The Price of Silence (16 page)

The windows turned dark. A halo of dull light rose above the Manhattan skyline.“Stay with me,”An-ling said.

There was no reason to go.No one was home. She insisted I take her futon while she curled up on the mountain of her tangled clothes. For the first time in months I slept through the night.

The next morning, while I was out getting breakfast, she ordered a mattress.“For when the guys go away again,” she said when it was delivered. She wouldn’t let me pay for it.

Two days later, as I was getting ready to go home, she stuffed a bag full of M&Ms into my handbag.

“For Tom and Josh.”

Her sweetness gave me courage.“You know about Amy.”

She looked taken aback for a moment, then walked across the room to sit on her futon.“I wanted to say I’m sorry you suffered so much, but Amy is your secret.”

I sat down next to her, surprised I felt only relief. No shame.“How did you find out?”

“A teacher at the League recognized you when you came to visit that one time. She grew up in Mapleton.”

“Why did you tell Tom and not me?”

“It doesn’t matter if he gets angry.”

I took hold of her hand.“We never told Josh. It would have been a terrible burden for him. Even worse now.”

“You can trust me.”

“I do. I hope you still trust me.”

“Don’t worry, Lady Teacher. I don’t blame you.”

I studied her face but could not read it. I needed to believe her too much.“Thank you.You may be the only one who doesn’t.”

Back at the apartment I waited for Tom and Josh to come home and wondered if, after Amy’s death, trust had ever resided in our home.

ELEVEN

TOD CURTIS, A tall, hefty painter and sculptor in his late forties, rents the loft directly above An-ling Huang’s. He is wearing chinos, running shoes, and a black T-shirt.

“Where were you on March thirtieth of last year?” Guzman asks.

“In my loft, preparing for a show that is now up at the Sogni Gallery in Chelsea. I didn’t leave it all day. Or night for that matter.”

“Did you, in the course of that day, hear anything out of the ordinary?”

“Yes. In the morning, around eleven o’clock, the defendant and the girl, An-ling, started fighting. They were very loud. I had to turn up Mahler—the
Fifth Symphony
—to drown them out. I always listen to music when I’m painting. It unleashes the imagination.”

“Can you describe the fight.”

“Not really. I heard ‘What you did was vile, disgusting!’ That’s it, I’m afraid.”

“Were you able to recognize the voice?”

“Her.” He points. “The defendant.”

“Emma Perotti?”

“No doubt about it.”

Emma

“Have you made up your mind?”Tom lowered his dinner plate into the sink. I was still at the table, eating grapes. Josh was in his room, studying. School had started. In the ten days since they’d come back from Maine,we had gone about our family business—eating together, asking routine questions, giving each other goodnight pecks—in slow motion and with great deliberation.The air around us had turned to sludge.

“Made up my mind about what?” I dropped a grape in my mouth.

“Are you still seeing An-ling?”

The fruit was tart, filled with seeds.“Yes.” I spit the seeds out. I’d seen her only once after my two-day stay with her. A quick lunch between her classes.“The M&Ms Josh gobbled up were a present from her for the two of you. She says sweetness breaks curses.”

“I asked you not to see her.”

“She found out about Amy from an art teacher who used to live in Mapleton.” His face registered disbelief. “Our guilty secret is safe,Tom. She won’t tell.”

Tom splashed water in the sink, turned off the faucet.

“That girl’s no good.”

“You have no idea what’s she’s like.You’ve never given her a chance. I’m going to help her for as long as I can,” I told Tom’s back as he left the kitchen.

That night Tom moved into the study.Over the next few weeks Josh spent a great deal of time with Max.Whenever he was home and I asked to talk to him, he shielded himself with a test to study for, a paper to write, a song to rehearse, an urgent call to make to Max. Scared that he too would ask me to give An-ling up, I didn’t insist.

I felt marooned.

When not teaching, while Josh was still at school, I would take the train to DUMBO. I brought flowers to An-ling’s loft, cleaned up, ran the washing machine and dryer my colleague had left behind. I filled the refrigerator with food, scoured the junk shops in the area for furniture that An-ling might like and that she could afford. I sat on a stool by the window overlooking the bridge and the slice of the East River and fed on the brilliance of September in that loft. Being there suffused me with warmth.

When An-ling found me in her home, she would clap her hands. “A hundred happiness frogs leap in my heart.

Please stay. It’s lonely at night.”

By late afternoon I’d be back in Manhattan as Tom’s wife, Josh’s mother.

“Do you know what you’re doing to Josh?”Tom hurled at me one night from the doorway of the bathroom while my mouth was full of toothpaste.“He’s sick to his stomach. His mother panting after some girl like a dog in heat. A girl who’s only after what she can get out of you. God damn it, Emma, Josh is your son! He should come first.”

I spit out the toothpaste. “An-ling is not my lover!”

He steeped into the bathroom and closed the door.“You love her like a daughter, right?”

“Yes, that’s exactly right.”

“How can you say that to me?” His voice was low, raw with emotion. “That girl is nothing like Amy. No one can replace Amy. She’s dead.You killed her, remember? You can’t get her back!”

I let the cruelty of Tom’s words steep until I started to believe he had no love left for me. In the years since Amy, anger had whittled away what good feelings he’d had. For fifteen years we had walked through our married life on opposite sides of a chasm. I knew it all along, I told myself. How could I not? And yet it was only now, leaning over the sink with toothpaste dribbling out of my mouth, that I realized how insurmountable the distance between us had become.

His face moved into the mirror. “Leave. Move in with her. Play mommy or lover around the clock. Get it out of your system.We’ll do fine without you.”

He wanted me to go. Just him and Josh, without the killer mom, the way he must have always wanted it. An-ling was his excuse. Our excuse.

On cross-examination, Fishkin asks, “Mr. Curtis, in the five months you and Emma Perotti lived in the same building, how many times did you speak to her?”

“Hard to say. Eight, ten times maybe.”

“Where did you speak to her?”

“In the elevator.”

“How many minutes would you say is the ride to the fifth floor where she lived?”

Curtis looks annoyed. “I never timed it, but I’d say two, three minutes. It’s a real old elevator.”

“What did the two of you talk about during that brief period?”

“Hell, I don’t remember. Nothing earth-shattering, I guess.”

Curtis raises an arm, exposing a streak of iridescent orange paint.

“Wait a minute. One time she asked me to come look at the girl’s work. She wanted me to help her find a gallery. I told her I had my hands full promoting my own work.”

“How did she react to your refusal?”

“She was always a cool lady. You know, the type that keeps her baggage under lock and key.”

“Having exchanged two- or three-minute conversations with Emma Perotti eight or ten times over five months, you say that you recognized her shouting voice one floor below, while listening to Mahler and concentrating on your painting?”

“Yup. She’s got a furry voice. Sexy.”

“Even when she shouts?”

Curtis’s eyes dart to Guzman. There’s a moment’s hesitation before he answers. “Yes, even then.”

Josh

It was about a month after the trip to Maine, a month when it felt like the iceberg that sank the Titanic had surfaced in our apartment. I was in bed, almost asleep. I heard a click, felt heat on my face. Then I heard Mom’s “furry” voice. “I want to talk to you about An-ling.”

I unscrunched an eye. She was standing over my bed. I poked my nose out from under the bedcovers and opened the other eye. The lamp lit her from the waist on down.

“Your father thinks you’re upset.” Her knees stuck out of her bathrobe.They looked like old wrinkled faces.“Are you upset?” Her face stayed in the dark.

“What, Mom?”

“Are you upset that I see her a lot? That I’m helping her?”

I shook my head. Shaking your head is like a twitch, something that can happen even if you don’t want it to. It’s not like downright lying, because the truth is, that while I wasn’t what I’d call upset, I did wonder what the hell was going on.

“I’ve tried to tell you we’re just friends.Our relationship is a perfectly normal one.”

“You’ve got to work it out with Dad. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“He wants me to give her up or leave and if I give her up—” she sucked in her breath, a quick sizzle of a sound.

“What?”

“It would be cruel. An-ling has no one in this country except us.”

I sat up. This was it, what Dad was preparing me for in Maine.“You do what you want to do, Mom. Don’t ask me to make up your mind for you.”

She grabbed hold of my neck, kissed the top of my head.

I could smell the perfume she uses—One by Calvin Klein.

Dad and I give her a bottle every Christmas. Remembering that made my stomach feel funny, caved in.

“You love your father very much.”

“Sure.”

“You’re best buddies.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t know where she was going with that. I mean, she knew this stuff already. I don’t know. Maybe she was jealous. She wanted me to tell her how much I loved her. I didn’t because,well, I just didn’t.Which didn’t mean I didn’t love her.

“Go stay with her for a while, if you want,” I said. “It’s okay.We’ll be okay.” That was what she wanted to hear, I thought. Now I’m not so sure.

Tom

Friday of Columbus Day weekend I had one of my cravings for ice cream in the middle of the night. I opened the freezer and was confronted with a wall of food. Every inch of space was crammed with stews from our favorite takeout place on Broadway, hamburger meat, chicken breasts, spinach, corn, pizzas, supermarket lasagna, Mars bars for Josh.

I shook Emma awake. “What the hell is all that food doing in our freezer?”

She turned over, mumbled. “It’s just food.”

I shook her shoulder.“There’s enough to get us through the entire winter.”

She sat up, pulled the blanket up under her chin. All she let me see was her face streaked with pillow marks. “I’m going away for a few days. I’ve discussed it with Josh and he’s okay with it. It’ll do us both good. Please don’t make it a big deal,Tom. It’s something you want too. As you pointed out, you and Josh will do fine without me. The two of you are a kingdom unto yourselves.”

“I want no such thing!”

“I’m going.”

She stared at me, waiting for me to fight her. Instead,my anger walked me out of the bedroom, back to the kitchen. I sat in the cold light of the open freezer and dug into a pint of strawberry ice cream.Anger got mixed with humiliation, with love, with grief.The new grief touched upon the old one of Amy being gone, went further back in time to the stunned silent grief of when my mother died.

For the duration of that pint, I cried tears I didn’t know I had in me.Then I threw that self-pity in the garbage with the ice cream carton and went back to the bedroom. She was waiting for me.

“How long is a few days?”

“That depends on you.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Again I walked. Josh and I were indeed a kingdom unto ourselves.

My wife left on Columbus Day. I wonder if she was aware of the irony of that date.

I didn’t ask Emma to leave our home, I told myself in the days that followed. Nothing would drive me to separate my son from his mother. By giving her a choice I was trying to jolt her mind, to clear it. I was presuming she was still a mature, responsible individual. I was assuming she could assess the consequences of her behavior, the damage to Josh, to our marriage.When I gave Emma a choice I had no doubts that she would stay. Her family or that girl—it was an absurd juxtaposition. It was no choice at all.

TWELVE

Josh

THE SUNDAY AFTER Mom left I met her for brunch on Avenue B—Alphabet City, a section of town Dad said was full of muggers and drug pushers. I pecked Mom’s cheeks. “How’d you know about this place?”Why here? Why not in Brooklyn near An-ling’s place? Why not in Morningside Heights, near me?

She pecked back. “I don’t remember,” she said in a small voice, like her throat was bothering her, like she didn’t want me to know An-ling was showing her a whole new world.

We sat by the window in a corner of a long, narrow room with polished metal walls and furniture that made me wish I owned sunglasses. Outside, couples walked past, holding hands or pushing strollers. No dealers I could spot.

“How are you?” she asked, after she ordered eggs benedict. I went for French toast.

“Fine.” The chair I was sitting in dug into my back. I put my down jacket back on.“Lots of work at school, but I can handle it. Practice with Max and Ben.You know, the usual.”

“Dad?”

“He’s okay. He’s working big time.”

Her eyes stayed glued on my face. Did she forget what I looked like?

“Stop it, Mom.”

She gave a tinkle of a laugh.“You’re becoming so good-looking.”

“In a week?”

The food came, which gave her an excuse not to answer that.The French toast was thick, the way I like it.“We got a cleaning lady on Friday”—my mouth was half full— “from Mrs. Ricklin. Soledad. She’s from Guatemala. She’s going to come twice a week.”

Mom’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. The egg dripped on the edge of the table, then slid down and landed on her lap.

“Just until you come back.”

She put her fork down.“Do you like her?”

What did she want me to say? That I hated Soledad, that she could never replace Mom? I opted for the truth. “She’s really nice and I thank her a lot.You always tell me not to exploit people.‘Gracias, Señora Soledad. Gracias para Usted trabajo.’ It makes her laugh.That’s good, isn’t it?”