I ran. I couldn’t wait for the elevator so I took the stairs. On the third floor I realized I’d look suspicious if anyone saw me coming out of the stairway, so I went into the hall and waited for the elevator. While I was waiting I noticed I was holding Yvonne’s panties in a ball. I threw them across the hall. Just left them there.
I ran out onto Riverside Drive. I ran until I reached Broadway. I slipped in a patch of icy slush and almost dropped Yvonne’s bag. It was small enough so I stuck it inside my own. I leaned against a bodega and closed my eyes. I could still see Yvonne and Mark in that bed. That rolling.
After a minute I crossed the street. That same guy was still selling Christmas trees. At 10:35 on Christmas Eve. Anyone buying a Christmas tree at 10:35 on Christmas Eve is succumbing to sentimental impulses as far as I’m concerned. He saw me and smiled. Joan Baez was playing again. I was almost out of breath.
“I’m still thinking of buying one,” I said.
“Well, I could give you a really good price now,” he said. He sipped coffee through a tear in the Styrofoam lid.
“They smell great,” I said.
“Yeah, I never get tired of this smell,” he said.
I touched a bough, closed my eyes, and breathed in the smell.
“What about your husband?”
He remembered.
“Fuck my husband,” I said. I thought how appropriate that was at the moment. “Everyone else does.”
“You need a tree,” the guy said. I thought of my dream. The tree. It seemed like an omen.
“How much for this one?” The tree was about my height.
He looked at it. Then he looked at me.
“How about fifteen?”
I knew it was a steal.
“Do you think it’d fit in a cab?”
“I’ll get you one,” he said.
On the way downtown I was so preoccupied with keeping the tree from getting crushed or bent that I almost forgot about Yvonne’s bag. When I did think of it I forced myself to wait until I got home. The cab driver asked a few polite questions but I didn’t feel like talking. I put my face in the branches to take in the smell of pine, to block out the picture of Mark and Yvonne in that bed, but my heart was pulsing like crazy and my head was like a slide show. Mark and Yvonne. Mark and Yvonne. Mark and Yvonne. I started doing this alternate-nostril breathing that’s supposed to calm you down. I held one nostril closed and took a breath, held it for a count of eight, then closed that nostril and let the air out the other for a count of eight. The cab driver kept sneaking looks at me in the rearview mirror. By the time we got to Spring Street it was midnight. All the Midnight Masses would be beginning all over the city. “Merry Christmas, Terry,” I whispered.
The loft was freezing. Tony and Chico raced out to greet me. “Merry Christmas, boys,” I said. Then I remembered the cat food. I’d forgotten it again.
I set the tree on its side and flipped on the phone machine, which was blinking like mad. Mark. Sarah. My mother.
Tony and Chico pawed and scratched my legs. “I’m sorry, boys,” I said. I poured them a bowl of Cheerios and filled their water bowl, which was completely dry. They just looked disgusted and followed me back out of the room. They looked like they felt as bad as I did.
I picked up the tree. I hadn’t considered how I would get it to stand. I propped it up against the front window with a couple of heavy books around the base. Tony and Chico came over immediately and started rubbing themselves against it. No matter how many times I pulled them away, they ran back. I think they were really mad.
The phone rang.
“Terry, it’s me. Are you there?” Sarah. It’s funny how many people leave messages saying “it’s me.” “I’m getting sick of this Yule log. Call me.”
I sat down and pulled Yvonne’s bag out of my own. It was soft black leather. A good bag, my mother would say. The phone rang again. I held the bag behind my back and waited to see who it was. Guilt makes you think people can see you over a telephone. It must be a Catholic thing.
“Treas, it’s me. Are you there?”
Mark. I wondered if he was calling from Yvonne’s. It was only an hour or so since I’d left them. I stared at the machine. “Terry, pick up the phone.”
I picked it up.
“What?” I asked.
“You weren’t going to pick up?”
“I was feeding the boys.”
“You okay?”
“Great,” I said. I hunched my shoulder to my ear to hold the phone and opened Yvonne’s bag. It was crammed. I’d expected everything to be wedged neatly against everything else. “I’m great.”
“You just get in?”
“Yeah.”
I pulled out a Lancôme makeup case and put it on the chair beside me. I have the same one. It seemed like minutes went by.
“It’s strange not being with you for Christmas,” Mark said after a while. “I miss you.”
I pulled out a gift box wrapped in the kind of wrapping paper they use in department stores. Little gold insignias on a white background. Little IUDs. I balanced it on my palm. I shook it. It sounded like earrings.
“Where were you tonight?”
“Yvonne’s,” I said.
“Terry don’t start.”
“Okay. I was in church. Where were you?”
Mark’s strategy when he thinks I am being unreasonable is to act as if everything is normal. To ignore any tension or weirdness. He takes long deep breaths and makes very reasonable statements.
“I went to a party with David and Glenda,” he said.
I wanted to believe it. I wanted so badly to believe it. I pulled a wad of tissues from Yvonne’s bag. A couple of green-tinted Christmas cookies shaped like a bell and a star fell out onto the floor. Tony rushed over and sniffed at them.
“Oh, where?” I asked. I leaned over to pick up the cookies and her phonebook fell out. I flipped to the H’s. Mark Holder. It was there. The gallery number. So she didn’t have our home number. There was only one name added after it so I guessed this affair was pretty recent.
“. . . a great apartment. Three Rothkos,” Mark was saying.
“Where was it?” I asked. I bit into the star. It was sweet. It tasted like Christmas. The cookies my mother makes once a year. Butter cookies with red and green food coloring. The kind you don’t want to eat, but end up eating handfuls of.
“I told you, Sixty-sixth and Park.”
“Right.”
I bit the bell, crammed the whole thing in my mouth. I chewed it then spit it into the napkin.
“Terry, are you okay? You sound weird.”
Weird. I considered the absurdity of being on the phone with my husband while I went through a pocketbook I’d just stolen from his lover as they were fucking. That was weird. A plastic spoon fell out of the bag and I remembered that container of salad I’d left at Yvonne’s.
“I feel weird,” I said. “I miss you.” Then I wished I hadn’t said it. I put Yvonne’s pocketbook on the couch and walked the phone over to Mark’s wine rack. I pulled out a bottle. “Any of these bottles you don’t want me to open?” I asked, showing the bottle to the receiver.
“Terry, how much have you been drinking?”
Actually, that was a good question.
“I mean I guess half of all this is mine, right?”
“I don’t give a shit what you open. You know that.”
I was trying to open the bottle with the phone wedged between my ear and shoulder. I’ve never been able to open bottles of wine easily. If I was going to be alone I’d have to learn how to use a corkscrew.
I took a sip from the bottle, sat down, and pulled Yvonne’s bag in my lap. It was soft. Like a tiny baby.
“Tree?”
Funny him calling me that now.
“Honey, I know Christmas Eve is a big night for you. Do you want me to come over?”
Mark saying Eve made me see Yvonne. Naked. That bruise at the top of her thigh. The moles. The curve of her ass. Did he call her Eve? Did even the sound of that syllable on his tongue right now get him excited? Make him feel guilty? Could he still feel her mouth on him, remember the taste of her? Could he have fucked her, come downtown, and sounded this calm? Was he capable of that?
“No,” I said, then regretted it. It sounded harsh. “I need to go through this alone,” I said. I looked down at Yvonne’s bag and started to laugh.
“Listen, Terry,” he said, “cut the self-pitying shit and talk to me.”
Yvonne had forty dollars in her wallet. Bank cards, credit cards. Not one photograph. I thought about her trying to get on the Long Island Rail Road in the morning without any cash. Without any ATM cards. She’d have to stay home. We’d both be alone for Christmas. I could call her up. We could feel sorry for ourselves together.
“Terry . . .”
“What?”
“I’m trying to talk to you.”
“Oh, right, okay. What do you want to talk about? Uh . . . let’s see. How about Yvonne? Oops, that’s right. We can’t talk about Yvonne. So maybe we should talk about who you’ve been fucking. Oh no, we’re back to Yvonne again. Boy, this is harder than I thought.”
Mark didn’t say anything. I couldn’t hear anything in the background. For all I know he could have been at Yvonne’s.
“You are being completely unreasonable.”
“I read your journal,” I said.
Nothing.
“I said, I read your journal.”
“Terry, I am going to hang up.”
But he didn’t.
“Well,” I said, and took another sip of wine, “you said you didn’t give a shit what I opened.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Whatever is done for love . . .” I said.
Something crashed near the front of the loft. I walked the phone over as Tony darted away from the Christmas tree he’d just knocked down.
“What was that?”
“Maybe I should read Yvonne’s journal, too. But she probably doesn’t keep a journal, does she? Or maybe she keeps it in her bag.”
I sat on the floor by the tree, and dumped the rest of Yvonne’s bag onto the floor. Nothing that looked like a journal or notebook. Only a letter she’d apparently forgotten to mail. The writing was almost illegible. I couldn’t even make out the name. I slit it open.
“What if I told you I’d read your journal?” Mark asked.
I didn’t know if he meant that he had read my journal, or he was asking how I’d like it if he had.
I didn’t say anything. I was torn between reading Yvonne’s letter and trying to remember what I had said in my journal. A lot of it was coded. Poems. I’d copied out Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Rival” last week and tried to write one like it. Maybe he’d think the poem was mine.
“I always have my journal with me,” I said.
Chico sat in my lap. I held him close and continued to read. Yvonne’s handwriting was so hard to read that I could stare at the letter and literally not make out a word. I saw green ducks in summer land. I glanced quickly down looking for Mark’s name. Playing in four graves. Either Yvonne was a completely irrational letter writer or I just couldn’t crack the code. No one could read that chickenscratch.
“Terry?”
I took a mouthful of wine. It tasted good. It tasted like dinners with Mark, like opening presents, like sex.
“Anyway, I know you wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“How do you know?” he asked.
A black picnic the size of hamlets. We ate [are?] dogs. I was never going to find anything out from this mess. I was almost glad she didn’t keep a journal. She could scrawl this stuff on billboards and still be assured of privacy.
“Terry . . .”
“I know you,” I said. And I do. I looked at the picture of Curly above our bed. I thought of Mark. The way he holds me after we fight, knows my moods. Forgives anything. I knew he hadn’t read my journal. Or maybe he had. I guess I don’t know what to think anymore. When did everything become so uncertain?
He didn’t say a word. The phone beeped for call waiting, but I ignored it. I don’t know why, but I thought of the police. For the first time I thought of how many traces I’d left in Yvonne’s apartment. All my fingerprints. For the first time I realized this could have repercussions beyond me and Mark and Yvonne. The world could become involved. Police. Investigations. I would have to get rid of Yvonne’s stuff. I’d have to get rid of the keys and any evidence. It was all hitting me at once. Whatever is done for love occurs beyond good and evil. Try telling that to the police.
“I’m scared,” I said. “I’m really scared. Please come home,” I said.
Mark didn’t say anything. The phone beeped again.
“At least come home tomorrow,” I said.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
The phone rang after we hung up. The machine clicked on. It was 12:30. My outgoing message ended. The tape switched on. No one was there.
I tore Yvonne’s letter into tiny pieces and tossed them—my own little snowstorm. I opened the present. A pair of those big ugly earrings Yvonne wears. Turquoise. I put them on.
There was the rest of the wallet to go through, nothing else in the bag. Only two pens. How could someone carry only two pens?
I found nothing unusual—charge cards, a cash card, two stamps, her NYU I.D., a punched-out card to Crunch, and a bunch of business cards, none of them Mark’s. The only odd thing was a St. Jude prayer card. That impressed me. Maybe she was doing a novena to get Mark to leave me.
I propped St. Jude against the tree. If it came to a choice between me and Yvonne, I know he’d pick me.