The Worst Thing I've Done (2 page)

“Five months and if I tell her you said to get the test she'll do it because of you and—”

“At one
A.M
.?” Dr. Virginia sounds impatient to get to the buy-me-now commercials. “First of all, a test is not going to resolve what is truly going on between the two of you. It is an issue of trust, of you not—”

“But she just got back from having sex Dr. Virginia and there should be a trace if we do the test right away like an X-ray or peeing into a cup or—”

“You are interrupting me again, Frank.”

“Sorry. I keep telling my wife one more time and that's it and—”

“Frank—”

“—it only makes her go to bars even though she knows—”

“Frank. Frank. Are you listening to a word I am saying?”

“Sure but—”

“Do you ever listen to your wife? Your problem is communication, and this jealousy of yours is sabotaging your marriage—”

“
L
ET ME
tell you about jealousy,” Annie interrupts Dr. Virginia. “About finding a penny on Mason's side of the bed…just a couple of months ago, while he and Aunt Stormy were in Washington, D.C., to protest any preemptive attack on Iraq. When he came home, I asked him about the penny, and he told me he didn't know anything about it…but then he admitted he'd put it there…three feet from the foot end…because I sleep on the futon in the living room whenever he's gone. He said if the penny had been moved or the sheets changed, it meant I had another man there and—”

“I want both of you to go to sleep now,” Dr. Virginia prescribes.

“I was stunned,” Annie says. “Then furious. Told him he was twisted inside. That my loving him was never enough for him.”

“And in the morning I expect you to look for a marriage therapist.”

“Too late for that,” Mason says.

“Unless of course you don't care to save that marriage of yours, Frank.”

“If I knew from a test that my wife didn't sleep with someone else I'd feel more trusting.”

As Annie drives into darkness, taking back roads wherever she can, her headlights cast pale gray circles on the black pavement. She's been driving this same loop every night: west from North Sea to Riverhead, then east on Route 27 as far as it goes to Montauk Point, from there west to North Sea, where Aunt Stormy lives at the end of a long, bumpy driveway, a strip of weeds down the middle. Big old trees. A hammock. From the driveway you can see her cottage and Little Peconic Bay all at once…see the bay through the windows of her cottage and on both sides of the cottage, silver-gray barn siding, bleached. Inside, a dried rose woven into a piece of driftwood hangs from the candle chandelier, along with delicate glass balls.

Annie doesn't want Opal to know she's out driving. But Aunt Stormy knows. Aunt Stormy said, “It's what you need for the time being.”

“A
ND WHAT
will it be next, Frank?” Dr. Virginia asks. “A test once a week to see if your wife has stayed faithful?”

“Do they have those?”

“There are no tests for trust.”

“Right.”
Annie slaps the rim of the steering wheel and thinks of a day, early in her marriage, when she bought herself a golden neck chain to celebrate the sale of two collages from her Pond Series.

Mason raised one hand to her throat, fingered the gold. “Who bought this for you?”

“I did.”

“I just don't think a woman would buy that kind of necklace for herself.”

“You're kidding. Right?”

“It's the kind of gift a lover would buy for a woman.”

As she stared at his angular face with the wide mouth and pale skin, at his blue-black eyes and his blue-black curls, it amazed her how all the familiar added up to this stranger.

And she came right back at him. “A lover? Don't you know that every woman is her own lover?” And she was, she was inventive, giving herself pleasure, not just in bed but also at the table, in the ocean…

“If there were tests for trust,” Dr. Virginia says, “I would suggest that your wife take
you
to be tested. Because you have a habit of fabricating flaws for others in order to avoid a confrontation with your own and very real flaws.”

“Can you at least give me the name of the test so that I have it for the next time in case my wife—”

B
UT ALREADY
Dr. Virginia is saying hello to Gloria from Albany, who is forty-four and lives with her widowed father.

“My dad treats me like a child. He tells me I have to be home by eleven, and—”

“Do you pay rent, Gloria?”

“He won't even let me close the door to my room when my boyfriend comes visiting. Just because my dad gets lonely and—”

“You want to hear a real story?” Annie asks Dr. Virginia. “Take this. From a woman who is driving fast after her husband hanged himself.”

“Once again: Do you pay rent, Gloria?”

“I can't afford to. And my dad knew that when I moved in. I got this minimum-wage job bagging groceries at—”

“Gloria, listen—”

“Hey, you listen, Chickie,” Annie tells Dr. Virginia.
And laughs out loud because she's never called anyone Chickie. But in a magazine at her dentist's was a picture of Dr. Virginia, resembling a chicken with her round body, beak nose, and maroon bubble hairdo.

“Listen closely now, Gloria. As long as you let your father be a parent to you—and that means provide you with food, transportation, toiletries—”

“Not toiletries. He gets the cheapest store brand. No, thank you!”

“—shelter, heat—”

“I pay for my own toiletries!” Gloria sounds agitated.

“—you give him permission to treat you as his child. Now if one of my daughters came home to live with me—Those of you who listen to me or subscribe to my newsletter at www.deardoctorvirginia.com know that my four girls are still too young to be out there on their own, the oldest seventeen, the next one twelve, then seven, and the youngest two years old, spaced a perfect five years from each other—”

“Know what I think, Dr. Virginia?”

“—and giving me such insight into every age of child rearing, while—”

“Dr. Virginia? Know what I think, Dr. Virginia?”

“—on the other hand, they're benefiting from my professional insights into parenting, which can be yours too at an introductory rate, fifteen months for the price of—”

“I think it's all about my dad being lonely and wanting me home for company.”

“Listen to me now, Gloria. I'm not merely talking about the independence of paying your own—”

“You listen now, Chickie.”

“You have every reason, Annie, to despise yourself,” Dr. Virginia says.

“I can turn you off,” Annie threatens.

“Not only because of how Mason manipulated you and Jake in the sauna but because you pulled this off together.”

“You tell her, Dr. Virginia,” Mason says.

“Because of what you can become when you're with him,” Dr. Virginia says.

“So true,” Mason says.

“For Christ's sakes, Annie,” Dr. Virginia says, “you're a mother. You have to admit to yourself that, on some level, you got off on it too—”

“Christ's sakes…? Getting off on it…? You don't sound like yourself, Chickie.”

“—and that you saw it as a way to strike out at your husband.”

“Thank you, Dr. Virginia.” Mason sounds grateful and considerate and so mature.

“You have such good manners,” Dr. Virginia tells him. “So considerate and mature.”

“Bullshit artists,” Annie says. “Both of you.”

“We don't need to subject ourselves to Annie's crude language,” Mason tells Dr. Virginia.

“You're brownnosing, Mason,” Dr. Virginia says. “Cut it out. And as for you, Annie, you outbet each other. Except he lost.”

“We both lost,” Annie whispers.

That seems to satisfy Dr. Virginia, because she starts preaching to Gloria about responsibility.

“E
NOUGH OF
you, Chickie.”
Annie switches to Dr. Francine, whose caller, Mel, is afraid of his new roommate.

“He is a bully. He shoves me, punches me. And he won't move out though we fight all the time.”

Now if Mel were calling Dr. Virginia, she'd interrupt him.
“It's a problem you got yourself into, Mel, because you are spineless and excessively needy.”

But Dr. Francine is not like that. Forever patient and compassionate, she sighs as she listens to Mel and coaches him in healthy assertiveness. “Make a list of acceptable behavior with the bully roommate.”

“What if he doesn't want to?”

“Find some way to get him to participate, and then agree on a date for the roommate to move out if he falls off the list.”

“He'll get mad at me, Dr. Francine, and—”

“Hold on, dear.”

An emotional voice is selling foot powder: testimonies of agony and of relief, of before and after. Annie drives around the traffic circle in Riverhead, heads toward Hampton Bays. The flicker of their headlights: three cars coming toward her. A sign:
FIRE AND AMBULANCE VOLUNTEERS NEEDED
. Darkness again. If she kept driving south, she'd drive into the ocean.

“Did you both sign the lease, Mel?” Dr. Francine asks.

“No no, it's mine. I signed it.”

“Good. Very good. That'll give you a way out. Now take a blank page, draw a line down the middle, and write down the reasons why you and Humphrey—”

“Hubert, not Humphrey.”

“—reasons why you and Hump——”

“Hump.” Annie shakes her head.

“I'm sorry,” Dr. Francine says. “Very sorry, Mel. I mean Hubert…why you and Hump—ubert…” A cover-up cough. “…Hubert should or should not cancel the cruise.”

“What cruise?”
Annie passes the sign:
HAMPTON BAYS 8 MONTAUK 42.
End of the island.
End of the world.

“How do I know”—Mel starts sobbing—“that Hubert won't get…cross?”

Another one of Dr. Francine's deep sighs.

“I bet you she has a sigh button on her microphone,” Mason whispers.

Annie has to laugh. “Right. And she pushes it at appropriate intervals.”

When she crosses the Shinnecock Canal, she opens her window. Cold night air whips her face, makes her eyes tear. She stays on 27. Passes Premier Pest Control. Outside the Elvis store, life-size animals in garish colors—giraffes and cows and elephants—are arranged as if about to trot into the road. Annie doesn't know the store's real name. Mason had called it the Elvis store ever since he saw a plastic bust of Elvis for sale. He loved to go there with Aunt Stormy, searching through the staggering accumulation of chain-saw art and rococo furniture, old jukeboxes and watercolor landscapes, cowboy figurines and Adirondack chairs, stained-glass windows and plastic napkin rings.

“Mason made sure I'd be the one to find him.” Annie tells Dr. Francine about the rope too thin for hanging. A heavier man might have snapped the rope, saved himself, spared her from seeing the rope slicing into his neck. Seeing before trying not to look—Mason—his face a face that's not-Mason.

Annie feels dizzy with hunger.

“When he did it, I was out, imagining myself leaving him, taking Opal with me, and letting him have the pond house and that goddamn sauna, where I figured out that I had to leave him.”

But he did the leaving for her. Impulsive. Vindictive. In her studio, spoiling it forever. Not giving her a chance to reconsider. But looping a rope across the rafter and stepping off her worktable, tipping it over, spilling tools and supplies for her collages—scissors and twine and wire and glue and box cutters, baskets with eucalyptus pods and wisteria pods, her brushes and jars—as if he wanted all that as the backdrop to his body, his death her final work. Jealous here too of the time she spent on her collages.

Annie tells Dr. Francine how she climbed on the table, whimpering, hacking through the rope.
What if he's still alive?
Hacking till he fell, the man who wore Mason's green Earth Day T-shirt but whose face was not-Mason.