The Pocket Wife (12 page)

W
hen the elevator doors close behind her, Dana breathes a sigh of relief. She reaches over to press the button for the fifth floor, and the elevator zips seamlessly upward, not stopping until, with a dull
dong,
it arrives at Ronald's floor.

“Excuse me,” Dana says, and she pushes past a gaggle of cartoon passengers. She moves to the front of the elevator, stepping out before the doors have fully opened. She moves quickly down the carpeted hall, avoiding the busy, teeming patterns on the rug. When she arrives at 522, she inserts the key card in the lock, and the reassuring click is loud in the silent hallway.

There's no one in sight. She pushes the door open and slides inside, closing it behind her. The room is not impeccably neat, as she'd imagined it would be. Instead Ronald's things are scattered everywhere—his boxers, his wrinkled shirts and khaki pants. Newspapers lie across a second queen-size bed, open to articles about Celia—a small piece on her life as an adult-education teacher, an earlier article that Dana has already read about the death itself, and a sheet of hotel stationery with a short, handwritten section of an obituary she assumes Ronald has written.
“Loving
mother and mentor. Funeral arrangements pending completion of police investigation.”
Dana shudders. Several pairs of socks are scattered willy-nilly on the floor, and the bathroom is a nightmare tangle of shaving paraphernalia and robes, of dental floss and toothpastes and brushes. Ronald even thought to pack a whitener booster, which Dana finds impressive, if surprising.

The room smells of alcohol and peppermint, of old stale wine stuck to plastic motel glasses, of unwashed socks and sneaker insides.
Hotel,
she thinks.
Wine. Smells. Death. Life. Socks,
as she sorts through a pile of clothing on a desk. The rubber duck lies on its side on a long, low bureau next to the TV, and Dana reaches out a finger, touches it lightly on the head. She tears through the piles of papers, of clothes, of shaving equipment. Everything, it seems, is here but Celia's phone.

She glances at her watch. Eleven-fifteen. She wonders if Ronald comes back to the hotel for lunch, if he brings a salad upstairs every day, if he sits at the small, cluttered table eating and penciling in a crossword puzzle from the
Times
—if he'll come back to this cramped, rank-smelling room to catch Dana thrashing through his personal belongings in her high-heeled sandals and her sexy black dress. She hopes not. She wishes she'd memorized Celia's cell-phone number, wonders if she ever even had it. She opens the dresser drawers, working her way through pajama bottoms and socks.

She sits down on the bed where Ronald sleeps, and it gives slightly under her weight. For a crazy minute, Dana thinks she might be able to sleep here in this anonymous place, where everything is topsy-turvy and foul-smelling, where nothing is expected of her. She even closes her eyes, stretching out across the bed. Her feet in the black sandals cross over each other precisely at the ankles, and she spreads out her arms, feeling like Jesus being crucified. She thinks of St. Christopher nodding on the visor. “Please,” she says. “Please.” She whispers it. She opens her eyes. Something
peeks out from the gap between the mirror and the bureau, something black. Dana crosses herself and mumbles, “Please, please, please,” as she picks her way across discarded clothes, trips on a loafer, and grabs the black, half-hidden phone.

“Thank you, God. Thank you, St. Christopher,” she says, “or. . . well, Christopher.” She closes her eyes. She sees Celia punching the code into her phone, the way her fingers crossed the number pad in a diagonal line from upper right to lower left. Twice. Three seven, three seven. The screen springs to life. She brushes her finger across the backdrop—Celia's boys in Martha's Vineyard—and it takes her only a moment to locate the pictures, the different groupings.
GRADUATION DAY, THE YARD, LADIES IN MORNING CLASS
. Dana thinks that the one of Peter and the Tart was at the end of the graduation pictures. She scrolls through them, but she doesn't see it. She scrolls back through again, to make sure, but there are only several shots of the two boys, looking gawky and prepubescent; of Celia, pretty and thin in a pastel, sleeveless dress; of Ronald, standing with the boys. She scrolls ahead, thumbing through a collection of plants—close-ups of Ronald's roses, the sprouts of a spring garden in their backyard. Nothing. She thumbs through again, going backward, going more slowly. She moves to the group of women in Celia's English class—the Bolivians and Peruvians, the Somalis and Bangladeshis, the Afghanis, the Romanians, the Chinese—women sitting at a table filled with food from all the countries represented in the class. They look happy. Celia looks happy. A Christmas party, Dana guesses from the way they're dressed, or maybe an end-of-term party. She zooms in on Celia's smiling face. Was she sleeping with Peter then? Was she meeting him in dark bars or motel rooms after her night class? Were they sliding into each other's front seats in the parking lot, Celia scrambling across the cold, dark leather of Peter's car, her skirt hiked up, his hairy-knuckled fingers tugging at her bra? Dana scrutinizes each of the party pictures, and then she
thumbs back through the photos, from beginning to end, until she's sure that Peter and the Tart are not there.

She turns off the phone and falls back across Ronald's unmade bed, cluttered with wadded, rumpled bedding. She stares at the ceiling, and it seems to be dropping lower and lower. The walls creep inward, until she's lying in a tiny space, a claustrophobic cell. There's nothing to anchor her here or anywhere—there's nothing to keep her going. If the picture wasn't real—if the photo of Peter and the Tart did not exist—then likely nothing she remembers from that day is real. Not only are her memories of Celia's actions on that afternoon a sham, but memories of her own as well. She gets up quickly, before the ceiling covers her, before the walls enfold her, crush her. She wipes her prints off the phone and sticks it back on the bureau. It's of no use to her now. Or was it ever? She runs her hands through her hair, but she avoids the mirrors that seem to be everywhere in this encroaching room. She glances here and there, on the table near the window, on the cluttered bathroom counter, making sure she hasn't left traces of her visit, bits of herself she feels are sloughing off at every turn.

It isn't even twelve when she presses the button at the elevator, mirrored and smooth in its casing. The pulley squeals, the door opens with a sharp swish, and she steps inside. In the lobby she sets the key card on the counter and looks down at her feet, avoiding the desk clerk coming toward her.

The doorman is now wearing a hat. He is a clown, Dana decides. He's wearing makeup and an orange wig. His nose is a balloon. His eyebrows are painted on, his lashes long and loopy.
Bozo,
she thinks. It must be a special day at the hotel. A special afternoon. For the children, but he seems serious, standing back, holding open the door. He smiles at her. His suit is silly, ruffled, hot, the buttons shiny and bright, catching the sun, throwing it back at her, blinding her with tiny spots of light.

“Thank you,” she says, and she stares down at her feet. She
does not look up. She avoids his loopy eyes, his bulbous lips, his balloon nose. She stares down at the black high-heeled sandals that Celia would have coveted and thinks they're worth four husbands. Twelve Peters.

“Have a nice day,” the clown says, Bill W. says, his nameplate blazing up at her as she nods and turns right, fairly running down the sidewalk to the overpriced garage.

She flips on the air conditioner in the car, aiming the vent up toward her face. The air is warm, but at least it's moving, blowing wisps of bangs off her forehead. She knows better than to turn on the radio, but the voices come out anyway. Reproaching voices, warning voices. Songs and pieces of songs bounce off the dash and circle the inside of the car, settling in the gaps and lines, the broken places in the roof, settling like paintings, like filmstrips, and she leans back, stares at the colors, floating and merging, and it's as if she's sitting in the Sistine Chapel, not an old maroon Toyota littered with bumper stickers. She closes her eyes.

She'd pinned her hopes on finding the photo in Celia's phone, this picture Peter told her wasn't there. “Why are you
saying
this?” he'd asked her, and now she doesn't know. She has no answers. All she has is remnants and raveling threads. All she has is pictures on the ceiling of her car, photos she imagined in a phone, contact numbers that don't go where she'd thought, threatening notes and fancy cars poised to run her down. All she has now, Dana realizes, sitting in the crudely lit space, her eyes focused on the movie playing against the cracks above the visor, all she has is madness. She turns the key in the ignition. Her hands shake on the steering wheel, and she avoids her face in the rearview mirror, the face of a woman who is not what she appears to be. Loneliness engulfs her, smothers her.

She pulls out of the garage and drives slowly toward the highway. There are too many cars as she approaches the bridge, too many reds and blues and headlight eyes—too many bumpers
smiling, too many grids, like white, straight teeth. She clutches the steering wheel and keeps her eyes on the road. When she has crossed the bridge, she turns toward the diner, letting the Toyota coast to a stop.

“I did it,” she says when Glenda comes to take her order. “I killed her.”

Glenda sighs. “Hang on. Let me get Hank to cover for me. Herbal tea okay?” she calls out, halfway to the counter, and Dana nods.

“Fine,” she says, but her voice is barely audible.

“So?” Glenda is back, sliding over the plastic seat across the table with two cups. She pulls an electric cigarette out of some mysterious place in her apron and takes a smokeless little puff.

“I did what you said,” Dana tells her. “I was proactive.”

“Good.” Glenda takes another little puff, squints her eyes like there's smoke.

“I stalked my own husband. I even went into Manhattan and ransacked Ronald's room.”

“Who's Ronald?” Glenda bends forward slightly.

“Celia's husband. The dead woman's husband. I was looking for a picture in her phone I thought was there. Everything is disappearing.”

“These things . . .” Glenda says, taking a puff off her electronic cigarette and glancing toward the front of the diner, where a line is forming at the register. “Maybe they're real and maybe they aren't. In either case, consider they're trying to tell you something. What was the picture?”

“My husband with another woman.”

“And
is
he with another woman?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there you are,” Glenda says, sliding across the seat.

“Yes. God! Thank you, Glenda. I always feel so much better after I've talked to you.”

“Just remember.” Glenda leans over the table before she bolts toward the register. “You're okay, Dana. You'll be okay. You're not a murderer. Remember that.”

Dana leaves a wad of bills beside her untouched cup and slips outside, where rain comes down in a lazy drizzle. If Celia's message was merely that—a
message
—if it never really was in Peter's phone, if it was instead her dead neighbor reaching out from the other side . . .
You know what to do.

She'll call Detective Moss, Dana decides, backing out onto the road. That's what she knows she should do. She'll tell him everything—that she might have killed her neighbor in a drunken, manic rage. She'll confess to trips across the George Washington Bridge at midnight, to dalliances with strange men. She'll tell him everything and let him decide what should be done. “Let go and let God,” she says, dredging up the line from an Emotions Anonymous meeting she attended a few times years before. “Let go and let Moss.”

Rain begins in earnest, falling in small, plump drops that splatter on the windshield, comforting and gray, making soothing, soporific sounds. A sign, she thinks, glancing up at St. Christopher. “Thanks,” she says. “Thanks for this at least,” and he nods; he even seems to smile. The rain picks up. The car hits a large puddle, sending water over the windshield, blinding her for a second, and she resolves to tell him everything, this man who looks so like the Poet. But first she'll get some help, she'll go see Dr. Sing. She'll take a pill or two or eight. She'll slow herself down just a tad so she can stand it when they lock her up, when the small cell closes in on her, suffocating her. She will be the bigger person—bigger than Peter, with his unfindable, unprovable Tart, bigger than Ronald with his rubber ducks and haikus, bigger than all of them. Like Jesus, Dana knows she has to suffer, that she is here to do the
unthinkable, to surmount the insurmountable, to save the clowns and the people in spike wedges, the topplers, the sinners. It is she who will rise to the occasion, she who, like the defunct saint who clings steadfastly to her visor, will surrender herself, unnamed and unremembered, for redemption.

She's nearly home, passing over the railroad tracks and accelerating through a small industrial section, when she sees a blur in the rain, a tiny white blotch that hops across the road several feet in front of her car. A rabbit, she thinks, but as she gets closer, she sees it's a kitten, that it's stopped in a small patch of grass, soaked and frightened—that it stares, not at the Toyota but directly through the driver's-side window, directly at Dana. It opens its mouth; it's saying something. She can see the words trail out into the rain like ribbons, blue and pink and gold, and she wonders if it's really there—if it's her mother or Celia trying to tell her something—to impart some wisdom from beyond. She shakes her head, trying to bring herself back, to ground herself inside the car, to collect what paltry remnants she has left of clarity, of sanity, of her mind.
Jesus.
She brakes too quickly. The car skids to the edge of the road, sliding in mud, and she feels for a fraction of a second as if the car is flying, as if
she
is flying, suddenly unfettered, unencumbered. Free. Is this what Celia meant in her voice-mail message, that Dana should join her somehow, extricate herself from the sordid mess that her life has recently become?
You know what to do.