So on this lengthening July afternoon, as I race down the streets of the Back Bay in Caspian’s familiar Ford, my hands clench the steering wheel and my stomach lurches in fear. If it weren’t for the anger, I’d stop right here. I’d pull to the curb and put my face in my hands and cry and cry, shaking in every sinew, since no one is here to watch me.
Josephine has informed me that Scott lives in an apartment on Back Street, not that far from where I lived in the years before I married Frank. Providential, really. It means I don’t have to think as I flash past the familiar blocks, the friendly trees. I don’t need to count the streets, to read the signs. The Ford stops and starts and turns almost by itself, and when I find a car-sized gap on the curb around the corner, between a Chevrolet and a dirty orange ten-year-old Oldsmobile, I slide perfectly into place on the first pass.
The super doesn’t appreciate my summons. He pushes open the outer door and takes me in, smart little hat to rounded leather toe, and scratches his white cotton belly. “What’s the matter, lady? I work the goddamned night shift. I don’t need this.”
“I’m from Mr. Maynard’s office. His place of employment. It seems he’s left an important document inside his apartment this morning.”
“Why can’t he come here himself and get it? The dumb cluck.”
“Because he’s out in Cambridge on business at the moment.” My palms are damp inside my gloves; my heart is beating so hard and so fast, it’s going to splinter my ribs. Trouble. I’m going to get in trouble for this.
“Aw, Jesus. I’m not supposed to let you in, lady.”
“Really, sir. Do I look like some sort of criminal to you?”
The super glances at the pocketbook on my elbow, at the white gloves on my slender hands. “No, I guess not.”
“Please, then.” I melt the frigid muscles of my face into a smile. “I’d be most grateful. We really do need that paper.”
He slumps his hairy shoulders in defeat. “All right, all right. Hold on, will you?”
A hunch, that’s all it is. A hunch, based on the flimsy presence of a roll of George Washington stamps on Scott Maynard’s desk, on the ready supply of plain manila envelopes in the Vote Frank campaign office, on the frequent access of Frank’s campaign staff to our house on Newbury Street, where the precious roll of Caspian’s film might or might not have ended up. He’s young and broke—the shabbiness of this brownstone suggests that, at least—and when you’re young and broke, you’d maybe think blackmailing the boss’s wife is a harmlessly profitable trick, wouldn’t you? She’s not going to tell her husband, and you’re certainly not going to let those photographs out in the wide world to destroy the candidate’s career. The rich little bitch can afford a few grand, can’t she? All those pretty jewels on her neck. Young Mr. Maynard makes a little dough to keep body and soul together, and no one gets hurt, right?
The super’s keys jingle on his hips as I follow him up the dirty steps, flight after flight. The stairwell smells of garbage and damp carpet, and the higher we climb, the warmer the air grows. By the time we reach the top floor, a rotting inferno encloses us. Not that the super seems to care. He fumbles for his keys while the sweat crawls down his neck and into the thatch of fur at the top of his back. A surge of nausea crosses my belly. I hold my hand to my mouth and breathe in the hyacinth scent of my gloves.
“The fuck,” mutters the super, and then: “Bingo.” He shakes the key free of its neighbors and sticks it in the lock. “Here you go, lady. Don’t be too long, all right? I gotta sleep.”
“I won’t disturb you, I promise. Thanks ever so much.”
The first thing I do in Scott Maynard’s apartment is open the nearest window. The air outside has freshened after the thunderstorm, and in comparison to the fetid heat at the top of the stairwell, the back alley is a spring garden. I breathe a few gusts deep into my lungs, and when the nausea recedes, I turn to lock the door and survey my surroundings.
Well, young Mr. Maynard is no Dorothy Draper, but his apartment—like his desk in the campaign office—is small and neat, containing only a scrap of a kitchenette and a square table for eating, a chest of drawers, a sofa, a bed, a few lamps. I check the chest of drawers first, but it’s all on the up and up, just tidy stacks of underwear in the top drawers and folded pajamas and shirts further down. In the tiny bathroom, there’s no room for more than a comb, a toothbrush, and a jar of Brylcreem.
I have just opened a promising cardboard box in the single closet when a voice drifts through the wall, and a familiar jingle of keys sends me scooping up my pocketbook and diving into the closet atop the shoes.
There is no knob on the inside of the closet door. I pull the barrier toward me, as close as I can, but a fine crack of light still streaks across my yellow skirt. I gather up my knees and bury my burning face between them. The shoes dig into my bottom, my pulse pounds at my temples. The edges of Scott Maynard’s three or four suits part around my hat.
He’s probably stopped here to change into one of those suits, hasn’t he? Maybe a fresh shirt, too, before tonight’s reception and dinner at the Harvard Club. In another moment, he’ll open the closet door and reach for the hangers on the rod, and his gaze will drop and find the white tip of my shoe, the length of my leg in its nude stocking.
I wait for the sound of the faucet, or the refrigerator door as he fetches a cool drink with which to refresh himself. I hope he doesn’t notice the open window behind the sofa. Men don’t notice details like that, do they?
But no such domestic noises reach my ears. Instead, I hear voices.
Frank’s voice.
• • •
You know those dreams, where some murderer comes into your room with a knife in his hands, and you want to scream and run away, but your limbs are frozen and your throat is frozen and you just stand there, paralyzed, watching your own murderer approach, hating your own body for betraying you like this, for failing to protect you from this elemental harm? I mean, really. Millions of years of evolution, and you can’t even run away from your own murderer?
I think I’m having one of those dreams.
“We only have an hour,” says Frank, muffled, imprecise, but still undeniably Frank through the wooden door of Scott Maynard’s closet. Through the slim crack of daylight.
Scott says something back, something I can’t quite hear because his body is perhaps turned away, or his voice is perhaps not as well-known to me as that of my husband.
Then the wet, familiar pause of a kiss.
“Oh, God,” Frank groans.
I want to close my ears at the despair in Frank’s voice, Frank’s voice as I have never heard it before, raw and anguished and alive, alive, alive.
But I can’t close my ears. I cover them with my hands, but it’s no use. I hear the rustle of clothing, the creak of sofa springs. Someone cries out; I think it’s Scott. I take in a mouthful of linen skirt and crush it between my jaws. “Jesus,” Frank sobs softly, “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Oh, God. Oh, God.” Over and over he invokes his Savior. Scott’s voice joins him, suppressed, because you don’t want the neighbors to hear, do you? You don’t want the police barging into the middle of all this.
And then it’s over, a final cry from one, a groan from the other, a wooden rattle and a thump, collapse. I think they must be on the floor.
My teeth bite into my skirt. I can’t cry, I can’t sob. They’ll hear me if I do.
“Jesus,” Frank gasps. “Oh, Jesus.”
Scott says something back.
“I know.” Frank is crying. “I know. God help me.”
The tears fall silently down my cheeks. Not for me—I’m beyond the reach of pain, I’ve spun bang out of this universe and come to rest in some nether dimension of excruciating numbness—but for Frank. Frank, on whose immaculate surface I have skated for eight years, unable to find the hairline crack that would lead me to the world undernea
th. No wonder.
I can hear them panting together on the other side of the door. A desperate syncopation that slows, breath by breath, into harmony.
“You okay?” Frank asks tenderly.
Scott murmurs something.
Frank says, “God. I can’t do this anymore. It’s killing me.”
This time, Scott’s voice is clear. “I love you.”
There is a long silence. Scott’s face is vague in my memory, next to the iridescent Josephine. I recall dark hair, dark eyes, an aloof smile, eyebrows that hooked at the ends. A nose that seemed to condescend to me, the candidate’s mere wife. How does Scott look right now, to my husband’s enraptured eyes?
“I love you, too,” Frank says, in a wholly different tone than the comforting I love yous that I, Christina Hardcastle, his wedded and lawfully bedded wife, receive from him daily. As if the sentence originates from some section of Frank that lies against his heart. And then, in despair: “I can’t help it. I can’t. I can’t stop.”
I sit absolutely still, absorbing Frank’s shame. The floorboards creak; the clothing rustles. There is a rush of water from the bathroom, and footsteps. “Thanks,” someone says, I can’t tell whom. I wipe my wet face against my skirt.
A silence begins, long and intimate.
“I’m sorry,” says one of them, I don’t know how much later. I think it’s Scott.
“It’s not your fault.” Definitely Frank.
“I should just quit. Quit the campaign and go to work in another city. Another fucking state.”
“Maybe you should.” More silence, and then: “No, don’t. Scott, no.”
“Come on.”
“Scott, no. I’m done, I can’t. My wife. I just can’t.”
But they do anyway, whatever it is they do. Quieter this time, voluptuous, while I stare at the thread of daylight and inhale the sweaty woolen scent of Scott Maynard’s suits, enrobed in shock, waiting and waiting for them to finish. I need to vomit. The tears have dried up by now, and the sinews have thawed, but I’m still trapped in my tiny closet, unable to leave.
• • •
I’m standing in a telephone booth on Cambridge Street. I don’t know how I got here. I remember crawling across Scott Maynard’s floor and throwing up in his toilet. Shock. My limbs stiff. I remember brushing my hair with his hairbrush, splashing my face with his water. Closing the window, turning the lock on the knob before I closed it. Stairs. Caspian’s blue convertible Ford, sitting around the corner, as if nothing’s happened.
Then a blurriness of driving, the streets of Boston passing before my eyes.
I stare through the glass at the gray walls of Massachusetts General. A doctor walks by, dressed in blue-green scrubs, holding a cup of coffee. I think of Vivian’s husband, a pediatric surgeon of what they call exceptional promise, who will soon be completing his residency at St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village. Mums frets that he’ll be offered some brilliant post somewhere else, somewhere across the country where you can’t get a decent martini. A handsome man, Vivian’s husband, a really nice guy, saving kids’ lives left and right. She calls him Doctor Paul sometimes, like it’s some sort of private joke between them, and he laughs and kisses her when she does. He worships her, really. Vivian, my incorrigible sister Vivian, thoroughly in love and married and respectable. Who’d have guessed? She writes a regular column in the Metropolitan now, a real must-read, sly and gossipy and elegant. Maybe you’ve seen it. They have a rambunctious one-year-old boy, on whom Mums dotes with an improbably idolatrous devotion, and another baby due this winter. A sunny apartment near Gramercy Park, not too far from the hospital, a few blocks away from our cousins the Greenwalds. A lovely, leafy, luxurious corner of Manhattan.
Why the hell did I ever leave New York City? At least in Manhattan, the queens aren’t afraid to let you know it. You don’t end up marrying them by mistake.
Then my brain goes static again, unable to bear the strain. I pick up the receiver, slip a dime through the slot, and ask the operator to put me through to the Boston Globe switchboard.
“Jack Lytle,” he says brusquely.
“Mr. Lytle. It’s Christina Hardcastle.”
“Jesus. Yes. Hello. What can I do for you?”
“I need to speak to you, Mr. Lytle. In private. Is there somewhere we can meet?”
An instant’s pause. “Where are you?”
“On Cambridge Street. Across from the hospital.”
“Whoa. All right. Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“I’m driving in from Dorchester. Can we meet somewhere on Charles Street in twenty minutes? There’s a coffee shop on the corner of Chestnut.”
“I . . . I hate to put you to any trouble.”
“No trouble at all. I was about to head downtown anyway, this dinner of your husband’s.”
“Oh! Were you invited?” My voice is bright with small talk. I lift my gloved fingertips and tap an arpeggio against the glass.
“Well, you know. They like to have press there at some of these speeches.”
“Well, that’s . . . that’s very nice. I’ll see you in twenty minutes, Mr. Lytle.”
“Can I ask what this is about, Mrs. Hardcastle?”
“No,” I say. “No, you may not.”
• • •
Jack Lytle orders coffee. I order water and ask him if he has any cigarettes. He tosses me the pack and lights us both up.
“You sure you want to hear this?” he says.
“I think I know what you’re going to say, if that’s what you mean.”
He looks long, then back at me. “All right. The way I hear it, Frank Hardcastle was summoned to the office of the dean of Undergraduate Studies in March of 1960 to answer rumors that he was having an affair with a professor.” The coffee arrives. Lytle adds cream and sugar—a lot of sugar—and says, as if it needed saying: “A male professor.”
“I see. And?”
“And that’s all. No official reprimand, no public record of any kind. Everyone in the dean’s office at the time denies a meeting ever occurred.”
“So it might be a rumor.”
He sucks on his cigarette. “It might. But I’d say my source is pretty solid.”
“You can’t tell me who it is?”
“No. Sorry.”
I play with the tips of my gloves, which lie alongside my pocketbook on the Formica table, a little dirty from the phone booth. The cigarette burns between my opposite fingers. I think, This is like a play. I’m some actress playing Christina Hardcastle onstage. This isn’t really me. This can’t possibly be my life. If I just keep going until the end of the scene, keep playing my part, the curtain will drop and the audience will applaud and I can go back to my real life. Back to Cape Cod, where I will start the whole summer all over again.
Even better: back to Boylan’s Coffee Shop, where I will start the past two years all over again.
Lytle observes me for a moment, the seasoned journalist, and then speaks up into the silence. “Any reason you’re coming to me now?”
“Yes. But I’m not going to tell you.”
“Fair enough.”
I look up and meet his gaze. “So. I suppose the rest of the story, the thing you’re trying to establish, is that the Hardcastles paid everyone off to make the story die. They had the professor deny everything, Frank deny everything, anyone who had any knowledge of the affair deny everything.” I lay the cigarette, untouched, on the edge of the ashtray. The smell is making me somewhat ill. “Then they set about looking for a girlfriend. For a . . . I don’t know. What’s the word? I’m sure there’s a word for me.”
He clears his throat. “A beard.”
“A beard. That’s it. And Frank threw himself into it, got himself a reputation as a ladies’ man, because it isn’t as if he’s not attracted to women a
t all. He just . . . He just . . .” My throat pinches down on the words.
“He just likes men more,” Lytle says quietly, flicking ash into the tray.
“I’ll bet they hand selected me,” I say. “Then they groomed me for it. They made me think I needed them, instead of the other way around.”
“You’re perfect for the role. Perfect in every way.”
“They were so grateful to me. As long as I behaved myself, as long as I went along with everything, they were so grateful.”
“Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? Everything depends on you.”
I fall back to my gloves, my pocketbook.
“So what are you going to do about it, Mrs. Hardcastle? You’ve got a pretty big decision to make. A crossroads, as we hack writers like to put it.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Can I ask you a question? Do you love your husband?”
“That’s a very personal question.”
“It’s relevant, though, isn’t it?”
Behind the counter, the waitress is eyeballing us as she wipes away at some smudge next to the register. Her hair is pulled back in a cap; her lipstick is a little too bright for the fluorescence above. I think of Em, the waitress at Boylan’s who always knew how warm I liked my apricot Danish, who never blinked an eye when I asked her if she knew where Caspian lived. “Always knew you had taste,” she said, that was all.
I never did go back to Boylan’s, after the wedding. I wonder what Em is doing now.
Lytle stirs his coffee and watches my face, patient as a slender clean-cut Buddha in a formal dinner jacket. Oh, damn, he’s good at this, isn’t he?
Well, then. Answer the question. Do you love your husband, Mrs. Hardcastle? Do you love Frank?
I speak softly to the Formica. “I think so. I did, anyway. I do. I love him, I always have, just not the way . . . I think . . .” I look up again. “I think he’d make a wonderful congressman. I really do.”
Tiny Little Thing Page 28
