5.

If Claire didn’t know better, she would have felt she was the source of Freddie’s illness—a cause-and-effect manifestation of her deception.

It was five in the morning and Freddie wanted water. He had woken them both with his coughing. She could hear his chainsaw breath cutting through his chest. It was probably a simple cold but he called it bronchitis or maybe, just maybe, tuberculosis. He wouldn’t be going into work.

She’d formed stories about Tomasz and the storage locker. Myths growing inside her head, stories that would explain all this. She told them to herself over and over again, as a child begs to hear the same story every night. Yes, there was a man, a fatherly type with an endearing brow and a speckled, trimmed beard, and he was the only one who heard the woman trapped in the basement. He rescued her. Also, the story of a man who’d tell all his friends that he’d fucked the married woman from 3B. I screwed the rich bitch. A notch on his belt. Rumors flying like ghosts through the old building.

“The sheets are too stiff,” Freddie said without opening his eyes.

And yet she couldn’t imagine lying beside any other man’s back but Freddie’s.

Claire rolled out of bed to get Freddie a glass from the kitchen.

When she’d come upstairs yesterday, after Tomasz, it was just before noon and she’d had nothing to do but wait stupidly for Freddie to return home. Her mind spun through the details on repeat. She listened to three radio shows and watched Young Dr. Malone on the set. She called Mary but hung up before she answered. She made herself a martini, then another. Finally, she took a bath, but not until she’d sat on all the chairs and lain on all the couches with a strange man’s smell still on her. Why had she done that?

She was tipsy when Freddie arrived, and he chuckled at her dozing on the sofa. But she hardly had time to say hello, and off he went to meet a college friend for drinks. Or someone. A woman. She later woke to Freddie’s raspy breathing—he’d been out all night, and must have returned around three a.m. She imagined the odor of Tomasz traveling through the house, sucked up through Freddie’s nose, swimming down to his intestines. He would know.

And then he woke feverish and full of phlegm. How could she not imagine her betrayal was the cause?

By the time Claire returned with water, Freddie was asleep again. She’d failed at her negligible task. She stood over him in the dark, the glass in her hands. He was so far away from her. She had the power to dump water over a sick, sleeping man, but what else?

He couldn’t even bother to feel jealous, while that was all Claire bothered to do. If he found out, he would build up stories around it, as Claire had, thick as a fortress, walls and walls of stories. What evidence did she have for her own life?

She couldn’t believe the thing she’d done to him, couldn’t believe it with such urgency that she didn’t believe it. It hadn’t happened, it was a daydream or someone else’s memory. Unfaithfulness did not belong to her. It had always belonged to him.

Still holding his water glass, Claire coughed loudly. She whispered, “I brought you some water.” Nothing. She nudged his shoulder, coughed again. “Are you thirsty?” Still nothing. “You look very, very thirsty.” Then she dumped the whole glass of water onto Freddie’s face.

He shot up in bed, looking around, blinking at her. “What did you? What’s wrong with you?” He wiped at his wet face with his hands.

“What woman was it this time?” Claire demanded. “Was it Nicolette?”

“What time is it? What are you talking about?”

“How many others have there been? Can you even count?”

“I’m sick, Claire. I have bronchitis.” Freddie threw his legs out of bed and pulled his wet shirt off, patted his face with it. He glared up at her with dim and tired hatred. “You’re a child. I don’t know who you are.”

She was too exhausted to meet his eyes. What little nonsense she’d said had sapped every reserve. He flipped his soaking pillow over, lay back down, and shut his eyes.

She could never beat his silence. So she jostled over him, to act like the child he said she was, then watched him as his feigned sleep became real. He looked younger than her, though he wasn’t. Freddie carried nothing with him that tugged his shoulders low.

Was that what had first drawn her to him? She studied the shadow shape of his body for an answer. When he resolved to have a dance after dinner, whether she would join him or not, was that it? Was it the way he fluttered about if she refused, batting his arms to make her laugh? The way he played characters at parties, the vapid aristocrat, the lovesick professor. He carried his voices around in his pocket and he always donned—needed—one mask or another. He was everywhere, a jittery reflection of a watch face on a wall. She could never quite catch up to him.

Claire used to fancy she was the only one who knew him through his guises. She thought he needed someone to know, to remind him which was the real Freddie, unmasked. But he didn’t want her to know him. He didn’t want her to know there was nothing to know. He didn’t need anyone.

She closed her eyes but couldn’t sleep. It would be a miracle if she didn’t catch what Freddie had. There was the ocean and there was the night. Her father’s jawline, then the back of his head. A big gray dog. She heard a noise, a crush in the darkness. She woke in a panic. Something was on her mouth, a vise—afraid, so intensely afraid she would die, and the dog and her father a mile down the beach. Freddie’s hand was cupping her jaw. He said she woke him with her grinding teeth. This had happened before but each time was new. She was scared of waking in his grip.

Both of them only half awake, he pulled up her nightgown. He climbed on top of her, his head buried in her hair. But she saw, briefly, how tightly his eyes were closed. He smelled wrong. She didn’t want him in her, but how could she say no after what she’d done. She wanted desperately to overwrite it, to erase it with Freddie. Without even touching her, he tried to push inside, and she tried to let him.

“We can try again,” she said. But he rolled off, mumbling he was too tired and sick anyway.

In the dark shadows of pillows, she covered her ears and heard only the inside of her cupped palms and the inside of her head, a storm system of silence. Claire imagined what it would be like to go mad—her old inventions. The voices she would hear, like a light drizzle all around her.

They drove north in midday traffic, Claire resting her forehead on the cool glass of the passenger window. Freddie had said he needed fresh air and that he knew how badly Claire wanted to see the leaves turn. He wouldn’t want her to miss that confetti ground.

Central Park. Then the Bronx and the Bronx Zoo, the children standing on street corners in thin coats, their fists hidden inside sleeves, sleeves holding radios. She caught pieces of songs. At a stop sign she heard Ray Charles, his bent-branch moan. She nodded her head to it and they drove on. An hour upstate they reached a dirt road and a small patch of trampled grass. They’d been here once, long before. They congratulated one another on finding it again.

The lookout point was a mile from the car, a view of the Hudson waiting there. The short walk proved difficult for ill Freddie, and he stubbed his toe on a rock. Nevertheless, he said he felt invigorated. He wandered off to the edge on his own, and she watched his back. He’d worn his gray trench coat and struggled to take it off. It swashed and moved with his body; it seemed too big for him now. Ahead of her, in the light and shadows, he was nearly camouflaged. But a moment later she heard his voice calling to her. “Get over here. It’s beautiful.”

Claire lagged behind along the path and the loud leaves sounded like cracking joints. She breathed the cold air into her lungs. It felt good. A cigarette would also feel good. A hand-rolled cigarette. She reached Freddie, leaned against him and looked at the river not so far below, the water shimmering in the breeze.

“We haven’t done anything like this in ages,” Freddie said.

“Why is that?”

“We could try. We should try to be good.” Freddie made her look him in the eyes. “I want to be good to you, Claire.”

She pulled away slightly to look at him better. “Is that so?” She tried to sound light, and thought: how funny that I do not feel a thing.

“You know you’re very hard to please,” said Freddie.

“And you’re so easy,” Claire said. She was smiling, wasn’t she?

“We should take a trip. We could go back to Cuba for our anniversary.”

“We could go to Ovid.”

“We’ll talk about it.” Freddie leaned in, spoke into her hair. “We’re all alone up here. No one around for miles.”

Claire turned from the wet of his breath, his arms around her waist.

He grinned. “You know I could kill you and no one would ever know.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I could, and then leave you here. Who would know?”

Claire did not answer.

He laughed sharply. “But I won’t. That’s the point. That’s how much I love you. I could, but I won’t.”

He took her silence to be anger—how would he know it was indifference?

He said, “It’s a joke, Claire. Come on. Come here.” He pulled her closer and tried to kiss her mouth, but she turned and he settled for her ear. The Hudson moved beneath them.

“You could barely walk up that hill, let alone fight me,” she said.

“It was a mountain,” Freddie mumbled. He let go and walked farther along the path, into the woods. She could not say out loud that she did not love him, because then it might be true.

I could kill you, you mean.