Using the excuse of work obligation, she came in on a Sunday, met him in the doorway of his building, and they walked to a service together. The reverend’s voice boomed past the microphone, reverberating hard against the stone, speaking about the elegance of grace, about the manner of forgiveness and the nature of redemption. He quoted from the book of Job:
The squares of the town forget them;
their name is no longer remembered;
so wickedness is broken like a tree.
On top of the flat pleats of her tweed skirt, tight against her spreading thighs, their hands rested, clasped firmly.
One year, from start to finish, the affair bent in a great arch, the first hints of lust building into the long lovemaking sessions at the apartment, twisting into the thick helix of obligation, the secretiveness of talk.
I want you to see the house, she said. I want you to know where I live, to get an idea. I want you to know a little bit about my life the way I know about yours. I’d like you to see my daughter. I want to kiss you on the riverbank, to implicate you into my existence. .
He rented a car, an old blue Ford — the kind of car a priest might drive — and drove across the bridge, turning up to the parkway as she had directed, exiting and following the river, crossing the town to her house, which stood up a drive — complacent-looking, just as she had described it, with its white clapboard and the lawn behind it stretching down to the water. He drove to the end of the road, to the park she had mentioned, and turned around and went past the house again. In his ribs was the clench of sadness. There was a light on in the upstairs window, behind a gauze of cotton, soft and yellowish. Her bedroom, he knew, was in the back and out of sight, facing the water.
He waited in the coffee shop for darkness to arrive, and emerged back into a soft fall evening. This time the house was silent and dark, and the car in the driveway was gone.
At the lookout off the Palisades Parkway, in her car, the lights of the Bronx a Milky Way of stars quivering in the Indian summer heat: Every year a kid falls from the Palisades here, she said, or leaps. I’ve talked to my daughter. . mouths kissing. . about it, about the dangers. . kissing, parting. . there is a reasonableness in her, there is something that still listens. .
As she left her office, the thin black skirt she wore was overcharged with static. She sprayed it and felt it lift away, but by the time she was back on the street it was recharged, clinging in wavelets to her thighs, riding along her crotch, sliding up with each step as she climbed the stairs to his apartment, where, in the wintry afternoon light, she stood before him and marched, letting the hem rise up and up her thighs until he was on his knees, clutching her waistband by the elastic.
There was the disrobing, the unveiling, the sublime exposure. The sunlight was low and cold; a bitter wind came in across Riverside. The heat in the pipes lurched and thumped, and from the steam valve there came a sputter, the sound of lips parting. He opened the window and she thought of her own house, leaking heat, the old plaster cold to the touch. It was that simple, in some ways, the wonder of the affair, the sense of lines that were drawn and redrawn: to have demarcations so clear and perfect, like lines on a map, not the regions and countries but the everlasting longitudes and latitudes; that part she retained when all else was gone.
He’s rather serious, she told a friend. Of course he has to be a bit serious, because he is studying theology. He speaks Hebrew and some Aramaic and is studying the Psalms. . but he’s funny, and not too serious, really, and you wouldn’t know from meeting him that he’s going to be a man of the cloth.
He’s funny, she told another friend. He’s lighthearted, with this nasal twang of a voice that somehow gets to me, you know, and he can turn phrases and do things that get inside me and make me feel alive.
The shame she felt came from the truth: she had been fucked and was fucking. The carnality of the affair was brutal and the main point. She wore the skirt again, electrified by the dry winter air, and let the static build as she walked along his street.
When you argue about your own story, she explained, well, that’s the end of things. As soon as we started to argue about our story, things fell apart for us.
When they tried to get God in, when he mentioned the idea of God nudging them together, the narrative, she would later think, immediately became banal and meek, rooted in the world. It was near the end. On a clear spring day the promenade urged them south. Beneath the wall that ran along Riverside Drive a man lay asleep on an old, splintered bench, his fat belly spilling from green work pants, a newspaper folded over his face. On the next bench sat another man wearing thick headphones, moving his head placidly in small rotations, as if working out an eternal kink in his neck. There was something unsettling about his deep absorption in music that could not be heard and that would never be heard.
They went down toward the river, cutting off the promenade along a thin dusty path through the weeds. He let her go a few yards ahead so he could watch her hips shifting beneath her skirt, the movement of her rear against the silk fabric, light- and dark-blue daisy-shaped flowers. There was that helplessness in her movement — from her pumps on the unsteady ground — that he enjoyed, a sense that she might tumble at any moment, and she did, twisting sideways to the right with a small grunt, and falling into the weeds.
The bone was broken — a spiral fracture — just above her ankle. With her arm around his shoulder, and his arm around hers, they hobbled up the path, along the promenade, to Riverside Drive, where they hailed a cab and went all the way up to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
In his apartment — cool with blue twilight — she lay on his bed while he ran his fingers along the soft cotton gauze, against the fiberglass, that spot where the two met. He’d remember that forever. His finger going up and in against the warmth of her foot, slipping as far as it would go.
On the way to the car, I was stepping off the curb and twisted it and the bone bore the brunt, she explained to her husband. I got a cab to this hospital and then went back to get my bag from the car. The story felt frail and feeble, like old lace; it had the gaping open spaces you’d expect, although it was made carefully, with consideration of all the angles. He chose to believe it. He let his compassion — his duty as a good husband — slip like mortar between the cracks. Much later he’d examine his foolishness and think: I was as complicit as she was in that story, driving in to pick her up, finding her standing up, leaning against the car.
A fetid, oily smell emerged from beneath the cast: sweat, dead skin, and dirt. Afternoons, she lay on a divan in the back room and read Tolstoy.