At this point, I suppose, I could have safely unlocked the back door and scuttled about in the kitchen, confident that everyone in the house was still asleep. Instead, I raised the lid of the garbage bin and found in one of the cans my complete dinner of the night before, slammed upside down atop a plastic bag and held in a circle of perfect integrity, as if still on the plate — a grilled veal chop, half a baked potato, peel-side up, and a small mound of oiled green salad — so that I could imagine the expression on Diana’s face as she had come out here, still angry from our morning argument, and rid herself of the meal gone cold that she had stupidly cooked for that husband of hers.
I wondered now at what hour had she lost patience. That would be a measure of whatever slack she granted me. Another woman might have refrigerated the dinner, but I lived in Diana’s judgment; it shone upon me as in a prison cell where the light is never turned off. I lacked interest in her work. Or I was snide and condescending toward her mother. Or I wasted beautiful fall weekends watching dumb football games on television. Or I wouldn’t agree to have the bedrooms painted. And if she was such a feminist why did my opening a door for her or helping her on with her coat matter so much?
All I had to do was stand outside my home in the chill of the early morning in order to see things in their totality: Diana felt that she had married the wrong man. Of course, I didn’t imagine I was the easiest person to get along with. But even she would have to admit that I was never boring. And, whatever problems we had, sex, the crucial center of our lives, wasn’t one of them. Was I under an illusion to think that that was the basis of a sound marriage?
Given these thoughts, I could not bring myself to walk in the door and announce that I was home. I made my breakfast of the congealed veal chop and the potato as I sat out of sight behind the garage.
I HAD MET DIANA when she was dating my best friend, Dirk Morrison, whom I had known since middle school. Because she was going with him, I looked at her more closely than I might have otherwise. I registered her as pretty, of course, very attractive, with a lovely smile, light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and what the merest glance could affirm was a fine body, but somehow it was Dirk’s interest in her, which was clearly of the most intense kind, that made me consider Diana as a potentially serious relationship for myself. At first, Diana wouldn’t go out with me. But when I told her I had gotten permission from Dirk to ask her out she relented, obviously from feelings of hurt and bitterness. Of course, I had lied. When eventually she and Dirk realized my perfidy, things became bitter all around, and in the ensuing competition, many months in duration, the poor girl was torn between us and, all told, we made the unhappiest ménage you could imagine. We were all children, the three of us, what — barely out of Harvard Law, in my case? And Dirk with an entry-level Wall Street job? And Diana working for a PhD in art history? Young, self-styled Upper East Siders. There were times when Diana wouldn’t see me, or wouldn’t see Dirk, or wouldn’t see either of us. Of course, in retrospect, it’s clear that all this was quite the normal thing, when, adrift in their hormonic tides, people in their twenties are about to land on one shore or another.
I didn’t know if, before I broke into their relationship, Diana had been sleeping with Dirk. I knew now that she was sleeping with neither of us. One day, in a stroke of genius, I told Dirk that I had spent the previous night with her. When he confronted her, she denied it, of course, and, showing his lack of insight and understanding of the quality of the person he was dealing with, he didn’t believe her. That was his fatal error, which he compounded by trying to press himself on her. Diana was not a virgin — nobody was by our age — but, as I was later to learn, neither did she have much experience, though that quality of sexy innocence I have mentioned could easily have passed for it. At any rate, you didn’t try to force yourself on this woman if you ever expected to see her again. His second mistake, Dirk, before he disappeared from our lives altogether, was to punch me out. He was the heavier of us, though I was the taller. And he landed a couple of good ones before someone pulled him off me. That was the first and last time I’ve ever actually been hit, though I’ve been threatened a few times since. But my black eye brought out a tender resolution of Diana’s feelings for me. Perhaps she understood that all my tactical cunning was a measure of my devotion, and, as her cool lips brushed my bruised cheek, I could not imagine myself ever having been happier.
After we had been married for a year and some of the energy had gone out of the relationship, I did wonder if my passion might have been pumped up by the competition for her. Would I have been all that crazy about her had she not been my best friend’s girl? But then she became pregnant and a whole new array of feelings entered into our marriage and, as her belly swelled, she became more radiant than ever. I had always liked to draw — I drew seriously as late as my freshman year at Harvard — and my knowledge of art had been one of the things that attracted her to me. Now she allowed me to draw her as she posed naked, with her small breasts fruited out and her belly gloriously ripened, as she lay back on some pillows with her hands behind her head and turned on one hip with her legs slightly pulled up but pressed together for modesty, like Goya’s Maja.
I SPENT THAT FIRST DAY watching through the bull’s-eye window for the sequence of events that would occur when it became clear that I had gone missing. First, Diana would get the twins off to school. Then, the minute the bus had turned the corner, she would call my office and satisfy herself that I had been seen off by my secretary at the usual time the night before. She would ask to be notified when I showed up for work, her voice not only under control but doggedly cheerful, as if she were calling about a minor family matter. I reasoned that only after a call or two to whichever of our friends she thought might know something would the panic set in. She would look at the clock, and, around eleven, steel herself and call the police.
I was wrong by half an hour. The squad car came up the driveway at eleven thirty, by my watch. She met the patrolmen at the back door. Our town police are well paid and polite and they are not very different from the rest of us in their distant relationship to crime. But I knew that they would take down a description, ask for a photo, and so on, in order to put out a missing-persons bulletin. Yet, when they were back in their car, I saw through the windshield that the cops were smiling: where else were missing husbands to be found but in St. Bart’s, drinking piña coladas with their chiquitas?
All that was wanting now was Diana’s mother, and by noon she was up from the city in her white Escalade — the widow Babs, who had opposed the marriage and was likely now to say so. Babs was what Diana, God help us, might be thirty years hence — high-heeled, ceramicized, liposucted, devaricosed, her golden fall of hair as shiny and hard as peanut brittle.
IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING, cars pulled up at the house at all hours as friends and colleagues came to show their support and to console Diana, as if I had died. These wretches, hardly able to restrain themselves in their excitement, were making victims of my wife and children. And how many of the husbands would hit on her the first chance they got? I thought about bursting in the door — Wakefield arisen — just to see the expression on their faces.
Then the house grew quiet again. There weren’t many lights on. Occasionally, I’d see someone for a moment in a window without being able to tell who it was. One morning after the school bus had stopped to pick up the twins, the garage doors below me rolled up and Diana got in her car and went back to her curator’s job at the county art museum. I was hungry, having lived off scraps in our garbage and neighbors’ garbage, and also fairly rank at this point, so I slipped into the house and availed myself of its amenities. I ate crackers and nuts from the pantry. I was careful when showering to rinse out my towel, put it in the dryer, and return it, properly folded, to the linen closet. I stole some socks and briefs on the theory that there were drawers full and a few missing would not be noticed. I thought about taking a fresh shirt and another pair of shoes but decided that that would be risky.