Things Withered (21 page)

It was like that, except that there was no money in the envelope, just some photographs that would damn Tom to hell forever.

But her, too.

And his wife.

Oh god, his poor wife.

Laura had only ever seen her in the flesh twice, both times viewed through hair hung over her face as though the woman would take one look and somehow know.
You! You there!
The wife (Betty, her name was Betty) was lovely, in an older woman sort of way, with blonde hair carefully dyed and a figure kept trim. At the time Laura hadn’t spent her time thinking those things, although she’d viewed her critically and judged her fairly on her shape, comportment and fashion sense, none of which had she come up short on. She was a good-looking woman for all her fifty years, and could have passed for less.

What she really remembered was her laugh.

The wife (Betty?
Betty
) had dropped by to pick up Tom for lunch. He hadn’t warned Laura at all, so perhaps it had been a surprise. (That was what she had told herself and she’d never had the heart to ask, didn’t want to hear that it wasn’t a surprise, didn’t want to hear about little domestic intimacies such as dropping by to take your husband for lunch.) Betty was, of course, well known in the office, Tom being a senior vice. As she made her way through the office she paused to chat with other senior people, and at each desk had laughed or made someone else laugh, as though she hadn’t a care in the world, as though—and at the time this was a fact, Laura would have staked her life on it, really truly—her husband wasn’t about to turn her in for a younger model (specifically, Laura). She’d moved swiftly past Laura’s cubicle, without knowledge, and had stopped in the broad hallway not fifty paces from Laura’s chair and talked to Mr. Devereaux, another senior vice. Her perfume lingered.

Anaïs.

Or Chanel. Something like that. Soft. Probably expensive.

Her laugh had been the laugh of a bright and funny woman, empowered and pleased with her place in the universe. Someone’s wife.

(Except she was more than that and Laura didn’t like to think about it, but she was the director of marketing at some upscale pharmaceutical downtown. And the mother to Tom’s sons.)

The second time she saw her was by accident, coming out of the building at the end of the day, walking with Janine and them, happy the day was over, and she saw the wife (Betty, her name is Betty) in the car. Tom’s car. A car she’d had sex in, with a pearl rosary that danced from the rear view mirror with every thrust. The woman was sitting in the driver’s side, her head resting lightly on the headrest, blonde hair slightly mussed, otherwise perfect in a little beige suit. Laura had been wearing a too-short skirt with a blouse that had a Peter Pan collar—in the morning she’d felt it whimsical and smart, and suddenly it seemed an embarrassing, poor choice, a failure. The wife’s (Betty’s) eyes had been half-closed, waiting for her husband to leave so they could drive home together, have dinner with their sons, probably watch a little television while the boys did their homework. Later, maybe they’d make love

(Laura knew the underside of the driver’s seat most intimately. She could pick the steering wheel out of a line-up, if she had to. Knew the markings and odd stains on the floor mat on that side. She’d viewed it all a lot of times, her head in Tom’s lap.)

The wife hadn’t seen her. And if she had, would it have made a difference? An office girl among four others.

It would make a difference after tomorrow.

Laura had done one other thing after spontaneously booking her two weeks at the beach, renting a cottage sight unseen. She had sat down at her computer and very carefully, using her daybook when she had to, compiled a list of dates.

Trysts, rendezvous, assignations. When she could, she supplied snaps for visual backup.
Do you remember the conference the company had in Miami, Mrs. Freeman?
The photo was a selfie of the two of them on the balcony of the hotel,
snap
; the two of them cuddled close and grinning lovers’ grins.
Snap
. Because that photo could have been a friendly shot of two people during an office conference on business, she also supplied another—a shot of Tom coming out of the shower, laughing, a towel dangling just in front, conspicuously casually.
Snap.

Mrs. Freeman, the trip to Saratoga Springs wasn’t “no wives.”
A snap of the two of them taken by a waiter in another hotel, the second night of the conference. (She’d spent the day cooped up in the hotel and refused to have sex with him until he took her out; she didn’t put that in the letter.)

I went with him on the Merchant junket.

Here we are at Niagara Falls.

Check his credit card statement for August of last year. He brought me a pair of earrings from Arizona. Real jade.

But the worst one, the very worst one, was the picture of Tom making a kissy face to her. A day trip to Rochester. In their car, the rosary swinging with the motion of the car, just slightly out of focus.

Oh god.

She hadn’t intended to do anything with the list, not really, hadn’t thought beyond the statement of it, made to herself a sort of reckoning of their time together. But still, she printed it off her computer and folded it neatly into three parts, carefully placing the snaps—her snaps—of the two of them, or just of him, into the middle of the folds. She’d addressed the envelope.

Betty Freeman.

Personal and Confidential.

And like Janet Leigh, had simply stuck the list in the envelope and walked away.

Thing was, after writing it all out like that—it had taken most of the afternoon, what with doing her regular work at the same time and switching screens whenever someone of note moved past her cubicle—she had been spent. There had been no
after
. The after had been much like the after from sex, when you no longer feel the need. Few things are as over as sex, that way.

Except maybe writing an incriminating letter to your ex-lover’s wife and adding a few snaps to make it all real.

She’d put the envelope somewhere on her desk and gathered her things up to leave for the day. Her heart at the time was pounding and she ached in every joint, like an old woman. Her stomach hurt. Mary Ellen had asked her about her plans for the evening and she’d said something about Lean Cuisine. The two of them had walked to the elevator. Susie showed up and said it was raining. The three of them left the building with their sweaters over their hair, handbags lofted in the air like flags.

The letter on her desk.

Mail room picked it up around seven. Of course.

There was no way she could stay in the cottage and brood about the facts any longer. It was very late by then, but there would be no sleep. There would be nothing but great black holes of guilt and the horrible twisting of her stomach, her body getting hot and obvious every time she allowed herself to think.

She would be fired, of course. And while she didn’t sign the letter, her face was in most of the pictures. She didn’t think for a minute that the wife (Betty) would remember her from office visits or from the street, or even from the annual end-of-year, lame company get-togethers. But she would make it her business to find out who she was.

And she would be fired.

It wasn’t even car payments, rent, VISA; it was two years building some kind of job equity. A reference. Getting another job.

(also car payments VISA rent)

There were times when she could hardly breathe.

The night was utterly silent. The few cottages that were occupied had lights on inside, but she swore she didn’t see anyone in chairs, no blue glow from portable televisions, no one casually strolling to the kitchen. The cottages that were unoccupied had looked lonely and sad in the daytime, but in the night without the sun shining over them, they seemed more sinister, more desperate for human company. Or company of any sort.

He, of course,
he
would be punished for nothing. The company would never know. It was unlikely she (Betty, her name is Betty) would leave him—they had small children, a life together. Instead, it would just eat away at their marriage until everything she said to him had an ugly edge to it, until eventually that would just be the way they communicated and their little boys would grow up hearing that loveless, pained and angry tone and in some kind of cosmic circle, probably cheat on their wives because of it. That’s how it had worked in her family.

Laura kept her eyes forward and followed the road. Even if there turned out to be no one on the beach, the beach was familiar enough. The walk was twenty minutes of her time.

She remembered what the woman at the store had told her—that west beach was a night beach. A night beach. It was a strange idea that didn’t matter anyway, but it did mean that there might be other voices there, that could drown out the horrible in her head.

Even focusing on the road, watching the light play between streetlamps and the way the moon looked on the water, the way it shimmered there, jumping from swell to swell, she still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was somehow obvious. There was a book in high school, by some dead author that she hadn’t liked much—
Silas Marner? The one with Heathcliff?
—where the woman was marked for her adultery with a big A on her chest. She felt like that: as though you could tell by looking at her, not only that she had sinned, but that she had
told.

Maybe they would get a divorce. It wasn’t like someone like her (Betty) needed the rent money.

It took a moment for Laura to recognize voices, as she got closer to the beach. She was used to hearing sound coming over the lake, and at first she thought it was that. As she got closer to the west beach, she realized the voices were closer. She pulled her cover-up a little tighter around her—feeling suddenly shy—and shifted her bag to her other arm. Other than the people at the store, she hadn’t spoken to a single soul since she’d arrived.

(Once, they’d walked with a bag and picnic lunch. Out of town, of course. She’d brought what she thought was a lovely surprise.

Laura, what’s this?

It’s a bottle of wine. For later.

We’re at Martha’s Vineyard, for chrissakes.

Oh.

He’d rolled his eyes, but said it was cute. She suspected he was lying.

Probably tomorrow she wouldn’t seem quite so young-dumb-silly and that was maybe the only good thing but at too large a cost.
See ya,
Kiddo.
)

She rounded the corner and fumbled only briefly in the dark for the path. Down below there was definitely the low rumble of voices.

It didn’t seem at all like the beach she had visited during the day. In the dark, the beach seemed to glow, the full moon on the fair sand, the lights on the water. Light seemed to come from everywhere, and she realized that the lone streetlamp at the top of the path filtered down to where there were a dozen or more people on the normally deserted sand.

At the bottom of the path, the black dog from days earlier bounded up to her. He barked loudly, startling her, his tail wagging. He leaned low and jumped up on his paws before rounding in his loop, heading back towards the water. She laughed nervously.

A young man saw her and smiled. “Hey,” he said. He held out his hand to help her over the few large rocks that cluttered the last couple of feet to the beach. She took it, laughing self-consciously.

“Is that your dog?” she said.

He shook his head. “His name is Rider.” He pointed to the water where the dog had run. There were people in the water, most of them having waded in only up to their knees or so.

“The water’s pretty cold,” he said.

He wore a half wetsuit, the sort that people wore when they surfed or dived. He was young, about her age. Handsome in a beach sort of way, with sandy hair and a tan, even in the dark.

“Are you surfing?” she said.

He shook his head. “Lost my board. Just a boogie board. Might look for it later.” He shrugged. He nodded at her, almost formally. “Welcome,” he said. And then he turned and jogged back to the water’s edge.

Rider barked, and no one paid much attention.

It was almost like a party.

People milled about and spoke in low tones, as seemed fitting for the hour. It had an elegance to it, and a kind of beauty. But it was an odd assortment of people. There seemed to be no fixed groups, everyone mingled together. Laura wondered who was with who, but didn’t ask.

She chatted with a girl from the city who wasn’t dressed for the beach, in fancy capri pants and a top with shimmery threads through it, like the water. Another girl, Jessie, was dressed similarly. She had been at a party, she told Laura. A set of car keys dangled from one pretty, manicured hand. Her words were a little bit slurred and Laura wondered if she had been drinking. Now and then the girl jangled the keys. Laura asked her if they were staying in town, and the girl looked confused.

“I don’t think so,” she said. For a brief second her expression was very confused, her forehead bunched. It didn’t last and she brightened up and said, “I
love
this song! Don’t you love this song? I’m going to crank it!” She jumped happily and ran down to the water.

Except there was no song, no music played and Laura decided that the girl was drunk.

It was chillier by the water than on the cliff road. The wind came up across the water and you could feel it. She shivered under her cover-up.

The water’s edge was definitely where the action was. Standing around in the shore was an old guy, about fifty, with an enormous gut, smoking a cigar; a lady with a little kid, who kept pulling off her water wings, protesting when her mother kept tugging them back on; the guy who lost his boogie board; an extremely attractive couple wearing nothing but their bathing suits in spite of the chill, walked hand in hand up and down the beach. Laura caught a little of what they were saying as they passed.

“—up to sixty—” he said.