In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Actually, Chester had jumped up, restored and starving. “Hey, don’t just lie there. Come on, I have to fix the bed.” He gave me something; a rag, his mother’s dish towel, for all I knew, and he helped me to my rocky legs.

  In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator, releasing a blast of its stale icy breath, and handed things out to me. In addition to her other, maternal failings, his mother was obviously a careless housekeeper. Some of the stuff in there was petrified with age: collapsing circles of cold cuts, cream cheese crusted yellow, white bread even the Parkway pigeons would have rejected. But I ate anyway, the eating a part of the whole terrible ritual.

  And Chester was manic now, a behind-patting playmate with one eye on the clock. He had done his job and had bagged a virgin in the bargain. “Wasn’t that nice?” he wanted to know. I let him walk me within two blocks of my home, giving him all false information, an invented phone number and address. I called myself Molly Bloom, once my private fantasy and now a gorgeous nom de plume for his memory book.

  It was very late, and the bathrobed sentries, their hysteria rehearsed, were waiting to grill me. But I stopped them dead with the cold concentration of my gaze. If this was what they were always so worried about, they could rest easy. Never, ever again. I silently pledged myself to a life of celibacy, not knowing about Howard, of course, who was still six months away in my future.

  “Go to bed,” I commanded, and scared and chastened, they did.

  And I went to mine, feeling nauseous and sad, unable to either throw up or go to sleep. The whole terrible experience, sex and spoiled food, passed through me undigested.

  Tears came to my eyes in recollection. “It was awful,” I confessed to Howard, dropping my guard completely.

  But Howard was like a stone, and for once I was sick of my beautiful control, my deference, the whole stupid burden of love. “What’s the matter with you?” I cried. “Don’t you care about me? Don’t you even give a damn about my rotten, fucked-up history?”

  But worse even than that, he had fallen asleep.

  22

  Dear Jackie Kennedy, do you ever imagine being me?

  Here, aproned in America

  Shutting windows after friends go home

  Sifting crumbs and ashes in search of meaning.

  Do you imagine childhood in a stucco house

  on a Brooklyn street and uncles in fluorescent light standing guard

  on summers’ nights?

  Do you sleep in vaulted rooms or lie sleepless

  and pretend my life?

  Without horses, without a word of French or wafers

  melting on your tongue?

  Why should it always be you

  who flies with Alice Faye to Argentina

  who loves Charlotte Greenwood as a friend

  who gets Don Ameche in the end?

  November 8, 1961

  My dear 19K,

  Are you blind? Deaf? They’re getting away with murder. My heart aches for you

  Your Anonymous Friend

  THE FIRST TIME I saw her up close, I felt a tremor of recognition. You! I thought. It was a wonder I didn’t say it out loud. All the little clues I had seen through the lens of those cheap binoculars zoomed into focus. The long hair was dark and straight, the kind of hair that corny novelists always have fanned out across the pillows. She moved like a dancer, with a confident, but seemingly unconscious grace. And oh, I was right, she was slender, with a hand-spanning waist and adolescent breasts. So much, I thought, for the importance of being statuesque.

  I had ridden that elevator for days, thinking that I would have to see her eventually, and that I’d know her as soon as I saw her. Even mystical illusions seem reasonable when you’re feeling desperate.

  Sometimes the kids were with me, riding up and down in that little box, listening to maddening elevator music, while I wondered which floor she lived on, what footsteps would be hers, and if it could possibly be true. The baby usually fell asleep. Any constant motion would do that for her; I had rocked her into unconsciousness enough times. But Jason tended to be cranky. There was nothing in this for him. I made up little games where he was the captain of the ship or the engineer of the train, and I let him push all the buttons when no one else was on. But after a while he became restless and he would whine, “I don’t want to play this anymore. Why don’t we get off?” If he was loud enough, he’d wake the baby, who added her screams to his in that tiny place, where my body seemed to absorb most of the sound.

  One day we held the elevator three times for different women who had yelled from the echoing corridors, “Hold it!” But none of them was her. I knew they wouldn’t be. They were too harried, too flushed with the hectic pace of their uneventful lives, to exude mystery or excite desire. They looked something like me. I was hoping that Mrs. X would appear ordinary too, mortal, even inferior, a testimony to Howard’s temporary dementia. But I really expected her to be some kind of Superwoman, as dazzling as a movie star, as regal as a newsreel queen.

  In fiction, in films, The Other Woman is an eventual loser, despite her cool beauty and her father’s millions. In the end, the true heroine (me) proves she can ice-skate, or swim, or tap-dance better, and the hero is easily re-won. Done. The Other Woman has to settle for a supporting actor or get lost. Whatever her original attraction, it has nothing to do with the true foundation of lasting relationships. It seemed to me that people who have memories of bitter, locked-bedroom quarrels, who stay up with croupy, teething babies, who accumulate dreary or ecstatic calendar days together, stay together. Of course statistics knock the hell out of that theory; hardly anyone stays together anymore. All over the city, the country, the world, newer, fresher, second wives share duplicate door keys with men, while those first wives, burdened with domestic experience and stretchmarks, have lonely nights, and days spent in collecting child support.

  But not me. Not Howard. Whatever it was that held him, it was only ephemeral, as glancing as an attack of petit mal. It had only to do with the life of fantasy, and no one can come up to the invention of our dreams.

  Mrs. X didn’t look that exciting. She was very pretty, of course, if you liked that fragile, pale, dark-haired type. But the truly exotic thing about her was her newness. The thrill of the stranger: new textures, odors, tastes. I stood close enough so that the scent of her skin and clothing was discernible without effort. But I sniffed the air anyway, like a badger hound. It was a fruity, powdery smell that I knew from dressing rooms in department stores, from the insides of other women’s pocketbooks.

  In those movies, The Wife usually managed to be smart-looking, even if she was a madcap. I tried to remember who—Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, all the way back to Irene Dunne. She was always full of the confidence that comes with terrific breeding. Too late for that certainly, too late to go back and adjust speech patterns, carriage, a whole life-style from which you emerge the adult everyone knows. I thought ruefully that I might have changed my slacks at least—a small stain had developed over the right thigh. And my sweater was stretched and faded. But I came quickly to my own defense. What else could I wear in the middle of my daily life, a woman with two small, stain-inflicting children? And I thought bitterly that Edith Head hadn’t designed the costumes for this encounter, that there was no appropriate dress for what I was doing.

  It didn’t matter anyway. She never looked at me, even as I memorized her, the geography of her hairline, the circumference of her throat. Either she didn’t sense my interest and my curiosity, or she didn’t care. Ah, that would have been even more important to Howard than her newness—that calm, splendid indifference!

  What a relief from my own unflagging concern, my too-muchness that he swore he loved and falsely claimed he needed to survive. But she never looked at the children either, not a glance at their faces, radiant with good will, at their little bodies teeming with Howard’s chromosomes and mine.

  Ah, Mrs. X. I wanted to say a thousand things to you. If only I had, maybe thin
gs would have turned out differently. “The jig’s up,” I might have said, or even a warning quote from Auden: “… games that call for patience, foresight, maneuver, like war, like marriage.” But Andrew Marvell would probably be more her style.

  Had she sent those letters to me in her own behalf, to begin unsettling things in my marriage? I could have asked for a handwriting sample or at least dusted her for Howard’s fingerprints. But I kept my silence and let the violins and vibraphones of that insipid music take over, until we came to the lobby. Click click, she was walking across the floor, almost out the door, on those delicate shoes, and I hadn’t said anything to her, hadn’t even heard her voice.

  “Miss,” I said finally, rushing so fast that the stroller nearly clipped her in the heels. “Oh, miss!”

  She stopped and I braked, breathless with fear and from my sudden nerve. In the end I couldn’t look at her eyes, as if I believed whole carnal scenes would be reproduced there for my edification. But she was waiting and I had to say something. “The time?” I managed at last, speaking the words through the rusted hinges of my jaw.

  She pushed back her sleeve from a flawless wrist, and looked with a charming myopic squint at her watch. “Three o’clock,” she said. Or maybe she said, “Four o’clock.” I don’t know. I don’t remember. She said something in that voice that was hers, and I nodded mute acknowledgment with my foolish smiling face, and then she was gone.

  My powers and my blood flooded back at once. “Oh, you dumb stupid bitch,” I told myself. “Oh, you imbecile, you fat moron!” I knocked my head against the bell system panel over and over again. Several trusting people buzzed back to let me in. Others called suspiciously over the intercom: “Who? Who is it? Who’s there?”

  Jason blinked.

  I didn’t even know her name.

  23

  “HOWARD,” I SAID. “WE have to talk.” I had called him at the studio and in the background I could hear the bebopping sounds of a singing group.

  “I can hardly hear you, Paulie,” he said. “We’re making a tape here. I shouldn’t even be answering the phone. Is there anything the matter at home?”

  “Nothing!” I shouted. Plenty. “But we have to talk!” Why hadn’t I said it to his face at breakfast that morning, or even to his back earlier, as he lay hunched, but not sleeping, on the farthest edge of the bed. “What are you doing way over there?” I could have said. “What’s going to happen?”

  “I’ll have to see you later,” Howard said. “I can’t hear a thing.” In the background the singers said, “Woo, woo, woo!”

  I was supposed to visit my parents that day. In the morning Howard had said, “What are you doing today?” and I had answered, “I’m having lunch with my folks. Will you be home in time for dinner?” Who had written this idiot script for us, and why were we so obediently playing it out?

  He had promised to be home in time for dinner that evening. So, that’s when it will be, I thought, and I was furious and I was terrified. Recently he was often late for dinner, or had it somewhere else. Oh, I didn’t need Ann Landers to tell me what was happening. I didn’t have to have all those lies and the notes and that sad distance between us in bed before I wised up.

  I was shivering. My hands were so cold, I finally had to wear gloves while I dressed the children. I looked out the window. If only it were spring. If only it were over.

  I tried to play it out in my head, a little dress rehearsal in preparation for the real thing. I would tell him that I knew, that I’d known for a while. He would try to deny it at first, but I would show him the notes, recite the evidence until he confessed. He would be relieved to talk about it finally, although he hadn’t wanted me to find out, to be injured in this way. It was all over anyway. It had only been a sort of fling, a madness. I knew him, didn’t I? His history sometimes led him into weak moments, into bad judgment. He had been suffering too, scared to death of losing everything. But he could come out of this stronger than he had been before, wiser, more faithful, if I would only let him.

  Let him!

  My mother would have advised revenge, some swordplay, at least a little suspense. But I only wanted it to be done with, to be over. Reprisals were not my style.

  Howard would swear on the heads of our children that there had been no real substance to their relationship, that even the other part had played itself out quickly, like those sparklers we used to light as children on the Fourth of July. All dazzle and then darkness. There were no mysteries. But he had to find it out the hard way. There was only this, the perpetual thing between us that could not be properly defined. He would make a confetti of the notes and sprinkle them over our heads like a blessing. And could I believe him?

  But it would not be the simple confession and empty contrition of a man caught in the act. I would know that from his eyes, from the quality of our embrace. She had never meant anything to him and I was his great love, his one and only, and the mother of his children.

  We would both weep a little in relief, and then I would decide to forgive him completely, without strings, without those little tugs of resentment and jealousy. If it was done, it was done. That was the way I was.

  Oh, I wished I had said, “Come home right now, Howard. It won’t hurt more than a minute, Sweetheart, and then it will be all over.” I was really crying a little by then, wiping my tears with the leather palms of my gloves, and the baby was peering curiously into the blurred glitter of my eyes.

  24

  “OH, MY GOD,” HOWARD said, when the children and I came through the bedroom door with the uncanny timing of a vice squad. He was throwing things into a suitcase on the bed: shirts, ties, socks, everything in a desperate, strangled mass. The bureau drawers hung open and even some of my own clothing was flung over the corners of furniture, or lay in small nylon puddles on the floor.

  Howard had said he would be home in time for dinner. But it was only the middle of the day and he was still supposed to be downtown at the studio. Finding him there, then, I felt as shocked as if I had encountered a robber rummaging through our belongings. And Howard looked just as shocked and alarmed to be discovered.

  “What?” I managed to croak, meaning of course, why? The children, taking their miracles where they could find them, ran to hug him. Their main love, their great tamed beast. “Daddy!” they cried, and I felt a swell of envy for their innocence. A father home in the middle of a weekday, a workday, was worth far more than two on the job. How much easier it was to be the children, I thought, who were only at thigh level to the soap opera of adult lives. Yet everywhere, at that very moment across the city, people lay on their therapists’ couches and remembered; dragged out dusty dramas of childhood from the attics of memory. Remembered mothers and fathers, those major villains, in ecstasy and bitterness, in screaming battle and more ominous silence; the stuff that made them the inadequate quivering grown-ups they are today. Children aren’t innocent, I knew, only defenseless. And here we were, traumatizing our own, maybe ruining forever their future relationships with other fucked-up people.

  Stop! I wanted to shout, but Howard might have taken it on the simplest level, thinking I meant stop packing, stop messing up the bedroom, or stop going away with Mrs. X, when I meant stop in a larger sense, as if I were talking to a projectionist showing a screening of our lives. It was time to rewind, to go back a few reels and discover all the bad places, the mistakes, and make them right before it was too late. But I was crazy—it was already too late when your husband was packing, and another woman waited in a private place and in all her private places for him. Look! Howard was kissing the children, clutching them to his chest like a soldier leaving for the front or a murderer off to the chair, as if he were being taken from them against his will. “Oh, my God,” he said again, but it had the unholy ring of blasphemy.

  “I thought you were going to your mother’s today,” he managed finally, confusing me. Somehow, I was in the wrong now for not being where he expected me to be.

  “Wa
it a minute,” I said. “Just wait a minute! You’re the one. What do you mean, I’m supposed … Howie, you were going away like this?”

  He looked at the children, then lowered his eyes. “I was going to call,” he whispered. “Tonight. Easier for everyone.”

  “Easier for Benedict Arnold,” I said. It was so terrible to be absolutely in the right. The sound of my own heart seemed to fill the room, a drumroll for all the action yet to come.

  “Shh,” he said, but I hadn’t raised my voice. I was too out of breath to shout, as if I had been running, or as if I were an invalid who couldn’t afford that sudden expenditure of passion and still expect to ever get well.

  “Don’t think you’re dealing with a fool,” I said. “Oh, I’ve known. I’ve known all along!” I went to the dresser drawer in search of the evidence, those warning notes from my anonymous friend. There was so much junk in there: bills, canceled checks, cleaning tickets, the very literature of our domestic lives, and I threw them across the bed at him, while I searched for the letters.

  Howard let the papers settle in silent snow around his feet, more bad weather from his marriage. “My God,” he began again in that irreverent litany. “Paulie, don’t, please,” he said, and by then my head ached and my vision was fuzzy from all the vying pressures of rage and sorrow, and the tears waiting just behind my eyes for the dam to be lowered.

  How was it that he was begging me? And despite his agony, he was still packing. I saw one of my own brassieres caught in the tangle of his underwear, going in with the rest. How would he explain that to Mrs. X in their love nest? As a silly but necessary souvenir of his marriage? As a secret fetish not yet revealed to her? He seemed to be taking everything. Would he throw the children in next? But at last, the suitcase was slammed shut, and he leaned over it, palms pressing down, eyes shut, and took great labored breaths.