I decided to ignore Christmas completely. I planned to wake up, have coffee, and stay inside all day reading the new biography of Yeats. For backup I had a listing for special Christmas day Al-Anon meetings. If things got bad I could always go.
The Christmas tree was lying on the floor. It had fallen again. I set it up against the window. It smelled good. It smelled like childhood and hope and expectation. I’ve always loved Christmas and I have to say I have had some near perfect “Christmas moments” in my life: Caroling with friends, snow falling through the streetlights, one Christmas Eve when I was seventeen . . . Sitting on Santa Claus’s lap in Macy’s telling him I wanted the Lennon Sisters Colorforms more than anything. And getting them. Him remembering . . . Running into the living room, a blue two-wheeler—I knew it was for me—leaning on its kickstand beside the lit-up tree . . . red felt Christmas stockings along the fireplace. It was an imitation fireplace that my mother had fitted with brick Con-Tact paper, but it didn’t matter. It was a fireplace. To make the fire, my mother (she still does it) sets up a bunch of tiny red electric lights behind the logs. Over the lights she balances a tin plate that revolves when the heating lights push the plate around. And the red light flickers over the logs like real fire.
I pulled out a set of Christmas lights Mark and I had hung at a party we gave a few years ago. I popped off all the bulbs except the red ones, and plugged it in. I bunched up the bulbs and wires under the tree, stuck a pie plate over it, and waited for the lights to heat. I watched it. I waited. I started to long for Christmas at home. With cookies and presents, my family and Mark. Tradition. I wanted to be part of something.
I made a cup of hot mint tea. I decided if it took me all night I’d figure out what to do. I sipped the tea and was staring into space, thinking about Yvonne and Mark in that bed, when I realized I was staring at the I Ching. I pulled it down.
What should I do? I wrote. I held the pennies in my hand until they got warm. I held the question in my mind, and then I threw. Broken, broken, solid. One hexagram down and I hadn’t thrown a changing line. I threw again. Broken. I had only two more throws. I needed to throw a changing line—it makes me feel like I have an extra chance. That I’m not in a fixed and static state. I threw a nine. Two changing lines. Two chances.
The first hexagram was #39: Obstacles. I read the text, underlining what applied. Something about a dangerous abyss lying before me and a steep inaccessible mountain rising behind me. I figured my life was the abyss, Yvonne and Mark the mountain. It said that these obstacles are part of my path and must be overcome. Seek advice, it said. The struggle takes place within the self.
This was getting me nowhere. I wanted something more specific. I turned to the changing hexagram, #52: Meditation (Keeping Still). Now it said to meditate and focus on achieving a quiet heart. That once my mind is calm I will transcend my inner turmoil. Act in accordance with the cosmos, it said. The future cannot be mapped out.
I shut the book. It’s pretty pathetic when a self-help book tells you to seek advice. Act in accordance with the cosmos. What is that supposed to mean? I thought maybe the answer would come if I meditated and kept still like the I Ching said. I sat on the floor and tried to breathe but I couldn’t stay still. Then I remembered an exercise from Hope for Your Nerves, a book Sarah had lent me. The four-step approach: (1) FACE, (2) ACCEPT, (3) FLOAT, (4) WAIT IT OUT. I sat there trying to face and accept the anxiety. My stomach pulsed. I couldn’t stay still. I walked back and forth through the apartment, trying to breathe, trying to face it, float in it, and all I could see were those two bodies rolling in Yvonne’s bed.
I called Mark.
“Honey, it’s one-thirty.”
So he wasn’t at Yvonne’s.
“Do you want to go to my parents’ tomorrow?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Do you have other plans?”
I thought I was going to start screaming and shrieking over the phone.
Mark didn’t say anything. If he was “the friend” Yvonne’s mother mentioned then he was weighing possibilities. It’s not beyond Mark to pull out last minute. I knew he could easily call Yvonne and cancel. And when he heard about her bag being stolen he’d be glad to avoid the conflict. Mark hates it when things get complicated. That is, if it was Mark. What still throws me is the blankets. Mark never fucks under blankets.
“Are you doing something else?” I asked. I could feel my voice getting too big and wide to fit in the phone wires. Like it was going to blow them apart.
“Could we talk about this in the morning?”
“I need to know now,” I said.
Mark mumbled something.
I couldn’t tell if the room was smoky or my lenses were getting dry.
“It smells like a fire in here,” I said.
“You always smell fire when you’re nervous,” he said. And he’s right. I’ve summoned Italian hotel managers at three in the morning to complain about smoke. I’ve called the fire department more than once, convinced the loft was on fire.
“I mean it, Mark,” I said. “It smells like, I don’t know, like when you melt crayons on lightbulbs . . . oh Jesus, the lightbulbs!”
Smoke was billowing out from under the pie plate, filling the front end of the loft. I couldn’t see Tony and Chico. I heard a pop, the lights started sparking.
“I can’t see the boys! I can’t see the boys!”
“Salt, Terry, salt,” Mark said. “Get the salt over the sink. I’ll stay on.”
I ran. I kicked over the bowl of Cheerios and the boys’ water bowl and almost slid across the floor. I hurled and tossed the salt. Tons of it. Luckily there were two boxes because I had to use it all. By the time I put it out there was salt all over the floor, the tree, the clock, the pile of lights, and the contents of Yvonne’s bag. I tossed a handful over my left shoulder, just in case, then I fished out St. Jude. The whole place reeked of burnt plastic.
“Terry, you can’t just plug in old lights without testing them,” Mark said. But I felt good. There’d been a fire and I put it out. I did it myself. I took care of it. Alone.
“Come to my parents’,” I said. I waved away some black smoke. “Please.”
“Treas, it’s late. Call me in the morning,” he said. “Honey?”
“Okay,” I said.
And it was okay.
I hung up. I opened the window a little. I turned on the ceiling fan. I picked up Tony and Chico and held them in my lap, brushing the salt off their fur. Everything felt different. It doesn’t matter, I thought. None of it matters. I thought about how much we always feel we have to know. But maybe it’s like the mysteries you grow up with. Like the Trinity, or the Resurrection, or Jell-O. You spend a long time thinking about how it works, trying to figure it out, and then, I don’t know, what gradually becomes certain, something you know for sure, is just the fact of that mystery. That it will always be a mystery. Maybe that’s all Nietzsche and Foucault meant. To let life keep its mysteries. I could let Mark keep his mystery. I could let Yvonne remain a mystery. Myself a mystery. You can’t know everything. Maybe there are terrible things that almost happen to us all the time. These close calls throughout our lives. Times we just miss being knifed or jumped, hit by a car, pushed off a subway platform, and we never know about them. Like Yvonne never knowing about me. Right there in the middle of her bedroom.
I woke up in the chair. Tony was in my lap. My back hurt from the position I’d slept in. When I put my foot down the salt crunched beneath it. It was 8:09. Christmas. The phone rang and I sat and watched the tape turn. I reached to answer. Mark’s voice went on and on. I don’t even remember what he said.
Books were scattered all over the floor. And salt, and Cheerios, and half-drunk glasses of wine and cold tea. Yvonne’s wallet and keys and makeup. I picked up her bag. I thought of her trying to get to East Hampton without cash. I wondered if she had an extra set of keys. Even then I thought it was funny that I had two sets of Yvonne’s keys.
I dialed her number, listened to the message. She didn’t answer. I hung up. I dialed again. The message played. She didn’t answer. I did it over and over. Then I just started hitting redial. I must have done it thirty times, alternately cursing her for not picking up and figuring she must have left for Penn Station. Maybe she keeps a stash of money in the apartment somewhere—although I’ve never seen it. Maybe she borrowed money from whoever it was that was in her apartment last night. Maybe it hadn’t been Mark. And there was only one way I was going to find out.
I took a cab to Penn Station. I fixed my hair in the ride up. I rubbed the leftover eyeliner from below my eyes, which made the circles darker. I hadn’t changed my clothes. I hadn’t even thought to brush my teeth. And I was still wearing those big earrings. I took them off and tossed them out the window. The cab driver said nothing. He didn’t even look at me.
The streets were quiet, deserted. A grim chill hung over the city. One old man rummaged through a trash can on Houston Street, filling a garbage bag with empty bottles. Usually I hate it when it’s damp and gray on Christmas morning, but today it was almost a relief. Like God felt as bad as I did.
Penn Station was crawling with people, everyone carrying shopping bags. Some dressed for Christmas and the usual lot of disheveled transients checking the coin returns in all the telephones. I don’t know which I looked more like. “Jingle Bells” played over the scratchy loudspeaker and a Salvation Army Santa Claus waved a bell up and down for donations.
I was carrying only a few dollars in Yvonne’s coat pocket and her leather bag. I bought coffee and a corn muffin at one of those stands that sells Life Savers and porno magazines. The muffin was so dry the crumbs caught in my throat and I started to choke. I threw it out. I took a few sips and tossed the coffee as well. There was a mirror on the wall but I knew how pale I’d look in the fluorescent light, so I checked my reflection in the black window of the Station Bar. I rubbed a napkin across my teeth. I needed to find Yvonne.
It was 8:52. I found the track number for the 9:11 to East Hampton but I didn’t see Yvonne anywhere. People had begun to board. I got on the first car and started looking. In every seat. I kept checking my watch. If the train started I’d be stuck for the ride. I didn’t have enough cash to cover a round-trip, but I could use Yvonne’s forty dollars.
People guarded their seats as I looked, wanting, I know, to keep an empty seat beside them. Once I got so annoyed I made as if to sit down, just to scare the woman sitting there, then I pretended to look her over and change my mind.
At 8:58 I still hadn’t found Yvonne. I decided to have her paged. I made up a story and convinced the conductor—an older guy with curly gray hair who smiled a lot and was saying “Merry Christmas” to everyone—that it was an emergency.
I stood outside the front car holding Yvonne’s bag. I heard the announcer say her name. Yvonne Adams. Will Yvonne Adams please come to the front car. People were still boarding. Everything was jumping inside me. The way it does when you’re about to see a new lover and you know it will be minutes. Even seconds. The way your body knows, leaps and leaps inside.
No one showed up. I stood there waiting. At 9:03 I began to think she wouldn’t come. I clutched her bag and looked at anything moving toward me.
“Looks like she’s not here, miss.” The conductor stood looking at me. His hands fidgeted helplessly around him.
“It’s an emergency,” I said. I could feel the panic pushing up through me. Little shivers of blood forcing into my heart ventricles. I was having trouble keeping still. It was cold and Yvonne’s coat wasn’t really warm enough.
“Are you sure you got the right train?” He was about my father’s age. He looked concerned. Like he would have concocted her out of plaster of paris if that would have made me happy.
“Please . . .” I said.
And then she was there. I don’t think she saw me at first. I know she didn’t.
She was alone.
She looked like she hadn’t slept. Her hair was pulled back in a clip and there were dark circles under her eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen her looking messy. She had a run in her stocking, a leather tote slung over her shoulder.
She was alone.
“Your sister . . .” the conductor said.
Yvonne looked at me. She seemed to try to place me. She looked confused.
I hadn’t thought at all about what I’d do or say. I’d made up no plan of action. The future cannot be mapped out the I Ching said.
I stared at her. She stared at me. I held out her bag.
“Yvonne . . .” I said.
She just stood there looking confused. Then she looked at the bag.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Yvonne . . .”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“We have to talk,” I said. I tried to smile at her.
I guess I was thinking that we could talk it out. Like adults. Go somewhere and have a coffee and I could explain how upset I’d been. That she would feel shame. Remorse. That we’d decide what to do. The two of us together. Like Norma and Adalgisa.
“Why do you have my bag?” she asked. “How did you get my bag?”
“I can explain,” I said.
She looked at the bag as though it were a bomb. She did not reach for it.
“All aboard,” someone yelled.
“It’s about Mark,” I said.
Several people ran down the station stairs and past us into the car.
“Excuse me, miss. Two minutes,” the man who’d helped me said. He approached us.
“I have to get on that train,” Yvonne said. She was beginning to shake. She had on the big garbage can lid earrings.
I moved toward her. She moved back.
“Please . . .” I said. I was so hot my body felt like a furnace in that coat.
“How did you get my bag?” she almost shouted, as if she’d say anything to keep me from talking.
She moved back onto the train. I followed. Those big earrings were dangling from her lobes. I was so close I could have yanked them out.
“Were you with my husband last night?”
She moved back another step, gripping her shoulder bag in front of her with both hands.
“Are you crazy? You are crazy.”
Her little squeaky voice was getting higher. I realized this was not going to be like Norma and Adalgisa at all. She didn’t sound remorseful in the least.
“Is something wrong?” someone called out.
I stepped closer to Yvonne.
“Were you with Mark last night?”
Someone moved behind me.
“Miss,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.” I yanked away.
He backed off. I turned to Yvonne.
“I need to talk to you,” I said calmly. It was like trying to approach a frightened animal. I was trying not to make any sudden movements.
Yvonne was shaking pretty hard.
“Miss,” the conductor said.
“This is personal,” I said.
I moved toward Yvonne, to touch her. To calm her down.
“Get away from me,” she said.
I was getting mad.
“I just want to talk.” I was almost shouting. I don’t really remember how it happened but I do remember we were off the train at that point. On the platform. I remember thinking if I could just get her to shut up I could explain everything.
“I’m going to call the police,” she said.
“Just listen,” I said. I grabbed her coat. She pulled back, called to the conductor.
“I am not going to talk to you like this,” she said.
I hit her. I hit Yvonne. I didn’t mean to but she wouldn’t listen.
Yvonne just stood there looking stunned. I hit her again. I’d seen it coming. I couldn’t stop. It was like my body was moving somewhere apart from my head. Taking over. Like when you’re having sex and you start doing and saying things that aren’t in your head at all.
Someone grabbed me from behind.
“Miss, are you getting on that train?” the conductor asked Yvonne.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” Yvonne moaned. She was looking at me. A policeman asked if anything was wrong. He looked like he was still in high school. Yvonne pushed back some loose bangs. She took her hair out of the clip then clipped it back again. Her hair looked dirty.
“What’s going on here?” an older cop asked. He’d pushed through the small group of people. He held my shoulder.
I started thinking of the cops finding all the signs of me at Yvonne’s. All the clues. Talking to the woman at the Korean vegetable stand. The guy selling Christmas trees. I pictured myself in prison. The lawyers questioning Eric. Tough, crazed guards forcing me to have sex. Losing all my friends.
“Please,” I said, looking at the older policeman.
“This woman has my bag,” Yvonne said quietly to the other cop.
I looked at her. Her stupid bag. I could have slapped her again.
“This woman is fucking my husband,” I said calmly to my cop. “This woman is fucking my husband,” I said it louder this time. “This woman is fucking my husband,” I started shouting over and over.
Now it was her turn. Now Yvonne was trying to calm me down.
“Stop it. Stop it,” she said. She looked pathetic and embarrassed. All these people had gathered around us. Both cops were trying to talk at the same time. The older one was still holding me. I noticed the younger one trying not to laugh.
“Deny it,” I said. “Say you’re not fucking my husband. Say it. Say it,” I was shouting.
WASP that she is, it was just too much outside Yvonne’s sense of things to hear me screeching like that. Like embarrassment was the worst indignity she could imagine. She calmly explained to the policeman that she was on her way to “visit her folks” in East Hampton. Could they please hold the train. Officer this, and Officer that. She pulled out every respectable stop. She’d moved onto the train and stood in the doorway. It must have seemed to her the height of adventure to hold the train like that.
Several people were shouting about getting the train going.
“Some fucking Christmas,” this guy with two Blooming-dale’s shopping bags was saying. He was leaning out of the same doorway Yvonne stood in.
“Shut up,” I said. I looked at Yvonne. “You,” I said, ripping away from the cop, “you have no soul. You could never understand Yeats,” I said. “You stupid bitch. Your stupid neat little apartment.”
I turned to the cops. “Even her toothbrush is neat,” I said. “‘Concetta, could you please fix the curtain.’ ‘Oh Concetta, wash the soapdish.’” I mimicked her to the cops. They just stared at me.
I’ve read about people—quite normal people—suddenly becoming unlatched. Murdering their husband or killing their mother. Someone who’d just returned library books or gone grocery shopping that afternoon. Then just snapped. Like there’s a valve that suddenly gives. That all the pain, all the loss and anguish, all the anxiety and disappointment and hurt you’ve felt, or tried not to feel, bursts out in one long rush. I think temporary insanity is kind of normal given the way we live.
I rushed at Yvonne. I grabbed her off the train and started shaking her. “You have no soul. You have no soul,” I kept saying.