Portrait of a Married Woman

by Sally Mandel

  “I don’t know what to say,” Maggie replied.

  “It was probably the breast lump,” Matthew suggested. “You were probably more worried than you thought.”

  “What breast lump?” Susan asked.

  “It’s all right,” Maggie said. “I got the biopsy report.” She had to concentrate not to say “autopsy.” “I’m fine. It was nothing.”

  “It’s all that coffee,” Susan said.

  Maggie let her lecture, glad to be off the hook. At the first opportunity, she escaped into the kitchen to dole out ice cream. Five minutes later she was still standing with the scoop in her hand, staring at the three pint containers and the four empty bowls. Fred wanted chocolate chip and cherry vanilla. Susan was for pralines only. Or was it cherry? Matt liked all three kinds. No, that was wrong. The scoop fell out of her fingers and she began to cry. Suddenly Susan was beside her.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” she asked.

  “I can’t keep it straight,” Maggie choked. “I don’t know. I’m so tired. I just can’t keep it straight.”

  “I’ll do it,” Susan said, pretending not to see her mother’s tears.

  “Thanks, darling.” Maggie excused herself and left Susan with the ice cream.

  In the bedroom later, Matthew ruffled Maggie’s hair and told her to use the bathroom first. “I think I’m going to take a shower, so you go ahead,” he said. Maggie went into the bathroom with her nightgown and robe over her arm. She was washing her face when she heard the bathroom door squeak. With rising panic she realized that Matthew had come in, but she was helpless, bent over the sink with soap all over her face. She heard him chuckle as he gave her a quick pinch on the rear end. Instantly she swung around and with all her weight behind her, drove her elbow into his midriff. She heard the air exploding from his diaphragm with a cartoon “Ooof!” Eyes smarting from soap and naked body vibrating with outrage, she said, “Don’t ever do that again. Now get out.”

  Matthew backed out of the room holding his stomach. His face was full of surprise, pain, and something very close to laughter. Maggie looked at herself in the mirror. The soap had dried in white splotches on her cheeks and her eyes were bloodshot. She looked ludicrous and formidable all at once, but she had defended herself, and it had been so easy. She wondered why on earth it had taken her nearly eighteen years to do it.

  She woke up about four A.M. as usual, with the dreaded sense of disorientation that had plagued her over the past few weeks. She would snap out of her sleep as if a gun had been discharged beside her ear, and lie blinking in the dark with her heart pounding. Something was wrong, she knew. Someone had died, or there had been some other awful tragedy. Then she would remember that it was David. Not that he was dead, but that he was not beside her. Before long, she would slip out of bed and begin the prowl that had become a ritual. She checked and rechecked the children, listening to their night sounds and recalling the murmurs and sweet sighs of their babyhood. Sometimes she stared down at Matthew and tried to unlock the swollen cache of emotion now buried so deep inside her that it was no longer within reach. She was existing in two separate dimensions of time and space. During the day, it seemed almost possible to preserve the tenuous balance. But night had become a menacing expanse of hostile territory that she had somehow to cross. She woke earlier and earlier, dazed and miserable, like a prisoner in a time machine, forever repeating a futile journey between two centuries.

  She sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. Then she got up and searched the drawers for a pencil and some paper. She found a red marking pen, but no paper, so she ripped off a paper towel, sat down again, and began making her list. It always started out the same way, with two columns, one headed D and one M. Under D she wrote Love, Peace, Fulfillment, Sex, Art. Tonight she added Self and underlined the word. Under M she wrote Years, Shared Experience. Then she crossed out Shared Experience since it fell under the same category as Years. She went on with Stability, Familiarity, Comforts, then Children underlined. One night, by way of experiment, she had tried to shift Children to the D column, but it hadn’t worked. The letters seemed to march on their own back to M. With a groan, she wadded the paper into a ball, buried it in the garbage pail, and went into the living room. She stared out at the building across the street. There were only three windows lit out of many dozens of black squares. People ill, perhaps, or restless. Ordinary members of ordinary families, just like Maggie’s. She felt the anguish rise up into her mouth like vomit and flung herself to her knees against the couch. She buried her face in the cushions and cried out: What am I going to do? Oh God, what am I going to do?

  Chapter 20

  For the sixth time, Matthew slammed the squash ball into the telltale for a foul, losing the point. “Goddammit,” he muttered, and swiped at his sweaty forehead with the back of his wrist. Jack Foreman gave him an odd look. In the ten years the two men had played together, Jack had never witnessed a display of temper by Matthew Hollander. Ordinarily, in fact, he rarely spoke on the court except to check the score or clarify a point.

  Matthew toweled himself off by the water fountain and took a long drink. He had never enjoyed losing, but usually he could put defeat behind him with a shrug and look forward to beating the pants off Jack the next time. Tonight he felt like breaking his racket in half or smashing it over Jack’s head. Jack, perhaps sensing Matthew’s hostility, had already set off for the locker room.

  “Goddammit,” Matthew said again.

  He stood in the shower for a long time and let the hot water pelt down on his face and shoulders. Perhaps the driving water would wash away the constriction in his head. He wondered how long he had been carrying it around, this not-quite headache. Many weeks, certainly. He thought he could even recall feeling it when they went to visit the children at camp. He had taken a couple of aspirin after the drive home. They hadn’t helped, so he had never bothered with pills again. It was not pain exactly. There was just this constant pressure, as if his brain were expanding inside his skull. There was heat, too, which made him think of the textbook illustrations of volcanoes in his high-school geology course—seething magma trapped in an underground chamber preparing to blast through layers of rock, and up into the open sky.

  Things had been out of whack in the office lately also. He had misplaced an important document. He kept calling his secretary “Marian,” which was the name of his previous secretary, gone a year ago to have her baby. He lost his temper with a junior associate over the use of the semicolon and had barely restrained himself from hurling The Elements of Style at the poor kid as he fled the office. Matthew was not accustomed to ransacking his life in search of the discordant note. Either something was wrong or it wasn’t, and there was not a single thing he could point his finger at and say: That’s it. The children’s summer had been wonderful. Fred slimmed down and gained confidence. Susan lost the belligerent attitude that had grated on him all last year. And Maggie was flourishing. She had embarked on this new, rather curious artistic adventure which he found difficult to understand but which engaged her to an extent he had not seen in years. He missed the paintings, those marvelous assemblages of color and line that so impressed him back in college, but if she was content with her output, that was what counted. She was a little run-down at the moment, but basically she was looking great—vibrant, healthy, sexy. Men had begun to notice her on the street. Maggie was totally unaware of it, of course. She was so damn oblivious of her own sensuality. But Matthew was amused by the surreptitious glances as he walked down Madison Avenue with her on a Saturday afternoon.

  His head pounded mercilessly so he turned the dial to cold, hoping that would help. Still … still … perhaps something was maybe slightly amiss there, or if not quite amiss, then unfamiliar. She had slugged him not long ago. Even more shocking than the blow to the solar plexus had been the sight of her face, all twisted with what amounted to hatred. He turned off the water. They had never discussed it. Probably it was time to let
up on the pinching and poking and ass-slapping. She was a grown woman, after all, no college kid. Maybe she was already beginning to experience some hormonal changes. Not that she hadn’t been perfectly pleasant and cordial since that night, only it seemed almost as if part of her had disappeared, gone on sabbatical. Christ, his head hurt. Maybe he ought to try aspirin again.

  “You okay, Hollander?” Jack asked him. He was blowing his hair dry at the mirror. Since his divorce a few years back, the hair-drying ritual consumed half an hour. He had explained to Matthew that erotic women relate to a well-groomed head of hair.

  “Headache,” Matthew said. He never bothered with the dryer, just toweled his hair fiercely and then combed it with his fingers.

  Jack snapped off the machine and studied Matthew. “I don’t know why I still bother to ask, but why not join me for a drink tonight? It won’t kill you, and you might even enjoy yourself.”

  It had become a joke between them that Matthew always declined Jack’s invitations. But for the first time, Matthew hesitated.

  “Come on,” Jack urged. “Let’s cure that headache.”

  The children were out late. Maggie had phoned about an art function she wanted to attend and given him instructions about heating his dinner. Matthew had half-planned on returning to the office to put in a few extra hours, but suddenly the idea of companionship appealed to him.

  “Okay, what the hell.”

  “Attaboy!” Jack exclaimed. “We’re gonna make it a veritable pub crawl straight up Columbus Ave.”

  Jack’s enthusiasm was daunting, but Matthew admitted to a twinge of excitement. It seemed pleasantly racy to be out on the town with this self-proclaimed womanizer.

  “First rule,” Jack said in the cab. “No shop talk. Anybody mentions the legal profession has to buy dinner.” When his marriage had disintegrated, Jack moved into a studio apartment on the West Side near Lincoln Center. He had since become the type of zealot who considered everything east of Fifth Avenue to be hopelessly dreary. “None of your tawdry Third Avenue bar scenes tonight, my friend,” he said, and began to chatter about his favorite obsession, next to women. “Later you can come up to my place. I’ve just finished another model, Stutz Bearcat this time. Best one I’ve done. Real leather upholstery, brass fixtures, I’m nuts about it. I told you I finally bought my first antique car, didn’t I, but it’s out on the island. I can’t insure it in the city.”

  “Yes, you mentioned it.” Matthew was beginning to regret his impulsiveness. Maybe it had been a mistake to allow his circumscribed relationship with Jack to seep out beyond the thick walls of the racket club. Where would it end, this invitation to intimacy? Matthew imagined himself being dragged to antique-car conventions in Bridgehampton. His head began to pound again.

  “I visit the damn thing almost every weekend,” Jack said. “Good thing Virginia and I never had kids.”

  Matthew regarded Jack with pity. Where was the humanity in this well-coiffed fellow’s life, the warm rough-and-tumble of a complex lively family? Matthew was struck with his own good fortune. If not for Maggie, he could certainly have wound up just like Jack, devoting his days to wherefores and hereinafters and nights to jigsaw puzzles or computer games. Matthew knew that there was much in his own character that reached for objects and ideas rather than people.

  “I’m buying tonight,” Matthew said.

  “No way.” Jack took out his wallet to pay for the cab.

  “How’re things going on that co-op conversion on Eighty-fourth Street?” Matthew asked.

  “Okay, I get the point,” Jack said. “But the drinks are on me.”

  “Deal.”

  The cab let them off on Columbus Avenue in front of a place called Thimbles. It was dark inside, with a long oak bar and tables in the rear. Jack was right. The people here bore little resemblance to the natty Upper East Side crowd that gathered at Uzie’s or McMullen’s. In fact, Matthew and Jack were the only patrons wearing suits. A young woman with a clipboard stopped beside Matthew. “Dinner?”

  “Christ, look at this,” Jack complained. “Rose, why is it I can never find you when I come in here alone, and now I’ve got this guy with me you’re on us like flies on a cowpie?”

  “You’re so poetic, Jack,” Rose observed.

  “A drink first, then dinner,” Matthew said.

  “I’ll put you on the list.” She smiled up at Matthew. “Name?”

  “Foreman,” Jack answered.

  “You make yourself at home and I’ll slip you in whenever you’re ready,” Rose said to Matthew.

  As she squeezed through the crush toward the tables at the rear, Jack muttered, “Bet she would, too. Hollander, you just may be a liability to a horny single man. I’ve been trying to score with that piece of ass for two years now.”

  They made their way to the bar and ordered a couple of beers.

  “She’s a class act, that one, a violinist when she’s not at this place. I keep telling her it’s not just for a quick stab in the dark. She’s marriage material.”

  “You want to get married again?” Matthew asked.

  “Sure I do. Who wants to be stuck in an empty apartment with a pile of plastic model pieces and a tube of airplane glue? I was the one who screwed up the first time. I drove Virginia crazy.”

  Matthew lifted his glass in salute. “This was a good idea. Thanks for pushing it.” It was agreeable standing here with Jack surrounded by lively intelligent-looking people. While Jack began a comical litany of his faults as a marriage partner, Matthew studied the mob. An earnest-looking group of middle-aged people in jeans moved off to be seated. It was then that Matthew got his first clear glimpse of the dining area. It used to be difficult to make out the faces through the haze in a place like this, Matthew thought. Maybe people were finally beginning to heed the voices of reason and cut down on cigarettes. Off in the far corner, his eye caught the outline of a familiar profile. There was the usual rather pleasant jolt to the consciousness that he often experienced on the street or in a crowded department store. The eyes, minding their own business, pass over the milling faces, come to a halt, retrack, and hold on a particular arrangement of nose, mouth, line of jaw. We know that person, the eyes tell the brain, just in case you’re interested. Sometimes he was, most often he was not, and would lose himself in the throng so as to escape a meaningless exchange with someone he cared nothing about. A moment too banal to qualify as even a minor event in a busy man’s busy day.

  So why in this darkened place with the warm air full of animated voices had this ordinary moment of split-second recognition suddenly sucked the breath from his lungs and set the wooden-plank floor tilting and shifting under his feet? If I look away, he thought, in words slow and deliberate inside his head, the sideways movement of my face will obliterate the scene before me like an eraser swept across a chalkboard. But he could not avert his eyes. He stood immobilized like a jammed, malfunctioning lighthouse that could focus on only one particular wedge of treacherous sea.

  The woman was distressed, perhaps in tears. She talked, mouth twisted in anguish, then listened with eyes that fastened on her companion’s face as if she were drowning and he possessed the world’s sole life raft. The man’s face was angled away, but Matthew could see the shoulder-length hair. No mistaking him for a woman, at least not for long. There was too much sinewy muscular power in his body. As he spoke, he gestured with his hands. Once he caught the woman’s fingers between his own and held them to his mouth. Her face crumpled, she dropped her eyes, and hid them with her other hand.

  Jack had stopped talking. His eyes followed Matthew’s to the corner table. “See someone you know?”

  Matthew exerted enormous effort and forced his gaze to meet Jack’s. “I thought maybe, but I was mistaken.”

  Breathing was Matthew’s immediate problem. His chest was paralyzed. So he ordered his brain to tell his lungs to expand. They did, and he gasped. But his upper body refused to take the next step withou
t further instructions. Exhale, he told his brain to tell his lungs. They did, and his body relaxed with a sigh. He kept his eyes focused on Jack’s face, but what he saw was the replay of an incident he had witnessed several years ago in a subway station. Matthew had stood in the rush-hour crowd waiting at Eighty-sixth Street for the downtown express. There was a distant rumble, and finally the appearance of a bright headlamp at the far end of the tunnel. Then a scream as a young man in a red windbreaker was shoved off the platform onto the tracks. Women’s shrieks mingled with the sound of brakes, but before the train could stop, the man had lost his leg. The whole thing took five seconds, maybe less. What Matthew found so horrible was the guillotine speed of the tragedy. There was no preparation. If the fellow had suffered frostbite, for instance, there would be the hospitalization, the medical consultations, with warnings that gangrene might ensue. Then, if weeks later the leg were amputated, at least there would have been some groundwork.

  Five seconds, and a life was altered forever. Everything would now be sorted into two categories: before and after. So while Jack Foreman related his exploits concerning an apartment full of “stews,” Matthew watched the news feature of the day unreel in the flat air an inch in front of Jack’s face: Intense Conversation in West Side Bar, starring Margaret Hollander, longtime wife and best friend of attorney Matthew Hollander. Costar unidentified.

  He had to get out. Now.

  “Go,” he interrupted Jack.

  “What?” Jack said.

  “Gotta go. Don’t feel so red-hot. Do it again sometime. Next week. Sorry.”

  He fled. It had begun to sleet, but the ice felt good against his face. He tried not to think, just walk and taste the cold air and breathe until the process became automatic again. He walked south past the damp glitter of Lincoln Center with its limousines and fountains, then across Central Park South, ignoring the sodden horses and their half-frozen buggy drivers still hawking for rides. Next he headed downtown on Fifth. The apartment waited for him like a beast huddled in the dark up on Seventy-ninth Street. He wanted to avoid it as long as possible. Perhaps he never had to go back there.