Portrait of a Married Woman

by Sally Mandel

  By the time he reached Fifty-first Street, he had begun to think that, of course, Maggie was in love. What a fool he had been not to see it. Or perhaps he had merely chosen not to see it. A businessman with well-trimmed hair and sensible horn-rimmed glasses passed by. Why not him? Matthew thought. Betray me if you must, but let it be one of my own kind, not that bohemian with the sensitive hands and the turtleneck sweater. He was probably an artist, no doubt the “fellow student” who had loaned her his studio. So many lies there must have been. So much deception.

  Matthew began to shiver. The shock and the cold had penetrated his topcoat. He ducked into a restaurant on a side street near Radio City Music Hall. It was a glossy place that catered to the theater crowd who had long since left. Only half a dozen people sat at the bar. The bartender poured goldfish crackers into wooden bowls in preparation for the mob that would arrive in an hour’s time. Matthew ordered a double Scotch, swallowed it in a hurry, and ordered another.

  “You okay?” the bartender asked before complying.

  “I have hate in my heart,” Matthew said. “Other than that, I’m fine.”

  The bartender studied Matthew dubiously. The sleet was melting off Matthew’s hair and dripping onto the polished surface of the bar.

  “Look, I forgot my hat. I’m an attorney. Lost a big case today due to deceit and corruption. I don’t usually drink much so it won’t be long before I’m totally blasted. I’m a very quiet drunk.”

  “Got a car?”

  “Nope. I’m on foot and I live right up the street.”

  “Okay.”

  He poured and Matthew drank. The liquor felt good going down, but seemed to have little effect on Matthew’s thoughts. To no avail, he huddled over his glass as if the whiskey’s warm comfort could reach into his soul. After he had finished his second double, a young woman sat down next to him and shrugged out of her wet trench coat. She wore an expensive navy silk suit with a Liberty-print tie and a bow at her collar. She smiled at Matthew.

  “Bad day?” she asked.

  “Bad of prodigious proportions.”

  “You’re an attorney, right?”

  “I’m dismayed that it shows,” Matthew answered.

  “Can’t help but recognize a fellow traveler.”

  “Oh shit,” Matthew said.

  “You don’t like women lawyers?”

  “Don’t like any lawyers. Minds like steel traps, hearts like basalt.”

  “I play the harp in my spare time. Professionally.”

  “That’s different,” Matthew said. “My wife’s fucking around.”

  The woman looked at him.

  “You hardly know what to say.”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “Neither do I. What’re you drinking?” Matthew asked.

  “Vodka on the rocks.”

  He ordered her drink and another double for himself. “It’s what’s on my mind this evening. My wife’s fucking.”

  “There’re a whole lot of questions I’d like to ask,” the woman said.

  “You’re an educated woman. Know how I can tell?”

  “No.”

  “Most people would say ‘there’s’ a whole lot of questions, not ‘there’re.’ ”

  “Ah.” She waited. “About those questions.”

  “Fire away.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “Tonight. I saw them. He’s a fucking hippie.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Eighteen years.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Drink.”

  “You’re extremely attractive. I suppose you know that.”

  Matthew was silent.

  “I mean, if you need bolstering in the confidence department, I’d be very happy to oblige. I’ve had a long day myself.”

  Matthew took a closer look at her. She had a soft face, not bony like Maggie’s. She was blue-eyed, rosy-skinned, and rather fragile-looking. Her mouth was pink and full. It had been a very long time since Matthew had kissed anyone other than Maggie. He could take her to bed, no doubt about it. A soft round body might be a welcome change from Maggie’s angularities. A sweet form of vengeance. The woman moved her chair closer to his. His face was no more than six inches away.

  “Try it,” she said.

  “Okay.” Matthew leaned forward and kissed her gently. His lips were numb from the liquor. It felt as if someone else owned his mouth.

  “Nothing, huh?” she asked.

  “Sorry. Should have tried it before the last round.”

  “I have a feeling it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

  “The trouble is …” he began.

  “Go ahead,” the woman sighed.

  “I keep wanting to tell Maggie about it.”

  “Who’s Maggie?”

  “My wife.”

  “I see your problem.”

  Her face expressed patient sympathy, but practiced, as if she had heard it all before.

  “The humiliation of it. Everybody always thought we were the perfect couple. Well, almost everybody, as it turns out.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “There must have been some …”

  “Why?” Matthew interrupted. “Maybe she just has the hots for him. A temporary hormonal derailment.” He caught a glimpse of the coat rack by the door. There were only two coats hanging, a woman’s fur, and over that, a man’s Burberry trench coat, the arms of which draped the fur in a protective embrace. The tenderness of it was too much for Matthew to bear. Once again, he was overwhelmed with the urgent need for flight. Pain kept tracking him down. If he could only find some respite, however temporary. He paid the bill and stood up.

  “Good luck,” the woman said.

  “I hope some nice violinist sits down in a minute. Stay away from lawyers.” He leaned over and kissed her again.

  He stopped beside the railing at Rockefeller Center and looked down at the skaters. They were teenagers mostly. They fell a lot, but seemed immune to pain. At the west end of the plaza, a team of men pounded at the scaffolding surrounding the giant bare Christmas tree. Matthew imagined Maggie and her lover crucified, hanging there from the wooden braces like macabre holiday decorations. Christ, how maudlin it all was. He wanted to kill Maggie, and yet all the time there was this need to go straight home and tell her all about the miserable night he was having.

  He could picture her at the kitchen table, leaning forward on her elbows, her expressive eyes watching him carefully as he spoke, so as not to miss a word. She was the perfect person to unload on because she never trivialized the complaint. If he was having a difficult time with a new secretary, Maggie never said, “Oh, but it will soon get better, you’ll see,” which, of course, he knew. Instead the response would be something like “It must be difficult adjusting to someone you’re so dependent on.” If his shoulder stiffened so that he could not play squash, she never said, “Aren’t you lucky it’s not serious?” Instead it was “You really count on that game. You’ll miss it this week, won’t you?” She had such a gift for making him feel understood. How he longed for her tonight.

  He wondered suddenly about Maggie. Where did she go with her pain? The question struck him full force. He supposed she confided in her friends. He remembered her stunned silence when he called to check on her biopsy report the other day. Clearly, she had been shocked at his interest. The fact was, he only remembered because his secretary had used her lunch hour to have a mole removed and was terrified it was malignant.

  Matthew crossed Fifth Avenue and stood looking up at the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, resplendent with its recently cleaned facade. He had liked it better grimy and gray, but then perhaps he was just uncomfortable with change. Christ, how long since he had wondered how Maggie was doing, or looked at her with careful eyes? He thought of her companion in the bar tonight. He was watching her, li
stening to her.

  “Oh, God,” he heard himself moan, and a passerby gave him a suspicious glance. He sat down on the stone steps in front of the cathedral, not far from a bag lady who picked idly through her tattered belongings and sorted them into piles beside her feet. But all Matthew could see was Maggie’s tormented eyes as they clung to the face of her lover.

  “All right,” he said aloud, but the bag lady did not seem to hear. It was time to sort this thing out. He had a legal mind. Then be a lawyer now.

  Maggie had met this man, been strongly attracted, resisted, but finally succumbed, with what terrible guilt he could only imagine, knowing her deep family commitment. It made Matthew’s stomach turn to think that another man had discovered the joys of this woman’s sensuality. But no, he would not think of that. He needed to understand, not torture himself. He stared down at his hands. They were capable, straight fingers, but not long and sensitive like that other man’s. How casually Matthew had abused her body, he thought, pinching, wrestling as if she were some kind of toy.

  Perhaps Maggie was attempting to give him up, this lover. There was conflict between them. Perhaps she was trying to remain in the marriage, even if only for the children’s sake.-Assuming this was so, did Matthew still want her?

  He thought of her face, the way she looked at the children with a kind of shy adoration, the way she stood all rumpled and sleepy at the kitchen counter each morning, her gentle voice. Whatever beauty there was in his life, she brought it. She was good and loving, and, yes, he wanted her. More than ever in his life, he wanted her, and Matthew put his head in his hands and cried on the steps of the cathedral.

  It was two A.M. when Matthew was finally sober enough to leave the all-night coffee shop on Seventy-fifth Street. It had begun to snow. At the corner news-stand, there were tubs of flowers now lightly sprinkled with white. Matthew stared at them for a moment, then swooped them up, daisies, carnations, irises, lilies. His arms were so full of dripping blossoms that he could barely get his money out, but soon he started off up Lexington Avenue toward Seventy-ninth Street.

  Matthew bid the doorman a pleasant good morning as the flowers created a puddle beside the elevator. He studied himself in the elevator mirror on the way upstairs. He barely looked drunk.

  Maggie was waiting by the door. She was ashen, with dark circles under her eyes. “Oh my God, Matthew, where have you been?” She did not notice the flowers. “I’ve been calling the office and the squash court and Jack didn’t answer his phone. Oh God, Matthew.” She began to cry, standing in her bathrobe with her arms stiff at her sides. Matthew handed her the flowers, which she took, opening her hands blindly. Matthew held her face between his hands and kissed her carefully. She wept with the flowers crushed between them.

  “I thought you were dead. Oh, Matt, don’t ever do that to me again. I was so scared, so scared …”

  “Shh, shh,” he soothed her, touching her hair. “Here, let’s put these in water.”

  She saw the flowers for the first time, stared down at her arms and their contents as if she had no notion how they got there. “What’s this?”

  “Flowers.”

  “Flowers,” she echoed. “What are they for?”

  “For you.”

  “Flowers for me,” Maggie repeated.

  “Yes, at two-thirty in the morning, flowers for you.” He put his arm around her shoulder and led her to the kitchen. “Come on, let’s get us all a drink, water for them, whiskey for us.”

  They sat at the kitchen table while Matthew tried to tell her what happened without telling her what happened.

  “I think I had a mid-life crisis or something tonight,” he began. “Oh, it sounds ridiculous, like some born-again nut. I hardly know how to describe it.”

  Her eyes were beginning to lose some of their terror. She held her tumbler of Scotch with both hands. “Where have you been all this time?”

  “Walking mostly. I even sort of went to church.”

  She waited.

  “I don’t know, Mag, I just suddenly realized that I’ve lost touch somewhere along the line. Or maybe I never was in touch.” He reached across the table and took her hand in his. She dropped her eyes as they both thought of the darkened table in the restaurant on Columbus Avenue. “I don’t want to go to my grave a successful lawyer and half a human being.”

  “What happened tonight, Matthew?”

  “Oh, Christ, I don’t know. Some silly bastard of a client was in today. Lost his whole family in an ugly divorce and he’s falling apart. It’s his own damn fault. He’s not what you would call a thoughtful human being. He’s about as tractable as a totem pole. I looked across my desk at him and suddenly I saw myself …” Matthew took a long pull on his drink. He had made it through the worst part. The lie was behind him now, and he saw that Maggie was eager to believe him. “I need you, Maggie. I want you to help me be more of a person. It’s a heavy load, I know, and I’ve got some hell of a nerve. Can you help me?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered softly.

  “I can’t lose you.”

  “I’m glad you’re safe, Matt.”

  “We’ve been together a long time. That counts for something.”

  Maggie drew her hand across her eyes. “I’m so tired.”

  “Come. Let me put you into bed.” He walked her down the hall, helped her into bed, and sat down on the edge beside her. He bent over to kiss her, then snapped off the light. Her eyes stared up at him in the darkness. “Please, Maggie,” he whispered. “Don’t let it be too late.”

  Then he got up and left her, closing the door softly behind him.

  But Maggie did not go to sleep. She lay on the bed with her heart beating so hard that she could almost feel the tug of her nightgown with each pulse. The fear had left a taste in her mouth, acrid and bitter like the chalky film from an aspirin that would not go down. For so long, she had been trying to resurrect her feelings for Matthew so that she could examine them. Had she truly spent eighteen years married to a man she merely respected? It seemed unlikely, and yet nothing surfaced to deny it. Until tonight, in the long hours when he did not turn his key in the lock and she became certain he was injured or killed—that there might never be Matthew on this earth again. The thought—in fantasy the solution to her dilemma—was in fact unbearable. The implications of her terror had been too complex for Maggie to deal with. I’ll worry about all that later, she had thought. Just please, please, let him come home.

  With the growing conviction of tragedy had come the flood of memories, long buried beneath the heavy cloak of anger. She remembered the first time she had found a lump, years ago, in the other breast then. Dr. Berg drained off some fluid and had it analyzed. The first report was inconclusive, and they had had to wait two dreadful weeks for the verdict. Matthew was a man who could not bear sleeping with anyone touching him. Nevertheless, every morning for fourteen days, Maggie had awakened with his arms tight around her. He never spoke of it, and when the good news came, he reverted to bounding out of bed first thing.

  She remembered a game he used to play with the children. He would place an object, a shoe perhaps, on the cocktail table. The children, delighted, would pounce on it and take it back to its closet. There in the empty pouch of the shoe rack they would find something else, perhaps a jar of spaghetti sauce. Off they would go to the kitchen to discover a pair of Susan’s socks where the spaghetti sauce belonged. The game continued until they reached the treasure—a box of chocolates or some silly wind-up toy. Maggie once asked Matthew where he had learned such a game. He shrugged and said he made it up.

  “Don’t ever tell me you have no imagination,” she had told him then.

  She remembered when she was first pregnant with Susan, going to spend a week by herself with her parents. The second day she began to experience stomach cramps. The local doctor prescribed bed rest, assuring them there was no reason for alarm, yet when Maggie telephoned Matthew that evening, he rented a car
and showed up in the driveway at five A.M.

  Recollections kept appearing one after the other, like marching bands in a raucous Fifth Avenue parade. Still Matthew did not come to bed. It was nearly light outside before Maggie remembered that last night she had spent two hours in a bar with David trying to figure out how to tell Matthew she was leaving him.

  Chapter 21

  Matthew and Jackson Brody walked downtown on Fifth Avenue. It was hard going, what with the slush underfoot and the crowds of holiday shoppers.

  “Sorry to just drop in on you,” Matthew said. “Christ, is it always like this around here?” He was nearly shoved into the street by a bulging shopping bag.

  “Always at Christmas,” Jackson said. “We’ll be out of it in a minute though.” He guided Matthew along Thirty-seventh Street and through the doors of a restaurant called Mary Elizabeth. “Ah, we’re early enough. Ten more minutes and we’d have been out of luck.”

  While they stood in line to be seated, Matthew looked about. There were long rows of tables in a large wainscoted room. Most of the patrons appeared to be elderly ladies wearing hats. He spotted one man, but he was accompanied by a woman and a child who was asleep in its stroller. “What is this place?” Matthew asked.

  “A little off the beaten track, isn’t it?” Jackson replied.

  There were two large glass cabinets on the wall above their table. One displayed a pair of green porcelain chickens and the other faded paintings of houses over which a poem was superimposed. Matthew strained his eyes but could make out only the first line: To think I once saw grocery shops with but a casual eye … None of the waitresses was younger than forty-five. Theirs flew past in frilled white apron, dispensing menus in her wake. But she reappeared in seconds.

  They ordered. After the waitress whisked away, there was a long silence. The men smiled at each other and then quickly averted their eyes. Matthew took a deep breath.