Perfection (17 page)

But to my surprise and relief, Tomas salvaged the awkward moment. He stepped toward me, put his arm around me affectionately, and said, “Yes! She is!”

There was one woman left.
Her name was Eliana. She was not mentioned in Christine’s letter. Once the news was out in the open, Matthew had come over to talk with me about what he knew about Henry’s women. He remembered that it was Eliana who had called early on the morning after Henry’s death, and that it was this woman’s screaming voice I’d heard from my bedroom.

After I found Eliana’s name in Henry’s address book, I waited a few days before trying to reach her. I had saved her for last. I needed time to work up courage.

Late July 2003

I had met Eliana once,
just a few months before Henry’s death.

The same November 2002 that found Henry and me driving up Route 9 to tour the private school for Liza provided a welcome night out. Lindsay, Tomas’s former girlfriend, invited us to her birthday celebration. I thought she had broken up with him rather shabbily the summer before, while he was living in our attic, and in the inevitable way that people choose one or the other party of a fractured couple, we had remained closer to Tomas.

Our town provided little drama. Lindsay had a talent for making her own, however, and I was happy enough to be included. The event was to be a costume party. Our children were invited, and Liza happened to have a blue pinafore-style dress, so I volunteered the idea that we might go as characters from
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
.

“I hate costume parties,” Henry responded dismissively. “What a pain in the neck.”

“Yeah, okay, but it’s Lindsay’s birthday and
she
wants a costume party. Tomas is even going. Can’t we just humor her?”

“Everyone always humors that girl.”

“You might have a point there.”

I fastened the row of buttons on the back of Liza’s blue ruffled dress. I put on a wine-colored velvet dress, one of my vintage favorites, and the crown I had sewn from pieces of scrap brocade and ribbon. I was quite proud of my eleventh-hour effort. Henry reluctantly agreed to say, if asked, that he was the Cheshire Cat after I suggested that his smile was enough of a costume. He grumbled on the drive over, but I had to admit that, in spite of my mixed feelings about the hostess, I looked forward to the evening. Gray autumnal melancholy was seeping into the house, a bit more each day, with its signs of quickly encroaching winter isolation. And every night out in company was a night when Henry and I didn’t fight or head off to our separate offices. A party might provide the stage for some family togetherness.

As we entered the noisy, crowded space, I spotted an ebony-haired woman, slender, dressed in black, supervising the food and drink table. In New York City this attire would have been unremarkable, but in our town it was a noticeable dark mark. Her wrists were encircled with black leather studded bracelets. Her long hair shimmered blue-black under the overhead light. Her eyes were framed with dark liner and mascara. If this was a costume for one of Lord Voldemort’s followers, it was convincing, but she moved with such ease in it that I wondered if she dressed like that all the time. She smiled at me, but I felt chilled.

Other distractions filled the room. One woman, reincarnated as a young Elvis, with hip swagger and blue suede shoes, sang a stirring version of “Heartbreak Hotel.” Jesus wandered through the crowd, dressed in white robes and leather strapped sandals. Tomas was frighteningly convincing as a Mafia goombah, a pillow stuffed under a stained wife beater, his hair greased back. As I forced a smile, he joked about exorcising his inner demons and angled his beer can in the direction of the hostess.

Lindsay, the birthday girl, turning twenty-five, was as pretty as ever. Everyone had been at least a bit in love with this golden girl when she and Tomas had first moved to town. Tonight she did not disappoint. She wore a mandarin-collared dress that elegantly displayed her long-limbed body. She brandished a vintage cigarette holder in one hand, and with the other she smoothed her blond hair, twisted in an updo, with nervous excitement. She waited expectantly for Henry and me to respond to her costume. Anaïs Nin, the famously petite and dark-haired early-twentieth-century writer of erotica, she told us, her scarlet-glossed lips briefly pouting after neither of us guessed. Aha, we smiled.

I sighed, suddenly wishing I had a long cigarette holder, with a cigarette burning in it. But, alas, I had finally quit years ago, in the interest of becoming a good mother. I was already experiencing an all too familiar urge to glue myself to the wall. I took Liza’s hand and directed us toward the corner where I had spotted Emily and her children.

Emily’s costume also featured a long cigarette holder. She would have looked more convincing as Anaïs Nin, I thought, with her dark bobbed hair and red lipstick. Like the Parisian bohemians she admired, Emily flowered in the chatter, her cheeks flushed with the warmth of the animated room, the otherwise peaceful studio where Lindsay led our yoga classes. I wondered for a moment if Emily ever got bored living in our small town. Life for a nonworking mom must have been much more fun in Berkeley. Food co-ops, women’s circles, progressive schools, and genuine political activity. No one really did much about that around here, though everyone talked a lot about what we could do to save the world for our children. Here we were too busy re-decorating our houses.

It was a good party: Lindsay was a welcoming hostess, there
was plenty of food and drink, there was music, and the guests were feeling free enough to dance. I was the problem child in the room.

I left Liza with her friends, walked over to the drink table, and accepted a glass of red wine from the woman in black. She smiled again. I returned her gesture weakly and retreated quickly to my corner. The wine soon softened the edges of the day and my irritation with the world. Henry, who had been cheerfully circulating (his grumpiness faded quickly with wine and company), appeared, then disappeared to mingle some more. I was happy to stand around the edge of the room with Emily and a few other friends, while our kids entertained themselves on top of a pile of coats.

During a pause in conversation, I glanced over to check out the dark-haired woman again. She and Henry were talking and laughing. When our eyes met, his were shuttered into narrow slits against the overhead colored party lights, and he was grinning madly.
The Cheshire Cat, to perfection.

Liza’s voice distracted my gaze.

“What did you say, sweetie?” I asked, turning away from Henry and the noise in the room.

“Can we go home now, Mama?”
My thoughts exactly.

“What did you think of Eliana?” Henry asked me a few days later. He looked up from the clutter of papers on his desk as I handed him his mail. I couldn’t bear to set the stack of new envelopes on top of the already chaotic pile of unopened bills. It was one of the many times when I was relieved that we had separate checking accounts.

“Who’s Eliana?”

“The woman I was talking to at Lindsay’s party.”

“The woman in black? I thought she was scary looking. Who is she anyway?”

“Lindsay hired her to help at the party. And Tomas knows her too. I’m planning to have lunch with her next week. I was thinking of asking her to help me with my book, you know, as an assistant. What d’ya think of that idea?”

“Whatever happened to the idea of a smart English major from one of the local colleges?” I shot back, amazed that I needed to point out the obvious. “Does this woman have any research background? Does she know anything at all about food? Is she a professional writer?” I edged away from his desk, desperate to retreat downstairs to my office before a battle broke out.

“She isn’t really a writer,” Henry said. “She’d be more of a”—he paused for a beat, searching for the right word—“spiritual guide.” Henry looked at me, almost plaintively, but still provocatively, melding the two facial expressions into a kind of dare.

“A ‘spiritual guide’? Since when do you, Mr. Rational Man, son of Voltaire, go for ‘spiritual guides’? I can’t even get you to take another yoga class.”

This was becoming stupid. The dark-haired woman with the black leather wristbands—an assistant? With regard to his book project, this was the most laughable idea I had ever heard him propose. I wanted to get out of his office, immediately, before I exploded, but I was paralyzed at the doorway with frustration and a sudden paradoxical compassion for Henry, who looked so mournful and lost.

“I feel blocked,” he continued. “I can’t seem to get started writing my book. I need some help getting organized and focused.” A silent beat passed as we both acknowledged the untamed piles of paper. “And why do you always have to be so negative about
everything?”

“I had lunch with Eliana today,” Henry announced one evening after dinner the following week as he rose from his seat at the kitchen table. Liza was finishing a dish of ice cream. “I really think she’d be great at getting my research together.”

I turned off the faucet and set down the scrubby sponge and the pan I was laboring over. He was heading into the hallway toward the stairs. I followed him up to his office, already conflicted about leaving Liza to finish her dessert alone.

“Look, Henry, you asked me before, and I told you what I thought. Why did you ask me for my opinion when you have no interest in really listening to what I have to say?”

He sat down at his desk gloomily.

“Henry, it’s crazy in here.” I surveyed the clutter of papers on his desk. His was a long desk, a seven-footer. There were no visible empty spaces. If Nature abhors a vacuum, his office had become a kind of rain-forest jungle without a patch of bare earth. Since our talk the prior week, more stacks of unopened mail and magazines had sprung up on the floor, this in a room lined with custom-built bookshelves.

“I honestly don’t understand what you do all day. I mean, I get up, I go into my office, I work. I don’t visit Cathy for coffee. I don’t take naps, I don’t go to the gym three times a week. I work and take care of Liza, and I take a yoga class once a week.” I paused, hoping my voice sounded measured, not hysterical and angry.

“I can’t fix this mess for you,” I continued, wrapping my arms around my waist self-protectively and perhaps bitchily, “we’ll just get in a fight about it. But I really think you need
someone bright and capable, not some weird girl in black leather wristbands.”

“You never like any of my ideas.” His lower lip curled down in a pout, like that of an indulged child who still, after all, wanted my approval before he misbehaved.

“Yeah, well, then just keep doing what you’re doing since it’s working out so well,” I said. “But I don’t want that woman in my house. And don’t complain to me when you miss your book deadline. I’m going back downstairs. I want to keep Liza company and I have work to finish before her bedtime.”

Before we could have yet another argument about Eliana, she was gone. Henry, visibly disappointed, told me that Eliana had decided to leave the area and move home. I didn’t care where home was, just that she was far away.

“A piece of work, isn’t she?” Matthew said, forcing a dark laugh. He’d come over to show me Henry’s computer photo files, previously hidden from view. I looked at the picture of Eliana, in full Queen of the Night regalia, her eyes peering out provocatively between two curtains of dark hair, and I sighed. Now I understood Matthew’s stoic mood during Henry’s funeral. He had known all this already. He had protected me, and I loved him for that. We were happy to close the computer window after a moment. Eliana’s image was already seared in my brain.
This is going to be very bad.

“Something sexual happened between Henry and this woman,” Matthew pronounced quietly. “I read through some of the e-mails. It looks like Henry saw her while he was in California on his last two research trips in the fall.” As if echoing my thoughts, he added, trying for some of his trademark dark levity, “I imagine,
you know, sordid hotel room scenes.” I tried to conjure up the very worst, to avoid later surprise.

Afterward, Matthew and I sat on the porch. I felt unsteady, almost dizzy, with the heat and my anxiety about getting in touch with Eliana.

“Henry really had no spiritual life,” Matthew said, shaking his head and looking down at the stone floor. “He rejected all that as nonrational thinking. I was always trying to get him to read some books on spirituality. I thought it would help him. I wanted him to be happy.” He looked at me very directly. “I wanted both of you to be happy. I loved you both. A couple of times I think he might have been trying to talk to me about what was going on with him and Cathy, but I cut him off, I just didn’t want to hear this at all. You were my friend too. I told him so.”

I thanked Matthew for his loyalty to me and to our marriage. Intense fury rose in me again, though I tried to stay calm. Just as he’d done with Irena, Henry had tried to place another person very close to me in a situation where he would be forced to lie.

“He and I didn’t spend that much time together the last year or so,” Matthew continued. “He hardly ever called me. I could see that there was something really missing in his life. He could be very self-destructive, ever since college, when we all drank too much and did drugs.”

“Yeah, he loved telling those stories, didn’t he?” I closed my eyes for a moment, remembering the adventures he’d told about his college days (the most colorful tale involved buying LSD preserved from the sixties from a nameless dealer at the Syracuse airport), and our own times together before Liza was born, when we’d all gone to parties and bars together.

Entering our thirties, we’d cleaned up our acts. I was never
much of a drinker anyway. Henry had stopped drinking for a year, and when he resumed, he drank only modestly. Therapy seemed to have been instructive—he spoke to me about how he had used alcohol to “self-medicate.” He understood finally, he said, how to drink in moderation. But I wondered now about the weekly dinner parties Henry insisted on throwing. Perhaps at some level they were about trying to recapture some of that time, to create an atmosphere of lawless abundance.

“Maybe”—Matthew sighed ruefully—“considering how everything turned out, maybe he was better off just drinking.”

I wondered about the transference of his addictions—drugging, drinking, adultery, it was all a kind of risk-taking for its own sake.

By this point, I hoped that nothing could really shock me, that I had reached the end of the line. I had been reduced to the level of silently praying (I, the skeptic) that Henry had cared enough about me to use a condom. Eliana looked like she got around, more than I had anyway in the last sixteen years. I had been a faithful wife.