1

On their last Christmas together, Paul Stillman bought his wife sheepskin booties from Eddie Bauer.  Rita, his lover, helped him pick them out, but May didn’t know that—or at least, didn’t want to know.  Beyond the windows of their little Cape in Concord, Massachusetts, it was snowing lightly, and a ray-less winter sun was just dawning in their sleepy neighborhood. One could almost imagine all the excited children, waking their parents from their separate dreams far too early.

Were it not for a vague sense that Paul was not entirely there, May would have been content. She loved the snow falling lightly over picturesque Concord, loved their home even with the rattle of the commuter train one block away.  Loved family life—or at least the idea of family life. But perhaps most of all she loved, somewhere just to the west of them, that old promise of transcendence.

Five-year-old Adam raced into their Spartan bedroom, where May and Paul slept back to back.  When it came to decorating, they could never agree on anything and so were left with their old bed and a lamp and a dresser May had picked up in a garage sale for thirty dollars and a faded oriental rug her mother had given her, worn through in places. 

“It’s Christmas!  It’s Christmas!” Adam cried.  He climbed up onto the bed and pushed at his parents’ bodies, still heavy with sleep.  Paul grunted and pressed a pillow over his head.  But May rose, slipping easily into the spirit of the day.  She would make things joyful for Adam. She put the coffee on and was soon calling to Paul, who was still in the bedroom, as she and Adam knelt by the foot of the Christmas tree.   She let Adam open one gift before she stopped and called again:

“Hey, let’s get this in a movie.”

“Get what in what movie?”

“Christmas.  You know, to send to Mom and Dad.  Isn’t that a great idea?”

Paul grunted from the bedroom: “It’s cold out.”

But soon they were recording their last Christmas for all posterity: the street, the home, breath-fogged air, the querulous dialogue, the unwrapping of gifts.

The booties were ugly things.  

“They’re odd,” said May, examining them from all sides, secretly wondering what had possessed him to buy them.  May was not the earthy type.  Her sensibilities about everything tended toward the refined, and whatever clothes she could be bothered to buy usually came from the sales rack at Ann Taylor. She measured five feet two on a proud day, and from her small, oval face large, observant brown eyes glittered.

Paul, just over six feet tall and wiry, was May’s opposite in many ways. A “techie” or “geek” was what they used to call men like him, men that were all science and little to no art. Sartorially, he preferred a studiedly casual look, often choosing to cast his sockless feet in penny loafers as he headed off to the software company he owned in Maynard.  Fur booties didn’t seem quite him, either. 

“They’re not strange,” said Paul.  “They’re supposed to be very warm.”  Then he added, “Rita helped me pick them.”

May flinched at the mention of Rita’s name.  But she merely said, “Well, I’m sure they feel great on.” She put her arms around her husband, wanting so much for everything to be fine.  Still, the booties lingered in her mind as an unnatural, unsavory gift.

May gave Paul a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt that didn’t match.  The bottoms were pale gray but the top was a bright purple with black University of Georgia lettering.

Paul looked puzzled.

“Georgia?  I went to Harvard.”

“I know what school you went to,” May said. “I bought it for the fabric.  These heavy sweatshirts are hard to find.”

“Oh.”

“Well, go ahead, put them on.”

“Not now.”

“Go ahead,” she urged him, unconsciously seeking a coziness, a touchability, she had not found in him in a long time.

For several months May had teased Paul about how he stayed resolutely buttoned up until long after she had gone to bed. 

In the best of times Paul had been a restless young man. He moved as if mere walking were too slow a means of locomotion.  He worked nearly around the clock, had little interest in anything domestic, and worshipped rationality. It was something May loved about him, believing that rationality meant predictability.

When they had married six years earlier, Paul’s family thought May would make their brilliant son a perfect wife.  She had no career of her own and would conform to the contours of Paul’s life.  May was, above all else, a good-natured, accommodating girl. 

Before them a fire crackled in the fireplace.  Nat King Cole crooned softly over the speakers.  Now that they had opened their gifts, May excused herself and went into the kitchen to make them a big Christmas breakfast.  They’d be going to her in-laws for dinner, but she wanted her own family time first.

“Go put on your sweats!” she commanded.

“It’s too early to get undressed,” Paul objected.

“It’s too early to be dressed,” she countered.  “Go on.  That’s what I got them for,” she called from the kitchen, hands full of bacon and beaten egg. 

Paul popped his head into the kitchen, rolled his eyes at her, then went to change.  When he came back out his mood had darkened.  But May hardly noticed.  She had become masterful at not noticing Paul’s dark moods.

“Now that’s more like it,” she smiled, seeing him. “Come here,” she said, wiping her hands and leading him to the living room sofa.  She kissed him, rubbed her hands down his thighs. Between his legs.  He jerked away as if she had hurt him.

But Paul had not moved quickly enough for May not to have caught a tiny yet unmistakable trace of a certain smell on his hair.  It was the smell a man’s head got when he spent time between a woman’s thighs.

“You smell like me on your head,” she said, frowning.

“I do not,” he said. He swatted at her arm.

“You do.  It’s weird.”

“Cut it out,” he said meanly.

Just then Adam came running into the living room.  He was still in his pajamas, and clamoring for breakfast.  May picked him up and hugged him tight, clinging to his warmth against the coldness she sensed in Paul.

2

Nadine said later that everyone could see it coming. The summer before, Nadine noticed how May had to lie down on the hot tarmac in the middle of their game, just to breathe.  It was as if her body sensed some danger she could not see. May’s lungs would suddenly take in no more air and the world around her would begin to spin. 

Today’s attack was particularly vicious, and she grasped her friend’s hand hard. 

“You won’t stop playing with me, will you?” asked May.

“No. But you can’t continue like this,” said Nadine.

“I know.”

“Just breathe, May, breathe.”

Nadine Gold was May’s best friend. She was six feet tall in her stocking feet and as competitive as May was diffident. She was terribly sharp, too. May had the feeling that she could hide absolutely nothing from her. Nadine would know a lie or an evasion. In fact Nadine had been a psychiatric nurse in another time and place, long before rising up the hierarchy at Harvard and becoming a top administrator at the medical school, where may had met her.

What had set off this panic attack was a letter she received that same morning from Noah Gray. Noah was another of May’s secret shames.

He was a poet whom May had met him two years earlier when someone had dragged her to a reading of his. What about Noah had touched her? He was not tall like Paul; he was not exactly handsome. Although accomplished—he had published two award-winning books of poetry, and his poems frequently appeared in The New Yorker—he had none of Paul’s outward, drive. Quite the opposite: meeting him, one found a shortish, modest man of few spoken words.

That was it, the thing that galvanized her. In contrast to his outward silence—a less generous observer might even have said awkwardness—May sensed in Noah a secret inner life much like her own. Someone once said that eyes were windows to the soul—well, that was certainly true in Noah’s case. They were not shy like the rest of him; they did not look away. They always looked straight at her, unabashed.

But May’s crush on Noah Gray was not something she liked so share with others, not even Nadine, because something about her fantasies belied her cheerful but barren enthusiasm for her husband, indeed laid bare everything unsatisfactory about her life.

A promise given at that reading to send May a poem had, in two years’ time, turned into a regular exchange.  That first poem, May recalled, had been stunning. It was about Walden Pond in summer. He had written it out for her by hand, a tiny, neat hand on cream stationary. She wrote to thank him.

That had been the beginning. Now, there had been more than a dozen letters written between them, each more intimate than the next.

There was no physical contact. Whenever they met by accident—in the Square, in the bookstore—it was painful, even mortifying. Whatever was expressed in the letters seemed unable to make its way through to expression in their mundane worlds.

But she dreamed of it. Oh, yes. She dreamed he took her in his arms as they left a restaurant. It was in the back alley of the restaurant, and she could smell Spanish food being cooked as he pressed her against the wire fence, protecting garbage against stray dogs. Every night she dreamed this same scene.

And Paul? What about Paul? May loved Paul. But something was missing, and because she had never had that missing thing, she had no sense of missing anything apart from this crush, this—craving. Noah’s letters were May’s hope; they touched some finely tuned string within her and thrilled it. There was sexual desire, certainly. But what she craved was something more than that, something deeper and thus more serious.

Hence, the panic attack.

Still lying on the hot tarmac, May took the letter she’d received that morning from her skirt pocket and handed it to Nadine. It was postmarked from an island up beyond Bar Harbor, Maine, where Noah and his wife—yes, his wife Sophie and their two children—had a summer home.

Sitting next to May on the asphalt, Nadine read the letter aloud:

The father osprey has gone off and left his mate for too long.  She feeds her babies as usual but I detect worry in her.  If he’s gone any longer, maybe she won’t let him back. 

Nadine set the letter down.

"It’s about birds,” she frowned.

“Ospreys,” May replied.  “There’s a whole family he’s followed for years.  You should read how he describes them.  Diving for food, feeding their young, grooming each other.  Oh, Nadine,” May sighed, “he loves me.  I know it.” 

“All right, he loves you, he loves you,” Nadine agreed with disgust. “But while you’re chasing Noah, what makes you think Paul’s not doing the same thing?”

“I’m not chasing,” May objected to the verb. “And neither is Paul.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone says. Come on.”

Nadine shrugged, then tapped May’s back with her tennis racket, letting her know that their time for panic was over. After all, they had a set to finish.

3

A few weeks after her tennis game with Nadine, May’s sister, Hadley, came to visit from Connecticut. Older than May by four years, Hadley was at first glance the kind of glamorous woman that former generations would have called a “bimbo.” She had a rich wavy mane of brown hair, and was every bit as tall and curvy as May was thin and petite.

The day Hadley arrived, officials in Concord announced a water ban, and Walden became so crowded that May had to find another place for them to go swimming.  Adam had gone to a little local summer camp in July, but now he was home with his mother, bored and begging for sand and water.

They went to a lake in the town of Harvard, which was less crowded, while Paul went off to work. There, lying in the damp sand next to Hadley, May burrowed down and watched her boy swim.  He was a happy, independent six-year-old. He loved to draw and read—he had been reading, May would boast, since he was two and a half. And he loved to swim—she had just that past year taught him to put his head under water. At the YMCA where she often took him after school, May loved to dive down and press her face to his underwater, blowing bubbles at him, until they both had to rise up to surface, exploding with giggles.

Now she shut her eyes against the view of her son and smelled the damp sand and dreamed about love. It was that same dream, of Noah pressing her to the fence back behind the Spanish restaurant. She existed in the dream as she did not in real life.

Hadley noticed her sister’s distraction, but said nothing.

Paul, meanwhile, was also distracted. When they got back from the lake at around five in the afternoon, May called Paul at the office only to learn that he wasn’t even close to coming home. 

“All right. We’ll get a pizza. I’ll save you some,” said May.

To May, Paul’s distraction seemed only slightly worse than usual. But the following day, as the two sisters lay baking on the small beach in Harvard, Hadley propped herself up on one elbow, turned to face her sister, and said, “I feel like Paul is up to something.”

“What could he be up to?” May said dreamily, having been interrupted in her passionate kiss behind the Spanish restaurant once more.

“I don’t know.  Do you?”

“No.”

“I just hope it’s not no good,” said Hadley. Then she closed her eyes and went back to working on her tan.

May, having been interrupted in her dream, sat up, took out paper and pen from her beach bag, and began to write. It was her turn.

Their parents always called Hadley the dumb one, because she had married and dropped out of college. But Hadley had tested off the charts on her intelligence test. She had never developed a career for herself and had, May sometimes thought, too much time on her hands. In her boredom, she had developed a bloodhound’s nose for trouble. 

“All right,” Hadley finally sat up, not even bothering to dust the sand off her skin, annoyed with her younger sister. “Are you going to share this nightmare with me or not?”

Abashed, May handed her sister the draft of her letter to Noah.

“It’s just about birds,” May tried to explain.

Hadley soon lowered the letter and frowned.

“You think this is about birds?” she waved it at her sister.

“Sure,” said May, believing her sister to be over-reacting. But then, unable to fool Hadley any more than she could Nadine, she told her sister everything about Noah, keeping her voice quiet so that Adam wouldn’t hear.

Noah Gray, meanwhile, was staring out upon the glassy water from his island camp, thinking about this strange business with May. He was deeply perturbed. What had begun as a simple flirtation had sucked him into something downright dangerous.  Noah loved his work, his wife, and his solitude, and while he hadn’t always loved them in that order, they had been the things that had ordered his life for many years. Now, that order was falling apart and he squarely blamed May. It was she, after all, who had awoken him from his somnolent routine, she who had instilled in him the idea that good was not quite good enough, that somehow he could feel more alive.

Noah had loved Sophie for years, had two children by her. He could not say that she was not a complex, gifted, loving, beautiful woman, because she was. So to find himself in love with May--yes, it was true--came as a very worrisome shock.  He knew himself to be awkward, even stupid in such matters. He also knew that he was playing a cruel game writing May about birds, keeping her guessing.  But it was so pleasurable and so safe—he had thought. There was nothing in the letters he wouldn’t be willing to show Sophie. Nothing May could take before a court of law to prove his love.

What did May want? Noah was touched that she thought that, whatever it was, she had found it in him. Sitting at his desk, Sophie and the girls—Maryann, seven, and Tess, four—having gone down to the beach to look for shells, Noah stared at May’s most recent for a long time, reading it over and over:

I believe I saw the retreating wings of a bald eagle over Bear Hill Pond this morning, and it made me think of you.  Dear Noah, I have nearly forgotten--all but in these letters to you--what intimacy feels like.  It feels like home, doesn’t it? Love, May

Noah felt something wet on his cheek. He brought a hand up to his face, shocked to discover that he was crying.

4

About two weeks after Hadley had left, on a fine, mid-August evening, Paul was late for dinner.  There was nothing unusual in that. In fact, it was one of those momentous events that goes utterly unnoticed when it happens, only to explode later, upon the present, like a buried landmine.  

He said he needed to go shopping for a birthday gift for her, a confession that bought him a certain right to secrecy. But the sun had already begun to descend in the sky when May, standing in the front yard with Adam, May finally caught Paul’s lanky form walking towards her from the direction of the train station.  He was carrying no package. 

Adam, always thrilled to see his father—Paul had spent little time with the boy lately—began calling, “Daddy!  Daddy!” Adam ran to him as if he would run straight into his kneecaps. Paul bent to sweep him up at the last moment.

May, relieved that Paul was home, allowed herself a peevish complaint: “You know I hate it when you’re late.  We’re starving.”

But Paul seemed undaunted by May’s lament.  He actually looked happy.  His hair was wet and freshly combed. 

“Your hair’s wet,” she said as he approached, reaching up to it. He caught her by the wrist.

The gesture was too violent.  May sensed something out of whack. By way of antidote, Paul immediately shrugged, then proffered a casual reply:

“I got hot walking.  I found a bathroom and combed my hair.”

May had never known Paul to comb his hair when out of the house.  It was one of those tiny details that, knowing a person, strikes one as out of character. 

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, belatedly.

“I see you didn’t find anything,” she said. “Am I that difficult?”

But he looked at her as if he’d forgotten all about his reason for going into the city.

And that was all.  They ate dinner, which was cold.

Ten days later, May, Paul, and Adam traveled to Nantucket for their annual holiday.  They rented the same little cottage in ‘Sconset, where May loved walking on the beach, eating lobster, playing tennis and letting Adam catch the wayward balls. This year they could even rent bikes again, as they did a decade earlier, having taught Adam to ride on two wheels just that spring. 

They took the little shuttle bus from Sconset to the wharf, and got ice cream cones, watching the gulls pick at bits of fudge and crumbs of cones left by vacationers on the asphalt.

“You think you’ll go back to work this year?” asked Paul as they ate their cones. May had tried to work after Adam was born, but found she missed her son too much. She didn’t want him raised by anyone else, certainly not the pink-haired punk-rocker with a silver-studded belt that filled and warmed his bottles while she was gone.

Paul had never pressured her to return to work, and his question seemed casual now, the kind of question a friend would ask.

“I don’t know,” May said. “I’m thinking maybe I’ll go to school.”

“School?” Paul said, shocked. “To do what?”

His tone of disapproval shut her down.

“It’s just an idea.”

“I just don’t think we can afford for you to go to school right now.”

“Mommy, don’t go to school,” Adam echoed his father.

May cringed at the idea that Adam had no good role model in her; he could come to think a woman’s role was to stay home. Well, maybe it was. She was ready to drop the subject, but Paul, wanting to seem open-minded, questioned,

“What would you go back to school in?”

“I always thought I’d make a good doctor.”

“Doctor!” Paul exclaimed. He’d let his cone drip down his polo shirt and said, “Shit!”

“It’s six years, I know. I’ll be forty. Forty-one.”

“You said a bad word!” Adam cried, shocked at his father, who he’d never heard swear before.

“Maybe a nurse would be more practical,” Paul said. “That’s only two years.”

May stopped speaking then.  She wondered, silently angry, how Paul would have felt had he wanted to go to medical school and she told him to be a nurse instead. Then, as always, her anger was diffused that Paul was just trying to be practical.

They rented their bikes and rode slowly back to ‘Sconset, not wanting to get too far ahead of Adam. Although Adam was already beginning to show May’s genetic heritage: he was agile, and coordinated. He rode well. He was filled with joy. Wasn’t that everything?

May loved Nantucket’s light across the dunes, and the freedom to dream.

That night, after Adam had gone to bed, May and Paul watched two Hitchcock movies back to back: Spellbound, and then Notorious.  May always loved the irony of Notorious: that the Nazi collaborator was better to the heroine than the hero was.

The image of Ingrid Bergman dancing with Cary Grant made May turn to Paul and resume an old, old lament, the kind that, in a marriage, signifies so much more than it appears to do.

“I wish you’d take dance lessons with me,” she said.  “You know I’ve always wanted to do that.”

Usually, whenever May mentioned dancing Paul just returned some noncommittal platitude.  But this time, he snarled: “If you want to take dance lessons, they’ll have to be with your next husband.”

The brutality of Paul’s tone, more than the words themselves, stung her into silence.  They went to bed that night facing different walls.

But the next morning, Sun already bright and warm over the dunes, Paul seemed contrite about how harshly he had spoken to May.

“Sorry I was so gruff last night,” he said.

“Oh, it’s okay,” she said.

They sat on the beach all that morning, Adam playing happily in the sand a few feet away. May watched Paul read. She decided, with an inward sigh, that you just couldn’t have everything in a spouse. But, as she continued to look dispassionately at his pale, thin body, his thick glasses, his intent involvement in the book, May could not help thinking that with Paul perhaps she had given up something quite essential.

When May was a girl, she wanted to be either a ballet dancer or a skater. She loved the feeling of flying across the ice, making perfect round circles, spinning in her flesh colored tights and bright white skates with their big blue rabbit-fur pompoms. 

She was adorable on the ice. She even got her hair cut just like Dorothy Hamill. But her parents never let her forget that she was nothing like Hadley. Her father laughed when she skated, told her she was clumsy and didn’t have Hadley’s natural grace—that she, the smaller and less beautiful child, was awkward as an ugly duckling. May never quite knew whether he said these things out of a mean desire to teach her, or to protect her from lofty aspirations. Either way, she grew self-conscious, grew fearful, and stopped skating.

Later, Paul, echoing her father, teased May about how silly she looked dancing.  He said she looked like a chicken flapping its wings.  May, all too ready to believe unflattering things about herself, did not believe him. She sensed that it was Paul’s own fear of looking foolish that compelled him to tease her, but she stopped dancing nonetheless. A married woman could not go out dancing on her own. But she still kept inviolate those early, ethereal memories of flight.

5

About a week after they returned from Nantucket, May finally met Rita Larkin, the new office hire. Paul had spoken about her quite a bit at first, but he had not mentioned her recently. She recalled those first weeks back in the spring, when Paul had told his wife about Rita, about how “interesting” she was, how eager to learn the business. He said he had taken her out to lunch.

“She wondered if I could talk to you about the business,” he reported somewhat sheepishly.

“And why couldn’t you talk to me?” May asked, half-distracted, making dinner, but hearing in Paul’s words an alarming shift in the balance of power.

“I guess she meant since you’re home with Adam.”

“Because I’m home with Adam – does that mean I have no brain?”

“No, no, you’re misunderstanding.”

There had been a certain befuddled light in his eye, a hitch in one corner of Paul’s mouth. Most of all, May noticed the girl’s presumption to talk to Paul about his wife, as if they had the more intimate bond.

Now, on a Friday afternoon in September, Paul had rented a cruise boat to celebrate a major acquisition of venture capital.  He and his small staff were meeting at the harbor behind the Cambridgeside Galleria.

It was Rita’s back May first saw as she boarded the boat: a long, slender back with a long, thin neck and long, dark wisps of hair curling from her nape.  She was wearing a long blue skirt so clingy that May could see that Rita wore no underwear. She could see the outline of her buttocks.   May did not think that it was entirely appropriate not to wear underwear for an office party.

On deck once they had left the harbor, Paul tapped Rita on the shoulder, forcing her to turn around. She had been gazing out dreamily over the water with a soda in her hand. The wind whipped her dark hair across her very pale face.

“Rita, this is my wife, May.  May, Rita.”

Rita had dark, dark. When those eyes found May’s face, she actually scowled. Although tall, her posture was stooped, a slight scoliosis, May thought.  Her hair had not been washed recently.  To May, Rita looked baleful and in some kind of pain. 

“Nice to meet you, Rita,” said May, as convention required. But Rita would not follow suit. Instead, her scowl furrowed even more deeply into her cheeks and she turned away. 

“That was rude,” said May to Paul.

“Oh, I think she’s feeling sick. Stomach thing. Don’t take it personally,” he said. After that, May didn’t have a chance to speak to Rita again, for wherever they strolled May saw Rita’s bony shoulders quickly retreating into another part of the boat.

May heard what her husband had said about Rita being sick, and part of her felt unease that he should know how Rita felt, because that meant that she had told him. She had told her boss that she felt sick—when was that, and why? Furthermore, part of her believed that what she had just seen in Rita was not illness but entitlement. Entitlement towards Paul, her husband. She thought it took a lot of nerve to feel entitled to someone’s attention just because they were your boss and you worked with them every day.

It was not in May’s nature to be jealous, and it was not quite jealousy she felt now, either. Rather, it was alarm at the change of alliances she felt in her own husband, and felt powerless to control.

On the boat, too, it seemed perfectly clear to May that if her relationship with her husband had been triangulated, she had been given the long and pointy end. She now hated Rita, without having anything to base her hatred on save all the wordless emotions she actually knew a great deal about.

Somehow she got through the boat ride. The weekend promised splendid weather and, on a sudden whim, Paul asked May if she wanted to head into the country.  They packed up their things and drove to a B&B in New Hampshire. 

It felt nearly like old times.  Paul was attentive, even solicitous, and May was pleased by their little room with its window seat overlooking the town green and the lush, soon-to-turn foliage.  Away from home, May felt the oppressive tension she could not name dissipate.  They took a walk in the woods and even did a bit of house shopping, before Adam complained that he was bored.  They made love while Adam slept. It was the first time in months. 

May returned home from their weekend calmed and contented. But no sooner had they walked in the front door than Paul, who had literally just carried the sleeping Adam to his bed, said, “I’d like to have Rita over to dinner this week.”

There it was again.  This thing, this fishnet of a person whom she could not escape.

“Oh no,” she could not help saying.

“Why not?” Paul scowled.  “I think we should congratulate her.”

“Congratulate?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” he asked casually. “She got engaged.”

The news relieved May, but did not release her from a faint, barely conscious sense of entrapment.

A few days later, on the morning of the day Rita and her fiancé, Rick, were coming to dinner, May went in to Boston to see if she could find something nice to wear.  She was feeling insecure about her appearance, and a usually somnolent competitive instinct drove her to look for something sexy.  May had a pretty face, with large, expressive brown eyes, a shy smile, and a well-proportioned little figure.  But she always dressed the way her mother had taught her to dress—neat and ladylike.  She usually bought clothes from Talbot’s or Ann Taylor, in grays and blues.  Tailored clothing suited her, she thought. But sometimes, for all her classiness, she felt invisible.  Rita, May guessed, would be dressed boldly, in something bright and gauzy and short.  Something Indian or Batik. May had just turned thirty-five. Rita was twenty-five.

It was a cold morning.  The streets of downtown Boston were nearly barren, and Filenes’s Basement was not yet open.  Drunks hung over from the night before slept wrapped up in their reeking rags. Shifty-eyed boys with pants worn so low they exposed their boxer shorts skulked guiltily about the subway entrance.  May had taken the T but now, without a means of transport home, she felt trapped and alone.  She began to walk toward a coffee shop when she grew dizzy, overcome by a sudden, violent sensation that she could not take another step without falling.  She just stood there looking up at the tall buildings, unable to move, tears growing cold on her face. This attack was even worse than the one on the tennis court with Nadine.

She thought of calling Paul but was too embarrassed to admit her weakness to him.   She hid her panic attacks from him, knowing he would feel more annoyance than compassion. She thought of calling Nadine. But then she merely shut her eyes and concentrated on her breathing.  Slowly.  In, out.  She breathed life into her legs by sheer will, until they were strong enough to take her back to the T and home. 

That night, May felt weak and insecure, crushed up inside. But she rallied by sheer force of will. She made certain that there were fresh flowers in every room and that the old wood floors glowed with amber wax, enjoying her superiority of age and experience. Then she bundled up her little boy and had Paul drop him off at her sister-in-law’s house for the night, which was fine with Adam. Paul’s sister Grace lived in the next town over; Adam loved playing with his cousins. As she bent down and kissed him goodbye she smelled his warm skin and thought, for some reason, at least no one can take this away from me.

May then waited anxiously for the doorbell to ring. When it finally did, she opened the door and came face to face with those same dark, anxious eyes, that same strangely mistrustful scowl, the bony, hunched back.  There in the foyer Rita thrust May a bouquet of flowers.

“Here you go,” the girl said, launching into a nervous stream of words. “I tried to get something unusual, not the usual daisies. I hate daisies, don’t you?”

May gazed down at Rita’s flowers, weird, waxy flowers from which protruded long red stamens. May felt slightly repulsed by the strange offering. Joe, the dog, began barking and trying to jump up on Rita. Instead of backing away like a normal adult, Rita laughed and sat down right there in the hallway. Joe jumped into her lap.

May noticed immediately that she wore no pantyhose under her purple miniskirt. Her long, thin legs were bare and unshaven.  She registered Rita’s nakedness as a pattern, a signal of some kind.

Rick, her fiancé, had the fresh-complexioned look of a boy.  May envied how young they were, though she could not say that they looked particularly in love.  In fact, they looked so alike and so faintly annoyed with one another that they could have been brother and sister. 

“Hey,” said Rick, “Nice to meet you. Thanks for having us over.”

“Oh, no problem. Come, sit,” said May.

May served them drinks as they sat in her living room. Rita sat with her legs crossed so that an entire flank of thigh bared itself to them.  She kept touching the back of Rick’s head obsessively, which he clearly found annoying. He kept reaching for her hand to still it, frowning.

May was wearing a blue silk dress shirt and black silk pants, a last-minute compromise after she had stepped out of the bedroom in a puffy-sleeved dress from the 1980s, to which Paul had responded by saying,

"What in hell is that?”

His tone was so harsh she had to fight back tears while changing.

Rita and Rick spoke about their upcoming wedding.

“Oh, I can’t get Rick to do anything. He’s not a planner,” Rita was complaining.

“Yeah,” Rick retorted. “That’s because I don’t want to know how much you’re spending,” he quipped.

May, changing the subject, told the story of how she had met Paul. Rita seemed to like that subject because she said,

“Oh, have you got wedding photos?  I’d love to see them.”

Now Paul frowned.

“May, don’t bore them with those things.”

“I’m not boring anyone,” she said. 

“She’s not boring me!” Rita agreed in a scolding tone to Paul, as if she were now May’s best friend.  May went to their bedroom and took down the photo album of their wedding, which sat covered in a light film of dust on their bookshelf. 

Rita stared transfixed at the photographs of May and Paul from seven years earlier. When May tried to turn a page of herself and Paul locked in a kiss, Rita grabbed her hand.

“Oh, you look so in love,” she sighed.

“Oh, we were,” May said, enjoying the memory.  “At first sight, nearly.”

“Sometimes one knows right away,” agreed Rita sympathetically.

Soon, dinner was ready and May led them to the kitchen table. 

“Wow, everything looks great,” said Rick.

“Thanks! Dig in, you guys,” said May, feeling suddenly so much older than her guests, with her pretty house and little boy and cooking skills. She had everything they did not. But somehow, that evening, she could not gloat about it.

Over dinner, Rita kept teasing Rick, a harsh sort of teasing that made May cringe.  Then, abruptly about-facing, Rita grabbed Rick affectionately around the neck and kissed him passionately, right in front of Paul and May. 

When their guests had left, May, cleaning up with Paul, said, “That was a fun evening, no?”

Rick just grunted, yawned broadly.

“Although,” she continued, “Rita was so mean to Rick. It was sort of embarrassing.”

“She was just being playful,” Paul said indifferently.

“It was more than that,” said May. 

“Nonsense.”

“I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Whatever,” Paul said, wiping his hands on the dishtowel and leaving the kitchen.

“It was a good evening, though, wasn’t it?” she called to him, wanting affirmation, not wanting them to go to bed angry. Not knowing what Paul was even angry about.

“Sure, whatever,” he said.  Soon, she heard Paul’s deep breathing.

The next day, May couldn’t wait to hear what Rita had thought of the evening.  She pounced on Paul the moment he got home from work. She had picked Adam up from Grace’s and he was in his bedroom putting together some elaborate Lego set she had given him.

“So, did she have a good time?” May asked anxiously, still in the hallway.

“She threw up,” said Paul, frowning and walking past her.

“What?”

“She went home and threw up,” he repeated unhappily.

“Well, that’s not very nice.”  May felt humiliated.  Humiliated but also disturbed that Rita would have felt close enough to Paul to tell him that she had thrown up. 

“Why did she do that?  None of us got sick.  There was nothing wrong with the food.”

“No, no.  Just nerves, I guess. Is Adam home?”

“He’s in his bedroom.” She continued, “Nerves?  I didn’t know coming to our house was so taxing on the nerves.”

“She gets nervous around people,” he said simply. Then he walked into his son’s room. Adam dropped his Lego and greeted his dad with delight. Paul lifted him up and hugged him tight.

“Oh, I missed you!” he said, buried his face in the boy’s chest.

“I missed you, too, Daddy,” said Adam. The way Paul hugged him, it was like Adam had been gone a month, not a night.

But May’s mind was still on Rita.

“Not around you, apparently,” she said, disheartened that all her effort had literally been flushed down the toilet, alarmed once more that her husband had the kind of relationship with Rita in which she would tell him she was sick and he would know she got nervous around people.

May recalled Nadine’s words of the summer before: how do you know he isn’t doing the same thing? She thought she might run the dinner party past Nadine, although she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to hear what Nadine might have to say.

6

She did hear it, though, the very next night. May found herself looking away from Nadine’s eyes; they expressed shock buffered by a profound understanding. Nadine had been munching on a spring roll, but when May got to the part about Rita throwing up she stopped. She was put off her food not by the grossness, but by some kind of realization she did not at first express.

“So,” May asked.

“So,” Nadine said, “I think you could take it into a court of law.”

“What do you mean?” May asked, cocking her head and smiling uncertainly.

“I mean it’s obvious.”

“What is obvious?”

“That something’s goin’ on.”

“What could be goin’ on?” asked May, adopting a naïvete even she no longer truly felt. “I mean, he’s home every night.”

“So, you’ve never done it during the day?”

May stared at her friend, appalled.

“Well, at the very least there’s a serious flirtation happening. You’ve got to talk to him. Straight out.”

Nadine went back to munching on her spring roll. May went on to change the subject, something about Adam’s wonderful pre-school report card. But her friend’s mind had wings. She flew above it all and asked:

“What are you doing here with me, anyway? It’s a Saturday night.”

“Oh,” said May, smiling. That was an easy one. “Paul thinks I need to get out more. That we both need more space.”

“Really. Any more space and you’ll be strangers.”

May just looked down at her plate.

Three weeks later, Rita and Rick got married.  May felt relieved to have her finally and truly gone—they were in Bermuda, Paul told her. He said he received a postcard.  A postcard was safe enough, she thought.

It was early October, and the days in Concord were splendiferous, a last reprieve before autumn.  The leaves still clung to the trees, the air was warm, and swirls of color cascaded down the sidewalks of the town.  One afternoon, as May stooped to plant bulbs with her son in their little side yard, she thought of how contented she was, kneeling next to Adam, feeling his warm body next to hers as he focused on his task.

Adam said,

“I can’t wait to go to Aunt Hadley’s and Uncle Gordon’s.”

May smiled.

“Yes, that’ll be so much fun, won’t it?”

He was talking about Thanksgiving, more than a month away. To most children, that would have seemed infinitely distant. But Adam was not entirely a typical child. He had a sense of time far beyond his age, and a profound compassion for adults. Sometimes May thought he liked hanging out with adults more than he did children his own age. Although only five, he read and wrote quite well. He liked sitting at May’s old computer and typing ghost stories. He liked drawing, too. But not the normal scribbles of a five-year old: a sun, a tree, a house. No, he was obsessed with skeletons. Not just any skeletons, either, but anatomically correct ones. May had turned a page of an encyclopedia to a celluloid page of the vertebrae, and Adam pored over that picture, painting it over and over until he had every human vertebra in the correct position.

May was justly proud of her gifted little boy; if only Paul spent more time with him. He seemed too exhausted when he came home at night, and it was left to May to help build the Lego sets, and play Memory all afternoon. At least Paul read to him before he went to bed. She had insisted on that.

May knew she loved her son, enjoyed him. But she could not imagine how ferociously she might one day wish to protect him.

Now, planting bulbs, they cast their sights ahead to a family Thanksgiving. Usually, they went to the Stillmans in Pound Ridge. Paul’s family was quite rich, especially for immigrants: they had a swimming pool, a clubhouse, a tree house, and a fourteen-room home where the entire extended family could stay and not all bump into each other.

Paul’s mother, Mary, was small, plump, and nurturing yet emotionally elusive.  Her chief passion in life was her knitting.  She carried needles and a half-finished baby sweater with her everywhere, as if the act of knitting for children as yet unborn was some kind of fertility ritual. Mary especially relished long car trips. 

Don’t you get nauseous?” May once asked her.

“Oh, no.  Not at all.”

Indeed, May thought, Mary lived in her own hyperbaric chamber, to fool her inner ear from detecting disturbance.  Balance was what the Stillmans had in such abundance, and May loved this about them, although it was the very same thing about them that infuriated Paul.

Mary’s only disappointment with her daughter-in-law was that May simply would not learn to knit.  May did not say that she had better things to do with her spare time, but she sidestepped the issue, suggesting to Mary that she had no aptitude for knitting. 

“Oh, rubbish,” said Mary, continuing to knit, suspecting that May had a far more independent constitution than she let on.

Paunchy Sam Stillman was a retired commodities trader, more direct and readable than his knitting wife.  He spoke his mind and never seemed to care what anyone thought about it, the result being that Mary was always shushing him.

“Oh, stop shushing me, for God’s sake, woman.  I wasn’t saying anything so terrible.”  He always widened his eyes humorously at May, which she loved. 

Finally, there was Paul’s younger sister, lovely Grace and her husband Hank, and their two little children, Amelia and Aaron. Aaron was exactly Adam’s age and his best friend.   They lived in Acton, and May saw them frequently. Over the years, she and Grace had become close friends as well.

But this year, Hadley had asked her to come down, and May could not refuse. How could she? It would be the first Thanksgiving Hadley had undertaken since her daughter Lily’s death four years earlier.

Lily had been Hadley’s only child. At the age of twelve, she was wiped out in a flash of light and noise on the way to a ballet lesson.  Hadley had been tied up at work that day and asked another parent if she could take their two girls to the lesson.  A drunk driver coming at them from the opposing lane wiped all but the mother out in downtown Stamford, in broad daylight.  How the mother fared May did not dare dwell upon.

The tragedy of Lily’s death had created an unspeakable bond between the two sisters and a permanent rift between the sisters and their parents.  For, to May and Hadley’s parents, Lou and Jen, Lily’s death simply confirmed what they already knew about the world. Recriminations flew like shards of glass until the wounds scarred too deep to forget.   Now, their parents lived in Sarasota, Florida, and if the sisters saw them once or twice a year, it was enough.

Adam was too young to have known Lily, who died when he was only one year old. But May could remember her cradling him in her arms, a living doll.  Lily was fair, and athletic, and loved to dance like her mother and aunt. She did not see the darkness ahead of her. Now, Hadley’s house smelled of loss, of tragedy. Photos in silver frames stood everywhere, memorializing a beautiful life that would never change or grow.

But Adam loved his indulgent Aunt. She always had something extravagant in store for him, like a giant stuffed giraffe, or a motorized car. The last time he’d been there, she had put a tent in his room, and he slept in there all cozy and private—except for the Weimaraner, Bucky, who weighed one hundred and fifty pounds and liked to sleep on top of Adam. Paul seemed indifferent to the prospect of Thanksgiving at Hadley’s. He seemed indifferent to the pretty new dress May bought for the occasion as well.

“Well, don’t you like it?” she said, modeling it, proud of the fact that she had lost a few pounds since her birthday, and secretly wishing Noah could see her.

“Sure. It’s fine.”

She was wounded by his indifference, but on the other hand, Paul’s desire of her had long since become more intellectual affirmation than something she actually desired herself.

When, on Thanksgiving morning, they all piled stiffly out of the car at Hadley’s house, a big Queen Anne Victorian on Stamford’s well-heeled north side, May noticed with delight that her sister had decked the place out for the holidays.  A huge Harvest wreath hung on the door, and evergreen garlands tied with rust-colored velvet bows festooned the staircase railing leading up to the porch. Inside, a fire was lit in the living room, where Gordon, Hadley’s husband, was smoking his pipe and looking ponderous, even Dickens-like, in a tall-backed wing chair. Hadley told May how, for the first year after Lily died, Gordon writhed on the floor in the middle of the night, swearing he’d kill himself come morning.

Now, as May watched Gordon smoke his pipe by the light of the fire, she thought he had retreated to a time far before Lily had even been born. Hadley, for her part, seemed gay and living in the present. But she had begun to travel—more and more frequently leaving home to shop for an antiques business she had started. At first it had been trips out of state for a day or two. Now, nearly every time May called Gordon told her sourly that Hadley was in Italy, or in London.

May and Hadley hugged each other tight. Hadley seemed unusually elated.

“They’re not coming. Mom and Dad. They’re not coming. I’m so relieved.”

“Oh, Adam will be disappointed,” said May, then felt guilty at her selfishness.  Their parents’ presence gave Hadley little joy and a great deal of pain. On this, her first Thanksgiving since Lily’s death, Hadley’s high spirits belied her fragility.

Apparently, their father had called earlier that day to report treacherous wind shear in the Northeast corridor.   He was a fearful flyer; he hated to travel. Normally, May liked to have the whole family together, even if they were difficult.  She thought family was something you made sacrifices for. But May’s mother was as alert to emotional turbulence as their father was to turbulence of the air, and so May herself was relieved to sidestep the scrutiny. 

“Let’s dance, then!” she hugged her sister again, feeling celebratory.

“Definitely,” Hadley smiled. “I’ve just got to check the turkey. The Palmers are coming, so that’s good.”

Adam was disappointed, though.

“I love Papa and Gram. Why didn’t they come?”

May, not wanting to instill in her son her father’s fear of flying, merely said, “We’ll go visit them this spring, okay?”

That seemed to placate Adam for the moment.

It might have been a quiet Thanksgiving had it not been enlivened by Adam’s exuberant presence, by the Palmers, a boisterous group of Hadley and Gordon’s old friends, who arrived half-plastered at 4 p.m., and by the preternatural vitality of Hadley herself, who by all rights should have dead with loss, as Gordon was. 

Reminders of Lily were everywhere: photographs of her as Mary Poppins in a school play; Lily playing on her middle school tennis team; Lily in her 5th grade graduation dress, two weeks before she was killed.  No matter how gracious Hadley was, no matter how much the sisters drank or, mocking their disapproving husbands, put on Bob Marley and danced, Lily would never run down those stairs again, full of life and fun, her blonde hair flying behind her.   After May and Paul and Adam left, the house would be empty once more, too big for the solitary couple that lived there.

As for Paul, he seemed withdrawn, but scarcely more than usual.  On the other hand, what was usual had so gradually eroded that May hardly noticed how much “usual” had changed. On Thanksgiving morning, waking up in one of Hadley’s guest rooms, he groped toward May, but his invitation felt half-hearted and she rebuffed him with feigned lightheartedness, saying she had to help Hadley in the kitchen.

“Fine,” he said gruffly, and rolled over, as if all the love he had for her had been exhausted in that one small touch of his hand on her breast.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, May peeled potatoes while Hadley got the turkeys into the double oven.  They continued their conversation of the summer before as if no months had passed.

“So, how’s bird-man?” Hadley asked. 

May looked around, worried that Paul might have been listening.  She then pulled from her bag a letter in an envelope to share with her sister, handling it over as if it were a holy relic.

“Read this, Hadley. Read.”

Hadley read, but she did not look happy.

It was a letter—a series of letters, actually, all on one piece of paper. May had sent it first, and he had returned it to her, to be written on again, so that neither kept it, neither owned it:

Sept. 3

Dear Noah:

I trust you left the osprey well. I worried to hear of a heavy storm off the coast of Maine. I worried about the nest—they love to build so high.

Sept. 20

Dear May:

I got this letter but waited to write until I knew what to say. Then I realized I would never know precisely what to say.

Even when their nests come down, they just build them back up. I’ve seen it happen.

P.S. I am home now, but not because I am back in Weston.

Oct. 20

Dear Noah:

Welcome home. I feel better knowing you are not so far away. Oh, how I wish we lived in some as-yet-undiscovered society where wives loaned their husbands out to those less fortunate. Say, for a basket of fruit. For you I might even give Sophie two baskets. (Don’t mind how ridiculous I am being! I know we are just friends.)

Love, May

Nov. 12

Dear May:

You’re not ridiculous. And even if you were, I wouldn’t mind.

Hadley handed the letter back to her sister without a word.

“I need to write him back,” May said, looking skyward, out Hadley’s kitchen window.

“And Paul?”  “How’s Paul?” asked Hadley, without pausing the conventional length of time before speaking.

“Okay,” said May, irritated at her sister’s sarcasm.

“Really?  To me he looks like shit.”

Hadley rinsed her hands and wiped them on a towel.  Then she turned to her sister.

“I hate to say this on a holiday, but I’m frankly worried.”

“Paul, you mean? Oh no,” May laughed uneasily.  “He’s fine.”

That is not what Hadley meant at all, but the truth that the older, wiser sister had gleaned and that had pressed itself to the surface, submerged itself once more in the ritual of celebration, in wine and laughter, and in Hadley’s delicious food.

Paul’s state worsened the very moment they returned home.   Indifference turned to sullenness. He was uncommunicative most of the time.  Nearly every night he came home from work late, smelling of perfume. 

“You smell like Bloomingdale’s,” May said, greeting him, scrunching up her nose.

“No, it’s just in the office air.  Rita wears very strong perfume.”

It was one of those lies May didn’t quite believe, but could not afford not to believe.

*

The film Paul didn’t want to make on Christmas begins at the end of their block of houses. It shows Paul’s retreating shoulder blades hunched in his leather jacket.  He is walking quickly away from May, toward home.  He looks out of place on their street, a kind of James-Dean-like rebel teleported by accident into a spirit-crushing suburban wasteland.

Inside the house is five-year-old Adam.  He will be six in June. He has grown blonde and tall, like his father, and tender, like his mother.  He is racing around excitedly in his one-piece pajamas.  And there’s May, in her Lanz nightgown, helping her son open his gifts from Santa.  May opens the ugly slippers Rita helped pick out, holds them up to the camera and makes a face, which Paul, off-camera, doesn’t find funny.  A fire blazes in the fireplace, and May is caught for posterity, making their last Christmas breakfast. 

Finally, the film ends with Adam: he is sitting in May’s lap, singing a song for his grandparents:  “I wake up in the mawnin’ it’s a quarter to five, I just can’t wait to come a-live.  I brush my teeth.  Sh ch sh ch, sh ch sh ch.” Adam grins into the camera, growing more and more excited with each verse. The film grows shaky as Paul tries to follow Adam, who has now leapt off his mother’s lap and is running in circles around and around the living room. 

“See, Dad!” May also grins into the camera.  “Now you don’t have to worry about me dying of pneumonia up here in frigid New England.”  Her face in the camera looks nearly as happy and unsuspecting as her small son’s, except for a slight nervous blink in her left eye.

Off camera, May sprinkles cheese on their omelet, Paul standing by her side.  She calls him some old silly name and they laugh about it.  

Then Paul turns off the camera.

“We have our own language, Paul,” May says to him.  “What would you do with someone else?  How would you ever communicate?”

Paul says, “Invent a new language, I guess.”

7

It was very cold that January.  Thin dribbles of light reached Concord, and when the sun finally did shine, it was not a warm brightness, but a kind of shadow-light that shone begrudgingly.  This year, there were even strange microbursts of snow or hail, and on one such day May saw it blizzard in her own backyard, while the sun continued to shine on her neighbors.  She was restless, unhappy, shut in.

Those deep winter days Paul looked half-dead when he came home, like he’d pushed his way past some fatal highway pileup just to get there.  He hardly spoke to her, played distractedly with Adam, and sat in silence over dinner.  Then he made his way quickly up to his study, in a cold, unfinished room of their little Cape, where he remained until May was asleep.  

For several weeks, May had been watching a PBS special on birds, hosted by Richard Attenborough. Every day, Paul got home to find her watching it.

“What’s with you and those birds?” he would say as he set his briefcase down and removed his coat and scarf.

“They’re fascinating. I think,” she would reply, each time aching to tell Paul how she felt about Noah, how she felt something was dreadfully missing between them, how, whatever it was, she still wanted to try to get it from Paul.

She was watching the episode about African cranes, and the sight of the birds dancing—huge, black cranes bobbing up and down—excited her in the way a hidden truth excites. The birds, absurd and beautiful in their excited dance, reminded her so much of human beings, moving in response to what was actually random stimuli but out of which the mind made patterns, or stories.

One night, lying in bed next to Paul, May decided to be brave. They had been talking about something but in the semi-darkness she said, “Paul, I’ve got this terrible crush.”

“Really? On who?”

“On this guy I met. He’s a poet.”

“Is he a good kisser?” he asked, bemusedly.

May was shocked at Paul’s indifference, amusement, even.

“I’ve never kissed him,” she said, offended but also titillated at the thought of it, the possibility, as Paul saw it.

“Why not?”

The conversation was not going at all the way she planned.

“Because he’s married, for one thing. And for another, my feelings for Noah have made me realize there’s something lacking between us. When I walk into a room, Noah’s eyes just light up. I want that from you, Paul. I don’t want to have an affair.”

May began to cry.

“I’m sorry,” Paul whispered, holding May against him. “I’m sorry I’ve been—out of it. Inattentive. I’m sorry I’ve been so distracted. You’re right.”

May nestled against him, surprised at how easily he had suddenly admitted guilt, affirmed her sense of there being something missing.

“I love you,” she said, as payment for goods received.

“I love you, too. I really do,” he said.

After such confessions, such intimacy, such promise of doing better, it would have been impossible for May to imagine what came next, even had she not been naïve. She was blindsided by the truth Paul hurled at her in their kitchen several nights later.

It was the end of a quiet dinner.  May and Paul used to talk a great deal; lately, conversation was sparse, despite their opening up to each other in the darkness of their bedroom. Adam had been playing with his food. He stopped suddenly, looked up at his parents, and said, “You guys are so boring,” then went off to play in his room.  When Adam had left the room, Paul bent his head down and rested it in his hands. 

“You look tired,” said May. “What’s the matter?”

Paul didn’t look at her, didn’t stare her down with wild, enraged eyes, didn’t contradict her the way she had grown to expect.  Instead, he got up from the table to get the pepper grinder on the counter.  Then, holding the grinder, he turned to her and sighed.  He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes.  They looked red and exhausted.

“May,” he said, trying to look at her through a myopic blur.

“What is it, Paul?” she said distractedly.

He shook his head. 

“I have something to tell you.”

May felt some bad energy tingle through her body. 

“Is it bad?”

“May--”

“You’re having an affair?” 

He nodded. He had her full attention now.

“With Rita?”  Her own voice sounded thin and fluty to her.

May knew from his face it was true.  She didn’t need him to say it.  It was true, had been true all along. Images from the dinner party returned to her: the strange flowers, Rita’s bare thigh, the words, “Oh, sometimes one knows right away.”

“I thought you said she was engaged,” said May.

“She is.”

“Have you had sex with her?” She could feel her voice rising.

He did not look at her when he answered.

“A little bit.”

“A little bit?  How is that possible?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?  How many times have you had sex with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stop saying you don’t know.  Oh God,” said May, turning as if she would flee.  “How could you do this?” 

I didn’t mean to.”

May began to tremble; she felt herself going into shock.  She didn’t see Adam and hoped he wasn’t listening in on them.

“I want to know where.  When, where¾” she said, as if knowing could encapsulate the betrayal, contain it somehow.

“May--” Paul began to object, but something hard and unbending in her look made him tell her.

“At her apartment, mostly,” he sighed, relieved to be finally telling her.

“Mostly?  Where else?”

Paul was silent.

“Here?” she said incredulously.  “In my house?  In our bed?”

“No, no,” he said, “never in the bed.”

“Oh, just, like, on the floor?  On Adam’s bed?  Our son’s bed?”

Paul was silent.

“And all those Sundays I thought you were going to work?”

“Sometimes we worked,” he said, with idiotic candor.

*

Where they stood, what they said, where Adam was--May would retain only a faint recollection of these details.  But she would always remember the danger in the air, of good things tearing apart in mid-fabric, of words on fire that hissed like burning fat. 

“And the time I found the notes, and you told me she was depressed?  You lied to me.”

“She was depressed,” he defended himself.  “She’s not evil.  She felt terrible about what was going on.”

“Poor thing.”

Somehow Adam was put to bed, none the wiser of the cataclysmic event that had just occurred between his parents.  By midnight, May was worn out.  But she could not stop asking questions.  She was driven to know, to get inside Paul’s betrayal, even though each answer ripped back another layer of her skin. And, in an odd way, she felt rudely trumped by Paul, mortified, her epistolary flirtation fading into schoolgirl titillation, compared to what Paul had actually gone and done.

In the darkness, lying by his side, she felt so alone. She begged him to touch her hair.

He lay beside her and she curled against him and he touched her hair the way he did whenever she needed calming.

“I thought it was just a crush, May,” he said, still stroking her hair.  “I wanted to tell you.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.  It’ll be all right, though.”

They fell asleep, but May woke up in the middle of the night.

“I want you to sleep on the couch,” she said, nudging Paul, who groaned and turned over.  “I said I want you out of here.  Get out.”

“All right.”  He grabbed his pillow and a blanket, but no sooner had he gone out into the living room than she followed him in there. 

“Never mind,” she said.  “Come back.”

“I thought you wanted me out.”

“I don’t know what I want!” she cried, feeling that only his skin on hers could quench the burning, although that same touch was now pure humiliation, and it was this impossible contradiction that made her go nearly out of her mind.

The next morning, May stood at the door and tried to block him from going to work. 

“I’ll come with you,” she said.

He tried to move her aside, but she grabbed him and held him to her until he had to gently pry her arms from around his neck. 

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said. 

May was surprised that he didn’t speak with more firmness.  Paul, once so certain about everything, seemed not to know anything for certain anymore. 

Mary was silent when May called to ask if she could take Adam for a few days.  She might actually have said, your son is fucking someone else, too much in shock to realize that she was shocking anyone else.

Sam, who had been listening on a second phone, breathed so hard into the receiver that May thought he might be having a heart attack.

What May did that day was lost to memory, but she must have called Hadley, because she remembered having to tell her not to come up, they were working things out. That night, when her in-laws came to pick Adam up, Mary bent down and put her hands on Adam’s shoulders. 

“You’re going to have fun with Grandma!  We can make a cake together.  Would you like that?”

May overheard Sam growl into Paul’s ear, “You don’t deserve this child.  Or this woman.”

Adam turned his astute little face up to his mother, “Why do I feel like you’re sending me away?” 

“Dad and I have some things to discuss, that’s all,” she replied.  “We love you.”  May bent down to him.  He leaned his little face into her and gave her a kiss as wet as her closed eyes.

After Adam had left, May followed Paul around the house like a hostile ghost.  No matter where he went, he couldn’t shake her.  Finally, backed into a corner of the bedroom, Paul began pulling his hair.

“That’s enough!  I can’t take it anymore!  Rita at work, you at home¾the only peace I get is in the car.  You don’t know how close I’ve come to running that car into a goddamned tree.”

“Poor Paul,” said May bitingly.

*

They fought, cried, made tea.  May’s skin burned like it had been soaked in kerosene and lit.  New angles of Paul’s betrayal kept coming to her, fresh misery with which to harm herself, as if pain came in limited reservoirs that one could simply burn out. 

“She says I’m a coward,” said Paul miserably. “And I am.”

“Oh, really? Because you don’t want to leave your wife and child?”

“Because I don’t want to change even when I know the change will make me happy.”

“What does Rita know about our marriage?” cried May indignantly. “Has she even once thought of me?  Of Adam?”

“Of course she’s thought about you.”

“Not enough to leave you alone, apparently.”

“We can’t leave each other alone,” he said in that baffled, sincere voice she had come to dread more than his anger.

They suffered several more days of sleepless nights, nights in which May threw Paul out of the bedroom only to retrieve him an hour later.  More days of combing morbidly through the detritus of Paul’s private life.  After he had gone to work, May would rifle through his things in search of evidence, as if mere suspicion were still possible.  She was driven to know every detail, she collected the evidence like a forensic scientist.  In the unheated quiet of Paul’s rough attic study, May flipped through her husband’s calendar book.  August.  There it was: the day he had come home late for dinner, his wet hair too neatly combed.  She found a cryptic note a few days before that:  “Drumlin Farm.”  Had that been their first trysting place?  There was a real storyline, a narrative history to Paul’s affair with Rita, but May could only guess at it.

She ripped the waxy blooms, now dried, from the flowers Rita had brought to the dinner party.

She searched Paul’s pockets.  In one pocket she found a crumpled leaf, minute proof of some autumnal tryst.  From there, she moved on to his file drawer, but she could find no letters.    Paul was not an old-fashioned “snail mail” fellow, she mused with bitter irony.   Not like Noah.  Then, in the back of his file, a blue velvet box presented the opportunity she had been looking for without having known it:  Paul’s wedding band.  Moving now with determination, she went into the basement, searched the dark, damp space until she finally found their garden hedge clippers.  They were old and rusted, so dull they had fallen into disuse.  She brought the hedge clippers up into the kitchen and turned on a burner. 

May put the ring on the edge of a knife and held it over the flame.  When it glowed orange, she transferred it to her wood cutting board, but by the time she had been able to maneuver it into the hedge clippers, it had grown too cold to cut.  She tried this twice, each time burning an indelible mark of Paul’s wedding band into the wood board. 

Finally, May hung the ring on the teeth of the hedge clippers and held the whole thing under the flame.  When the ring glowed red, she squeezed the clippers shut with a grunting cry.  The ring twisted into a figure eight but did not break.  She stuck the molten mass under the flame again for a minute, then squeezed a second time. This time a piece of red-hot gold ring fell onto the cutting board.  There, the whole thing quickly became a black, twisted mass.

For years, May had sentimentally kept the trinkets from her wedding:  lace stockings that no longer fit, a blue garter, now dirty gray, delicate lace underwear, gloves she had sewn herself out of scraps of old lace, mere wisps of cloth open at the knuckles and thumb.  Now she took the blackened wedding band and wrapped it in a lace glove.  Then she took that and put it back into the blue velvet box and put it on Paul’s desk.

Inexplicably, she felt better.

When Paul got home he found the box right away.

“That’s pretty pointless,” he muttered, closing it and shoving it toward the back of his desk.  He didn’t even seem angry.  He hardly seemed to care at all.

May was standing behind him.

“I want you to leave,” she said. 

May later wondered whether she had really said those words.  She berated herself over and over for saying them—if in fact she had.  Perhaps, had she swallowed her pride, he might have stayed, and the course of their lives would have been different.  As if she had that power.

Adam returned home that night, already asleep, Sam carrying him to his bed, but not before casting his son a withering glance. The next morning the boy came rushing into their bedroom.  He hopped onto the bed between them and cried,

“I love my family!”

May turned into her pillow so Adam could not see her devastation.  It was as if, somehow, he knew.

Paul rose and packed up a few things.  He took Adam for a ride in the car, saying he wanted to talk to him alone.  Adam came back half an hour later, chin quivering, lips pinched tight.  He ran to May and buried his face in her leg.

“Well, see you,” Paul said to May; he rubbed the top of Adam’s head.

But May had a surprise for him: postcards.  While he had been driving around with Adam, she had made him two postcards, addressed to herself.  One of them said, “I love you and want to come home.”  Another said, “I’m sorry for the pain I caused.  Forgive me.” 

She handed them to Paul.  “You can’t come back until you send me these,” she said.  He looked at them, shoved them in the side pocket of his suitcase, and frowned, as if they meant less than nothing to him.

8

After Paul had gone, May paced the house.  She walked into the kitchen, agitated.  She looked at her hands and noticed that she still had her wedding band on.  She took it off and threw it across the kitchen, where it rolled for a while, spun around on edge, then disappeared. 

But the next morning, May decided that she did not want to part with her ring just yet.  Someday soon he would sign those postcards and she would get them in the mail.  Paul would come home.  She searched the kitchen floor, but it was no longer there.  Joe watched her looking for the ring with his tongue hanging out. 

“Joe,” she turned to the dog, “what did you do with my ring?”

He continued to pant, thinking something exciting was going on.  Maybe she was searching for a tennis ball or a bone for him.

But the dog’s excitement gave May a thought: maybe he had eaten the ring.  Of course.  He had eaten the ring. 

It was below zero that morning in Concord; before going out, May put on kitchen gloves.  It was early, about seven.  Adam was still asleep in his warm bed.  May went into his room, leaned over him, and breathed in the sweet smell of his skin, pressing her cheek against his hot red one.   Then, without bothering to put on coat or hat, she stepped outside in the stupid fuzzy slippers that Rita had picked out, her rubber gloves, and a plastic bag.  There were six inches of old snow on the ground, iced over, dirty and crusty, hiding the frozen sticks and leaves they’d been too distracted to clean up that fall.  May’s toes were numb and white and her ankles were scraped by the time she’d filled the plastic bag with the frozen dog shit and returned to the house.  There were a couple of pounds of it¾the amount, roughly, of a bag of bagels from Einstein’s Bagels.  She dumped the turds in the bathroom sink and began to run the hot water over them, feeling for something hard.  Looking for glinting gold. 

As luck would have it, the doorbell rang just then.  People rarely came by her street unannounced, and she wasn’t expecting a package.  Strange.  She rinsed her hands quickly, wiped them on a towel, and went to answer the door. 

It was Nadine. She was standing there looking puzzled when

Joe pounced on her, having gathered a potent velocity from across the living room.

“Fuck!” she cried, brushing off her nice pants. “You realize this fucking dog is insane.”

Bark was still jumping, trying to reach Nadine’s eyeglasses. Next to tennis balls, they were his favorite thing.

May smiled distractedly as she moved back toward the bathroom.

“I’m in the middle of something,” she said. 

“In the middle of what? I’ve been calling and calling and you haven’t picked up.”

May did not answer, and Nadine followed friend into the bathroom, noticing her wet footprints.  In the bathroom, she watched as May turned on the water and continued what she had been doing. 

“May?” she whispered.  “What are you doing?”

“Washing shit.  What does it look like?”

The shit had begun to soften and get squishy in her fingers.

“Oh God, May.  Come away from that.”

“I’m trying to find my wedding ring.”

“What?”

“Wedding ring,” she said calmly.  “I threw it across the kitchen floor, and I think Joe ate it.”

“Okay, May.  That’s enough.  Come on.”

She took her small, slender friend by the upper arms and literally lifted her away from the sink. 

“But the ring.  It could be in there,” May protested.

“It’s not in there, May.  Joe didn’t eat the ring.”

“Maybe he did.”

“No.  Come on, sweetheart.”

Nadine spotted the plastic bag on the floor and with one side of it she swiped up the shit and deposited the whole mess into the toilet.  She flushed.  May’s hands were covered in dog shit and Nadine, with all the efficient tenderness of the psychiatric nurse she had once been, gently led May back to the sink and washed her hands.  Afterwards, she got May to lie down on her bed and placed two pillows under her head.  Very, very casually she said, “I’d like to call your sister. What’s her number?”

“You don’t need to do that,” said May, shutting her eyes.  She suddenly felt exhausted.

“No, I’d like to call.”

“Why, because I’m washing dog shit?”

“That, among other things.”

“I was only doing it to find my ring.”

But May was too tired to argue.  She zoned out on her bed, staring up at the ceiling, with Nadine sitting by her, cradling the cordless phone under one ear.  Time must have passed, but she had no idea how long, because the next thing she remembered was her sister banging through the hallway with her suitcase. Adam was up and Nadine was lying on the living room floor, pretending to be a sleeping giant while Adam giggled and poked her.

“I’m calling your doctor,” said Hadley. “Where’s his number?”

“Why?” asked May, alarmed.

“He can prescribe something mild. You’ll take it.”

The way Hadley said it, May knew she would, too.

May found the ring nearly a year later.  It had rolled under a heavy bag of birdseed in the kitchen closet. 

Paul never sent her the postcards she had given him.