XXXVI

It was rather exhausting, shadowing George. After trying to keep up with him for a few days, she promised herself she wouldn’t follow him out into the street anymore, trailing him up and down Manhattan—carefully stalking him in and out of bookstores where he signed stock, hiding behind clothes racks at the department store where he purchased a new cardigan, and pressing herself against a brick building in the numbing cold for hours, waiting for George to finish a leisurely meal with his private banker.

She resorted to observing him whenever he was at home with her. She tensed as a reflex whenever he entered a room or said a word; she studied the way he spoke to Jonathan, the way he generally avoided Martha. She looked through his study for clues as often as possible and one time even listened in on a telephone conversation with Edgar (during which, to Mrs. March’s frustration, they only discussed news of George’s film deal).

Whenever George stepped out, Mrs. March adopted another role: Sylvia. Within days of returning from Maine, she had gone back to the store on 75th and Lexington to buy the black velvet headband. She’d also purchased Sylvia’s brand of perfume—the one she had seen on her bedroom dresser—at the department store. It was on sale, so she could hardly pass up the opportunity. To complete the transformation, she’d bought a wig from a costume shop downtown, and once a week she’d buy peaches, the same size and color as the one Sylvia was holding in the newspaper photo.

At home, with her bedroom door locked, she had taken to becoming Sylvia. She’d walk, back straight, feet pointed, across the carpet. She’d eat the peaches in front of the bathroom mirror, trying on smiles in between bites, watching the juice stream down her chin. She read beauty magazines as she imagined Sylvia would, licking her finger to turn the page, or just lounged, looking at the wall, contemplating her own death. She discovered that Sylvia grew bored and impatient when she lounged, that she felt more sensual when wearing a silk slip than when fully undressed. Sometimes she’d smoke, too—the last of the cigarettes from the stolen cigarette case—tilting her hand the way Gabriella did, holding the cigarette languidly between her index and middle fingers.

She aired out the room afterwards to eradicate the smoke and perfume. No matter how vigorously she soaped herself afterwards, Mrs. March could still smell Sylvia on her throughout the day—a stinging, provocatively sweet scent that seemed to hide an underlying rot, like when her mother sprayed Chanel No. 5 in the bathroom to disguise the reek of a leaking pipe.

Mrs. March would wash her neck and wrists in her bathroom—suds falling between her breasts and down her back, the delicate skin on the inside of her wrists peeling from the repeated rubbing—refilling daily the gilded soap dispenser (which she’d been assured by a pushy antiques dealer once belonged to Babe Paley). Then she’d sniff herself repeatedly, stopping on her way down the hall to wash herself again in the guest bathroom.

It was on one such occasion, after washing her increasingly cracked hands in the guest bathroom with a round soap George had brought back from the London Ritz—that she noticed the painting. The painting, which once depicted several naked women bathing in a stream and peering shyly in a half-turn, now showed the women with their backs completely turned.

The towel dropped from Mrs. March’s hands. She stepped closer to the painting. They were the same women—she knew their hairstyles and coloring by heart—and yet their smiling, rosy faces and their plump, pastel breasts had disappeared. On display now were their pale backs and dented buttocks. She stared at it, confounded. Had they bought the two paintings as a set and she had somehow forgotten all about this one? But even if that were true (which was unlikely), where was the one that had been hanging in this bathroom for ten years? She studied the painting for several minutes, touching it softly with one fingertip, willing it to change back.

She stepped out into the hallway, debating whether to tell George about the painting, contemplating the possibility that he would laugh at her. As she approached her bedroom, she heard voices. Whispers. She stopped dead in the middle of the hall and cocked her head to listen. The voices were coming from Jonathan’s room. “This game is boring,” she heard Alec say. “Let’s play something else?”

Mrs. March tiptoed to the door, pressed her ear to it. On the other side Alec said, “I wanna be the cop.”

“Okay. I’ll be the criminal then,” Jonathan answered.

“A robber?”

“Naw, something better. Like a murderer.”

“A murderer, gee.”

“Would you turn in a murderer to the police?” asked Jonathan. “Even if you knew ’em?”

Mrs. March covered her mouth with her hand, her wedding band cold against her lips.

“How do you mean?” asked Alec.

“Like, say it was your brother?”

“But I don’t have any brothers.”

“Well, say it was your mother then.”

“I couldn’t rat out my mother,” said Alec firmly, with a touch of pride that prompted a surge of envy inside Mrs. March.

“But if it was the right thing to do?” said Jonathan.

“I don’t know. Can we just play now?”

The voices quieted, replaced by light thumping sounds. Armed with a new determination, Mrs. March sought George out—he was reading in the living room, the television on in the background—and asked him, straight out: “Who changed the painting in the bathroom?”

He frowned but kept his eyes on his book. She rubbed her wrists, then turned off the television for something to do.

“Mmm?” said George, more at his book than at her.

“The painting in the guest bathroom. Who changed it?”

George appeared to continue his reading as he said, “Honey, I’m sure the painting is the same as it’s been all these years.”

When she didn’t answer, he peered at her over his glasses in that George-like way that irked her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Of course I am,” she said. “I thought I remembered it differently, is all.”

“Well, it’s been up there for so long, you probably just never really noticed the details.”

“Yes,” she said, looking at him. “That certainly seems to be the trouble.”

Gritting her teeth, she retired to her bedroom and closed the door, her hands trembling with rage so that her fingernails tapped on the panels. He was denying it, just like he had done with the dead pigeon in the bathtub. Like he had done with everything.

She slipped on the wig, fingering the brunette tresses, admiring herself in the bathroom mirror. He didn’t consider her worthy of murdering, of possessing in such a fervent, urgent way. He thought she was stupid, plain, boring, only deserving of humiliation in the pages of a book. A joke.

She slid the black headband over the wig, the velvet like soft down under her fingertips. Her pupils dilated in the mirror. “It’s me you want, George March,” she whispered.

SHE WAS waiting for George in the dark when he entered the bedroom that night. She sat, whoever she was, in shadows in the armchair in the corner. “George,” she said. Her voice was different, like her larynx had been restrung.

George turned toward her, squinting. The moonlight through the window only illuminated her hands, crossed in her lap, in faint streaks. “Can’t sleep?” he asked.

She slunk toward him and embraced him as she imagined a young girl who was having a yearning, long-distance affair would: feeling every wrinkle in his shirt between her fingers, taking in the scent of him (whisky, old wooden drawers). George touched the tips of the wig tentatively. “You changed your hair,” he said, as if admiring the effort. The room seemed to darken further around them in response.

That night, Mrs. March seduced her husband. Familiarly at first, then strangely—laughing, biting herself. George seemed curious, politely responsive, then ultimately appreciative, his pine-needle beard grazing her neck, his heart beating against her chest. She could feel her shoulder blades protruding more than usual, threatening to slice through her skin.

There was a quick, sharp pain between her legs as he pressed his way into her. She pictured a closed ear piercing, the skin grown over it like the stump of an amputated limb.

Pounding the mattress with her fists, she felt a trail of maggots—Sylvia’s maggots—tickling her from the inside before dripping out of her in wet, writhing knots.

She rocked back and forth, humming softly, Sylvia’s chocolate locks brushing her clavicles, until Johanna was no more.