Visiting them, there had been times she’d been sure she could feel . . . she didn’t know what. A something there in the house with them . . .
That there had been another woman in their parents’ marriage was an inference that for Weber and Gertrude Schenker had taken on all the trappings of fact. During the most recent of the late-night conversations that had become a Christmas-Eve tradition for them, Weber had christened the existence of this figure “The Keystone,” for her and her intersection with their mother and father’s marriage were what supported the shape into which that union had bent itself.
Over large-bowled glasses of white wine at the kitchen table, his back against the corner where the two window seats converged, Web met his eleven-months-younger sister’s contention that, after all this time, the evidence in favor of her remained largely circumstantial by shaking his head vigorously and employing the image of the stone carved to brace an arch. Flailing his hands with the vigor of a conductor urging his orchestra to reach higher, which sent his wine climbing the sides of its glass, Web called to his aid a movie’s worth of scenes that had led to their decision—during another Christmas Eve confab a decade earlier—that only the presence of another woman explained the prolonged silences that descended on the household without warning, the iciness that infused their mother’s comments about their father’s travels, the half-apologetic, half-resentful air that clung to their father after his trips like a faint, unpleasant smell. The other woman—her, the name custom had bestowed—was the stone that placed a quarryful of cryptic comments and half-sentences into recognizable arrangement.
As for why, ten years on, the two of them were no closer to learning her real name, much less any additional details concerning her appearance or the history of her involvement with their father, when you thought about it, that wasn’t so surprising. While both their parents had insisted that there was nothing their children could not tell them, a declaration borne out over thirty-one and thirty years’ discussion of topics including Web’s fear that his college girlfriend was pregnant (which, as it turned out, she wasn’t) and Gert’s first inkling that she might be gay (which, as it turned out, she was), neither their mother nor their father had asked the same openness of their children. Just the opposite: their parents scrupulously refrained from discussing anything of significance to their interior lives. Met with a direct question, their father became vague, evasive, from which Web and Gert had arrived at their secret nickname for him, the Prince, as in, the Prince of Evasion. Their mother’s response to the same question was simple blankness, from which her nickname, the Wall, as in, the Wall of Silence. With the Prince and the Wall for parents, was it any wonder the two of them knew as little as they did?
Web built his case deliberately, forcefully—not for the first time, Gert thought that he would have made a better attorney than documentary filmmaker. (They could have gone into practice together: Schenker and Schenker, Siblings In Law.) Or perhaps it was that he was right, from the necessity of the other woman’s existence to their parents’ closed-mouthedness. Yet if the other woman was the Keystone, her presence raised at least as many questions as it answered, chief among them, why were their mother and father still together? A majority of their parents’ friends—hell, of their parents’ siblings—were on their second, third, and in one case, fourth marriages. If their mother and father were concerned about standing out in the crowd, their continued union brought them more sustained attention than a divorce, however rancorous, could have. Both their parents were traversed by deep veins of self-righteousness that lent some weight to the idea of them remaining married to prove a point—especially to that assortment of siblings moving into the next of their serial monogamies. However, each parent’s self-righteousness was alloyed by another tendency—self-consciousness in their mother’s case, inconstancy in their father’s—that, upon reflection, rendered it insufficient as an explanation. Indeed, it seemed far more likely that their mother’s almost pathological concern for how she was perceived, combined with their father’s proven inability to follow through on most of his grandiloquent pledges, had congealed into a torpor that caught them fast as flies in amber.
It was a sobering and even depressing note on which to conclude their annual conversation, but the clock’s hands were nearing three a.m., the second bottle of wine was empty, and while there was no compulsion for them to rise with the crack of dawn to inspect Santa’s bounty, neither of them judged it fair to leave their significant others alone with their parents for very long. They rinsed out their glasses and the emptied bottles, dried the glasses and returned them to the cupboard, left the bottles upended in the dishrack, and, before switching off the lights, went through their old ritual of checking all the locks on the downstairs windows and doors. Something of a joke between them when their family first had moved from Westchester to Ellenville, the process had assumed increased seriousness with an increase of home invasions over the last several years. When they were done, Web turned to Gert and, his face a mask of terror, repeated the line that concluded the process, cadged from some horror movie of his youth: “But what if they’re already inside?” Gert, who had yet to arrive at a satisfactory response, this year chose, “Well, I guess it’s too late, then.”
The fatality of her answer appeared to please Web; he bent to kiss her cheek, then wound his way across the darkened living room to the hallway at whose end lay the guest room for which he and Sharon had opted—the location, Gert had reflected, the farthest possible distance from their parents’ room but still in the house. This had left her and Dana the upstairs room, her old one, separated from her mother and father’s bedroom by the upstairs bathroom. Gert could not decide whether Web’s choice owed itself to a desire to maintain the maximum remove from their parents for his new wife and himself, or was due to an urge to force the closest proximity between her and Dana and her parents, who, seven years after Gert’s coming out, and three years since she’d moved in with Dana, were still not as reconciled to their daughter’s sexuality as they claimed to be. Of course, Web being Web, both explanations might have been true. Since some time in his mid-to-late teens, the closeness with which he had showered their mother and father, the hugs and kisses, had been replaced with an almost compulsive need for distance—if either parent drew too near for too long, tried to prolong an embrace, he practically vibrated with tension. At the same time, he had inherited their parents’ self-righteousness, and given an opportunity to confront them with what he viewed as their shortcomings, was only too happy to do so. If Gert was uncomfortable, it wasn’t in the plastic pleasantness that her mother and father put on whenever she and Dana visited, to which she’d more or less resigned herself as the lesser of many evils—it was in being fixed to the point of the spear with which Web wanted to jab their parents.
As she mounted the stairs to the second floor, she wondered if Web was anxious about his marriage going the way of their mother and father’s, if his need for the downstairs room was rooted in anxiety about him and Sharon being contaminated by whatever had stricken their parents. It wasn’t only their behavior that displayed the souring of their union. Physically, each appeared to be carrying an extra decade’s weight. Their father’s hair had fallen back to the tops of his ears, the back of his head, while their mother’s had been a snow-white that she refused to dye for as long as either of their memories stretched. Their parents’ faces had been scored across the forehead, to either side of the mouth, and though they kept in reasonable shape, their mother with jogging, their father racquetball, the flesh hung from their arms and legs in that loose way that comes with old age, the skin and muscle easing their grip on the bones that have supported them for so long, as if rehearsing their final relaxation. The formality with which their parents treated hers and Web’s friends buttressed the impression that her brother and her were a pair of last-minute miracles, or accidents. Without exception, Gert’s friends had been shocked to learn that her mother and father were, if not the same age as their parents, then younger. She thought Web had received the same response from his classmates and girlfriends.
Although she swung it open gently, the hinges of the door to her and Dana’s room shrieked. No sneaking around here. In the pale wash of streetlight over the window, she saw Dana fast asleep on her side of the bed, cocooned in the quilt that had covered it. Leaving the door open behind her, Gert crossed to the hope chest at the foot of the bed and unlatched it. The odor of freshly-laundered cotton rose to meet her, and along with it came the groan of the floorboards outside the door.
“Mom?” She stood. “Dad?” The hall sounded with whichever of them it was hurrying to their room. Gert waited for the hinges on their door to scream, wondering why they hadn’t when whoever it was had opened it. After ten years of promising to do so, had her father finally oiled them? She listened for the softer snick of their door unlatching. She could feel someone standing there, one hand over the doorknob, their eyes watching her doorway for movement. “For God’s sake . . . ” Five steps carried her out into the hall, her face composed in an expression of mock-exasperation.
The space in front of the door to her parents’ bedroom was empty, as was the rest of the hallway. For a moment, Gert had the sensation that she was not seeing something, some figure in the darkness—the feeling was kin to that she had experienced looking directly at the keys for which she was tearing up the apartment and not registering them—and then the impression ceased. The skin along her arms, her neck, stood. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself; nonetheless, she made certain that the door to her room was shut tight. Later on, she did not hear footsteps passing up and down the hallway.
II
Gert’s decision to pursue the question of the other woman, to ascertain her identity, was prompted not so much by that most recent Christmas-Eve conversation as it was by a chance meeting with an old family friend in the din of Grand Central the week after New Year’s. While waiting in line to purchase a round-trip ticket to Rye (where lived an obscenely wealthy client of her firm’s who insisted on conducting all her legal affairs in the comfort of her tennis-court of a living room), she felt a hand touch her elbow and a voice say, “Gertie?” Before she turned, she recognized the intonations of her Aunt Victoria—not one of her parents’ sisters, or their brothers’ wives, but an old friend, perhaps their oldest, at a dinner party at whose house their father first had met their mother. With something of the air of its presiding genius, Aunt Vicky, Auntie V, had floated in and out of their household, always happy to credit herself for its existence and therefore, by extension, for hers and Web’s. During Gert’s teenage years, Victoria had been a lifesaver, rescuing her from her parents’ seemingly deliberate lack of understanding of everything to do with her life and treating her to shopping trips in Manhattan, weekends at the south Jersey shore, even a five-day vacation on Block Island her senior year of high school. In recent years, Victoria’s presence in their lives had receded, the consequence of her promotion to Vice President of the advertising company for which she worked, but she was still liable to put in an appearance at the odd holiday.
Victoria’s standing in the line was due to a speaking engagement with a sorority at Penrose College, in Poughkeepsie, to which she had decided it would be pleasant to ride the train up the east shore of the Hudson. She was dressed with typical elegance, in a black suit whose short skirt showed her legs fit as ever, and although her cheeks and jaw had lost some of their firmness of definition, her personality blazed forth, and Gert once more found herself talking with her as she would have one of her girlfriends. The result of their brief exchange was a decision to meet for lunch, which consultation with their respective Blackberries determined would occur a week from that Saturday; there was, Victoria said, a new place in NoHo she was dying to try, and this would provide the perfect opportunity. Gert left their meeting feeling as she always did after any time with Victoria, refreshed, recharged.
Not until the other side of her visit with Miss Bruce (ten minutes of business wrapped inside two hours of formalities), as she was watching the rough cut of Web’s latest film on her laptop, did the thought bob to the surface of her mind: Maybe Aunt Vicky was the other woman.
The idea was beyond absurd: it was perverse; it was obscene. Victoria Godfrey had been a de facto member of their family, closer to the four of them than a few of their blood-relations. She had been present during the proverbial thick, and she had been there through the proverbial thin. To suggest that she and Gert’s father had carried on, were carrying on, an affair, was too much, was over the top.
Try as she might, though, Gert could not banish the possibility from her thoughts. The same talents for analysis and narration that had placed her near the top of her class at NYU seized on the prospect of Auntie V being her and found that it made a good deal of sense. While both her parents had known Victoria, her father’s friendship with her predated her mother’s by several years. In fact, Victoria and her father had spoken freely of the marathon phone conversations with which they’d used to pass the nights, the restaurants they’d sought out together, the bands they’d seen in concert. Certainly, the connection between them had endured the decades. And during those years, her father’s consulting job had required him to travel frequently and far, as had Aunt Vicky’s work first in journalism and then in advertising. That Victoria, despite her declarations that all she wanted was a good man to settle down with, continued to live alone seemed one more piece of evidence thrown on top of what had suddenly become a sizable pile.
But her mother . . . Gert closed her laptop. In the abstract, at least, Gert long had admitted to herself the probability that her father had been unfaithful to her mother, perhaps for years. Restricting her consideration to her father and Aunt Vicky, she supposed she could appreciate how, given the right combination of circumstances, their friendship could have led to something else. (Wasn’t that what had brought her and Dana together?) Factor her mother into the equation, however, and the sides failed to balance. Her father’s relationship with Victoria might be longer, but her mother’s was deeper; all you had to do was sit there quietly as they spoke to know that, while their conversation’s focus might be narrow, it was anchored in each woman’s core. Gert had no trouble believing her aunt might be involved with a married man if the situation suited her, but she could not credit Auntie V betraying one of her dearest friends.
Nonetheless, the possibility would not quit her mind; after all, how many divorces had she assisted or managed in which the immediate cause of the marriage’s disintegration was a friend or even in-law who had gone from close to too-close? That the same story might have repeated itself in her parents’ marriage nauseated her; without changing its appearance in the slightest, everything surrounding her looked wrong, as if all of it were manifesting the same fundamental flaw. She shook her head. All right, she told herself, if this is the truth, I won’t run from it. I’ll meet it head on. False bravado, perhaps, but what was her alternative?
A week and a half later, pulling open the heavy glass door to Lettuce Eat and stepping into its low roar of voices, Gert repeated to herself the advice that she gave the new lawyers: Act as if you’re in control, and you will be. She had not been this nervous arguing her first case: her heart was thwacking against her chest; her palms were wet; her legs were trembling. In moments scattered across the last ten days, she had auditioned dozens of opening lines, from the innocuous (Hi, Aunt Vic) to the confrontational (What do you say we talk about you and my father?) and although she hadn’t settled on one (she was leaning towards, I’m so glad you came: there’s something I’d like to talk to you about), she was less concerned about the exact manner in which they would begin than she was with the substance of their talk. What she would do should Auntie V confirm the narrative whose principle points Gert had posited on a legal pad she hadn’t shown anyone, she could not predict. Nor did it help matters any that Victoria, in addition to a black turtleneck and jeans, was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses, the necessity of which, she explained as she stood to kiss Gert, arose from an office party that had not ended until 5:00 a.m. “I’m not dead yet, by God,” Victoria said as she resumed her seat and Gert took hers. “I can still give you kids a run for your money.”
Gert answered her aunt’s assertion with a polite smile that she maintained for the waitress who appeared at her side proffering a menu. In reply to the girl’s offer to bring her something to drink, Gert requested a Long Island iced tea and focused her attention on the menu, whose lettuce leaf shape was printed with the names of eight lunch salads. After the waitress had left for her drink, Victoria said, “That’s kind of heavy-duty for Saturday brunch, don’t you think?”
“Oh?” Gert nodded at Victoria’s Bloody Mary.
“Darling, this is practically medicinal. Really: if I thought my HMO would cover it, I’d have my doctor write a prescription.”
Despite herself, Gert laughed.
“Now,” Victoria continued, “you don’t look as if you were sampling new cocktails till dawn, so that drink is for something else, isn’t it? Everything okay with Dana? Work?”
“Fine,” Gert said, “they’re both fine. Couldn’t be better.”
“All right, then, how about your brother? Or—his wife, what’s her name, again? Sharon?”
“Sharon’s fine, too. Web is Web. He’s working on a new film; it’s about this painter, Belvedere, Thomas Belvedere. Actually,” Gert continued, “there is something—in fact, it’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Sweetie, of course. What is it?”
“It has to do with my parents.”
“What is it? Is everything okay? Nobody’s sick, are they?”
“Here you go,” the waitress said, placing Gert’s drink before her. “Do you know what you’d like to order?”
Gert chose the Vietnamese salad, which, Victoria said, sounded much more interesting than what she’d been thinking of, so she ordered one, as well, dressing on the side. Once the waitress had departed, Victoria said, “The last time I saw your mother, I told her she was too skinny.”
“Nobody’s sick,” Gert said.
“You’re sure?”
“Reasonably.”
“Oh, well, thank God for that.” Victoria sipped her Bloody Mary. “Okay, everybody’s healthy, everybody’s happy: what do you want to discuss.”
The Long Island Iced tea bit her tongue; Gert coughed, lowered her glass, then raised it for a second, longer drink. The alcohol poured through her in a warm flood, floating the words up to her lips: “It’s my Dad. I need to talk to you about the other woman—the one he had the affair with.”
At NYU, the professor who had taught Gert and her classmates the finer points of cross-examination had employed a lexicon drawn from fencing to describe the interaction between attorney and witness. Of the dozen or so terms she had elaborated, Gert’s favorite had been the coup droit, the direct attack. As she had seen and continued to see it, a witness under cross-examination was expecting you to attempt to trick them, trip them up on some minor inconsistency. If the opposing counsel were conscious, they would have prepped the witness for exactly such an effort; thus, in Gert’s eyes, it was more effective (unexpected, even) to get right to the point. The strategy didn’t always succeed—none did—but the times it worked, a certain look would come over the witness’s face, the muscles around their eyes, their mouths responding to the words their higher faculties were not yet done processing, which Gert fancied was the same as the one you would have witnessed on the person whose chest your blade had just slid into. It was a look that mixed surprise, fear, and regret; when she saw it, Gert knew the witness, and probably the case, were hers.
It was this expression that had overcome Victoria’s face. For an instant, she seemed as if she might try to force her way past it, pretend that Gert’s question hadn’t struck her as deeply as it had, but as quickly as it appeared to arise, the impulse faded. Her hands steady, she reached up to her sunglasses and removed them, uncovering eyes that were sunken, red-rimmed with the last night’s extravagances. Trading her eyeglasses for her drink, Victoria drained the Bloody Mary and held up the empty glass to their waitress, passing near, who nodded to the gesture and veered towards the bar. With a sigh, Victoria replaced the glass on the table and considered Gert, who was helping herself to more of her drink, her mind reeling with triumph and horror. The thrill that sped through her whenever her coup droit succeeded carried with it a cargo of anguish so intense that she considered bolting from her chair and running out of the restaurant before the conversation could proceed any further. The next time she and Aunt Vicky saw one another, they could pretend this exchange had never happened.
But of course, it was already too late for that. Victoria was speaking: “How did you find out? Your father didn’t tell you, did he? I can’t imagine—was it your mother? Did she say something to you?”
“No one said anything,” Gert said. “Web and I put it together one night—I guess it was ten years ago. We were up late talking, and the subject turned to Mom and Dad, the way it always does, and all their little . . . quirks. I said something along the lines of, It’s as if there’s another woman involved, and Web took that idea and ran with it. It was one of those things you wouldn’t have dreamed could be true—well, I wouldn’t have—but the more we discussed it, the more sense it made, the more questions it answered. Since then, it’s something we’ve pretty much come to take for granted.”
“Jesus,” Victoria said. “Ten years?”
Gert nodded.
“And this is—why haven’t you asked me about this before?”
“For a while, we were happy to let sleeping dogs lie. Web still is, actually; he doesn’t know I’m talking to you. Recently, I’ve—I guess I’m at a point where I want to know, for sure, one way or the other. At least, I think I do.”
“No, no,” Victoria said, “you’re right. You should know. I should’ve spoken to you—not ten years ago, maybe, but it’s past time. You have to understand—”
Whatever was necessary for Gert’s understanding was pre-empted by the return of their waitress with Victoria’s drink and their salads. Gert stared at the pile of bean sprouts, mango, banana, rice noodles, and peanut in front of her and thought that never had she felt less like eating. With each breath she took, her internal weather shifted sharply, raw fury falling into deep sadness, from which arose bitter disappointment. That she managed an, “I’m fine, thanks,” to the waitress’s, “Can I bring you anything else?” was more reflex than actual response.
Before the waitress left, Victoria was sampling her next Bloody Mary. She did not appear any more interested in her salad than Gert was in hers. “All right,” Victoria said once she had lowered her glass. “I want—you need to remember that your father loves your mother. She loves him, too—despite everything, they love each other as much as any couple I’ve ever known. Promise me you’ll do that.”
“I know they love one another,” Gert said, although she could think of few facts in which she currently had less confidence.
“They do, honey; I swear they do. But your Dad . . . ” As if she might find what she wanted to say written there, Victoria’s eyes searched the ceiling. “Oh, your father.”
“Yes,” Gert said.
“Let me—when you were, you must have been two, your father spent about three days calling everyone he knew. Anyone he couldn’t reach by phone, he wrote to. All those calls, those letters, said the same thing: for the past seven years, I have been having an affair. He had decided to end it, and the only way he was going to be able to follow through on that choice was if he came clean with all his family, all his friends, starting with your mother.”
Gert tried to imagine her father being that decisive about anything. “How did you feel about this?”
“In a word, shocked. It’s one of those times I can remember exactly where I was, what I was doing. I was in this sleazy motel outside D.C., prepping an interview with a guy who claimed he had dirt on the junior senator from New York. There was a single, coin-operated bed in the room that had the most hideous green and orange spread on it. The walls were covered in cheap paneling and were too thin: for about an hour, I’d been listening to a couple on one side of me having drunken sex, and a baby on the other side of me wailing. Very nice. It was a little after nine o’clock; I had the TV on in an attempt to drown out the circle of life around me and the theme from Dallas was playing. When the phone rang, I thought it was my editor, calling with yet another last-minute question. The senator already had a reputation as a vengeful son-of-a-bitch, and my editor was nervous about any story that wasn’t ironclad.
“Anyway, I heard your father’s voice, and at first, all I could think was, How did he get this number? Then I caught up to what he was saying and,” Victoria shook her head. “If you’d had a feather, you could have knocked me to the floor with it. I consider myself pretty perceptive. There isn’t much that happens with my friends that I didn’t see coming a mile away. But this . . . ”
“What was it that surprised you?” Gert said.
“Are you kidding? Your father was cheating on your mother. He had been all through their relationship, their engagement, their marriage. Who does that? Okay, plenty of people, I know, but your father, he was—I guess you could say, he played the part of the devoted husband so convincingly . . . that isn’t fair. He was devoted; it’s just, he’d gotten himself into such a mess. I screamed at him: What the fuck have you done, you asshole? I mean, there was your mother with two little kids. What was she supposed to do?”
Was the alcohol slowing her comprehension? Gert said, “What about the other woman?”
“Her.” Victoria spat out the word as if it were a piece of spoiled meat. “I know,” she said, holding up her hand to forestall the objection Gert wasn’t about to make, “that isn’t fair. It takes two and all, but . . . ” Victoria slapped the table, drawing glances from the diners to either side of them. “She was already married, for Christ’s sake! She had been for years.”
“Did—did you know her?”
“No, which is funny, because she lived three doors down from me. This is back when I had the place on West 71st. Over the years, I must have seen her God knows how many times, but I’d never paid any attention to her. Why should I have? Little did I know she was—well, little did I know.
“That changed. Although it was after eleven when I finally hung up with your father, I was back on the phone right away. There was this guy, Phil DiMarco, a private investigator we used at the paper. He specialized in the cheating spouses of the rich and powerful; we turned to him whenever the rumor mill whispered that this politician or that movie star wasn’t living up to their marriage vows. He was expensive as all hell, but he and I had this kind of thing, so he said he’d have a look around and get back to me.”
“Why?” Gert said. “Why did you call a PI?”
“One of my oldest friends had just admitted that he’d been lying to me for years: not exactly a statement to inspire you with trust. Who knew if this was him coming clean, or some other lie? I was pissed off. I was afraid, the way you are for your friends when they’re sliding down into something very bad. I felt sick. I kept thinking about your mom and you and your brother. This was when you were living in the house on Oat Street; I don’t know if you remember it, but the front door was this gigantic thing you’d expect on a castle, not a modified Cape. It was ridiculous. Whenever I hauled it open, Web would shout, Aunt Wicky! and run at me on those chubby legs of his. You were much more reserved: you’d hide behind your Mom with that bear, Custard, clutched to your chest like a shield, until she stepped aside and urged you forward. And now . . . your father had fucked up your lives royally. The whole situation was so unfair—I figured I could at least find out if he was telling the truth; it seemed like one thing I could do for your mother, for you.”
“What did this Phil guy find out?” Gert asked. “Was my father telling the truth?”
“As far as Phil DiMarco was able to determine—he did a more thorough job than I’d expected; although he said he could take things further if I wanted him to, which I decided I didn’t—anyway, yes, your Dad had been honest with me, with us.
“Which was good,” Victoria said. “I mean, it beat the alternative. But there was still the matter of what he’d been so honest about. There’s no way you and Web could remember any of what followed, the next year. Not to sound melodramatic, but there are large portions of it I’d like to forget. There wasn’t—it’s difficult to see, to hear people you love in pain. And I did love both of them. Furious as I was with your father, he was still my friend who’d made a terrible mistake he was trying to set right. Your mother was—she’d been very happy with your father, with you and Web, with all of you as a family, and then, it was like . . . ” Victoria waved her hand, a gesture for chaos, unraveling.
“How is everything?” Their waitress stood beside the table, nodding at their untouched salads.
“Wonderful,” Victoria said.
“Are you sure?” the girl asked. “Because—”
“Wonderful,” Victoria said. “Thank you.”
While Victoria had been speaking, Gert had been aware of restraining her emotions; in the pause created by the waitress’s interruption, a flood of feeling rushed through her. Gert could distinguish three currents in it: relief, regret, and dread. The relief, sweet and milky as chai, was that her Auntie V could remain her Auntie V, that Gert would not have to hate her for an error she had made decades prior. The regret, sour as a rotten lime, was that her father had in fact betrayed her mother, that her and Web’s elegant theory had been incarnated into sordid fact. The dread, blank as water, was that she had not yet heard the worst of Victoria’s story, a groundless anxiety which, the instant she recognized it, she knew was true.
Some of what she was feeling must have been visible on her face, set loose by the alcohol she’d dropped into her empty stomach; it prompted Victoria to say, “Oh honey, I’m so sorry. This is too much, isn’t it? Maybe we should change the subject, talk about the rest later.”
Gert shook her head. “It’s all right. I mean, it is a lot, but—go on, keep going. Tell me about the woman, the one my Dad was with. What was her name?”
“Elsie Durant. Did I mention she was married? I did, didn’t I? She was a few years older than he was; I can’t remember exactly how much, six or seven, something like that. Coming and going from my apartment, I kept an eye out for her, and managed to walk past her a couple of times. She was nothing special to look at: pointy nose, freckles, mousy hair that she wore up. About my height, big in the hips, not much of a chest. When I saw her, she was dressed for work, dark pantsuits that looked as if she’d bought them off the rack at Macy’s.”
“How did they meet?”
“At a convention out west, in Phoenix, I’m pretty sure. Your Dad was looking to drum up clients for his business, which was only a thing on the side back then. She was a sales rep for one of the companies he was hoping to snag. When they met, it was as professionals, and that they both came from the same town was a coincidence to be exploited so he could continue his sales pitch. Their conversation led to drinks, which led to dinner, which led to more drinks, which led to her hotel room.” Victoria shrugged. “You’ve attended these kinds of things, haven’t you?”
Gert nodded.
“You know: a certain percentage of the attendees treat the event as an opportunity to hook-up. It’s like, while the cat’s away, she’s gonna play. If I were a sociologist, I’d do a study of it, try to work out the exact numbers.
“So your Dad and Elsie started out as one more tacky statistic. They could’ve stayed that way if he hadn’t called her the week after they returned from the convention—to follow up on the matters they’d discussed. Fair enough. He had a legitimate interest in securing this contract. It was just about enough to allow him to ditch his day job, and it was the kind of high-profile association that would put him on the map. Obviously, though . . . ”
“His motives were ulterior.”
Victoria smirked. “You might say that. I’m not sure if he knew that she was married, at first, but if he didn’t, then he found out pretty soon. Her husband was a doctor, an endocrinologist at Mount Sinai. He was Polish, had immigrated when he was eighteen. In another instance of six-degrees-of-separation, one of my friends was under his care for her thyroid. She said he was a great physician, but had all the personality of a pizza box.”
“Did he know? About them?”
“I don’t know. Your father insisted he must have, and it’s hard to believe he didn’t suspect something. Although, apparently he was a workaholic, out early in the morning, home late at night, busy weekends, so maybe he wasn’t paying attention. Or could be, he was carrying on his own affair.
“To be honest,” Victoria said, “there’s a lot of this part of the story I have only the faintest idea of. The night your father called me, I wasn’t especially interested in hearing the detailed history of his relationship with this other woman. Later on—when, I admit it, I was curious—encouraging him to revisit the details of his and Elsie’s affair seemed less than a good idea. I have the impression that things were pretty intense, at first, but aren’t they always? If you’re in the situation, it’s . . . its own thing, fresh, new; if you’re outside looking in, it’s a movie you’ve seen one too many times. He wanted her to leave her husband. She promised she would, then changed her mind. He threatened to go to her husband. She swore she’d never speak to him again if he did. Eventually, they settled into an unhappy routine. A couple of pleasant weeks would be followed by one or the other of them promising to break things off because of her marriage.
“After your father met your mother, he and Elsie didn’t see one another for a while. Apparently, she was pretty pissed at him for becoming involved with somebody else. Hypocritical, yes, but what’s that line about contradicting yourself? I don’t know why he returned to her, and I cannot understand how he continued the affair once he was engaged, and then married, to your mother. I gather their encounters had slipped from regular to occasional, but even so . . . ”
“You must have asked him about it,” Gert said.
“Oh, I did. He told me he’d been in love with two women. He had been, but he’d decided to make a choice, and that was your mother.”
“Do you . . . ”
“Do I what? Think he was still in love with Elsie?”
“Yes.”
“Your mother asked the same question,” Victoria said. “She was obsessed with it. Of course your father had told her that she was the only woman he loved but really, what else was he going to say and have any chance of her not leaving him? This left it to me to hash out with her whether he was telling the truth.”
“You told her he was.”
“What else was I going to do? I knew that he loved your mother—that he loved you and your brother. If he and your Mom could hang in there, gain some distance from what he’d done, I was sure they would work things out. Which they did,” Victoria said, “more or less.”
“You still haven’t answered the question.”
“You noticed that. Sweetie, I don’t know what to tell you. I thought he was fixated on her, mostly because he’d been unable to have her . . . completely, I guess you could say. Because she’d remained with her husband. I tend to think that isn’t love—it certainly isn’t the same as what he felt towards your mother.”
“But it could be as strong.”
“It could.”
“Obviously, Mom decided to stay with him,” Gert said.
“She told me your father had chosen her, and that was enough. Maybe she believed it, too—maybe it would have been, if—”
“What? If what?”
Victoria answered by draining the remainder of her Bloody Mary. Her heart suddenly jumping in her throat, Gert brought her own glass to her lips. The alcohol eased her heart back into her chest, allowing her to repeat her, “What?”
“That first year was bad,” Victoria said. “Your father spent months alternating between the couch—until your Mom couldn’t stand having him around, and ordered him out of the house—and a motel room—until your Mom freaked out at the prospect of him there by himself and ordered him back to the house. There wasn’t much I could do for him: when I phoned, your Mom wanted to speak with me, and it wouldn’t have worked for me to take him out somewhere. He had done wrong; it was his duty to suffer. Once in a while, I would stop over and find your mother out; then I would have a chance to talk to him. Not that there was much to say. Mostly, I asked him how he was doing and told him to hang in there, your Mom still loved him.
“Which was the same thing I said to your Mom: He loves you; he loves you so much; he’s made a terrible mistake but he loves you. Nights your Dad was home to watch you guys, I’d take her out. There was a little bar down the road from the house you were living in, Kennedy’s—we’d go there and order girly drinks and she could say whatever she needed to. What didn’t help matters any was that your father hadn’t stopped traveling. In fact, he was gone more. He’d won that contract with Elsie’s company, and their association had had exactly the effect he’d expected. By the time he met your Mom, he was worth a couple of million; by the time you arrived, that amount had tripled. But whatever the money his firm brought in, it wasn’t enough. (I swear, how he found the time to carry on an affair, I’ll never know.) For about a month after he came clean on Elsie Durant, your Dad put that part of his life on hold, turned the day-to-day running of the firm over to his number two guy. During that month, though, Number Two was on the phone to him at least three or four times a day, and in the end, he made the decision to return. I wanted him to sell the business, take the money and invest it, live off that, but that was a non-starter.”
Their waitress passing near, Victoria held up her glass.
“So . . . what?” Gert asked. “Was my father meeting this woman on his trips?”
“Not as far as Phil DiMarco could tell. Your Dad went where he was supposed to, met with whom he was supposed to, and otherwise kept to himself. No clandestine meetings, phone calls, or postcards. His one indulgence was presents, mainly toys for you and your brother; although he brought back things for your Mom, sometimes. Most of it was jewelry, expensive but generic. Your Dad’s never had much taste when it comes to stuff like that; all your Mom’s nice jewelry is stuff I told him to buy for her. There was one thing he brought back for her, a little figure he found on a trip to, I think it was Utah of all places, that was kind of interesting. It was a copy of that statue, the Venus of Willendorf? It’s this incredibly old carving of a woman, a goddess or fertility figure, or both, all boobs and hips. The copy had been done in this grainy stone, not sandstone but like it, coarser. It was just the right size to sit in your hand.”
“Okay,” Gert said, “I’m lost.”
“Here you are.” Their waitress placed a fresh Bloody Mary beside Victoria and removed the empty glass. “How is everything?”
“Wonderful,” Victoria said. This time, the waitress did not pursue the matter, but smiled and departed. Looking over the rim of her drink, Victoria said, “By your third birthday, your parents were—I wouldn’t say they were back to normal, but they were on the mend. Finally. And then, one afternoon, the phone rings. Your Mom picks it up, and there’s a woman on the other end. Not just any woman: her, Elsie Durant.”
“No.”
“Yes. She said, My name is Elsie Durant. I know you know who I am. I’m sorry to call you, but I need to speak to your husband.”
“What did Mom say?”
“What do you think? What the fuck are you doing calling here, you fucking bitch? Haven’t you done enough? She was so angry, she couldn’t relax her grip on the phone enough to slam it down—which gave Elsie the time to say, Please. I’m dying.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of . . . ?”
“I know,” Victoria said. “Your mother said the same thing, How stupid do you think I am? But the woman was ready for her. She told your mother she’d sent a copy of her latest medical report to your parents’ house, along with her most recent X-ray. Your mother would have it tomorrow, after which, she could decide what she wanted to do.”
“Which was?”
“To start with, she called me and asked me what I thought. I said she should forget she’d ever spoken to the woman and find out what she’d have to do to have her blocked from phoning them. What about the report, the X-Ray? Don’t even open that envelope, I said. Take it out back to the barbecue and burn it.”
“She didn’t.”
“She didn’t. As I’m pretty sure Elsie Durant must have known, the lure of that plain brown envelope was too much. She tore it open, and learned that the woman who had been the source of so much pain in her marriage was suffering from glioblastoma multiforme. It’s the most common type of brain cancer. It’s aggressive, and there were fewer options for treating it then than I imagine there are now. The patient history included with the report revealed that Elsie hadn’t sought out treatment for her headaches until the tumor was significantly advanced. As of this moment, she was down to somewhere between six weeks and three months; although three months was an extremely optimistic prognosis. When your mother held up the X-Ray to the light, she could see the thing, a dark tree sending its branches throughout the brain.”
Gert said, “She told him.”
“She did. How could she not? That was what she said to me. How could I keep this from him? She’s dying. It was too much for her to keep to herself. I would lay money that bitch knew that was exactly how she’d feel.”
“What happened? Did my father see her?”
“He spoke with her. Your mother told him everything, and when she was finished, he went to the phone and called her.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. Your Mom walked away—”
“She what?”
“She couldn’t be there—that was how she put it to me.”
Gert found her drink at her lips. There was less left in it than she’d realized. When the glass was empty, she said, “You must have asked Dad what they talked about.”
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
“Why not?”
Victoria shook her head. “He wouldn’t say anything. He just looked away and kept silent until I changed the subject. At first, I thought it might be too soon for him to discuss it, but no matter how much time elapsed, he wouldn’t speak about it.”
“What about Mom? Did he ever tell her?”
“She refused to ask him. She said if he wanted her to know, he’d tell her. I may be wrong, but I think he was waiting for her to ask him, which he would have taken as a sign that she had truly forgiven him.”
“While Mom was waiting for him to come to her as a sign that he had truly repented.”
“Exactly.”
“Jesus.” Gert searched for the waitress, couldn’t find her. “How long—after she and Dad spoke, how long did Elsie Durant last?”
“Two weeks.”
“Not long at all.”
“No.”
“How did they find out?”
“The obituary page in the Times,” Victoria said. “I saw it, too, and let me tell you, I breathed a sigh of relief. As long as Elsie Durant was alive—not to mention, local—she was . . . I wouldn’t call her a threat, exactly, but she was certainly a distraction. They could have moved, someplace out of state, but your father traveled as much as he ever had. With Elsie permanently out of the picture, I assumed your parents would be able to go forward in a way they couldn’t have before—free, I guess you might say, of her presence. I had half a mind to drop in her funeral, just to make sure she was gone.
“As it turned out, I got my wish.”
“You were there?” As soon as the question had left her mouth, its answer was evident: “For my father: you went to find out if he went.”
“Your mother was convinced he would attend. To be honest, so was I, especially after his silence about his and Elsie’s final conversation. Of course, I didn’t say this to your Mom; to her, I said there was no way he’d be at the funeral. I mean, if nothing else, the woman’s husband would be there, and wouldn’t that be awkward? She didn’t buy it. It was all I could do to convince her not to go, herself. For God’s sake, I said, stay home. Hasn’t this woman had enough of your life already? Why give her anything more? That had more of an effect on her, but in the end, I had to promise her that I would attend. If anybody asked, I figured I could pass myself off as a sympathetic neighbor.”
“Did my Dad—”
“Yes. Elsie Durant’s funeral was held upstate, at St. Tristan’s, this tiny church about ten minutes from the Connecticut state line. It was a pretty place, all rolling hills and broad plains. I don’t know what her connection to it was. The church itself was small, much taller than it was deep, so that it seemed as if you were sitting at the bottom of a well. The windows—some of the stained glass windows were old, original to the church, but others were more recent—replacements, I guess. The newer ones had been done in an angular, almost abstract style, so that it was if they were less saints and more these strange assemblies of shapes.
“Your father and I sat on opposite sides at the back of the church, which still wasn’t that far from the altar. The funeral was a much smaller affair than I’d expected: counting the priest and the altar boys, there were maybe ten or eleven people there. The rest of the mourners sat in the front pews. There was an older man with a broad back who appeared to be the husband, a cluster of skinny women who were either sisters or cousins of the deceased, and a couple of nondescript types who might have been family friends. Honestly, I was shocked at how empty the church was. I—it sounds silly, but Elsie Durant had been such a—she had loomed over your parents’ lives, their marriage, over my life, too—she had been such a presence that I had imagined her at the center of all sorts of lives. I had pictured a church packed with mourners—maybe half of them her illicit lovers, but full, nonetheless. I was unprepared for the stillness of—you know how churches catch and amplify each sob, each cough, each creak of the pew as you shift to make yourself more comfortable. That was what her funeral was to me, an assortment of random sounds echoing in an almost-empty church.
“After the service was over, before they’d wheeled the coffin out, I snuck out and waited in my car. Not only did your Dad shake Elsie’s husband’s hand—and say I can’t imagine what to him—he accompanied the rest of the mourners as they followed the hearse on foot across the parking lot and into the cemetery. He stayed through the graveside ceremony, and after that was over, the coffin lowered into the ground, everybody leaving, he remained in place. He watched the workmen use a backhoe to maneuver the lid of the vault into place. He watched them shovel the mound of earth that had been draped with a green cover into the hole. Once the grave was filled, and the workers had heaped the floral arrangements on top of it, he held his position. Finally, I had to go: I hadn’t been to the bathroom in hours, not to mention, I was starving. I left with him still standing there.”
“He’d seen you—I mean, in the church.”
“Oh yes,” Victoria said. “We’d made eye contact as soon as I sat down, glanced around, and realized he was directly across from me. I blushed, as if he were the one catching me doing something wrong, which irritated me to no end. I kept my eyes forward for the rest of my time there—when I left, I stared at the floor.”
“What did he say to you about it?”
“Nothing. We never discussed it.”
“What? Why not?”
“I assumed he would call me; it was what he’d done before. And I was—frankly, I was too pissed-off to pick up the phone, myself.”
“Because he’d done what you thought he would.”
“Yes. But—”
“You were afraid of what he might say if you did talk.”
“All things considered, wouldn’t you have been?”
“What did you tell Mom?”
“Pretty much what I said to you: that he’d been at the back of the church and I’d left before he did.”
“Did you mention him standing at the grave?”
“She didn’t need to hear that.”
“I assume they never talked about it.”
Victoria shook her head. “No. She knew, and he knew she knew, but neither wanted to make the first move. Your mother discussed it with me—for years. I would come over and we would sit at the dining room table—this was when you were in the house on Trevor Lane, the one with the tiny living room. However our conversation started, it always ended with her asking me what your father attending Elsie Durant’s funeral meant. Needless to say, she was certain she knew what his presence in that back pew had implied. Well, that’s not it, exactly: she was afraid she knew its significance. Who am I kidding? So was I. Not that I ever let on to your Mom. To her, I said that your father hadn’t been doing anything more than paying his respects. If he’d loved Elsie Durant that much, he never would have ended things with her; he wouldn’t have elected to stay with your Mom. All the while, I was thinking, What, are you kidding me? Maybe he changed his mind after he called things off. Maybe he wasn’t the one who ended the affair: maybe she did, and in a fit of pique, he made his confessions. Maybe—God help me—he was in love with two women at once. The possibilities were—it would be an exaggeration to say that they were endless, or even that they were all that many, but they were enough.
”We would make our way through a bottle of red, repeating what had become a very familiar argument. Your Mom would have the little statue—the souvenir your Dad had brought her, the Venus of Willendorf—in one hand. While we talked, she’s turn it over in her palm—by the end of the night, her skin would be raw from the stone scraping it. On more than one occasion, that statue’s pores were dotted with blood.
“After one of those conversations, I had a nightmare—years later, and I can recite it as clearly as if I’d sat up in my bed this very minute. Your Mom and Dad were standing in a dim space. It was your house—it was all the houses you’d lived in—but it was also a cave, or a kind of cave. The walls were ribbed, the grey of beef past its sell-by date. Your parents were dressed casually, the way they were sitting around the house on a Sunday. They looked—the expressions on their faces were—I want to say they were expectant. As I watched, each held out an arm and raked the nails of their other hand down the skin with such force they tore it open. Blood spilled over their arms, streaming down onto the floor. When enough of it had puddle there, they knelt and mixed their blood with the material of the floor, which was this grey dirt. Once they had a thick mud, they started pressing it into a figure. It was the statue, the Venus, and the sight of it sopping with their blood shot me out of sleep.
“You don’t need to be much of a psychiatrist to figure out what my dream was about; although, given how your parents have been looking these past few years, I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t just a little bit predictive. But I think about them—I have thought about them; I imagine I’ll keep thinking about them—alone in that big house with that space between them, that gap they’ve had all these years to fill with their resentments and recriminations. Visiting them, there have been times I’ve been sure I could feel . . . I don’t know what. A something there in the house with us. Not a presence—a ghost, no, I don’t think they’re being haunted by the spirit of Elsie Durant, but something else.”
Gert thought of standing in the hallway looking at the door to her parents’ room and not seeing anything there. She said, “What? What do you mean?”
Victoria said, “I don’t know.”
Returned at last, the waitress took Gert’s empty glass and her request for another with an, “Of course.” Once she had left, Gert sat back in her chair. “So that’s it,” she said. “The outline, anyway. Jesus Christ. If anyone had bothered to talk to anyone else . . . Jesus.”
Victoria remained silent until after the waitress had deposited Gert’s second drink on the table and Gert had sampled it. Then she said, “I understand, Gertie. When I arrange everything into a story, it seems as if it would have been so easy for the situation to have been settled with a couple of well-timed, honest conversations. But when I remember how it felt at the time—it was like having been dumped in the middle of the ocean. You were trying to keep treading water, to keep your head above the swells. If all of us had been different people, maybe we could have avoided this . . . it’s quite the clusterfuck, isn’t it?”
“It’s my life,” Gert said, “mine and Web’s. This . . . what happened . . . what’s still happening . . . ”
“I understand,” Victoria said. “I’m sorry; I’m so, so sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I tried—we all tried. But . . . ”
“Sometimes that isn’t enough,” Gert said. “It’s just—why? Why did they stay together?”
“I told you, sweetie: your Mom and Dad love one another. That’s . . . I used to think the worst thing in the world was falling out of love with someone. Now, though, I think I was wrong. Sometimes, you can stay in love with them.”
III
One week after her lunch with Aunt Veronica, well before she had come to terms with much if any of what they’d discussed—well before she’d shared the details of Elsie Durant with Dana—Gert found herself opening the front door to her parents’ house. She had spent the day a few miles up the road, surrounded by the luxury of the Mohonk Mountain House, at which she’d been attending a symposium on estate law that seemed principally a tax-cover for passing the weekend at Mohonk. While Gert could have stayed at the hotel—which would have allowed her to continue talking to the attractive young law student with whom she’d shared dinner and then an extensive conversation at the hotel bar—she had arranged to stay at her parents’, whom she’d felt a need to see in the flesh since Aunt Vicky’s revelations. That need, together with a sudden spasm of guilt over having spent so long in the company of another woman so clearly available when Dana was at home, working, sped her to the hotel’s front portico, where a valet fetched her Prius without remarking the lateness of the hour. Her reactions slowed by the pair of martinis she’d consumed, Gert had navigated the winding road down from the mountain with her palms sweaty on the wheel; with the exception of a pair of headlights that had followed her for several miles, while she worried that they were attached to a police car, the drive to her parents’ had been less exciting.
Now she was pushing the door shut behind her, gently, with the tips of her fingers, as she had when she was a teenager sneaking home well after her curfew’s expiration. She half-expected to find her mother sitting on the living room couch, her legs curled under her, the TV remote in one hand as she roamed the wasteland of late-night programming. Of course, the couch was empty, but the memory caused Gert to wonder if her mother hadn’t been holding something in her other hand, that weird little statue that seemed to follow her around the house. She wasn’t sure: at the time, she had been more concerned with avoiding her mother’s wrath, either through copious apologizing or the occasional protest at the unfairness of her having to adhere to a curfew hours earlier than any of her friends’. Had her mother been rolling that small figure in her palm, or was this an image edited in as a consequence of Auntie V’s disclosures?
The air inside the house was cool, evidence of her father’s continuing obsession with saving money. His micro-management of the heating had been a continuing source of contention, albeit, of a humorous stripe, between him and the rest of the family. Shivering around the kitchen table, Web and she would say, You know how much you’re worth, right? which would prompt their father to answer, And how do you suppose that happened? to which Web would reply, You took all those pennies you saved on heating oil and used them to call the bank for a loan? at which he, Gert, and Mom would snort with laughter, Dad shake his head. Gert decided she would keep her coat and gloves on until she was upstairs.
Halfway across the living room, she paused. The last time she had stood in this space, the Christmas tree had filled the far right corner, its branches raising three decades’ worth of ornaments, its base bricked with presents. Together, she and Dana, Web and Sharon, Mom and Dad, had spent a late morning that had turned into early afternoon opening presents, exchanging Christmas anecdotes, and consuming generous amounts of Macallan-enhanced-eggnog. It had been a deeply pleasant day, dominated by no single event, but suffused with contentment. Except, Gert thought, that all the time, she was here with us. Elsie Durant. She watched Dana tear the wrapping from the easel Mom and Dad bought her. She sat next to me as I held up the new Scott Turow Web had given me. She hovered behind Sharon at the eggnog.
Nor was that all. Elsie Durant had been present at the breakfast table while she, Web, and their mother had teased their father about his stinginess. During the family trips they had taken, she had accompanied them, walking the streets of Rome, climbing the Eiffel Tower, staring up at the Great Pyramid of Giza. As Gert had walked down the aisle at her high school graduation, Elsie Durant had craned her neck for a better look; when Web’s first film had played over at Upstate Films, she had stood at the front of the line, one of the special guests. Every house in which they had lived was a house in which Elsie Durant had resided, too, as if all their houses had possessed an extra room, a secret chamber for their family’s secret member.
A sound broke Gert’s reverie, a voice, raised in a moan. She crossed to the foot of the stairs, at which she heard a second, louder moan, this one in a different voice from the first—a man’s, her father’s. Her foot was on the first stair before she understood what she was listening to: the noises of her parents, making love. It was not a chorus to which she ever had been privy; although Web claimed to have eavesdropped on their mother and father’s intimacy on numerous occasions, Gert had missed the performances (and not-so-secretly, thought Gert had, as well). Apparently freed of the inhibitions that had stifled them while their children were under their roof, her parents were uttering a series of groans that were almost scandalously expressive; as they continued, Gert felt her cheeks redden.
The situation was almost comic: she could not imagine remaining in place for the length of her Mom and Dad’s session, which might take who knew how long (was her father using Viagra?), but neither could she see creeping up the stairs as a workable option, since at some point a stray creak would betray her presence, and then how would she explain that? After a moment’s reflection, Gert decided her best course would be to play slightly drunker than she was, parade up the stairs and along the hall to her room as if she’d this minute breezed in and hadn’t heard a thing. Whether her parents would accept her pretense was anyone’s guess, but at least the act would offer them a way out of an otherwise embarrassing scenario.
To Gert’s surprise and consternation, however, the clump of her boots on the stairs did not affect the moans emanating from the second floor in the slightest. Unsure if she were being loud enough, Gert stomped harder as she approached the upstairs landing, only to hear the groans joined by sharp cries. Oh come on, she thought as she tromped toward her room. Was this some odd prank her parents were playing on her? They couldn’t possibly be this deaf, could they?
She supposed she should be grateful to learn that her mother and father had remained intimate with one another, despite everything, despite Elsie Durant. Yet a flurry of annoyance drove her feet past the door to her bedroom, past the door to the bathroom, to the door to her parents’ room, open wide. She had raised her hands, ready to clap, when what she saw on the big bed made her pause, then drop her hands, then turn and run for the front door as fast as her legs would carry her. Later, after a frantic drive home, that she had not tripped down the stairs and broken her neck would strike her as some species of miracle.
Of course, Dana would awaken and ask Gert what she was doing home, wasn’t she supposed to be staying at her parents’? The smile with which Gert greeted her, the explanation that she had missed her lover so much she had opted to return that night, were triumphs of acting that brought a sleepy smile to Dana’s lips and sent her back to bed, satisfied. I am my father’s daughter. On top of the tall bookcase in her office, dust clung to a bottle of tequila that had been a gift from a client whose divorce Gert’s management had made an extremely profitable decision. She retrieved it, wiped the dust from it, and carried it through to the kitchen, where she poured a generous portion of its contents into a juice glass. She had no illusions about the alcohol’s ability to cleanse her memory of what she’d seen: the image was seared into her mind in all its impossibility; however, if she were lucky, its potency would numb the horror that had crouched on her all the drive back. At her first taste of the liquor, she coughed, almost gagged, but the second sip went down more smoothly.
IV
The streetlight that poured through the tall windows in her parents’ room reduced its contents to black and white. The king-sized bed at its center was a granite slab, the figures on it statues whose marble limbs enacted a position worthy of the Kama Sutra. Startled as Gert was by her mother and father’s athletics, she was more shocked by their skin taut against their joints, their ribs, their spines, as if, in the few weeks since last she had seen them, each had shed even more weight. In the pale light, their eyes were blank as those of Greek sculptures.
There seemed to be too many arms and legs for the couple writhing on the bed. Her father stroked her mother’s cheek with the back of his hand, and another hand lingered there, brushing her hair behind her ear. Her mother tilted her head to the right, and another head moved to the left. Her parents arched their backs, and in the space between them, a third figure slid out of her father and into her mother with the motion of a swimmer pushing through the water. While her mother braced her hands on the mattress, the figure leaned forward from her and drew its hands down her father’s chest, then turned back and cupped her mother’s breasts. Her parents responded to the figure’s caresses with a quickening of the hips, with louder moans and cries that might have been mistaken for complaints. In the space between her mother and father, Elsie Durant drew herself out of their conjoined flesh, the wedge that braced their marriage, the stone at its heart.