In the office, when the light dimmed early in the day. In the winter. Before they were together. She must have looked at the shadows on her desk and felt like a person lost in the forest.
If she thought that, she never said it.
Did she confide in Charlie?
To some extent. She and Charlie palled around together before she became involved with Andrew. Afterwards, too, a little. She was always consulted when he needed to buy a new tie.
Did Charlie go to the wedding?
There was no wedding. It was a civil ceremony.
Where did they go on their honeymoon?
Paris. He always wanted to see Paris.
But his wife went to Paris.
That was just coincidence, and besides, she wasn’t there at the same time. By then she was his ex-wife. Jeanette never knew that his wife had been to Paris.
What things did he not know?
That she once lost two hundred dollars in a cab. That she did a self-examination of her breasts twice a day. She hid her dislike of the dog, which they had gotten at his insistence, from the pound. The dog was a chewer.
When an image of Andrew came to mind, what was it?
Andrew at forty, when she first met him. She felt sorry that he had a mole on his cheekbone, but later came to love it. Sometimes, after his death, the mole would fill the whole world of her dream. At least that is what she thought it was — a gray mass like a mountain, seen from the distance, then closer and closer until it became amorphous and she was awake, gripping the sheet. It was a nightmare, obviously, not a dream. Though she called it a dream.
Who is Berry McKenn?
A woman he had a brief flirtation with. Nothing of importance.
Why do storytellers start to tell one story and then tell another?
Life is a speeding train. Storytellers get derailed too.
What did Andrew see when he conjured up Jeanette?
Her green eyes. That startled look, as if the eyes had a life of their own, and were surprised to be bracketing so long a nose.
What else is there to say about their life together?
There is something of an anecdote about the watercooler. It disappeared once, and it was noticeably absent, as if someone had removed a geyser. The surprise on people’s faces when they stared at the empty corner of the corridor was really quite astonishing. Jeanette went to meet Andrew there the day the repairman took it away. They made it a point, several times a day, to meet there as if by accident. One of the other girls who worked there — thinking Charlie was her friend, which he certainly was not: he was Jeanette’s friend — had seen the watercooler being removed, and she whispered slyly to Charlie that it would be amusing when Jeanette strolled away from her desk, and Andrew left his office moments later with great purpose in his step and holding his blue pottery mug, because they would be standing in an empty corridor, with their prop gone and their cover blown.
What did Charlie say?
Jeanette asked him that too, when he reported the conversation. “They’re in love,” he said. “You might not want to think it, but a little thing like that isn’t going to be a setback at all.” He felt quite triumphant about taking a stand, though there’s room for skepticism, of course. What people say is one thing, and what they later report they have said is another.
HOME TO MARIE
My wife, Marie, has decided to give a party — a catered party — and invite old friends and also some new people and the neighbors on the left, the ones we speak to. Just before the caterer arrives there’s a telephone call from Molly Vandergrift, to say that her daughter’s temperature is a hundred and two, and that she and her husband won’t be able to come, after all. I can see my wife’s disappointment as she consoles Molly. And then, a few seconds after the call, Molly’s husband’s car peels out of the drive. My thought, when I hear a car streaking off, is always that a person is leaving home. My wife’s explanation is more practicaclass="underline" he’s going to get medicine.
My wife herself has left home two times in the three years we’ve been reconciled. Once she left in a rage, and another time she extended her visit to a friend’s house in Wyoming from one week to six, and although she did not really say that she wasn’t coming back, I couldn’t get her to make a plane reservation, couldn’t get her to say she missed me, let alone that she loved me. I’ve done wrong things. I’ve bought myself expensive new cars and passed off my old ones on her; I’ve lost money gambling; I’ve come home late for dinner a hundred times. But I never left my wife. She was the one who moved out the time we were going to get divorced. And after we reconciled she was the one who tore off in the car as a finale to a disagreement.
These things bubble up from time to time; some little thing will remind me of all the times she’s left, or threatened to leave. Or she’ll want something we can’t afford and she’ll look at me with what I call her stunned-rabbit eyes. For the most part, we try hard to be cheerful, though. She’s been looking for work, I come straight home at the end of the day, and we’ve worked out the problem with the remote control for the TV: I give it to her for an hour, she gives it to me for an hour. We don’t tend to watch more than two hours of TV a night.
Tonight there won’t be any TV at all, because of the cocktail party. Right now, the caterer’s car is double-parked in front of our house, and the caterer — a woman — is carrying things in, helped by a teenage boy who is probably her son. He’s as glum as she is cheerful. My wife and she give each other an embrace, all smiles. She darts in and out, carrying trays.
My wife says, “I wonder if I should go out and help,” and then answers by saying, “No — I hired her to do it.” Then she’s smiling to herself. “It’s a shame the Vandergrifts can’t come,” she says. “We’ll save something for them.”
I ask if I should put some music on the stereo, but my wife says no, it’ll be drowned out by the conversation. Either that or we’d have to crank it up so loud that it would bother the neighbors.
I stand in the front room and look at the caterer and the boy. He comes through the door holding one of the trays at arm’s length, carefully, like a child with a sparkler that he’s half afraid of. As I watch, Mrs. May, the neighbor we don’t speak to (she called the police one night when we went to bed and mistakenly left the light burning on the front porch), comes by with her toy poodles, Annaclair and Esther. She pretends not to notice that a caterer is carrying party food into our house. She can look right through you and make you feel like a ghost. Even the dogs have cultivated this look.
My wife asks me which person I’m most looking forward to seeing. She knows that I like Steve Newhall more than anybody else, because he’s such a cutup, but just to surprise her I say, “Oh — it’ll be nice to see the Ryans. Hear about their trip to Greece.”
She snorts. “The day you care about travel,” she says.
She’s as responsible for fights as I am. She gets that edge to her voice. I try to keep a civil tongue in tone as well as in speech. She never minds giving one of those cynical little snorts and saying something cutting, though. This time, I decide to ignore it — just ignore it.
At first I can’t figure out how come my wife and the caterer are so huggy-kissy, but as they talk I remember that my wife met the caterer at a shower in Alexandria a few months ago. The two of them are shaking their heads over some woman — not anyone I’ve met, so she must be a friend of my wife’s from back when she had her job — and saying that they’ve never heard of a doctor who let labor go on for over sixty hours. I find out, as the foil is pulled back from the deviled eggs, that the woman is fine now, and that she had her tubes tied before she left the table.