The Wife Between Us(3)
TWO
The shriek of Aunt Charlotte’s teakettle awakens me. Weak sunlight sneaks through the slats of the blinds, casting faint stripes across my body as I lay curled in a fetal position. How can it be morning already? Even after months of sleeping alone in a twin—not the king I once shared with Richard—I still lie only on the left side. The sheets beside me are cool. I am making room for a ghost.
Morning is the worst time because, for a brief moment, my brain is clear. The reprieve is so cruel. I huddle under the patchwork quilt, feeling as if a heavy weight is pinning me here.
Richard is probably with my pretty young replacement right now, his navy-blue eyes fixed on her as his fingertips trace the curve of her cheek. Sometimes I can almost hear him saying the sweet things he used to whisper to me.
I adore you. I’m going to make you so happy. You are my world.
My heart throbs, each steady beat almost painful. Deep breaths, I remind myself. It doesn’t work. It never works.
When I’ve watched the woman Richard left me for, I’m always struck by how soft and innocent she is. So like me when Richard and I first met and he would cup my face between his palms, as gently as if it were a delicate flower he was afraid of damaging.
Even in those early, heady months, it sometimes seemed as if it—he—were a bit scripted. But it didn’t matter. Richard was caring, charismatic, and accomplished. I fell in love with him almost immediately. And I never doubted that he loved me, too.
He is finished with me now, though. I’ve moved out of our four-bedroom colonial home with its arched doorways and rich green sweep of lawn. Three of those bedrooms remained empty throughout our marriage, but the maid still cleaned them every week. I always found an excuse to leave the house when she opened those doors.
The wailing of an ambulance twelve stories below finally prompts me to get out of bed. I shower, then blow-dry my hair, noticing my roots are visible. I pull a box of Clairol Caramel Brown from under the sink to remind myself to touch them up tonight. Gone are the days when I paid—no, when Richard paid—hundreds of dollars for a cut and color.
I open the antique cherrywood armoire that Aunt Charlotte purchased at the GreenFlea Market and refurbished herself. I used to have a walk-in closet bigger than the room in which I now stand. Racks of dresses organized by color and season. Stacks of designer jeans in various states of distressed denim. A rainbow of cashmere lining one wall.
Those items never meant much to me. I usually just wore yoga pants and a cozy sweater. Like a reverse commuter, I changed into a more stylish ensemble shortly before Richard came home.
Now, though, I am grateful that when Richard asked me to leave our Westchester house, I took a few suitcases of my finer clothes. As a sales associate at Saks on the designer-label third floor, I depend on commissions, so it is vital I project an aspirational image. I stare at the dresses lined up in the armoire with an almost military precision and select a robin’s-egg-colored Chanel. One of the signature buttons is dented, and it hangs more loosely than the last time I wore it, a lifetime ago. I don’t need a scale to inform me I’ve lost too much weight; at five feet six, I have to take in even my size 4s.
I enter the kitchen, where Aunt Charlotte is eating Greek yogurt with fresh blueberries, and kiss her, the skin on her cheek feeling as soft as talcum powder.
“Vanessa. Sleep well?”
“Yes,” I lie.
She stands at her kitchen counter, barefoot and in her loose tai chi outfit, peering through her glasses as she scratches out a grocery list on the back of an old envelope between spoonfuls of her breakfast. For Aunt Charlotte, momentum is the key to emotional health. She’s always urging me to join her for a stroll through SoHo, or an art lecture at the Y, or a film at Lincoln Center . . . but I’ve learned activity doesn’t help me. After all, obsessive thoughts can follow you anywhere.
I nibble a piece of whole-grain toast and tuck an apple and a protein bar in my bag for lunch. I can tell Aunt Charlotte is relieved I’ve landed a job, and not just because it seems as if I am finally getting better. I’ve disrupted her lifestyle; normally she spends mornings in an extra bedroom that doubles as her art studio, spreading rich oils onto canvases, creating dreamy worlds that are so much more beautiful than the one we inhabit. But she’ll never complain. When I was a little girl and my mom needed what I thought of as her “lights-out days,” I’d call Aunt Charlotte, my mother’s older sister. All it took was the whispered words “She’s resting again,” and my aunt would appear, dropping her overnight bag on the floor and reaching out with paint-stained hands, folding me into an embrace that smelled of linseed oil and lavender. Without children of her own, she had the flexibility to design her own life. It was my great fortune that she put me at the center of it when I needed her most.
“Brie . . . pears . . .” Aunt Charlotte murmurs as she jots the items on her list, her handwriting full of loops and swirls. Her steel-gray hair is swept up in a messy bun, and the eclectic place setting before her—a cobalt-blue glass bowl, a chunky purple pottery mug, a silver spoon—looks like the inspiration for a still-life painting. Her three-bedroom apartment is expansive since Aunt Charlotte and my uncle Beau, who died years ago, bought in this neighborhood before real-estate prices skyrocketed, but it has the feel of a funky old farmhouse. The wood floors slope and creak, and every room is painted a different color—buttercup yellow, sapphire blue, mint green.