Leonard shuddered. A rivulet of icy sweat ran down the side of his cheek like a tear.
So, no. He would not confront her. Not just yet. For the fact was, Leonard had the advantage: He knew of Valerie's secret attachment to the first husband, and Valerie had no idea he knew.
Smiling to think: Like a boa constrictor swallowing its living prey paralyzed by terror his secret would encompass Valerie's secret and would, in time, digest it.
* * * *
The anniversary trip to Italy, scheduled for March, was to be postponed.
"It isn't a practical time after all. My work..."
And this was true. The Atlanta case had swerved in an unforeseen and perilous direction. There were obligations in Valerie's life, too. “...not a practical time. But, later..."
He saw in her eyes regret, yet also relief.
* * * *
Doesn't want to be alone with me. Comparing me with him isn't she!
* * * *
"...a reservation for four, at L'Heure Bleu. If we arrive by six, maybe a little before six, we won't have to leave until quarter to eight, Lincoln Center is just across the street. But if you and Harold prefer the Tokyo Pavilion, I know you've been wanting to check it out after the review in the Times, and Leonard and I have, too..."
In fact, Leonard disliked Japanese food. Hated sushi that was so much raw flesh, uneatable.
This passion for gourmet food, wine! Expensive restaurants!
Where love has gone, he thought bitterly.
Listening to Valerie's maddeningly calm voice as she descended the stairs speaking on a cordless phone to a friend. It was nearly two weeks after he'd discovered the Polaroids, he'd vowed not to look at them again. Yet he was approaching the cherrywood table, pulling open the drawer that stuck a little, groping another time for the packet of Polaroids that seemed to be in exactly the place he'd left it and he cursed his wife for being so careless, for not having taken time to hide her secret more securely.
(His small cache of soft-core porn, pulpy magazines, X-rated videos, evidence of a minor, minimal interest in porn and hardly a consuming passion, he'd taken care to secrete away deep in one of the locked drawers of his filing cabinet downstairs amid documents of stultifying dullness pertaining to IRS payments, stock holdings. His secret he was sure Valerie would never discover!)
"'Oliver and Val, Key West, December 1985.’”
With what childish pride Valerie had felt the need to identify the lovers!
At a window overlooking a snowy slope to the river and the glowering winter sky he examined the photographs eagerly. He had seen them several times by now and had more or less memorized them and so they were both familiar and yet retained an air of the exotic and treacherous. One of the less faded Polaroids he brought close to his face, that he might squint at the ring worn by the coppery-haired girl—was it the emerald? Valerie was wearing it on her right hand even then, which might only mean that, though Oliver Yardman had given it to her, it hadn't yet acquired the status of an engagement ring. In another photo, Leonard discovered what he'd somehow overlooked, the faintest suggestion of a bruise on Valerie's neck, or a shadow that very much resembled a bruise. And Oliver Yardman's smooth-skinned face wasn't really so smooth, in fact it looked coarse in certain of the photos. And that smug, petulant mouth, the fleshy lips, Leonard would have liked to smash with his fist. And there was Yardman wriggling his stubby yet long toes, wasn't there a correlation between the size of a man's toes and the size of...
Hurriedly Leonard shoved the Polaroids into the drawer and fled the room.
* * * *
"The time for children is past."
Years ago. Should have known the woman hadn't loved him if she had not wanted children with him.
"...a kind of madness has come over parents, today. Not just the expense: private schools, private tutors, college. Therapists! But you must subordinate your life to your children. My husband—” Valerie's voice dipped, this was a hypothetical, it was Leonard to whom she spoke so earnestly, “would be working in the city five days a week and wouldn't be home until evening and—can you see me as a ‘soccer mom’ driving children to—wherever! Living through it all again and this time knowing what's to come, my God it would be so raw."
Valerie laughed, there was fear in her eyes.
Leonard was astonished, this poised, beautiful woman was speaking so intimately to him! Of course he comforted her, gripping her cold hands. Kissed her hair where she'd leaned toward him, trembling.
"Valerie, of course. I feel the same way."
He did! In that instant, Leonard did.
They'd been introduced by mutual friends. Leonard was a highly paid litigator attached to the legal department of the most distinguished architectural firm in New York City, its headquarters in lower Manhattan on Rector Street. Leonard's specialty was tax law and within that specialty he prepared and argued cases in federal appeals courts. He was one of a team. There were enormous penalties for missteps, sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And there were enormous rewards when things went well.
"A litigator goes for the jugular."
Valerie wasn't one to flatter, you could see. Her admiration was sincere.
Leonard had laughed, blushing with pleasure. In his heart thinking he was one in a frantic swarm of piranha fish and not the swiftest, most deadly, or even, at thirty-four, as he'd been at the time, among the youngest.
The poised, beautiful young woman was Valerie Fairfax. Her maiden name: crisp, clear, Anglo, unambiguous. (Not a hint of “Yardman.") At CitiBank headquarters in Manhattan, Valerie had the title of Vice-president of Human Resources. How serious she was about her work! She wore Armani suits in subdued tones: oatmeal, powder-gray, charcoal. She wore pencil-thin skirts and she wore trousers with sharp creases. She wore trim little jackets with slightly padded shoulders. Her hair was stylishly razor-cut to frame her face, to suggest delicacy where there was in fact solidity. Her fragrance was discreet, faintly astringent. Her handshake was firm and yet, in certain circumstances, yielding. She displayed little interest in speaking of the past though she spoke animatedly on a variety of subjects. She thought well of herself and wished to think well of Leonard and so had a way of making Leonard more interesting to himself, more mysterious.
The first full night they spent together, in the apartment on East 79th Street where Leonard was living at the time, a flush of excitement had come into Valerie's face as, after several glasses of wine, she confessed how at CitiBank she was the vice-president of her department elected to firing people because she was so good at it.
"I never let sentiment interfere with my sense of justice. It's in my genes, I think."
* * * *
Now, you didn't say fired. You said downsized.
You might say dismissed, terminated. You might say, of vanished colleagues, gone.
Leonard typed into his laptop a private message to himself: Not me. Not this season. They can't!
* * * *
Another time, in fact many times, he'd typed Yardman into his computer. (At the office, not at home. He and Valerie shared a computer at home. Leonard knew that, in cyberspace, nothing is ever erased though it might be subsequently regretted and so at home he never typed into the computer anything he might not wish his wife to discover in some ghost-remnant way.) Hundreds of citations for Yardman but none for Oliver Yardman so far.
He meant to keep looking.
* * * *
"...first husband."
Like an abscessed tooth secretly rotting in his jaw.
In his office on the twenty-ninth floor at Rector Street. On the 7:10 A.M. Amtrak into Penn Station and on the 6:55 P.M. Amtrak out of Penn Station returning to Salthill Landing. In the interstices of his relations with others: colleagues, clients, fellow commuters, social acquaintances, friends. In the cracks of a densely scheduled life the obsession with Oliver Yardman grew the way the hardiest weeds will flourish in soil scarcely hospitable to plant life.
&
nbsp; Sure he knows. Knows of me: second husband. What he must remember! Of her.
Had to wonder how often Valerie glanced through the Polaroids in the desk drawer. How frequently, even when they'd been newly lovers, she'd shut her eyes to summon back the first husband, the sulky, spoiled mouth, the brazen hands, the hard stiff penis thrumming with blood that would never flag, even as she was breathless and panting in Leonard's arms declaring she loved him.
Since the discovery weeks ago in November he'd looked for other photos. Not in the photo album Valerie maintained with seeming sincerity and wifely pride but in Valerie's drawers, closets. In the most remote regions of the large house where things were stored away in boxes. Shrewdly thinking that because he hadn't found anything did not mean that there was nothing to be found.
"Len Chase!"
A bright female voice, a Salthill Landing neighbor leaning over his seat. (Where was he? On the Amtrak? Headed home? Judging by the murky haze above the river, early evening, had to be headed home.) Leonard's laptop was opened before him and his fingers were poised over the flat keyboard but he'd been staring out the window for some minutes without moving. “...thought that was you, Len, and how is Valerie? Haven't seen you since, has it been Christmas, or..."
Leonard smiled politely at the woman. His opened laptop, his document bag and overcoat in the seat beside him, these were clear signals he didn't want to be interrupted, which the woman surely knew, but had come to an age when she'd decided not to see such signals, in cheerful denial of their meaning Please leave me alone, you are not of interest to me, not as a woman, not as an individual, you are nothing but a minor annoyance. Melanie Roberts was Valerie's age, and her frosted hair was razor-cut in Valerie's style. Very likely Melanie was a rich man's daughter as well as a rich man's wife but the advantage she'd held as a younger woman had mysteriously faded, even so. Melanie seemed to think that her neighbor Leonard Chase might wish to know that she'd had lunch with friends in the city and gone to see the Rauschenberg exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum and then she'd dropped by to visit her niece at Barnard. Melanie was watching Leonard with sparkly expectant eyes in which dwelled some uneasiness, a fear of seeing in Leonard's face exactly what he was thinking. He had to concede, he saw in Melanie Roberts's face that he might still be perceived as an attractive man, in his seated position he appeared moderately tall, with a head of moderately thick hair, graying, but attractively graying; his skin tone was slightly sallow, but perhaps that was just the flickering Amtrak lighting; his face was dented in odd places, and loosely jowly in others; his nostrils looked enlarged, like pits opening into his skull; his eyes behind wire-rimmed bifocal glasses were shadowed and smudged; yet he would seem to this yearning woman more attractive than paunchy near-bald Sam Roberts, as others’ spouses invariably seem more attractive, since more mysterious, than our own. For intimacy is the enemy of romance. The dailyness of marriage is the enemy of immortality. Who would wish to be immortal, if it's a matter of reliving just the past week?
Melanie Roberts's smile was fading. Amid her chatter, Leonard must have interrupted. “...hear you, Len? It's so noisy in this..."
The car was swaying drunkenly. The lights flickered. With a nervous laugh Melanie gripped the back of the seat to steady herself. Another eight minutes to Salthill Landing, why was the woman hanging over his seat! He yearned to be touched, his numbed body caressed in love, so desperately he yearned for this touch that would be the awakening from a curse, but he shrank from intimacy with this woman who was his neighbor in Salthill Landing. On his opened laptop screen was a column of e-mail messages he hadn't answered, in fact hadn't read, as he hadn't for most of that day returned phone messages, for a terrible gravity pulled his mind elsewhere. The first husband. You cannot be first. Melanie was saying brightly that she would call Valerie and maybe this weekend they could go out together to dinner, that new seafood restaurant in Nyack everyone has been talking about, and Leonard laughed, with a nod toward the window beside his seat where some distance below the oily-dark sprawl of the Hudson River was lapsing into dusk, “Ever think, Melanie, that river is like a gigantic boa constrictor? It's like time, eventually to swallow and digest us all?"
Melanie laughed sharply as if not hearing this, or hearing enough to know that she didn't really want to hear more of it. Promising she'd tell Sam hello from him, and she'd call Valerie very soon, with a faint, forced smile lurching away somewhere behind Leonard Chase to her seat.
* * * *
He would track down the first husband, he would erase the man from consciousness. He would erase the man's memory in which his own wife existed. Except he was a civilized human being, a decent human being, except he feared being apprehended and punished, that was what he would do.
* * * *
Early November when he'd discovered the Key West photos. Late February when his CEO called him into his office in the “tower."
The meeting was brief. One or two others had been taken to lunch first, which had not been a good idea; Leonard was grateful to be spared lunch. Through a roaring in his ears he heard. Watched the man's piranha mouth. Steely eyes through bifocal glasses like his own.
Downsized. Stock options. Severance pay. Any questions?
He had no legal grounds to object. Possibly he had moral grounds but wouldn't contest it. He knew the company's financial situation. Since 9/11, they'd been in a tailspin. These were facts you might read in the Wall Street Journal. Then came the terrible blow, unexpected, at least Leonard believed it to be unexpected, the ruling in Atlanta: A federal court judge upheld a crushing $33 million award to a hotel-chain plaintiff plus $8 million punitive damages. The architectural firm for which he'd worked for the past seven years was hard hit. Conceding yes, he understood. Failure was a sickness that burned like fever in the eyes of the afflicted. No disguising that fever, like jaundice-yellow eyes.
Soon to be forty-six. Burnt-out. The battlefield is strewn with burnt-out litigators. His fingers shook, cold as a corpse's, yet he would shake the CEO's hand in parting, he would meet the man's gaze with something like dignity.
He had the use of his office for several more weeks. And the stock options and severance pay were generous. And Valerie wouldn't need to know exactly what had happened, possibly ever.
* * * *
"...seem distracted lately, Leonard. I hope it isn't..."
They were undressing for bed. That night in their large beautifully furnished bedroom. Gusts of wind rattled the windows, that were leaded windows, inset with wavy glass in mimicry of the old glass that had once been, when the original house had been built in 1791.
"...anything serious? Your health..."
From his corner of the room Leonard called over, in a voice meant to comfort, of course he was fine, his health was fine. Of course.
"Damned wind! It's been like this all day."
Valerie spoke fretfully as if someone were to blame.
Neither had brought up the subject of the trip to Italy in some time. Postponed to March, but no specific plans had been made. The tenth anniversary had come and gone.
In her corner of their bedroom, an alcove with a built-in dresser and closets with mirrors affixed to their doors, Valerie was undressing as, in his corner of the bedroom, a smaller alcove with but a single mirrored door, Leonard was undressing. As if casually Leonard called over to her, “Did you ever love me, Valerie? When you first married me, I mean.” Through his mirror Leonard could see just a blurred glimmer of one of Valerie's mirrors. She seemed not to have heard his question. The wind buffeting the house was so very loud. “For a while? In the beginning? Was there a time?” Not knowing if his voice was pleading, or threatening. If, if this woman heard, like the frightened woman on the train she would laugh nervously and wish to escape him.
"Maybe I should murder us both, Valerie. ‘Downsize.’ It could end very quickly."
He didn't own a gun. Had no access to a gun. Rifle? Could you go into a sporting goods store and buy a rifle? A shotgun? No
t a handgun, he knew that was more difficult in New York State. You had to apply for a license, there was a background check, paperwork. The thought made his head ache.
"...that sound, what is it? I'm frightened."
In her corner of the room Valerie stood very still. How like an avalanche the wind was sounding! There had been warnings over the years that the hundred-foot cliff above Salthill Landing might one day collapse after a heavy rainstorm and there had been small landslides from time to time and now it began to sound as if the cliff might be disintegrating, a slide of rock, rubble, uprooted trees rushing toward the house, about to collapse the roof.... In his corner of the room Leonard stood as if transfixed, his shirt partly unbuttoned, in his stocking feet, waiting.
They would die together, in the debris. How quickly then, the end would come!
No avalanche, only the wind. Valerie shut the door of her bathroom firmly behind her, Leonard continued undressing and climbed into bed. It was a vast tundra of a bed, with a hard mattress. By morning the terrible wind would subside. Another dawn! Mists on the river, a white wintry sun behind layers of cloud. Another day Leonard Chase would endure with dignity, he was certain.
* * * *
2.
"'Dwayne Ducharme,’ eh? Welcome to Denver."
There came Mitchell Oliver Yardman to shake Leonard's hand in a crushing grip. He was “Mitch” Yardman, realtor and insurance agent and he appeared to be the only person on duty at Yardman Realty & Insurance this afternoon.
"...not that thisis Denver, eh? Makeville is what this is here, you wouldn't call it a suburb of anyplace. Used to be a mining town, see. Probably you never heard of Makeville back East, and this kind of scenery, prob'ly you're thinking ain't what you'd expect of the West, eh? Well see, Dwayne Ducharme, like I warned you on the phone: Thisis east Colorado. ‘High desert plain.’ The Rockies is in the other direction."
Yardman's smile was wide and toothy yet somehow grudging, as if he resented the effort such a smile required. Here was a man who'd been selling real estate for a long time, you could see. Even as he spoke in his grating mock-Western drawl Yardman's shrewd eyes were rapidly appraising his prospective client “Dwayne Ducharme” who'd made an appointment to see small ranch properties within commuting distance of Denver.
EQMM, January 2008 Page 7
