ANDY SAID, “Well, don’t you think it’s mysterious?” It was three months since the murder; Lillian was still upset, and Arthur seemed beside himself. “I’ve never seen Arthur so…so…I don’t know.”
“Who was murdered again?” said Dr. Smith.
“A friend of theirs, named Mary Meyer. She was shot in the head and in the heart, walking down the towpath in Georgetown in the middle of the day.”
“Have you ever met this woman?”
“I don’t think so, but it horrified me. I had nightmares about it, and we had to come home two days early.” Andy was lying on the mat, staring at the ceiling. She didn’t often avail herself of the mat, but Dr. Smith’s facial expressions could be unpleasant. His bushy eyebrows lowered over his eyes until they seemed to disappear. Sometimes he tapped the lead of his pencil on his teeth while she talked, which she found so distracting that she fell silent. What really horrified her was a thing that she was not comfortable telling: that Lillian and Arthur seemed to be falling apart. The injustice of this disturbed her. She said, “May I change the subject?”
“There is only one subject.”
“I went to Bendel’s to get a dress for a cocktail party at the Upjohns’ next week. Frank said it had to be Dior or Chanel, but I hated the Chanel, and the Dior looked very girlish to me, though brown. Brown is so dull. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.”
He coughed as if losing patience.
“Anyway, as I came into the vestibule, but before I opened the outside door, I saw Frank pass with a woman on his arm — rather a plain thing, I must say. I stopped in my tracks. I knew it was Frank — he was wearing his gray Brooks Brothers overcoat that I picked up at the cleaners’ the day before. And he was smiling. I registered that right away.”
“You didn’t recognize the woman?”
“Never saw her before.”
“Did you go out into the street?”
“I did. I watched them, and when they turned the corner, I followed them down Fifty-seventh Street.”
“Can you tell me their exact demeanor and posture?”
Andy’s hip began to hurt, so she crossed her ankles. Dr. Smith would be taking note of this, she knew. She said, “She looked upright and self-contained. Her elbows were at her sides, and her head was straight. Her shoulders were straight.”
“And your husband?”
“First he was holding her elbow, and then he put his arm across her shoulders.”
“Was he leaning toward her?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Smith wrote busily, then sniffed.
Andy said, “She didn’t look like a prostitute.”
“Is there any reason that she should look like a prostitute?”
Andy crossed her ankles the other way. “This young man where he works, one of the sons, he asked me at a party last summer, when we were staying in Southampton, if I knew that Frank frequented prostitutes downtown.”
“What did you say?”
“I said yes.”
“You haven’t mentioned this to me before, Andy. Were you telling the truth?”
“I didn’t know it.”
It hadn’t been as difficult as she’d thought it would be to tell about seeing them, the couple, Frank and the woman he loved. She said, “I did go to Bonwit’s and buy a dress. Navy-blue shantung, with a matching coat. It was last season, but on sale.”
“So the sight of your husband and another woman who was rather dowdily attired motivated you in some way?”
Andy nodded.
“Let me ask you this. Which of your physical assets do you feel that this new outfit makes the most of?”
Andy lifted her chin, almost unconsciously, then put her hand on her neck. Dr. Smith said, “Your neck. Your chin.”
“My waist. My legs and ankles. I’ll put my hair up, of course.”
“So — you plan to accentuate your slenderness, your paleness in contrast to the dark color of the dress, your, let me say, androgynous qualities, as if to say to all, once again, that sexuality isn’t your business? And so your husband falling in love, if that is what it is, with a dowdy but, let’s say, womanly rival makes perfect sense.”
Andy said, “I suppose it does, from his point of view.” She said this in a reasonable tone of voice, and was just about to say something else when Dr. Smith was right there, nose to nose with her, and apparently in a rage. Andy recoiled. Dr. Smith exclaimed, “Andrea Langdon, are you so flat and small that you have no reaction to this? Is there nothing inside you, no mote of emotion or resistance? No ego? No identity? No being? You come here to me, three days a week, faithfully. As far as I can discern, you are a wraith, floating through your own life not only with no affect, but with no response. I ask you if you drink, you say yes. I ask you if you ever get drunk, you say yes. I ask you if you embarrass yourself when you get drunk, and you say no, you just doze off or go sit in a corner. Sometimes you say you laugh at nothing. That’s the extent of your transgression.”
“I thought I was supposed to behave myself if I had too much. Frank says—”
“Your husband is cheating on you! He loves another woman! He’s been to prostitutes! But your voice trembles only when you describe the murder of a stranger.”
“She was JFK’s mistress! At least that’s the rumor!” Andy coughed, thinking of how many times Dr. Grossman had explained the concept of displacement to her. She leveled her voice, then said, “I don’t think she loves him. She wasn’t leaning toward him in any way. Her body language said that she was—”
“Are you using my own terms to show me up?” Now Dr. Smith seemed really angry. Andy slid to the right, and put her left hand lightly on his arm, to prevent his moving toward her again. He said, “I am yelling at you! I am berating you! How does that make you feel?”
“I think you must be having a bad day.”
“You think this has nothing to do with you?”
Andy stared at Dr. Smith, and decided that he must have been a headstrong child, which was possibly why he had become a psychiatrist. Then she said, “Ragnarök.”
“What is that, please?” He sounded both surprised and contemptuous.
“The end of the world, in Norsk.”
“Gotterdämmerung. The Apocalypse?”
She nodded.
He said, “Please describe this to me.”
Andy closed her eyes, remembering. It was still very clear. “First, I thought, the dogs would begin to howl, and then the wolves in the forests would gather in town, Decorah, where I grew up, and join them. The howling would get so loud that you could not hear, no matter how hard you listened, that the snakes were slithering out of the river. We lived on Winneshiek, which was just south of the river. Anyway, the snakes were big as pythons, but they were cottonmouths, more poisonous than rattlesnakes, and they would slither through the front door and up the stairs, and first they would go into my parents’ room and smother them and bite them all over, but you couldn’t hear my parents’ screams because of the howling. Then the snakes would wait in the hall for me to open my door. I could stay in my room for days, but eventually they would slither around me and bite me. They would be as cold as ice. Then the house would burn down.” This was a true memory, from when she was about seven.
“What would cause the house to burn down?”
“I don’t know.” Andy shivered.
Dr. Smith stared at her, then said, “Perhaps we are getting somewhere.”
—
WHEN CLAIRE WOKE UP from what seemed to her to be a childbirth-induced state of catatonia, Gray was three months old, and it was the first of May. Forsythia was done, dogwood was done, daffodils were done, and she saw that she no longer had an excuse for not visiting Rosanna, something that ordinarily she hated to do. She woke up in a bad mood, even though the sun was shining and Paul was jolly and Gray could not have been cuter, and after she kissed Paul goodbye and he wished her a safe trip, she laid Gray carefully in his car basket, bought by Paul from someone he knew in Europe, and made sure he was properly strapped. The hour that it took them to head up the 330 was far too short, and then there was Rosanna — looking out the window, standing on the porch, her arms open wide. Claire felt her teeth grinding, but only for a moment. She held out the baby.