The Wife Between Us(82)

I became acutely aware of my surroundings. I cultivated my sense of gaze detection, to avoid becoming prey. The sensation of static rising over my skin, the instinctual lifting of my head to search out a pair of eyes—these early-warning signs were what I relied upon to protect me.

I never made the connection that there could have been another reason why my nervous system became exquisitely heightened immediately after my engagement to Richard. Why I obsessively checked my locks, why I started getting hang-ups from blocked numbers, why I’d pushed Richard away so hard when my loving, sexy fiancé had held me down to tickle me on the night we watched Citizen Kane.

The symptoms of arousal and fear can be muddled in the mind.

I was wearing a blindfold after all.





CHAPTER





THIRTY




I exit Saks for the last time, avoiding the security guard’s eyes when he checks my bag, then I begin to walk to Emma’s apartment. I try to tell myself that it is also for the last time. That after this, I will leave her alone. I will move on.

Move on to what? my mind whispers.

Ahead of me on the sidewalk, a couple strolls hand in hand. Their fingers are interlaced, and their gaits are in sync. If I had to make a snap determination of the quality of their relationship, I would say they are happy. In love. But, of course, those two feelings are not always intertwined.

I consider how perception has shaped the course of my own life; how I saw what I wanted to—needed to—during the years I was with Richard. Maybe being in love carries the requirement of filtered vision; perhaps it is so for everyone.

In my marriage, there were three truths, three alternate and sometimes competing realities. There was Richard’s truth. There was my truth. And there was the actual truth, which is always the most elusive to recognize. This could be the case in every relationship, that we think we’ve entered into a union with another person when, in fact, we’ve formed a triangle with one point anchored by a silent but all-seeing judge, the arbiter of reality.

As I stride past the couple, my phone rings. I know who it is before I even see Richard’s name flash.

“What the fuck, Vanessa?” he says the moment I answer.

The fury I’d felt earlier when I looked at Duke’s photo comes roaring back to me. “Did you tell her to stop working, Richard? Did you tell her you’d take care of her?” I blurt out.

“Listen to me.” My ex-husband bites off each word. In the background on his end, I can hear honking. He obviously just received the photograph, so he must be on the street outside his office. “The guard told me you tried to deliver something to Emma. Stay the hell away from her.”

“Bought her a house in the suburbs yet, Richard?” I can’t stop goading him; it’s as though I’m letting out everything I was forced to repress during our marriage. “What are you going to do the first time she makes you mad? When she isn’t your perfect little wife?”

I hear a car door slam, and suddenly the background sounds on his phone—the city’s ambient noises—cease. There’s a hush, then a distinct voice I recognize as one that runs on a loop on New York Taxi TV: “Buckle up for safety!”

Richard is adept at being a move ahead of me; he must know exactly where I’m going. He’s in a cab. He’s trying to get to Emma first.

It’s not even noon; traffic is light. From Richard’s office to Emma’s apartment is maybe a fifteen-minute drive, I estimate.

But I’m closer to it than he is; my trip to Saks took me in the direction of her place. I’m just ten blocks away. If I hurry, I’ll beat him. I quicken my pace, feeling for the letter in my purse. It’s still there. A breeze tingles across the light perspiration on my body.

“You’re insane.”

I ignore this; those words from him no longer have the power to derail me. “Did you tell her you kissed me last night?”

“What?” he shouts. “You kissed me!”

For a moment my pace falters, then I recall what I said to Emma the first time I confronted her: Richard does this! He confuses things so we can’t see the truth!

It took me years to figure that out. Only by writing down all the questions that were battering my mind did I begin to see a pattern.

I started about a year after my mother’s death. I began to keep a secret diary that I hid under the mattress in the guest room. In my black Moleskine notebook, I logged all the statements Richard made that could be construed in more than one way. I recorded the supposed lapses in my memory—big discrepancies, such as my wanting to live in a house in the suburbs, or the morning after my bachelorette party, when I’d forgotten Richard was flying to Atlanta—as well as smaller ones, such as my supposedly mentioning I wanted to take a painting class, or thinking lamb vindaloo was Richard’s favorite dish.

I also painstakingly documented unsettling conversations I couldn’t ask my husband about—such as how he knew I’d gone to see someone other than my aunt when I’d secretly traveled into the city. I wrote down some of what had happened during that first clandestine meeting. After I’d introduced myself to the sympathetic-looking woman who’d ushered me inside, she’d gestured for me to sit on the couch across from an aquarium filled with colorful fish. She took the upholstered straight-back chair to my left and told me to call her Kate. What would you like to talk about? she asked. Sometimes I worry I don’t know my husband at all, I blurted. Can you tell me why you think Richard is trying to keep you off-balance? she asked toward the end of our discussion. What would his motivation be for this?