The Furies

“I NOW BELONG TO an incredibly exclusive club,” Ray Testa had said in his speech at his wedding reception. He savored the moment, then winked and added, “There are not many men who can say they’re older than their father-in-law.”

He was fifty-eight, his new wife, Shelby, thirty-one; his father-in-law was fifty-six and seemingly at ease with this older man marrying his daughter. He said, “She’s an old soul.”

Ray Testa was a dentist, and for seven years Shelby had been his hygienist. But “I’m thinking of leaving,” Shelby said one day. Ray urged her to stay and finally pleaded, “You can’t leave. I love you.” She didn’t smile. She swallowed air and said that she had feelings for him, too. Then, “What about Angie?”

He confessed everything to his wife, adding that he wanted to marry Shelby.

Angie took it badly, as he guessed she might, but unexpectedly she said, “Why didn’t you leave me years ago, when I might have met someone who really cared for me?”

He hadn’t imagined she’d object in this peevish way, for such a coldly practical reason, because his timing was inconvenient for her. He thought she’d tell him how she’d miss him and be miserable without him, not that she might have been better off with someone else.

Staring at him, her eyes went black and depthless and she seemed physically to swell, as though with malevolence. Ray expected a shout, but her voice was the confident whisper of a killer whose victim is helpless. “I know I should say I wish you well, but I wish you ill with all my heart. I’ve made it easy for you. I hope you suffer now with that woman who’s taken you from me. These women that carry on with married men are demons.”

She sounded like her mother, Gilda—Ermenegilda—sour, mustached, habitually in black, pedantically superstitious, Sicilian, always threatening the evil eye. He told himself that Angie was bitter, cruel for being grief-stricken, demented by the breakup, she didn’t mean this. They had no children; they divided their assets in half, the proceeds of his more than thirty years of dentistry. Angie got the family house, the dog, a lump sum; Ray the vacation house on the South Shore—he’d commute to his office from there, Shelby by his side. Shelby wasn’t greedy. She said she’d never been happier. Ray did not divulge to Shelby the vindictive curse Angie had uttered. He now had what he wanted, a new life with Shelby.

She was a treasure, unconventionally beautiful, not the fleshy new graduate she’d been when he first hired her but with the lean feline good health of the jogger she now was, tall and sharp-featured. Her mouth was almost severe—she hardly parted her lips when she spoke, and then always in a low certain voice that got his attention, as in, “What about Angie?”

With the unwavering judgment of someone untested, someone innocent and upright, Shelby was young, alert to the obvious. Her eyes were gray, blinkless, cat-like. Ray had desired her from the first, but thought that his feeling would diminish as he got to know her better. Time passed and his desire to possess her became a physical set of symptoms, like hunger, a swollen tongue, a droning in his head, a tingling in his hands.

Now she was his. He could not believe his luck, how she had come into his life, to lead him confidently into a future he’d hated to contemplate. He sometimes eavesdropped on her working on a patient in her concentrated way and he was almost tearful with gratitude that she was his wife. People said how a second wife was often a younger version of the first one, but she was in every way the opposite of Angie.

They had never argued, and so their first argument, a few months after their marriage, came as a shock to Ray. It concerned his high school reunion, the fortieth. Ray wanted to take Shelby. She protested that she’d feel out of place. Everyone knew a high school reunion was hell for a spouse. She said, “I think you’ll regret it.”

But Ray became a big smiling boy with a boast, and Shelby agreed, even to their staying the night at the hotel in his hometown, where the reunion would be held in the ballroom.

Medford had changed: it was denser and now divided by the interstate, much busier, but still full of memories, as he told Shelby on their tour through the place, the two brick façades that had once been the entrances to single-screen movie theaters, the National Guard armory that bulked like a granite citadel, the basement stairs that had led to Joe’s poolroom, the Italian cobbler, the Chinese laundry, the post office with the old murals of shipbuilding in its lobby. Now Medford had a new hotel, with a ballroom large enough to accommodate the high school reunion.

“One night, nonsmoking, king-size bed,” the clerk said at the reception counter, tapping the check-in card with her pen, but she kept glancing at Shelby, uneasily, almost with pity, as though suspecting an abduction.

They drew stares later, too, as they searched the table for their name labels.

“I don’t really need one. It’s your night,” Shelby said.

But as she said it, Ray peeled the paper backing from Shelby Testa and stuck the label to her beaded jacket.

A woman in a black shawl approached them as Ray was patting the label flat. The woman flourished a large yellow envelope and drew a black-and-white photograph from it, saying, “Miss Balsam’s class. Third grade. Do you recognize yourself?”

“That’s me, third row,” Ray said. “And that’s you in the front with your hands in your lap. Maura Dedrick, you were so cute!”

“Aren’t I still cute?” the woman said.

Twisting her fingers together over the old photo, she was small and thin and deeply lined, with weary eyes. No makeup, with a trace of hair on her cheeks, fretful lips, her open mouth like a grommet in canvas.

“Of course you are,” Ray said.

Smiling sadly, as though he had satirized her with his sudden answer, appearing to dare him, wanting something more, she seemed to go dark with defiance. And she turned, because two other women had come to greet her.

“You remember Roberta and Annie,” Maura said.

Ray said “You married Larry” to Roberta.

“He left me,” Roberta said.

“I’m divorced too,” Annie said.

All this time, Ray was aware that while they were talking to him they were eyeing Shelby. Annie was bigger than he remembered, not just plump and full-faced but taller—probably her shoes—and she was carrying a handbag as big as a valise. Roberta was heavily made up, wearing ropes of green beads, Gypsy-like. Ray had known them as girls. They were old women now—older than him, he felt, for their look of abandonment tinged with anger. When they became aware of his gaze they recoiled in a way that made him feel intrusive. They were fifty-eight, everyone in the room was that age, though when he surveyed the growing crowd he could see that some had fared better than others.

“May I introduce my wife?” Ray said. “This is Shelby.”

The women smiled, they clucked; but Ray saw that Maura had narrowed her eyes, and Annie had leaned closer, and Roberta seemed to snicker. Putting his arm around Shelby, he felt her tremble.

Maura said to Shelby, “Angie was so mad when I went to the junior prom with Ray. Angie was my best friend—still is.”

Roberta hovered over Shelby and spoke in a deaf person’s shout, “He took me to Canobie Lake. He got fresh!”

“Remember what you wrote in my yearbook?” Annie said. “‘You’re the ultimate in feminine pulchritude.’”

“I guess I had a way with words,” Ray said.

“You had a way with your hands,” Roberta said, shouting again.

Maura said to Shelby, “I’ve known Ray Testa since I was seven years old.”

Everything that he’d forgotten was real and immediate to them—the prom, the lake, the yearbook, Miss Balsam’s third-grade class. He had lived his life without looking back, and he’d been happy. But had their disappointment made them dwell on the past, as a consolation?

He said, “Shel and I need a drink.”

Maura said, “I’ll get it.”

“Don’t bother.”

But she insisted, and after she slipped away they spoke with Annie and Roberta. While they chatted about changes in Medford, he remembered the rowboat at Canobie Lake, the fumbled kiss, his clutching Roberta, the way she had snatched at his hands. And Annie—the summer night on her porch, her arms folded over her breasts, and “Don’t, please.” And when Maura returned with the drinks he recalled the back seat of his father’s car at the drive-in, the half-pint of Four Roses, and “Cut it out.” Horrible.

Maura handed over the two glasses of white wine. Ray sipped his, but Shelby held hers in both hands as though for balance, not raising it.

“Drink up,” Maura said.

Shelby put her glass to her lips, and Ray did the same. The warm wine had the dusty taste of chalk and a tang he couldn’t name, perhaps a metal—zinc, maybe, with the smack of cat piss—and he found it hard to swallow, but to please Maura he swigged again, and he knew he was right in thinking it was foul, because Shelby did no more than sip. And seeing Shelby struggle, Maura looked on with what he took to be satisfaction.

He remembered their flesh, and he sorrowed for what they had become, parodies of those young women. They had badly neglected their teeth. He felt grateful that Shelby did not resent his being so much older, but he was never more keenly aware of their age difference.

In the ballroom, where a small band played, some couples had begun to dance. His arm around Shelby’s waist, as he steered her onto the floor, he could feel her body go heavy, resisting the music.

“How you doing?” he heard. It was Malcolm DeYoung, a high school friend. “Hey, who’s this fine lady?”

“Shelby, I want you to meet my old friend Malcolm.”

Malcolm said, “What about some food? There’s a buffet over there.”

They stood in the buffet line, and afterward they sat together at a table. Ray said, “I used to know everyone. But the only people I’ve met so far, apart from you, are those three”—Maura, Roberta, and Annie were at a nearby table. “The funny thing is, they were my girlfriends, at different times.”

Malcolm said, “You got a target on your back, man,” and he winked at Shelby.

“I really wanted to introduce Shel to my old friends.”

Malcolm put his fork down. He stood up and said, “I don’t drink these days. But let me tell you something. In a little while these people are going to get a little toasted. I don’t want to be here then. I don’t think you want to, neither.”

Then he left them. Ray didn’t speak again, nor did Shelby say anything more. She put her knife and fork on the uneaten food on her plate, and her napkin on top, like a kind of burial. Ray hugged her and said, “Ready?”

She said, “I was ready an hour ago.”

They left quickly, not making eye contact, and in the hotel lobby Ray said, “Shall we go upstairs?”

“What did you do after the prom?”

“We watched the submarine races up at the Mystic Lakes.”

“Show me.”

He drove her through the town and to the familiar turnoff, then down to the edge of the lake, where he parked, the house lights on the far shore glistening, giving life to the black water. He held Shelby’s hand, he kissed her, as he had in the first weeks of their love affair. He fumbled with her, loving the complications of her dress, delighting in the thought of her body under those silky layers slipping through his fingers, and now she seemed as eager as he was.

“Here?” he asked. “Now?”

“Why not?” She shrugged the straps from her shoulders and held her breasts, and as she presented them to him, their whiteness was illuminated by the headlights of a car, swinging past to park beside them.

“Cops,” Ray said.

Shelby gasped and covered herself, clawing at her dress, and ducked her head, while Ray rolled down his window. A bright overhead light came on inside the other car, which seemed full of passengers.

“You pig.” It was Maura Dedrick, her face silhouetted at her window, someone beside her—Annie, maybe—and someone else in the rear seat.

Ray was in such a hurry to get away, he started the car without raising the window, so he heard Maura still calling out abuse as he drove off, and the shouts were mingled with Shelby’s choked sobs that made her sound like a sorrowing child.

Back at the hotel (the reunion was still in progress—fewer people, louder music) Shelby lay in bed shivering, repeating, “That was awful.” Ray tried to soothe her, and in doing so felt useful, but when he hugged her, she said, “Not now.”

Once, in a dark hour of the night, the phone rang like an alarm. Ray snatched at it, and the voice was a shriek, the accusation of a wronged woman, which Ray felt like a snatching at his head.

“Wrong number,” he mumbled, and hung up, but was unable to get to sleep again.

In the morning Shelby said, “Show me whatever you’re going to show me,” and slid out of bed before he could touch her, “then let’s go home.”

He drove her to his old neighborhood and then slowly down the street where he had lived as a boy. The trees were gone, the wood-frame houses faded and small. Shelby sat, inattentive, as though distracted. But he urged her to get out of the car, and he walked her to the side of a garage where he’d scrawled a heart on the cinderblock with a spike, the petroglyph still visible after all these years. It was here, in the garage between two houses, that he’d kissed a girl—what was her name?—one Halloween night, crushing her against the wall, tasting the candy in her mouth, and running his hands over her body.

“Hello, stranger.”

A great fat woman with wild hair stood, almost filling the space between the garage and the nearby house. She laughed and put her hands on her hips. She wore bruised sneakers and no socks, and when she opened her mouth Ray could see gaps in her teeth, most of her molars missing. She raised her hand, clapping a cigarette to her lips, then blew smoke at him.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Is it”—he squinted to remember the name—“Louise?”

“Who else?” she said, then, “Who’s that, your daughter?” and laughed again.

Shelby said, “I’ll meet you in the car.”

“She’s scared,” Louise said triumphantly.

Ray was frightened too, but didn’t want to show it. The woman was hideous, and her sudden appearance and her weird confidence made him want to run. But he sidled away slowly, saying, “Don’t go away. I’ll be back.”

“That’s what you told me that night. I’ve been waiting ever since!”

Had he said that? Probably—he’d told any lie for the chance to touch someone. She had scared him then, she scared him now. He had the sense that she wanted to hit him, and when she took another puff of her cigarette and tossed the butt aside, he feared that she was coming for him. She was big and unkempt and reckless-looking.

“Please,” he said, and put his hands up to protect his face and ran clumsily to his car.

Louise did not follow him. She watched from the passageway beside the garage, potbellied, her feet apart, and as he started his car she shook another cigarette from the pack, fearsome in her confidence.

“I haven’t seen her for years,” Ray said. Shelby did not reply; she was mute, her arms folded, faced forward. “Imagine, she still lives there.”

“Waiting for you.”

“That’s crazy.”

But when they got home there was a further shock. Ray parked and noticed a white slip of paper thumbtacked to the front door. The idea that someone had come up the long driveway and through his gate and left this note disturbed him. And he was more disturbed when he read the note: Ray, You must of gone out. Sorry I missed you—Ellie.

“Who’s Ellie?” Shelby said.

He was thinking must of, and he knew Ellie had to have been his college girlfriend. She’d become pregnant. “I missed my period.” It had happened just about the time they were breaking up. She told her parents, who arranged for her to have an abortion in another state—it was illegal in Massachusetts then. When it was over they’d written to his parents, denouncing him, saying he’d ruined their daughter’s life. He had not seen her since. And that was who Ellie was—Ellie Bryant.

But he said, “I don’t know anyone by that name.” It was the first lie he’d told Shelby in all the time he’d known her. Shelby seemed to guess this, and smiled in triumph. Ray said, “Maybe an old patient.”

Another bad night, and in the following days, each evening he returned home with Shelby from the office, he expected Ellie to be waiting for him. Friday came. He knew something was wrong when he passed the front gate. The gate, always latched, was ajar—a small thing, but for a frightened house owner, alert to details, it had significance. And he heard on his nerves the creak of the porch swing at the side of the house.

Shelby said, “There’s someone here.”

“I’ll check—don’t worry,” he said, and braced himself for Ellie.

She was on the porch swing, facing away. He saw the woman’s back, her cold purply hands—it was November—on the suspended chains that held the seat, the kerchief tightened over her head. She turned and the swing squeaked again.

“You.” The snarled word made her face ugly, as though with pain.

He had no idea who the woman was, and before he could speak, Shelby came up behind him and said, “What are you doing here?”

“Visiting my old friend Ray Testa,” the woman said.

“Are you Ellie?”

The woman frowned at the name. She said, “No. Ask him who I am. Go on, Ray, tell her.”

But he didn’t know. Even so, he started to gabble in fear.

“Think,” she said. “You used to visit me and my husband in New Hampshire. He was a photographer. You pretended you were interested in his pictures. You were very chatty. And then, when he was away, you visited me. You couldn’t keep your hands off me. Always sneaking around, sniff-sniff.” To Shelby she said, “This man drove two hundred miles to touch me.”

And the effort seemed preposterous, because the woman was gray, with papery skin and sad eyes and reddened gums showing in her downturned mouth. He hated himself for seeing only her fragility and her age, but because of her defiance it was all that mattered.

He said, “Joyce.”

“See? He knows who I am.”

“What do you want?”

“Just to pay a friendly visit.”

“Please go.”

The woman said, “Isn’t it funny? You drove all that way to see me—took half a day to get to my house, and all the probing, to make sure Richard was away. And now you can’t wait to get rid of me.”

With that, she stamped on the porch floorboards and hoisted herself from the swing. She stood leaning sideways, and she came at him, maintaining the same crooked posture, with a slight limp, a suggestion that she was about to fall down.

“This is how he’ll treat you one day, sweetheart,” she said to Shelby.

Ray let Joyce pass, then followed her to the driveway and kept watching her—where was her car? How had she gotten here?—but, still watching her, he saw her vanish before she got to the road.

Shelby was in tears, her face in her hands, miserable on the sofa. She recoiled when he reached for her.

“You know them,” Shelby said. “All of them.”

She refused to allow him to console her. She was disgusted, she said. She didn’t eat that night. She slept in the spare room thereafter. He regretted their sleeping apart, until one night soon after Joyce’s visit, he woke in his bed and became aware not of breathing but of a swelling shadow, someone holding her breath in the room.

He said, “Shelby?”

The soft laugh he heard was not Shelby’s.

“You probably think you had a hard time,” the woman said, becoming more substantial, emerging from the darkness as she spoke. “In those days, an abortion was a criminal offense. A doctor could lose his license for performing one. And it was painful and bloody and humiliating. It had another effect—I was never able to bear another child. I got married. My husband left me when he realized we’d never have children. I became a teacher, because I loved kids. I recently retired. I live on a pension. You destroyed my life.”

Just as he thought she was going to hit him, she disappeared.

In the morning Shelby said she’d heard him. “Who was it?”

“Talking in my sleep. I was dreaming.”

Certain that he was lying, Shelby said she could not bear to hear another word from him, and when he attempted to explain, she said in her unanswerable, dead-certain voice, “You keep saying how old and feeble they are, and how repugnant. But don’t you realize who they look like?”

He gaped at her, feeling futile.

“They all look like you. I sometimes think they are you. Each person in our past is an aspect of us. You need to know that.”

 

Ray called his ex-wife, but got her voice mail. “Angie,” he pleaded, “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but please stop. I’ll agree to anything if you stop them showing up.”

For several weeks no women from his past intruded, and Ray believed that Angie had gotten the message. He even called again and left a thank-you on her voice mail.

Shelby demanded that they see a marriage counselor. Ray agreed, but on the condition that the counselor be in Boston, far from their home, so that their anonymity was assured. “I want it to be a woman,” Shelby said, and found a Dr. Pat Devlin, whose office was near Massachusetts General Hospital.

On their first visit, after they filled out the insurance forms, they were shown into the doctor’s office.

“Please take a seat,” Dr. Devlin said. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

She read the insurance forms, running her finger down the answers to the questions on the back of the page. She was heavy, jowly, almost regal, wearing a white smock, her hair cut short, tapping her thick finger as she read, and her chair emitted complaint-like squeaks as she shifted in it, her movements provoked by what seemed her restless thoughts.

“I’m afraid I can’t take you on,” she said, sighing, removing her glasses, and facing Ray, who smiled helplessly. “Did you do this deliberately, to make me feel even worse?”

Ray said, “The appointment was Shelby’s idea.”

Looking hard at Ray, the doctor said, “I thought I’d seen the last of you and heard the last of your excuses. Maybe it’s unprofessional of me to say this—but it’s outrageous that you should come here out of the blue after the way you treated me.” She gripped the armrests of her chair as though restraining herself, and holding herself this way, her head back, she seemed like an emperor. “Now I must ask you to leave.”

Shelby was silent in the elevator, because of the other passengers, but in the street she said, “Tell me who she is, and don’t lie to me.”

“We were at BU together,” he said. “Premed.”

“You’re stalling,” Shelby said.

He was. But he had been thrown by “Dr. Devlin.” Her name was Pat Dorian—Armenian, a chemistry major. She was beautiful, with a sultry central-Asian cast to her face, full lips, and thick jet-black hair. He’d taken her to a fraternity party and they’d gotten drunk, and she’d said, “I feel sick. I have to lie down,” and she’d fallen asleep in his room, in his own bed, only to wake in the morning half-naked but fully alert, saying, “Did you touch me? What did you do to me? Tell me!”

He’d said, truthfully, that he could not remember; but he was half-naked too. And that was the beginning of a back-and-forth of recrimination that ended with Pat changing her major to psychology, so that she would not have to face Ray again in the chem lab.

“I knew her long ago,” Ray said.

“Don’t tell me any more,” Shelby said. She turned her gray eyes on him and said, “She looks like you too.”

Shelby became humorless and doubting, and she was like a much older woman, slow in the way she moved, as though fearing she might trip, quieter and more reflective, seeming rueful when Ray passed the bedroom and saw her lying alone—her bedroom. He slept in the spare room now.

He wanted to tell her that most people have a flawed past, and act unthinkingly, and that we move on from them. New experiences take their place, new memories, better ones, and all the old selves remain interred in a forgetfulness that was itself merciful. This was the process of aging, each new decade burying the previous one, and the long-ago self was a stranger. But for these women, all they had was the past. They dragged him back to listen to them, to take part in this ritual of unfulfillment, the reunion of endless visitations, old women, old loves, old objects of desire with faces like bruised fruit.

Instead of telling Shelby, he called her father and told him some of this. He did not seemed surprised to hear it. He hardly reacted, and when Ray pressed him for an opinion, the man said, “I can’t help you.”

Ray said, “She’s like a stranger.”

“That’s my Shelby,” the man said, and hung up.

Shelby still worked with him. Her father’s abruptness (he had also seemed grimly amused) had rattled him, and so he said to her, “You are everything to me now. Those women are all gone and forgotten.”

This was in the office. There was a knock, the receptionist saying, “We have a new patient.”

Ray went cold when he saw her tilted back in the chair, awaiting his examination. She did not even have to say, “Remember me?” He remembered her. He remembered his mistake. She was Sharon, from the cleaning company, and he was surprised that someone so young—no more than eighteen or so—was doing this menial job. Why wasn’t she in school? He’d asked her that. “I hate school,” she said. “I want to make some money.” She seemed to linger in her work, and one evening when they were alone, Ray had surprised her in her mopping, and kissed her, hoping for more. But she’d pushed him away, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and never came back. That same year Shelby had become his hygienist, so she knew nothing of Sharon. He’d never seen Sharon again, nor thought of her—it was only a foolish, impulsive, hopeful kiss!—until now.

She stared at him with implacable eyes; her very lack of expression seemed accusatory. She lay canted back in the chair as Shelby hooked on her earpieces and adjusted the protective goggles. Sharon’s mouth was prominent and her cold eyes were blurred by the plastic. She seemed weirdly masked, with an upside-down face, from where Ray stood, slightly behind her with Shelby. Her mouth began to move, the bite of the teeth reversed.

“You got yourself a hot assistant now,” Sharon said. “Bet you kiss her when no one’s looking. Like you did to me.”

“This is my wife,” Ray said, hating the way Sharon spoke. “Now open wide and let me have a look.”

“I can’t do this,” Shelby said. She gathered the loops of the suction device and tossed them into the sink.

“Shel,” he said, then, seeing it was hopeless, that Shelby had closed the door behind her, he attended to Sharon, his fingers in her mouth, gagging her. He wanted to pull out her tongue.

When he finished the cleaning he said, “You’ve never been here before as a patient. I haven’t seen you for years. You don’t need any serious work. Why did you come?”

“Just a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Sharon said. “Hey, you probably think that kissing me and touching me was something I’d forget.”

He sighed, he was going to shout, but he forced himself to speak calmly. “I’m done. I’ve knocked some barnacles off your teeth. Don’t come back. If you do, I will refuse to see you.”

Now Sharon’s goggles were off and she was upright, blinking like a squirrel. She licked a smear of toothpaste from her lips and said, “I won’t be back. I don’t have to. I’ve done what I needed to do.”

“What was that?”

“Make you remember.”

But it would be a new memory. He had not recalled her as so plain, so fierce-faced. She had been young, attractive, in a T-shirt and shorts, with a long-handled mop in her hands, and now she’d accused him of forgetting her. But he had not forgotten—he remembered her as a girl, alone in the corridor of his office, holding the sudden promise of pleasure. The shock to him on her return was that she had aged, that she was raw-boned and resentful and no longer attractive.

Before going home to Shelby that day he saw himself in the bathroom mirror and hated his face. He hated what time had done to it, he hated what time had done to these women. He had flirted and pawed these old women. They all look like you. He hated the sight of his hands. I sometimes think they are you. Each person in our past is an aspect of us. You need to know that.

Shelby treated him as though he was dangerous and tricky. She seemed afraid to be with him because of who might show up, to remind him of what he’d done and who he was, an old beast they haunted because they could not forgive him.

Shelby and he lived separately in the house, took turns in the kitchen, ate their meals apart, more like hostile roommates than a married couple—a reenactment of his last months with Angie.

He called Angie again, but this time her number had been disconnected. Then he found out why. A patient said casually, just as he’d finished putting on a crown, “Sorry about Angie.”

Misunderstanding, Ray began to explain, and then realized that the patient was telling him that Angie had died.

It had happened two weeks before. He found the details online, on the Medford Transcript website. Collapsed and died after a short illness. Instead of going home, he drove the seventy-five miles to the cemetery and knelt at her grave. A metal marker with her name, courtesy of the funeral home, had been inserted in the rug-like cover of new sod. He told himself that he was sorrowful, but he did not feel it: he was relieved, he felt lighter, he blamed Angie for the swarm of old lovers. This feeling scared him in the dampness of the cemetery, where he suspected he was being watched. It was then, looking around, that he saw that Angie was buried next to her mother, a reunion of sorts.

He told Shelby that Angie had died—“It’s a turning point!”—that they could start all over again.

“You actually seem glad that Angie’s dead,” Shelby said. “Poor Angie.”

Shelby stopped coming to work. She didn’t want to stay at home either, as though fearing a woman would appear unbidden, a hag from the past, to confront Ray, to humiliate her. She seemed to regard him as the monster he believed himself to be in his worst moments, the embodiment of everything he’d done, and now, from the return of these offended women, she knew every one of his reckless transgressions.

With the death of Angie, the visitations ceased. But, demoralized, humiliated, Shelby left him. She did not divorce him at once. She demanded a house, and he provided it. She asked for severance pay at the office, and got it. And by degrees they separated. They spoke through lawyers until it was final, and he was alone.

Ray is not surprised when, one night, he is awoken by a clatter, as of someone hurrying in darkness. It is a familiar sound. He awaits the visitation, hoping it might make him less lonely. Perhaps it is Angie, who has come to mock him. He hopes to beg her forgiveness. No, it is not Angie’s voice. It is Shelby’s, and it is triumphant. But the body, the hag’s face, is his own.