After Melanie Read online

  Sighing, she dimmed the kitchen light and secured the garden door.

  ‘Goodnight, David,’ she called but she knew that the strains of the Berlioz Requiem obscured her voice.

  In the room they no longer shared, she curled up in their large double bed where she now slept alone and surrounded herself with a small protective literary fortress – George Eliot’s essays, a new biography of Jane Austen, the final collection of Virginia Woolf’s letters, the slender volume of Adrienne Rich’s poetry. She touched each book in turn but did not lift a single volume. Surrendering to a sudden and crushing fatigue, she fell into an uneasy sleep.

  For the very first time she dreamed about Melanie. It began happily. They walked together, she and her daughter, through a beautiful garden, lined with beds of golden rosebuds and long-stalked purple irises. Their hands were linked. Melanie bent to pluck a blossom. The golden rose turned blood-red in her hand. Suddenly, she sprinted forward and ran wildly down a path. Judith called her name and chased after her, her breath coming in painful gasps, but Melanie did not turn. Instead, she ran faster and faster, leaving a trail of crimson petals that turned into small pools of viscous liquid. At the end of the garden path, an abyss of damp earth yawned open before her. She shrieked as she stumbled into it and shrieked again as the dark quicksand enveloped her, as she sank, slowly, inch by inch, into that oozing grave while Judith wept and shouted her name.

  ‘Melanie! Melanie!’

  The sound of her own voice wakened her. Her throat was raw; her white nightgown was drenched with sweat. Her heart pounded in an unfamiliar tympanic beat. Trembling, she struggled to contain her fear.

  ‘Melanie! Melanie!’

  She was fully awake now, but she could not stop calling her daughter’s name, each syllable resonant with the terror she could not control.

  It was David who restored her to calm.

  He sat beside her, held her close and comforted her, his hands gently stroking her quivering body. ‘A dream. Only a dream,’ he said softly. ‘Everything will be all right, Judith.’

  His words, his tone, were familiar. Always, during the early years of their marriage, when she had been haunted by infrequent nightmares, he had known instinctively how to soothe her, how to reassure her. The habit of decades had been neither negated nor forgotten. The comfort he offered, as always, filled her with gratitude.

  He stood, looking strangely boyish in his striped pajamas, his feet bare, crusty bits of sleep interrupted rimming his eyes. She had wakened him, she knew.

  ‘David, thank you.’ Her voice was a whisper.

  ‘It was just a nightmare,’ he murmured. ‘It’s over. You’re fine.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’

  She pulled the covers back, thrust the books that littered his side of the bed to the floor, straightened his pillow, each gesture a silent plea. She wanted him to lie down beside her. She wanted to feel herself safe in his arms.

  He hesitated, smiled and shook his head. ‘Not now. Not yet.’

  When?

  The question. unasked froze in her throat. Wounded, her eyes closed, she leaned back and hoped that she would not weep.

  Leaving the door ajar, he padded down the darkened hallway to the room where he lay alone and awake through the long night.

  TWENTY-TWO

  David left the house earlier than usual the next morning, the lone passenger on the very first commuter train. He ate breakfast at a McDonalds near Grand Central, something he had never done before, the routine of years violated. It had long been Judith’s habit to set the table in their breakfast nook each evening, and every morning the scent of coffee, brewed on a percolator timed to the morning hour, drifted through the room. In that she unknowingly emulated his mother who had doggedly imposed order on his boyhood home, everything in its place, never a cup in the sink or a dirty plate on a counter. It had been, he supposed, her compensation for the emotional chaos she had endured when his father confessed his brief and much-regretted infidelity.

  David had long nursed the fantasy that if his father had remained silent, their lives would have been different. Unsaid words could not be regretted. It was that fantasy, he thought bitterly, that had prevented him from telling Judith about Nancy and imposed silence when she, in turn, spoke Jeffrey Kahn’s name.

  ‘Jeffrey Kahn and I,’ she had begun, and he had not allowed her to finish the sentence.

  He had feared that the words she might add would forever alter the increasingly uneasy balance of their shared life. He had opted for the safety of silence, the pretense of ignorance, a withdrawal from intimacy. A foolish and dangerous option.

  He drank his watered-down orange juice and realized how foolish he had been, how futile his effort to pretend not to know what, of course, he knew. His marriage, his and Judith’s, was not a replica of his parents’ tortuous coupling. It was of their own making. Its future, its survival would be determined by their own choices. Her misstep and his own would not cancel out the years they had shared, the love that had sustained them, the terrible loss they had endured. That he had realized during the long hours of a sleepless night, haunted as he was by the memory of her ghostly pallor in the aftermath of the nightmare. He had held her close as she trembled and shrieked their daughter’s name.

  Lying awake, isolated images had floated through his mind in a disorderly jumble of memories and half dreams. Drifting images. He saw Nancy, so quiet, so consoling, burdened with a grief that matched his own, unafraid of his tears. Melanie. And Judith. His Melanie. His Judith. How clearly they appeared to him in reverie. Melanie whirled into Judith’s outstretched arms. They danced together, his wife and his daughter, and he smiled at their grace even as he himself clumsily spilled a glass of wine. Had that ever happened, he wondered, or was it a waking dream wrested from the depths of his imagination?

  Judith. Yes. His Judith. He knew that he should not have left her when she so clearly wanted him to stay, when she needed him so badly. He did not understand why he had done that. Yes, he did know. He had left their bedroom, although he had, in fact, yearned to lie down beside her, to enfold her in his arms. But even at that moment he had feared the conversation that would surely follow such closeness and he had not known what he would say, what he wanted to say.

  He had turned back before he closed the door and had glimpsed the tears that silvered her cheeks. Her outstretched arms, within the wide white wings of her sleeves, were atremble, and yet he had not returned to her bed, to their bed. He had failed her again, as he had failed her through all the long nights of their sadly separate mourning.

  He lay in a tangle of sweat-drenched sheets, and in the miasma of a half sleep he saw her, graceful, so graceful, gliding through her grief, hand in hand with Jeffrey Kahn, a man bereft, a man in need. As she was. As he himself was. As Nancy was. All of them thrust together by losses grievous and incalculable. He slept briefly and jerked into wakefulness at dawn, the invasive images of those dark imaginings intact. He fled his home, fled the neatly set breakfast table in search of a neutral landscape.

  Seated at the formica table, he stirred his coffee, newly determined to concentrate, organize his thoughts, sort through memories, weigh realities. He and Judith could not continue to live in limbo. It was time to assess their marriage, its strengths, its fragilities. It was time for them to come to a decision, which should not be difficult.

  Decisions, he thought wryly, were his stock in trade. He was trained in a discipline that required the careful weighing of alternatives, the balancing of conflicting arguments, conflicting views. He envisioned a balance sheet, similar to those so useful in his work. There would be two headings: Judith, David. Or perhaps Marriage, Divorce. He would list assets and deficits, the choices and settlements available to each of them, the pros and cons of alternate decisions. He found a pen in his briefcase, plucked up a paper napkin and outlined a ledger page, drawing two wavering lines, writing too swiftly. Two columns. Marriage. Divorce.

  He stared at the w
ord, saw that he had misspelled it and crossed it out. The word itself, in its dark and hopeless enormity, filled him with despair. He crumbled the napkin and tossed it on to a tray already littered with trash. All rational thought was abandoned. He knew himself to be incapable of making a decision. Not yet. No, not yet. There was Nancy to consider.

  It was Nancy, after all, who had rescued him from his solitary sorrow. It pleased him that her daughter slept in the bed that had belonged to Melanie. It comforted him to watch the child pad barefoot across the red carpet, her tiny toes, like Melanie’s, plump and pink. He recognized that he was indulging in a fantasy, but it did not impact on fidelity to Judith.

  He would not, could not, be unfaithful to her. He loved her; he had pledged himself to her. He had been foolish not to tell her about Nancy from the outset, but he knew it to be a foolishness born of fear, fear that she would not understand, fear that she would think him weak, fear that in turning to Nancy he had rejected her. And, he acknowledged, he had perhaps done just that. Unwittingly, unwillingly.

  ‘Jeffrey Kahn and I,’ she had begun.

  It was a sentence that he would not allow her to complete, its ending clear despite words unsaid. With that silence, the balance of their marriage was altered; weights were redistributed on trembling scales that listed now one way, now another.

  They needed more time, he had thought then, a suspension of intimacy, the clarity of nocturnal solitude. They were at a crossroads and there were decisions to be made.

  He remembered that Judith, years ago, had spoken of marriage, all marriages, as novels with many chapters. They were in a new chapter then, their roles reversed, their narrative undefined, their separate needs elusive. How would it end?

  ‘How?’

  He spoke the single word aloud, indifferent to the startled stares of the two women at the next table. They shrugged and continued their conversation. He stared down at the Egg McMuffin he could not bear to eat and sipped the bitter coffee now grown tepid. He felt the cold shadow of fear and knew, at last, how he wanted the next chapter of his marriage to read.

  A homeless man sank into the seat opposite him, his eyes rheumy, a rank odor emanating from his unwashed clothes. He pointed to David’s untouched food.

  ‘You gonna eat that, buddy?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ David said and shoved it toward him.

  He glanced at his watch. He would call Judith and suggest that they have dinner out. He imagined talking to her very softly across a table set with a white cloth on which a small lamp glowed. The thought comforted him. They would dispel their silence, talk their way into a future. Alone? Together? He dared not speculate. Walking very slowly, he headed up Madison Avenue toward his office.

  He waited until early afternoon to call Judith. She did not answer her cell phone. He tried the thrift shop and spoke to Suzanne Brody. Judith had been in earlier but she had left for the Kahn house and would not be back that day.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ David said. ‘I should have remembered.’

  He could not remember what he had never known. He sat quietly at his desk, his eyes closed, and willed himself to calm. Rationalizations tumbled over each other. Of course she was at the Kahn house. Why wouldn’t she be? She had told him that there was still much to be dealt with there. She was responsible. She would not leave a project unfinished.

  All right, then, he told himself. She will be home before dinner. I’ll call her then and ask her to choose a restaurant.

  He thought again of the lamp-lit table covered with a white cloth and was comforted.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Unlike David, Judith wakened from her fitful sleep later than usual. Dizzied after her dream-haunted night, she stood in the kitchen and saw that David’s breakfast setting was untouched. The fragrance of brewed coffee, the special blend he favored, wafted through the room but the carafe was full. She took it as a sign, akin to his retreat from their bedroom the previous evening. The routine of their marriage was dangerously altered. She poured the coffee into the sink, dressed quickly, stopped at a Starbucks for a latte and a croissant, and drove too rapidly to the thrift shop. Glancing in her car mirror, she was startled by her own pallor and too swiftly rouged her cheeks.

  She stood behind the counter, drinking her coffee, and watched as a middle-aged couple, both of them overweight and dough-faced, argued fiercely over whether or not to purchase a small coffee table. They gesticulated angrily and stormed out, the table abandoned, hatred in their eyes. They were frequent customers, timewasters who wandered in now and again, and inevitably disagreed fiercely over the smallest purchases. She wanted to buy a ceramic napkin holder. He refused. He wanted a bedside lamp. She snatched it from his hand. They were skilled at hurling anger at each other. Judith thought it probable that their uncontained fury gave focus, however negative, to their marriage.

  What was it that gave focus to her own marriage, she wondered but dared not follow the thought further. She did not want to recall the previous evening; she closed her mind to the memory of David leaving their bedroom in silence, her plea rejected, the tears that streaked her cheeks ignored. She, in turn, had not called after him, compounding his rejection with her own. They had each opted for a muteness that was neither comforting nor cathartic.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Mandell, do you think you can help me?’

  Audrey, a sweet-faced girl, a frequent and favorite customer, smiled shyly at her.

  ‘Of course. No problem. I’ll be glad to help you.’

  The distraction from her own dark thoughts was welcome and she listened with great attentiveness as Audrey explained that she wanted curtains for the kitchen of her newly assigned apartment in a halfway house. Judith knew that Audrey was a recovering addict who had recently completed a county-sponsored program. She knew, too, that Suzanne always went out of her way to help her, but Suzanne, standing nearby, was busy with another customer.

  ‘Everything is so great.’ Audrey spoke in a burst of manic enthusiasm. ‘I love the apartment. I have a boyfriend. He lives a floor below me. I registered for classes at the community college. Phlebotomy. You know – taking blood. I even have a job interview.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Judith said, and she and Suzanne locked eyes.

  They did not believe Audrey but they envied her ability to reinvent herself, to take delight in small, uncertain pleasures – a course that she might fail, an interview for a job she might not get. They themselves were incapable of self-deception. The losses that limned their lives, their vanished children, their marriages, the one ended, the other endangered, were ever present in mind and heart.

  They smiled at Audrey, cautioned her to get enough sleep, to eat nourishing meals. Suzanne found a set of almost new red-and-white checked curtains and Judith charged her only half the price scrawled on the tag.

  Their own kindness pleased them and they turned to greet the next arrivals, two dark-haired women, their faces ashen, their eyes reddened with weeping. They entered very quietly, both of them moving with matching grace and swiftness, their faces and their expressions so similar that they had to be sisters. One of them thrust a wedding dress, sheathed in a clear plastic garment bag, across the counter. The other placed a bag that contained long white gloves and white high-heeled strapless slippers next to it. As swiftly as they had entered, they hurried out, before questions could be asked or a donation receipt filled out. Suzanne and Judith, Libby, Lois and the other volunteers stared after them, saddened and intrigued.

  The pristine dress was held up and admired. The sheer sleeves and the bouffant skirt met with approval. Almost at once, there were speculations about its history and alternate stories were suggested. Clearly a wedding had been canceled, but which of the sisters had been the bride? Lois thought that the young women were twins. An older woman, who was a very occasional volunteer, recognized the sisters as the daughters of a quiet couple who lived on her street. The girls had always been inseparable, had often dressed alike, although they were not, in fact, twins. She could n
ot remember their names, but she had heard that one of them was to be married, at summer’s end.

  A discussion ensued about what might have led to a broken engagement at such a late date. Perhaps the groom had opted out. Lois knew of a marriage canceled because the girl’s fiancé had confessed to being gay. They toyed with the possibility and dismissed it. Libby thought it was probably the bride who had decided against the marriage. It might have meant moving to a distant city and leaving her sister.

  The volley of creative scenarios gathered momentum even as they smiled absently at customers and sorted through piles of new donations. They traded hypothetical situations and frivolous imaginings woven of suspicion and supposition. Such flights of fancy, such harmless fictional invasions of other people’s lives, were a thrift shop perk.

  ‘What do you think, Judith?’ Libby asked.

  Judith could often be counted on for creative scenarios, but oppressed by her own dark mood, she remained silent. She had registered the misery on the sisters’ faces. She could not, would not, mock its source, close as she was to her own nocturnal sadness. She did not want to think about weddings and marriages.

  She carried the bridal gown, staggering beneath its weight, to a rack already crowded with formal finery. It dangled there, a ghostly presence, amid discarded gem-colored prom dresses and pastel bouffant bridesmaid gowns.

  Briefly, she stared at herself in the mirror, noting that she had lost weight. Her favorite black shirt and her black cotton slacks hung too loosely on her narrow frame.

  Why had she chosen to dress like a widow this morning? She was still a wife, albeit a wife who had slept alone and wakened to an empty house, an absent husband, an undisturbed breakfast table.

  Dispirited, she wandered back to the counter, relieved that the chattering volunteers had dispersed for lunch, where, of course, additional fantasies about the mysterious wedding gown would be created.