When she told him about Olivia Korhonen’s behavior at the Bridge Group, he seemed hardly to hear her. In his usual style of picking up in the middle of the intended sentence, he mumbled, “… take that damn game so damn seriously. Bud and I don’t go yelling we’re going to kill each other”-Bud Gorko was his steady golf partner-“and believe you me, I’ve got reason sometimes.” He snatched a beer out of the refrigerator and wandered into the living room to watch TV.
Mattie followed him in, the second G &T strengthening a rare resolve to make him take her seriously. She said, “She did it twice. You didn’t see her face.” She raised her voice to carry over the yammering of a commercial. “She meant it, Don. I’m telling you, she meant it.”
Don smiled muzzily and patted the sofa seat beside him. “Hear you, I’m right on it. Tell you what-she goes ahead and does that, I’m going to take a really dim view. A dim view.” He liked the phrase. “Really dim view.”
“You’re dim enough already,” Mattie said. Don did not respond. She stood watching him for a few minutes without speaking, because she knew it made him uncomfortable. When he got to the stage of demanding, “What? What?” she walked out of the room and into the guest bedroom, where she lay down. She had been sleeping there frequently enough in recent months that it felt increasingly like her own.
She had thought she would surely dream of Olivia Korhonen, but it was only in the sweet spot between consciousness and sleep that the woman’s face came to her: the long mouth curling almost affectionately, almost seductively, as though for a kiss, caressing the words that Mattie could not hear. It was an oddly tranquil, even soothing vision, and Mattie fell asleep like a child, and did not dream at all.
The next morning she felt curiously young and hopeful, though she could not imagine why. Don had gone off to work at the real estate office with his normal Monday hangover, pitifully savage; but Mattie indulged herself with a long hot shower, a second toasted English muffin, and a long telephone chat with a much-relieved Virginia Schlossberg before she went to the grocery store. There would be an overdue hair appointment after that, then home in time for Oprah. A good day.
The sense of serenity lasted through the morning shopping, through her favorite tea-and-brioche snack at La Place, and on to her date with Mr. Philip at the salon. It ended abruptly while she was more than half drowsing under the dryer, trying to focus on Vanity Fair, as well as on the buttery jazz on the PA system, when Olivia Korhonen’s equally pleasant voice separated itself from the music, saying, “Mrs. Whalen-Mattie? How nice to see you here, partner.” The last word flicked across Mattie’s skin like a brand.
Olivia Korhonen was standing directly in front of her, smiling in her familiar guileless manner. She had clearly just finished her appointment: the glinting warmth and shine of her blond hair made that plain, and made Mattie absurdly envious, her own mouse-brown curls’ only distinction being their comb-snapping thickness. Olivia Korhonen said, “Shall we play next week? I look forward so.”
“Yes,” Mattie said faintly; and then, “I mean, I’m not sure-I have things. To do. Maybe.” Her voice squeaked and slipped. She couldn’t stop it, and in that moment she hated her voice more than she had ever hated anything in the world.
“Oh, but you must be there! I do not know anyone else to play with.” Mattie noticed a small dimple to the left of Olivia Korhonen’s mouth when she smiled in a certain way. “I mean, no one else who will put up with my bad playing, as you do. Please?”
Mattie found herself nodding, just to keep from having to speak again-and also, to some degree, because of the genuine urgency in Olivia Korhonen’s voice. Maybe I imagined the whole business… maybe it’s me getting old and scared, the way people do. She nodded a second time, with somewhat more enthusiasm.
Olivia Korhonen patted her knee through the protective salon apron, plainly relieved. “Oh, good. I already feel so much better.” Then, without changing her expression in the least, she whispered, “I will kill you.”
Mattie thought later that she must have fainted in some way; at all events, her next awareness was of Mr. Philip taking the curlers out of her hair and brushing her off. Olivia Korhonen was gone. Mr. Philip peered at her, asking, “Who’s been keeping you up at night, darling? You never fall asleep under these things.” Then he saw her expression and asked, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Mattie said. “I’m fine.”
After that, it seemed to her that she saw Olivia Korhonen everywhere, every day. She was coming out of the dry cleaners’ as Mattie brought an armload of Don’s pants in; she hurried across the street to direct Mattie as she was parking her car; she asked Mattie’s advice buying produce at the farmers’ market, or broke off a conversation with someone else to chat with Mattie on the street. And each time, before they parted, would come the silent words, more menacing for being inaudible, “I will kill you.” The dimple beside the long smile always showed as she spoke.
Mattie had never felt so lonely in her life. Despite all the years she and Don had lived in Moss Harbor, there was no one in her local circle whom she could trust in any sort of intimate crisis, let alone with something like a death threat. Suzanne or Eileen? Out of the question-things like that simply did not happen to members of the Bridge Group. There was Virginia, of course… Virginia might very well believe her, if anyone did, but would be bound to fall apart under the burden of such knowledge. That left only going further afield and contacting Patricia.
Pat Gallagher lived directly across the bay, in a tiny incorporated area called Witness Point. Mattie had known her very nearly as long as she had known Virginia, but the relationships could not have been more different. Pat was gay, for one thing; and while Mattie voted for every same-sex-marriage and hate-crimes proposition that came up on any ballot, she was honest enough to know that she was ill at ease with homosexuals. She could never explain this, and was truly ashamed of it, especially around someone as intelligent and thoughtful as Pat Gallagher. She found balance in distance, only seeing Pat two or three times a year, at most, and sometimes no more than once. They did e-mail a reasonable amount though, and they talked on the phone enough that Mattie still knew the number by heart. She called it now.
They arranged to meet at Pat’s house for lunch on the weekend. She lived in a shingly, flowery, cluttery cottage, in company with a black woman named Babs, an administrator at the same hospital where Pat was a nurse. Mattie liked Babs immediately, and was therefore doubly nervous around her, and doubly shamed, especially when Babs offered in so many words to disappear graciously, so that she and Pat could talk in private. Mattie would have much preferred this, but the very suggestion made it impossible. “I’m sure there’s nothing I have to say to Patricia that I couldn’t say to you.”
Babs laughed. “That you may come to regret, my dear.” But she set out second glasses of pinot grigio, and second bowls of Pat’s minestrone, and sat down with them. Her dark-brown skin and soft curly hair contrasted so perfectly with Pat’s freckled Irish pinkness and they seemed so much at ease with one another that Mattie felt a quick, startling stitch of what could only have been envy.