the floor six inches from where she stands. She looks at him, perplexed but not as afraid as she ought to be.
“Don’t you know that you never put the sauce over the entire bowl of noodles?” William’s voice is cruel. “Never?” He lifts the pot, which has been mostly emptied, and slings what remains over Lainie’s cream-colored crocheted sweater.
Neither Lainie nor I move. The truth is out, there is no place to hide. Years ago I married William and bore him these two precious children. Once he loved me enough to hold me until I was fast asleep; once we went to Berlin and stayed up the entire night going to clubs with transvestites and funky music. We danced, we drank, we went back to the hotel and made love. Ages back that happened. Was he barbaric then? He has always had this ugliness that is well guarded and buried within. Mostly within.
“You are ruining the pasta!” William is shrieking. “Ruining it!”
Asshole William.
Charles has come to the scene of the crime. “Hey, William, it’s a dish of spaghetti. A goddamn pasta side dish.”
William says to Charles, “Yes and no.” William takes Lainie’s wrists and yanks them sharply. Lainie cries out, another mistake. He begins to twist her arms painfully. I know it too well—how my husband tightens his piercing grip. How next he might start shaking her shoulders. Back and forth. Back and forth. How he will bruise her and how long it takes for the bruises to turn from deep blue to that yellow that means one is healed. Not.
Any minute one of the children or several of the children will come through the swinging doors. There must be an alternate domain where I am not sick inside.
“William, please!” Charles comes over and puts his hands firmly on William’s forearms and William drops Lainie’s wrists. Charles holds Lainie to him; her heart is next to his. Lainie is crying and in shock. I needed to warn her, to keep her from that goddamn sauce.
The football game drones on while the rest of us fall into an empty shock, a shock that has no end, no place to go. After a minute or five minutes or eternity, I speak up.
“Does anybody know how I can get the fuck out of here tonight?” I ask. “Does anybody have a clue?”
* * *
Charles wins for restoring order and a semblance of decency. I am nothing tonight but an abused wife, battered physically and emotionally. One of the stats you read in women’s magazines and online, in the newspapers and in posthumous articles about Nicole Simpson. You swear to yourself, not me, yet it’s you, it’s you and you sweat that your daughter cannot know nor your friends nor your family. Lainie witnesses the depths of my despair and she is forced to come through, to stoke the fire in the great room and check that the children are fed. An inch away from fetal position and a bottle of vodka, my heart hurts. Mostly because Charles was there, mostly it is the shame and remorse. I should have explained it, I should have warned him. Not that tragic, I self-soothe, it’s my life through lies and secrets.
Mrs. Higgins reappears at Lainie’s insistence and helps out with the dinner. William is taciturn but unrelenting; the children collapse at various hours through the night. The twins in a heap on my favorite cashmere throws by the coffee table, the older children in fits and starts in the adjacent smaller den, counting down the minutes until the ball descends.
Per usual, we are together, the damaged foursome. Lainie is cuddled up with Charles, her head against his left shoulder on the green leather couch. I don’t wish to knock her out of position, only to lie against Charles’s right shoulder. Let’s share him, share him while we watch the Milky Way this winter night. Charles looks at me and I look back. Lainie’s eyes are half closed; William is feigning sleep from where he sits on the wing chair. Only Mrs. Higgins is moving about. She gathers the dirty glasses and dessert plates, catches the furtive glimpses, absorbs th
e narrative, and pads out of the room with her heavy tray. I am too sick to cry, too sick to follow her into the kitchen, the scene of the crime, and make some wretched excuse. Instead I consider the consequence of tonight and the risks of a slow fade.
PART THIRTEEN
Lainie
THIRTY-TWO
The children are asleep after a full day at school and Charles has conked out on the sofa in the family room. His head is back too far and his legs are deployed across the coffee table. I open the back door and stand against the side of the house and view a starless night. The bitter wind blows through the trees without the quasi-romance of Vermont, and the extinguished sky is blackness.
When I come back inside Charles has gone upstairs and has already turned out the lights. The past two nights have been surprisingly amorous and I’ve followed my instinct to be beside him in bed. In a fresh new year, I must do more that is wifelike—beyond the sex—and be more grateful to Charles. Once the paintings are completed for the show, I’ll be that person, I’ll view Elliot in a better light. I’ll not only appreciate Charles, I’ll consult Jess. Jess could be Matilde’s mentor. A qualm of conscience washes over me. Matilde, who mothers the twins, Matilde, who suffers the curse of being set apart. Again that nagging knowledge that fitting in is a gift—for example, Jess, who embodies every nuance of conformity. Not that Jess isn’t tough or dogmatic, that she prevails. She wouldn’t jeopardize her social position, she always knows right from wrong in the social swirl.
The night is before me. I use the hours in my studio to paint sections of my triptych—first the sandpipers, then the gulls, who engulf and devour whole creatures. The shoreline is riddled with debris while the atmosphere above is contoured. I end up there until morning.
* * *
“There will be plenty of sales clothes, designer mostly, to choose from,” Jess tells me the next morning when after swimming we drive to the Mall at Short Hills. Although I’ve never been to this center before, it was one of Charles’s selling points of moving to Elliot. He had shown me a Wikipedia synopsis of the mall when we were living in the city. “You see, Lainie,” he had said, “Short Hills, not twenty miles from Elliot, was founded by a man described as a nature lover. The mall has chic stores—as chic as any in the city, they rival the city. Look at this, there is an Hermès, Chanel, Gucci, Van Cleef.”
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