Perfection (10 page)

I listened; my brain was a wide-open portal; I felt calm. There was me, listening, and the inner caretaker of me thinking about how I should feel about what I was hearing.

My first thought:
I have to go pick up my child.
Liza was in the home of a woman who had been involved in a long affair with my now dead husband, who had used her own daughter to gain daily entry to my home, who had insinuated herself into my life, eaten my food, preened by my swimming pool, pretended to be a friend. A woman who had left a fucking fruit salad in my refrigerator.

A gun was too swift, too merciful. I wanted a sword to slit her end to end and then, with one hundred more cuts, dice her body into small pieces and leave the bloodied, quivering remains of skin, muscle, and soulless guts on her front lawn, arranged in a gruesome scarlet letter.

I couldn’t kill Henry anymore, since he was, conveniently enough, dead.

July 2003

Heat rose in waves
from the asphalt road ahead of me.

Jesusfuckingchrist

I gripped the steering wheel so hard that I veered off course.

I want to fucking kill that woman.

The road was arrow straight, alongside the railroad tracks.
slit her from her head to her fucking

Vertigo overtook me as I stared at the perfect receding vanishing point.

A summer day, two years earlier.

I had stopped by to visit Cathy’s next-door neighbor, Jenny. I drooped into one of her Adirondack chairs and gratefully accepted a glass of lemonade. Her younger children ran around the yard, supervised by their older brother. I was amazed they had
the energy in the stifling heat. The rose petals were wilting on the bushes, and the lawn was turning brown. I wiped sweat from my forehead, though we sat in the shade.

“You know, he’s over there all the time,” Jenny said, nudging her chin in the direction of Cathy’s house, whose gingerbread roof peeked over the dividing fence. She settled into another chair with her lemonade. “You don’t think there’s anything going on, do you?” She looked at me, as if embarrassed to present such an idea.

Cathy? The woman Henry had called “a gaunt hag, with oversize boobs and sloped shoulders”? These defects were severe aesthetic sins in his beauty standard book, just one level above thick ankles. Not to mention the fact that Cathy could be just plain weird and chilly. My face registered surprise.

Jenny, allegedly Cathy’s close friend, answered herself. “Yeah, ewww. Couldn’t be, right?”

But then again.

A year ago, six months before his death.

I had passed in and out of Henry’s office several times that evening, to find him involved in a lengthy phone discussion. He addressed Cathy by name in a soothing manner that signaled this was an Important Talk. At last he hung up.

“Why do you have to fix all her stupid problems?” I asked with irritation. “You should be spending time with your family, not talking to her.”

He and I never had Important Talks anymore. We talked about whether we should call the electrician to fix the ancient exposed wiring in the back hall, whether he or I would be picking Liza up from day camp that day, who was coming to dinner that weekend, what the menu would be, what we would eat that night. Food, our final connection to intimacy.

I paused, glaring at Henry as thoughts coalesced in my brain. Words came out of my mouth that shocked me.

“Are you having an affair with Cathy?”

Henry smiled gently and after a beat replied, “No, I am not.”

He was a fucking liar. I was a fucking idiot.

The back of my neck prickled, in spite of the car air-conditioning. I had allowed this ugliness to happen, right under my nose. I hadn’t wanted to see it, but it was always there. Now I understood her personality and my feelings of unease around her. Some part of me had never trusted her. Why hadn’t I listened?

Her sudden religiosity made sense—some kind of advance penitence. I smiled—darkly—at the twisted logic. Attend church, suck up to well-meaning minister, sing in choir, sign child up for Sunday school now, and perhaps things won’t go so wretchedly later, when everyone finds out about your adultery
and what a lying fucking cunt you really are
. Hypocrisy has its own elegant symmetry.

Excruciating—like sunburn searing my brain—to consider the many meals we had shared while their affair went on secretly. Henry proudly presiding over the steak on the barbecue while we four had conversations that felt authentic about our hopes for our daughters, our work, books and music we loved, our plans for the future.

On a few rare occasions Cathy and I had even spent time together away from our husbands. There was the time she had insisted on taking me out for my birthday along with her neighbor, Jenny. I still had the Polaroid in my office taken by the waiter in the Mexican restaurant—the three of us in an embrace, I in the center, wearing an enormous and ridiculous sombrero hat.

Cathy and I had gone clothes shopping together on one idle weekday afternoon, a trip to the Old Navy at the mall, where we bought T-shirts and jeans. It was supposed to be fun, but in the end, I had anguished, noting that she wore a smaller size than I did. It was like a bad day in high school when what you remember most is that you felt fat. I never went shopping with her again.

And all that exercising might have been not for herself but to please Henry, who liked his women slender. How often I had felt fat and full of self-loathing during our marriage—wishing I could perform self-surgery on my offending blobby bits—a feeling in no way softened by my observation of Henry’s own slowly inflating midlife paunch.

He was a piece of shit bastard making me feel like a crazy person. Insisting that we invite them over all the time, every goddamned weekend, the way she sat like a queen by the pool and wore those super-low-cut bikini tops with her tits hanging out, like a fucking porn star.

There was that day when I peeked into Henry’s office and noticed that the sheets on the twin guest bed looked rumpled. I saw a small damp spot—it looked like middle-aged nap drool. I offered to wash the sheets with that day’s laundry. No, Henry insisted, he would wash them. What an idiot. At least it was in his office, not in our bed. I wondered if I had been in the house at the time, working in my office downstairs. Anything was possible.

She has been so fucking nice to me since January.

Cathy and I had shared meals in these last months since Henry’s death. I had listened to her book recommendations while eating her serviceable meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and oversteamed broccoli. We had watched movies afterward while sipping cups of
tea on her couch. That couch—the silent witness—had undoubtedly seen a lot of action.

I found myself on Cathy’s quiet street, parked in front of her house, a sweet, gingerbread-trimmed Victorian. I could see her, relaxed, reading in her hammock on the porch.
He’s over there all the time
. With dumbfounded disgust I realized that I must have provided child care for Amy after school, while Steve was at work and Cathy and Henry fucked on her couch, or in her spare bedroom, or wherever they did their fucking.

My car door slammed with a satisfying, German-engineered
thunk.
I walked up to her porch steps. She put her book down, smiled, then the corners of her mouth dropped, her expression changed to concern; my face felt like stone.

“Get over here,” I said between gritted teeth. “We are going to talk
now
.” She rose from the hammock, and I walked her to the vacant dirt parking lot of a nearby building, where we stood next to each other for a silent moment as I tried to focus my thoughts. She looked at me expectantly.

“I have been told about your affair with Henry.”

“Julie, I need to sit down.” She slumped onto a rotting tree stump, her already pale face immediately drained of remaining color.

Fuckingcuntbitch.
My hand twitched, it wanted to smack her face. But the thought of touching her skin felt toxic. I never wanted to touch her again. Standing so close was more than I wanted, but I would have to endure this, what I hoped would be our last time in such an intimate situation.

“What,” I asked, tensed with bewildered anger, “
what
did you think you were doing?”

She murmured her response. She had been weak, Henry had been so persuasive, she was so sorry, so sorry.

Blame the dead guy. That’s nice. That’s easy.

“That fucking fruit salad you left in my refrigerator. Did you think that if you were really, really nice to me that when I found out I would forgive you?”

She nodded weakly.

“You are a fucking cunt.” I had never used that word directly to another woman. My mouth felt ugly, polluted. I had reached into a dark pit inside me and pulled out a slimy swamp creature.

“My love for you was genuine—” she began.

“What do you mean,
genuine
? There is nothing genuine about you. How can you feel love for a woman in friendship and be fucking her husband? What kind of woman does that and thinks she is being a friend? A psycho case, that’s who. You disgust me. You’re like poison.”

She looked down at her feet. “You know, Henry never loved me, he never really cared about me at all. He loved you, he always loved you.”

“And what kind of love would that be?”

No wonder I was taking fucking medication for twelve years.

I wonder how many others there were.

There were definitely others. Maybe the woman who screamed was one of them.

“So.” I looked at her hard, daring myself to make eye contact. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You have a week to tell your husband or I am going to do it for you. You weren’t going to tell him—were you?”

“I’ll do it,” Cathy replied quietly, choosing not to answer my question. Her head slumped farther down. She looked at me with
the look of a sorrowful child, chastened but still hoping to squirm out of trouble.

“Julie, I’m begging you, for the sake of our children, can they still—”

She doesn’t get it, not at all. A sword. Is what I need. Maybe death by one hundred cuts is too kind.

“I do not want my child to ever be in the same room with you or your child ever again if I can help it. Do not blame me for this. You and he did this. This is your fucking fault. Now, I’m going to get my kid.”

I turned around and walked back toward her house. She remained seated on the tree stump.

Henry, you are so lucky to be fucking dead.

He had been a clever man, blessed with a great sense of dramatic timing. Seven months earlier, Henry’s death had been a random medical catastrophe, a tragedy that had caused so much misery for Liza and me. Hundreds of sad people at his funeral. Now it looked more like the Great Escape.

The inside of Cathy’s house, as quaint as the outside, smelled familiar. Coffee, toast, that morning’s
New York Times,
the faint ammonia smell of a favored brand of kitchen cleaner.

I called for Liza, who appeared promptly with Amy on the second-floor landing as if she understood my urgency. Liza scurried down the stairs with unusual promptness. Her sleepover bag was neatly packed, slung over the banister post. I grabbed the bag, took Liza’s hand firmly, pulling her out the door onto the sidewalk, across the street to our car. Liza climbed in silently. I slammed the car door closed.

Cathy was still sitting on the stump in the empty parking lot across the street.

Insanity followed behind me
in a beat-up red pickup. The driver, a beer guzzler, gut busting out of his stained wife beater, slumped behind the wheel of his truck with mismatched chop-shop doors, muffler burnt out, spewing exhaust. Beer Guzzler reached for the can in the cup holder, slugged the last of it, wiped his mouth with the back of his hairy hand, and tossed the empty can onto the road just to piss off my tree-hugger soul. The can clattered away, my brain jangled.
Maybe I really am crazy.

My hands were shaking on the steering wheel, but the car kept going forward. We approached the town’s lone intersection with a traffic light. I registered the red light just in time to apply the brakes.

“Mama, why are you so sad?”

“Something terrible just happened between Cathy and me. Cathy did something horrible. I can’t ever trust her again. I’m so sorry, but I don’t think we can have any more playdates with Amy.”

Liza started crying. She and Amy had been friends since they were two years old. I was crying too—crazy and furious. What was I doing to my child? But what else was there to do? The light turned green.

Drive us home, get us there in one piece, and then set up the barricades. Get us home, close the windows, push heavy furniture against the doors to keep out the crazy guy right behind me.

Was Henry laughing at me? He drove us both mad, Cathyfuckingbitch and me. Maybe he enjoyed it. He did enjoy it. It was a game.

“Mama, what did Cathy do?”

“I can’t tell you now, but one day I will. I just can’t tell you now.”

“If she said she was sorry, would that make it better?”

“No, because what she did is so terrible that I can’t ever trust her again. I can’t trust her to take care of you.”

“Did she take something from you?”

I paused, wondering if Liza knew something.

“Yes. Yes, she did.”

When we got inside the house, I could see that it was too late; the craziness had slipped in through the screen doors on the hot July air, and now it floated everywhere, permeating every room.

My marriage was a dead thing. Leaving Liza standing in the kitchen, I walked up the stairs to my bedroom dresser, took off my wedding ring, dropped it into my jewelry box. The world of my marriage seemed to be mostly illusion.

I remembered the many times in recent years when I hadn’t wanted to have sex with Henry. I had felt repelled by him, there had been something insincere, almost smarmy that I couldn’t place, as if he were a stranger inhabiting the body of the man I’d known for sixteen years. Even kissing him felt like a violation. I had retreated sexually—to preserve myself from the deception my body understood. Now I could be honest. I hated him. I loathed him. And I still loved him.

I phoned Cathy on four successive days.
It was like talking to a dead line. She said nothing, though I tortured her for a response. I ranted.

“Isn’t adultery the big no-no at your church?”

“Isn’t it pretty much the big no-no everywhere?”

“So, Henry was some kind of hypnotist?”

“That’s your explanation for an affair of almost three years?”

“For two, three years you couldn’t say ‘No, this is wrong, we must stop’?”

“What is this, the death of free will?”

“A fucking fruit salad was supposed to fix things?”