by Ed Gorman
Leonard asked another time if Yardman had remarried and Valerie said, “How would I know, darling?” in a tone of faint exasperation. Leonard said, “From mutual friends, you might have heard.” Valerie carried the steak in a covered dish to the refrigerator where it would marinate for two hours. They never ate before 8:30 P.M., and sometimes later; it was the custom of their lives together for they’d never had children to necessitate early meals, the routines of a perfunctory American life. Valerie said, “‘Mutual friends.’” She laughed sharply. “We don’t have any.” Again Leonard noted the present tense: Don’t. “And you’ve never kept in touch,” he said, and Valerie said, “You know we didn’t.” She was frowning, uneasy. Or maybe she was annoyed. To flare up in anger was a sign of weakness, Valerie hid such weaknesses. A sign of vulnerability and Valerie was not vulnerable. Not any longer.
Leonard said, “Well. That seems rather sad, in a way.”
At the sink, which was designed to resemble a deep, old-fashioned kitchen sink of another era, Valerie vigorously washed her hands, stained with watery blood. She washed the ten-inch gleaming knife with the surgically sharpened blade, each of the utensils she’d been using. It was something of a fetish for Valerie, to keep her beautiful kitchen as spotless as she could while working in it. As she took care to remove her beautiful jewelry to set aside, as she worked.
On her left hand, Valerie wore the diamond engagement ring and the matching wedding band Leonard had given her. On her right hand, Valerie wore a square-cut emerald in an antique setting, she’d said she’d inherited from her grandmother. Only now did Leonard wonder if the emerald ring wasn’t the engagement ring her first husband had given her, which she’d shifted to her right hand after their marriage had ended.
“Sad for who, Leonard? Sad for me? For you?”
That night, in their bed. A vast tundra of a bed. As if she’d sensed something in his manner, a subtle shift of tone, a quaver in his voice of withheld hurt, or anger, Valerie turned to him with a smile: “I’ve been missing you, darling.” Her meaning might have been literal, for Leonard had been traveling for his firm lately, working with Atlanta lawyers in preparation for an appeal in the federal court there, but there was another meaning, too. He thought She wants to make amends. Their lovemaking was calm, measured, methodical, lasting perhaps eight minutes. It was their custom to make love at night, before sleep, the high-ceilinged bedroom lighted by just a single lamp. There was a fragrance here of the lavender sachets Valerie kept in her bureau drawers. Except for the November wind overhead in the trees, it was very quiet. Still as the grave, Leonard thought. He sought his wife’s smiling mouth with his mouth but could not find it. Shut his eyes and there suddenly was the brazen coppery-haired girl in the red bikini top waiting for him. Squirming in the darkly handsome young man’s arms but glancing at him. Oh! she was a bad girl, look at the bad girl! Her mouth was hungry and sucking as a pike’s mouth seeking the young man’s mouth, her hand dropped beneath the table top, to burrow in his lap. In his groin. Oh the bad girl!
Leonard had the idea that Valerie’s eyes were shut tight, too. Valerie was seeing the young couple, too.
“I found your passport, Valerie. I found these Polaroids, too. Recognize them?”
Spreading them on the table. Better yet, across the bed.
“Only just curious, Val. Why you lied about him.”
She would stare, her smile fading. Her fleshy lips would go slack as if, taken wholly unaware, she’d been slapped.
“… why you continue to lie. All these years.”
Of course, Leonard would be laughing. To indicate that he didn’t take any of this seriously, why should he? It had happened so long ago, it was past.
Except: maybe “lie” was too strong a word. The rich man’s daughter wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to in such a way, any more than Leonard was. “Lie” would have the force of a physical blow. “Lie” would cause Valerie to flinch as if she’d been struck and the rich man’s daughter would file for divorce at once if she were struck.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea, then. To confront her.
A litigator is a strategist plotting moves. A skilled litigator always knows how his opponent will respond to a move. Like chefs, you must foresee the opponent’s moves. Each blow can provoke a counterblow. Valerie was a woman who disliked weakness in men. A woman with a steely will, yet she presented herself as uncertain, even hesitant, socially; she knew the value of seeming vulnerable. Her sexuality had become a matter of will, she delighted in exerting her will, even as she held herself apart, detached. In all public places as in her beautifully furnished home she was perfectly groomed, not a hair of her sleek razor-cut hair out of place. Her voice was calm, modulated. It was a voice that could provoke others to be cutting but was never less than calm itself. Leonard had witnessed Valerie riling her sister, her mother. She had a way of laughing with her eyes, mocking laughter not uttered aloud. She was a shrewd judge of others. If Leonard confronted her with the Polaroids, the gesture might backfire on him. She might detect in his voice a quaver of hurt, she might detect in his eyes a pang of male anguish. He was sometimes impotent, to his chagrin. He blamed distractions: the pressure of his work which remained, even for those of his generation who had not been winnowed out by competition, competitive. The pressure of a man’s expectations to “perform.” The (literal) pressure of his blood, for which he took blood-pressure pills twice daily. And his back, that ached sometimes mysteriously, he’d attribute to tennis, golf. In fact out of nowhere such phantom aches emerged. And so, in the vigorous act of love, Leonard might begin to lose his concentration, his erection. Like his life’s blood leaking out of his veins. And Valerie knew, of course she knew, the terrible intimacy of the act precluded any secrets, yet she never commented, never said a word only just held him, her husband of only nine years, her middle-aged flabby-waisted panting and sweating second husband, held him as if to comfort him, as a mother might hold a stricken child, with sympathy, unless it was with pity.
Darling we won’t speak of it. Our secret.
Yet, if Leonard confronted her over the Polaroids, that were her cherished sexual secret, she might turn upon him, cruelly. She had that power. She might laugh at him. Valerie’s high-pitched mocking laughter like icicles being shattered. She would chide him for looking through her things, what right had he to look through her things, what if she searched through his desk drawers would she discover soft-core porn magazines, ridiculous soft-core videos with titles like Girls Night Out, Girls At Play, Sex Addict Holiday, she would expose him to their friends at the next Salthill Landing dinner party, dryly she would dissect him like an insect wriggling on a pin, at the very least she might slap the Polaroids out of his hand. How ridiculous he was being, over a trifle. How pitiable.
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 Leona
rd 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 cherry — wood 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 secret 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 were 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 Grand Central Station and on the 6:55 P.M. Amtrak out of Grand Central 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.
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.
