Five years ago.
Tonight, she watched her husband in action at her own dinner table.
A fierce September rain lashed the window panes of their sixth floor apartment, and far below she could hear the sound of automobile tires hissing on wet asphalt. The clock on the dining room wall read exactly ten o’clock. Over coffee and dessert, Bobby was telling a New York atrocity story to their guests. Laura watched him from the opposite end of the long table, listening only distractedly. She knew it was happening again, and that she was helpless to stop it.
Bobby’s eyes twinkled as he told the story. He liked New York atrocity stories, especially those about cab drivers. A smile was forming on his mouth now in anticipation of his own punch line. She knew he would burst into immodest laughter the moment he finished the story. She knew him so well. She’d been married to him for nine years. He was her beloved Bobby. Her spouse. Her mate. The father of her two adorable children. Under the table, his left hand was resting on Nessie Winkler’s thigh.
“By now, this is the fifth time we’ve circled the Plaza,” he said. “Now even if I were fresh off the banana boat, I’d begin to recognize the same hotel going by five times, wouldn’t you think? I’d begin to maybe suspect a little something?”
Had he just squeezed Nessie’s thigh under the table?
If not, why had she turned to him in that quick conspiratorial way and looked dopily into his face? Nessie. For Agnes. But you could not call a lissome blonde Agnes. Agnes was for the comic characters of the world. There was nothing funny about Nessie Winkler or the fact that Bobby had his fingers spread on her thigh under the table.
“So finally I tapped on the glass — they’re all so terrified of getting held up these days — and he slid open the partition, and I told him he’d better take me to Forty-seventh and Fifth immediately, and do you know what he said?”
Lucille came in from the kitchen just then, and stood immediately inside the swinging door, visibly nervous. She was a plain, brown-haired, pudding-faced woman of perhaps twenty-six and Laura suspected this was the first dinner party she’d ever served. Everyone at the table was watching Bobby, waiting to hear the end of his cab-driver story.
Lucille said, “Ma’am?” and Bobby turned to her immediately and snapped, “Would you mind, please?”
He leaned toward his guests then, and grinned, and in the heavy Brooklyn accent the cabby must have used, delivered the long-awaited zinger to his story.
“He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Look, mister, you shoulda tole me you was a New Yorker!’ ”
He burst out laughing, just as Laura knew he would. Nessie burst out laughing, an instant later. Laura laughed, too. Politely. Everyone was laughing but Lucille, who was standing just behind Nessie’s chair now, looking somewhat bewildered.
“Yes, Lucille?” Laura said.
“Ma’am, shall I start clearing?”
“Please.”
Bobby’s hand was still under the table. Laura watched him incredulously. A fork slid off the plate Lucille was lifting from the table, clattering to the floor. She flushed a deep red and immediately knelt beside Nessie’s chair to retrieve it. When she rose again, her eyes met Laura’s.
There was knowledge in those eyes.
She had seen.
“Delicious,” Nessie said, and folded her napkin.
At five minutes to twelve, Laura went into the kitchen to pay Mrs. Armstrong and Lucille and to thank them for helping to make the dinner party such a success. Mrs. Armstrong accepted her check and told Laura what a pleasure it always was to work for such a fine lady. Lucille took her check and said nothing. Her eyes avoided Laura’s.
Mrs. Armstrong and Lucille were wearing almost identical black topcoats and carrying black handbags. Mrs. Armstrong was carrying a red umbrella. Lucille had no umbrella, and when Laura asked her if she’d like to borrow one, she replied, “No, thank you, ma’am, I’m only catching a bus on Fifth,” which was the longest sentence she’d uttered all night long.
Her eyes still avoided Laura’s.
It was as if she were somehow blaming Laura for what she’d seen earlier.
When the two women left the apartment, Laura double-locked the service door behind them. Bobby was sprawled on the living room sofa, sipping a cognac and watching an old cowboy movie on television.
“Nice party,” he said.
“I thought it went smoothly,” Laura said.
“Want a nightcap?”
“Thanks, no. Are the kids okay?”
“What?”
“I asked you to look in on them while I...”
“Slipped my mind,” Bobby said. “Got involved in the movie here.”
“I’ll do it,” Laura said, and went out of the room and down the corridor to the children’s bedrooms.
Both of them were asleep. Seven-year-old Jessica had the blanket twisted around her like a strait jacket, and Laura had difficulty unwinding it without awakening her. She extricated her daughter at last, and then kissed her on the forehead and went next door to where five-year-old Michael was sleeping with his face to the wall. Laura touched his brow, smoothed his hair, kissed him on the cheek, and tucked the blanket tighter around his shoulder.
When she came back into the living room, Bobby was still watching television. He did not look at Laura as she came into the room.
She sat beside him on the sofa and, without preamble, said, “About Nessie.”
“What about her?” Bobby asked.
He still did not turn away from the screen, where a band of hapless cowboys were being ambushed at a waterhole by a larger band of Indians.
“Do you find her attractive?” Laura asked. She was not at all asking about Nessie Winkler’s attractiveness; only a blind man would not have noticed her startling beauty. She was simply asking whether Bobby was sleeping with her. Nor was she even asking that. She didn’t know what she was asking. Maybe she only wanted to know if he still loved her.
“I think she’s a good-looking woman, yes,” Bobby said.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Laura said, and became immediately frightened of what might follow. She did not want this confrontation. She had been foolish to bring it to this dangerous point in the short space of several sentences.
Bobby turned from the television screen. His eyes met hers. Blue, steady, level — challenging. Evenly spacing his words, stretching them out interminably, he said, “What, exactly, is, your, question?”
Tell him, she thought.
Tell him the question is one of trust; you either trust someone completely, or you don’t trust him at all.
Tell him you stopped trusting him five years ago.
Tell him you would appreciate it if he kept his whores out of your home where they only embarrass and humiliate you before the hired help.
Tell him, damn it!
“Well?” he said.
She was trembling.
She smiled and said, “I forgot the question.”
His eyes held hers a moment longer, as if to make certain the matter had been finally and irrevocably put to rest. He turned back to the television screen.
“I think...” Laura started.
“Yes?” he said.
“I think I’ll go down for a walk.”
“At this hour?”
“I need some air.”
“It’s still raining, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s let up.”
“Suit yourself,” Bobby said, and shrugged.
Laura walked out into the entrance foyer. She took her yellow slicker and rain hat from the closet, put them on, and let herself out of the apartment.
The streets glistened with reflected light, green and yellow and red from the traffic signals, white from the overhead street lamps, a warmer white from the headlights of infrequently passing automobiles. The rain had indeed stopped. The city smelled fresh and clean.