* * *
Other than when she used it to call Adele this afternoon, it’s rare that the telephone rings in the antique jewelry department. What would they ask? Have you any rings with doves on them? So late in the afternoon, Roz almost drops the Georgian brooch she’s been logging in when the phone shakes itself awake.
“I wondered if you’re free tonight,” Weaver says, smooth and unruffled. Certainly not a man who does away with his wife, she thinks. “I hope it’s okay—me calling you at work.”
“Of course. And, yes, I’m free.” Her friends have often told her how they played hard to get with their beaux. They ended up married. But somehow, it’s never suited her to play games, to strategize. Because then—as she sees it—you’re married to someone you’ve manipulated.
“I wondered, would you be willing to come to my flat tonight?” he asks. “After work, you could go home and pack a bag. Clothes, nightgown, that sort of thing. Then . . .” He clears his throat, as though trying to work up the courage. “Then maybe you’ll spend the night with me here? All I want . . . all I want is to wake up to you . . . in my own bed. To feel you near all night.”
“Weaver . . .” She wonders if the Field’s operator is listening in. Such intimate words for the middle of a sunstruck afternoon. He was tender with her in the past sometimes. But his words were never like this. “Tell me when and I’ll be there,” she says.
“Thank you, love,” he says. He never would have thanked her in the past or sounded grateful. Maybe he was, but he was always too guarded to say so.
* * *
She hasn’t been to Weaver’s Hyde Park apartment since the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. After that, she was so depressed, they stopped making love and she stopped visiting his apartment altogether. The way she saw it, how could they revel in pleasure when others who’d died at their hands could seek pleasure no more? Sometimes, in those dark days, he stayed at her place and held her in his arms all night, but she couldn’t open up to him even when she tried. Her desire for lovemaking was just reawakening at the time he left her. They’d made love with astonishing passion just two nights before he told her it was over. And later, she recalled there was a desperation to his lovemaking that night. That he whispered again and again, “My Rosalind. My sweet Rosalind. Never forget how much I care for you.” It’s one of the reasons his departure was so confounding.
From earlier, happier times, she does have joyful memories of the grand old twenties mansion where he rents his rooms on the second floor, his apartment so British and masculine, with dark walls and a drinks cart, horse prints, tweedy furniture, and a rack fitted with five gleaming pipes. She never once saw him smoke them; still, those pipes looked at home there. The apartment’s most unique feature was a narrow stone terrace overlooking Drexel Avenue. Nights, they’d spend sweet hours on that porch rocking on a metal glider he’d picked up off the street. How out of place that glider looked on an urban terrace, more suited to a suburban patio. Pressed out of metal, turquoise like an Aegean sky, it’s back formed to look like two buttoned pillows. But how happy they were swinging, sipping spiked iced tea, speaking about science and their dreams. Rosalind’s dreams were focused on cities, farms, and ocean liners run by nuclear energy. Weaver’s wildest fantasies were about nuclear-powered rocket ships to the moon or Mars.
Her most vivid memory is of one scorching night when his apartment was unbearable and they dragged the glider inside so there’d be room to sleep under the stars. Lying on an opened cardboard box and two eiderdown comforters atop each other to shield against the unforgiving stone floor, they made love twice, their bodies slippery with desire and heat, then slept naked and entwined under a perfect half-moon.
Recalling that night makes Rosalind shiver. Weaver. How she once adored him. Now, she can’t help thinking that another woman has lived in that apartment, slept in his bed, maybe made love to him on the stone terrace. What has Clemence left behind? Papers, notes? Flowered cushions? Will Rosalind find something worth sharing with Charlie? The desire to see Weaver and the desire to spy on him are less at odds than she might have guessed. All lovers are would-be spies, aren’t they? What woman doesn’t want to know her lover’s most closeted secrets, to search out what he would never tell her? The mixture of excitement and guilt is delicious and disturbing.
She’s pondering this as she steps out of Field’s and nearly runs into the empty-eyed man. Christ. Though her heart starts to gallop, he passes as though he has no interest in her. As he walks away, she notices that his hands are huge and misshapen. Knuckles raw and thickened. She’s certain that as soon as she’s not watching, he’ll turn around and follow her.
She sets right off down Randolph to Michigan as though she’s running a race, weaving around slower walkers. In her rush, she even parts the hands of two lovers, dashing between them. “Sorry,” she calls behind her. “Sorry for that.” The man’s nostrils flare with annoyance. But as far as she can tell, she’s lost her pursuer. What is she afraid of? The man has done nothing to her. But she recalls Charlie’s worried face when he heard she was being tailed. And it’s just the idea that he’s a Russian, an enemy, that he’s tracking her like a hunter tracks an animal. It all makes her feel watched. The irony that lately she’s feared invisibility does not go by unrecognized.
She thinks she’s outrun the man, when, as she’s about to step into the revolving door of her building, she spots him across the street smoking. Jesus. Her heart starts up again like a motorboat engine with a tug and a jerk and a roar. She runs into the sheltering arms of her lobby. In the elevator, she presses herself to the wall. Once in her apartment, she pours herself a Scotch and drinks it down too quickly. She pulls out the card Charlie gave her. Should she call him? But what would he do? Track her as well. She slips the card back into her purse. She wants to pretend none of it is happening. Later, when she steps out of the building with her overnight case, hoping to catch the bus to Weaver’s, her head pounds with worry and that glass of liquor. But she doesn’t see the man anywhere.
* * *
She’s amazed that Weaver’s made dinner. They both know how to feed themselves, but neither of them had ever learned the first thing about cooking. He’s set the table with chalk-white French damask napkins. Did he buy them just for her? Or did they belong to Clemence? No. They’re brand-new: The fabric labels are stiff. He opens a bottle of wine and asks for her to light the white tapers. He’s got two steaks laid out on a broiler pan. Green beans in a pot of water. He tells her there are baked potatoes in the oven. “Wrapped in tinfoil,” he says proudly. “I can’t have them in the oven while I’m using the broiler, apparently. So I hope they stay warm while I make the steaks.”
“Potatoes stay hot forever,” she says. She thinks of his envelope, which she considered her hot potato.
“No guarantees on the cooking,” he warns. “But it’s not unlike following a formula in a chem lab, thanks to this.” He lifts The Joy of Cooking. He didn’t own that before.
“Did you cook for her?” she asks. “Clemence?”
He doesn’t answer at first, just fusses with the meal to come.
“I guess mostly we ate out,” he says. “She couldn’t cook.”
“It’s hard to think of her here,” Roz says hoarsely. She can’t help herself. He must sense her distress because he stops what he’s doing and comes over to her, puts his hands on her shoulders.
“Please put her out of your mind. I swear you don’t need to think of her at all.”
“But she’s here. Between us . . .”
“She’ll never be here between us again,” he says. “And if you want to know the truth, she never was.” Never was? The pot of green beans has begun boiling and he turns back to lower it to a simmer. She can’t help thinking: Did Clemence sit in that chair? Did Clemence light that fire? Yet where are the floral curtains that Rosalind thought she’d find, the hooked rug or red canister set? Except for the gian
t Philips radio having been replaced by a handsome cabinet television, in no other way has the apartment changed. The walls are the same deep green. The furniture overstuffed, covered in wool and leather. Entirely masculine.
“Are you still in touch with her?” Roz asks, watching him gingerly light the broiler. She works hard to make it an offhand comment, complete with a sip of wine. She doesn’t look him in the eye or make much of it.
“No,” he says. “No reason to be.”
He takes a deep swallow of wine, knocking it back the way he drinks Scotch.
“Do you have any idea where she’s ended up?” she pushes. “Surely you have some feeling for her. You were married how long?”
“I told you, you can’t imagine the truth.”
“I want to,” she says.
He focuses on seasoning the steak: salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika.
“You like it medium rare, don’t you?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He looks up. “I don’t want to talk about Clemence,” he says. “Only you. You and me. That’s all that matters now.”
Rosalind can’t help but notice that on the bar cart, Weaver has set a large machine-turned silver frame displaying a photo of Roz and Weaver as a couple. It was taken five or six years ago at the wedding of Carl Sturgin—a colleague of theirs at the Met Lab. Though the photo is black-and-white, Roz remembers her cream-colored wool suit with the carnation-pink collar, the pink hat with a veil ruched into a flower at the side. It was before the bomb dropped, at a time when everyone was certain that their device would never, ever be used as anything but a deterrent. What a fine couple they made! Weaver, so upright and handsome. She, slender, graceful, and hopeful in her suit. His hand rests on her waist with affection, ownership, pride. He kept this photo somewhere the whole time he was married to Clemence. In a drawer beneath the paper maybe? In a file cabinet? Did he look at it surreptitiously? Did he think of her, while another woman sat across the table from him and slept in his bed?
* * *
The dinner he cooks is good. Far better than she could have done.
“Apparently,” Weaver says, “all you have to do is follow instructions. If I’d known earlier, I would have taken up cooking.” She helps him dry the dishes. He looks tired, though, and eventually sets aside the last few things he needs to wash to collapse into one of his big tweed chairs.
“Oof,” he says. “Work’s been hard this week.”
“What are they doing to you there? Are you on a deadline?”
“Rather . . .”
“Can you tell me what you’re working on?”
“Quantity.”
“Quantity? Of bombs, you mean?”
“I shouldn’t have said even that. No more questions, please.” He won’t tell her—but he shares secrets with the Russians?
Later, when he excuses himself to the bathroom, she pokes around his desk, reads the entries on his desk calendar. Next week there’s a scribble on Wednesday. K—drop, Midway tree, 2:30, it reads. She lets her memory absorb the entire page of the calendar. Later, she’ll be able to tell Charlie what she saw. She quietly opens his desk drawer and sifts through the bills, papers. There’s an envelope with a woman’s handwriting on it but no return address. Roz slides the letter out.
There’s something about the handwriting that stops her. It’s foreign. The same looped o’s as the notes in the margins from Madame Rousseau, her French professor in college. The notecard is thick and vanilla colored, with a seashell embossed at the top, iced in shiny clay-green ink. You can’t get away from me, it says, with two periods after me. When she looks up, Weaver is standing over her.
“Aren’t you a snoop,” he says. It’s not a question.
“I . . .” Heat scorches her cheeks. “I was being nosy,” she admits.
“Apparently.” His eyes are bright, the color of green olives. “Please give it here, if you will.” She hands over the letter and he glances at it, slips it back into its envelope, drops it into the wastebasket with something of a flourish. There’s a flutter in her stomach. A thrum in her ears.
“That letter was from Clemence, wasn’t it? You do know where she is.”
He turns on her. Suddenly, viciously. “Stop saying her name! I don’t want that name to come out of your mouth again!” His face is red, and the wolfish quality she’s noted in his new leanness seems magnified. Why has she pushed him? Why hasn’t she kept her questions, her jealousy, to herself? He turns away, moves toward the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” she calls out.
Nothing.
She comes into the kitchen to see him bent over the sink, leaning on his arms. He looks old.
“I’m just exhausted,” he says. “I just can’t bear to speak of her.” She notes his fingers are gripped and pale. There’s a sheen on his brow. What’s wrong with him?
“Do you want me to leave?”
He doesn’t answer.
“I’ll go.” She reluctantly goes to the front closet, finds her hat. “I should.”
“No.”
“I’ve upset you. Best I go. What did you do with my bag? Is it in the bedroom?”
He straightens up and stops her, his hands on her arms.
“Can you just refrain from asking about her, Roz? You’re torturing me. She’s not part of this equation. She’s not part of us.” His lips are tight, gray.
Charlie warned her. Don’t ask questions unless they’re natural. She really does wish she could go home.
“Stay,” he says. “Go get ready for bed. I’m awfully tired. You don’t know what it means to me to have you here. I’m sorry I lost my temper.”
Hesitantly, she steps into the bathroom, washes her face, changes into her nightgown. She’s brought this on herself. He tried hard to please her and she’s ruined the mood. But it’s taught her: She’s still angry at him. She’s still jealous. She’s spying on him because she wants revenge. It’s an ugly brew. Wouldn’t it be better to extricate herself? She hates that Charlie’s the one who’s brought her back to Weaver. That she never would be here if he hadn’t made her curious about whether her old lover is a traitor. But is she being honest with herself? Wouldn’t she have been drawn back by her feelings for Weaver alone? For they still linger, will always be there.
Yet, for some reason, as she slides into bed next to Weaver, she thinks of Charlie’s kind, worried eyes as he fanned her, recalls the way he pushed the cold cola toward her with an encouraging smile. He radiated kindness. He wanted to take care of her. Why couldn’t she love a man like that?
She and Weaver don’t make love. Maybe he’s angry. Maybe he’s too tired. She doesn’t feel she could be vulnerable with him right now. But when she rolls over, he holds her. She feels the kick of his sleep fall, and then the soughing of his dozing breath, even and comforting. He never used to fall asleep so effortlessly. But she lies there in his arms for what feels like hours, Clemence’s note etched on her vision: the expensive textured cream paper with the embossed green seashell, the looped o’s of the handwriting. The double period after me. You can’t get away from me. Later, Rosalind will write it out, just as she saw it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Louisa drops Ava off to spend Saturday night. Rosalind notices right away that her niece is chewing on her hangnails, sighing like a man with six children and no paycheck.
“You okay, monkey?” she asks.
“It’s them,” she says, rolling her eyes.
“Them?”
“My parents. They don’t talk to each other now. And they want me to talk for them. Ask your father if he’s going to be home in time for dinner tonight. Tell her I may or may not.”
“That’s no fun.”
“Even though they’re not talking, it’s noisy. Being angry, that’s noisy. You know?”
Rosalind nods. She thinks of the unsaid things that
crowd a room. It was sometimes that way with Weaver. Why don’t you love me enough to marry me?
“Things are complicated for adults,” she says.
“They make things complicated,” Ava says. “By not talking. Mommy was crying last night. She wouldn’t even talk to me.”
“That must have been hard for you,” Rosalind says. Ava shrugs.
“She said something terrible.”
“What?”
“She said, ‘Now nobody will care if I die.’”
“What did you say?”
“I said I’d care. And that she’d better not die because I’d never forgive her. She stopped crying at least.”
For the first time, Roz worries how hard it must be for Louisa: to be certain of Henry’s love for decades. And then to have him suddenly so angry that he turns his back on her, wants to leave. Roz has always taken Henry’s side, but now she feels for her sister, understands how it must unbalance her. Nobody supported Roz more when she was spun into oblivion by the loss of Weaver. Shouldn’t she do more for her sister? The thought buzzes inside her. Later she’ll call; she’ll try to break down the wall that Louisa’s built. At least right now, she’s helping by taking Ava off her hands for the weekend.
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