Four Wives (22 page)

“H
AVE YOU SEEN PAUL?”

He had stayed in the shadows since that afternoon, the day Gayle could not chase from her thoughts, but today he was literally nowhere.

Celia shook her head, and when she did, Gayle caught something in her expression that was alarming. It was a look of innocence, a quality the young woman did not possess.

He was always back by five. Neatly dressed, clean-shaven, unobtrusively moving through the kitchen to prepare dinner. It was almost six thirty now.

“Did he say anything to you?” she tried once more, though she knew the answer.

“No.” Again, the feigned ignorance sent Gayle into a panic.

“Watch Oliver,” she said.

Rushing out the back entrance to the driveway, Gayle turned her eyes to the apartment above the garage. No lights were on. She kept moving, around to the back, up the narrow staircase to the door. She knocked hard several times, unconcerned with how this would all seem if he came to answer’the worried look on her face, the hurried breath. She knew he was not coming. Cupping her hands at the window, she peered inside to the kitchen. It was just as she thought it would be. Empty.

She turned the knob. It was unlocked. She walked inside, this time taking it slow, delaying the discovery that was now inevitable. So much was as it had been’the chair, the lamp, the easels. The couch where she had sat with him. But there was no sign of Paul. The easels were empty. The sketches, the portfolios’everything was gone. The only personal effects remaining were the books, stacked neatly in the corner.

Standing dead center in the room, Gayle let out the breath she’d been holding. He was gone, and she’d known it before reaching the top of the stairs.

Hearing a car pull up, Gayle moved to the window. It was Troy, and it was too early for him. She backed away, out of sight, then waited for him to pull the car in and make his way to the house. Paul was gone. Her husband was home. And the thought that had been submerged for days began to rise, inching out the heartache that was beginning to take hold. With cautious movement, she left the room, the apartment, and closed the door behind her. She walked down the steps, then around the formal side of the house, the part that would be empty. Like a criminal, she stayed close to the walls and ducked under the windows until she was at the front door. She pushed it open, slowly, then went inside. She could hear the voices in the other room, Troy trying to roughhouse with his son. Oliver’s strained laughter. Quietly, she walked up the front staircase, then down the hallway to her room. She closed the door, went to the bathroom, then closed that door as well, locking it shut.

She opened the vanity drawer and searched for the Xanax. She removed two, then swallowed them with some water. She walked to her chair and sat down, looking at herself in the mirror. She thought of the sketch she had seen so briefly, the ageless, beautiful portrayal Paul had made of her. Looking at that same face now with indifference, it occurred to her that for the first time in her life, she had been able to see that beauty, as though the image Paul created had been transposed onto her flesh. And she had begun to believe that he saw her that way as well. How ridiculous she had been, thinking about Paul like this. As a friend, a confidant. And, if she were truthful, as more than that. Still, she had thought those things and they had made her happy. Even as thoughts and little more, they had filled her with a lightness that she had not fully appreciated until just now’now that they were gone.

She waited until the light buzz rang in her ears. Then a calm started to trickle in. She walked downstairs where Celia was making dinner for her son. At the stove, stirring pasta, the young woman was laughing at some banal comment made by her husband’something said to Oliver that had left him unamused. Sitting at the island on a bar stool, Troy put his arm around his son, jostling him hard.

“That’s my kid for you. Can’t take a joke.”

Gayle said nothing, but lifted Oliver into her arms.

“Paul left today,” she said matter-of-factly.

“I know. Weil find someone else,” Troy answered. Then he shot a look at Celia, who looked back with questioning eyes.

Through the haze of the medication, and with her vision partially blocked by Oliver who was draped around her like a rag doll, Gayle could still see it. The sequence of events rolled out before her. Her visit to Paul’s apartment. Celia watching her as she left, asking why she was late to pick up her son. Paul’s interruption that horrible day in the kitchen. Now Paul was gone and Troy was not asking questions’not bitching about the unreliability of the underclass. Instead, he was exchanging guilty looks with the nanny.

She would have found it comical, the two puerile creatures standing before her in her own kitchen, in the room that Paul once occupied. But instead, she imagined what was said to that kind man, the berating, chastising statements that her husband undoubtedly spewed forth along with his order of dismissal. That was why there had been no good-bye, not even a note explaining his departure. Compromising her further was the last thing Paul would do.

“Mommy, I’m tired,” Oliver said in her ear. She squeezed him hard, then set him down. Taking his hand, she led him out of the room.

“We’re going to read a book. Call when dinner’s ready.” Her voice was dismissive, and it caught the others by surprise. Still, she imagined they were relieved that she was going, providing them with a chance to get their stories straight.

T
HEY MET ON THE
Passetis’ porch, the two generals in charge of Love’s illness. Yvonne, who had called the powwow, settled the four older children in front of a video and rocked Baby Will to sleep in his stroller, leaving Bill with no excuses.

He gave his kids one last check before joining his mother-in-law, who had already made herself comfortable on a wicker chair.

“I only have a minute,” he said. “What’s this all about?”

Yvonne squinted her eyes at him and shook her head. “Oh, sit down already. The kids are fine.”

She waited then for Bill to pull a chair over from the other side of the porch’his every movement exaggerated as though she were making him dig trenches in cement.

“OK. All set?”

Bill nodded, then leaned back in the chair. “I suppose so.”

“Good. Now I want to talk to you about Love.”

“Really?” Bill said sarcastically.

Yvonne ignored him. “I’ve heard you out’all your talk about these viruses with no name that can hurt people. I’ve helped her out the door for the tests. I’ve filled the prescriptions for the painkillers, the antibiotics, antiinflammatories, and all the other pills. I’ve told her to take them even though they knock her out and kill her appetite. All I ask now is that you hear me’start to finish.”

With his blood pressure rising, Bill drew a long breath and pretended he owed her this. Hadn’t he let her subject Love to that pseudo-shrink? It was days later and there was no sign of improvement.

“OK. I’m listening.”

“Are you, really?”

“Yes. I’m really listening.”

Yvonne’s face relaxed then, relieved to have his attention. Still, she spoke carefully, knowing this could be her last chance.

“Can you also assume for this conversation that there might be some possible connection between Love’s emotional state and what has happened to her, even if it’s simply to consider that her emotions put her under stress that made her body vulnerable’to the fall, the virus, whatever?”

Bill nodded, again breathing deeply to control his growing impatience.

“Good,” Yvonne said, nodding with satisfaction. “Now, has she told you about the’”

“Letter? Yes, I know about the letter. The one you found in her papers. She told me the night you dug it out.” His tone was judgmental, and Yvonne let it slide. She probably deserved it, and she didn’t care.

“And do you understand what her father’s book could mean for her?”

Now his impatience was pulling ahead. “Yvonne, she’s my
wife.
Do you remember how we met?”

“Yes. Of course you know about her troubled teen years, the suicide attempt, the estrangement from her father …” She paused then, almost afraid to go on. But she did.

“What I need to know,” she said, leaning forward to see into his eyes, “is whether she’s told you about the night it all began.”

Bill looked away, not wanting to witness the agony that was taking shape within the contours of her face. It was always there in traces’even the lines burrowed through her soft skin seemed to reflect the years of pain. Still, she hid it well, through a false smile or haughty know-it-all expression. All of that was gone now, exposing the force that had become her core.

He struggled to answer her. “I think so. The night of her father’s party. Is that what you mean?”

Yvonne cupped her face with her hands as she shook off the emotions that were building. She needed to get through this, get through to Bill. This could not turn into a therapy session for
her.

“Yes. So you
do
know.”

Bill nodded. “It was the night her father told her he was ending her studies. That he needed to focus on his own career.”

“I see.” Yvonne stopped to gather her thoughts, realizing now that he knew very little. How could she possibly make him understand? Still, it wasn’t her place to tell him.

“She’s never confronted her father about that night. She’s never asked him why he abandoned her. And now’for months’she’s been living with the fear that he’s planning to tell the world about everything she did. No one could endure that much despair without consequence.”

Bill pulled on the ends of his eyebrows as he always did in the face of this much discomfort.

“Have you read it?”

Yvonne shook her head. “She won’t let me go near it. I promised her.”

“What if he didn’t betray her?”

“It wouldn’t matter much. The point is that he’s back in her life, even if only as thoughts and memories.” She looked at him with conviction. “Bill, she has never dealt with that night and the years that followed.
Never.
She’s managed to hide behind all of this’the house and kids. But it hasn’t worked, can’t you see that? The letter was just the key that opened the door.”

“OK,” Bill said, trying to bring the conversation under control. “So what are you proposing?”

“I want her to see him. He’s in L.A. for a few weeks trying to hammer out a movie deal for his book. I want her to fly home with me and see him.” Bill stood up, his face growing angry. “Are you crazy? She can barely walk down the stairs and you want her to fly across the country and dive into the center of the storm? How the hell is that going to help her?”

“It just is,” Yvonne answered, struggling to remain calm. She had expected his reaction and practiced her own. But she hadn’t expected him to be blinded by the fog of misinformation.

“That’s it’enough pretending and assuming. I’ll give you that she hasn’t dealt with her issues from her crazy childhood. But she is sick. You have to understand that. My wife, your daughter’their mother,” he said, pointing toward the house, “is
sick.
And if we get distracted by anything else instead of trying to get her well … I can’t even think what might happen.” He turned from her then as he felt the swell inside him. Since the day of the fall, he hadn’t allowed himself to come to this place’the place inside him where he held the worst possible fear. And it was more than he could bear. He felt the flush in his face, the tears, then the gentle hand on his shoulder.

“All right,” Yvonne said. “It’s all right. We’re all more scared than we let on. And I don’t want to argue with you. I just want you to think about it. Maybe not now, but later when you’ve had some time.”

Bill shook his head. “I will never allow it. Never.”

He brushed her hand from his shoulder and marched toward the front door to retrieve his children.