Nursing her espresso, she recalled—feeling sad for herself—how she had supported George at the beginning of his career by listening to him, by nodding at whatever he said, by not complaining. Even though she’d known there was no money in writing. George had said such a thing often, apologetically, as had her father (less apologetically). In those days George would take her out to his favorite cheap little Italian joint, where the waiters rattled off the menu—always different, always fresh—each night from memory. There, seated at a table sans tablecloth, a candle in a wine bottle flickering between them, he’d tell her about his latest story, his newest idea, as if he too had a fresh menu every night. She’d marveled at the genuine interest this respectable college professor appeared to have in her opinions. Not wanting to jinx it with her personality, she smiled at him and nodded and flattered him. All for him, for her George.
What could have merited this humiliation? Now the whole world would look at her differently. George knew her so well, maybe he had assumed she would never read it. A risky maneuver. But no, she concluded with scorn, he didn’t really know her that well at all. Johanna—she imagined her vividly now, sitting beside her in the cramped café, sweaty and black-toothed, she of spotted bosom and paltry existence—was nothing like her. She considered storming into every bookstore, buying every copy, destroying them somehow—a huge bonfire lit on a cold December night—but that was mad, of course.
She drummed her fingers on the table, checked her wristwatch blindly, and, unable to bear the anxiety any longer, resolved to return home and read the book. George had several copies of it in his study, and he was away until evening.
She paid for the coffees, apologizing for her absent friend, Johanna, whose untouched latte cooled, foamless, on the table. The black-aproned waiter paid no heed as she stepped out, pantyhose wrinkling around her ankles like furrowed brows, as if in reaction to the cold.
Walking home, Mrs. March passed a clothing store where two saleswomen were undressing a mannequin in the window. The women pulled at the dummy’s clothes viciously, one taking off her hat and stole and the other tugging at her dress, exposing one glossy, nipple-less breast. The mannequin looked on with such vivid, black-lashed blue eyes, and such a painful, wretched expression, that it compelled Mrs. March to look away.
Mr. and Mrs. March lived in a rather agreeable apartment on the Upper East Side, with a dark green entrance canopy displaying the address—Ten Forty-Nine—in cursive script, each word capitalized, as in the title of a book or a movie.
The building, its small, box-shaped windows stacked with small, box-shaped air-conditioning units, was presently guarded by the day doorman, rigid in his uniform, who saluted Mrs. March courteously as she entered the lobby. Courteous but contemptuous, Mrs. March thought. She always assumed he must despise her—and most likely everyone else in the building. How could he not, when he was there to serve them and adjust to the patterns of their lives while they lived in luxury and never once bothered to glean anything about him? Although, she now considered woefully, maybe the others had made an effort to know him. Maybe the fact that she never asked him anything about himself, that she’d never after all these years noticed if he wore a wedding band or if he displayed any children’s drawings by his desk, accounted for the starch in his manner toward her. How inadequate and unworthy he must find her, especially when compared to the other women in the building—retired ballerinas and former models and heiresses to great fortunes, some of them.
She crossed the lobby, which had been decorated for the holiday season as it was every year. A Christmas tree stood in the corner nearest the entrance, adorned with secular stars and candy canes (no choir of angels or rustic Nativity), and wreaths of artificial fir hung over the lobby mirror. She looked at her reflection in passing and, as usual, found it substandard, and tried to plump out her hair.
She was careful, when entering the elevator—a grand, ornate contraption—to check behind her in case anyone else intended to enter. It was often taxing, interacting with neighbors, and the ensuing expectation to comment on the nation’s state of affairs, or the building’s state of affairs, or, horror of horrors, the weather—she was simply not up to it today, of all days.
The mirror paneling inside the elevator revealed several Mrs. Marches, all looking at her, alarmed. She turned away from them to focus on the numbered buttons lighting up in sequence as the elevator arrived at the sixth floor. She closed her eyes and sighed in an effort to center herself.
Her nerves dissolved when she reached door number 606. Such a beautiful, round number, she had always thought. She would have felt worse after this bad day if she had come home to a 123, or some such discomfiting number.
She opened the door to a rush of fresh air—Martha must be airing out the living room—and hurried through the hallway, wishing to avoid her housekeeper at all costs. She ducked into her bedroom, where she could hear through the wall the fast-paced jazz playing at the neighbors’. The walls were shamefully thin for such a luxurious apartment, and Mrs. March wondered, not for the first time, why they hadn’t addressed the issue when they first renovated. She may not have even noticed it back then.
She shed her coat and gloves as if removing a suit of armor, then stepped out of her shoes and walked into the hallway, treading lightly on the creaking wooden flooring that was so fond of betraying her presence. She stood still for some seconds, illuminated only by the lazy sunlight drifting into the hallway through the open door of her bedroom. The other doors along the corridor were closed, including the one to George’s study. She tiptoed toward it. A voice, likely Martha’s, called out from the living room as she slid inside and closed the door softly behind her.
Half expecting to be greeted by an audience applauding her pitiful stupidity, she was received instead by dark red toile wallpaper depicting Chinese scenes and brimming bookcases and lofty abstract paintings. Mrs. March was secretly convinced that George was just as baffled by modern art as she was, even though they were both self-proclaimed enthusiasts. Against one wall sat a huge leather chesterfield sofa, fitted with paisley sheets, speckled with crumbs, and marked by burn holes from his cigars. George occasionally slept here when under one of his writing spells.
The windows faced a rather bleak brick wall. George couldn’t deal with distractions while writing, and he must deem even this uninspiring view too diverting, for his desk was turned away from it to face the door.
Mrs. March approached the desk almost apologetically. She had never wielded the confidence to enter this room unattended, much less to do what she was about to do. The word for it, in her mother’s vocabulary, was snoop.
She moved her fingers over the table like a blind person, rattling the monogrammed pens, lifting the lid off a porcelain jar to finger its contents (cigars and matchboxes). Her eyes fell on the corner of a newspaper clipping protruding from a notebook. She pulled it out with a gentle tug. A beautiful young woman smiled up at Mrs. March from a black-and-white yearbook photograph. She had long dark hair and dimpled cheeks, and the easy smile of someone not deliberately posing. SYLVIA GIBBLER STILL MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD, the headline read. Odd, thought Mrs. March, for George to have saved a clipping of such a grisly event. It made her insides churn. Sylvia Gibbler, she recalled vaguely, had been all over the news after disappearing from her hometown in Maine. She had been missing for weeks. Research for a book, she told herself, tucking the article back into the notebook.
As last she spotted her quarry—her eyes registered the rich, baroque colors of the cover before her mind could process them—on the edge of the table. On the floor to the left of the desk lay a whole box of them.
She picked up the novel. It sat heavy in her hands, her fingertips leaving oily prints on the glossy dust jacket. The texture of it unnerved her. It was strangely smooth, like the skin of a snake she had once been forced to pet in science class. She opened the book nervously, slowly, at first, looking for the dedication. She flipped from the title page to the first
chapter, then back to the title page. She could find no dedication. This in itself was strange, for George included one in all of his novels. She had been the recipient of one herself, years ago. Once the novel was published she had asked George to sign that particular page when gifting friends, so that it wouldn’t go unnoticed.
She turned a few more pages and accepted, with frustration, that there was no dedication. She opened the book at random, the spine crackling. She read quickly, superficially, but still managed to absorb the words, so beautiful and soft they melted off the pages like butter.
The whore from Nantes. A weak, plain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, unlovable wretch. Johanna’s physical description could safely match her own, but then her appearance was so unremarkable she couldn’t say for sure whether it was intentional. Always coated in fur, her coarse hands protected by gloves (Mrs. March flipped through the pages for any reference to the color—if it was mint green she would die), her petticoats regularly steamed and perfumed—although they were rarely seen, for her clients, who paid her out of pity, would not touch her. And finally, an inevitable fate, one of pauperism and squalor, a death worthy of an Italian opera, open wounds seeping into the mink …
Something so ugly described so beautifully. To trap you, surely, to trap you into reading and slowly seduce you into agreeing with this deplorable portrait. And the whole world would know or, worse still, would assume. They would see inside her, wickedest of all violations.
On a frightening hunch, she leafed through the bloated book to the acknowledgments page, scanning the names—editor, agent, professors of French history, mother, father (always in our thoughts and prayers)—until reaching the very last line: “lastly and most importantly, to my wife, a constant source of inspiration.”
Mrs. March clutched her breast, breathing hard, faintly aware that tears were falling amidst convulsive gasps. Then she shook the book, smashed it against the desk, opened it to the author photograph on the jacket flap, clawed out George’s eyes, scratched out the threaded spine, and pulled out fistfuls of pages—which flew around the room like feathers.
Only when the last airborne page fluttered to the floor did Mrs. March register what she had done. She gasped. “Oh no,” she said aloud. “Oh no, oh no, oh no …” She clasped her hands, wringing them as she often did when she was nervous. Something, she had now irreversibly learned, Johanna did too.
She replaced the book with one from the box on the floor, laying it on the desk with care to compensate for the one she had maimed, then hiked up her skirt and yanked down her pantyhose. Bending over—her hair in her face, her nose runny—she stepped out of them, shifting her weight precariously from one foot to the other. She knelt on the floor and stuffed everything into the tights—whole pages, bits of paper, and the remnants of the hardcover—wrapping and tying the glossy fabric around the mess until it was a secure, albeit swollen package. It was the only way, she told herself, to safely transport the evidence to the kitchen trash can (where George would never look).
She gave one last glance at the study before she slipped out, as quietly as she had snuck in.
She leaned on the hallway wall, a little shaky, as she made her way past the living room—flinching at the sound of a scraping chair—and into the kitchen. Cold, tiled heaven.
The trash container was hidden behind the kitchen sink skirt. Mrs. March pulled it out with some effort and lodged the stockinged ball under a greasy cake box. She emerged from the waste in triumph, right as Martha appeared through the kitchen door.
“Oh,” said Martha, surprised to see her there. They had long ago forged a silent agreement in which Mrs. March had ceded her the kitchen, and whenever they both occupied the apartment, they engaged in the complicated dance of avoidance. They’d tiptoe around each other, rotating through the rooms as if they were playing an elaborate game of musical chairs, never quite meeting in the same place. Or at least, Mrs. March did.
“Everything all right, Mrs. March?”
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. March, short-winded. “I was just thinking of making some pasta for dinner tonight. The dish George likes, with sausage.”
“Well, we don’t have many of the ingredients. And pasta for dinner—I would advise against it, Mrs. March. Especially after last night’s chicken pot pie.”
Martha was about fifty, broad-shouldered, with hair forever tied into a small, painfully tight bun, with slightly freckled skin free of makeup, and pink-rimmed blue eyes that seemed to suffer eternal patience. In truth, Mrs. March was rather afraid of her. Specifically, she was afraid Martha wished—or rather knew—that she was the boss, and that Mrs. March should be the one cleaning the apartment.
“I would recommend the swordfish for tonight,” said Martha.
“Well, maybe,” Mrs. March said, “but George does like that pasta—”
Martha took a step toward her. The enormity of her! “I really would leave the pasta for next week, Mrs. March.”
Mrs. March swallowed, then nodded. Martha smiled gravely, almost consolingly, and Mrs. March backed out of the kitchen, hoping Martha hadn’t noticed her bare calves.
Mrs. March observed George that night as they convened for dinner. He entered the room looking at his shoes and scratching his chin, distracted. She stiffened, smile in place for his first glance at her. When he failed to look up as he gripped the back of his chair and sat down, her smile drooped.
They ate in the small dining room, which was connected to the living room by sliding French doors. Chopin’s nocturnes played in the background. The table was lavishly set, a habit instilled in Mrs. March by her mother, who told her daughter, numerous times, that a healthy marriage is built from the outside in, not the other way around. A husband, upon returning home from work, should always be received by a wife looking her best, and by a house so thoroughly kempt as to maintain his pride in it. Everything else would spring from that. Her mother emphasized that if she couldn’t be a good homemaker, she would have to hire someone who was. Martha had been trained to set the table, every day and every evening, with the silver candlesticks, the monogrammed napkins, the black olive bread in the silver breadbasket, and the wide carafe for the wine. All of it was laid out atop the embroidered linen tablecloth that used to belong to Mrs. March’s grandmother (and part of a trousseau her mother was very disinclined to give her, seeing as how she was marrying a divorced man, and in a civil ceremony no less).
This was the default display even if it was just Mrs. March having dinner, which happened often. When George was immersed in his book-writing, he barely ate, except for a few sandwiches brought to his study by Martha. Otherwise he was away on book tours or at conferences or meeting for gourmet dinners and long lunches with his agent or editor. On those days, Mrs. March still played Chopin, and still used the silver platters and fine china, and sipped from her nut-molded wineglass under the watchful eyes of the Victorian oil portraits lining the dining room.
Mr. and Mrs. March sat mostly in silence. George seemed to find silence soothing. She glanced sideways at him, his belly protruding from his sensible gray cardigan, his beard growing out unevenly in irregular tufts along his jaw. He chewed his food audibly, even through a closed mouth. She could hear the snapping of the asparagus between his teeth, the way he rinsed the wine slightly before swallowing it, the saliva at the corner of his mouth when he parted his lips. It made her cringe, not to mention the way he would occasionally give one loud, startling sniff. He caught her looking, smiled. She smiled back. He asked, “Everything ready for the party tomorrow?”
“Hmm, I think so.” She added a hint of uncertainty to her answer, as if she weren’t completely sure the preparations were under control. As if she wouldn’t have a total and irreparable breakdown if they weren’t. Then, casually, serving herself more of Martha’s swordfish from the platter: “How is the novel doing? Any news?”
George swallowed as he patted his mouth with his napkin, which Mrs. March took for a tell. “Good, good,” he said. “You know, I t
hink it might be my best one yet. Or at least my most successful one. That’s what Zelda says, anyway.”
Zelda was George’s agent. Chain-smoking, raspy-voiced, partial to square hairstyles and brownish lipsticks. A woman whose idea of a smile was baring her teeth. Mrs. March doubted that Zelda, who was always flanked by a flock of hardworking assistants, had ever actually read one of George’s novels. Certainly not from beginning to end.
“That’s wonderful, dear,” she said to George. “Would you …”—carefully—“would you like me to read it?” She could hear Martha having her own dinner in the kitchen, the clink of utensils against her plate echoing down the hallway and into the dining room.
George shrugged. “You know I always love your feedback. In this case, though, there’s not much I can change now that it’s out.”
“You’re right, of course. I won’t read it. What would be the point after all.”
“Now, that’s not what I said.”
“No, I know,” said Mrs. March, softening, “I mean, I’ll read it eventually. When I finish the one I’m on. You know I hate to read two books at once. Can’t concentrate fully on either one, and everything just begins to blur—”
She felt something on her hand and looked down. George had placed his hand on hers, reassuringly. “You’ll read it when you read it,” he said kindly.
She relaxed a bit but, unwilling to give up, knowing it would gnaw at her later, said, “I did read a bit of it, you know.”
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