Ghosts of Manhattan: A Novel(54)

I walk past Julia’s office. Sketches of rooms in someone’s suburban home are lying out with catalog photographs of furniture and bed linens. A crib and rocker for a baby room. I keep walking to our bedroom. My suit is starting to feel like it’s made of shrinking burlap and my feet are hot in my shoes.

I hang the suit, lining up the pant creases, and fill the shoes with the shoe trees. As a kid I used to watch my father do this. I walk to the dresser to get a T-shirt, and on top of the dresser is a book with the kind of leather cover that can bend like a paperback. I recognize it as Julia’s diary and see there is a pen in the pages poking out for my attention. I flip the diary open to where the pen is and look up and down the pages without reading the words. I understand the hand is Julia’s. It feels like a stranger’s. I realize I rarely see her handwriting at all.

Before I can look away, my eyes have begun to decode words and take in sentences. I do it without thinking. Without allowing myself to think, so I can avoid the guilt that might otherwise stop me. The page is opened to an entry on December 19, 2005, and it looks like there are several more since then. She must have been rereading old entries.

I am fat. FAT! Emergency fat. So fat am I that I am mortified at the thought of Oliver seeing my giant . . .

Oliver. My eyes passing over the name knock me right off the page. I’m scrambling and unscrambling the letters to make sure that I’ve read it right. O-L-I-V-E-R. It’s actually written there, in her diary. I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. Everything about me has been threatened and is under attack. My hands are shaking and my body is weak as though I’ve had a lethal dose of caffeine. I peer back down at the diary and I find the word as though it was written in a different color ink.

. . . Oliver seeing my giant and ever-expanding ass making its way to the dinner table.

I stop again. Everything about this moment feels perverted. Maybe discovering infidelity by sneaking a look in another’s diary with drink in hand and in your own bedroom is the best way to find out.

This entry is more than a month old. My mind flashes to a confrontation with Julia coming home from the gym and me waving the diary like the prosecutor with exhibit A. That would spell the end and I know I’m no good at confrontation. Not just with Julia. I hate any kind. Some people thrive on combat, but I’m averse. I’ve been able to manage confrontation at work but never in my personal life. The stakes are too high and the damage is permanent.

I feel guilty having read any of the diary now. I’ve never read it before. Never thought about it, even when seeing the familiar binding on her nightstand or sticking out of her travel luggage. Sometimes she’d read parts to me. Unpack an old diary to read to me about her self-confessions and excitement when she got home from our first dates years ago. These are my experiences with the diary and I don’t want to contaminate them.

I lower the book. There is a strong argument that it is no violation to read the diary of a woman who has betrayed me. Or may have betrayed me. A woman who at a minimum cares enough about how fat her ass looks in front of another man to come home and write about it.

I need to read more, no matter how masochistic the impulse. My heart races with nerves and I look in the direction of the front door, which I could see only if I could look through walls. I’d make a terrible spy.

I skim pages braced for a sex scene with Oliver that she writes about wistfully, saying that but for her domestic prison and abusive husband, she could be with her true love. I skim over an encounter with a challenging client of hers and a conversation with her father that was so meaningless she got upset. Then I see

Nick hurt me last night. So deeply I may not recover. It revealed something about his view of me. Maybe it is something I need to consider, but his disgust with me was so thorough that I don’t know if we have anything left.

I check the date and it’s about the time of the Da Silvano dinner. Damn, I’m an *. I keep skimming but with less steam. There are only a few pages left anyway and then I see it.

Oliver called again. We had a long conversation and I have to admit I appreciate the attention. Where can I be honest if not here. Not sure how to handle this one.

I’m at the end of her pages and I put the diary down. There isn’t a sex scene but there’s confirmation of contact. Oliver is trying to have sex with her and she hasn’t been telling me about that. My instincts are telling me something is very bad.

I look around the bedroom and make an uncomfortable pivot of my feet, turning in a complete circle like I’m lost in the woods. I need to get out. I need to get out before she gets home. I’m in no shape to talk, no shape to be seen.

I’m in a sudden desperate rush. I need to clear the apartment, hallway, elevator, lobby, and city block before she gets near. I have pants, a sweatshirt, loafers, and a coat pulled on just enough to stay with me, and I get my keys from the dish in the foyer on the third frustrated swipe and I’m out the door. Time enough to straighten myself in the elevator.

I round out of the elevator and into the lobby with arms pumping as fast as can still be considered a walk and not a jog. Charlie sees me coming, and I can see he looks worried for me. My face is telegraphing trauma and in my mind Charlie perceives the cause and knows all. I’d appreciate talking to Charlie now but it’s more important to put distance between me and this building, as though I can hear the bursting, burping alarm sound that signals a nuclear reactor breach. I tighten my body language and stare to make sure there is no mistaking that I will leave the building without stopping to talk.