Flesh and Blood (18 page)

1977/
Mary knew. She knew by the smells he brought home with him, by the tunes he hummed. Constantine wore the woman on his face. The fact itself didn't surprise her. Men strayed, they were driven by appetites. She'd been educated as a little girl, and she'd never let sentiment pass for thought. What surprised her was not the fact but her own sense of distance and even, on certain exhausted nights, of relief. Constantine was unfaithful to her, and it made sense. She was far from a perfect wife, though she'd set out to be one. She'd suffered over the birthday cakes, cleaned everything, sewn flawless hems. But years went by and she never picked up the habit of desire. She was cool and reluctant in bed. She stole, and could not seem to stop. She failed to befriend the prominent women, to become their intimate, though she served on endless committees. If Constantine had something going, if he'd found a way to crush his yearnings the way other men stepped outside for a cigarette, it was all right with her. She knew, with rock-hard certainty, that he wasn't in love. The smug, self-satisfied limits of his affection clung to him like the woman's perfume. It was Constantine's nature to build, to acquire, and he might add a woman or two to his life but he would never voluntarily relinquish any of his holdings. He wouldn't sacrifice the prickly friendship he and Mary had found, the comforts of the home they'd built. So she went along. She disliked pretending ignorance. She could feel so stupid, so underestimated. Still, it seemed a small enough price. She couldn't live inside an arrangement. She couldn't water her ivy or try new recipes as a woman who openly consented to her husband's infidelity. But she could keep a secret.

She kept the secret for nearly a year, and might have kept it much longer, but one day in the middle of a heat wave unprecedented since the turn of the century she stopped by Constantine's office on her way to the grocery store to drop off a contract he'd forgotten at home. She rarely went to his office. She had no business there. It was not the kind of place wives were meant to visit. It had no amenities, no magazines or comfortable chairs, and the bathroom, a communal one down the hall to which one carried the key on an oversized brass ring, was unspeakable. If Constantine and his partner were ruthless in the economies they applied to the houses they built, they were, at least, similarly severe about their own professional comforts. Their offices, on the third floor of a vaguely Tudor-style commercial building, were sheathed in Masonite paneling and furnished, haphazardly, with imitation-wood desks and green Leatherette chairs. Mary disliked entering the office at all. Its cheapness made her uneasy, and on the rare occasions when she was forced to go there she felt for some time afterward edgy and insecure, as if she'd caught a glimpse of termites browsing the foundations of her house.

Still, the contract was needed, and so she went to the office just before ten on a scorching morning, dressed in a beige linen skirt and an eggshell-colored silk blouse. She found Constantine at his. desk, looking so hectic and overworked, so much like the living embodiment of those conditions, she suspected that upon hearing the outer door opening he had picked up the phone, lit all three hold buttons, and begun scribbling nonsense words on a yellow legal tablet. She thought it might be a public-relations gesture, a protocol designed to seduce creditors and investors alike, and as soon as he saw her he'd relax, hang up the telephone, sit back in the big wheeled chair that produced a harsh, serrated sound whenever it moved over the clear plastic panel Constantine kept on the floor behind his desk to protect the carpet.

But he kept talking. “—I said a low estimate, if that's your idea of a fucking low estimate, Jimmy, I don't know what to tell you—” He waved at her, a chopping gesture at once welcoming and dismissive. He pointed to the right-hand corner of his desk, where she laid the contract. He mouthed the words Thank you, and continued talking into the receiver.

“—I want you to get a good price, is what I want, you want me to tell you what a good price is, I'll tell you, a
good price
is—”

Mary turned to go, anxious to return to the relative hush and clean, cushioned surfaces of her own life. She came flat up against Nick Kazanzakis's secretary, what was her name, the fat girl she'd met at the Christmas party two years ago.

“Oh,” Mary said, and smiled. “Hello. How are you?”

What
was
her name? Martha, Margaret. No, something foreign.

The girl stood staring at Mary with an expression so empty, so dumbly astonished, that Mary suspected she must be feebleminded. She had something of that look, fat and small-headed, with blondish no-color hair pulled tightly into a little blond fist at the top of her head. Mary's first impulse was to speak slowly and distinctly, as she would to a child. She might have said something like, I'm Mrs. Stassos, what a pretty dress you're wearing.

“Hello,” the girl said, in a voice harsh and accented but not in any way simple. Mary saw her face fill with expression just as a colored glass fills with clear liquid. Under her makeup the girl's face became petulant and triumphant, as if she alone knew of some past transgression of Mary's, an ancient sin Mary had thought was safely buried away.

“We've met, I think,” Mary said. “I'm Mary Stassos.”

“Magda Bolchik,” the girl said. She continued looking at Mary with a victorious hatred so naked it seemed to emanate from her in waves, like heat rising from asphalt.

“The Christmas party, I believe,” Mary said. “I'm on my way out, I just dropped off some papers.”

“Yeah, the Christmas party,” Magda said.

“Yes. Well, it was nice seeing you again.” Mary stepped around the girl, went to the door, and she might have left with no more than a puzzled feeling, a sour sense of unrest, but she turned and saw it. She saw that the girl had stepped quickly around Constantine's desk and that she stood there with her hand on his shoulder. She saw Constantine brush the girl's hand away and she saw him look up at her, at Mary, with panic in his eyes, even as he continued talking about the proper price to pay for lathwork.

This was the girl.

Mary lost herself; she lost her own inner convictions of cause and effect. She'd known Constantine was having an affair but the girl she'd imagined was so different, so superior to this one, that the very laws of physics seemed to have been violated. If this plain, overweight girl could be sleeping with her husband—could be her rival—then the papers on Constantine's desk could shriek, rise up like birds, and fly around the room. The coffeepot could explode, the walls could crack. Mary stood through the moment as Magda stared at her with the furious satisfaction of a gorging bear and Constantine looked up pleadingly, guiltily, while he argued into the telephone.

Mary did the only thing she knew how to do. She said, in a pleasant voice, “See you later.” She touched her earring. And she left.

She found that she couldn't be in her house, even after she'd taken a pill. The rooms felt infected, filled with a silence so dreadful it seemed weighted, as if a lethal, invisible gas were seeping in through the walls. It occurred to Mary that her breathing trouble might come from something in the house, some vapor floating up through the earth that was poisoning only her because she spent more time there than anyone else. Of course, that was ridiculous. She'd had these fits of breathlessness most of her adult life. Still, she couldn't be in the house right now. She couldn't breathe there. She couldn't stay at home. She couldn't go shopping. She couldn't visit a friend because all her friendships were formal ones, related either to Constantine's business or to her own charities. The women she liked best, the calm well-bred women who chaired the committees and gave the luncheons, had never offered her more than the outer edge of their affectionate attention. While she'd subsisted on that for years she could not have it now; she couldn't possibly pay an unannounced call on someone who would cordially tolerate her presence. Assuming she was received, accepted into a living room and given a glass of iced tea, she was too afraid she'd break down. And if she broke down in front of any of those cool assured women she'd be little more than an immigrant, full of an immigrant's hysterical, bottomless trouble—gesticulating, babbling, keening at the white ship as it sailed away. She knew they'd treat her kindly but she knew as well that they'd think her pathetic, and she knew she could not survive that.

She drove, instead, to New York and took a room at the Plaza.

The Plaza calmed her a little. In the ornate golden hush of its lobby she felt, once again, like a woman who could handle herself, a woman of power and means who could do whatever must be done. She let herself be shown to her room, murmured something to the bellhop about her bags arriving later, and when she was alone she turned the air-conditioning on as high as it would go and lay down on the double bed. Her room faced south, which was not as she'd wanted it, but there'd been none available overlooking the park, at least none available to a woman arriving alone, without luggage or a reservation. Outside the window, New York lay bleached and roiling in the heat. It didn't stop, not even on a day like this. Taxis still bellowed down Fifth Avenue, and across the street, in Bergdorf' s, saleswomen still moved with swift, icy assurance among the racks. Heat didn't stall this striving, this wide-ranging quest for perfection, the slipper or the jewel or the glass of wine; the golden egg you could hold in your hand and say, Yes, here it is, this, right now. New York was the opposite of Garden City. There time altered itself to match your mood and there, if you let yourself fall into torpor or futility, the world seemed to share your lapse of faith, which it demonstrated by showing you empty rooms full of furniture, the bird feeder standing unused as old Mrs. Ramble across the street came out in her coat and scarf to remove a scrap of paper that had blown onto her lawn. New York carried on, it didn't mind about you, and for nearly ten minutes Mary was able to lie on the bed in a state of relative peace, breathing, surrounded by muffled street noise and the immaculate gelid luxury of her room, the roses on the wallpaper, the basket of expensive toiletries she knew would be waiting beside the sink.

Then she thought of the girl again, with her sated expression and the row of pearlized plastic buttons shining on her synthetic, apricot-colored blouse. Touching her husband's shoulder. The girl Constantine had chosen.

Mary sat up and dialed the telephone. She wanted, suddenly, to talk to her children. Not, certainly, to tell them what their father was doing, but simply to hear their voices, to receive whatever affection they had to offer her, to be reminded that their lives had been set in motion and would continue. Billy was the one she most wanted to talk to but Billy was off somewhere, traveling, following a mysterious itinerary, having refused all courtesies beyond the promise to drop a postcard in the mail every few weeks. In a year she'd gotten three cards, one from San Francisco, one from Gallup, New Mexico, and one from British Columbia. She tried Susan in Connecticut but she got no answer, and as the phone rang she could see the empty rooms of her daughter's house, the prim Early American antiques and the sedate, formal wallpaper. She felt a loneliness more piercing than any she could remember. Finally she dialed Zoe's number. Zoe lived less than a mile from where Mary lay on her rented bed, but she seemed, somehow, the most remote of the children; the one she was calling from across the greatest distance.

The phone rang three times before someone picked it up and said, “Hello?” It was a woman's voice, husky and dark.

“Oh, sorry,” Mary said. “I've got the wrong number.”

“No, no, this is Zoe Stassos's number, she just stepped out for a minute. I'm the maid.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Little joke. I'm a friend of Zoe's, she'll be back in about two shakes. Can I give her a message?”

“Well. This is her mother.”

“Oh. Mrs. Stassos. I've heard so much about you.”

“Really?”

“Mm-hm. I'm a friend of Zoe's, I've actually been dying to meet you. My name's Cassandra.”

“Oh, yes,” Mary said. “Zoe's mentioned your name.”

Zoe had not, in fact, as far as Mary could recall, said anything about anyone named Cassandra. Still, one offered these little gestures. The woman sounded older than Zoe, which seemed strange, but she had a warm, refined voice. Better than that homely, gallumphing child Tramcas, and the other oddities Zoe had brought home over the years.

“Shall I have her telephone when she gets in?” Cassandra asked.

“No, that's all right. Just tell her I called to say hello.”

“Certainly.”

“I hope she's managing in the heat,” Mary said. “I hope you both are.”

She knew it was time to get off the phone but she wasn't eager to return to the silence of the hotel room, the uncertainty of this hour and the next. She'd talk for a minute or two, just ordinary idle things with a pleasant stranger.

“Oh, I don't mind the heat,” Cassandra said. “I learned the secret years ago. You have to give yourself over to it. When it gets like this I put on not one lick of makeup, and I don't care
who
I scare on the street.”

Finally, Mary thought, here was someone who spoke in a language she could understand. Here was someone who didn't scoff at nylons or makeup, who didn't insist on going around bare-legged, wild-haired, dressed in scraps strangers had thrown away.

“I only wear silk and linen in the summer,” Mary said.

“Perfect,” the woman answered.

“And can I tell you a little secret of mine?”

“Please do.”

“I put my bra and panties in the freezer overnight.”

“Oh, I'm going to try that.”

“It's wonderful,” Mary said. “And if you get enough sun on your legs you can sneak by without nylons.”

“I love the sun. But you know, I freckle terribly.”

“You want to watch that if you're fair.”

“I'm the exact color of an egg.” Cassandra sighed. “Scandinavian stock, all my forebears just huddled around the banks of the fjords and kept marrying the palest girl in the village.”