by Gian Sardar
“I can come back later.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Edith is the one the neighbors keep an eye on, the unpredictable one. Oddly she’s sheared off clumps of geraniums—not a typical cut flower—and stuck them in a crystal vase. Tall and wild. Claire sits by them, breathing in their peppery, lemony scent. It’s actually extraordinary, the smell, and suddenly their placement in the parlor makes sense.
“So tell me,” Edith says, and Claire begins the list—the lipstick, the call from Dr. Adams, the woman who just hung up.
“You’re right,” Edith says. “He’s having an affair.”
She was supposed to at least put up a fight, to insist that no, it can’t be true, William would never do that, the lipstick could’ve been from anyone, the call perfectly innocent. That she’s not protesting in the slightest makes this real. “I’ve sensed distance,” Claire says. “For a while now.”
“He always was popular with the ladies.”
Claire looks up sharply, then back to the geraniums, their thick, awkward stems. “I thought he would change.”
Edith shrugs. “Of course you did. Love’s trickery. Love at first sight, destiny, all that—lies so we have children. Mother Nature’s one shifty broad.”
“When I met him at my deb, I fell for him. Wanted nothing more than to marry him. That it happened, even after all those years, felt as if the stars had finally aligned.”
“Something feels like fate, you think it comes with immunity.”
Edith stands, her robe gaping wildly, and heads in the direction of the piano. For a moment Claire thinks she’s going to start playing, some vaudevillian racy number to accompany the insanity of love, but instead she passes the piano and reaches for a crystal decanter on a trolley. Ice cubes tumble and snap with a hit of scotch.
Claire watches Edith’s back. “For my deb, I had a Mainbocher gown straight from Paris, did you know? Ivory lace over white silk organdy. A full, sweeping skirt. He told me I was the most radiant girl at the ball—which he had to say, of course. But then he mentioned he had a few pieces of Rookwood, one decorated by Kataro Shirayamadani, my favorite of their painters. I’d just started collecting, wanting to do pottery. My father, I guess, had told him that. William, of course, knew exactly what to say. I spent the rest of the night watching him.”
There were other nights, too, more balls, more parties, all of them leading nowhere. Claire remembers his quick breathless sips of water between songs, flocks of women, bare throats exposed with laughter, husbands pointing to their daughters across rooms. One night he disappeared around a corner. A sultry female voice: The Markhams will never hire me again. Then William: The band sounds just fine—besides, don’t singers need to rest their voices now and then? Silence, followed by the woman’s laughter and her claim that this is not resting.
Claire was used to wanting and not receiving. Wanting real love and romance instead of fantasies of longing and lust, wanting to spend her days doing her pottery—a venture her mother had only at first indulged her in thanks to a stray compliment from a friend of a friend, someone from Paris who smelled like cigars and was close to Coco Chanel—instead of attending teas or charities. Ultimately she’d known her father would find someone for her, the son of a business associate, someone polite with slicked hair and a job at a company with his last name. Not arranged perhaps, but encouraged. Though neither she nor the boy would fight it, both would spend the rest of their lives loving sleep if only for the chance it gave them to be visited by a certain dream; the craved voice, the longed-for face, the lost chance.
“A person like him can’t be had,” Claire says, then takes a sip of her drink, actually enjoying the shot of pain that courses down her throat. “Or maybe it’s that a person like me could never have him.”
“Oh stop,” Edith says. “You’ve read too many books. A romantic will always be disappointed, it has nothing to do with you.”
Mathilde, the housekeeper, appears with tea, and sets the tray on the trolley by the window—but it won’t sit flat. Awkwardly she feels for the cause, finally finding a round rock.
Edith reaches for it. “Please.”
She holds it up as Mathilde hurries from the room. The rock is almost perfectly round and Claire recognizes it as what Dorothy played with the day Edith released the butterfly. She’d thought it was a marble.
“A geode,” Edith says. “Teddy found it. Dorothy wants to bash it open, thinking there’s diamonds inside, but I won’t let her. Poor thing’s yet to learn the value of a dream.” She sets it on the table before them, next to the vase, her own diamond flashing on her hand. “So yes. Frank is a member of the cheater’s club.”
She’s said it so nonchalantly, with such ease, that Claire takes a moment to retrace the conversation, to make sure they’re talking about the same thing. “He’s had an affair?”
“Four at least.”
Claire looks down the hall, in the direction of Edith’s husband, Frank’s, study. He’s rarely home. A partner in a law firm, Edith once told her, would not be partner if he knew his way around his own house—said after an evening when he’d sat in the parlor for a half an hour before realizing the scheduled card game with his family was actually taking place in the game room. Claire had watched from her own dining room window as Edith threw the cards at him, the children sinking into velvet chairs.
“I still remember when I found out, about the first one. I was more like you then. Worst day of my life. Dorothy came home from school with strep throat and I just held her and cried into her hair. Because it’s not just your future, it’s your past as well. It’s everything. All your happiness gets rewritten.” She takes a lengthy sip of her drink. “You’ve got to nip it in the bud. One will lead to another, you can be sure.”
“What if he’s been waiting for me to say something so he can go? I’d be nowhere.”
“Oh, you’d still be somewhere.” Edith stands, setting her drink on the leather-top coffee table. Ringed stains are scattered along the edge, as she refuses to use coasters.
“But how would it look? With him leaving me, and then my family.”
Edith, other than William, is the only other person Claire has told about her father. That Edith says nothing makes it worse. Claire sits back, eyes on the geraniums on the table. Tiny roots stretch from the cuttings, curled at the bottom of the glass.
—
When William is at last home that evening, she can barely look at him. The threat of tears is too pressing, and every step she takes seems to skim the edge of a great and wide ravine. Even the next morning, while he sleeps, her back is to his steady breaths. This will make it worse, she knows, this distance she’s allowing between them, and yet the way her heart contracts when she sees him, as if it were being squeezed by someone who could not stop, is simply too much.
Sundays are the day William spends at the Lafayette Club. Normally she tries to work, but today the pressure from her hands is too great. “Letting go” is what her teacher called it. Too much pressure forms a mound of clay—one must let go to let the form appear. But Claire’s mind is stuck, consumed. The clay slips off center. What normally is a metamorphosis, a creation sliding from one form to the other, lifting, rising, bulging and expanding, becomes attempt after attempt until she herself caves and sits back from the wheel. After the clay is put away, she washes her hands, takes her wedding ring from its protected spot by the door, and slips it back on, a routine act that now seems foolish.
Less than two years they’ve been married. Did he ever love her? He seemed interested in her only after his parents’ death, and the proposal came quickly after that, the wedding—a small September ceremony, a much-coveted invitation—so immediate her mother made it a point to inform every guest that there were no plans for children as of yet. Why her? She’d wondered even then. William’s father had known her father for years and there was a mutual res
pect—both self-made men, one by choice and one by circumstance. Was it that? That his father would have approved? Had encouraged, even?
She feels sick, as if the world were tightening into a dark, humid tunnel. For fresh air she heads to the garden, and before she knows it, she’s thinking of tulips and again feels the world narrow. William bought her bunches when they first met, huge clusters that wobbled and drooped when first placed in a vase but then stood up straight the next day and swayed with the light. The first was a red bouquet. When he discovered they were her favorite flower—they dance, she’d said, what other flower looks anything else but dead?—he’d returned the next day with a selection of yellow. By Wednesday he’d found pink. Thursday it was a game, and he appeared with white; Friday, purple. On Saturday he had his work cut out for him, but finally arrived with a delicate cluster of yellow tulips with fiery orange edges. And then came Sunday, and she’d woken exhilarated, wondering what he’d find, convinced his arms would be empty. But there he was, late in the afternoon with stark white petals placed inside Van Briggle’s Lorelei vase, and all at once she’d realized this was about him, not her. He had to outdo himself every day, it was a game, and to end it on a Sunday with a repetition of white held inside a vase by her favorite potter could have been seen as cheating. Still, at this point she was in love. They brought all the flowers into her parlor and placed them on the large mahogany table by the window, then danced in their little field.
A nap. Sleep the only way to escape her life, if she can manage. When Ketty knocks on the door, Claire sees that already two hours have passed, and William should be home soon from the club.
“What is wrong with you,” Ketty says the moment she enters the room. It’s not a question, it’s a statement as she approaches the bed and sits heavily.
Claire rolls over onto her side and moves her jaw to release some tension, the loneliness inside her a hot radiance that seems worse with every move. She can’t say anything. Her life is secrets, symphonies of doors shutting and bolting. “I miss William,” she finally says, the truth.
“But he’s back soon, for dinner.”
“It only reminds me he’ll leave again. Over and over we do this. An endless loop.”
Ketty frowns, an expression her face slips into easily. “He won’t stay for even a day if this is what he finds.”
“I wish he’d take a week off. Just one week, to stay with me.”
“I’d like a week off, too,” Ketty says, standing and facing the closet. “But it’s not always roses.”
“Did you want this week off?” Claire asks. Ketty’s not taken more than a few days here and there since Claire moved in, and in her mind she sees Ketty on the street, dressed in normal clothes. Where would she be going?
“Not this week,” Ketty says, draping a dress over a chair. “Maybe next. Maybe we’ll get William to stay home this week.” She smiles, tight-lipped. “Get dressed. Poppy-seed cake is almost done.”
Claire nods and Ketty leaves the room. The dress that was chosen, out of a closet full of gowns and sundresses and skirts and blouses, is the blue one, the off-the-shoulder one she’s been wearing a lot lately for its room in the waist. Ketty must have had it cleaned, for Claire had worn it just the other day. But now it’s here, ready. Nothing, Claire knows, gets past those Danish eyes.
11
Now
JUST ABOUT TWO WEEKS, she said last night. That’s how long she has. And now another day almost gone. Aidan should call her. Make sure she got her car back—an excuse for contact, he knows. He’s at Sarah Breining’s uncle’s place, a large beige ranch house near the park with white trim. Out of the corner of his eye there’s movement—at the neighbor’s across the street, the curtain falls into place. He waits in the car, and sure enough, the curtain moves again. Someone has something to say.
“I have this feeling,” Aidan says when the neighbor answers his door, “like you want to say something.”
Aidan hands him his card and the guy’s eyes flick to Alan Breining’s house.
“Other than that he never takes the bins up? You know you’re supposed to do that the next day, but they’re right there till the end of the week. Right at the curb.”
“That’s annoying.”
“Sometimes he never takes them up. Just brings the bags down.”
“Other than that, you like him?”
“I don’t know. I got issues with him.”
“I would too, he keeps the cans on the curb.”
Again the guy looks across the street. “I got your card. I’ll think on it.” The door closes.
Two newspapers are on Alan’s front walk, and Aidan gathers them as he approaches the door. Right as he’s about to knock, his phone rings. He takes a couple of steps back toward his car.
“My cat’s missing,” Rebecca Sullivan says.
“How’d you get this number?”
“My cat’s missing. You didn’t even notice we weren’t at the reunion?”
Right, her husband, in Aidan’s class, he’d forgotten. “Sorry—skipped training day on feline recovery.”
“I’m not joking. She’s gone. She’s an indoor cat, that doesn’t just happen.”
“Rebecca, you want to talk about Rick and the forgery case I’m all ears, even though I don’t have time. Your cat goes missing, you open a can outside, put up signs, I don’t know. We got bigger fish to fry right now.”
“How ’bout you come by to check my locks? See how easy they’d be to pick.”
“You want I can send an officer there.”
“I would like that, thank you.”
He’s surprised she took him up on the offer. “Okay. I’ll call the station.”
The second he hangs up, the door swings open. “Working on a Sunday?” Alan Breining asks. Balding. Thick black glasses.
“Weekends off are a thing of the past,” Aidan says, handing him his card along with the newspapers, taking a glance inside the house. “You knew my parents, they lived a couple houses down from you back on Cherry Lane.”
Alan glances at the card. “I remember your mother. She gardened. Best-looking peonies. I killed mine. A woman’s touch, I guess. They left, didn’t they?”
“They did. They’re in Ketchum now. Listen, Aaron Hardt stopped by the other day. We were just wanting to clarify—when did you work at that vet on Euclid?”
“My vet. Not ‘that’ vet. I started it. It was mine. Until a year ago. I retired.”
“Why’d you tell Hardt two years ago?”
“I didn’t. I loved what I did, I waited to leave as long as I could.”
“Okay, he noted you worked there till two years ago. Guess it was a mistake.”
“It was. I had a party with about a hundred people. Why would I fudge it by a year? Because ketamine went missing? I was there when that happened, I’m not hiding that.”
“We’re just trying to get it right. You remember when it went missing?”
“Sure. He asked me this. We had a few things taken. I passed along names of employees.” He pauses. “Usually I feel them coming.”
“Excuse me?”
“Storm,” Alan says, nodding to the horizon. “Not this one. Snuck right on up. Like a tiger.”
Aidan turns. Sure enough, in the sky is a summer storm, haunches of rolling darkness edged with bands of lighter gray.
What woke her was the feeling of real tears on her cheek. The pillow was wet, the windows dark. After a while her heart settled, the nightmare receding, then replaced with the recollection of Aidan and his words. For a while she was up with this, undisturbed with thoughts of him, a replay of everything he’d said. For once the early morning hours were kind in their solitude, a time blockaded from the rest of the world, cordoned off and hers alone, he remembered that first day. Then the sun warmed her bed and sleep was an eager friend, kind and waiting.
Now it’s the afternoon.
“Your car,” her mother says, sitting in the kitchen, newspaper in hand, “is still at the school. Aidan drove you home. The Aidan, I’m assuming? He was polite. Sober. Which was good. With what’s going on, you need to be careful.”
A memory skitters through her mind—being confused at his car, that it wasn’t the old Bronco he used to drive, and then tuning the radio incessantly, looking for a song that most likely never existed. “I was really tired,” she tells her mother. “And yes, the Aidan.”
The coffeepot is full. She takes a mug from the cupboard and pours it to the edge. Aidan Mackenzie. The way he looked at her. You were the reason I knew it was going to be okay. A trapdoor in her mind. Stop. “I want to read those letters. Anything that might have to do with Claire.”
“They’re downstairs. There’s a lot down there.”
“So do you think your mom was having an affair? Right the wrong, the note with the ring, did that mean come with me? Leave Grandpa?”
Her mother lowers the paper. “I didn’t even know it was there. I didn’t really know her. No one did.”
“That’s sad.”
“It is what it is, but thank you for saying that. I used to miss her, some made-up version of her I had in my head. Childhood longing is a powerful thing.”
Abby’s cell phone rings. Robert. “Hold on,” she says as she answers, then steps outside. A wasp hovers near the roofline, so she walks onto the lawn. Bare feet, the blades soft. “What’d you find out? A call on a Saturday, that had to be good.”
“The producer is friends with Stephen. I think they had plans anyhow.”
“Come on. No downplaying it, this is huge.”
“What it is, is the beginning. A first step. Don’t go booking wedding venues.”
Abby stops in the middle of the yard.
“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to snap. I’m stressed. I keep thinking of all I need this to do, how far it needs to stretch, and it just doesn’t seem possible. But then I think of it not happening and—”