Lady in the Lake(52)

The movers carried a green silk sofa into the van. Maddie had lost her virginity on that sofa the summer she was seventeen. “Can’t you stay a little later?” he had asked. “There’s going to be an eclipse tonight. That’s practically a once-in-a-lifetime event. And I know your parents never worry when you’re here with me.”

No, they never did. Even at seventeen, Maddie understood how ironic this was.

Two months later, in the fall, she met Milton. Of course he had assumed she was a virgin, and she saw no reason to contradict him. She was and she wasn’t. She was someone new, a different Maddie. If anything, she felt more innocent, younger for having been defiled and tricked by an older man, who had no compunction about using words to talk her out of what people claimed was her greatest gift, her singular asset to offer a man, the only dowry that still mattered.

Did Cleo Sherwood have a boyfriend? Everyone said no, but casual dates didn’t give a girl an ermine stole. Cherchez l’homme. Maddie was going to find Cleo’s lover, this married man, demand answers. It would make up for her lack of nerve when she was seventeen and she failed, again and again, in her resolve to introduce herself to her lover’s wife.

Of course, his wife already knew her, but only as her son’s classmate, the girl he had dated, asked to the prom, then dumped. The girl whose portrait her husband was painting in his studio. The resulting painting was stiff, absent of her vitality and charm. Absent of all the qualities he said he saw in her, when he put his brushes down and made love to her, again and again and again, the summer she was seventeen.





The Moviegoer





The Moviegoer



I swear I have never done anything like that in my life. It was not a plan. Okay, yes, it was a plan to sit next to her. I have my choice of seats, after all. The theater isn’t crowded and I usually don’t like to be that close to the screen. It hurts my neck, my eyes. But I see her go in with the couple, almost like their chaperone, then leave them to the back row as she moves down front. I follow, sitting across the aisle, then moving next to her after the cartoon, just as the feature begins.

I am—I don’t want to tell you what I do. I’m respectable, trust me on that. I am a good man, a good provider. Yes, I am married, but my wife is cold to me. She has always been cold to me. I don’t think she likes me. I ask her sometimes, “Do you like me?” and she says, “I love you,” as if that’s better, as if that should be enough. But it’s not. I need her to like me, too, to laugh at my jokes, to seem less put-upon by my general existence. When I come home at the end of the day, my wife seems to find my very presence in the house an imposition. A nice house, that I pay for. It reminds me of the old myth, Cupid and Psyche, only she can’t be bothered to try to steal a look at me as I sleep. She’d be fine, being married to the monster, as long as he brought home a paycheck.

So, sometimes, I tell her I have to work late and I go to the movies or stop in somewhere for a drink. But you have to believe me: I have never, ever done anything like what I do tonight. And what I do, is it really that big a deal? I touch a leg, a knee, outside her clothes. Her skirt is short, which is why I make contact with her actual knee. I’m not planning to touch her, I’m not, but then something happens to her breathing. It slows, almost in invitation. It seems sensual to me, although the scene playing out in front of us is not particularly romantic. She smells so good, not of perfume, but of something more organic, some innate essence that is better than perfume or shampoo or soap. It’s like walking past a flowering shrub in a neighbor’s yard, just over the fence, but maybe a few blossoms are trying to escape. First, you want nothing but to smell it. You lean forward, inhale. It’s impossible not to touch it, rub your finger along one silky, velvety petal, release pollen into the air. Then, if the neighbor doesn’t come, you cross the line, you actually pluck it and take it with you. Hasn’t everyone done this?

I don’t go that far. I touch her knee. A friendly touch, a glancing touch, possibly accidental. I wait. For a moment, it seems as if she’s considering touching me back. I can feel her thoughts, the way she weighs her options. She puts my hand back in my own lap, but gently, sweetly even.

And then she begins screaming her head off.

Luckily, I know the neighborhood, know the theater. I run out of the fire exit, near the screen, which lets off into an alley. Once outside, I’m too cagey to keep running. They will be looking for someone who is trying to get away. I take out a cigarette, my hands shaking just a little, and light it, leaning against the rear of the Chinese restaurant next door, inhaling more grease than nicotine. I see a man come out, two women behind him, watch them look up and down the alley. I look straight at them, smoking as nonchalantly as possible.

They walk toward the street, but they’re less urgent now, not so much looking for the perpetrator but trying to comfort the woman, the couple bookending her, taking her arms as if she’s an invalid. I want to yell after them, All I did was touch her knee.

I go home. My wife is sitting at the kitchen table, working the Jumble. A kids’ game and it takes her almost twenty minutes to do it.

“How was work,” she says, not looking up, not even letting her tone go up. It’s not a question. It’s just something you’re supposed to say when your husband comes home. She has less affect in her voice than the robot maid on The Jetsons.