If Mrs. Sutter could see from the kitchen window all the way to the back wall of the barn, she would have seen Paul if he had been there. Wouldn’t she? If, as Paul had insisted, he had been working late on the floorboards, then Mrs. Sutter would have seen him, seen him from the kitchen window as she had seen him finishing up the back wall. If she could see the whole barn, well, then, how could she have missed him?
How could she? How could she have missed him?
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mrs. White pulled into her driveway, the question still pestering her. She tried to shake it away but, as she walked to the house, it followed like a persistent beggar. When she got inside and closed the door behind her, she thought she had left it at last outside, where nonsense belonged.
But, to her annoyance, she found it had come in with her. It was a discrepancy. Hadn’t Mrs. Sutter said the back of the garage? Mrs. White could only shake her head. She was sure that was what Mrs. Sutter had said.
There were only a few minutes until Mary would be home. Mrs. White found herself edgy, waiting for her, unoccupied. She went into the kitchen and took out the vegetables for salad. Then she switched on the kitchen radio. It blared out wild rock music, and Mrs. White, wincing, quickly changed the station. She put on the “oldies” station that played fifties tunes she liked. Peggy Lee was singing “Lover.”
Lover, when I’m near you,
And I hear you call my name …
Mrs. White began peeling the wet plastic from the lettuce. The familiar song pleased her, and she hummed along, though she had forgotten the words.
It was just a silly thing after all, she thought. Probably Mrs. Sutter was as blind as Paul had said. She was probably just too vain to wear glasses and too lazy to put in contacts. What she’d said about seeing Paul couldn’t be trusted. Mrs. White began to chop the lettuce.
Lover, please be tender,
When you’re tender, tears depart.
Still, she seemed like a nice lady, Mrs. Sutter. A little snobbish, maybe, but not malicious or anything. If she hadn’t seen Paul, it must have been because he hadn’t been there. And if he hadn’t been there, that meant he had lied to her when he said he was working late. Mrs. White’s knife slipped. The blade cut swiftly across the surface of her palm. She let out a small curse.
Lover, when you’re …
Mrs. White turned off the radio. She watched the injured hand for a minute and then sighed, relieved that it was not bleeding. Just a graze, she thought. Still, it stung. She fanned the air with the hand, as if it were hot.
Paul had never lied to her before. Why should he start now? When they were young, they had made a pact never to lie. Mrs. White smiled, remembering. Why would Paul lie?
Just then a small but audible banging came at the door.
Mrs. White called, “Coming.” She opened the door with her good hand and Mary burst in breathlessly.
“Mommy, Mommy, look!”
The little girl held up a long red unopened rose. “Look what they gave all the little girls in the class.”
Mrs. White smiled. “Why, isn’t that lovely? Why don’t you go and put it in some water?”
Mary nodded. She proudly tramped with it to the sink. Mrs. White followed her with her eyes, watching the bobbing bud. As she saw the color move up and down, up and down, clutched in the little hand, she could not keep from wondering what could be so important that it would make Paul lie. What could he possibly be doing if he wasn’t at the Sutters’?
It was such an awful question. It was all Dorothy’s fault, telling her those horrible, morbid murder stories. Now she was thinking morbid thoughts. Now—suddenly—in a single flash—something stirred in her memory that had not stirred in almost twenty years. She made a small noise, as if to ward it off, but it came to her anyway.… Something that had happened not long after she began dating Paul.…
On their first date together, Paul and Joan had gone to a dance. Joan had been dreaming of dating him for so long that she felt a bit dazed. She could hardly believe it was happening. Paul, on the other hand, seemed nervous and a bit too formal. He watched his own feet as they danced and seemed to be counting to the rhythm: one-two-three and one-two-three. Joan did not care. It was enough just to be in his arms.
Soon they went out onto the lawn for a smoke. Paul offered her one of his. Joan accepted it and held his cupped hands as he lit it for her. She could see his hands shaking.
They each carried a plastic cup of punch. From his coat pocket Paul took a miniature bottle of scotch, the sort they have on airplanes.
“My cousin’s a stewardess,” he said. “You want a spike?”
Joan shyly shook her head no. She hardly ever drank. Paul shrugged, as if to say “suit yourself,” and poured the entire contents of the bottle into his punch.
Until now neither one of them had mentioned Mike. Joan thought of him just then and felt a little guilty. She would probably not have been there if it hadn’t been for him. But she didn’t care; she was too happy. She watched as Paul let the smoke ease out of his nose. She watched him nonchalantly sip from his cup like a man of the world.
“What will you do next year?” she said. “After you graduate?”
Paul paused a minute. He stared off, as if searching elsewhere for the answer. Then he said, “Something. Something with my hands.”
Joan nodded. “Like building or … car mechanics, maybe?”
Paul shrugged. “Could be, yeah. Shop’s the only class I stay awake for.”
He smiled. It was almost a smirk. Joan did not know whether to join in the joke or not.
“Oh,” she said, then, after a moment, “I’m sure you’re a good student. I can tell, even in history. You’re probably just bored by the teacher.”
Paul paused as he thought about it. “Yeah—yeah, that’s it,” he said. He smiled at her fully now, and she, delighted, smiled back.
“Listen,” he said, suddenly awkward and serious again, “you’re not … you’re not still seeing Mike, are you?”
Joan blushed a bit, but she was glad he had the courage to bring it into the open. “Me and Mike?” she said. “No, no. We’re just—friends now.”
Paul nodded, unable to restrain a smile. “Yeah, that’s what I thought; that’s what I thought.” He nodded reflectively. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy and all. He’s just a little …”
He didn’t finish it, and Joan thought it better not to help him. At the moment, she meant to pursue it; she meant to ask him about what had happened on that deer hunt, what had ended his friendship with Mike. But then he was talking again, about something else, and the thought slipped from her mind.
She did not bring it up again for a long time. In fact, as the school year ended and her summer vacation began, they dated constantly, and yet Joan rarely asked him anything about his personal life. Paul was so closed off, so taciturn. He volunteered nothing; he never even had her meet his parents. There were even times when she felt afraid—afraid he would suddenly confide in her. She was afraid she would bungle it somehow, be unable to handle it. And she wanted to be perfect because she liked him so.
The fact was she more than liked him. She adored him. He was everything she thought he would be. He was strong and silent, self-sufficient but not selfish. His body was powerful, and his eyes were full of secrets. As the summer wore on, she grew ready to know those secrets; she grew eager.
After school had ended, Paul had had to look for work. For a while, he worked at a gas station, a job which exhausted him, and which he hated. But in August he got a job with a construction company, helping to build houses. It was then, when things were going well, that he told her he loved her. It was then they went to bed together for the first time.
Joan was still a virgin and when Paul and she lay together naked on his bed under the picture of a motorcycle he’d taped to the wall, she was not really sure if it had happened or not. She didn’t know whether to say “That was wonderful” or “It’s all right.?
??
She said, “Are you worried?”
He lit a cigarette, lay back, and smoked it pensively. “Nah, I just—I just don’t want to rush it, that’s all.”
She nodded. “It’s all right,” she said. Then: “You’re not afraid your parents will come home, are you?”
He turned away from her. “Nah.”
She watched him smoking.
“It’s all right,” she said again. She paused. She sensed that now was the time: this was the moment to open him up.
“You don’t like your parents much, do you?” she said.
Paul did not answer for a moment. Then he said quietly: “They’re okay.” He looked up at the ceiling and she could see his face was tight with the effort of self-control. “It’s just my mother. She’s got to … she’s got to mind him, that’s all. I mean, she can’t … She’s just got to stop it, you know?”
Joan slowly reached over and touched his shoulder. She whispered now. “Have you ever talked to anyone about it?”
Paul shrugged. “To Mike. A little.”
Joan hesitated. “What happened between you two?” she asked suddenly. The question surprised even her. “If you were both so close? What happened that time you went hunting?”
Paul turned over toward her. His eyes were now more alert; the muscles in his neck and arms had tensed. “He tell you something happened?” he said.
“No, I … I just thought … But it couldn’t have been nothing. Could it?”
Then Paul’s face was alight with its easy, charming grin. “Ah,” he said, “he was just angry at me ’cause I got a deer and he didn’t. That’s all. He was just being—petty, that’s all.”
Joan sighed. She felt, for some reason, relieved. It was exactly as she’d thought. Exactly. And yet even as the relief swept over her, something in Paul’s attitude, something in the way he had spoken, told her he was lying. She tried to shake it, but there it was. When he had said that, she had been looking into his eyes and she could see it there as plain as day.
Paul was lying on his back again, staring up at the ceiling dreamily, as if he were remembering something. Joan was about to speak when he turned to her. His eyes were burning. There was energy filling him, and then it was filling her too. He spoke again, but Joan wasn’t listening anymore. She was looking at him, waiting. His hand cupped the back of her head, his fingers clutched her hair. His face came close, his body covered hers. The wood under the mattress banged. It banged again and again. She did not hear. She did not remember a word he had said.
But Paul had lied to her. She had known it, and then he had taken her and she had loved him and she had pushed it out of her mind. Something had happened on that deer hunt, something that had made Mike hate Paul; and when she had asked Paul about it, he had lied. She had not thought about it for over twenty years, and now suddenly, as she stood with Mary by the kitchen sink, it flashed through her mind again.
It flashed through her mind because—because Paul was lying to her now again. He had not been at Mrs. Sutter’s. She knew it as certainly as she had known that day when he had told her about the hunt.
But why? Why did he have to lie to her? Was he covering up for something? Was he doing something he was ashamed of?
“Mommy!”
Mrs. White looked and saw Mary arranging her flower in a coffee cup. The long stem bent and the flower drooped.
“No, no, honey, you need a bigger glass,” Mrs. White said.
She advanced to Mary and carefully took the flower and the cup from her. She was picking the rose out, admiring its soft, shapely beauty, when a horrible thought suddenly occurred to her. So deeply did it rock her that she stood motionless for a minute, flower in hand, trying to force it from her mind.
“Mommy, look,” Mary said, and pointed. “The flower stained you.”
Mrs. White looked down at her own hand. From her palm to her wrist, a thin line of red had appeared. Her cut had finally started to bleed.
“Oh, my God,” Mrs. White whispered.
What if Paul were having an affair?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
What if Paul were having an affair?
Slowly over the next week the question became a suspicion. The suspicion became Mrs. White’s companion. It didn’t stay with her continually, rather it approached and backed off, approached and backed off, like a hungry dog that keeps coming to the door. She could neither believe it consistently, nor wholly push it away. From moment to moment it appeared to her in different lights.
In the mornings she would cook Paul’s eggs and look at the yellow mass in the pan and think: It’s impossible. Paul was just not that type of man. He was a hard and ambitious worker. He was always so contemptuous of the rich, idle men with “nothing better to do than have three-hour lunches and spend the weekend with their secretary.” And, besides all else, how would he ever find the time?
But, then, as she mixed the eggs with cheese or mushrooms, as the yellow became a slightly tarnished brown, she would think again. Maybe he wasn’t as busy as he said he was. If he lied about the garage at Mrs. Sutter’s house, why wouldn’t he lie about everything he did? Maybe he was so worried about saving more money because he wasn’t doing enough work …
By the time Paul would sit down to breakfast, his eggs, dry and overcooked, would have to be scraped off the bottom of the pan. Paul would look at them and make some smart remark, and Mrs. White would smile wearily. She blamed it on fatigue.
After he left she would put the dishes in the sink. She would run water on them to loosen the eggs, but leave the real washing for later. Then she would get the children off, their voices seeming vaguely to blare and recede, blare and recede about her, like that dog, like her suspicion.
She would go first to her bedroom and make the bed. She would pull the sheet up from where Paul had kicked it and puff the pillows and run a hand quickly down the covers to smooth them. When she was done, she would look at the tight, sturdily made bed and she’d feel ashamed. She was behaving like a woman on a soap opera. She had never cared for those programs. Why would she imitate their melodrama in real life?
She would tidy up the brushes and cosmetics by the mirror on the dresser. She would arrange the stacks of bills and papers Paul always left there. She would look at the mirror above the papers. And she would sigh.
Why shouldn’t he cheat on her? She wasn’t what she used to be. There were small wrinkles, like cuts, below her eyes, and her cheeks were on their way to becoming jowls. She had let her body go. She had so much extra, useless flesh on her now. Feeling heavy, she would sit on the bed, mussing it all over again.
When she drove to the market, she would pass Pine and Stamford and Williams streets, where the wealthy people lived, where Paul did much of his work. She would see the women coming in and out of their homes, revving up their cars, driving—where?—to beauty parlors, gyms, plastic surgeons? Of course they looked young. Why shouldn’t they? They could afford it; they had nothing better to do. Mrs. White would watch the grocery list flapping and dancing on the dashboard and think: I could still be slim and pretty, too, if I had all the time and money in the world. She could not blame Paul if he had had his head turned by them.
On Thursday morning she found that in addition to her cool morning coffee she had smoked one of Paul’s cigarettes while waiting to start the day. She had not smoked in years and the taste, at first, revolted her. But she quickly became used to the dirty taste and harsh aroma. She continued to smoke.
She had crushed the butt out in an ashtray when, through the window, she saw Jonathan Cornell passing by. She waved her hands about to rid the room of smoke. Then she went to the door, stepped outside, and waved at him, inviting him in.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Cornell had had a good day’s fishing. He’d landed one huge fighter of a trout and he was in a cheery mood. He did not even mind the prospect of Mrs. White’s light coffee and pound cake and, though he would have preferred to go straight home and clean his ca
tch, he entered her kitchen with an agreeable nod.
“Where should we put that thing?” Mrs. White asked, looking askance at the trout dangling from his stringer.
“The refrigerator?”
Mrs. White was reluctant. “Won’t it … smell?”
He eyed it, shrugged. “I guess so. You’d smell, too, if you were dead. All right, if you object, maybe you could give me a plastic bag.”
Mrs. White brought Cornell a Hefty trash bag. He ran a little water into it, tossed the fish in, and tossed the bag outside the door. Then he joined his hostess at the table.
“You look awfully smug this morning,” she told him with a smile.
“First catch of the season. I’ve been catching a lot of branches lately. Doesn’t do much for your morale.”
“I guess not. Your milk’s already in.”
Cornell smiled thinly. But he took an extra-large piece of Mrs. White’s cake.
There was an uneasy silence for a while as the two sipped and munched. Mrs. White looked quizzically at Cornell, who, in turn, looked at his plate. He was a man of the world, she thought suddenly, sophisticated, married once, divorced.…
“I wonder if you could help me with something,” she said.
“Something Paul can’t fix? If he can’t, I’m not so sure I—”
“No, no, nothing like that. It’s a … personal matter.”
Cornell grew quiet. Then, curious, he nodded.
“Oh, not about me, don’t misunderstand,” Mrs. White said quickly. “It’s a friend of mine. A girl I’ve known for years. You see, she … well, she’s a silly girl sometimes, and right now she’s all upset—she can’t help worrying that her husband is … having an affair. I’ve tried to persuade her that it’s … it’s ridiculous, her husband—he’s such a good man—but she still … nothing can completely convince her.”