At one-thirty in the morning, the last guest had gone, the ballroom was cleared and swept, all the glasses and plates and platters and party things had been washed and stowed back in the enormous pantry, the help had been paid in crisp bills and set free. The house stood cocooned in winter stillness, except for the reassuring tick of the Aaron Willard arched-hood grandfather clock (circa 1790) in the upstairs hall. Kenneth sat on the chair in front of Maggie’s vanity heaving sighs of exhaustion. One sock dangled stupidly half off his right foot.
“Come to bed,” said Maggie, who sat propped up against the cherrywood headboard perusing a rival’s new book of Tuscan-inspired recipes, busily annotating the pages with a felt-tipped pen.
“I’m so tired,” Kenneth moaned.
Maggie patted the mattress briskly. “Come on now.”
Kenneth pulled his tuxedo shirt over his head like a lacrosse jersey, without undoing the studs, wadded it up, and flung the thing in the direction of his closet. It landed on the carpet with a mild thud. This sort of slovenliness usually drove Maggie up a wall, but she said nothing. Next Kenneth stood up and dropped his pants and underpants and, stepping forward, left them mashed together in an unappetizing heap. His triathlete’s face sagged, and despite the meaty pectorals, bulging deltoids, and rippling abdominals, he looked middle-aged. Maggie drew the quilt open, inviting Kenneth into his customary side of the bed. He crawled in, flopped this way and that, pounded his pillow, and finally settled on his back, pulling the quilt up to his chin.
“Must be all those drugs,” Maggie remarked.
“Oh, I wasn’t so bad tonight, Mags,” Kenneth replied, eyes closed. “Didn’t put a lampshade on my head.”
“No, you didn’t put a lampshade on your head.” She carefully placed her book on the night table and slid down off the great raft of pillows so that her head lay on Kenneth’s meaty chest.
“I’m tired, Mags,” Kenneth said, code words meant to signal that he was not especially interested in sex at this time.
“You just relax now,” Maggie said.
“Hey, at least turn off the light, babe.”
“In a minute.”
She pecked a trail of perfunctory kisses down his sternum to his navel and then a little below, where her sensitive nose picked up what she suspected: a telltale aroma of bluefish and cumin, a combination that uncannily simulated the natural perfume of female sexual equipment. In fact, Maggie once made such a dish of bluefish in cumin seed—baked in parchment paper with cilantro and lime—and she and Nina had turned to each other with exactly the same thought. They ended up making a joke about it. Bluefish à la puta they had named the dish. And here it was now, all over Kenneth’s groin. She recalled the scene in the library earlier: the girl exiting the powder room, then Kenneth slinking out moments later. He wanted to be caught! Maggie was sure of it as she resurfaced now above the quilt.
“How long have you been banging Laura Wilkie?”
Kenneth’s eyelids rolled up like windowshades in a cartoon. “Who?” he asked.
“Laura Wilkie.”
“Who’s Laura Wilkie?”
“I see. You’re going to pretend that you don’t know who I’m talking about. The little cookie in the black strapless thing that Charlie Duckworth’s supposedly going with.”
“Her? You think I’m banging her?”
“She works for Throop, Cravath, doesn’t she?”
“Not in my department.”
“How come you pretended not to know her name?”
“I am not ‘banging’ this Laura Wilkie creature.”
“Kenneth, you are really such a lousy liar, I don’t see how you can even make a living on Wall Street. I can smell her all over you.”
“I was dancing, for God’s sake. I got sweaty.”
“That’s not sweat, you bastard. It’s bluefish and cumin!”
“Huh … ?”
“Pussy, you dolt. I can smell her all over you!”
“Oh, please … Can we talk about this in the morning?”
“No. You’re not going to be here in the morning.”
“Ha!” Kenneth said with a little snort and closed his eyes again as though challenging her. Maggie rose to her knees, put both hands together as though clasped in prayer, and brought them down as hard as she could on Kenneth’s solar plexus. Springlike, his body catapulted weirdly off the bed, as though he had been launched like a missile, and then he was crawling rapidly around on the carpet emitting the most peculiar shrill noise, just like the pigs they had seen being slaughtered for market in northern Spain years ago. For several moments, Maggie worried that she had actually stopped Kenneth’s heart. But then he stopped squealing and commenced gasping for breath, and she understood that she had simply succeeded in knocking the wind out of him. A few more moments and he was merely breathing hard and coughing. He even managed to mutter “You bitch!” between breaths, and she knew he was perfectly all right.
In the interval she grabbed the fireplace poker out of its brass stand.
“I saw you come out of the bathroom ten seconds after Laura Wilkie came out, you lying, stupid sonofabitch,” Maggie growled. “Out,” she demanded. “Out of the house!” When Kenneth failed to move, she whacked him across the buttocks with the poker. The blow seemed to propel him to his feet, and he took an apelike stance, as though to menace Maggie physically. She let him have it again, this time on the shins.
“Ow! You crazy bitch!”
“Out! Out of my house!”
“Not anymore,” Maggie barked. “You threw it away for a five-minute standing fuck in a toilet.”
She brandished the poker overhead again. This time Kenneth lunged for the fireplace tool stand and seized the little brass broom. “Come on, Mags,” he said, taunting her like one of the characters out of the rumble scene in West Side Story. “Come on. Try and hit me again.”
“Moron,” she said, scurrying across the great bed until she seized the telephone receiver and punched the numbers 9–1–1 on the keypad. “Hello,” she said pleasantly. “This is Maggie Darling at 1803 Kettle Hill Road in West Rumford. My husband is about to beat me up with a fireplace tool. Would you come over right away? Thanks, so much.” She hung up. “They’ll be here in about seven minutes,” she smiled.
“Oh, that was really brilliant, Maggie. Just the kind of publicity you need, I’m sure—”
“Put on your pants and pack a bag, buster.”
Kenneth pitched the brass shovel into a corner in disgust. It bounced off his StairMaster exercise machine. Before he could get his Gucci loafers back on, two Connecticut state police cars pulled into the long driveway. Their sirens were off, but the revolving gumball roof lights made a creepy flickering blue fantasia out of the winter landscape. Maggie flew downstairs in a red tartan flannel robe to let in the two troopers. Kenneth followed moments later, sheepishly toting a leather-trimmed canvas overnighter. He walked past the policemen and out the front door, which they had failed to close behind them.
“Just a minute, sir,” one of them called out, and Kenneth turned around.
“He didn’t actually strike me,” Maggie said. “He only threatened to.”
“Ha!” Kenneth barked.
“Well, technically you don’t have to actually strike a person to commit assault, ma’am,” said the first trooper. “Do you intend to press charges?”
“Oh, certainly not,” Maggie said. “Just get him out of here.”
“Uh, sir, your wife wants you to leave the premises.”
“Really? What do you suppose I’m doing out here in the snow at two o’clock in the morning with a suitcase in my hand.”
“I don’t know, sir,” the trooper said, apparently immune to sarcasm. “But we’ll just stick around until you leave, if you don’t mind.”
“What if I do mind?”
“We only say that to be polite, sir. If you don’t remove yourself right away, we’ll have to arrest you and take you in and all. You won’t like it. Even well-off people like yourself, their lawyers really don’t like gettin’ called this time of night, especially Christmas Eve, and, well, I’d just get going, I was you.”
“Have yourself a merry little Christmas, Maggie,” Kenneth said, and then, shaking his head as if utterly baffled, he headed for the garage where his BMW waited in all its Teutonic grandeur. Soon, his red and orange taillights disappeared through the gateposts. Maggie made coffee for the troopers and carved them each huge slices of the chocolate bûche de No!ël. Of course, it was an excuse for them to wait around and see whether Kenneth intended to return. But he did not. Maggie knew that they would never dwell together again under this roof. And when the troopers departed at last around three o’clock Christmas morning, Maggie trudged back upstairs to the bedroom and cried her heart out.