by Rita Ciresi
Lisa looked down at the floor. She shook her head. “It’s just that . . .”
I waited.
“Say,” I finally said.
“. . . you know. I get tired of doing what we’re supposed to do all the time. I just want to be able to do . . . what we want.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well. So do I.”
“You do?”
“Of course. But for now, this is the situation. You have to accept the situation.”
Lisa looked down at her hands. She got up from the tub—frowned at herself in the medicine-cabinet mirror—and wandered into the master bedroom. I followed her. This room still had furniture in it—a pine armoire, an oak cheval mirror, and a big four-poster bed. The chaste white bedspread, dotted with a nubby pattern, reminded me of the coverlet that used to be on my parents’ bed. When I was a boy, I had loved lying on that coverlet, which had seemed so safe and warm and comforting.
I reached out and touched Lisa’s arm. I was going to say something loving, like I dare Danny—or even Dr. Goode and all his rules—to bother us in here, when I heard Cynthia’s voice—and Cynthia’s laughter—float melodiously up from the kitchen.
I looked down at Lisa’s dirty white socks against the braided rug. “Since when do you write for Playboy?” I asked.
Shame—or defiance—blazed across Lisa’s face. “Since when do you read it?” she said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LISA
Ebb reached into his shirt pocket—and to my surprise, he unfolded the first page of “He Left His Heart at the Office.” Although I knew that Ebb and I were about to exchange words (and that those words were bound to get ugly), I still felt a thrill when I looked at my first byline. It was all I could do to keep from whispering, Elizabeth Diodetto, Elizabeth Diodetto, I am the mighty Elizabeth Diodetto.
Ebb dangled the magazine page in front of me (which, I noted, gave him a good view of the naked Playmate pictured on the back).
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“Josh subscribes. At the office.”
My jaw went slack. Then I laughed. “I’m telling Deb.”
“Don’t you dare,” Ebb said. He turned the page around and gave a quick glance at the text. “I give you an A again,” he said. “For being so . . . accurate.”
“Too accurate?”
Ebb shrugged. “The truth bothers me less than what you made up.”
“But, Ebb. I had to make up. It’s fiction.”
“But, Lisar. Don’t you realize how people will read this? I can take that people might mistake me for this Simon. But if they thought that I was obsessed with my secretary—”
“You are a little obsessed with Victoria.”
“That’s because I want to kill her—not kiss her.” Ebb swallowed—not once, but twice—which meant this conversation already was giving him heartburn. “Besides, did you stop to think—for just one second—how she might feel when she reads your novel?”
“Probably a lot better,” I said, “than she felt after she read your bliss.”
Ebb looked pained. “Listen, Lisar.”
I resisted the urge to plug my ears. “You have my undivided attention.”
“I thought this was well written. And kind of moving. But did you have to tell Josh and not me?”
“I meant to tell you,” I said. “Last night. Really. But every time I started, I thought about how you’d get all bent out of shape.”
“I’m bent—as you call it—not so much by what you wrote, but where you published it.” Ebb looked down at the Playmate. “Why do you have to write for Hugh Hefner? Why can’t you write for someone who runs a nice, clean magazine, like this Martha Stewart woman Josh was telling me about?”
“Martha Stewart is a crock of shit!” I sunk my toes deep into the braided carpet. “Martha’s supposed to be the perfect housewife and hostess. But I read in Publishers Weekly—”
At the mere mention of PW, Ebb winced.
“—that right after she wrote a book on planning your dream wedding—for which she was paid some astronomical advance!—Martha’s husband up and left her for—I forget which—either Martha’s personal assistant or Martha’s fake hands.”
“What are fake hands?”
“You know, like body doubles for movie stars who don’t want to do the nude scenes?” I held out my hands at Ebb. “Martha’s got these beat-up hands, so in the photos of her cutting out gingerbread cookies and arranging gladioli they substitute the hands of a younger woman.”
I reached forward, plucked “He Left His Heart at the Office” from Ebb’s fingers, and smoothed out the wrinkles. “I don’t get your objections to Playboy.”
“It’s total fantasy.”
“So? Don’t you have fantasies, every now and then?” My eyes caught Ebb’s in the cheval mirror and I laughed a nervous laugh. “Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to share them.”
Ebb gave me a tired smile. “Too bad. I was so hoping you would.”
Did he really mean that? I wondered. He couldn’t have meant that. I honestly didn’t want to know what he was thinking of when he . . . And the last thing I wanted to confess was that . . . well, now wasn’t the time to mention matadors. Or plumbers. Or any of the other odd assortment of men I sometimes consorted with in my dreams. I didn’t want them there. I swear it. But they kept on coming at me, over and over, so that I had begun to think, Surely I must be dreaming of all these other men because I no longer love Ebb. But I did love Ebb. Why else did I feel so sad—and so hurt—to know that he also dreamed of women other than me?
I got so confused thinking about it that I did something I never deigned to do when I was in a stranger’s house, because I felt like it was far too personal: I sat down on the four-poster bed. Surprisingly, Ebb didn’t chide me for sitting on someone else’s mattress. He simply stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and jingled his keys, as if he wished the keys—and not we—could do the talking. Then he took his hands out of his pockets and sat down on the bed next to me, so the mattress gave off an embarrassing creak.
“I did like your story, Lisar.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“No. Really. I thought you put your finger on that kind of vague dissatisfaction that people feel—when they don’t really know what they’re feeling. It seemed . . . very realistic.”
I shrugged. “I’m not so sure I want to hear that.”
“You know what I mean.”
I looked down at Ebb’s right hand—when had those small but distinct age spots appeared along his thumb?—which was just inches away from my own left hand (which looked as dry and wrinkled as the hide of an elephant). And I had to tell myself, Don’t you dare start crying, when Ebb put his hand on mine and squeezed it.
“You could have used your real name, Lisar.”
“Well, I thought people might get confused,” I said. “By the final r.”
Ebb nudged my foot with his foot.
“Plus,” I said, “I didn’t want to open you up to embarrassment at work.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Plus . . . I don’t know. I guess I’ve just gotten tired of being Mrs. You.”
“But I don’t think of you as Mrs. You. I mean, Mrs. Me.”
“Other people do. Like at these parties we go to. Whenever I get separated from you, I have to go around introducing myself as Eben Strauss’s wife.”
I thought Ebb would get offended—take his hand away—and say something defensive like, Well, what’s wrong with that? But he held on to my hand and said, “Is that why you really hate those parties?”
It was tempting to whine—once again—about all the inconveniences of putting on control-top panty hose and making endless chitchat. But I plucked at one of the nubs of the bedspread and said, “It’s just that lately, there’s never enough time for anything. And I was kind of hoping—you know—that we could have more of the kind of parties we used to have. Where the guest list was confined to you and me.”
Ebb cle
ared his throat. “I like those parties too.”
“Too bad Danny keeps crashing them.”
Ebb sighed. “I know. But we couldn’t live without him.”
I kept silent. Ebb would think I was a rotten mother—even I thought I was a rotten mom!—for sometimes thinking that Ebb and I would have a much better relationship (or certainly a more romantic one) if only Danny didn’t come between us right and left.
Ebb took “He Left His Heart” off my lap. He carefully folded the magazine page picture side up, first in half, then in quarters, then in eighths—until I almost hollered, No! No! Please do not go down to sixteenths! Yet that was exactly what he did—making the Playmate into the equivalent of a kindergarten origami project. Then he got up from the bed and stuck the tight little wad of paper into a plastic sleeve of his wallet.
In the silence that followed, I wondered why a house built in 1931 wasn’t better soundproofed. Cynthia’s voice came wafting up through the vents.
“I forgot Cynthia was down there,” I said.
“She probably overheard every word we said.”
I listened. But I couldn’t distinguish her words, which meant she hadn’t been able to recognize ours. “She’s probably been on the phone the whole time,” I said. “With her boyfriend.”
“She has a boyfriend?”
“She told me she’s in love with him.” I got up from the bed. “Did you check out the closet space in here?”
I reached for the doorknob that led to the walk-in closet and went inside. On the right-hand side, a thick crush of women’s clothes hung on the rack. The rod on the other side of the closet—with the exception of half a dozen wire hangers, which began to ting! against one another like wind chimes—was empty.
Ebb stuck his head into the closet. “What do you know about him?”
I gestured at the empty hangers. “The guy obviously left his wife.”
Ebb frowned at the solitary hangers left on the rod. “Maybe he died.”
“And maybe I’m Martha Stewart.”
Ebb—rather sorrowfully, I thought—shook his head. “I was talking about what you knew about Cynthia’s boyfriend.”
“I don’t know if he’s ever been married,” I said.
“I should think you’d have the entire poop on him by now. Considering how much you know about this hairy Angus.”
I shrugged. “I just know that her boyfriend has a really weird job. He owns this service that rids people’s homes of wildlife.”
Ebb’s voice rose. “Cynthia goes out with an exterminator?”
“Shhh. He doesn’t trap mice or spray for roaches. He captures big game.”
“Moose and elk are big game, Lisar.”
“So are squirrels and raccoons—if they’re stuck in your walls and attic. But her boyfriend does do big creatures. Once he even took care of a bear in someone’s backyard.”
“He killed a bear?”
“Of course not. I think he shot it with one of those National Geographic harpoon-things that puts the animal to sleep. And then he relocated it somewhere more appropriate, like a zoo or a Girl Scout camp.”
Ebb looked confounded by all this information. “Where did she meet this guy?”
“Rotary,” I said.
Ebb took my arm and led me out of the closet. “Come on. We’ve got a house to look at.”
“Do you like this house?” I asked.
“No,” Ebb said slowly, as he gazed around the bedroom. “I don’t know why—but I love it.”
Maybe without knowing why was the only way to love. My heart, at least, never seemed to work in conjunction with my head. As Ebb and I retraced our steps upstairs, then did the same downstairs, I felt—more than I rationally evaluated—that the house seemed just right for us. After all, we’d just had our first argument in it, and yet we were still talking.
We rejoined Cynthia in the kitchen. As Cynthia finished her call and hung up the wall phone, I went to the back window and gazed out on the snowy garden. “Over in the corner—off to the left—there’s an arbor,” I reported. “And statuary.”
“It’s a rose garden,” Cynthia said. “It will look beautiful in spring.”
“Spring is never going to get here,” I said.
“It already is here,” Ebb said.
“On the calendar, maybe. But not in real life.”
“Patience,” Ebb said.
“Optimism,” Cynthia replied.
“But every year winter seems longer,” I said.
Cynthia smiled. “Somebody once said that winter only adds to the poetry of a house.”
“It also adds—significantly—to the oil bill,” Ebb reminded her.
“It must cost a shitload to heat this place,” I said.
“There’s a new furnace,” Cynthia said. “The windows are double-paned Andersen glass. And in the attic—I don’t suppose you went up to the attic—the owners have put down fiberglass insulation. If you like, I could find out the average heating bill and report back to you.”
When neither of us replied, Cynthia said, “I’ll have the numbers on Monday. As I said, this is a brand-new listing. You’re the first couple to come through here.”
I barely kept myself from commanding Ebb, Whip out your checkbook!
“Do you think this house’ll get a lot of traffic?” I asked.
“Traffic always picks up in the spring,” Cynthia said. She gathered up her keys. “I take it you like this one.”
I brought one finger up to a hairline crack in the ceramic tile, as if it represented numerous flaws in the house’s structure. “It’s different than everything else we’ve looked at so far.”
“We really had in mind,” Ebb said, “something more modern.”
“But it is modern,” said Cynthia. “If you think about it. A colonial has the same clean lines as a contemporary.”
Cynthia then gave us the rundown on what she called “the nitty-gritty”: the property taxes (ouch!) and the public school system (yes, the house was in the right district) and the “proximity to desirable amenities” (I refrained from asking, How far is the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts?). Then she got to the downside. “Of course, this house has less square footage than others in this price range.”
Ebb and I exchanged a quick glance.
“I don’t think I was in on the conversation,” Ebb said, “when you and Lisa discussed the price.”
“Actually, we didn’t discuss it,” Cynthia said. Cynthia always gave her figures in abbreviated form—instead of using hundred thousands, she merely said “mid-fives” or “low sixes.” Now she gave us a number that seemed as high as that pig weathervane, and just as whimsical: three quarters.
Three quarters of what? I wanted to ask, until I realized she was saying million.
“Forget it,” I said.
Ebb gave me one of his annoying I’ll-handle-this looks. “It’s overpriced.”
“Astronomically,” I added.
After she talked up the new bathrooms and kitchen and roof and reminded us of the size of the lot, Cynthia finally admitted, “It’s a little steep. But I thought it worth your time to come out here because that’s just the listing price.”
“But the owners will hold on until someone comes close,” I said.
“Don’t be so sure,” Ebb said. “They may be anxious to get rid of it.”
“Well, the husband obviously already cut his losses—unless he decided, on a whim, to send his entire wardrobe to the dry cleaner’s.” I turned to Cynthia. “We went in their closet.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Did you know the owners had split?” I asked.
Cynthia nodded. “I met the wife.”
“What was your read on the situation?” Ebb asked.
Cynthia paused. “My read—without going into the specifics right now—was that the negotiations most definitely would swing in the buyer’s favor. Now, if there are no more questions—no more questions for now?—we’ll walk out the back and look around the prope
rty.” She pointed at our stockinged feet. “Don’t forget your shoes. I won’t be responsible for frostbite.”
Cynthia put on her trench coat. In the parlor, Ebb fetched my down coat. I saw him look puzzled at how heavy it was, and I feared he would reach into my pocket and pull out the goose-egg gravel I had stolen to hide beneath our bed. But then he held my coat out to me so I could easily get into the sleeves. For a second, I thought this gesture caused a flicker of sadness in Cynthia’s eyes. Maybe she wanted someone to hold out her coat for her, I thought. Or maybe she thought it was totally passé, the old-fashioned way Ebb treated me.
Outside, the wind had sharpened, and the confettilike shreds of dead leaves that weren’t buried beneath the snow skittered across the lawn. Ebb’s loafers crunched on the gravel. I lowered my face into my scarf and turned up the collar of my coat. We circled around the back of the house, walking down a bricked path lined with dormant rosebushes and verdigris statues: a country bumpkin wearing a wig of snow and strumming a mandolin as he courted a maiden, a terra-cotta rabbit howling at the moon, and a wide-faced stone frog, practically buried in a grave of white, that seemed on the verge of letting loose a tremendous burp. A sundial sat on a pedestal; it was so cloudy, the gnomon caught no shadow.
Much as I wanted to linger—peek back in the house and look around the property some more—I also was anxious to get to the salon in time to suck on a breath mint and touch up my makeup before I sat down in Ricardo’s chair and begged him to . . . well, do me.
I pulled back my coat sleeve and glanced at my watch. “Look at the time,” I said. “I’ll be late for my haircut.”
“We wouldn’t want to keep Roberto waiting,” Ebb said.
“Ricardo,” Cynthia and I both said.
Cynthia also looked at her watch. “You’d better run. I’ll drop Eben off on my way back to the office.”
As we started to trudge around the side of the house, I asked Cynthia, “You don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” Ebb said.
I hesitated. Who asked you? hardly seemed a polite response. So I said, “Don’t forget to pick up Danny.”
“I won’t,” Ebb said.
“And you got the garbage out, right?”
