She changes out of her day clothes into a simple black dress. Standing in front of her wardrobe mirror she’s vaguely surprised to see herself looking perfectly well. Her complexion is pale, but she’s always had a natural pallor. People remark on it, tell her that she ought to see a doctor. Once in a while she resorts to a powdered blush to give her cheeks some color, but the contrast with her milky skin can make her look vulgar, so most of the time she leaves well enough alone.
The phone rings as she’s transferring her wallet and keys to a clutch bag. She picks it up and checks the call display. She can’t talk to Dean right now. It’s time to leave for the restaurant. She’s already running late, and Alison will be waiting. She’ll speak to Dean later, she decides, but she nonetheless carries the phone to the foyer and leaves it on the console table while she puts on her coat, and on the sixth ring, irrationally, she picks it up and presses the talk button.
“Dean,” she says. “You’ve been trying to reach me.”
—
Alison is a chunky blonde with apple cheeks and bobbly blue eyes. Being close to Jodi’s age—a little past her prime—is good reason in Alison’s opinion to wear her heels a little higher and her necklines a little lower. Twice divorced, she has settled into a functional independence and regards her short-lived marriages as little more than minor disruptions in her life, temporary and unavoidable, like bad weather not her fault, unexpected squalls in otherwise placid waters.
The Garnet Club is Alison’s home base and social sphere. She often spends her day off sitting at the bar sipping a cola. The staff and regulars are like extended family, and she is den mother to the girls, who squabble over everything—schedules, costumes, music, territory. Alison’s boss, the club manager, can see that she is the glue that binds things together, and so she is allowed certain freedoms. This is what Jodi has gathered from Alison’s talk.
Tonight they’re having dinner at Cité on the top of Lake Point Tower, where they like to watch the sun setting over the city. Spotting Alison across the room, already seated with a glass of wine, Jodi smiles with pleasure. Alison, as always, strikes her as larger than life, a vivid presence with a generous measure of vitality. In the cooking class where they met, Alison emerged as a natural leader, helping people with their knife technique even though she never did take to cooking. For her part, Alison found it impressive that Jodi was paid money to give advice, something that she herself has always done for free.
“Is that the Duckhorn?” Jodi asks, taking a seat.
“How can you tell?”
“You always have the Duckhorn.” She waves the server over and orders a glass of the same.
“So how are you keeping, sweetie?” Alison asks but doesn’t require an answer. The question is merely a prelude to her newscast. “You’ll be glad to hear that Crystal broke up with her boyfriend,” she says. “Took her long enough. And Ray’s wife finally died, poor thing. It’s hard on Ray, but at least now he can move on.”
Jodi knows that Crystal is a stripper who suffers from low self-esteem. She’s heard a lot about Crystal’s hard-earned money and the way her boyfriend spends it. Ray is one of the regulars, an elderly man who is treated by the girls like a favorite pet.
“I’m just so relieved for them both,” Alison says. “It takes a weight off. It really does.”
Jodi’s wine arrives and she raises her glass. “Here’s to better times ahead for Crystal and Ray.”
Alison touches her glass to Jodi’s and forges on, eager to share a treasury of detail about Ray’s wife’s final illness and Crystal’s boyfriend’s reaction to getting the boot. Jodi understands that Ray and Crystal are like brother and sister to Alison—what happens to them is part of Alison’s own life story. Alison has a heart like open country, and although she chides herself for getting caught up in other people’s lives, other people’s lives are what she is all about.
The restaurant is more subdued than usual, all the action taking place in the blazing sky beyond the windows where the sun is busy with its feverish descent. The closer it gets to the horizon the more dramatic are its effects. Alison rambles on, pausing only when the server comes to take their order. Her voice is soothing and distracting, a steady, dependable patter, like rain on a roof. Not until their wine has been replenished and their food is on the table does she stop to take her bearings and consider a change of subject.
“You’re quiet tonight,” she says.
It’s true that Jodi would normally be interrupting her with questions and comments. She nods and says, “I must be tired.”
She isn’t aware of lying or trying to conceal anything. Rather, she has the sense that dealing with Todd all these years has indeed tired her out. In fact, she would gladly share with Alison everything she learned from Dean, but the news is thrashing around inside her like a trapped bird, giving her a kind of psychic vertigo. “I don’t understand it,” she says, referring, however obtusely, to the stupefying revelation—the pregnancy, the wedding, the magnitude of the betrayal, the scope of the intrigue—but even as she speaks, the words and even the thoughts behind them seem to dissipate and lose all meaning. If someone has to talk it had better be Alison.
“How are things with Renny?” she asks, knowing that once Alison gets started on her first husband it’s like she’s on a train that she can’t get off. Loser that he is, Renny has worked his way under Alison’s skin, and her lament is one that she often repeats: “I’m crazy about that man. I’d marry him again if he’d ever grow up.”
Renny comes from a small town in Quebec, where he was raised by a French father and an English mother. His full name is Sylvestre Armand René Dulong. He’s done jail time for drug trafficking. Alison met him at a Montreal nightclub where she waited tables one summer. He used to come in with his biker friends, and they’d sit near the stage so they could slide hundred-dollar bills into the girls’ G-strings. Renny would tip Alison the same, even though she was just a server.
Alison’s courtship with Renny, a high point in her life, featured heaps of cocaine, sex from dusk to dawn, and joy rides up and down the mountain on his Harley. The marriage itself lasted under a month. He didn’t tell her he was seeing someone else—just stopped coming home and let her figure it out for herself. But he still drives from Montreal to surprise her, and he still likes to give her a whirl.
“He’s always trying to get money off me,” Alison is saying. “He knows I’m at work most nights so he calls at four or five in the morning when I’m trying to sleep. Of course, he would never ask for it up front. That’s not Renny. It’s like he’s giving me this fantastic opportunity to invest in some deal he’s got going. I put in ten Gs and get back fifty. If he’s dealing on that level then why is he broke?”
Jodi is doing her best to stay alert and follow along. She feels like she’s perched on a treetop in a high wind.
“What I need,” Alison says, “is a nice, quiet, steady guy with a good income. Guys come into the club, they’re hitting on me all the time. Married guys. What do they take me for?”
Alison sips her wine and frowns at her manicure. The server takes their empty plates and leaves them with dessert menus.
“The quiet, steady guy may be a myth,” says Jodi. “Biologically, men are predators.”
“Tell me about it,” says Alison.
“Women like to believe that their men are nicer than they actually are,” Jodi adds. “They make excuses for them. They don’t see the whole picture, just bits at a time, so it never seems to them as bad as it really is.”
Jodi looks at her dessert menu, which the server has placed squarely in front of her. The words are floating—little boats set adrift in white space. “It’s hard to choose,” she says.
“You like the crème caramel,” says Alison.
“Okay,” says Jodi.
“But we don’t have to stay for dessert. If you’re feeling too tired.”
“We always have dessert.”
“But we don’t have to. How are you
feeling?”
“Actually, I’m a little dizzy,” says Jodi. Dizzy is not the word for what she’s feeling, but it’s a convenient shorthand for a volley of symptoms that she can’t itemize or describe.
Alison’s concern is immediate and genuine. She gets the server’s attention, gives him her credit card, asks him to rush it, takes Jodi’s arm, and insists on driving her home.
“Don’t be silly,” says Jodi. “It’s a ten-minute walk.”
Alison ignores this. As they leave the restaurant she keeps a protective arm around her friend, and when the valet brings her car she buckles her in as if she were a child. When she gets Jodi home she makes her lie on the sofa and brings her a cup of tea.
“Where’s Todd?” she asks.
Jodi shakes her head. “It’s still early.”
“Maybe I should call him.”
“God no.”
“Why not?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“So,” says Alison. She sits in an armchair and rests back. “What’s he done?”
Jodi doesn’t immediately answer. Alison waits. The moments that pass are taut, marked by a distant sound of water rushing through pipes and the ticking of the Keininger mantel clock. Jodi resists divulging her news because right now it’s nothing but words in her head, a story she was told that she could still try to forget.
“Have I ever mentioned someone named Natasha Kovacs?” she says finally.
“I don’t think so,” says Alison. “Not that I can remember.”
“Todd has gotten her pregnant,” says Jodi.
“Oh dear,” says Alison.
Having made a start, Jodi finds that going on is less of an effort. “Natasha can’t be more than twenty or twenty-one. She’s Dean Kovacs’s daughter. Dean is an old school friend of Todd’s.”
“That’s disgusting,” says Alison. “How could he do that to you?”
“He’s planning to marry her. That’s what Dean says.”
“He doesn’t have to marry her. How ridiculous. She can have an abortion.”
Jodi finds herself rising to Alison’s show of outrage. “He wants to marry her. According to Dean he’s dying to marry her.”
“Well, maybe Dean doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Or maybe the marriage is Dean’s idea. Maybe Dean is the old-fashioned type who thinks that you marry the girl if you get her pregnant.”
“I don’t think Dean wants Todd to marry her. I think that’s the last thing he wants.”
“Okay, well, let’s not go off half-cocked. Better get the story straight first.”
Jodi shrugs. Dean has no reason to deceive her. The way he tells it is probably as close to the truth as it’s going to get.
—
After Alison has left she gets up from the sofa, smooths her hair and dress, and goes into the bedroom. The clothes she wore to the seminar are draped across the made bed: beige trousers, white shirt, flesh-toned bra and thong, sheer panty hose. Her Fendi leather handbag is on a chair, and under the chair her Jimmy Choo leopard pumps are lying askew. Surveying her beautiful clothes gives her a measure of comfort. It isn’t that she’s insecure about her looks, but it could be that the bloom is not as fresh as it once was, that a younger woman might enjoy advantages that she herself can no longer claim. At one time she could throw on a pair of Levi’s and a T-shirt, and she can still do that, no question, but there’s reassurance in dressing well.
She picks up the shirt and undergarments and drops the items one by one into a hamper. The trousers she arranges on a hanger in her wardrobe. The shoes go into their original box, which she places back on the shelf with her other shoe boxes. She partially emptied the handbag before she went to dinner, but it still contains a number of items. She opens it, turns it upside down, and dumps its contents onto the bed: ballpoint pen, tiny notebook, assorted receipts, loose change—and the sleeping pills. The pill bottle, one of those clear plastic vials with an oversize twist-off cap, makes the sound of a baby’s rattle as it rolls into a slight depression in the duvet. She picks it up and reads the print on the label: Kovacs, Natasha. Take 1 (one) tablet at bedtime as required.
She’s feeling better now. “Almost back to normal” are the words she used to reassure Alison, and they were very nearly true. She’s at least regained a sense of being held down by gravity, and the objects around her are keeping their shape. Methodically, finding it soothing, she goes through her nighttime routine: turning down the bed, plumping the pillows, tidying away this and that stray object. She changes out of her dress, removes her makeup, and brushes her hair. By the time she hears Todd’s key in the lock, she’s sitting on the sofa in her robe and slippers reading a travel magazine. She waits while he scrabbles around in the foyer disposing of his jacket and keys and change. She hears him clear his throat and mutter a word or two under his breath. She even hears his shoes as he approaches, dragging on the pile of the carpet.
“You’re still up,” he says.
He comes around the sofa to stand in front of her and kisses the top of her head. She closes her magazine, puts it aside, and gets to her feet. There’s something about his posture. He’s caught wind of Dean’s call and thinks that she may have stayed up to confront him. He places a hand on her shoulder, searching her face.
“Alison was here,” she says. “We ate at Cité and she drove me home. How was your day? What did you get for dinner?”
“I had a burger at the Drake,” he says.
He smells of alcohol and fried food. His nose is shiny and his voice is pitched high. She picks up the magazine she was reading and adds it to the stack on the coffee table. When she turns back he’s still standing there looking at her.
“What?” she says.
“Nothing. It’s good to see you.”
“You should get the dog walked. I’ll wait up for you.”
When he gets back she’s in the kitchen using a wooden spoon to stir a pot of Ovaltine. Now he becomes talkative. He wants to tell her about various things that happened at the bar over the course of the evening—a couple making out, really going at it, and a gang of priests getting soused. There was some kind of religious convention at the hotel. He talks about the mishap of the morning—the missing key—and laughs about his bad temper. “Poor guy,” he says, referring to the janitor. “But he was gone so fast. You’d almost think he was waiting for an excuse.”
She puts four slices of bread in the toaster and pushes down the lever. As he talks on, she responds mechanically with nods and murmurs. He doesn’t seem to notice that she isn’t really listening. When the toast is ready she butters it, spreads it with strawberry jam, and cuts it into triangles. These she arranges on a plate, which she places on the bar top. He pops one of the triangles into his mouth and takes a turn around the room. He comes back, picks up the plate, and continues to pace.
“You didn’t talk to Dean today,” he says. “By any chance.”
“Dean,” she says. “Why would I talk to Dean?”
“No reason.”
“I can make more toast,” she says.
“Dean is a bastard,” he says. “I hope you know that.”
He’s getting dangerously close to confessing. She’s relieved when he moves to the fireplace and turns his attention to the newly framed picture on the mantel.
“This is quite the picture,” he says. “The detail in these things is phenomenal.”
“How do you like the frame?”
“The frame. I didn’t even notice it.” He laughs. “Good job. I like it.”
When he comes back with his empty plate, his mug of Ovaltine is waiting for him. It’s not too hot and he gulps down half of it in one go.
“I love you, you know,” he says combatively.
She’s standing at the sink washing the pot and the wooden spoon. “That’s nice,” she replies, looking at him over her shoulder. “How’s the Ovaltine?”
“Good.” He puts the mug to his lips and recklessly drains it.
“Give me
that.” She holds out her hand.
He comes around the bar top and gives her the mug. As she rinses it under the tap, he presses against her from behind, circling her waist with his arms. “You’re too good to me,” he says.
—
When she wakes up on the sofa it takes her a while to remember why she’s here, and then there’s a moment of escalating panic. Last night, after getting Todd undressed and sitting him down on the edge of the bed, after giving him a push and watching him collapse backward like so much dead meat, his jaw slack and his eyes already closing, after lifting his legs off the floor and trying without success to roll him into his proper place, she covered him with the duvet and left him there, lying across the mattress on a diagonal.
Eleven pills. That’s how many were in the vial, round blue tablets like buttons on a baby’s smock. She spilled them into her hand and counted them out as she dropped them one by one into her mortar. A woman who grinds up sleeping pills in her kitchen mortar and stirs the resulting chalky powder into her husband’s bedtime drink could potentially attract a lot of negative attention, could even make a name for herself, but that’s not how she was thinking about it at the time. It was more a matter of the just and appropriate thing to do. The pills were in his pocket; he was careless enough to leave them there; it was only right that he should be the one to ingest them. If he ingested the pills they would disappear, and in the process the score between them would be settled.
Unfortunately she failed to notice the dose, and it’s now too late to check because the information is gone—the label scraped off and flushed away, the vial itself down the chute with the rest of yesterday’s trash. Not that knowing would be any help because she has no idea what dose would be likely to kill him or how much he’d had to drink or what the exponential effect of the alcohol would be. Looking back now she sees that she couldn’t have been in her right mind, taking a risk like that without even stopping to think.
The Silent Wife: A Novel Page 8
