The Witch

by Jean Thompson

  Amparo was still crouched in a corner of the hallway, ready to flee or sound the alarm. “I didn’t catch the name,” Edie said.

  He pointed to the name patch on his chest. “Bialosky, United States Army.”

  Edie frowned. “I’m sorry, I thought you were . . . Isn’t Milo your father?”

  “Legally. Biologically. Occasionally.” Edie shook her head, not getting it. “Obviously, there’s some information he hasn’t shared with you.”

  Edie ignored this. “Well he’s out of town. He just left.”

  “How disappointing,” he said, not sounding particularly disappointed. “So, what happened to the big tall goonybird girl? The previous Mrs. Baranoff?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. How did you get in here, anyway?”

  “People tend to trust a man in uniform.”

  “They shouldn’t. I don’t.”

  “But you’re curious. Did you say Edie? Jake.”

  She didn’t offer to shake hands with him. They stared at each other. Edie said, “Why do you have a different last name?”

  “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  Edie turned to Amparo, and, pantomiming and nodding, tried to convey that things were all right, all right, and that she should bring them some coffee. Amparo wailed and fled. They watched her go. Jake Bialosky raised an eyebrow, inquiring. “We don’t have much company,” Edie explained.

  “Good thing, that.”

  “Why don’t you sit down. Are you a sergeant or a captain or something?”

  “Lieutenant. Or something.”

  Edie waited until he chose a seat, then took one opposite him. There was a space of silence that felt like a competition. Then Edie said, “I’m afraid that Milo hasn’t told me much about you.”

  “A shocking oversight.” He was enjoying himself, all jaunty hostility.

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”

  “How long have the two of you been married?”

  “Never mind that. Why did you want to see Milo, anyway?”

  “I need a reason to see my own dear pappy?” It was the strangest thing, looking at him. Like viewing Milo’s baby pictures. “I was in New Jersey, visiting my mother. This is a side trip. A whim.”

  “Your mother. I’m sorry, I thought . . . I thought she had cancer.” And died. Milo had said so.

  “That was a long time ago, when I was a kid.”

  “So . . . she’s all right?”

  “Any reason she shouldn’t be? No thanks to Milo. He bailed on us. Of course, he wasn’t Milo back then. He was Myron Bialosky. You didn’t know? Just one more thing, I guess.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “He underwent a convenient transformation.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I didn’t bring documentation.” He shrugged, Milo’s habit of moving one shoulder, then the other.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It drives my mom crazy. ‘Milo? Why Milo? He wants to be classy? Why not Maurice?’ She took to calling him ‘Milo the Magnificent.’ The name kind of stuck. I think he actually likes it.”

  “That’s some story,” Edie said. People could say anything.

  “You don’t believe me. Okay. Here’s the rest of it anyway. We lived in Bayonne, my mom’s still there. Just your ordinary, one-generation-up-from-the-ghetto immigrant life. Myron was working for his father-in-law, my grandfather, painting houses. Can you imagine that? But Myron’s an ambitious guy. Smart too. You may have noticed, we are never allowed to forget how smart he is.”

  He was watching her for some reaction. Edie wondered if he was here for money, if he’d get around to asking about money. “Go on.”

  “I guess he wanted a brand-new shiny life, not a sick wife and two little kids. He started spending time in the city, he said he was working there and taking night school courses. And maybe he was. Along with making sure he met some useful people who could help him out. We saw him less and less. He sent money for a while. He talked my mother into a divorce and married this rich Canadian woman. Oh come on. You didn’t think he earned all this by the sweat of his brow.” Bialosky nodded to the room’s compass points.

  Edie heard a faint rattling that meant Amparo had delivered the coffee cart to the next room. Edie got up and wheeled it in to them. “A Canadian. That’s a nice touch. I’ll make sure to ask Milo about her.”

  “You do that. Cream, please. No sugar.”

  “So where is she?” Edie asked, pouring his coffee. “This Canadian?”

  “She died.”

  “Oh come on,” Edie said, scornful now.

  “You’re very loyal. I’m sure he likes that.”

  “It’s in really bad taste, having her die. It’s piling on.”

  “Rather unexpectedly, I believe.”

  “So now he’s a murderer.”

  “I didn’t say that. But there are different ways of killing somebody,” Bialosky said. “I see that your ring doesn’t quite fit.”

  Her left hand curled into itself, a reflex. The emerald slid around to her palm. “It needs to be adjusted. I haven’t taken it in yet.”

  “I expect it’s recycled.”

  “You hate him and you want me to hate him too.”

  “I wouldn’t say it rises to the level of hatred. More like, loathing.”

  “Maybe you’re just some kind of con man.”

  “Maybe Milo’s the con man.” He drank some of the coffee and set the cup down, reached into his jacket pocket, took out a card, and scribbled on it. “Here. Call me, we can keep up with the family news.” Edie didn’t reach for it, so he put it on the table.

  “Shouldn’t you be overseas somewhere? Shouldn’t you be off fighting a war?” She thought that anybody could go out and rent a uniform, anybody could pretend to be anybody.

  “I’m stateside now. Fort Drum. Milo will be so pleased to hear it. Where did he find you, anyway? You look, I don’t know, more wholesome than his usual.”

  “Perhaps,” Edie said, “you wouldn’t mind seeing yourself out.”

  Bialosky stood, tucked his hat under his arm, and left the room. The front door closed behind him. Edie’s nerves jingled and jangled. At that moment what seemed important was not even the truth of the matter, but what she chose to believe. Was she really loyal? Did she want to be? It seemed as if she had been given a choice as to exactly which of two ways she wished to be stupid.

  That evening, after Amparo left to go home, Edie stood again in front of Milo’s study door. Once more, she used a credit card to ease the latch open, and sat down at his computer. When the password window appeared, she typed in, MilotheMagnificent.

  The screen changed to its home page, open for business. Edie tried his e-mail account. His mailboxes were tidy and disappointing, as if he’d cleaned them out before he left town. A couple of messages had come in, one from a charity foundation and one from someone hoping that Milo would blurb a book about the coming environmental apocalypse. And a one-line message sent just last night from someone with a screen name of remarkablelady: Have you forgotten?

  Before she could talk herself out of it, Edie typed in a reply: Remind me. And sent it off.

  She closed the computer and left the room. Oh goddamn Lieutenant Something, scratching the itch of her neglected-wife grievance, sending her peeping and prying in what was certainly a bad idea.

  But there was also something thrilling about it.

  Milo called from Australia in the middle of her sleep. The connection was tinny and his voice had a filtered quality. Still, he sounded in excellent spirits. Everything was going very well, very well indeed, and he hoped Edie was getting by all right, and wasn’t it funny to think that here, Down Under, it was already tomorrow!

  Edie sat up in bed, listening to him. She said she was fine, and she was glad to hear that he was enjoy
ing himself, and he said he would let her get back to sleep now. “Goodbye, Myron,” she said, and there was an especially long, filtered pause before he said goodbye to her.

  In the morning she called her sister Anne. “What if it turns out that somebody might have told a few fibs about their past? Would that be a big deal? A mortal sin?”

  “Somebody like a spouse? I don’t know, I guess it would depend on if the person married to them felt like they were being played. What’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure.” She didn’t want to tell Anne about Jake Bialosky, if only because it would make everything seem more real. “I guess I’m having trust issues.”

  “Has he been screwing around on you?” Anne asked, too avidly.

  “No, that’s not it.” Edie was indignant. But then, what about remarkablelady? And once you allowed yourself to doubt, everything began to unravel. If Milo wasn’t Milo, what else might be false? She hid Jake Bialosky’s card away in her copy of The Foucault Reader.

  She knew she wasn’t going to be able to stay away from Milo’s computer. She was curiouser and curiouser. She was bitten and smitten. This time Edie went through his address book. There was no entry under Bialosky. But here was Edie, along with her old campus address. There were also a great many female names, but most of these were only first names, Suzanne or Maeve or Helena, with just a phone number attached. And here, although she had not been expecting it, was Ondaate, complete with phone, e-mail, and Manhattan address.

  Reckless now, she dialed the number. It was answered on the third ring, surely by Ondaate herself. Who else would speak with that peculiar intonation, that combination of lilt and purr: “Halloo?”

  Edie had not thought about what to say. “Oh, hi, you don’t know me, but my name is Edie Baranoff.”

  “Baranoff? What does the little patoot want from me?”

  “Nothing, he doesn’t even know I’m calling.”

  “Who are you, Baranoff?” Suspicious now. “Some other family?”

  “No, Milo and I got married.” Edie waited a beat. “Recently.”

  “You want what, congratulations? Or advice? Or where I hid his Viagra? I did that. Hid it so he would not distress me.”

  Edie decided to pretend this was humorous. “Oh ha ha. No, that’s okay, I guess I just wanted to say hello, you know, ahead of time, in case we should ever see each other, around town.”

  “If I am seeing Milo, I am running the other way. He is a terrible snob man. No one is ever good enough for him. He is always pick, pick, pick at me. I am too thin, too stupid, too foreign. He marries me just to tear me down! Hateful man! I have no time for this!”

  “Wait, could I just ask you, do you know anything about him being married to another woman, a Canadian? A woman who died?”

  “If she died it was because he bored her to death with his big talk. I have other problems, I am hanging up. I have cut off all my hair and now my head is very tiny. Goodbye.”

  Edie was still at Milo’s computer. The e-mail bell chimed. The message was from remarkablelady. Edie opened it. It was a picture of two enormous breasts, globe-sized and tipped with spreading brown nipples, distorted by the camera angle. The breasts were thrust forward and filled the entire screen, the body behind them invisible. Edie deleted the picture and shut the computer down. Milo was due back home the day after tomorrow.

  He called from Sydney, where he had a night’s layover, still jazzed up from his week of oratory and glad-handing and dining well. The conference had been a great success. Everyone said so. But of course he was looking forward to getting back home, he’d missed her so!

  “I expect you’ll be jet-lagged,” Edie said. “I’ll try to let you sleep in when I get up. I have some job interviews the next morning.”

  Milo said he must have misheard her. Something about interviews? “Yes,” Edie said. “I called around to a few of your friends.” She mentioned their well-connected names, the editors and columnists and producers who held the keys to so many kingdoms. “I’m hoping one of them can come up with something for me.”

  There was the gravel sound of Milo clearing his throat. “I’m not sure this is such a good idea, sweetheart.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Well, when you get hired through the back door, so to speak, you enter the workplace with other people resenting that, you know, and that’s a burden you don’t want to have.”

  Edie pretended to mishear him. “Yes, it’s exciting, isn’t it? The pay probably won’t be much for an entry position, but there’s tons of potential. You have a good flight!”

  Milo arrived home late the next evening, cranky from travel and with bloodshot eyes. Right away he started in on the job search. “I really wish you hadn’t made those calls. It could put me in a very awkward position. Conflicts of interest, that sort of thing.”

  “But you said you were going to call them. And when you didn’t get around to it, I thought I could do it myself and spare you the trouble.” This was not entirely untrue, only mostly.

  “And what makes you think you have the qualifications to do the sort of high-end work we’re talking about here? I’m sorry, my dear, but I believe you’re confusing your very ordinary liberal arts education with the kind of advanced knowledge and sophistication these positions require.”

  They stared at each other. Milo rubbed at his eyes, inflaming them further. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, I’m too tired right now. But I don’t think I can sleep yet. I might catch up on e-mail. It was so difficult to get Internet access.”

  Did Edie imagine that he gave her a particularly searching look when he mentioned e-mail? But that was nonsense; he’d been halfway around the world when she’d done her snooping. Edie said solicitous things about the wearying effects of crossing so many time zones. She went to bed but she couldn’t sleep either. The two of them had entered some new phase. Milo might not be exactly who he said he was, or who she had believed him to be. But then, it was possible that she was not the person she had believed herself to be all this while.

  By the next day, when she looked at Milo’s study, he had nailed new and sturdier pieces of wood trim around the door frame.

  She went out and got herself a job in the office of a company that developed television shows for different cable outlets, shows that featured makeovers and competitive weight-loss derbies and battling families, all her old trashy favorites. She had missed watching television. Her job was “production assistant,” and it involved a lot of fetching things and answering phones. The office was a hectic place where business was transacted at top volume. Edie would make herself indispensable. She saw that right away. She would learn the ropes and anticipate needs. She would unpack some of her old hanging-out clothes, jeans and T-shirts and boots so that she’d look like everyone else there. Milo would hate it.

  And he did. “I can’t imagine what you were thinking. These are vulgar people who make a vulgar product. I can’t be associated with any of this.”

  Edie said that he was not associated with it. “I’m not using Baranoff. I’m on the payroll as Edie Gordon. And you never have to watch any of the shows.”

  “Why couldn’t you work somewhere more”—Milo raised his hands and let them fall to his sides—“suitable?”

  “You told me I was too badly educated and commonplace to do anything important,” Edie reminded him.

  “I didn’t mean you should do something ridiculous! Why do you need to work anyway, don’t I provide for you?”

  “Now Milo, please don’t be prehistoric. Oh! I forgot to tell you, your son Jake stopped by while you were gone.”

  “Jacob? What did he want?”

  “Just saying hello, I expect. He didn’t stay long. He seems like a very nice young man. And good-looking! Takes after you.”

  Milo gnawed on his bottom lip, considering her. His eyes looked even worse today, puffy and
with drooping, blood-red rims. At least he’d stopped going on about her job. Edie said, “Would you like me to call the pharmacy and see if they have any kind of salve, you know, cream they could send over? In case you picked up an infection.”

  “What are you saying? What infection?” He tried to stare her down but he was too bleary.

  “Your eyes, silly. Conjunctivitis. Very contagious. Try not to rub them. I can call and they’ll run right over with some medicine. The kinds of services you can get in New York! It’s really . . .” Edie paused. “. . . remarkable.”

  Milo went to the eye doctor, who diagnosed an infection and prescribed antibiotics and a green eyeshade that made him look like an irradiated frog. He sat in the main room and brooded, unable to read or write. Edie suggested books on tape, or voice-recognition software, or even a television, but Milo would have none of it. She was glad she had a reason to leave.

  It was her second full day of work. She had a blast. Already she could tell who among her fellow employees would become her friends, who would be a pain in the ass, how she’d navigate among them. There would be opportunities, possibilities. She would prosper.

  She was walking home, enjoying the mild chill in the air, the blue and lengthening shadows, the preposterous fall fashions in the boutique windows. As she approached the apartment building, she saw Amparo standing outside, dressed in her old furry coat and clutching a number of plastic bags. Her tragic monkey face registered distress. Edie hurried up to her. “Amparo, what’s the matter?”

  The old woman’s hands clutched at Edie’s sleeve. “Quitting.”

  “What happened, is Mr. Baranoff all right? Amparo?”

  She only shook her head and pressed a small key into Edie’s hands. “Secret,” she said, then scuttled away toward the subway and disappeared underground.

  Apprehensive now, Edie hurried upstairs. Milo was just where she’d left him, installed in his chair with a litter of Kleenex, coffee cups, and empty plates surrounding him. “What happened with Amparo, what did you do to her?” Edie demanded.

  “How telling,” Milo said, “that you assume I did something to her. A number of small but valuable objects are missing. She removed them and sold them for profit. I can think of no other explanation.”