After Melanie Read online

  ‘I’m asking now,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m asking you to tell me what you were doing when you claimed to be working late. I want to know who you were with and where you slept on the nights you didn’t even come home. You owe me that much, don’t you?’

  The question had at last been asked. Her cheeks burned and her heart beat too fast.

  He sighed, loosened his tie and went into the kitchen. He returned carrying a glass of white wine for her and bourbon for himself. He took a small sip before sitting down.

  ‘I was with Nancy Cummings,’ he said softly. ‘With Nancy and her daughter, whenever I was late coming home. When I stayed at her apartment, it was because I was so exhausted that I fell asleep on her couch. I did not sleep with her. There is nothing sexual between us. Nothing romantic. You remember my promise, your promise, that we would always and forever be faithful to each other. I have never broken that promise.’

  She remembered. Of course she remembered. A naïve promise made by the very young, very naïve lovers they had been on a sun-swept day. They had pledged that, unlike his parents’ bitter coupling, they would always be true to each other. And then, hand in hand, they had walked to a nearby stream and, giggling with delight, for no reason at all they had washed each other’s faces. She remembered still the feel of his hands as he touched her cheeks. He had such very large hands. She stared at them now, took a sip of her wine, struggled to regain her composure.

  ‘Nothing sexual, nothing romantic,’ she repeated and marveled that her voice remained calm even as she gripped the arms of her chair for support against the sudden dizziness that threatened to overwhelm her.

  ‘I’ve never lied to you, Judith. You know that. I won’t lie now. I will tell you the truth, as I told it to Brian.’

  ‘Brian? You spoke to Brian?’ she asked. Her hand trembled.

  David drained his drink, stared at the empty glass as though pondering a refill and then set it down. She held her own glass tightly but she did not drink. She wanted no buffer to the pain she was certain his words would cause her.

  ‘Yes. Brian called me some weeks ago. He and Denise were concerned about what they saw as difficulties between us. And so I told him how I was coping. I explained that I was trying to spare you my grief, that I was afraid you would see it as weakness.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why were you afraid of that?’

  ‘Because you are so strong. You were strong enough to weep, to say Melanie’s name aloud, to acknowledge her death, to find help where you could. My tears were frozen. I felt powerless. I loved you too much to impose my misery on you. I felt more alone than I had ever felt. And then one morning Nancy Cummings came into my office.’

  He paused. She sat motionless, her hands clenched. He continued, speaking very slowly, all traces of that incipient stutter vanished as he described his initial meeting with Nancy, her instinctive understanding, her own story and how, mutually and similarly bereft, they had comforted each other. He spoke of Lauren, how he tutored her as once he had tutored Melanie, and then, with a surge of courage, he told her how he had wept in Nancy’s comforting presence and then, exhausted by his tears, had fallen asleep on her sofa.

  ‘On her sofa,’ he said emphatically. ‘Not in her bed.’

  ‘Did you want to sleep in her bed? Did you want to make love to her?’ she asked harshly and was immediately shamed by her punishing questions. She had no right to ask them. His guilt would not mitigate her own.

  David’s story, she reflected, was not unlike her own experience with Jeffrey Kahn. Jeffrey too had offered her a gentle expression of sympathy and understanding at a time when all condolences had ended. Even as Nancy and David had found common comfort in the mutuality of sudden loss, so she and Jeffrey had entered into a mutuality of grief. Nausea overcame her as she acknowledged that it was there that all similarity ended. She had, in fact, collapsed on to Jeffrey Kahn’s bed. She had allowed him to make love to her. David had only felt the touch of Nancy Cummings’ hand upon his own; he had slept on her sofa and taken comfort from her understanding of his grief. But, in the end, he too had been unfaithful. His infidelity had been emotional and unregretted.

  She drained her wine glass, newly calm. The scales then were oddly and unevenly balanced. They were both guilty of betrayal. His answer to her question was irrelevant.

  He stared at her as though trying to understand what she had asked but when he replied his voice was firm, unwavering. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I did not want to sleep with her. It never occurred to me. You are my wife, you are my love. I could not, would not, ever betray all we have been to each other. What I want from Nancy is her understanding, her compassion. Her friendship. I want to continue helping Lauren because she is a lonely, fatherless child. But I want to come home to this house, to you, to our life together.’

  She stared down at her hands. They were no longer trembling, no longer clenched. His words had steadied her, had imbued her with courage. It was a time for honesty. She braced herself.

  ‘I too have something to tell you. Jeffrey Kahn … Jeffrey Kahn and I …’ Her voice broke.

  She paused, and he put his hand to her lips.

  ‘Don’t say anything else,’ he cautioned. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  But she understood that he did know. Her voice, when she uttered Jeffrey’s name, had betrayed the truth and it was a truth he could neither bear nor accept.

  He was very pale. He drained his glass and rose from his seat, swaying unsteadily. She feared that he might fall.

  ‘David,’ she said, her voice broken, and held her hands out to him. ‘Let me explain.’

  ‘No. I don’t need your explanation. I d–don’t want your explanation.’ The stutter had returned and would not be subdued.

  She lowered her head. She did not know, after all, what explanation she could offer him.

  They stared at each other.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘Ridiculously enough, I am.’

  Hand in hand, like wounded children, they walked into their well-lit, cheerful kitchen.

  She opened a can of mushroom soup, made a simple omelet. They ate in the dining room, politely passing each other salt and pepper shakers, she offering him the sliced sourdough bread he favored, he filling their water glasses and adding slices of lemon, the habits and gestures of their long marriage in place.

  Washing up, she stared at her reflection in the small mirror that stood on the windowsill. Melanie’s mirror. Was it really herself she was looking at? she wondered bitterly. Was she that sad-eyed woman, her face blanched by sorrow, vagrant strands of silver ribboning the cap of her smooth dark hair, who stared back at her from that mist-covered looking glass? Angrily, she wrapped the mirror in a tea towel and thrust it into a drawer.

  It was David who went upstairs first. She heard him enter the room that had been Melanie’s, that was now the office she had furnished so carefully. She heard him pull the sofa bed open. Swiftly then, she climbed the stairs and stood beside him.

  ‘I need time,’ he said. ‘I think we both need time. Time alone. Apart.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed and did not recognize the sound of her own voice.

  She went to the linen closet, pulled out sheets, a pillow, a blanket. Together, wordlessly, they made the bed, pulling the sheets tight, spreading the blanket wide. They had, after all, made up so many beds during their long years together. The domestic mechanisms of their marriage remained in place. He plugged in the hallway night light. She filled a glass of water and placed it where he could reach it easily in the night. Their movements were rote, their needs immediately apparent to each other.

  She held out his pajamas, newly laundered, carefully folded. He took them from her and placed his hand very gently on her head. She nodded, as though the tender gesture required a response of a kind, and then left him to go into the bedroom. They would sleep apart for the first time since they had moved into this wide-windowed house.

  NINETEEN />
  Their lives had changed but their routines remained strangely unaltered. Each morning David closed the sofa bed and stowed the linens and pajamas neatly in the closet. Judith brewed the coffee and set the table for breakfast. Sometimes they ate together, sometimes not. Most evenings he returned home for dinner, always calling to tell her which train he was taking. Judith’s small, clever meals were dutifully prepared. They sat opposite each other at the carefully set table and spoke in the cadence of polite strangers – about the gardener’s carelessness, a rooftop leak that had to be repaired, an electric bill that had gone astray. When he knew he would be late, he left messages on the answering machine and she never asked for a reason.

  Immediately after dinner, when she had cleared the table, she retreated into the bedroom where she surrounded herself with the books she did not open and stared at the telephone that did not ring. He, as always, listened to his music, turned the pages of the newspaper and then went upstairs in his stockinged feet and very softly closed the door. The refurbished room had become his nocturnal fortress of solitude and sadness.

  One morning, as they sipped their coffee, Judith shattered the quiet by telling him that Brian and Denise planned to spend two weeks at the end of August with Denise’s family at their New Hampshire home. Denise’s mother had called Judith and generously invited them as well.

  ‘Not a good idea,’ David said and she nodded her agreement.

  They had always vacationed at the end of August but in this, the summer of their discontent, they had made no plans. It occurred to Judith that they were, in fact, on vacation from each other, their days apart, their evenings alone.

  Determinedly, she adhered to her routine. Much to her own surprise, she wrote a précis for her long-delayed monograph, changing the topic and even choosing a tentative title: An Approach to Grief and Loss in the Work of Women Writers. Too expansive, she thought, but she could change it later. In the interim it offered her focus. Self-monitoring, she worked on it only during the set hours reserved for writing and research. She did not even think about it during her mornings at the thrift shop nor during the afternoons spent sorting through the rapidly diminishing clothing and personal effects that had belonged to Sylvia Kahn.

  David, she knew, was faithful to his own routine. She did not know if Nancy Cummings continued to assist him. Their conversations were brief, civil and impersonal. One morning he told her that he was having lunch with Brian. She did not tell him that she was spending the afternoon at the Kahn house. She imagined her son and her husband seated opposite each other as she followed Jeffrey Kahn up to the dressing room. They stood on the threshold and stared at the nearly empty racks.

  ‘Soon we will be finished,’ she said.

  ‘Still a great deal to do,’ he countered, and she understood that he did not want their shared effort to come to an end.

  The shelves were emptied and they turned their attention to the more personal items tucked into pale-blue quilted containers. There were delicate summer nightgowns and sturdier flannel ones, a profusion of undergarments, slips and bras, camisoles and a frothy collection of panties. The pastel-colored lingerie was beyond Jeffrey’s scope. He abandoned them to Judith’s discretion and busied himself instead with outdoor wear stored in a basement cedar closet, assembling coats and jackets in piles for her consideration.

  She recalled her own frenetic swiftness as she dealt with Melanie’s undergarments, the barely worn training bras, the flimsy panties embroidered with flowers or stamped with the days of the week, the cunning nightgown imprinted with magenta butterflies. She had brought them all to Goodwill.

  Emptying those quilted containers of the dead woman’s intimate clothing, she thought that Sylvia’s daughters should have undertaken that task. Daughters were supposed to do that. She had done as much for her own mother and then for David’s mother, those dutiful but unloving women, both of them bred to frugality. They were women who had mended the elastic waistbands of their worn white cotton underpants and replaced the straps of brassieres worn thin. Judith acknowledged that she had seethed with resentment as she had stuffed those sad remnants of vanished lives into shopping bags and thrust them into the gaping maws of supermarket charity bins. But she, unlike Jeffrey’s daughters, had done her duty.

  She sighed. She knew her annoyance at the Kahn sisters living their lives to be entirely irrational. Annoyed with herself, she worked swiftly, pausing to set aside two silk peignoirs, one apricot and the other a pale violet, as well as a cotton robe of sunshine yellow.

  ‘Your daughters may want these,’ she told Jeffrey, showing him the peignoirs. ‘When Beth marries, she may even want a trousseau, if brides still have trousseaus. But I’d like to give the robe to Emily, my little Korean protégé.’

  ‘Yes. Of course,’ he agreed, not even glancing at the garments.

  He turned to her, his gaze concerned. ‘Judith, is everything OK? You’ve seemed so sad, so preoccupied these last few days.’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s just a difficult time for us. For David. For myself.’

  ‘Not because?’ She heard the fear in his voice.

  ‘No. Nothing to do with you.’

  She spoke the lie with casual certitude and placed the peignoirs in a newly emptied drawer, pressing a lavender-filled sachet between them. At the very least, Sylvia’s daughter would carry her mother’s scent to her marriage bed. She folded the robe and placed it in an empty shopping bag. She would not allow Emily to buy it. She would put money in the thrift shop till and give it to her as a gift.

  ‘You’re fond of this young Korean girl?’ Jeffrey asked, a new topic, a safe topic.

  ‘Very. I’ve sort of adopted her. A symbiotic relationship, although she’s unaware of it. She needs a mother and I need a daughter.’

  There was a familiar ring to the words she had not articulated before. Of course. David had said as much when he spoke of Nancy’s child. Lauren needed a father and he needed a daughter, he had said. She and David, bereaved mother and bereaved father, had each claimed a surrogate child. She smiled at the strange parallel. And Jeffrey, relieved by her smile, pulled her to her feet.

  ‘I’ve bought croissants,’ he said. ‘And blueberry jam. The first of the season, they told me at the farmers’ market.’

  They sat opposite each other at the wooden kitchen table and sipped their iced tea on which sprigs of Sylvia’s mint floated, smearing the deep blue jam on the golden pastry, talking softly, easily. She told him about Emily, about her brave little family, her beautiful baby and her hardworking medical student husband.

  ‘I may be able to help them,’ Jeffrey said. ‘If he has any interest in ophthalmology, I just received a grant which covers a research assistant. Not a lot of money but more, I imagine, than he is making as a hospital aide.’

  ‘That would be terrific,’ she said.

  He reached for his wallet, fumbled for his card which he handed to her. ‘Give this to his wife and tell her he should call me. It would be my pleasure to help him.’

  Driving home, she thought of Jeffrey’s instinctive kindness, his need to make things better for others. Perhaps that was what had attracted him to Sylvia, whose life had been shadowed by the ghosts of the half-siblings she had never known. No. It had been more than that. Jeffrey had loved her. He had demonstrated that love in the serenity that he had offered her, their gracious home furnished with the softest of fabrics in the softest of colors at a sylvan remove from any urban or suburban intrusion. Garden fragrance drifted in through the wide windows in spring and summer, crisp clean air in fall and winter.

  It was sad that Sylvia’s death had been too early, too painful, but how good her life with Jeffrey had been. The depth of his grief reflected the depth of his love.

  Tears came unbidden. Blinded and trembling, shamed by the envy she felt for a dead woman, she pulled over to the side of the road. She struggled, as the last rays of the dying sun danced in rhomboids of light across her windshield, to free herself from the weight of
that sudden sadness.

  ‘Your mother and I talked,’ David told Brian.

  They sat opposite each other at the same table in the same restaurant where they had last met. It was David who had initiated this meeting and Brian who had accepted with reluctance.

  ‘Yes. I suppose you had to. Denise told me that she was having lunch with Mom and they saw you with Nancy and her daughter,’ he said drily.

  It angered him that he and Denise were enmeshed in this painful interplay between his parents, inadvertent actors in an unanticipated and frightening scenario. They felt strangely vulnerable, assailed by a threatening uncertainty.

  Tales of familial dysfunction were not new to them. They were of a generation who exchanged the names of therapists and traded tales of childhood traumas. They read Facebook posts that abounded with unhappy confidences, revelations of despair, irrational promises of hope.

  Things will get better. Hang in there.

  Such reassurances were repeated with disturbing frequency.

  Their close friends, Jennifer and Marc, both of them children of divorce, had separated only a year after their wedding. Brian had sat with Marc in a coffee shop and watched tears stream down his friend’s face.

  Frannie, Denise’s college roommate, drifted from one lover to another. Her mother had been twice married. Her father lived with a girl as young as Frannie herself.

  Brian and Denise had considered themselves to be exempt from such sad scenarios, protected as they were by the stability of their own families, their parents’ long and intact marriages, their happy childhoods. Their past rendered their future secure, their horizons serene. They would marry and, like their parents, live happily ever after.

  But that ‘happily ever after’ had vanished. Brian’s family was shadowed by loss; his parents were no longer an indomitable couple.