The Pocket Wife (2 page)

L
ove is such a muddle, Dana thinks, especially for people like her and Peter in lengthy, problematic marriages—difficult enough without neighbors butting in and, now, dying. Celia had served quite a nasty little tidbit to her that afternoon, amid a lot of drunken rambling, and Dana shoves it to the back of her mind to be dealt with later. The night is oppressive; tall buildings downtown trap the heat, leaking warm air into the suburbs even at nearly nine o'clock, and streaks of pink zig and zag through the gray sky. She leans back on her hands and squints, remembers that summer in New York, staring over the Hudson River at a pink sky. “Look!” she'd shouted, pointing.

“What?” Her companion was an earnest poet from the East Village.

“The sky! It looks like Oz if Oz were pink instead of green!”

The Poet had tucked his hair behind an ear, long hair, poetic hair, and puffed on the dying ash, the sweet heat of his pipe from Chinatown, exhaled his answer with a stream of smoke. “It's only the pollution,” he said. “Good old New York filth.” She hadn't married the Poet. She'd married Peter instead, his fresh
good looks, his blue-eyed blondness seeping underneath her skin, erasing nights spent with the dark, sad Poet in his room with the broken wall. Where is he now? she wonders sometimes, nights when the sky is streaked with pink and she is nothing but a pocket wife. She glances at the trace of color still clinging to the sky and thinks she might reread her son's collection of the Oz books—
Ozma
and
Glinda
and
The Patchwork Girl—
but it's too sad; it makes her think of the Poet and of Jamie growing up and moving off to Boston.

A set of headlights bounces over the small hill at the end of their street. Seconds later Peter's Lexus purrs in the driveway and Dana watches as he moves around inside it. The light of his Bluetooth fades away from his ear, dims in the dark car.

“I made a couple of calls from the office after we spoke,” Peter says, talking as he tromps up the driveway. “Apparently Donald almost tripped over his wife in the entrance to their living room. It's a good thing Jamie's back at school. Until they find out what the trouble is, no one's really safe.” His voice is strained; it splatters out around his breathing, his huffing and puffing. He stops beside where she sits, leaning back on her hands. “The police. Until they uncover what it is.”

“What
what
is? And it's Ronald, by the way.”

“What killed Celia.” Peter fishes in his pockets for a cigarette, and Dana breathes in the sulfur smell of the spent match, the smoke she craves tonight, although she hasn't in years. It's only when her body speeds up and her mind click-clacks like a runaway train that she even thinks of cigarettes and now, suddenly, of Peter beside her in bed, the two of them smoking after sex a million zillion years ago.

“It isn't what,” Dana points out. “It's who. It wasn't a meteor or a tractor that struck her down in the prime of her life. It was definitely a who.” Her words sound silly, bouncing back at her from the thick night, and she crosses her arms over her chest. She
shakes her head to clear it, fighting the confusion, the helplessness of not remembering exactly what happened earlier that day. Surely Peter will notice; he is a lawyer after all. “I saw her right before she died.”

He turns to look at her. She feels his eyes on the side of her face. “Oh, yeah? How come?”

“I was borrowing some sugar for dessert, but we didn't get that far. We started talking, and we just . . .” She inhales deeply, holding her breath. A sudden unexpected rage tickles the back of her throat.

“What about?”

“This and that.” She almost says,
You!
She almost says,
We talked about the picture Celia took of you at a table in Gatsby's, leering down the blouse of your little tart of a secretary,
but she doesn't. Do people still say “tart,” she wonders? She has always liked the word. It sounds like what it is.

“What were you going to make for dessert?” Peter puffs out a row of smoke circles and pushes himself up off the porch.

“Tarts,” she says.

Peter snubs out his cigarette with the toe of a shiny, pricey shoe and stretches. “Let me put the car in the garage.”

At first she'd thought Celia was crazy—that she'd doctored the photo somehow out of jealousy. Ronald seemed like such an unfun, squirrelly little guy, running to the sink to wash up after their introduction, his handshake like an eel sliding over her palm. Still, the hungry look in Peter's eyes was obvious, even in the totally inferior pixels of Celia's cell, so there was no denying what she saw, no matter how or why it came to sit amid the badly taken photos that rolled ad nauseam throughout the Pic File section of Celia's phone. “Look!” Celia had screeched that afternoon, stumbling across the room in her wedge shoes. Celia was only five-one
and had recently taken to pumping herself up on these silly shoes that, Dana thought, she hadn't mastered yet and so should save for emergencies.

“I'm looking,” Dana told her. “They probably work together,” and she vaguely remembers Celia making an unflattering, horsey sound and tottering back to the kitchen.

“They're working
you
together,” she'd said.

Dana watches her husband from the front porch; she wishes she could talk to him the way she used to. If she could, she'd tell him that not remembering everything she did that afternoon terrifies her—these blank spots. She would say she's lately felt the familiar and unnerving energy of her madness nudging at the edges of her brain, pulsing against the backs of her eyes; she'd share with him the doubts and questions jammed inside her, but she doesn't. She can't. Celia's voice rattles in her brain, how she stood in the doorway to the kitchen, how she said, “Peter looked at me like he'd slit my throat if he had the chance.” For a moment Dana sees a coldness in his eyes that makes her turn away.

D
ana waits for the sound of her husband falling into bed. She won't bother with dinner; it's far too hot to cook and lately eating has become a hassle. There are so many more important things to do, so many more interesting things to do; she has such energy now that there's little time and, really, little need for food. And anyway, Celia is everywhere, slipping through the walls and air—Celia laughing at a yard sale, Celia handing her sangria, Celia lying silent in a bloody pool across the foyer. Dana reaches for her book on the coffee table, and a shudder moves like a current through her body. She sobs on the sagging couch cushion, dappling it with small wet dots as Peter's snores slice through the silence of the house.

She turns the air conditioner lower and makes herself a cup of tea, sits down at the dining-room table with his cell phone. It takes her a minute to figure the thing out. It's locked, but she fiddles with it until she finds the right combination of numbers—their anniversary date—and green arrow; the tiny icon of a padlock disappears, and she thumbs over to his contact list, looking for the
Tart's number—or photo, maybe. She isn't really sure what she's looking for. Affairs are clandestine by nature, and Celia wasn't exactly lucid by the time Dana got to her house. “Daanaaa!” she'd called from her front porch. “Come on over! It's life or death!” She'd yelled so loudly that their neighbor Lon Nguyen had stopped washing his car, his sponge midway between a sudsy bucket and the left front fender of an aging Miata, his rubber flip-flops sinking in the mud. Celia reeked of alcohol and something fruity, standing there in her doorway. She'd rushed Dana over to a chair and shoved the picture so close to her that at first she couldn't make it out. “They're
fucking
!” Celia yelled.

“Where were you when you took this?” was all Dana could think to say. And, “Could I have one of whatever's on your breath?” She squinted over the photo of her husband and gulped down one sangria and then another, polishing off the bottle of vodka for good measure and feeling unusually calm until the drinks hit her all at once, making her fuzzy and far away, and she gagged on the burn of the two colliding liquors. “So
where
were you?” Dana said again.

“Across the room. I snapped the picture before they noticed me.”

“And after you snapped the picture?”

Celia laughed a humorless little laugh. “They noticed me. Peter did. Later, in the parking lot, he tried to get me to delete the photo. He never actually saw it. I wouldn't show it to him. If he'd seen how bad it was—how unclear—he wouldn't have been so worried. ‘This was about work,' he told me. ‘You could have come over there. You could have met her.' He was kind of shouting, and people were beginning to stare.”

“When was this?”

“Monday,” Celia said. “I was going to just delete it. I wasn't even going to mention it to you, but then I . . .”

“Got drunk?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess.”

“But why— I mean, it's nice you care and all, but why exactly
do
you care?” By this time the room was swimming, and she'd wondered how she was going to get out of the chair, let alone back home. Celia's face was nothing but a smudge, and all Dana can really remember after that is a lot of ranting about yard sales and women sticking together, struggling out of the estate-sale chair, weaving, trying to keep her balance in the spinning room, and at some point falling through the front door into the muggy summer afternoon. The next thing she remembers is waking up on her couch to a blinding headache and the realization that she'd left her purse in the car.

She scrolls through her husband's phone. She isn't at all sure what she's looking for. Pictures, maybe, that he's taken on his own. She shivers in the damp room. A chill falls like a shadow over her, and she remembers why she all but stopped drinking years before. She remembers the headaches, the migraines, the madness, and the fear that at heart she was an alcoholic like her father.

She scrolls over to his files, and Peter's pictures pop up. There are several shots of Jamie and even a couple of her—a few from his last work picnic—ordinary photos, images of pedestrian moments in a pedestrian life. She yawns. She moves to his contact list and scrolls down, trying to remember the Tart's name. Anna, was it? Hannah? And then there's a mysterious initial. “C.” Celeste? Cynthia? On impulse she hits the number beside it, and there's a faint click as her call goes straight to voice mail.

“Hello,” an oddly familiar voice says. “This is Celia. You know what to do.”

Dana hits redial and listens to the recording, and then she hits redial again. Peter's hidden Celia's number in his phone. She'd never think to look for it here, under “C.” She wouldn't think to look for it at all. She feels sick. She feels as if she's been punched in the stomach; she feels duped. She closes her eyes and sees Celia, bloody and dying at the edge of her living room while her
dedicated, docile husband sat, oblivious and mired in traffic, while Dana dreamed sangria dreams four houses down. It makes sense now, the way Celia acted, her fury over Peter ogling his secretary in the restaurant. Dana shakes her head to clear it, but the images remain, the sounds and sights, the blood, the babbling husband, Celia's stupid voice so easily retrieved from Peter's phone. Kaleidoscopic, they separate and move and form again, each image less appealing than the one before.

She didn't marry the Poet because she couldn't slow herself down. Lying beside him on the dingy mattress in that place with the broken wall, she couldn't relax. Night after night she lay awake, watching the rise and falling of his hairy chest, the shadows underneath his eyes, the neon light from a liquor store across the alley blinking at the sky. Like a signal, she'd told him, like a warning, and the Poet laughed. “Have a toke,” he said. “It'll relax you. It will help you sleep,” and the Poet stuffed his Chinese pipe with small, soft lumps of hash. It didn't make her sleep, though. Nothing did. Every week she slept less, walking through the downtown streets with the Poet, arm in arm, until late into the night, until his eyes were closing and he fell asleep exhausted on the mattress, leaving her to pace and write. Her classes flew by in a confusion of voices and raised hands—of papers written in the middle of the night, so brilliant, so esoteric.
I think I'm channeling God,
she told the Poet, her body nothing more than flesh on bones.
He tells me what to say.
But they didn't understand—her professors, the other students. Only her dark Poet understood, and finally not even he could catch the words that tumbled from her brain onto the page in tiny, oddly slanted script that even she could barely read. The night he came home and found her on the roof, squatting at the edge in nothing but a slip—the night she said Jesus told her she could fly, the night she floated hundreds of handwritten
pages into the winter sky over Avenue D, he'd driven her to Bellevue in a borrowed car.

The tea burns her throat. She hits redial once more and listens to Celia's voice, torturing herself with the nasal, slightly southern sound of her dead neighbor. “You know what to do.”

She sinks onto the floor of the dining room and stares at the cell phone in her hand, scrolling through the contact list until she finds her son's dorm number. “Celia's dead,” she whispers into his voice mail, although she doesn't think Jamie has ever actually met her. She stops; she counts to ten inside her head. “Never mind,” she says. “I love you,” and she holds her thumb down on the red arrow until the tiny screen goes mercifully black.

She blows on the cup, on the cooling tea, and thinks again of what Celia said—that Peter looked like he could slit her throat. Or does Dana only
think
she said that? She takes another sip of tea and feels a familiar rush of energy. She needs it now, this energy, this magic that has her staring at the ceiling many nights, that wakes her from her sleep and stuffs itself inside her days. It began when Jamie left for Boston, she thinks now, sitting cross-legged on the floor—after that endless, agonizing journey home from parents' weekend, peppered with Peter's mysterious phone calls at rest stops between Boston and New Jersey, her successful husband sitting on a picnic bench or standing in a clump of trees, his fleshy hand curved like a shield around his phone—“A client,” he said, or “this case I'm working on,” but Dana knew he was lying.

After Bellevue she had not returned to school. Her time at NYU is nothing but a haze of voices and trains and pigeon crap and neon lights, of barred windows and her mother taking her back home with her lips pursed in a little pout and a prescription for
lithium in the zipped compartment of her bag. The only thing Dana remembers clearly from that time is the Poet, is feeling loved, is their naked bodies in the summer, soft and pink, like peaches on the lumpy mattress, and the bright orange blanket from the Andes wrapped around them when the snow fell down outside the window.

Manic depression, the doctors said—the great magical force that turned on her and tricked her into thinking she could fly. Episodic, they said. Her mother blamed the Poet and his pipe, Camus and Nietzsche and Sylvia Plath, but Dana knew better; she knew that the madness was a part of her; she knew that it crouched along her veins. Waiting. For a while she took the medicine that made the world around her such a faded, unbright place to be, let it hold her in its sagging, dimpled arms until with a sigh she shuffled into the rest of her life, eventually trading the drug for a tall, blue-eyed husband and a world more numbing than lithium could ever be.

There were times over the years when her demons won out, when she wore her lipstick too dark, her mascara too heavy, her dresses too short. When they did slip through—when they whispered in her ear, waking her from sleep, she drove her car into the city and looked for the Poet, who was no longer there. In corners of dark bars or perched on crumbling stoops near where he used to live, she sometimes thought she'd found him, and if she closed her eyes, it almost seemed she had—a certain look, a certain touch, a sweetness—but in morning, in the brighter light of day, she always realized her mistake.

She sticks her cup in the sink; she walks to the front door and slips out onto the porch, where moths circle the yard lights. They dance and dip and buzz inside the glass, their fragile bodies knocking up against the metal sides, the tips of their wings sticking
on the scorching bulbs, and Dana feels like one of them, adrenaline pumping through her veins, her nose pressed up against the glass.

She won't sleep. She knows the signs. She feels the starting of a long night of shadows just at the corner of her eye, disappearing when she turns her head, like the game she played with her cousins growing up. Freeze, she thinks it was. She was very good at it; she often won.

It's not entirely unpleasant, this restlessness, this energy, the sharpness of her thoughts, her swift responses, intuitive, clever. The clarity will in time give way to chaos. Her quick, bright thoughts will start to come too fast, will crash into one another, but she'll get help, she tells herself; she'll get help before things reach that point. Right now she needs the clarity her illness brings her. Right now the world is crystal clear, a honed and beauteous thing, allowing her to solve the mystery of her neighbor's death, to bring back the soggy, foggy afternoon, to recover the missing moments and fill in all the blanks until she knows she had nothing to do with Celia's violent departure.

It all began with that photo in the cell. If only she could see it one more time, she thinks, and shuffles the thought to the back of her mind as she steps into her sandals and locks the door behind her, sliding into the front seat of the Toyota. She'll go to Manhattan. Maybe she'll stop off somewhere for a drink to calm her nerves, and then she'll go to a bookstore downtown to browse, to clear her head, to figure things out. She thinks of the Poet. It's exactly the kind of night he would have gone out to a pub or leafed through some esoteric titles at the bookstore near Sheridan Square. Hot, sultry nights like this, he'd burn up in that apartment with only the fan whirring, loud and ineffectual, by the window.

She adjusts her rearview mirror. St. Christopher remains motionless on the visor until she turns to fasten her seat belt. It's dark inside the car, so all she really sees is a brief flicker of light,
which she thinks might be his tiny metal head catching the quick glance of a passing car. She smiles. He's traveled with her many times across the bridge. He's waited patiently inside her car while she drank or ate or shopped, while she walked down lamplit streets in search of the Poet. St. Christopher has never failed her; St. Christopher has never run away. As she turns the key, he seems to shift his gaze to the left, toward Celia's house, and Dana nods. “You're right.” She inches out the car door and around to the backyard, nearly tiptoeing all the way to the Steinhausers', where yellow tape crinkles in the balmy night and clues lie thick as fog inside the tainted walls of Celia's house.

She finds the Steinhausers' key on her ring and unlocks the dead bolt on the back door. She meant to return it after watching the dog while they were away—a weekend in New York, a Broadway play—but she never did. The house is damp and still—a cache of angry words and ghosts and spilled wine. She flips on the flashlight from the glove box of the Toyota and lets it play across the room; she squats down where hours earlier Ronald hunched, staring at the phone under the sofa. She thinks he grabbed it, assumed he'd grab it, but she isn't sure—there was so much noise and confusion, so much blood. She shines the flashlight under the couch, under the estate-sale chair she helped pick out; she shines it under every stick of furniture in the living room.

A car trolls down the street and stops. Its lights bounce through the living-room window, and she ducks through the house, locking the back door carefully behind her. She doesn't stop until she's in her car; she turns the key, inches down the driveway to the street.