by Peter Israel
Typical Kitty: on the worst day of my life and, by extension, hers, to have abandoned me. Deflated, I finally made my way down to Grand Central and found a train home. It was crowded and (it, too) more clamorous than usual. I caught snatches of conversation—how So-and-So had taken the pipe, and So-and-So was hanging by his thumbs. It was always someone else who’d been ruined that day, never the speaker. Bravely resigned, the speakers themselves were riding it out. Sitting on the sidelines. Waiting for the bottom. Great opportunities acoming. Meanwhile the stir and hubbub of having experienced a great moment in history firsthand, the battlefield, at least Yale 29 Harvard 29, and the world would never be the same again, a brand-new ball game out there, chins jutting, heads raised in class defiance, and the communal garb of serge, flannel, tweed, and Burberry.
By the time I got home to our columned Colonial manse, I was dangerously close to sober. Sober meant thinking about tomorrow and what I was going to do. Sober meant thinking about Kitty and where she was. Our Irish couple asked me if I wanted dinner served alone. The phone had been ringing nonstop, they said, but no word from Mrs. Thompson. I told them to forget about dinner, that I would eat something cold later, and reached for the Laphroaig.
I woke up diagonally. I was sprawled on our bed, face down, clothes on. Shoes on. I thought it was the middle of the night. (Had I just dreamt the dream again?) It wasn’t. Five-something. Dark outside, the lights on in the room. I got up on my hands, elbows, to a monstrous, blinding headache. No Kitty. How could there be if I was diagonal on the bed? A taste of total inky rancidity that only a bottle or more of pure malt can instill so indelibly. A flood panic: that it was over. That what was over? Everything.
I had to deal with everything. But one step at a time.
By the time I got downstairs, the headache was better and the lights in our kitchen no longer hurt my eyes. Kitty’s car was still in the garage. On a hunch, I called her driver. I think I woke him up. He said he’d had a message from Mrs. Goldmark’s office the afternoon before, telling him she wouldn’t be needing him. Wouldn’t be needing him when, last night? Last night and this morning too, he supposed.
The city, then. She must have stayed in the city.
I dreaded going, but I went. I drove all the way, beating enough of the traffic to get to my office before it opened for the day. I stood alone by our receptionist’s desk, listening to the tape she’d put on the evening before, at closing. There’d been a number of calls then—two from Wanda Russell—but none from Kitty. And no calls this morning.
I left, ducking through the downstairs lobby lest any of my employees spot me, and walked over through the morning throngs to Kitty’s office. It occurred to me that I’d done this once before, a long time ago, when I’d been searching for her. Katherine Goldmark Enterprises on the twin glass doors. I went in. Some people were already at work. I think I frightened them. I barged through the premises—her own empty office with the secretary outside and the burgeoning ficus spreading sideways at her ceiling. People at their desks, startled. No, they hadn’t seen Kitty, no, they hadn’t seen Ms. Goldmark, no, they had no idea where she was, when she’d be in. How could they have no idea? How could the great and trusted Bettina herself not know? Who kept her calendar? Where was her schedule?
Finally (Bettina admitted), yes, she’d already called in, before anybody got there, to cancel all her appointments for the day.
I made them play the tape for me. Kitty’s morning voice, cheerful enough: “Hi, this is for Johanna (her secretary), please cancel everything I’ve got on today. I won’t be available. Talk to you later.”
I think they—Bettina probably—even called Building Security, for on my way out—Was I that storming? That furious?—I passed somebody who looked the type. But by the time they’d have explained to him, I was long gone, back on the street.
I had saved the most logical place for last. No accident there. Even as I rounded the corner, I felt the dread suffuse through me. I must have been having trouble breathing. I remember stopping in sight of the park, the canopy, my sides heaving though I hadn’t been running, and taking deep breaths, in, out. I was sweating, though I’ve no sense what the weather was like: hot, cold, wet, dry.
I know it rained sometime that day.
I hadn’t been there in months. Even the nights we were out late in the city, she’d preferred to go home. On the rare occasions when I’d had to spend the night in New York myself, I’d used the club.
Kitty, of course, still used the apartment.
Ah, yes.
The doorman, however, recognized me readily enough. In fact he barred my way, as courteously as he could.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you in, Mr. Thompson.”
“What are you talking about, can’t let me in? It’s my wife’s apartment, isn’t it? Is she upstairs?”
“Yes,” he said with obvious embarrassment. “But I have my instructions.”
“You mean she told you not to let me in? What is this? Has she got somebody up there with her?”
He didn’t answer, which was my answer.
“Please, Mr. Thompson. Please at least let me call upstairs first. It’s my job.”
“I’ll tell you this much, Donald”—his name coming back to me—“if you so much as lift the phone, I’ll have you out on the street by this afternoon. And that’s a promise!”
With that I shoved past him, through the inner doors and on to the elevators.
When I got to our floor, my neck was clammy with sweat, the back of my shirt soaked, and my heart pounding as though I’d run up twenty-odd flights of stairs. Well, what did you expect? What did you expect? What did you expect? I kept saying it to myself over and over.
I’ll tell you what I expected, though, fumbling for my key ring in that hallway, I couldn’t have formulated it then. I expected to find Kitty with a man I’d never seen before, the new Tommy, so to speak. I might have imagined them in flagrante, yes, but just as easily in more civilized postures, eating breakfast, perhaps, in front of the familiar park view, their heads close together, making plans. How long they’d have been together, who could say? But it wouldn’t have been just since yesterday. That wasn’t Kitty’s way. The Kitty I knew would have been grooming my replacement, as I had once been groomed, et cetera.
Et cetera. Et cetera.
How much of a cluck can one man be?
At least she hadn’t changed the locks on me.
I let myself in, closing the door silently behind me. The lights were on in the living room, the disarray considerable. Remnants of food, drink, I think. Clothes strewn on the Chinese rug, a shirt. Empty of people. Something different in the way the furniture was arranged, or maybe it was new?
I thought I heard sounds. I crossed the living room to the small back hall. The door to Kitty’s bedroom was open.
The lights on. My lungs struggling for air.
They were naked on the bed backward, heads toward me, feet at the pillow end.
Goldmark was on his back, head far back, chin raised, eyes closed, arms crossed above and behind his head and off the edge of the bed. His chest hair was dark and curly, too. His chest was heaving like a bellows, in, out, the air coming out of his open mouth in rhythmic snorts.
Kitty was on her hands and knees over him, body pulled back so that her arms were fully, stiffly extended. Rocking back and forth, head down and ass high up the glistening ramp of her back. Her face was hidden in his crotch, hair splayed darkly to either side but not concealing the rocking movement of her head.
The air had a haze of sex to it, and the sweet-and-sour redolence of Kitty in heat.
I don’t think he saw me. I know she did. Whether or not she heard me, she pulled her head back abruptly. Her neck arched back. Her mouth still momentarily clamped his erection, or what was left of it. Her face was wet, smeared, and I saw her eyes go wide from tiny glittering pupils into a gasping expression.
It seems to me she must have gasped, must have shrieked. With her body
if not her mouth. Maybe she did. But I was too confused as I turned, stumbling, to know where the noise was coming from, and it was only when I somehow got down into the street again, blinded by light again, and still heard the raucous, taunting clamor, that I realized the clamor was inside my head.
25
I must go fast now.
We never had a chance, not a one of us. Not Thorne, not Sprague, not all the other men she’d ever inveigled into her web of greed and deceit.
Not, finally, myself.
At least the pianist, as far as I knew, had escaped with his life.
To say that I realized this that morning, on Central Park South, would be an absurdity. I realized nothing. What I had beheld sickened me—yes, sickened even me. Next to it my poor recurrent dream, that nightmare of Starkie in danger which had haunted my adult life, seemed such meager fare. And this was no dream, no hallucinogenic horror show. This was the real McCoy. I had just seen the unseeable.
Nor will I try to describe the crazed life I led those next days, when I snuck like some renegade in and out of the wreckage of my former existence. I passed my nights in unfamiliar hotels, motels. I jumped at shadows, mostly my own. I did what I had to do, and I drove rented cars, and if I thought once that I had to go to her, in spite of everything, I thought it a thousand times. I couldn’t grasp life without her. Yet each of those thousand times I saw her face as I’d last seen it, smeared, hideous, and each of those thousand times I understood what had been going on all along, and I choked on my understanding. The unexplained absences, the performances, the fights (always over the secrets she kept from me), the stonewalling, the lying. All to hide the true partner of her life, her darling, her curly-haired prince of finance, her brother, her lover.
His very name, the mere thought of it …
My God.
I made no attempt to contact her that week. Nor she me. I knew what she was plotting, though. It had to be. It was my turn to be strapped into the driver’s seat, and hers to reach across me, left hand depressing the brake pedal, right hand groping for the shift, breasts brushing my lifeless knees, skirt tight across …
Why finally had she gotten rid of Sprague after all those years? Because, I was willing to bet, he’d found out the truth about them.
And why Thorne? Because Thorne had known, if not her incestuous secret, still enough to bring them down.
Whereas now I held both parts. How long would she endure the risk of exposure, the menace of my revenge?
I let it gnaw at her longer than I dared, almost a week. By then, though, sweet revenge had yielded to a grimmer instinct and I’d bought the gun, courtesy of American Express.
On Saturday I went to visit my children. I’d spent the night before in a Stamford hotel. (Could it have been the same one she’d stayed in that time? And had she really been alone that night? In a pig’s eye!) Only in the morning, though, did I call the house—a reflection of my paranoia and clearly a mistake. When I told Susan I’d be there in fifteen minutes to pick up the children, she hit the roof. How could I do this to them, just show up like that? I’d never done it before, what was so important now?
What was really bothering her, it turned out, was that she had another man there, and once I’d wormed that out of her, I couldn’t keep from bursting out laughing. And then apologized, congratulated her instead and told her not to worry, that if he and I ran into each other, I’d be my most civilized self.
I never saw him, not Susan either for that matter. Mary Laura and Starkie met me at the door. I hadn’t seen them since the wedding. Either they’d since taken their teenage vows of silence vis-à-vis adults, or they were pissed, or both.
“What’s up, Dad?” Starkie said, still in the doorway.
“Nothing’s up,” I answered. “I had an impulse to see you, that’s all, and I’ve acted on it. Look,” I said, glancing from one uncomprehending face to the other, “I know you may have other things to do, but in that case I have to ask you to cancel. Bear with me, please. Just go make your phone calls and let’s get going.”
Instead they trailed me out to the car. Starkie asked where my new Mercedes was. I told him that I hadn’t come from home, therefore I’d rented a car. (The Mercedes? Was it still in the New York garage where I’d left it?) We drove off, Mary Laura with her arms crossed in the back seat, Starkie repeating:
“But what’s up, Dad? Is this some kind of surprise thing?”
“No,” I answered. “Maybe the way to think about it is that every once in a while adults get crazy ideas. Just like you.”
“But you’ve ruined our day,” Mary Laura said from the rear. “And you’ve never done this before, just showing up.”
“True,” I said.
Silence. Then, from Mary Laura:
“Well, where are we going?”
In fact, I had no idea.
“It’s still October,” I said. “Maybe we could go over to the beach, take a walk together.”
“The beach!” she said, astonished. “We’d freeze to death!”
And so it went, back and forth, my stabs at enthusiasm blunted by their sullenness, and short of telling them the truth, I don’t suppose it could have been different. Still, I stuck it out, and made them stick it out, through lunch. We ate in one of those long-menued deli diners we’d been to before. Mary Laura couldn’t find anything she wanted. Starkie, I think, had a hamburger and a shake. They answered my questions in monosyllables—about school, their work, their friends, sports, fads—as though there was absolutely no way they were going to let me break through their resentment.
When I took them home, I kissed Mary Laura good-bye on the cheek, then made Starkie stand still for a hug. This, too, was new—normally we shook hands, if that—and I could feel his body wriggle in embarrassment. Too bad, I thought. Maybe someday he’d remember it, maybe not. In any case they were free of me, and I got back into the car and drove off, realizing that neither of them had once asked about Kitty.
Then I had nothing to do except wait for my call or, rather, wait for news when I called in, which I did periodically. Two days before, I’d hired a detective agency, the same one I’d previously used for Susan. Their assignment was simpler this time: I simply wanted to know my wife’s whereabouts round the clock. No, there was no place they could reach me; I’d be on the road, but I would call in for their reports.
Early that morning, before I’d checked out of the hotel, she’d still been at the mansion up the Hudson, Goldmark’s place, having driven there the day before. Now, when I turned the car in at its Stamford lot before walking across the street to rent another, yes, she was still there. Was there anything else I wanted them to do?
No, I said, just keep up the surveillance.
I drove west slowly, to another motel not far from the river, and there I stayed, all but completing this account. My life was reduced to one activity and one goal. I was going to see her again. For diversion, I dismantled the weapon, stripping it to its components and laying them out on a motel towel. My obedient fingers wiped them clean. I held a square of gauze to the far end of the barrel and sighted through, looking for dust. There was none. Then I put the pieces back together again.
Shortly before noon on Sunday, they both drove off, she and Goldmark, in separate cars. In accordance with my instructions, only she was followed. Was that correct? Yes, that was correct.
The rest of Sunday, I called in every hour. She had gone home, I learned. Her car was in the garage. She hadn’t moved since. As near as could be determined, she was alone.
I waited. There was a chance that he, or someone, would show up for dinner. Seven o’clock, eight o’clock. No one did.
With my nine o’clock call, I canceled the surveillance.
I showered, shaved, dressed, and packed my belongings. Sometime before eleven, I got into the car and drove off. I drove a little slowly, in minor traffic. I could find none of her Mozart on the radio. Out of nowhere instead—some attempt at black humor?—came thoughts of myth
ical and literary figures: the homecoming sailor in the Tennyson poem; Odysseus back in Ithaca, looking for Penelope; even old Van Winkle, geographically closer, stirring from the dead. Except that I was only in my forty-third year, no beard, no white, and I had been awake, at least in theory, since the end of World War II.
Then nothing except the winding lane, the dark trees, mailboxes, fenceposts.
I parked at the edge of our property. I was wearing a heavy black turtleneck, wide-wale black corduroys, rubber-sole shoes. New purchases. I walked in through the trees toward the lights of the house, the night air cold in my face.
The garage, where my old Aries still stood. The tool bin. The smells of polish, wax, in the darkened dining room. The center hall, alight, where Kitty had tripped on the stairs while Goldmark drank Scotch in the living room.
I froze, startled, when the hall lights went out behind me.
Only the system at work. Random selection.
Silence.
Our door, our room, upstairs. Listening. Entering.
Kitty asleep. The dim light, lime green, from the Victorian lamp. Her dark hair against a sea of pillows. Her nightgown, dusky pink, silk, rising, falling.
I listened to her breathing, my own. Yes, my last silent good-bye, whispered, brief requiem.
And then she looked up at me.
“Go on, Tommy. Do it. Show me you have the guts.”
When I didn’t immediately respond, she threw back the covers and got up abruptly. She brushed past me as though I wasn’t there and padded barefoot across the carpet toward her antique dressing table.
The pink silk of her nightgown trailing behind her body.
“The only thing I’ve been wondering,” she said without turning, “is what took you so long. You look like shit. Did it really take you that long to screw up your courage?”
No mockery in her tone, however. I stood there, watching for what she would do next, conscious of the weight in my hand.
