A GLIMPSE OF SCARLET

The week before Labor Day is the quietest of the year in New York. Everyone is somewhere else, holding on to the last loose days of summer, the last glimmer of freedom. In the city, it’s like being on the bottom of a lake: a deep, dreaming moment. The air is hushed and motionless, sounds are close and intimate, the plants and trees are huge and luxuriant from the summer in the solar greenhouse of the city.

There was a teachers’ meeting at school that week, so I was in town, and Guy was at work, so he was there. The meeting was over around four-thirty, and I walked home across town. Those shady, quiet streets in the East Seventies were deserted. The brownstones had been closed up since June.

I started up the block between Third and Lexington. There were young sycamore trees in neat planted squares along the sidewalk. Wisteria and trumpet vines hung in swooping tangles across the houses, and impatiens plants stood in damp jungles around the tree trunks. Everything was hot and lush and quiet. I walked slowly. It was strange, being in the city like that. The boys were still out in the country, staying with friends. With no children, no friends there I felt adrift, as though I were alone in a foreign city. Anything might happen, in that heat and silence.

One of the front doors opened ahead of me, and a man stepped out onto the stoop. His shoulders were hunched and protective, and he moved gently, as though he were trying to be invisible. He did not look around, he was afraid of catching an eye. It was the urgency of this, his not wanting to be seen, that caught my attention. He was rigid with it. He turned to close the door, and as he did so he looked back at someone just inside. I caught a glimpse of something red, a violent color, vivid and hot. It was a sleeve, a scarf—I couldn’t see—but the man in his rumpled gray suit leaned in toward it, and was taken in a kiss. That was clear, the way he leaned in, the way his body longed inward.

The kiss went on and on. I wondered if he would give in to it, and step back inside the door and close it behind him again, but he pulled himself away in the end. It was quarter to five, and finally he pulled himself back, and closed the door and stepped quietly down the stone steps. The door opened again, just for a moment. She didn’t want to let him go. There was no light on inside, the doorway was dark, but again I saw a glimmer of scarlet. The man didn’t risk his invisibility again, though, he didn’t look back. He went down the steps quickly, his eyes lowered. But I was staring, and as he came past me I caught his eye—he didn’t want me to! I was transfixed. It was so clear what he had come from.

What boldness, lying there in her husband’s house, the shades drawn against the August afternoon, lying amid the silence of her marriage, surrounded by her life with someone else, everything overshadowed by the fact of her husband. Her husband: no matter where on earth he was definitely, absolutely, unalterably known to be that afternoon, there was the possibility, simple and likely, that he would unexpectedly put his key into his own front door at any moment. While the two of them whispered upstairs, on those musky sheets, her husband might easily be stepping across the doorstep into the front hall of his own house, setting down his briefcase, turning over the letters on the hall table before he put his foot on the bottom step of the stairs.

How brave, how desperate, how admirable of this man, I thought. All that risk, the guilt, the danger, balanced against something so rich, so sumptuous, so imperative that he had no choice but to risk it all. He could see that I knew what he had come from. He was ordinary looking, thin, with narrow shoulders, a lined face and vanishing hair, a small round chin. To look at him you would have seen nothing extraordinary—but I knew the current he was helpless in, I knew the strength of it. As I met his eyes he looked partly guilty, partly defiant. It was clear that he had no choice. He turned away, but I watched him, filled with admiration. He walked down the street past me, carrying his briefcase, shrugging his shoulders into his suit, stretching his chin, settling himself into anyone else. I looked back at the house he had come from, but there was nothing. She had gone. She was padding barefoot back up the stairs to the room they had used: a child’s, or the back guest bedroom. She was going to make the bed up clean, but first she might, for a moment, sink into it again, gathering up the sheets and pressing her face against them, closing her eyes into all that pleasure.

Our doorman waits intently behind the big glass doors of our building, scanning the street. When he sees one of us he springs to life, hauling on the heavy door before you can touch it. That afternoon he pulled it smoothly open before me, nodding.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Cunningham,” he said briskly, “Mr. Rosen,” he added, to the man coming in behind me. Mr. Rosen and I got into the elevator—he lives above us—and I thought: I could never have an affair here. We’d have to meet somewhere else. I was still in the spell of that empty street, the humid air, that man leaning inside for a moment and being taken in a kiss. The extremity, the secrecy, and the great violence of the pleasure.

Our apartment was dim and quiet. No one would be home for hours. The tall French doors at the end of the living room were luminous shapes against the long summer evening. I was alone in the shadowy rooms. The bedrooms upstairs were empty. I stepped into the front hall quietly, making no sound on the parquet. I moved up the dim staircase toward our bedroom as though there were a man behind me, silent, urgent, his breath held, as mine was, as though we had no choice.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t want an affair. I had one during my first marriage. That current takes you over the falls, there’s no changing your mind once you’ve started. You deceive yourself at first: you pretend that what you want is something quite innocent. When you can no longer pretend that, you pretend that it is what you deserve, and that no one will be hurt. When you can no longer pretend that, it is too late to pretend anything at all: there you are, with the scarlet letter on your forehead, and all around you in broken pieces on the ground. It’s not what I want. Guy and I have been married now for seven years, and that’s what I want. But I see that between us all the violence has gone, all the urgency dissolved—as it should, as it must, in seven years. And sometimes, when I suddenly see it in someone else’s life, it comes back to me, that lovely, voluptuous thrill. The extremity, the secrecy, and the great violence of the pleasure.

It was about three weeks after school started that Alden called me there. I never get calls at school, for one thing, and for another I haven’t heard from Alden in nearly ten years, even though he lives ten or twelve blocks away. Our lives changed absolutely away from each other, as they had to. I’m a tutor in remedial reading. Ordinarily I’m busy every period, but that day Jamie Wainwright was home sick, so at ten o’clock I was sitting on the grubby chintz sofa in the teachers’ lounge and listening to Helen Chisholm tell me about her fertility problems. Helen’s class—first grade—was in the music room, so we had the whole forty minutes to discuss her new doctor.

“He wants to send me to a place in Virginia,” Helen said. “You go there for two weeks and you come back pregnant.”

“Virginia?” I said. “That’s convenient.”

Helen laughed and shrugged. She is round-faced, with a neat round cap of hair, and round-rimmed glasses. She looks like one of those figures that beginners can draw, using only circles.

“Oh, it’s very convenient. Malcolm is thrilled. The whole business is convenient, let me tell you. Malcolm has to drop off a new sample each time I switch doctors. Then he has to produce a new sample every month. He says he’s got the fastest hands in the East.”

“Poor Malcolm,” I said, thinking of him trudging around with a screw-top jar. I also felt faintly smug, that I had managed two boys without any effort at all. Granted, it had been the wrong marriage, but there they were, twelve and fourteen, sane and healthy.

When the telephone buzzed I picked it up, expecting to take a message for someone else.

“Lisa?”

A voice you’ve known like that is a star bursting inside you, whether you want it or not.

“Hello,” I said.

“What’s up?” Alden’s voice was as close, as casual as though we’d spent the night together. I began to laugh. I was frightened.

“Well,” I said, “not much.”

“Want to have lunch?”

“Lunch?” I said.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” Alden said.

“You have?” I wanted to get off the phone.

“I’ve been wondering how you were.”

“Well, I’m fine,” I said. But I couldn’t pretend that there was any distance between us, I couldn’t pretend that Alden didn’t know exactly who I was.

“Oh, you are,” he said, “gee, that’s great.” He began to laugh at my dopey answer, and I couldn’t help it, I began to laugh too, as though we were close friends, as though ten years hadn’t ground by between us.

“So,” he said, “when are we going to have lunch?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I’ll call you.”

“Great,” he said. There was a silence. “Only you won’t.”

I looked at my fingernails. “I might not.”

There was another pause. We listened for each other.

“Well, it’s been good talking to you,” Alden said finally, making it funny, and he started to laugh again. “Really great.”

“Right,” I said. I wondered what Helen was thinking.

“I saw you on the street the other day.”

For some reason I thought at once of the day I saw the man coming out of the brownstone.

“You look great,” Alden said, his voice serious. “You look spectacular.”

There was a long silence. I look the way I look, and it’s my business. Someone watching me on the street, making his own decisions about it—I didn’t like it.

“Well,” I said, “thank you.”

Alden waited for a moment.

“Bye,” he said.

“Bye,” I answered, and we hung up.

My face was hot, my whole skin was anxious. Helen was watching me. I got up to make myself a cup of tea.

“Was that Guy?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, before I thought. I stood at the hot water machine, my back to her, slowly dipping my tea bag again and again, keeping my face turned away. I was afraid that she would see that my face was hot, that my system was running on Alarm, that I had told a flat-out lie.

“Well,” Helen said, sipping from her mug, “so I guess I’m going to try this thing in Virginia. I feel like a brood mare, being shipped down for breeding.”

“And what’s the process? What do they do down there?” I asked, squeezing the tea bag around my spoon. I wanted to talk about anything but my phone conversation: my heart was still racing, as though I’d been caught stealing.

“It’s in vitro,” said Helen, “you know, you must have read about it.” She sighed.

“In vitro,” I said, carrying my mug back and sitting down across from her again. I thought of steel instruments entering your body, doing things they had no business doing, I thought of shining glass dishes stirring with bits of life. “That sounds, I don’t know, awfully extreme, doesn’t it?”

“Extreme,” Helen said, looking at me. She stirred her tea. “Have you ever thought about what it’s like, not being able to have a baby?” I didn’t say anything: I hadn’t really. “It takes over every thought in your life. You look at every woman on the sidewalk to see if she’s pregnant, and if she is you hate her. You turn your face away from her, you close your eyes as she walks past. There are friends of mine I can’t see anymore, I don’t even want to talk to them on the phone, because they have children.” As she talked Helen began to cry. Tears ran down her cheeks into the corners of her mouth, and as they got close enough she licked them off. “Every month becomes a misery to you. Malcolm and I fight all the time, over stupid things, not over the fact that he’s angry that I’m so angry, and I’m so angry you can’t imagine it. Your whole life is consumed by it, and there’s nothing you can do, nothing.”

Helen took a Kleenex out of her pocket and put it over her nose, and then she covered her face with her hands.

“Oh, Helen,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

She shook her head, and the two of us sat there in that sad, unpainted room, in silence. It was as though a tremor had run through the ground beneath us, reminding us that there was chaos below. I wanted to think things were governed by logic, but here we were: why was Helen grieving and empty instead of a mother? And I, why did I feel shaken and undone by Alden’s call, as though I had come very close to something dangerous, why had I lied about it, as though I had done something wrong, when I had done nothing at all, when I didn’t want to feel that way at all, when that wasn’t what had happened at all?

Fixing dinner that night I was as nervous as a bird. Would I tell Guy about the phone call or not? My son Alex slid into the kitchen in his stockinged feet, his shirttails hanging over his baggy pants. He poured a huge glass of orange juice.

“I have late soccer practice tomorrow,” he announced.

“Good,” I said. I would definitely tell Guy. I’d wipe the slate clean. We don’t keep things from each other. I took the lamb chops out of the refrigerator.

“Why good?” Alex asked. He licked the orange juice off around his mouth.

“I mean, not good,” I said. But if I told Guy that Alden had called, he would think it was important, he would think I was warning him that something significant had happened. I began to wash the broccoli.

Alex drank a second glass of orange juice like a chicken, his mouth wide open and his chin pointing straight up into the air.

“Why not good?” he asked. He wadded up the paper bag the broccoli had come in and dropped it on the floor. He began kicking it from foot to foot.

“I don’t mean that,” I said. Where had I put the lamb chops? They had vanished. Maybe I was being cowardly, not telling. Certainly Guy would be angry if I told him. He’d see it as unfair, for one thing. He never does this kind of thing to me: Guy is as solid as a rock. And he knows who Alden is in my life. He sees Alden’s figure outlined in red, DANGER stamped across it.

“What do you mean, then?” Alex asked cheerfully.

I stared at him. “I don’t know what I mean,” I said firmly. Alex grinned and tapped his head. He began sliding up and down past me in the narrow kitchen, making dazzling goals with the broccoli bag. I found the lamb chops in the refrigerator. Had I put them back, or had I imagined taking them out? And was I going to tell Guy or not?

He appeared in the doorway. Guy is tall and narrow, with very blond hair, nearly white, and a noble, beaky nose. He stretched his arms up and grabbed the top of the door frame. His jacket opened, showing his rumpled shirt. The light from overhead darkened the lines in his cheeks, and there were circles under his eyes.

“Phew,” he said, “what a day.” He came over to kiss me. He moved slowly.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Tried to get in to see Kaplan.”

“And?”

“Couldn’t. I’ll tell you: I can’t wait to get away from here.”

“To Portugal? Or you mean just this weekend?”

“Anywhere,” Guy said, “either. Both. Just away.”

There’s something going wrong for Guy at his law firm. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’d like to, I’d like to act like those mothers who come into school, fresh from the hairdresser, my high heels clicking on the long hallways. I’d like to make an appointment with the senior partner, and wave my finger at him behind the closed doors of his office. I’d like to make accusations: favoritism, perfidy, unfairness. I’d like to extract apologies for the past, and promises for the future.

I put my arms around him as hard as I could. Definitely, I wouldn’t tell him about the phone call.

That weekend we were in the country. We have a small, unkempt house in Watermill, which is quiet. We have friends with big, kempt houses in Southampton, which is not. On Saturday night we went to a dinner party at a house that might as well have been at Sixty-eighth and Fifth, not on the outermost reaches of Long Island. The dining room had oxblood enameled walls, and over the sideboard was a mirror framed by a gilt serpent, his tail in his mouth. On either side of it were ormolu sconces, with orchids poised on them. The women were all in silk and real jewelry. As we came in to dinner, the candlesticks gleaming, the deep, rich walls enclosing us all, stern waiters in white coats ready to serve, strange men on either side of me, I thought of starting the skein of conversation, asking questions it might be interesting for these men to answer. I hate strange men, I thought, and looked around for Guy. But he was at another table; I heard his laugh again and again during the meal.

As soon as dinner was over I said good night and edged past the people in the faux marbre front hall. They were all kissing the air past one another’s cheeks and telling lies about calls they would make, lunches they would share. I stepped out alone onto the big front porch. The great night sky expanded in a rush above me, the silence took hold of me, and the soft air came in off the water like perfume. I stood there taking deep breaths and trying to absorb the soft dark night, trying to splinter that dense, enameled evening.

When people came out behind me, I moved down onto the driveway to wait for Guy. He came out with a group of people. He was talking loudly; he’d had some wine.

“I’ll call you, then,” he said, looking at something in his hand. “We’ll go to the Hard Rock Cafe.” He was talking to a girl in a low-backed black dress. She had short blond hair, and seemed sleek and self-possessed. Guy looked at the crowd around him. “And if you see us having lunch,” he said, to the world, “just pretend you don’t.” He laughed.

It was utterly unlike Guy. I walked across the driveway and got into our car. On the way home, Guy told me what a good time he’d had. He’d sat next to a girl named Sylvia Patton, a writer who was very funny and very bright. And she had a lisp that Guy had noticed. He mentioned it several times. It seemed he had liked it.

At home I undressed and got into a nightgown: something I don’t ordinarily wear. I got into bed and picked up my book. I began to read. Guy got into bed and reached for me. I didn’t move.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” These are formalities.

“Come on,” Guy said, pulling gently at me.

“I didn’t like that joke about you having lunch with that girl.”

Guy sighed. “Now, look,” he said. “Sylvia knows the Algarve very well. We’re just getting together so that she can tell me places for us to go.”

I sat up in bed and stared at him. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re serious? You’re really planning to go off and have lunch alone with this woman?”

“We haven’t set a specific day for it, if that’s what you mean,” Guy said.

“Even now,” I said, “even now you think this is all right? That you’re going off to have lunch alone with this strange woman? At the Hard Rock Cafe?”

Guy sighed, as though I were a hysterical woman and he were a reasonable man. “The Hard Rock Cafe is a good place for us to go because they have big tables, so we can spread out the maps.”

“No other reasons,” I said. “It has no other connotations. I suppose you take your clients there all the time, so you can spread out your briefs.”

Guy sighed again.

“And why do you have to have lunch with her to see the maps? They can’t be sent through the mails? They’re contraband maps?”

“You’re trying to pick a fight,” Guy said loftily.

“I can’t believe you’re saying that.”

“Sylvia knows a lot about the place we’re going,” Guy said. “It will be more fun for us if I find out things for our trip.”

“Our trip?” I said. “I’m not tagging along to the Algarve to see the places you and Adorable Lisp have picked out. Take her to the goddamned Algarve.”

Guy turned on me, He became a lawyer. “Are you telling me,” he said severely, “are you telling me that you seriously do not want to come on our trip to Portugal?”

“Yes,” I said instantly.

I was so angry. And in the middle of it I was impressed by it, by the rage. Sometimes the connections between Guy and me seem like soft old ropes, turned slack and listless with age. This violence! I hadn’t expected it.

“Well, you’ve set a precedent,” I announced. “After the next dinner party, I may perfectly well come home giggling about the wonderful man I sat next to, and tell you we’re going to have lunch next week, so he can give me the book we talked about.”

Guy pulled the sheets up high under his arms and lay flat on his back. “You’re making something of nothing,” he said, staring straight up at the ceiling. “Good night.” He closed his eyes.

I thought of something.

“If this is nothing,” I said, “then why did you look around and say to everyone, ‘If you see us having lunch, pretend you don’t’?”

I saw Guy’s eyes flicker open for a moment. He shut them again at once, pulled the sheets up tighter and settled himself more firmly in bed, his chin stuck out high in the air like the prow of a ship. He wouldn’t answer. It didn’t matter. I had seen the flicker.

It was midnight. Guy lay there pretending to be asleep until he was. By then he had relaxed, and his lovely round shoulders were curved open against the sheets. His breathing had slowed and lengthened. I looked at him, at his elegant, bony shoulders, his smooth neck, his startling pale hair. I wanted to stroke his hair, but of course I didn’t.

I lay and read the same page over and over until one-thirty. Then I turned out the light and lay pulsing in the dark. I could hear my heart pounding along. It was so loud in my ears that I wondered if it would wake Guy. I lay very still; he needed to sleep.

At four o’clock I thought of something else. Guy had had something in his hand, out in the parking lot. At this very moment, in the same room with his wife, Guy had a token of his meeting. It was in the room with me.

I got out of bed and moved quietly across the room. I tripped over a scrap basket, knocking it over. I could hear no noise: my heart was hammering like a demon carpenter. I reached the bureau and began touching the things on top of it. There was Guy’s wallet. There were his cuff links, his silk handkerchief. No slip of paper. I went into the alcove and turned on the light. I found Guy’s blazer and pants hanging in the closet. I went through the pockets. My heart was crashing still, racing: I wondered if I would know it if I were having a heart attack. There was nothing in the pockets. I went back into the bedroom and tripped over the scrap basket again. I found Guy’s wallet and brought it into the bathroom. I opened it over the sink.

Guy’s wallet is fat and smooth, made of soft, limp leather. It bulges with important facts about Guy: his lawyerness, his citizenship, his fiscal responsibilities. I scrabbled inside it. Sylvia’s note was tucked neatly into the first flap next to Guy’s business cards, her name set tightly against his. Sylvia Patton, it said, and then her home number and her service. Holding it, I felt as though I were touching raw plutonium.

I tore the note crosswise, then lengthwise. I tore it into as many pieces as I could. I threw them violently into the toilet. They floated mildly down, and settled on the pale surface of the water. I pushed viciously at the lever. The water rose, the scraps swirled, everything sank. The water rose again, empty.

It was over; the note was gone.

I picked up Guy’s wallet, and saw myself in the mirror. The greenish light flickered overhead. My pupils were huge and black, my shoulders were hunched against the late-night chill. I held someone else’s wallet in my hands, like a thief. The house was silent, and the empty night spread out around me. I didn’t like the way I looked.

My sense of outrage began to ebb. I began to wonder what I’d done. The bottom seemed to fall away beneath me: it was possible now that Guy had been right, that I was making something out of nothing. I felt as though I’d killed something.

Oh, there had been something. I had seen that flicker in Guy’s eyes. But it was only a flicker. Just for one moment, standing under the great expanding night sky after dinner, the stars pulsing overhead, the wine pulsing within, Sylvia smiling at him and declaring her love for the place he’d chosen, he must have felt a moment of widening freedom, possibility, a glimpse of scarlet. Just as I had, my pulse clamoring at Alden’s voice.

It was that moment I had destroyed, that brief freedom, with all my wildness, all my rage. I had beaten it down, I had choked it utterly. And I was swept with shame, and with tenderness for my husband, lying there so warm and elegant in the next room, needing his sleep, needing his freedom.

But what could I do? What else could I have done?