That moment, Leonora learned how to wait. Learned all a woman as fidgety as she would need to learn about waiting in a lifetime. While her husband unbuttoned his left cuff. While he folded it up twice. While he started on the other. While she noticed a speck of lint on the carpet.
Slowly, Victor lowered himself into the chair farthest away from her.
She counted the frames that hung on the wall behind him: five.
Counted the faces of family in Anthony’s first-communion photo: ten.
Counted the nails in the string picture of the sailboat: seventy-four.
Said: “I know, Vic.” And felt him struggling. Resisting. But she pulled him in. Felt strong and beautiful and cold as she pulled him in. “I know about you and Elaine.” She was both—on stage and in the audience—being and watching this woman who looked extraordinarily calm; this woman whose black hair framed her thin neck; who didn’t look at him directly, just let her eyes follow the vines and leaves in the carpet, follow the vines out to the fire escape, along the washlines and back in, along the walls and to the frames above him. Five. “But I want to hear about her from you, Victor.”
She pulled him in closer yet, until his words slopped on the floor between them and froze into ice thick enough to keep him from reaching for her, ice fragile enough to make any crossing treacherous. She let him talk. The habit of confession. Of trading sins for absolution. Sitting as still as a priest in the confessional, she concealed all shock, all sadness, all rage, and whenever Victor hesitated, she said, “I know,” and bludgeoned him with her brutal silence till he said Elaine had seduced him.
“Oh, please,” Leonora said.
“I swear I didn’t intend for it to turn into sex.”
“What did you think it would turn into? A cartwheel? A Ferris wheel? A—”
“It’s the truth. She seduced me.”
“And you held still while she seduced you. Of course. What else could you have done? Now that was the first time, right? Tell me, how many times did she manage to seduce you over the months?”
“I’m ending it with her.”
“Don’t do it for me.”
“What are you saying?”
“That you’re on your own. That you’ve already left me,” she said, and felt stunned by utter loneliness. “At least have the decency to admit your part in that affair. Not that decency has anything to do with it.”
“I’m sorry. I am. I want us. You and me and Anthony.”
“And Elaine. And Elaine’s sister.”
“She doesn’t have a sister.”
“Right.” Leonora was reminded of a documentary she’d once seen about one afternoon in a marriage. The conversations between the woman and man were bizarre—their incessant probing of each other’s thoughts; their fussy competition for the affection of their five dogs; their inept cooperation in tidying their grimy kitchen—but once Leonora got beyond wondering why they’d let any filmmaker into that private mess of their lives, she realized that for them all this was normal and that, if a filmmaker were to follow any two people who were close to each other—follow Victor and herself—just for a few hours, they, too, would come across as bizarre: the things they did in private; the way they talked private-talk; the words and the gestures and the habits. Except that most people knew not to expose all this to a filmmaker. Still, the impact of the film on Leonora was her amazement at what people took for ordinary, because, for this woman and this man, what they revealed about themselves was not bizarre at all. At least not half as bizarre as this conversation with Victor.
Not even ten percent as bizarre as hearing Victor ask: “You want me to call Elaine now? Tell her I won’t see her again? I will. If that’s what you want me to do. I’ll call her in front of you. To prove to you that I’m ending it with her.”
“You expect me to take one phone call as proof? After you’ve been lying to me for one year and one month?”
His lips moved as if he were doing the math.
“How many seductions were you exposed to in one year and one month?”
He reached for the phone. “You can listen to what I tell her.”
“You would do that to her? Have your wife listen in while you break up with your lover? Don’t you think she deserves more?”
Victor stared at her.
“At least have the balls to tell her in person. You can’t just fuck someone—”
“I hate it when you use that word.”
“And I hate it when you do that word with someone else.”
“I am sorry. I said I was sorry.”
“You can’t just fuck someone for one year and one month and then end it over the phone.”
“You’re sending me back to her?”
“Are you afraid she’ll seduce you again?”
Leonora runs her hand through James’ hair—hair so curly and lush it snags her fingers—then down his spine, across his buttocks, flatter than Victor’s. As she tightens her fingers, she feels him squirm with pleasure. Away from James, she barely thinks of him.
“What happened between you and Mr. Amedeo?”
For an instant, she thinks he means Victor’s father, then realizes he’s talking about Victor. “What name do I have when you think of me?” she teases him. “Mrs. Amedeo?”
“Leonora. I thought of you as Leonora whenever I thought of doing this with you.”
“Good answer…I’ll tell you what happened between me and Mr. Amedeo. Another woman got involved in my marriage.”
James laughed.
“It’s not intended to be funny.”
“Just how you said it. Like you invited her into your marriage.”
“Most definitely not.”
“You know what’s nice?”
“Tell me.”
“That we’re using each other without pretending that it’s something else.”
“I’m not using you. I don’t believe in using anyone. And I’m—”
“‘Using’ is the wrong word. What I mean is—”
“Fucking?”
“Yeah…fucking.”
“Fucking each other without pretending for it to be love…I like that.”
They did try, she and Victor. Tried with their marriage after he left Elaine. Tried to be together more. Tried to talk and tried to listen. But Leonora made the mistake of wanting to understand—not only why Victor had been unfaithful, but also what her own decision would be. That’s why she encouraged him to take her inside his dreams, his fantasies. “No secrets between us, Victor. No lies.”
And he made the mistake of making her his confidante. All for the sake of honesty. Also because she was the only one he could talk to about Elaine.
She barricaded her jealousy inside her cold calm heart; didn’t flinch when he confided how often he thought of Elaine; witnessed his exquisite pain at saying the name of his beloved aloud: Elaine; understood that he needed to feel that charge at hearing himself say: Elaine. Because it had been like that for her, too, when she had started loving Victor: tasting the sound of his name, Victor; needing someone to witness that sound: Victor.
He offered her more than she wanted: how he envisioned Elaine thinking of him at the exact moment he was thinking of her—
“Thinking what?”
—how he’d dreamed that Elaine was getting on the El in front of him at White Plains Road while it was raining—
“Did she look back to see you?”
—and that he’d followed her, without her noticing, to the Crotona Park station and from there to her apartment—
“What is it like, her apartment?”
—with the green kitchen cabinets and the purple carpet, purple leaves on purple, and that they’d barely gotten inside before they’d made love—
“Fucked,” Leonora said. “That’s not love.”
—in their wet clothes, standing against the door—
“You didn’t take anything off?”
—and how he’d imagined pulling off his shirt and Elaine kissing
the dimple on his shoulder and—
“You do not have a dimple on your shoulder,” she whispered, the rage harsh in her throat.
“Well, I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do.” Stiffly, he pointed to his right shoulder. “Here,” he said.
“I would know if you had a goddamn dimple on your goddamn shoulder.”
“Want to see?”
“Spare me.”
Because he had torn the marriage vows that were sacred to her, she questioned his faith, his relationship to his God, trying to tear what was sacred to him. Whenever he’d wrest himself from those raw and strange conversations, she’d remind him that she’d rather know than speculate. What they created between them was a greedy and nightmarish honesty. Days and hours they spent on feeding this honesty with their pain, with their satisfaction at keeping their marriage alive, until the honesty got so fat that it craved more.
“I’m crazy about your body,” James tells her.
He is crazy about her body. He has told her. Many times. Leonora used to think he was merely saying it the way some men believe they have to tell you they love you once their hands get inside your clothes. Not that she has a lot of experience, but she reads enough to know that, indeed, James is crazy about her body.
“You are fantastic in bed,” he tells her as he straddles her.
“I’ve never been with a woman who likes sex as much as you.”
For an instant she feels ashamed. Insatiable. She doesn’t like to feel insatiable around food or sex.
But already James is pushing himself inside her. “Am I the best lover you’ve ever had?”
“The best,” she says, resolving that not even shame will distract her as she yields to the urgency between them.
When Victor arrived that morning to get Anthony, he was wearing a tux and carrying a Hoffman Soda carton. “Look what I got for you today.”
“I can’t believe you’re shlepping groceries to me on your engagement day.”
“I got you Dugan’s chocolate doughnuts and a butter dish and—”
If she didn’t stop him, he’d pack two cartons every day at work, one to drop off with her, the other to take home to Elaine. “Why, Victor?”
“Because we need a butter dish.”
“We?”
He glanced around the room as if making sure she hadn’t moved the furniture without consulting him. It made her want to drag the couch into the bathroom, her bed into the middle of the living room. Just to unsettle him.
“Anthony…” she called.
He opened his door as though he’d been standing behind it, wearing a new suit plus the black shoes Victor had bought for him.
“Your father is ready to go.”
“I’ll get him back to you early evening, if that’s all right with you,” Victor said, but he waited as if hoping she’d prevent him from going through with this foolishness. The collar of his new shirt pinched his skin, pressed a ridge into his neck.
She felt a strange sense of finality, more definite than on the day he’d moved out. It made her temples ache, and she pressed her fingertips against them.
“Another migraine?” Victor asked.
“Nothing you can do.”
“Well…” He got this nervous little grin on his face, the grin she’d found charming when she’d first met him.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Well now…” He ruffled their son’s hair.
But Anthony jerked his head aside. He usually was edgy before Victor picked him up, angry after he was back home.
“What have you told the boy about me?” Victor had asked her. “He’s content when he’s with me, and I can’t understand why he’s so aloof between visits, why he refuses to talk to me on the phone.”
“Don’t blame me,” Leonora had said. “He makes his own observations.”
One afternoon last month, when she’d taken the bus to retrieve Anthony from Victor’s tiny apartment off Westchester Square, she’d found them sitting on the sunny front stoop, Victor’s arms loosely around Anthony, who sat with his back to him. Victor’s left palm lay against Anthony’s chest, and she wished that they both would harbor that touch, Victor’s palm against their Anthony’s chest just like this, and that they would turn to that memory whenever they’d miss one another.
“Well now…” Victor said again, moving one hand across his jaw as if searching for his lost beard. “Anthony, the two of us better be off.”
As Leonora bent to kiss her son’s cheek, it gave her some measure of satisfaction that he did not shrink from her touch, and that Victor noticed. “Have a real good day with your dad,” she told him as if it were a regular visit, as if she were not worried about him. At least her father-in-law had promised her that he’d sit with Anthony. And there’d be others in the family, including Belinda.
She listened to their steps in the hallway, on the stairs, until she could no longer hear them. Eyes closed, she rubbed her temples. Orgasms were the best remedy for migraines, but James was still at work, and she didn’t feel like masturbating. She was restless. Searched for something to occupy her till he arrived so that she wouldn’t think of Victor with Elaine. She turned on the radio, filed her nails, flipped through copies of Look and Good Housekeeping, and when she came across instructions for decorative centerpieces, she chose to make the most ludicrous one, an edible basket.
At Russ’ on 183rd she bought the vegetables she needed, then got Pall Malls at the candy store. As she crossed the street, the old tailor in Koss’ window looked up from his sewing machine. At the Hebrew National Deli, she waited in line for pastrami on rye and a bottle of Dr. Brown’s cream soda, which she drank while working at her kitchen table, weaving strands of dough into a basket. But she didn’t feel like eating the sandwich because she was filling up on dough. Like Anthony, she preferred raw dough over anything baked, liked how it swelled inside her like light, adapting itself to her shape without making her feel heavy.
While the basket was in the oven, she got out her rolling pin to flatten red and yellow peppers, and then pressed flower shapes from them with cookie cutters. She carved radish roses, fashioned stems from asparagus, leaves from peapods. Her ferns were scallions and celery, cut into long strips, and she was arranging those around the flowers inside the warm basket when James rang the bell. She took one last look at her creation and was stunned into disbelief. Nothing was what it seemed: her braided basket was not rattan but bread, and her flowers were not flowers but vegetables. Altogether, her centerpiece looked exactly as it had in the magazine: false.
As she strokes the insides of James’ thighs, he curves himself toward her. She is amazed that she is capable of having sex without love. Amazed and a little smug. An added benefit is that, with all these orgasms, she’s hardly had any migraines.
He touches her left eyebrow with his ring finger. “How did you get this?”
“I was born with it.”
“Looks almost like lightning struck you here.”
“Lightning…” She smiles. Sees herself standing still beneath a tree as it is split by lightning. While she stays intact—the one change her eyebrow. Like the signature of lightning. Daughter of lightning. Lightning herself. Fast and hot and powerful. As a girl she used to turn the left side of her face away from her mother’s camera to hide this eyebrow that was almost entirely white except for a few dark hairs where it began. But Victor loved what he called the light side of her face, and she came to love it, too. The picture she framed of their wedding is the one with her face turned fully toward the camera, her eyebrow as white as her gown.
As James traces her eyebrow with one thumb, it moves her that he, too, appreciates that uniqueness in her. Even though he is so young. Maybe all along he’s been more mature than she thought.
But he destroys that illusion. “Have you ever thought of dyeing it black like your other eyebrow?”
“I don’t want to dye it black.”
“Don’
t get so mad. I mean, you paint your fingernails. And you wear lipstick. And—”
“That eyebrow defines me.”
“Sure it does. It’s only that—”
“What?” She sits up. Reaches for the wineglass.
“Never mind.”
“It’s only that—what?”
“That you’d be a real knockout if you dyed that eyebrow.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be a real knockout.” She hears the sharpness in her voice and thinks how much quicker this man retreats from her edges than Victor. James cannot match her there. Cannot grind his edges against hers and set off fire. Not like Victor. It makes her feel sorry for James. Makes her wonder how many men she will scar with her edges. I hope there’ll be many.
Setting down her glass, she reaches for James, traces the dark curls on his chest with her tongue, draws him close to her skin, aroused by his swift desire that blots out images of Victor walking toward a distant and deceptive altar.
Minutes after James leaves comes a knock on the door, and she opens it in her robe, thinking he must have forgotten something. But it’s Victor’s sister in the black party dress that used to fit just right but now hangs on her with the darts in the wrong places and the scalloped hem drooping.
“What is it?” Leonora shifts one hip into the opening of the door to keep Floria out.
“I want to be sure you’re all right.”
“I am very much all right.”
“May I come in?” No makeup ever. Just planes of pale, mobile skin. And that wide, mobile mouth with one freckle on the left side.
“I’m about to take my bath.”
“Only for a few minutes? You don’t even have to talk to me.”
“Did you go?”
“He’s my brother.”
“So…how was it then, his engagement party?”
“Sickening. I couldn’t stay.”
“Oh.” Leonora steps aside. Lets her in. “Anthony…How did he—”
“Quiet. The way he gets, you know? But not unhappy.”