I have been stalking my husband’s lover. I’m not sure exactly how long this has been going on. Twenty-two or twenty-three days, I think. I could check. I’ve written it all down.
Yvonne. Her name is Yvonne. I thought she’d be exotic. A belly dancer, a singer, a beautician. Yvonne. I only had her name for a while. Her first name. When I finally met her—saw her really—at an opening in my husband’s gallery, I was surprised at how ordinary she looked. I mean, she could have been me. The clothes were wrong, though, the style. Not wrong for her. They looked pretty good on her. They just didn’t look like me at all. I’m sure of that now that I’ve seen her whole wardrobe. A closet full of elegant dresses and skirts, some still in their dry-cleaning wrap. Little moth crystal hearts on hangers in each corner. Dressers full of stacked, color-gradated sweaters. Fourteen boxes of shoes—all good names and well cared for. I think she’s obsessive. I couldn’t even find much of interest in her wastebasket.
This afternoon was my first visit to her apartment.
I didn’t come up with much but at least now I know what kind of toothpaste she uses. I bought it. And a toothbrush the same color as hers. Green with those little silver sparkles. The kind that tapers at the tip to fit easily into your mouth. I like it better than the kind I’ve been using. The square kind. She uses Opium perfume, the same as me. So I guess I would never have detected the new smell on him. I wonder if he bought it for her. He bought me my first bottle for Christmas, the first year neither of us went home to our families, the Christmas we lay in bed all day, making love, drinking Chevalier-Montrachet, opening gifts haphazardly.
Mark is extravagant. That year we outdid ourselves in the choosing, wrapping, and presentation of gifts. He had quite a time getting at the tiny gold ring I’d strung on a red ribbon and wrapped, so to speak, inside me. His tongue was numb for twenty minutes after that. There was no order to the gifts. A silver box etched with scenes from Orpheus and Eurydice followed a Patty Duke coloring book and crayons. I hung a framed picture of Curly, his favorite Stooge, beside the bed and waited for him to notice. The Opium he laid on my stomach—unwrapped, save for its engraved Oriental case—at the very end of the day. I think he must have planned that. “I always want to smell you on me,” he said. “Always and everywhere.” I guess everywhere eventually included his lover.
“What are you eating?” Mark asked this morning, grimacing at my plate. He poured a cup of coffee and refilled mine. Our mornings are like that. Snatches of conversation as he’s getting dressed, I’m doing my yoga headstands, putting on coffee, writing notes for the lit classes I teach in the afternoons at NYU. I’m an adjunct.
“Pastina,” I said.
“You okay?”
“I guess.”
I always eat pastina when I’m depressed. This morning I was depressed and excited. A deadly combination. I was shaking and jumpy and I needed to calm down. Last week I’d found the keys to Yvonne’s apartment—I knew they were her keys—in the top drawer of Mark’s desk at the gallery. In an enamel box I gave him three years ago. I had the copies I’d made in my pocket.
He wrapped his arms around me, kissed my hair. “What, baby?” he asked. I love the way his dark hair falls across his face. “Want me to stay home for a while?” He slipped his hand down the neck of my black tank which was covered with cat hairs. “Want to go back to bed?”
We used to do that a lot. Some days he’d never even make it to work. Some days we’d go back to bed, then spend the rest of the day wandering around the city, looking at art, going in and out of galleries, or just wandering and talking. All day. Then we’d come back to the loft, make love again, and order in for dinner.
“Honey,” I said, “you have to leave. My lover’s coming by in a few minutes.” He didn’t even wince. I wanted to see him wince. “She’s very jealous,” I said. Then he laughed.
“Call me later,” I said. I kissed him. “And tell Glenda thanks for that catalog.” Glenda is his assistant at the gallery.
He was out the door. Just like that. Like things were normal and he wasn’t fucking Yvonne to death in a room full of mirrors. (Actually, there’s only one mirror in her bedroom and you can’t see your reflection while you’re lying on the bed.)
After the initial thrill of following her through the halls at Columbia where she teaches English lit (I don’t know how she can afford those clothes on an adjunct’s salary), sitting in on one of her lectures on the poems of Yeats, I wanted to see more of Yvonne. Where she lived, who she met, what she ate for dinner. I followed her home one evening up Broadway toward 103rd Street. It was one of the first dark fall nights after you put the clocks back. The streets felt sluggish and dull. Yvonne walked into a Korean vegetable store and I waited outside by a sidewalk stand that displayed sneakers and sheets and household cleaning products. She picked up a plastic container and began to circle the salad bar with those long silver tongs upright in her hand like a wand. She looked pale in the bright fluorescence. I think she stuck mainly to the raw vegetables. Didn’t take any of the fried stuff or Italian-style greasy concoctions. I tried to see if she took a vegetable sushi like I used to, but a stack of cartons was blocking my view. She filled the container.
I gave a quarter to a woman who asked and watched as Yvonne handed back the plastic fork and spoon and napkin the Korean woman had slipped under the rubber band on the container. I guess they made her feel lonely, as if the Korean woman thought she was going back to an office or something to eat. I started to feel sorry for her. She was pretty, but she looked pathetic in that harsh light. Everything did. I started to feel sorry for the Korean woman whose skin looked like she lived on all that salad bar food. Everything that didn’t sell during the day. Yvonne was taking her change. She smiled at the Korean woman. I liked that.
On the way out she leaned into a bunch of tiger lilies and breathed them in. I wondered if she was thinking of Mark. Mark at home having dinner with me. If it made her feel sad. I wanted to rush over to her. Tell her I’d left a message on our machine telling Mark I’d be late. To start dinner without me. I thought of Mark being lonely and me being lonely and Yvonne and the Korean woman. All of us lonely. I thought how easy it would be to walk up to her, say I remembered her from the opening. I was Mark’s wife. Maybe we could have a drink. That she would tell me to pick up a salad, she’d buy some wine, come to her place for dinner.
She walked toward the door. I moved behind the man selling sneakers until she was enough ahead of me, then I followed.
Broadway uptown can feel so desolate at night. Dark and shabby and unfamiliar with the occasional remains of a once-elegant hotel. Miserable-looking people leaning against buildings or walking alone. Slowly. Not hurrying. Old women sitting in Blimpie’s. Children out later than they should be. Maybe it’s just that my therapist’s office is on 95th Street. I’m used to feeling sad up there. Wanting to weep up there. I was beginning to weep. I held it back. I wanted to jump in a cab down to Soho, walk into the kitchen with a bottle of Cabernet, and pretend I’d never learned my husband was having an affair.
Yvonne crossed Broadway at 103rd and walked to Riverside. I went as far as her building and waited. The rest would be easy as long as her last name was on the box. It was. Adams. I found it out last week. Yvonne Adams. A WASP, apparently. Her dark hair had thrown me. I always assume WASPs are blond. What WASP names their child Yvonne? I remembered she hadn’t taken any condiments for her salad and wondered if she ate it plain or kept dressing upstairs. Bottled, probably. Probably Paul Newman. She couldn’t even make her own salad dressing.
“What are you thinking about?” Eric asked.
I still can’t believe I have a male shrink. Sometimes I hate him. How calm he is. He never gets ruffled, never shows any visible sign of passion, never coughs or twitches. On his desk, facing away from me, is a picture of a wife and young child. “I wonder if you have the capacity for great love,” I asked him once. What did he do? He smiled.
“Yeats,” I said. “I’m thinking about Yeats.” When I’m feeling ornery I sometimes quote long passages of poetry. I know he doesn’t have the kind of soul to really hear into a poem and it gives me an edge. He was waiting for me to begin. Maybe something about the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Foul enough. “His wife, really,” I said.
He looked approving. “What about his wife?”
“Oh,” I said, “that stuff about her starting to do automatic writing on their honeymoon. On their honeymoon for God’s sake.”
Eric glanced at the clock. I never know if he is thinking I’m avoiding the issue or wondering when the session’s going to end. Actually, I spend enough energy entertaining him so I’m pretty sure I’ve won some small place in his enthusiasms.
“I mean, here all Ireland knows Yeats has been panting after Maud Gonne for half his life, and her always putting him off but wanting to be good close friends and political allies.” Eric was frowning. “Here she is gorgeous and passionate and elusive, refuses three times to marry him and then marries some handsome war hero she barely knows. I mean, God, he even proposed to her daughter the last time Maud declined. And then he marries this gentle Englishwoman and how’s she going to hold him? It’s ingenious.” He does jump slightly when I bang my fist on the armchair. “When I think of the love and devotion it must have taken, making up all that automatic, unconscious stuff, year after year, and him making those beautiful poems out of it . . .”
“Theresa . . .”
“I mean, God, it’s really sad. And he probably always loved Maud Gonne.” Fuck if Yvonne hadn’t lectured about just this part of Yeats’s life.
“Have you dreamt about Yvonne again?”
He was sitting the way he often does, with his hands pressed together against his lips, like he’s praying for me. It always makes me think of the ceramic statue of the Praying Hands my mother made when I was a kid. I just stared at him.
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking,” he said.
Eric Anderson rarely uses the word “fantasies.” I think it embarrasses him. Like he’s asking me to tell dirty secrets. Ever since the time I told him I’d thought about him spanking me.
“Well,” I said, and pulled my feet up onto the chair, “this afternoon I was imagining Mark and Yvonne fucking in our loft.”
“How did that make you feel?”
When I first started seeing Eric I asked him how he saw himself. Did he see himself as a mirror? Another version of me? He just sat there watching me, staring the way he does. A blank screen? I asked. He looked like a blank screen. “I see myself as a prism,” he said finally. “I see myself taking in what you say and refracting it back to you in a whole spectrum of meaning.” He actually said that. For a while after that I couldn’t look at him without seeing an enormous crystal hanging from a pink ribbon in a sunny kitchen window.
“Horny,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
“I was thinking of him fucking her over the banister outside our loft. She had her pants down and his cock was moving into her from behind.” Actually, I was embellishing this. In my fantasy they’d just been on the bed. “He was slamming into her and I was watching from the doorway. His hands were on her ass and he kept telling her to lean forward.” I was really getting into this. “‘I said, bend over,’ he kept saying.”
“Does he do that to you?”
I felt myself starting to cry. I tensed everything to keep it in. I held my breath, imagined I was a statue, marble and immovable. I guess it was the first time it really hit me. What my best friend Sarah had told me. About Yvonne. I think I’ve just been numb. Or scared. I still can’t believe it. Of course he does that to me. Mark loves me. I know he loves me. We have great sex and great fun and it just doesn’t make sense.
Eric looked concerned. If I had jumped into his lap and begged to be held he would have gasped, I’m sure, put me firmly back in my seat.
I need a new therapist.
It happens in every session. Twice a week the tears come up and I imagine myself a rock, a statue. Eric’s moved the tissues closer to my chair, to tempt me, I guess. But I will not cry.
I dream about Yvonne. Our clothes mixed up together in big laundry bags. Yvonne and I swimming together. Eating together. Flying in small boats across elaborate sunsets. Yvonne in exotic veils and costumes, bent over windowsills. Only now it’s me behind her. Sometimes she just holds me. Takes off my clothes and dresses me in colorful silk robes. She brushes my hair. Gives me a bath. Dabs Opium at my neck and wrists and armpits. I’m not unaware of the irony of my fear of calling out Yvonne’s name in my sleep.
It was in a particularly bad session that I hit upon the idea of going into Yvonne’s apartment. Eric was going on about investigating the self, the key to rooms you didn’t know existed—something like that—and it just hit me. But it was in my session this morning that I knew I would do it. Normally I’m a coward when it comes to things like that. I’m a sneak, but a coward. I don’t like to take chances. I cringe at the thought of being caught.
She gave him her keys, Sarah had said. I saw them. At the gallery. She said she’d seen them together at Bar Pitti the week before or she wouldn’t have thought anything. Sarah is Mark’s friend, too, and as we plotted and planned, as she hesitated and apologized, tried to backpedal and reassure me, I think she felt nearly as bad as I did. Sometimes I wish she hadn’t told me.
After my session I walked around Yvonne’s block several times. I knew she was in class but I kept wondering what I would do if she or Mark showed up. I started laughing when I thought of that. I walked back to the Korean vegetable stand. The same woman was sitting at the counter, eating an ice cream. It seemed too cold for ice cream, too early. I bought a pack of tissues and smiled at her but she wasn’t looking at me. She rubbed her fingers on a cut lemon and thumbed nine singles and change from my ten. Nine dollars could get me downtown in a cab before I did anything crazy. I walked to Yvonne’s.
In the elevator my legs were shaking so much I thought I was going to faint. I got off on the fifth floor. 5C. C for cunt, I thought. I never use that word. It made me feel stronger. After that it was easy. I tried each key and found the right locks. I walked in the door and switched on the light. A woman’s voice startled me and I froze until I heard the familiar beep of the answering machine.
“God, I’m really scared and you have to help me,” I started to pray, but when I thought about God helping me break into my husband’s lover’s apartment I started shaking again.
I sat on the couch. One of those futon couches with a wooden frame. I wondered if this was where they fucked until I saw beyond the telephone table to the bedroom. But I wasn’t ready.
I flipped through the papers on the table. It was just some junk mail, but it reminded me of the time last year when Eric left his office for a minute and I got out of my chair and walked around, looked at the papers on his desk, that picture of his wife and young boy. How anxious I’d been.
Yvonne’s place was neat. Not a pillow off its angle. A letter from India on the desk beside a silver letter opener, as if she’d arranged it. I thought of her trying to arrange it all to please Mark. There was no sign of him yet. I went into the kitchen which was large enough for a refrigerator, oven, and sink. Immaculate. Two bottles of Dos Equis in the refrigerator. Mark’s favorite brand, but a lot of people like Dos Equis. English muffins. Jam. And salad dressing. Paul Newman.
There was a glass in the sink and I examined it for traces of lipstick or mouthprints. I filled it with tap water and drank three glasses. I was ready for the bedroom.
I knew it would be neat and beige. A picture of a man that was not Mark sat on her bureau with a few pins and bracelets scattered around. Maybe it was her father. A brother. Not a hint of Mark. Not a T-shirt. It’s hard with men, no treacherous earrings to drop loose and give them away.
There wasn’t a strand of hair on the bed. I sat on it. Bounced. The mattress was pretty firm and the box spring didn’t squeak. I laid down on the pillow. I curled up and rocked and took in the scent. Opium. It might have been me.
I checked for mirrors. Just a modest wooden one above her bureau which didn’t reflect the bed area as far as I could tell.
Gradually I went through every drawer. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular—handcuffs or anything like that. Mark and I had already gone through that phase. I just wanted to see what she was like. I wasn’t even particularly careful not to mess things too much. I tried on a string of pearls, wrapped a scarf around my shoulders. When I saw the bottle of Opium and dabbed it on my neck it reminded me of nothing more than sneaking into my mother’s bedroom and dressing in her clothes. The only difference was that Yvonne was about my age and my husband’s lover. And I was in her apartment.
After a while I wasn’t even worried. When the phone rang I had an urge to answer it. The machine picked up. I prayed it wouldn’t be Mark. I wanted it to be Mark. It was a hang-up.
The bathroom adjoining her bedroom was softly lit. A small makeup table was strewn with lipsticks and powders, the only sign of disorder in the apartment. The white wicker wastebasket was empty except for a few tissues and an empty bottle of contact lens solution. I sat at the mirror. I don’t wear lipstick myself, more because I’ve never been able to figure out the right color than anything else. Also, it’s uncomfortable. I picked a dark red. Scarlet Memory it was called. I still had on the pearls and green scarf over my black T-shirt and it was hard to look at myself in the mirror. I started to make faces. Little kissing movements. I widened my mouth the way I see women do all the time and drew a dark line of Yvonne’s Scarlet Memory across my bottom lip. I pressed my lips together, then filled in the rest. The face looking back looked like my mother. I took a tissue and began to blot. I applied the lipstick again and blotted and blotted until there were several tissues covered with my lip prints. Then I threw them in the wastebasket. Right on top. Give her something to think about if she noticed. I have to laugh thinking about her blotting and trying to compare the lip shapes. Come to think of it I don’t even know what kind of lips she has.
After I’d gone through her closets and drawers I was almost bored. I had an urge to call Eric and tell him where I was. To call Mark. I took another look through the medicine chest. There was a package of condoms on the top shelf. What a place for them. I’d checked the drawer beside her bed already. That’s where they should be. Well, see what happens next time, sweetie, when they’re not here. I put them in my bag.
It was time to go. I took the red plastic alarm clock by her bed, popped open the back panel, and emptied the battery out. I don’t know why I did that. I put the pearls back but kept the scarf. It smelled of Opium, just like me.
On the platform for the Broadway local at 96th Street I began to feel chilled. I pulled the green scarf closer around my throat but when it hit me whose scarf it was I started shaking. I’ve always thought New York is the place to be if you are going to cry in public. Most people just ignore you. I mean they look at you, but no one approaches. I was weeping. First gently. Then I was sobbing. Violently. I was sobbing, doubled over by the edge of the platform, holding my stomach and saying things like “oh God, oh God” and hoping the train would come quickly so I could sit down. When I got myself quiet I tried to look down the tunnel for the lights, but I thought of Mark and Yvonne and I began to cry again. I leaned against a pillar and started looking for the pack of tissues I’d picked up at the Korean place. I never have things like tissues and tampons when I need them. I pulled a packet from my bag. The condoms. When I pictured myself wiping my face with a condom I almost laughed. But I was crying too hard.
A woman walked by me. She was stooped over and smelled awful. She pushed a broken cart with plastic bags bulging out of it. I thought she would say something. Something wise or meaningful, something that would help me know what to do next. She stopped. I thought for sure she would speak. Then she moved on. She needed a bath. I needed a bath. A long bath. And after that I’d clean up the apartment. Get some order. Then I’d be able to think. I’d stop and pick up some things we needed around the house. Toothpaste. Soap. Stock up. The thought of the drugstore near our apartment cheered me. Our drugstore. So familiar with its friendly cashier and fat old Mrs. Weisbaum who owns it.
I was cold. The train was coming. The front of it looking like the face of some ancient god. It’s a funny thing, the subway. The way the tracks run under and through the city, connecting everything. Places. Lives. The way the trains run back and forth across the boroughs. Year after year. Over decades. Through wars and tragedies and terrible depressions. Carrying thousands, millions of bodies under the long snaky spines of Broadway, Lexington Avenue. Millions of lives. A long house connecting us all. Sometimes thinking like this makes me feel better. I was thinking about me and Mark and Yvonne. What connected us. What would happen to us. I knew the train would take me home. That I would have dinner with my husband. That our life together would be filled with hidden pockets of desire and mystery and possibility. That you can never really be certain of anything. I get these moments sometimes. I feel bigger than myself. Wise and rational and compassionate. And then I start to cry.