Trust Me (34 page)

Dulcie had come up behind the other woman, and gave her a comradely hug. Their two curly heads were side by side, their tan faces with pale laugh crinkles at the corners of their eyes. “Isn’t she terrific?” Dulcie asked, though Spencer couldn’t see quite how. But, then, years ago, he remembered, he had been insensitive to Dulcie’s charm. “The Greenfields have just moved to town, and I’ve promised to have them over.”

Deirdre glanced around, rather urgently. “Let me find Ben.” She hurried into the crowd, which was dressed with facetious country-club gaudiness—scarlet pants, straw hats—under the hanging cloud of mesquite-flavored smoke. Spencer felt a fateful sliding in his stomach.

“I don’t want to meet any new people,” he told his wife.

“You’ll like him,” Dulcie promised.

The aggressive copper-haired woman was dragging a man
toward them—a tall, dazed sacrificial lamb with a sheepish air, an elegantly narrow and elevated nose, slicked-down black hair, and a seersucker suit that gave him, with his blue button-down shirt and striped necktie, an endearingly old-fashioned, vaguely official ambience. He was, in his way, beautiful.

Spencer, his face heating up, hardly had time to protest, “I don’t want to like him.”

E
D
M
ARSTON
awoke in the night to urinate, and as he groped his way back to bed the moonlight picked out a strange flash of white paper in his wife’s top bureau drawer, which she had not quite closed. This drawer, he knew from twenty-two years of cohabitation, Carol devoted to her underthings and a small stack of folded headscarves over on the left. Paper belonged in her desk downstairs, or on the hall table, where she usually left the day’s mail. She was breathing steadily, obliviously, like an invisible ocean in the dark, not ten feet away. With two fingers extended in a pincer, taking care not to rustle, Ed extracted the paper out from under the top scarf and crept back to the bathroom. He shut the door, turned on the light, and sat on the closed toilet seat. As he unfolded the concealed document, his hands were, more than trembling, jumping.

It was a homemade valentine to her from the husband of a couple they knew, a pleasant bland couple he had never much noticed, on the politer fringes of their acquaintanceship. Yet
the valentine had been flamboyantly penned and phrased with a ceremonious ardor, its short text encircled by a large heart in red ink, a heart which, the writer reassured the receiver, was “even bigger this year than last.”

A weapon had been placed in Ed’s hands. He reread the missive more than once, and in his nervous excitement had to lift up the seat and urinate again. He switched off the bathroom light. The moonstruck snow outside the window seemed to leap bluely toward him, into him, with its smooth and expansive curves of coldness, its patches of shadow and glare. He felt toweringly tall, as if his feet rested not on the bathroom floor, which had fallen away, but on the earth itself. His trustfully sleeping wife, and her lover asleep in his house up the road, and that man’s own wife, and all their combined children were in his hands.

Still trembling, he refolded the valentine. Sliding along beside the bed toward the bureau in its slant of moonlight, he soundlessly tucked it back into the drawer, beneath the top silk scarf. Tomorrow Carol might notice its slightly exposed position, and rebuke herself, and thank God that Ed had not noticed. Not that she was much one for rebuking herself, or thanking God.

Suddenly her voice, out of the darkness of the bed, asked sharply, “What are you doing?”

“Trying to find you, sweetie. I’ve just been to the bathroom.”

She made no answer, as if she had spoken in her sleep. When he got back into the warm bed beside her, her breathing seemed as deep and oblivious as before. Gently the aroma of sleeping flesh and its soft snuffles and rasps washed over his senses. Her life was like a spring in some dark forest, constantly, murmuringly overflowing. Far away in the
neighborhood, a dog barked, excited by the moonlight on the snow.

It fit, he realized: Carol’s volatile moods of late, her spells of lovingness and depression, her increased drinking, her unexplained lateness in returning from certain trips into New York and from evening meetings in their suburb—meetings of a zoning commission, come to think of it, of which the other man, Jason Reynolds, was the chairman. It had been he, in fact, who had proposed Carol for membership; he had come to the house one night, after a portentous phone call, and, while Ed obligingly did the dinner dishes and put the youngest child to bed, murmured downstairs to her, at the dining-room table, of the crisis facing their suburb, of predatory builders and their corrupt brothers-in-law on the planning board, of the need for a woman on the commission who was here during the weekdays and could bring a homemaker’s point of view, and so on. Carol had told Ed all this afterwards, wondering whether she should accept. It would take her out of the home, she worried; Ed told her she had put in enough time in the home. She didn’t know anything about planning or building; he told her, speaking as an engineer, that there wasn’t much to know.

Now he wondered if even then, over two years ago, the affair had begun and she was only pretending to vacillate, to hang back. If so, it had been a pretty piece of acting. Ed smiled appreciatively in the dark. He had urged her to accept because she had seemed to him in danger of becoming one of those suburban agoraphobes who wind up not daring leave the house even to shop, who have everything delivered while they sit sipping sherry behind the drawn curtains. Twenty-two years and five children had pretty well absorbed the venturesome subway-rider and semi-Bohemian, in sneakers and
babushka, of their city days. She could hardly be persuaded, these last years, to come into town and join him for dinner and a play. Her nervousness about flying, as the children attained college age and began to fly here and there, increased to a phobia, and she no longer felt up to the trips she and Ed used to take to the Caribbean in the winter. “Anyway,” she would argue, “they say now the sun is terrible for your skin.” Carol was blue-eyed, with wiggly oak-pale hair.

“It’s always been terrible; your skin wasn’t meant to last forever. You can sit inside and read. You can use a number-fifteen sun block.”

“Well, that seems to defeat the whole purpose of going. Why not just stay home and save the airfare?”

“You know something, my dear? You’re becoming a real drag.” Ed had urged her to accept the commission appointment because he wanted her out of the house. He wanted her, if the truth be known, out of his life.

But she had done him no harm—had done, indeed, everything he had asked. Borne him healthy children, created a home that could be displayed to colleagues and friends, served as an extension of his ego. Yet, lying beside her night after night, rising to urinate once, twice, depending on his insomnia, which expanded in spirals like a rage, he had become convinced that there must be a better life than this. A better life for the both of them. Carol had her qualities still—a flexible grace, though she had put on weight with the years, and a good-humored intuitiveness that was like the pure blue pilot light burning in an old-fashioned oven—but Ed had never dared expect that some other man might covet her. Jason Reynolds’s message, in its festive red outline, had struck a tone handsomely blended of friendliness and passion, a tone of manly adoration. Carol, somehow, was loved. Realizing
this made Ed, too, feel loved, and like a child in arms he fell swiftly asleep.

For days and weeks Ed did nothing with his knowledge, merely observed. How could he not have seen before? At parties, the lovers would do a long circling dance of avoidance, elaborately courteous and jolly with almost everyone else there, and only after dinner, when the shoes come off and the records go on, and the tired host brings fresh logs up from the cellar, did Carol and Jason allow themselves to drift together, and to talk quietly in that solemn way of people to whom the most trivial daily details of one another’s lives have acquired the gravity of the sexual, and then to dance together with a practiced tenderness that they trusted those around them to be too drunk or sleepy to observe.

Jason was a thin and dignified man, a trust officer at a mid-town bank, who observed a rigorous health regimen of exercise and diet; he had a rowing machine, played squash at lunchtime in the city, and after dinner jogged along the country roads in a reflective orange vest. It sometimes happens with such people that their bodies make their faces pay the price of aging, and so it was with him: his middle-aged face needed flesh. His fatless, taut, weather-yellowed features, his deep eye sockets and long creased cheeks and dry gray hair were those of a man ending rather than beginning his forties. Jason was forty-two, like Carol. In his arms she looked young, and her broad hips suggested a relaxed and rounded fertility rather than middle-aged spread. Though Jason’s eyelids were lowered in their deep sockets, and seemed to shudder in the firelight, Carol’s blue eyes were alertly round and her face as pristine and blank as a china statuette’s each time the slow
music turned her around so Ed could see her. It was not their faces that gave it away, it was their hands, their joined hands melting bonelessly together and Jason’s other hand pressing an inch or two too low on the small of Carol’s back.

Ed was not watching alone, he noticed; the flickering, dim room, cushions and chairs and fuzzy heads and stockinged legs, was lined with shadows watching Jason and Carol, or studiously not watching. People knew—had known, with the casual accuracy of detached observation, long before he had, before the night of the valentine. Until then he had existed in a kind of bubble, a courteous gap in the communal wisdom. He had been blundering with a blind smile through society while the truth, giggling, just evaded his fingertips. This, in retrospect, was hard to forgive. Did his opposite number, Patricia Reynolds, also exist in such a bubble? What did she know, or guess, or feel?

She was a short woman, with exemplary posture, who seemed wooden to Ed. Even her prettiest feature, her thick chestnut hair, seemed a shade of wood, brushed shiny and cut short in a helmet shape, with bangs. She jogged and exercised alongside Jason, but the regimen that had ravaged his face gave hers instead a bland athletic smoothness. Her chin was square, her brown eyes opaque. From a wealthy but not famous family, she had attended correct second-best schools and was thoroughly the product of her background; with a mannish upper-class accent, throatier than one expected, Pat had a good-soldier air about her, as if she had stiffened in her mission of carrying her family line into the next generation. There were two Reynolds children—a son and a daughter. Pat was slightly younger than Jason, as Carol was younger than Ed. Ed had never heard Pat say anything unpleasant or unconventional; but, then, he had rarely listened to her. At parties they tended to avoid each other. He had the feeling
that he, with his rumpled, sleepless air, his incorrigible cigarettes and bossy, clownish, perhaps coarse manner, rather dismayed her; when he approached, she grew extra polite. Now, though, his eyes sought out her chiselled profile in the room, to see if she, like him, was watching.

In fact, she was seated on the floor not far away and, her face turned full away from the dancers, was discussing with another woman that most appropriate of topics for the commission chairman’s wife, zoning—the tragic break-up of the local estates, the scandalous predations of the developers. Ed moved from his easy chair to the floor near her and said, “But, baby—you don’t mind my calling you ‘baby,’ do you, Pat?—nobody wants to
live
in the old estates. The third generation is all in SoHo doing graffiti art. They can’t afford the upkeep and the taxes and nobody can afford servants and they want to get their money
out
and in
hand
.”

“Well, of course that’s what everybody says,” Pat said, “and I suppose there’s some truth to it.”

“
Some
truth! It’s all truth, Pat honey.” Six bourbons were talking through him, not quite in synchrony. “You blame these poor hard-working Italian contractors who do the bulldozing and put up their four-hundred-thousand-dollar tract houses, but it’s the rich, the
rich
who are greedy, who are dying to sell and let somebody else put the new slate roof on Daddy’s old stables. Condominiumization”—he was so proud at having got the word out intact that even Pat smiled, briefly showing her dental perfection—“is the only way to save these old places from the wrecker’s ball.”

The woman next to Pat, Georgene Fuller, tried to come to the rescue. She was lanky and lazy and whiny, with long bleached hair loose to her shoulders. Ed had slept with her, for six months, years ago. “Still, Ed, you have to admit—”

“I have to admit nothing,” he said quickly. “How about you, Pat? What do you have to admit?”

A flicker of puzzlement crossed this other woman’s even features. Georgene nudged Ed in the small of his back. But she needn’t have feared; it suited him to have Pat in the dark, in her bubble.