Darling, we won’t speak of it. Our secret.
Yet, if Leonard confronted her over the Polaroids that were her cherished sexual secret, she might turn upon him, cruelly. She had that power. She might laugh at him. Valerie’s high-pitched mocking laughter like icicles being shattered. She would chide him for looking through her things, what right had he to look through her things, what if she searched through his desk drawers would she discover soft-core porn magazines, ridiculous soft-core videos with titles like Girls’ Night Out, Girls at Play, Sex-Addict Holiday, she would expose him to their friends at the next Salthill Landing dinner party, dryly she would dissect him like an insect wriggling on a pin, at the very least she might slap the Polaroids out of his hand. How ridiculous he was being, over a trifle. How pitiable.
Leonard shuddered. A rivulet of icy sweat ran down the side of his cheek like a tear.
So, no. He would not confront her. Not just yet. For the fact was, Leonard had the advantage: He knew of Valerie’s secret attachment to the first husband, and Valerie had no idea he knew.
Smiling to think: Like a boa constrictor swallowing its living prey paralyzed by terror his secret would encompass Valerie’s secret and would, in time, digest it.
The anniversary trip to Italy, scheduled for March, was to be postponed.
“It isn’t a practical time after all. My work...”
And this was true. The Atlanta case had swerved in an unforeseen and perilous direction. There were obligations in Valerie’s life, too. “...not a practical time. But, later...”
He saw in her eyes regret, yet also relief.
Doesn’t want to be alone with me. Comparing me with him isn’t she!
“...a reservation for four, at L’Heure Bleu. If we arrive by six, maybe a little before six, we won’t have to leave until quarter to eight, Lincoln Center is just across the street. But if you and Harold prefer the Tokyo Pavilion, I know you’ve been wanting to check it out after the review in the Times, and Leonard and I have, too...”
In fact, Leonard disliked Japanese food. Hated sushi that was so much raw flesh, uneatable.
This passion for gourmet food, wine! Expensive restaurants!
Where love has gone, he thought bitterly.
Listening to Valerie’s maddeningly calm voice as she descended the stairs speaking on a cordless phone to a friend. It was nearly two weeks after he’d discovered the Polaroids, he’d vowed not to look at them again. Yet he was approaching the cherrywood table, pulling open the drawer that stuck a little, groping another time for the packet of Polaroids that seemed to be in exactly the place he’d left it and he cursed his wife for being so careless, for not having taken time to hide her secret more securely.
(His small cache of soft-core porn, pulpy magazines, X-rated videos, evidence of a minor, minimal interest in porn and hardly a consuming passion, he’d taken care to secrete away deep in one of the locked drawers of his filing cabinet downstairs amid documents of stultifying dullness pertaining to IRS payments, stock holdings. His secret he was sure Valerie would never discover!)
“‘Oliver and Val, Key West, December 1985.’”
With what childish pride Valerie had felt the need to identify the lovers!
At a window overlooking a snowy slope to the river and the glowering winter sky he examined the photographs eagerly. He had seen them several times by now and had more or less memorized them and so they were both familiar and yet retained an air of the exotic and treacherous. One of the less faded Polaroids he brought close to his face, that he might squint at the ring worn by the coppery-haired girl — was it the emerald? Valerie was wearing it on her right hand even then, which might only mean that, though Oliver Yardman had given it to her, it hadn’t yet acquired the status of an engagement ring. In another photo, Leonard discovered what he’d somehow overlooked, the faintest suggestion of a bruise on Valerie’s neck, or a shadow that very much resembled a bruise. And Oliver Yardman’s smooth-skinned face wasn’t really so smooth, in fact it looked coarse in certain of the photos. And that smug, petulant mouth, the fleshy lips, Leonard would have liked to smash with his fist. And there was Yardman wriggling his stubby yet long toes, wasn’t there a correlation between the size of a man’s toes and the size of...
Hurriedly Leonard shoved the Polaroids into the drawer and fled the room.
“The time for children is past.”
Years ago. Should have known the woman hadn’t loved him if she had not wanted children with him.
“...a kind of madness has come over parents, today. Not just the expense: private schools, private tutors, college. Therapists! But you must subordinate your life to your children. My husband—” Valerie’s voice dipped, this was a hypothetical, it was Leonard to whom she spoke so earnestly, “would be working in the city five days a week and wouldn’t be home until evening and — can you see me as a ‘soccer mom’ driving children to — wherever! Living through it all again and this time knowing what’s to come, my God it would be so raw.”
Valerie laughed, there was fear in her eyes.
Leonard was astonished, this poised, beautiful woman was speaking so intimately to him! Of course he comforted her, gripping her cold hands. Kissed her hair where she’d leaned toward him, trembling.
“Valerie, of course. I feel the same way.”
He did! In that instant, Leonard did.
They’d been introduced by mutual friends. Leonard was a highly paid litigator attached to the legal department of the most distinguished architectural firm in New York City, its headquarters in lower Manhattan on Rector Street. Leonard’s specialty was tax law and within that specialty he prepared and argued cases in federal appeals courts. He was one of a team. There were enormous penalties for missteps, sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And there were enormous rewards when things went well.