The Secret Lives of Married Women (10 page)

The detective hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “I understand. Still, the guy comes over to finish the room, he leaves without doing anything much, and for the next week you don’t see hide nor hair of him. If it was me, I would be aggravated. At the very least, I’d wonder.”

His tone had changed. This was subtle but unmistakable.
He knows,
I thought. (Knows
what?)
It was essential, I told myself, not to seem defensive.

“When you put it that way, it does seem strange,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t give it much thought. To tell you the truth, the man could be a little overbearing. He kind of took any opportunity to talk to me, and he talked a lot. Not seeing him for a few days was a little bit of a relief.”

“Would you say you were on friendly terms, though?” the detective pressed. “Or was there maybe some bad blood brewing there?”

“No, we were friendly,” I told him. “I mean, even when I was anxious to get away from him, I tried not to seem impatient.”

“Were you happy with his work? So far, at least?”

“The paint job?” I said. “It was fine as far as I could tell. Do you want to see it?”

I regretted the question the moment I’d asked it. Even to myself, I sounded too eager. To accommodate, to seem helpful, to yield information and access—as long as it was useless. But if the detective saw it this way, he didn’t show it. On the contrary, he actually followed me down the stairs to peer at the two yellow walls.

Before he left, he said he’d be back to talk with Stas.

“Leda. Tell me exactly. I need to know exactly what you said to this detective about last Friday.”

“I already told you! Three or four times already! Stas, how many times do you need to hear it?”

“You did not mention me or Vladimir.”

“No. I told you I didn’t.”

“Okay,” Stas said. “Okay.” He raked at his hair with both hands. I could see that he was afraid, and it was making me afraid.

We were speaking in hushed tones in the backyard because Stas thought the detective might have bugged the house. He had gotten down on his knees to look at the underside of the wooden kitchen table.

“Stas, you’re freaking me out. What are you afraid of? You told me nothing happened with Jack, that you had some words, that was all.”

“And this is true. But if something has happened to him, it is possible that they will try to pin it on me.”

“What could have happened to him?”

“How can I know this? But it seems he is missing.”

I felt my own eyes narrow as I stared at him. I was holding myself with crossed arms, to keep from trembling.

“Why was Vladimir with you that day?”

“He was with me because we were going to Yacolt.”

“No, come on, Stas, don’t play dumb. He got out of the car with you. He put on those shades like some thug in a movie.”

“Yes. Exactly like in a movie. That is exactly why. He did this just for—how do you say?—for kicks. Because he knows the way he looks, with the scar. Like a gangster. He enjoys it.”

For a moment, I let myself be reassured. But then Stas looked away and I had no idea what to believe.

Going back inside our home was like walking onstage after conferring urgently in the wings. Because of my husband’s idea that the house might be wired, we kept our conversation not only free of references to Jack, but stilted in every way. We talked the way we might talk in public, aware that others were listening.

“Very good dinner, honey,” Stas told me.

“I’m so glad you like it. Lillian sent me the recipe. I wouldn’t have thought of putting olives and dates together in a marinade, but it’s really nice, isn’t it? Clara, sweetie, can you have another little bite of chicken?”

“Will it be this hot tomorrow, do you know?”

“I don’t think the heat’s going to break for a while.”

* * *

“Would you please state your full name, slowly and clearly, for the record?” Detective Rayburn had exchanged his notepad for a tape recorder. It was Saturday and he was back, as promised, to talk to Stas.

“Stanislav Ivanovich Vasiliev,” Stas said.

“Mr. Vasiliev, do you know why I’m here?”

“I understand that Jack Shelby is missing,” Stas said carefully.

“Well, as a matter of fact, we have reason to believe he’s dead,” Rayburn said.

“Dead?”
This came from me.

“Yes, ma’am.” He was looking at me steadily, as if he knew how I felt at that moment. And how did I feel? Shocked and thrilled and sick and hollow.

“That’s...that’s awful,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Well, let’s see. He’s been married eleven years, and he’s never gone a full week without contacting his wife. For that matter, his cell phone hasn’t been used at all during the last seven days, and he hasn’t used his ATM card either. He disappeared right before payday, leaving all of his possessions, including his truck and his dog. In our experience,” he concluded, “factors like these usually point to the worst.”

I turned to Stas, who looked pale and stricken. As I glanced back and forth between him and the detective, it came to me with sudden, unequivocal clarity: Stas did it. He killed Jack.

* * *

You hear these stories. You see them on the news or read them in women’s magazines. Half the tabloid headlines, it would seem, have to do with elaborate deception and betrayal.
He led a double life.
At the heart of each of these stories: a long-married woman whose image of her husband has cracked open like an egg and hatched a snake.
Her world was shattered.

But in fact, the most surreal aspect of situations like this is that your world is not shattered. The detective leaves and the house is still standing, the leaves are still drifting into the street in front of it, the same kids are clattering by on bicycles and skateboards. The only difference is within, the rising panic and disbelief, the weakness in your limbs. All the thoughts in your head have been replaced by a single question:
what should I do?
But perhaps the strangest, most staggering truth of all is there is no need to do anything. You can keep on just as before. Life inside your house has become theater and you need only adhere to your usual script.

It used to be a joke of mine. I used to joke that Stas was probably a spy or a gangster, working for the KGB or the Russian mafia, that his interest in weapons and body armor was likely not as innocent as he’d have me believe. That one day, after he’d committed some atrocity or terrorist attack, the F.B.I. would interrogate me and the media would expose me for my nearly unbelievable naiveté.

So, Mrs. Vasiliev
(I’d drawl mockingly, with the southern inflection I associated with federal officers),
as your husband accumulated a stockpile of ammunition...and an arsenal of guns...and a closet full of Kevlar...did it ever! occur to you! that perhaps he was up to something less than wholesome?

And then I’d provide my own imagined answer, in the voice of a half-wit.
Oh gee, no, officers, I never did think anything of it... I just figured it was a harmless little hobby...

But when it happens, when you’re truly forced to revise the meaning of the clues you’ve disregarded, there’s no humor in it, only breathlessness and dread. My husband, the father of my little girl: a killer. Sleeping beside me every night for more than a thousand nights: a murderer. Not prowling in the shadows or watching through the window or lurking in the basement, but entwined with me, inside me, naked and pressed up against me. If you’re lucky, you can rid yourself of the wolf at your door, but what do you do when the wolf is in your bed?

You think:
I have to tell someone about this or go out of my mind.
But who can you tell? It’s not a conversation you can have on the phone. Nothing you can discuss over coffee or cocktails. Not something you can disclose even to your friends or family.

I thought:
Stas and I need to talk about this.
But this thought was replaced almost immediately by:
he can’t ever suspect that I know.

Sometimes I wavered, retreated from my own conviction. Impossible. Impossible that he could have killed Jack: it was broad daylight. He would have to have done it in a way that left no blood, which would rule out the use of his guns or knives. And then he’d need to get rid of the body. How would he know how to do something like that? But what did I know about what Stas knew?

And Jack was dead; the detective was sure of that.

Maybe Stas had been mixed up with the mob before coming to America; maybe that was why he couldn’t go back. Maybe that was how he knew the friend who was in prison. Maybe he’d had terrorist training.

Were those hands going to close around my throat one night? Could his love for me be nothing but an elaborate and long-term pretense? If it was, he was far better at acting than I’d ever been.

In all the bewilderment, the vertigo, the upended perspective of a funhouse mirror, one lone conviction was still in place: Stas loved Clara. Nothing in the world could make me doubt that. He had spent countless hours bathing her, playing with her, stretched out asleep on the floor beside her crib when she couldn’t bear to be left alone in the room. I knew at least that he would never hurt her, and it followed that—if only for her sake—he would not hurt me either. For this reason alone, my life was unlikely to be in danger.

There are no words for the shock.
Of finding yourself in this place, this far-flung edge of your own life. Weighing the possibility that your husband might kill you. Alone in the world after all.

* * *

That night in bed, Stas put a hand over my mouth as he had done so many times before, his thumb grazing my lips. He did not speak. My skin tingled as I imagined him closing off my breath. Something I asked of him early and often was to hold my wrists above my head, look straight into my eyes, and keep a flat impassive expression throughout the act of sex. The face of a card sharp, that was what I wanted: the face of an executioner.
Be careful what you wish for.

Tonight he did this—it seemed to me, anyway—with a special deliberation, as if he could sense my fear of him and had no wish to dispel it. As he pressed into me, he closed one fist around my hair and flattened his other palm across my bared teeth, all while staring into my eyes with what could only be called a vengeance. And suddenly from within me came a white-hot answering flash, like oil flung into a hot pan or the silver of a hooked fish catching the sun. I bucked and twisted and thrashed and caterwauled; I screamed into his hand. This seemed to go on and on; I could not get enough. Even after my husband was spent, I lay there clutching his back with both hands, the motion of my hips convulsive, compulsive, thrusting against his of their own accord. I was whimpering.

Sex with Stas had always been more than satisfactory, but this was something else; this was a revelation.

Even after all motion had subsided, and we lay there in stillness, I continued to whimper: a whelp in her first heat.

Spokoyno
, Stas whispered after a while. Then, by way of translation:
Shhhh.
I wondered whether anything would ever surprise me again. He had never spoken to me in Russian before.

On the night table, my cell phone began to vibrate and when I made no move to pick it up, the call went to voicemail. It was Rae, inviting me to lunch.

* * *

During the spring before any of this happened, when Rae and I had our conversation about intimacy, I said many different things about my decision to marry Stas, and all of them were true.

I said, “Before Stas, I’d never had a romantic relationship that began as a friendship. But Stas and I worked together, day in and day out, for over a year before we started dating. And by that time, I had already come to trust him.”

I said, “I had no doubt that he would be a good husband and eventually a wonderful father.”

I said, “I was able to choose a real partner because I was finally ready.”

There were other things I didn’t say.

I didn’t say:
I was tired. I was tired and I didn’t think I had it in me to go another round in the old ring.

Or:
I probably needed to marry someone I didn’t really know. Someone with so much built-in mystery that I might never really know him. I knew so little about him when I married him that it was almost like an arranged marriage. Except that I arranged it myself.

I never said:
I’d begun to notice that my status as a single woman left me at a disadvantage in my relationships with married men. During fights, during holidays, and in the wake of every breakup, they went home to their wives and I went home alone. So a basic inequity was always there, a source of leverage I could never access. And at some point, I actually told myself: you know what, I’ll get married too, and that will level the playing field for future trysts.

These were things I didn’t tell Rae, and all of them were true as well.

Having failed to disclose all this, I could hardly reveal the punch line: that something funny happened on the way to the altar. That I fell in love with my fiancé, came to see him as someone I would never betray.

The joke would have been on me if Stas himself were revealed, later, as the type to stray. But I’d never seen any such tendency in him. He was a hard-working, stoical, one-woman man, as far as I could tell.

There was a refrain I kept hearing from young women, when they were parting ways with some liar or cheat or deadbeat. I’d overhear them in coffeehouses and cafés: talking to their friends, or into their cell phones, or even to the men who had disappointed them. Over and over, I heard:
I deserve better.
Well, in my case, the opposite was true: surely I deserved worse.

“Angel called last night,” Rae reported at Mona’s, a café in downtown Vancouver. “He just got out of Red Rock and he wanted to come over. It took everything I had—and I do mean everything—not to let him.”

“Red Rock?”

“Oh, sorry. That would be the Arizona state pen.”

“What was he in for?”

“This time? He shot out someone’s kneecaps. He would have been in longer, but half a dozen witnesses heard the other guy threaten Angel earlier that night. Plus the guy can still walk. He needs a cane, but at least he’s not in a wheelchair or anything.”