That had been one of the vows he’d written when they married: We will keep nothing from each other, no secrets between us, something, something. She could not remember it all now.
Time diffused some things. And others it highlighted, a spotlight cast about a dark room full of shelves disappearing into the rafters of an impossibly high ceiling, the memories stacked on the shelves in labeled boxes like a museum warehouse. She imagined her husband’s face crumpling with disappointment, but she could not predict what he might do or say after.
Later that morning, Dr. Harcourt returned. She found him at her door in his signature clothing — the jeans, the Converse, the corduroy jacket.
“Let’s start over,” he said. “I was incredibly rude running off the other day.”
Eva set down a basket of her sons’ dirty clothes. She said she understood. “It’s hard to go back to places from the past.”
Dr. Harcourt agreed, eagerly, his eyes brightening. “Some of it’s a blur, and then the rest is so real and vivid. For instance, I remember you so well.”
Eva crossed her arms over her chest. She wore her pajamas — a T-shirt and a pair of loose cotton pants. “And this house?” she said. “Is this part of the vivid past?”
She saw his smile falter, but his eyes stayed on hers. “The house.”
It was as if he did not want to look past her into its depths.
“Let’s go for coffee,” he said. “And then I promise you a tour. How’s that?”
When she was a college student it had been the Alfa Romeo he used to lure her in. She’d seen him getting into it one muggy afternoon as she crossed the faculty lot and called out to him asking for a ride. It had been a joke, but she knew now he’d seen her real desire to leave campus and its pressure of school and roommates behind, and he’d played along. Now, it was the house. As much as she tried to pretend the story of the house didn’t matter, somehow he knew it did.
His car, parked at the curb, was a silver Prius. She got in and tucked her skirt under her legs.
“This takes me back,” he said, turning the key in the ignition. She half expected the old R&B songs, but the radio was silent.
They didn’t drive far — just along one of the curving roads to the small shopping plaza. Eva and her husband had taken the boys to the nearby Mexican restaurant. The coffee bar had chairs set up outside, but Dr. Harcourt held the glass door for her, and she slipped into the dim interior.
“Coffee or beer?” he said, pulling out a chair for her.
Along the wall were bottles of wine, taps for beer behind a counter. “Beer, for old time’s sake,” she said.
Dr. Harcourt ordered two pilsners. It was ten a.m. Eva imagined her boys at their school tables, their pencils shaping letters on worksheets. Her husband downtown presiding over a meeting. She should have asked Dr. Harcourt about his wife and children, but she didn’t want to know. She drank the beer and said, “So?”
Dr. Harcourt took a long sip, set his glass on the tabletop. “Patience,” he said.
“Patient Griselda,” she said. They’d read Boccaccio’s awful story in his class.
Griselda’s husband saves her from poverty by marriage. He believes all women to be faithless and wicked and he tests her by taking her children away and claiming they are dead. He banishes her to her father’s small impoverished hut under the pretense of marrying another woman. Dr. Harcourt had been obsessed with the story. They’d even read Perrault’s fairy tale written about her. At the time, Eva had not cared about the story’s intent as a guide for young women and wives. She had not ever thought she’d be a wife, a mother.
She pressed her finger against the tabletop and felt the sting of the glass beneath the skin. The beer made her woozy.
“Do you think I’m not a faithful wife?”
“You are who you always were,” he said, cryptically.
A bell on the door rang and Eva glanced up. She didn’t know any of the neighbors yet — barely remembered their welcoming faces at her door — but this woman might have been one of them, the way she eyed Eva with a faint smile. Eva understood it mattered who she was seen with now.
Dr. Harcourt slipped from his chair and returned with two new glasses of beer. Eva tried to protest but he set the tall glass beside her, and she found herself finishing her first, reaching for the second. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his ankles.
“The house,” he said. “And my mother.”
He told her his mother was no Griselda. She was everything the husband in the tale feared — faithless and conniving. He ran his hand over his cheek as he talked, as if trying to rub off a smear of lipstick. She was a bank teller, or a receptionist, or a ladies clothing store clerk, he couldn’t remember which. “A lowly sort, when my father met her,” he said. “It was 1958.”
His father was bewitched by her and married her, believing that her gratitude for the marriage and everything it would bring her — the sprawling ranch house, the yacht club, the garden club — would be a guarantee of her love.
“But is it ever?” Dr. Harcourt said. He sat forward suddenly in his chair, and Eva, startled, leaned away. She remembered the way he would lecture, pacing the room, his Converse sneakers squeaking on the wood floors.
“For some women it might be,” Eva said.
He smiled and took a sip of his beer. “She met someone else and had an affair. My father heard rumors and hired a private detective who took photos of her at a motel with the man. Then he confronted her. I was ten or so. My brother was twelve.”
His father spoke to his lawyer about divorce, and his mother knew it was coming: the loss of everything she loved — the clothes, the jewelry. “According to our father, she never worried about losing us,” Dr. Harcourt said. “She worried about her Cadillac.”
Eva felt her apprehension beneath the effects of the beer. She wondered if she should offer some sympathetic comment, but she could not speak, waiting for the end of the story.
“Not many people acknowledge the other side of this grim tale,” Dr. Harcourt said.
“Her side,” Eva said, her voice an underwater sound. The barista steamed milk and roasted beans. Customers came in, and maybe they were Eva’s neighbors, or not.
“What she endured from him — this pillar of society, this much-loved man. Those nights he berated her, accused her of things she had yet to do, ripped her clothing from the closet and drove it in the car to Goodwill. Deprived her access to the bank account so we had no money for food. These things happened — I remember them happening. And still, she stayed.”
“Like Griselda?” Eva said, confused.
“I’m not sure what the breaking point was,” he responded, drumming his fingers on the table.
“Maybe the man she met was kind. Maybe she wanted a bit of happiness for herself.”
Dr. Harcourt drank his beer in one long swallow. Eva saw his throat move. His hands cradled the empty glass. “She hired some thug to kill him. He came into the house and waited for my father to return from work one evening and he bludgeoned him to death.”
Eva felt the cold of the glass move through her arm, down the length of her torso. “Is this all true, Dr. Harcourt?”
“It’s a notorious local story,” he said. “And please, call me James.”
He’d asked her to do that before, and she had, to please him. But to do so now would take her back to that time with him — the closeness they’d forged driving the grid of streets, having sex in the empty day-lit parks where at night students gathered, negotiating with their money and their fake IDs and pharmaceuticals. She knew it would not take much to close the gap the years had formed between them.