“Some documents for Naturcare.” He waved a hand dismissively. “But don’t bother; I’ve already looked through everything here.”
“I moved some things out to the garage,” I suggested.
“Maybe I’ll look there before I go,” he said distractedly, as I hoped he would.
I shook my head. “Not tonight. It’s late, and the kids and I need to get to bed. And next time, ask me before you start going through my office.”
He glared at me with disgust, having fallen into the trap. I savored my mean little victory on the postmarital playing field, but it gave me small satisfaction. I felt diminished, and I relented a little. “Would you like some coffee while you clean this stuff up? It would only take a minute.”
He gave me the cold look that only someone with light-colored eyes can properly effect. He had often told me the best negotiating position for a lawyer is to be sitting on his opponent’s chest. When had he become so unyielding, so hard? Toward the end of our marriage, he laid out his clothes every night—his suit first, then his shirt and tie, his socks and underwear on top. Did it comfort him to have this tangible reminder of his “real” identity so close? Did it smooth his entry into the world of important issues and big-time compensation? Did it speed his exit in the morning?
He hadn’t always been that fastidious. His dorm room at Stanford, where he was a senior and I a sophomore when we met, was predictably chaotic. It was stacked with books, of course, and papers and all the normal detritus of a liberal arts education, but there were athletic trophies, too, and cast-off clothes piled beneath the Miró print on the wall. Not just a bookstore poster like the rest of us had, but an honest-to-God signed and numbered lithograph. I took it as a signpost of “true culture,” like Steve’s ability to discuss Camus in well-accented French (though he was only taking the twentieth century French lit class to fill a language requirement for his Poli Sci major) or to introduce Kierkegaard into a conversation without sounding pompous. He was a Renaissance man, well-rounded and proficient, and law school would be the key to unlocking opportunities for exercising the broad scope of his talents. He scorned corporate law and making money; he would be a great jurist like Felix Frankfurter or a politician like Earl Warren, but either way, the only place to be was the Supreme Court.
I liked it that he didn’t feel he had to pick up the room for me (though his roommate, a meticulous transfer student from Princeton, moved into an available single about four weeks into the term). We had to shift Principles of American Government and Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox and The Great Depression off the bed and onto the floor, so we could progress from protracted mouth exploration to more serious anatomical discoveries. Swooning back against the dusty pillowcase, nearly beside myself with excitement, I moaned when his fingers made electric arcs beneath my shirt. In no time at all, his hands were sliding down inside my jeans with what seemed like amazing expertise.
“Take them off,” he whispered.
I could scarcely catch my breath to answer him. Still, common sense had not entirely deserted me. “Do you have anything?” I asked him. I was not on the pill, and my education was costing my parents so much a year that I was not about to take foolish chances.
He looked up from what he was doing and frowned a little. “No. Don’t you?”
I shook my head.
Even then, Steve was not easily defeated. “It doesn’t matter,” he said and tugged at my jeans.
“Steve—”
“Trust me.”
Volumes can be written about women who have fallen for that line, but I was not yet old enough for a disinterested assessment. I slipped out of my jeans, which suddenly seemed unnecessarily burdensome and restrictive, and when his fingers gently eased off my underpants as well, I made no protest.
I was not so yielding, however, when he knelt on the rug beside the bed and pushed my legs apart. “Don’t, Steve,” I said, clamping them together again so that the sponginess of my inner thighs would not show.
“Are you sure?”
This was a difficult one to answer. While I was thinking about it, Steve took the initiative. In a short time, I stopped thinking altogether.
“Jesus,” I gasped.
“Did you like it?” Steve asked a while later, while I applied a wad of tissue to strategic areas. The rough dorm blanket chafed my bare backside, and the sheets were all the way down to the foot of the bed.
“Jesus,” I said again.
“Jesus, Caroline,” my husband said coldly, interrupting my reverie. His fingers curled around the edge of the desk. “You really are manipulative, you know?”
“I’m manipulative?”
“What would you call it? And while we’re on the subject of manipulation, I don’t appreciate your going behind my back and complaining about me to one of my oldest friends. I wasn’t going to say anything, but when you act like this—” He broke off in apparent exasperation over my perfidious behavior.
You rat, Gene, I thought. Still, I remembered his idea about not throwing gasoline on the fire with aggressive tactics and tried for moderation. “I didn’t know who else to talk to,” I told him candidly. “After our last conversation about…about the house, and about Jason and Megan, I was a little upset. I needed to talk to someone who cares about both of us and get his opinion.”
“From what I hear, you were throwing around accusations about Barclay Hampton as well.” His mouth was tight and ungenerous.
I shrugged. “I just said that it looks like Eleanor was right: Some men do take advantage of their wives.”
“You got all this from the book Eleanor was writing?”
I squirmed. “More or less.”
“And you believe it?”
Yes. “I don’t know,” I told him.
“Caroline, I am seriously worried about you. This obsession you have with Eleanor Hampton is unhealthy, to say the least. I can’t believe you would drag one of our closest friends into our personal affairs on the basis of the rantings of that lunatic woman. You’re imagining this whole thing!”
“Did I imagine that you want to sell the house and take custody of Jason and Megan?”
“Look, I know I rushed you on that. It’s too soon; I see that now. Christ, we don’t even have a legal separation yet. I know you need some time to think things through. But face it, Caroline, you’ve got to get on with your life. Look forward. You might enjoy the challenge of living somewhere new, starting a new career without anyone to worry about except yourself.”
“You bastard.”
He sighed. “Have it your way, Caroline. But one way or the other, things will move forward. It would be better for everyone if they proceed harmoniously, but it’s really all up to you. If you want to fight me on every issue, you’ll have to pay a lawyer a lot of money to do it in court, and that will put a big drain on your resources. Think about it.”
I was so frightened and angry I couldn’t get my breath to answer him. I stood leaning against the doorsill, arms folded, unwilling to give him the victory of leaving him alone in the office.
When he had put all my papers and books and things away (not back, because that would imply that he put them where he had found them, and of course he didn’t), he pushed past me in the doorway. He stopped in the hall and looked at me. “One more thing, Caroline. Leave this thing with Barclay and Eleanor alone. Forget about it, and get on with something else.”
I drew in a breath to tell him he made it sound like a threat, but he put out a hand to silence me. He always had to have the last word. “Don’t make a big thing out of it,” he said with a sigh. “I’m just telling you for your own good.”
I resisted the urge to chase him down the hall hurling epithets and presently was rewarded by hearing him converse with Jason for a minute or two in well-modulated tones. Then I heard the car start up, and he was gone.
I was about to shut off the light in the office and go to bed when I paused, my attention caught. There was something different about the room, something more than j
ust the reordering Steve had done in the aftermath of his search. As a matter of fact, there was something missing.
I looked around dully for a few moments. I was very tired, and unless you have a photographic memory, trying to identify the missing piece of the puzzle is like trying to reconstruct a map of the United States totally out of your head. Try it. I shifted things around mentally a bit and then I had it: I couldn’t locate Eleanor Hampton’s box.
I had stubbed my toe on it every day for a week, and then, gradually, it had become part of the office furniture. When I thought about it, I couldn’t really remember the last time I had seen the box. It might have been gone two hours or two days. I had transferred most of the contents to the attaché case I had taken to coffee with Gene, and as far as I knew, that was still upstairs in my closet, where I had left it. All that was left in the box were a few of the most vitriolic letters, the ones I had already gone through carefully and decided should never see the light of day.
Still, it bothered me that the box was missing. It occurred to me that if Steve had stumbled across it, he might have destroyed it in a fit of pique. I briefly considered calling him to ask whether he had done anything with it, but I did not particularly want to remind him of its existence, and it seemed likely, given his loathing for anything having to do with Eleanor Hampton, that he would have given it a wide berth.
Then a more sinister thought occurred to me: What if he was looking for something that had been in the box? I had told him it was just Eleanor’s fictional ramblings, but Barclay might have known that Eleanor had documents that would show he had tried to defraud her. What if Steve had mentioned that she gave me some materials, and Barclay had asked him to find out what I had? I wondered how damaging the documents would be if they got out.
You’re paranoid, Gene had told me. Like Eleanor. Maybe I was seeing the bogeyman in the closet, but first thing in the morning I was going to find a copy machine and file a second set of the documents in a safe place. It couldn’t hurt, even if I was wrong. The whole thing seemed like a bad spy novel, and I couldn’t really believe the scenario I had created, but there was no doubt that, in addition to behaving belligerently and making some pretty nasty implied threats, Steve had acted rather strangely.
That reminded me of something else I wanted to check. “Jason,” I called out when I heard him going up the stairs to his room, “what time did Dad call to tell you he was coming over tonight?”
The heavy tread stopped. “I didn’t talk to him, Mom. He just came. He said he had to look for something important. I thought it would be all right. I mean…”
“It’s fine,” I said in a reassuring tone. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Did he find what he was looking for?” he asked anxiously.
“I don’t think so.”
I followed him up the stairs and down the hall. The light was showing under Megan’s door. I opened it gently. Her bedtime was usually about 9:30, but she often fell asleep before that beneath a pile of books or, occasionally, Melmoth.
Her hair was spread out on the pillow, and her eyes were tightly closed. She looked absurdly young and vulnerable, and there was none of the budding confidence she exhibited while awake. Her fingers still marked her place in her geography book, tracing the tributaries of the Mississippi. I raised her hand, heavy with sleep, and removed the book. She turned on her side and opened her eyes a little.
“Hi, Mom. What time is it?”
I told her.
She stirred. “Sorry. I fell asleep. Was Dad here, or did I dream it? I thought I heard his voice downstairs.”
“Yes, he was here.”
She sighed. “Why didn’t he come up, then? I would have liked to see him.”
I smiled and pulled the covers up around her chin, as if she were four instead of fourteen. “He wanted to. I told him you were sleeping.”
“Oh. Okay. Good night.”
“Good night.”
They were so natural, these lies. I’d scarcely noticed when I’d begun to cover for Steve’s lapses with Jason and Megan, to reinterpret, excuse, fabricate. I had been doing it for a long time before he moved out. Occasionally, in a mood of extreme truthfulness or a bout of self-criticism, depending on your interpretation, I had to wonder whether part of me did not relish the fact that Steve was not as good a parent as I was. Having to cover for him was proof of that, wasn’t it? Mostly, however, it just made me angry. How could a man who couldn’t even take the time to come upstairs to see his daughter have the gall to suggest that he take custody, just because the arrangement would benefit him financially? No way, Steve.
So much anger, so little time. No wonder the kids looked apprehensive every time the subject of their father came up, despite my best efforts at insouciant cheer.
I had one other inquiry to pursue before I rested from my labors for the night.
I went down the hall to our—my—bedroom and closed the door. I loved this room. An interior decorator friend had hand-painted a Mexican motif along the base and top of the walls, and I had added south-of-the-border touches in the throw pillows and terra cotta pots of dracaena and sansevieria. Wide casement windows opened onto a tiled balcony. It was spacious and light, and in summer and early fall, night-blooming jasmine perfumed the air.
I walked to the bedside and pressed the message button on the answering machine.
Beep.
“We’d like to interest you in our Med-Alert system, which ties into your phone line and enables you to signal for help if you fall down and can’t get up—”
Beep.
“This is Doctor Kronberg’s office calling to remind you that your last dental checkup was more than six months ago. I’ll call again to schedule an appointment—”
Beep.
“Caroline, this is Susan. I just called to find out if you still want to go to the Old Globe Theater next week. The firm is picking up the tickets but…”
Beep.
Once, in a frenzy of English-major-style speculation (and doubtless under the influence of one too many margaritas), I came up with the theory that the answering machine is the perfect metaphor for the deconstructionist’s view of reality: i.e., that reality is incomplete if viewed from any one point of view, and incoherent if viewed from all points of view at once. Still, the sum of my messages gave me a pretty coherent, if scarcely upbeat, view of my new life overall, like those experts who are supposed to be able to reconstruct your entire personal universe by sorting through your trash.
I pressed the message button again, just in case.
Nothing.
Steve hadn’t called first.
Another lie.
7
Dear Eleanor, read one of the letters I took out of the case to copy, As I tried to explain to you last week, you are liable for one half of the losses on our investments out of your settlement figure. The debt accrued until the day of the divorce and will be approximately $700,000. The value of our community property was frozen at the date of our separation, so it is not reasonable for you to keep insisting on a larger portion of my interest in the law practice just because it has recently increased in value. You are still left with a sum that should be more than enough to support you and the children in comfort.
This letter is also your official notice that your personal coverage under my medical plan is canceled as of today’s date, and from today forward you are responsible for paying the premiums on the children’s coverage as well, as per our settlement agreement. To help you in this, I have outlined the amounts and expiration dates of the premiums as follows…
Eleanor,
I write to inform you that in view of your refusal to stop slandering myself and my wife through deliberate and malicious lies about our personal lives, I will in future reduce your support by $500 for every instance that is reported to me.
Yours sincerely, etc.
Dear Mrs. Hampton,
Thank you for your inquiry into the possibility of our representing you in connection with yo
ur divorce proceedings. I regret that I am considering leaving the practice of law to become a judge, and while a final decision has not yet been made, I do not feel that it would be fair to represent you under the circumstances. Nevertheless, I wish you all the best.
Very truly yours,
Jay Thompson, Esq.
Dear Mrs. Hampton,
We have received your request for postponement of payment of country club membership dues for the coming year. We are sorry to inform you that your husband, Mr. Barclay Hampton, sold your membership in October. Divorce is always a sad and complicated matter, and we regret the necessity of informing you in this fashion. Should you wish to purchase a membership in your own name, please contact our membership secretary at…
Dear Mrs. Hampton,
As a follow-up to our conversation of last Tuesday, I would like to reiterate the point I made to you at that time. Although I understand the source of your rage at Mr. Hampton, your anger must be diverted through more legitimate channels. The slanderous attacks against Mr. Hampton, Miss Lindera, and Eastman, Bartels, and Steed must stop. If you cannot live within the guidelines I have set down, I will cease to represent you. I cannot spend my time and talents attempting to justify your unjustifiable behavior to the courts. Moreover, I feel that it is my duty to suggest that psychiatric counseling might be of great potential benefit at this stressful time.
Wishing you all the best, yours sincerely, etc., etc.
Dear Eleanor,
Believe me when I tell you how truly sorry I am about the way things have worked out between you and Barclay. We at the firm are all fond of you and hope you will stay in touch, particularly if we can be of any service to you or the children. At the present time, however, I’m afraid I cannot be of any further assistance with regard to Barclay’s bonus. That is a confidential firm matter arrived at between the partner himself and the compensation committee, but of course it is also a matter of record with the IRS. If you really feel it necessary to do so—and I cannot believe, dear Eleanor, that it will be—you could have your attorney subpoena the tax records. At all events, the matter is out of my hands. We at Eastman, Bartels, and Steed are sincere in wishing you all the best.
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