TWO MORNINGS AFTER our wedding, at about eight-thirty, there was a knock at the door. We were now set up in our apartment, room 58. We only had a bed, a desk, a rocking chair in the living room, and four ladder-back chairs at the kitchen table. Elizabeth opened the door. I was sitting at the table having coffee. This was the first time we’d laid eyes on Alfonse Padgett. He looked about fifty; later I learned he was forty-three. He wore his bellman’s uniform with epaulets, a bellman’s cap, and trousers with a dark stripe that ran the length of the legs. He was roughly six feet tall, handsome though a bit gaunt, his black hair was slicked back, and he had a noticeable scar, about three inches long, horizontal as a natural furrow, on his forehead. Above his left breast pocket Mr. Padgett was stitched in gold cursive. “A Mrs. Lattimore?” he said, then checked a piece of paper. “I have the right room, don’t I?”
“Yes, you do,” Elizabeth said. Then she did an odd thing. Lizzy had on a Dalhousie University sweatshirt, jeans, and black tennis shoes and socks, but immediately went and put a sweater on. The radiators were working nicely, and the apartment was well heated. Looking back, I don’t comprehend this in some mystical way, like she was feeling a premonitory chill at the sight of Alfonse Padgett. It’s just that the sweater didn’t seem necessary. When she came back to the living room she said, “I take it you’re delivering my chaise longue?”
“Brought it up on the service lift,” he said. He stepped aside and we could see the chaise longue in the hallway. My thought was that he must be physically strong to move furniture like this. He then picked it up and carried it into the living room and set it down. Then he said something definitely off-tilt: “Some men get to carry a bride over the threshold. Me, a musty old piece of furniture, eh?” He left without another word, shutting the door behind him. We more or less shrugged this incident off. Elizabeth looked so happy to see the chaise longue.
“Did you see the name?” Elizabeth said. “Mr. Padgett.”
“Now I get to sit on the chaise longue you’ve been telling me so much about.”
“Well, we have to break it in,” Elizabeth said. She slid the sweater off over her head and then, her hair now disheveled, began to lift the sweatshirt off.
“Elizabeth, you said it was from Victorian times. There’s a good chance it’s already been broken in.”
“Not by us, darling. Not by us newlyweds. T-shirt now fallen to the floor, she was naked from the waist up. She bunched up her hair and held it above her head, and whenever she held her hair up that way, it was my fall from grace. “I’m going to take the rest of my clothes off and we’ll lie down on this Victorian chaise lounge. And later . . . But let’s give it some time. I’m going to tell you all about how I discovered Marghanita Laski, okay? And especially her novel The Victorian Chaise-Longue. Because you’ll want to know all the details. And I’m ready to tell you. I know what you’re thinking, that there’s not room enough for both of us, but you know what? There’s room enough if we fit ourselves together.”
Elizabeth removed her shoes and socks, her jeans and panties. I got out of my clothes, too, adding to the pile on the kitchen floor. I lay down on the chaise longue. With her legs around my hips, Elizabeth slid me into her. She leaned forward, her breasts against my chest, her arms tight around my neck and shoulders, moving to her rhythm, which became mine. “I’m all jostled and alert, but maybe not. I’m just not sure,” she said. Fragments, like things said in sleep. I don’t know where they came from. I believe she was speaking to me, though maybe as much to herself. Attempting to turn over in tandem, we almost fell off the chaise longue but managed not to. Then her legs were around my shoulders, and she pulled me deep inside and said, “I was so thirsty and now I’m not”—somehow these non sequiturs intensified everything—“but I will be,” and then, trembling convulsively, “I’m there,” and then I was.
It wasn’t more than three minutes, our breaths ratcheting down to near normal, before she said, “Stay inside me, okay? You know, for as long as you can.” We lay side by side, her leg stretched over mine, and she was speaking over my shoulder, more or less into the maroon velvet back of the chaise longue, with its ornate wooden framework and equally ornate wooden legs. “I’d put things off. I had to find a topic for my dissertation at Dalhousie quickly. I mean in a week. My professors were on my case. I don’t blame them. They wanted good things for me. I spoke with my adviser, Professor Auchard. Auchard asked if there was anyone whose novels I secretly loved. Putting it a bit provocatively, I thought, but I knew he meant novels that I thought were excellent but nobody much talked about, let alone taught them. He wanted me to discover someone new on his behalf, I think. I understood that right away. I thought that was great. So I said, Yes, Marghanita Laski’s novels. And I was so, so happy that he had never heard of Marghanita Laski, and here I’d thought he’d read everything.”
“Is Marghanita Laski still alive?” I said.
“Yes, she lives somewhere in England, I think. I actually met her. I went to Europe and met her. It all started with a letter I wrote to her.”
“Why write her in the first place?”
“See, The Victorian Chaise-Longue was published in 1953. I first read it when I was eighteen, my first week at Dalhousie. I’d found a Penguin paperback—you know, with the orange cover—in a bin at a library sale. Fifteen cents, I think. I picked it up, read the back cover, which I still can recite by heart: ‘In this short, eerie novel a young mother who is recovering from tuberculosis falls asleep on a Victorian chaise-longue and is ushered into a waking nightmare of death among strangers.’ I’m telling you, darling, with just that I was hooked.
“But my letter, maybe four or five handwritten pages, was all about the fact that I’d found a real Victorian chaise longue. Found it in a shop on Water Street. I told her I used my holiday money from my parents to purchase it. Told her it was my one piece of furniture, besides my bed and student desk, in my room across from Dalhousie. I told her I sometimes slept on it.”
“Were you surprised she wrote back?”
“Yeah, I didn’t expect to hear from her. And when I told Professor Auchard about the exchange of letters, he said, ‘You’ve found your topic.’ And so I had.”
“Yes, and now you’re on page eighty-six.”
Since Elizabeth’s death, I have read the manuscript a dozen times. That is, up to page 193, the page she was on when she died. In fact, Lily Svetgartot mentioned to Peter Istvakson that she’d noticed the unfinished dissertation on my work desk the first time she visited me at my cottage (as an uninvited guest), and the director immediately wanted to see it. Lily Svetgartot wrote me a note stating that Istvakson “needs to know everything possible there is to know. He’d very much appreciate reading the dissertation.” But I refused.