As she mounted the stairs to the second floor, she wondered if Web was anxious about his marriage going the way of their mother and father’s, if his need for the downstairs room was rooted in anxiety about him and Sharon being contaminated by whatever had stricken their parents. It wasn’t only their behavior that displayed the souring of their union. Physically, each appeared to be carrying an extra decade’s weight. Their father’s hair had fallen back to the tops of his ears, the back of his head, while their mother’s had been a snow-white that she refused to dye for as long as either of their memories stretched. Their parents’ faces had been scored across the forehead, to either side of the mouth, and though they kept in reasonable shape, their mother with jogging, their father racquetball, the flesh hung from their arms and legs in that loose way that comes with old age, the skin and muscle easing their grip on the bones that have supported them for so long, as if rehearsing their final relaxation. The formality with which their parents treated hers and Web’s friends buttressed the impression that her brother and her were a pair of last-minute miracles, or accidents. Without exception, Gert’s friends had been shocked to learn that her mother and father were, if not the same age as their parents, then younger. She thought Web had received the same response from his classmates and girlfriends.
Although she swung it open gently, the hinges of the door to her and Dana’s room shrieked. No sneaking around here. In the pale wash of streetlight over the window, she saw Dana fast asleep on her side of the bed, cocooned in the quilt that had covered it. Leaving the door open behind her, Gert crossed to the hope chest at the foot of the bed and unlatched it. The odor of freshly-laundered cotton rose to meet her, and along with it came the groan of the floorboards outside the door.
“Mom?” She stood. “Dad?” The hall sounded with whichever of them it was hurrying to their room. Gert waited for the hinges on their door to scream, wondering why they hadn’t when whoever it was had opened it. After ten years of promising to do so, had her father finally oiled them? She listened for the softer snick of their door unlatching. She could feel someone standing there, one hand over the doorknob, their eyes watching her doorway for movement. “For God’s sake . . . ” Five steps carried her out into the hall, her face composed in an expression of mock-exasperation.
The space in front of the door to her parents’ bedroom was empty, as was the rest of the hallway. For a moment, Gert had the sensation that she was not seeing something, some figure in the darkness—the feeling was kin to that she had experienced looking directly at the keys for which she was tearing up the apartment and not registering them—and then the impression ceased. The skin along her arms, her neck, stood. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself; nonetheless, she made certain that the door to her room was shut tight. Later on, she did not hear footsteps passing up and down the hallway.
II
Gert’s decision to pursue the question of the other woman, to ascertain her identity, was prompted not so much by that most recent Christmas-Eve conversation as it was by a chance meeting with an old family friend in the din of Grand Central the week after New Year’s. While waiting in line to purchase a round-trip ticket to Rye (where lived an obscenely wealthy client of her firm’s who insisted on conducting all her legal affairs in the comfort of her tennis-court of a living room), she felt a hand touch her elbow and a voice say, “Gertie?” Before she turned, she recognized the intonations of her Aunt Victoria—not one of her parents’ sisters, or their brothers’ wives, but an old friend, perhaps their oldest, at a dinner party at whose house their father first had met their mother. With something of the air of its presiding genius, Aunt Vicky, Auntie V, had floated in and out of their household, always happy to credit herself for its existence and therefore, by extension, for hers and Web’s. During Gert’s teenage years, Victoria had been a lifesaver, rescuing her from her parents’ seemingly deliberate lack of understanding of everything to do with her life and treating her to shopping trips in Manhattan, weekends at the south Jersey shore, even a five-day vacation on Block Island her senior year of high school. In recent years, Victoria’s presence in their lives had receded, the consequence of her promotion to Vice President of the advertising company for which she worked, but she was still liable to put in an appearance at the odd holiday.
Victoria’s standing in the line was due to a speaking engagement with a sorority at Penrose College, in Poughkeepsie, to which she had decided it would be pleasant to ride the train up the east shore of the Hudson. She was dressed with typical elegance, in a black suit whose short skirt showed her legs fit as ever, and although her cheeks and jaw had lost some of their firmness of definition, her personality blazed forth, and Gert once more found herself talking with her as she would have one of her girlfriends. The result of their brief exchange was a decision to meet for lunch, which consultation with their respective Blackberries determined would occur a week from that Saturday; there was, Victoria said, a new place in NoHo she was dying to try, and this would provide the perfect opportunity. Gert left their meeting feeling as she always did after any time with Victoria, refreshed, recharged.
Not until the other side of her visit with Miss Bruce (ten minutes of business wrapped inside two hours of formalities), as she was watching the rough cut of Web’s latest film on her laptop, did the thought bob to the surface of her mind: Maybe Aunt Vicky was the other woman.
The idea was beyond absurd: it was perverse; it was obscene. Victoria Godfrey had been a de facto member of their family, closer to the four of them than a few of their blood-relations. She had been present during the proverbial thick, and she had been there through the proverbial thin. To suggest that she and Gert’s father had carried on, were carrying on, an affair, was too much, was over the top.
Try as she might, though, Gert could not banish the possibility from her thoughts. The same talents for analysis and narration that had placed her near the top of her class at NYU seized on the prospect of Auntie V being her and found that it made a good deal of sense. While both her parents had known Victoria, her father’s friendship with her predated her mother’s by several years. In fact, Victoria and her father had spoken freely of the marathon phone conversations with which they’d used to pass the nights, the restaurants they’d sought out together, the bands they’d seen in concert. Certainly, the connection between them had endured the decades. And during those years, her father’s consulting job had required him to travel frequently and far, as had Aunt Vicky’s work first in journalism and then in advertising. That Victoria, despite her declarations that all she wanted was a good man to settle down with, continued to live alone seemed one more piece of evidence thrown on top of what had suddenly become a sizable pile.
But her mother . . . Gert closed her laptop. In the abstract, at least, Gert long had admitted to herself the probability that her father had been unfaithful to her mother, perhaps for years. Restricting her consideration to her father and Aunt Vicky, she supposed she could appreciate how, given the right combination of circumstances, their friendship could have led to something else. (Wasn’t that what had brought her and Dana together?) Factor her mother into the equation, however, and the sides failed to balance. Her father’s relationship with Victoria might be longer, but her mother’s was deeper; all you had to do was sit there quietly as they spoke to know that, while their conversation’s focus might be narrow, it was anchored in each woman’s core. Gert had no trouble believing her aunt might be involved with a married man if the situation suited her, but she could not credit Auntie V betraying one of her dearest friends.
Nonetheless, the possibility would not quit her mind; after all, how many divorces had she assisted or managed in which the immediate cause of the marriage’s disintegration was a friend or even in-law who had gone from close to too-close? That the same story might have repeated itself in her parents’ marriage nauseated her; without changing its appearance in the slightest, everything surrounding her looked wrong, as if all of it were manifesting th
e same fundamental flaw. She shook her head. All right, she told herself, if this is the truth, I won’t run from it. I’ll meet it head on. False bravado, perhaps, but what was her alternative?
A week and a half later, pulling open the heavy glass door to Lettuce Eat and stepping into its low roar of voices, Gert repeated to herself the advice that she gave the new lawyers: Act as if you’re in control, and you will be. She had not been this nervous arguing her first case: her heart was thwacking against her chest; her palms were wet; her legs were trembling. In moments scattered across the last ten days, she had auditioned dozens of opening lines, from the innocuous (Hi, Aunt Vic) to the confrontational (What do you say we talk about you and my father?) and although she hadn’t settled on one (she was leaning towards, I’m so glad you came: there’s something I’d like to talk to you about), she was less concerned about the exact manner in which they would begin than she was with the substance of their talk. What she would do should Auntie V confirm the narrative whose principle points Gert had posited on a legal pad she hadn’t shown anyone, she could not predict. Nor did it help matters any that Victoria, in addition to a black turtleneck and jeans, was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses, the necessity of which, she explained as she stood to kiss Gert, arose from an office party that had not ended until 5:00 a.m. “I’m not dead yet, by God,” Victoria said as she resumed her seat and Gert took hers. “I can still give you kids a run for your money.”
Gert answered her aunt’s assertion with a polite smile that she maintained for the waitress who appeared at her side proffering a menu. In reply to the girl’s offer to bring her something to drink, Gert requested a Long Island iced tea and focused her attention on the menu, whose lettuce leaf shape was printed with the names of eight lunch salads. After the waitress had left for her drink, Victoria said, “That’s kind of heavy-duty for Saturday brunch, don’t you think?”
“Oh?” Gert nodded at Victoria’s Bloody Mary.
“Darling, this is practically medicinal. Really: if I thought my HMO would cover it, I’d have my doctor write a prescription.”
Despite herself, Gert laughed.
“Now,” Victoria continued, “you don’t look as if you were sampling new cocktails till dawn, so that drink is for something else, isn’t it? Everything okay with Dana? Work?”
“Fine,” Gert said, “they’re both fine. Couldn’t be better.”
“All right, then, how about your brother? Or—his wife, what’s her name, again? Sharon?”
“Sharon’s fine, too. Web is Web. He’s working on a new film; it’s about this painter, Belvedere, Thomas Belvedere. Actually,” Gert continued, “there is something—in fact, it’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Sweetie, of course. What is it?”
“It has to do with my parents.”
“What is it? Is everything okay? Nobody’s sick, are they?”
“Here you go,” the waitress said, placing Gert’s drink before her. “Do you know what you’d like to order?”
Gert chose the Vietnamese salad, which, Victoria said, sounded much more interesting than what she’d been thinking of, so she ordered one, as well, dressing on the side. Once the waitress had departed, Victoria said, “The last time I saw your mother, I told her she was too skinny.”
“Nobody’s sick,” Gert said.
“You’re sure?”
“Reasonably.”
“Oh, well, thank God for that.” Victoria sipped her Bloody Mary. “Okay, everybody’s healthy, everybody’s happy: what do you want to discuss.”
The Long Island Iced tea bit her tongue; Gert coughed, lowered her glass, then raised it for a second, longer drink. The alcohol poured through her in a warm flood, floating the words up to her lips: “It’s my Dad. I need to talk to you about the other woman—the one he had the affair with.”
At NYU, the professor who had taught Gert and her classmates the finer points of cross-examination had employed a lexicon drawn from fencing to describe the interaction between attorney and witness. Of the dozen or so terms she had elaborated, Gert’s favorite had been the coup droit, the direct attack. As she had seen and continued to see it, a witness under cross-examination was expecting you to attempt to trick them, trip them up on some minor inconsistency. If the opposing counsel were conscious, they would have prepped the witness for exactly such an effort; thus, in Gert’s eyes, it was more effective (unexpected, even) to get right to the point. The strategy didn’t always succeed—none did—but the times it worked, a certain look would come over the witness’s face, the muscles around their eyes, their mouths responding to the words their higher faculties were not yet done processing, which Gert fancied was the same as the one you would have witnessed on the person whose chest your blade had just slid into. It was a look that mixed surprise, fear, and regret; when she saw it, Gert knew the witness, and probably the case, were hers.
It was this expression that had overcome Victoria’s face. For an instant, she seemed as if she might try to force her way past it, pretend that Gert’s question hadn’t struck her as deeply as it had, but as quickly as it appeared to arise, the impulse faded. Her hands steady, she reached up to her sunglasses and removed them, uncovering eyes that were sunken, red-rimmed with the last night’s extravagances. Trading her eyeglasses for her drink, Victoria drained the Bloody Mary and held up the empty glass to their waitress, passing near, who nodded to the gesture and veered towards the bar. With a sigh, Victoria replaced the glass on the table and considered Gert, who was helping herself to more of her drink, her mind reeling with triumph and horror. The thrill that sped through her whenever her coup droit succeeded carried with it a cargo of anguish so intense that she considered bolting from her chair and running out of the restaurant before the conversation could proceed any further. The next time she and Aunt Vicky saw one another, they could pretend this exchange had never happened.
But of course, it was already too late for that. Victoria was speaking: “How did you find out? Your father didn’t tell you, did he? I can’t imagine—was it your mother? Did she say something to you?”
“No one said anything,” Gert said. “Web and I put it together one night—I guess it was ten years ago. We were up late talking, and the subject turned to Mom and Dad, the way it always does, and all their little . . . quirks. I said something along the lines of, It’s as if there’s another woman involved, and Web took that idea and ran with it. It was one of those things you wouldn’t have dreamed could be true—well, I wouldn’t have—but the more we discussed it, the more sense it made, the more questions it answered. Since then, it’s something we’ve pretty much come to take for granted.”
“Jesus,” Victoria said. “Ten years?”
Gert nodded.
“And this is—why haven’t you asked me about this before?”
“For a while, we were happy to let sleeping dogs lie. Web still is, actually; he doesn’t know I’m talking to you. Recently, I’ve—I guess I’m at a point where I want to know, for sure, one way or the other. At least, I think I do.”
“No, no,” Victoria said, “you’re right. You should know. I should’ve spoken to you—not ten years ago, maybe, but it’s past time. You have to understand—”
Whatever was necessary for Gert’s understanding was pre-empted by the return of their waitress with Victoria’s drink and their salads. Gert stared at the pile of bean sprouts, mango, banana, rice noodles, and peanut in front of her and thought that never had she felt less like eating. With each breath she took, her internal weather shifted sharply, raw fury falling into deep sadness, from which arose bitter disappointment. That she managed an, “I’m fine, thanks,” to the waitress’s, “Can I bring you anything else?” was more reflex than actual response.
Before the waitress left, Victoria was sampling her next Bloody Mary. She did not appear any more interested in her salad than Gert was in hers. “All right,” Victoria said once she had lowered her glass. “I want—you need to remember that your father l
oves your mother. She loves him, too—despite everything, they love each other as much as any couple I’ve ever known. Promise me you’ll do that.”
“I know they love one another,” Gert said, although she could think of few facts in which she currently had less confidence.
“They do, honey; I swear they do. But your Dad . . . ” As if she might find what she wanted to say written there, Victoria’s eyes searched the ceiling. “Oh, your father.”
“Yes,” Gert said.
“Let me—when you were, you must have been two, your father spent about three days calling everyone he knew. Anyone he couldn’t reach by phone, he wrote to. All those calls, those letters, said the same thing: for the past seven years, I have been having an affair. He had decided to end it, and the only way he was going to be able to follow through on that choice was if he came clean with all his family, all his friends, starting with your mother.”
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 16