Must Read Well, page 19
All the same, even though I won’t lie beside him unwillingly, I would greatly prefer not to have sex.
Here she’d left another blank line. I said so and continued.
I’m thinking now of what I said to Greg about not being able to stay with Steve. “No matter what happens between us,” I told him, and I did mean it, I do mean it. How could I stay and go on lying? I surely can’t stay and tell the truth.
I hope I remember that certainty if it turns out to be true that (as some little part of me still suspects) Greg may sometimes have been unfaithful to Susan, may have slept casually with an admirer on the road or even, as I’ve imagined before, at his studio. Men are men! If it is true, isn’t it likely that one day he’ll be unfaithful to me in my turn? I know he loves me. I know that. And for my own part, I know that I must “leap into the boundless.” There’s nowhere else for me to go. Still, he loved Susan too, and that little voice whispers in my head, What if? What if?
This last sentence brought the writing to the bottom of the page. I turned it.
“There’s nothing else for that day,” I said. I didn’t mention that the next passage had obviously been written while she was overwhelmed with emotion. The handwriting zigzagged above and below the lines, less legible than ever.
“Then just go to the day after.”
Saturday April 13, 5 p.m. Room 428 at the Waldorf.
Here alone, waiting for Greg, still shuddering two hours after telling Steve. I had thought very carefully about exactly what I’d say, but I can’t write it down here. It’s too sickening. With every sentence, I felt as if I were hacking him with an axe.
I knew it would be awful, but not like it was. He hardly said a word. Didn’t ask who it was, didn’t argue, didn’t yell, didn’t reproach me, didn’t cry, just sat there. If I hadn’t seen his hands clench, his body grow rigid, I’d have thought he couldn’t hear me. God, if only he’d screamed at me, kicked a chair over, slammed his hand against a wall, anything but sit in silence!
The moment I was done, he said he’d take a few things and find somewhere else to stay. Today, immediately. I objected—I would go. Why should he leave his own home? But he replied that the idea of staying there nauseated him. He didn’t say that this was because our home was where I’d lied to him while we shared what he thought was a happy marriage, but he didn’t have to. He took a few minutes to pack up some papers and clothes and left the apartment.
“It skips after that to 1:30 in the morning,” I reported.
I hadn’t looked at Anne since starting the previous entry and saw now that she’d begun to cry again.
“I think you’d better continue,” she said, her voice unsteady. “I’d rather take what’s coming now than put it off.”
“You’re sure? I can read tomorrow morning. We’ve already read so much today.”
“Quite sure.”
I gave in.
1:30 a.m.
Home again, and shaken to the core. Greg never turned up tonight. Why should I even record this? It’s not as if I’ll ever forget it.
Writing this through a rain of tears.
From the blotches where the ink had run, blurring her words, I knew already that she’d been crying then.
I waited for hours—seven hours—without hearing anything. Waited in an agony of suspense, frantic with speculation about what could be delaying him. Maybe Susan had detained him with weeping or a furious screed or threats or God knew what and he didn’t want to leave her that way. If the two of them were embroiled in some sort of climactic emotional drama, I told myself, it was natural he’d stay, and moreover, be reluctant to make a call that would only inflame her more. But beneath all this—oh God, hadn’t I known, somewhere in my heart, that he might betray me? Why did I let myself imagine that a man would break up a marriage of more than twenty years—a marriage to a woman he admits he will always love!—for an affair of barely a month? The thought kept pushing itself into my mind and I kept pushing it out. He was the one who raised the idea! Surely it couldn’t be. A man would be the devil himself to suggest such a plan and not follow through.
By eight-thirty, I was hungry. I called down to room service and asked for a grilled cheese sandwich, the blandest thing on the menu. I couldn’t eat even half of it. I doubt I will ever eat a grilled cheese sandwich again.
I had a couple of books with me, but it would have taken Scheherazade to hold my attention. I paced the room, washed my face, and made it up again for when he arrived, turned on the radio for a minute, then the television. Again and again, with increasingly violent shivers of terror, I wondered if he could indeed have changed his mind. But if that were so, why wouldn’t he call to tell me? He isn’t a cruel man, and for Susan, a call with such a purpose would be a welcome victory. I sat with my head in my hands, telling myself that he would not, could not fail me.
Finally, the phone rang. I said hello. Greg answered in a voice I hardly recognized. Flat, dead.
“Go home. I won’t be coming. You should leave.”
That was all he said. He hung up before I could ask why, what had happened, if he meant he wouldn’t be coming tonight or would never come. Might Susan possibly have been out all day and all evening, so that he’d had no chance to tell her until late at night? I know this is wishful thinking; his tone wasn’t that of a man apologetically warning of a brief delay—far from it. It was the tone of someone announcing doom.
And he’d hung up on me. Unless Susan had a gun to his head (he spoke exactly as you’d expect in such a case, come to think of it), he has no intention of ever following through with what he said he would do just yesterday. He has changed his mind. He has changed his mind.
How will I survive this?
“There’s another gap here, a few lines.” Anne was still crying, but not as copiously. Her voice broke as she told me to continue.
I wanted to call him back but even then didn’t dare phone him at home. Whatever he’s done to me, I don’t want to avenge myself on him. I love him. God help me, I doubt I will ever stop.
Besides, he might simply have meant that he wouldn’t be coming tonight; if so, a call from me would only ratchet up whatever drama was going on between him and Susan. And what if she answered?
I waited another two hours, hoping he’d call again. Eventually, I got angry. How does he even know I still have a home to go to? How could he abandon me this way? At twelve-thirty, I packed up and left. As I passed the front desk, the clerk saw my suitcase and asked if my husband was in the room or if we were checking out. My husband.
“Checking out,” I muttered.
“Then I’ll prepare the bill.”
I had no choice but to pay it. I was lucky to have enough cash for this—I’d taken a lot with me, since I was running away—but the ridiculous price left me without money to take a taxi here. Stricken, humiliated, unable to control my tears, I waited in Grand Central for the shuttle, trudged to the No. 1 platform, and waited again alongside a drunken, raving woman. Then I walked home from 14th Street in the dark middle of the night, alone, my now vainglorious suitcase in my hand.
Coming into the building, I made myself say goodnight to Andrew as I normally would, then fled to the elevator—the elevator where Greg stood too close to me two months ago, asking how much to tip the handyman. The day he launched what I now see was his seduction.
Upstairs, I turned the key I’d turned with such different feelings this afternoon and came into an empty apartment, as empty as if all the furniture were gone. For a while, face down on the sofa, I sobbed like a child. I could not lie on our bed. My bed. Then I came in here, to my study, to write this, closing the door behind me as if it mattered.
“Maybe we should stop here for the night,” I said, looking up to find her dry-eyed but with hands clutched to her temples.
“Maybe so. Yes. I’m very tired. I need to rest.” Her voice was muffled, almost inaudible, the mumble of a person too weary to speak. She had stopped listening to her own story and begun to relive it.
I stood up to give her the notebook again but she’d already sunk back against the pillows, eyes closed, almost asleep. Quietly, gently, I slipped it under the pillow beside her and left.
SEVENTEEN
The morning after Greg Morris jilted Anne—for I had begun to think of the events in the journals as if they were happening as we read them—I found an email in my inbox from a man named Pierce MacAuley. We’d been friends in our undergraduate days—Pierce was on financial aid too, and we met working side by side at the salad bar—but there was always some undercurrent between us, something unexplored, and I was unreasonably happy to read that he was moving back to the city. A theater major, he’d become a casting agent in L.A. soon after graduation. Now, he wrote, he had an offer from an agency in New York that was too good to turn down. He’d love to get together sometime and catch up; he hoped I’d be up for that soon. Meanwhile, though, he needed to find a place to live, and he wondered if I knew of anything...
I laughed out loud.
A few hours later, Marta let me know that Anne wanted me to read to her again. I found her in bed as before, but the look on her face was fearful, as if she were scheduled to go into an operating room for serious surgery. She said hello in a tone that didn’t invite an answer and, without speaking, I sat down in the wooden chair at her bedside and took the journal she silently handed to me.
April 14
Disaster.
That was all the entry said. After this, a page had been left blank. On the next, she had written at length.
9 p.m.
Shattered. How to write down what’s happened? I feel like a character in a horror story. It’s a way to distance myself, I know, disassociate, protect myself. But do I deserve protection?
There was a gap of two lines before she went on.
Last night I slept in the guest bedroom. I woke abruptly after four hours and sat up, briefly disoriented. Then I remembered in ghastly detail all the events of yesterday.
I sat thinking that I must find Greg. If he’d tried to reach me at the hotel again, if he’d shown up there after all, I’d have been gone. He wouldn’t dare try calling me here: What if Steve picked up? But I could try the Waldorf. And if he wasn’t there, I could go to his studio.
In another part of my brain, I knew he would never come back to me. Will never come back to me.
Still, I tried the hotel. No, there was no Mr. Morris there, and no Mr. Weil either. Stomach clenched, I made myself eat a piece of toast, drank some coffee, and dressed to go to the studio.
I closed the door of 10A with a sense of relief. It’s already haunted by my brutal scene with Steve. How I bludgeoned him, crushed his contentment, how, for him, my announcement had come out of a clear blue sky. Where might he have gone? How might he be doing? Guilt, guilt...Yet no regret. What I told him yesterday was true. I could never stay with him after all I’ve done.
I went down in the elevator but never left the building. Two policemen and three firemen were in the lobby. The policemen were talking to Vincent, the doorman on duty. They stood close to him, keeping their voices low. A moment later, another policeman came in from the street. Two medics followed him, armed with a stretcher and bulky cases of medical gear. Then our new super—I can’t think of his name—appeared and led them through the door to the service elevator. The policemen who’d been talking to Vincent went out to the sidewalk and I took their place to ask what was going on. I’ve never seen police and firemen in the lobby at the same time. One or the other, but not both. The scene was so unexpected that, for a moment, I forgot my own catastrophe.
From Vincent’s vantage point, I could see the ambulance and fire engine outside the building. I asked what had happened.
“Was there a fire? Is anyone hurt?”
Before he could answer, Rodrigo came out of the C/D elevator, paper-pale and visibly trembling, a policeman on either side of him. They sat him down in one of the wing chairs by the fake fireplace. One stayed with him; the other went into our elevator.
Now Vincent turned to me, leaned over, and said softly into my ear, “It’s Mrs. Morris. Mrs. Morris jumped out of the window.”
I’ve read in poorly written novels of a “cold hand” seizing the protagonist’s heart. Now I know what it meant. I felt the blood drain from my face. I thought I might be about to faint.
“Mrs. Morris?” I echoed, my voice barely audible even to myself.
“Yeah, I don’t know if you know her. Knew her. Mrs. Anhalt called me right after—I guess you’d know Mrs. Anhalt. She’s in your elevator line, in 6A. So 6A being right across the courtyard from 6C, she actually saw it. She saw Mrs. Morris pull the window wide open and jump. Well, not jump, I guess. You can’t really stand up inside a window here and jump, but open it and climb out and, you know, let herself fall into the courtyard. Mrs. Anhalt was at the sink in her kitchen, washing dishes, and she said the movement caught her eye.
“So I hung up and told Rodrigo—he was right here, he just happened to be looking through the repair requests—and he went straight down to the courtyard to see if he could help, and there she was. Or there someone was. I guess a person that falls six stories doesn’t look much like a person anymore. Rodrigo said it was nothing like what you see in a movie. He said she kind of exploded. The poor kid. He’ll never get that out of his head.” He shook his own head, then went on.
“Anyway, I called the cops and they sent the ambulance and, you know, the firemen came. Maybe the cops called them? Anyway, a couple of them are talking to Mrs. Anhalt now. The police, I mean.”
I must have gone into a state of shock, because I could hardly take in what he was saying. I heard the words, but they were almost unintelligible. All the same, I understood enough to ask, “And this happened half an hour ago?”
“About that, yeah. You might of heard her when she hit the pavement. Joe did. He was in the basement mopping the floor.”
With a clutch of horror, I realized now that I had indeed heard it. I was in my own kitchen, washing the mug and plate I’d used for breakfast. I heard it and thought the building handymen were in the courtyard and had dropped something heavy, the way they do sometimes. You hear a bang, a thud, then voices as they yell at each other. What I heard was also a thud, but I would never have believed it could be a human body.
Now the medics returned to the lobby. They went outside to the ambulance, Vincent holding the door for them. He returned to his post, where I still stood as if paralyzed. Finally, the dreadful thought came to me.
“Was Mr. Morris there?”
It seemed minutes before he answered.
“No, no one else. Mr. Morris went out around six this morning. Andrew was still on the door then and the police called him at home to ask. They’re trying to find Mr. Morris now.”
I knew I should say something, some conventional phrase—“Oh, how awful,” “I can’t believe it”—and go out to the street as if on the errand that had taken me downstairs in the first place. Instead, I turned around without another word and came up here. I opened the door, threw myself on the couch, and howled.
What can have happened? How could she have done it? Was this why Greg didn’t come yesterday? Was she threatening to kill herself if he left her? It must be. I think it must be. But why did he go out so early today? Did he think I might still be at the Waldorf? Was he coming to me after all? Where is he?
A storm of emotions whipped around inside me. Fury at her for hurting Greg. For hurting me! A wave of nausea as I remembered the thump in the courtyard and imagined what must have happened when her body hit the ground. Bizarrely, indignation as a Windrush resident: the selfishness of choosing to leap into a courtyard looked out at daily by scores of families! Now we’ll all think of it every time we look outside our back windows. And what if it gets into the papers? What about our privacy? Our property values? What about the building’s reputation? Not to mention poor Rodrigo, blundering into a mass of human smithereens—and Frieda Anhalt, who will remember the woman’s falling body for the rest of her life.
But most of all, what it might do to Greg.
Why would she kill herself? That’s the question I’ve been trying to figure out all day. For God’s sake, thousands of women are deserted by their husbands every year, every week, every day, and they don’t kill themselves. They sue the bastards for all they’re worth. They make them move out, they start a new life, they find a lover of their own. I think of her, cool and smug and superior in her leather jacket at Carnegie Hall. She was no fragile flower, that’s for sure. How manipulative she must have been under that swaggering show of indifference, how spiteful. I haven’t felt a moment’s pity for her.
Here, seeming to pull herself into the present from a place far away, Anne interrupted me.
“I suppose you’re shocked by this.”
I knew what she meant but tried to dodge it. “Well—it is shocking,” I said. “Any suicide is shocking.”
She hesitated before saying, “I don’t mean the suicide. I mean my reaction.”
I nodded. This was too true to deny. In fact, I had read that last paragraph with growing disbelief, struggling to keep my emotion out of my voice.
“I can tell you that I came to feel very differently,” she said. “And not long afterward.”
At the time, this didn’t impress me much. We sat in silence for several long seconds before I took the initiative and began to read again.
Still, since she has done it, there’s no longer any reason Greg and I can’t be together. Here’s the blessing of it. There’s no need now for him to stay true to Susan. There is no Susan; she saw to that. Of course we’ll have to wait to make our attachment public, see each other only covertly for some months, maybe even a year. But after that, there will be nothing to keep us from coming into the open, nothing untoward, no reason for gossip. We live in the same building. It’s no secret that we’re acquainted, and I’ll soon be divorced.
