On the night of the party in question, everyone was having a wonderful time. Maggie was an effortless host, padding across the faded Turkish rugs in her silky caftan, circling like the moon, delivering napkins, pouring wine, herding the group from the foyer to the great room. She tucked in and out of the kitchen, stirring the sauce, basting the meat, but her absence was hardly noted, as she managed to glean the edge of each conversation. Every now and then their Great Dane bellowed from the den, and she would crack open the sliding door and toss him a biscuit. All this, and not a hair sprung out of place. It was swooped back in an elegant, flammable coif, gathered at the nape with a barrette.
My husband and I were newcomers to this circle, new to Richmond itself. It had been a little over year since he’d accepted an offer at the university hospital where he spent his days in a laboratory coat. Maggie’s husband, Greg—Gregory in certain company, worked in finance. Which meant that he was good with numbers and decent enough with his irons to talk shop from the fairway. My husband intimated that Greg enjoyed the banker’s holidays, martini lunches, afternoon liaisons. He said this with a rare twinge of jealousy after a long stint at the hospital.
It was the women who had forged the group, and the men at the table had no prior loyalties between them. Still, there existed the usual ease of masculine bonding, the ancient muscle of locker rooms, a lifetime of baseballs tossed and reflexively caught.
My husband knew very little of Greg, and his suggestion of liaisons alarmed me. He flung the word as if such things were casual and expected. It elicited visions of swift, romantic affairs, afternoon love making, and starched hotel beds. When I pressed him for more, he shrugged me off, insisting it had been a joke. But unless accompanied by a cadaver, or a sudden geyser of blood, my husband was not known for humor.
Dinner was served in the wallpapered dining room where ancestors gazed dourly from the walls in gilded frames. The table was round, early Colonial, and Maggie had dressed it in a lace tablecloth and filled it with platters of short ribs in a wine reduction, fondant potatoes, green beans with pickled shallots. The proximity invited the most intimate of discussions, bursts of honesty, misplaced hands and feet. There were two other couples—my husband and I made up the third.
Silverware clinked on porcelain plates, compliments were scattered, heaped upon Maggie, and genially brushed aside. Geraldine and Ezra told us about their winter trip to New York City, about the Rockettes and their stallion kicks, about the homeless man that had unfurled like a sea monster from his bedraggled perch and sloshed after Geraldine calling her little snow bunny as she trampled down Fifth Avenue, hung with bags.
“The un-housed, dear,” said Maggie with a light hand.
“The un-medicated,” said Ezra.
“The un-couth!” Greg laughed. Ezra performed a touché with his fork. Maggie pressed the bowl of green beans into her husband’s hands and motioned for him to pass them around again.
My husband said nothing, and I felt the mighty spark of having the least embarrassing spouse. I squeezed his leg beneath the table, feeling the width and musculature of his thigh, astonished by how unfamiliar it felt. I could have gripped a thousand thighs and not known which belonged to him. These blind spots had become a disturbance to me—evidence of the ambivalence of marital love. All those years of curiosity that had shriveled like a slug dashed with salt. I reached across his lap to see if the other leg could be found familiar, and he gave me a look of retribution as if I were attempting something untoward. Once upon a time, we had been consumed, almost treacherous in the heat of our devotion, we had broken lamps, we had lain nude upon a beach, we had fogged the windows along the backseat of our sedan. I gulped my wine.
Across the table, the newly pregnant Geraldine, circled her belly with her hand. When I touched my own stomach, I felt the aftermath—a stubborn pooch, the ab-less laxity, a general emptiness filled with rumbles of hunger.
We had been having some issues with our own child, Nora. In fact, the relocation to Richmond had been a welcome relief. We had spent the entirety of that previous summer carting her between therapists after her involvement in “the swirly incident.” A bathroom saga in which she had been accused of being a bully and a perpetrator. She had been ostracized from sleepovers and volleyball camp, and my husband and I had spent our nights running down message boards and drinking wine from coffee cups, aiming our grievances at each other like invisible darts.
Maggie knew of these struggles. When I met her at a charity gala, lightheaded on cheap champagne, I told her the whole sob story as the auctioneer rifled off trips to Puerto Vallarta. Maggie was dazzling and sympathetic. She touched my arm with her glistening nails and told me about the difficulties they’d had with their eldest son—the one they had sent off to boarding school in Massachusetts years ago. “He sold some pills,” she whispered so softly I had to read her lips.
I knew that each of us regarded Geraldine as a woman who had yet to make mistakes, and it was hard not to hold it against her. Across the table, she stopped her circling and lifted her long, black hair away from her neck. Her family was Peruvian, and her features were set off by dark eyes and untouched eyebrows and a nose so unoffensive it nearly disappeared. She smiled at me, looking flush, and began dabbing the tip of her linen napkin into the water and touching it to her cheeks.
“Is it warm in here? It’s warm in here, isn’t it?” said Maggie.
“It’s those floor vents, they don’t work right,” said Greg. “The landmark status was not worth it, let me tell you!” He pulled at the starched collar of his shirt.
The stately brick home with its labyrinth of rooms sat on an oak-lined street with branches spanning the roadway like limber ballerinas. They had a man that came around every few months with a long pole to twist the moss away from the limbs.
My husband and I didn’t live in that neighborhood or in the ones that flanked it. Before the move, sight-unseen, we had rented one of the downtown Victorians that ran shoulder to shoulder in a neighborhood known as The Fan—which had turned out to be rather bohemian. Beyond the painted bricks, many of the homes were oddly arranged, having been rigged and outfitted with century-long attempts to shove the new into the old. There were thrift stores and matcha shops, breweries, and rusted water towers. The belch of the populace emanated from the drain grates. We had thought downtown would be swanky and adventurous, but instead time had granted it the intractable scars of a shifting earth: sidewalks and streets broken into gulfs like tectonic plates. There were leaning brick buildings, graffitied landmarks—everything conflicted, resistant to change.
“I’m just so warm these days! I could walk straight into a river and not feel a thing. You remember what it’s like,” Geraldine said to us.
“Should I open the window? Is everyone O.K. with the window being open?” asked Maggie.
“Here, let me, I’m a doctor,” my husband stood with a sarcastic flourish and lifted the lower sash of the window.
My husband, the doctor. The sentence had not yet lost its bounce. It was the sort of useful profession that covered a multitude of sins.
The fall air rushed in, wet with leaves, and the candles danced in their votives at the center of the table. I was pricked with the déjà vu of a séance and felt a rush of girlish excitement, like a filament sprung loose from a bulb. The room was dimly lit, and I could see out the black of the window—the earlier rain trapped in its moonlit puddles, a figure loping down the street with something large and indecipherable on a leash. Halloween had just passed. There had been a few stray candy wrappers along the sidewalk where we parked, and a slight tackiness had collected on the sole of my shoe as if a Jolly Rancher had become lodged beneath it.
“Who would you try to contact during a séance?” I asked, swinging my thoughts into the open. That was how you made a party a party after all. I laughed and swirled my wine.
“Leave it to Shirley!” Maggie said. She found me amusing, which struck me as the kind of thing one might say about a pet dressed up in a silly hat or galoshes.
Greg, Gregory, snapped his fingers. “Harry Houdini.”
Ezra frowned and slid the last of the short ribs onto his plate. “Houdini, you say?”
“That way I can ask him how to escape!” Greg laughed loudly and slapped the table, his wedding ring clanging at the wood.
“Hardy har har,” said Maggie. When she stood, I caught the spice of her perfume which struck the air like glitter. She hesitated and then bent and flicked Greg at the ears playfully before lifting their plates. “No, no, please. I’ve got this,” she said, motioning for everyone to stay seated.
I made a half-move, shifted in my seat, and then slumped back. My husband set his fork down without finishing, rose and began stacking the remaining plates. He put the silverware on top and then stacked the platters and carried them into the kitchen all at once. He was showing off, but his helpfulness reflected well on both of us. I counted on my fingers beneath the table. Four glasses? Or was it only three? We were drinking a Bordeaux that Maggie had carried up from the cellar. She had taken a cloth and wiped dust from the label before uncorking it. A maroon ring had bloomed beneath the decanter, bleeding across the tablecloth. As I reached for it, my strap slipped from my shoulder, but no one seemed to notice. I refilled my glass and set it back into its circular stain.
“I would call up one of those lesser-known Presidents, Herbert Hoover perhaps, ask him about the Masons,” said Ezra.
“There’s always Van Buren,” said Greg.
“Or Chester Arthur,” I said.
“I would summon my father, of course, but that answer’s no fun,” said Geraldine. Maggie laughed brightly from the kitchen, and I nearly snorted into my glass with the horror of her timing. Geraldine arched back in her chair, stretching the spine of her rapidly changing body, and Ezra put his arm around her.
I could picture my husband standing in the kitchen, feigning domesticity, a dishtowel slung atop his shoulder, telling Maggie a familiar story—an emergency tracheotomy in med school, climbing Mt. Rainier with his father. I could count the precise beats of those stories—the dramatic pause, the practiced wit, the self-deprecation barely obscuring the aggrandizement. And then there was only the sound of the faucet, water running unimpeded for longer than could be accounted for. Had they brushed against each other and discovered some unexpected charge, a shock of longing? That was always the danger at these things, after dinner, after drinks—a transference of emotion: boredom, revenge. A quick flirtation with someone else’s spouse might be the only thrill of the week. Plus, there was the thing about Greg. If it was obvious enough to pass the threshold of my husband, then surely Maggie must know.
I had phoned Geraldine to dish about it the previous week. Gregory the third—was how we referred to him when Maggie wasn’t around. But even when we were being rude, we were nothing if not polite—dancing around subjects, beating about the bush—following the subtle rules of speaking ill about someone with whom you are well acquainted. Plausible deniability, my husband would say. I mentioned something about Greg traveling a lot. She said something about her OBGYN. Then I commented on Maggie’s weight loss over the last few months, wondering aloud what had prompted it. And Geraldine asked me about baby formulas, even though by then my only child was consuming dairy via Frappuccino. I didn’t go so far as to tell her about seeing Maggie and Gregory together in the hallway at our last gathering, about him wrapping his arms around her from behind and squeezing her chest, about the brutal slant of her face when she brushed him off and went to grab the canapés. What I told her was that they say, breast is best, and had she noticed Maggie’s new sapphire ring?
What I couldn’t say was liaison and my husband’s own inference. What I couldn’t put into words was the same fear that was in us all—that our tethered, spousal life could become unlatched.
When my husband and Maggie rounded the corner with dessert, it was a relief to see them looking like separate entities. Ezra and Greg were talking about the Sixers, which was Geraldine’s fault since she had taken the wind out of the room with the stifle of our unspoken sympathies.
“Don’t forget John Tyler,” my husband added.
“Is he on the roster? D league?” asked Ezra.
“The President thing—John Tyler,” he said. He pulled out his chair and then sat down, flexing his fingers in his habitual way, a touch of embarrassment coloring his nose.
His mother had told me that he had a tick as a child, an eye thing she had tried to emulate by winking and squinting and rolling her eyes all at once. She made me swear not to bring it up. She told me a few weeks before she passed—"In case it carries to children,” she said. Apparently, when he was ten, he had gotten rid of it by looking in the mirror and forcing himself to watch it over and over again. But I was always on the lookout for its arrival, wondering if it could be coaxed to the surface. Even when our daughter came home with periwinkle hair: nothing, just a face of stone. He told her she looked like that Osborne girl, and she dyed it back over the bathroom sink the very next week.
I was surprised they had been listening in from the kitchen, but Maggie was a dull flirt. She could throw a luncheon like nobody’s business, order a string quartet a moment’s notice, but any reference down south made her tuck behind a cocktail napkin. She had been some county queen back in the day and then one of those newspaper models all smudged and grainy, posed in a way that made slips and hosiery seem modest and old-fashioned.
Now she spun around the table with tiny ramekins of chocolate pots de crème, depositing one in front of each of us with a child-sized spoon. We talked about local prep schools while I carved away at my dessert and then I reached for my husband’s, half-eaten. The tender beginnings of a party left me too anxious and demure to do anything more than peck at my dinner, but by that hour I was ravenous.
My husband looked down at his empty doily and then grabbed my original, now empty dish and placed it in front of himself—a move born of practice, of marital cover.
The topic then shifted to eminent domain and the Hollow Lake reservoir project. With boredom, I watched the men gesturing, their mouths pantomiming, but I kept any of it from penetrating. It was a talent to be both present and adrift, to reshape the scene before me into a farce or satire. If only everyone could see how insightful and original my thoughts could be, how they swept the table before me into a child’s tea party, how sometimes I wanted to laugh at myself for playing grownup. I scraped at the ramekin’s chocolate edges and twirled the tiny spoon in my mouth.
“No, no, that’s not how it works,” said Greg.
“They will never get it off the ground, mark my words,” said my husband.
“That’s just what they want you to think, don’t you see!” said Ezra with his fists on the table.
“Trust me, these things always come and go,” said my husband.
“Yes, don’t be so green, pal,” said Greg with an intolerable smile. “We’ve been around the block a few more times.”
Greg probably talked to his rumored mistress that way—his condescension ladled out with pet names. Don’t you see, Kitty, this is how it must be? He had been a swimmer in college, and his body was still shaped like an inverted triangle, threatening to topple. I tongued the spoon clean and placed it on the tablecloth.
Greg stood to get Geraldine some ice for her water, asked if he could get anyone a nightcap. My eyes carved into him, searching for a tell, but he was impenetrable, unflappable.
“Scotch,” I said.
“Here, here,” said Ezra.
My husband didn’t seem to notice that I’d had too much. Wax drooled down the candles, and the black smoke had smudged the votives. The old pinewood floors creaked, and we could hear Greg humming in the great room at the bar cart. Geraldine had an orange spider ring on her finger, a plastic Halloween trinket. I thought it strange that I hadn’t seen it before, circling her belly. She caught me staring as my head lulled to the side.
“Found it on the walkway!” she said.
I nodded. What else had I failed to notice? Soon she would have a baby girl, a pumpkin next Halloween, a sunflower the year after. I would know her only through photos then.
Maggie stood to clear the dessert. I scooped up three of the ramekins before my husband’s attempt and followed her into the kitchen, trailing the swoosh of her caftan, feeling it brush against my knees. My own clothes felt perilously tight, my belted dress cinched around a body I barely fed, a body starved for something I hadn’t yet discovered. I consisted of wine and lettuce, of yogurt and coffee and that fancy beef jerky my husband kept on hand that cramped my stomach. I was wild; I was tame.
Maggie filled the sink, pumping soap from a dispenser until it was luxurious with suds. When I was younger, all I had wanted was a tub with pink bubbles, a room full of floor pillows, a crown of braids. In truth, those desires had never really gone away, they had simply been repressed, forgotten. What a relief it was to have discovered a therapy topic for Tuesday. I stretched my arms out in front of me, looking all the way to the tips of my fingers, but I couldn’t steady myself, and the black and white pattern of the floor kept swapping places, getting mixed up.
“Oh darling,” said Maggie, “let’s get you some water.” She said it without judgment. I reached for a baguette that had tumbled out of the basket while she poured water from a pitcher.
Greg peeked his head around the corner, holding out a crystal highball with a finger of scotch.
“I think she needs some water,” Maggie told him.
“I’ll add ice,” he said with a dumb wink. Maggie rolled her eyes.
I sat down in a chair at the kitchenette by the bay window, pinching small bites from the bread.
“Is everything alright, dear?” asked Maggie, patting my hand.
I looked at the plate wall behind her. What order there was in that place. It was an order that existed down to the cutlery, each finial carved with their family initial, a certainty of belonging.
Tell her? Don’t tell her? How could I gather the heart? Everything was hopelessly scrambled. I stuffed my mouth with another bite of bread and stared out into the thick of the night. The streetlights had come on hours ago, their little yellow orbs stationed at the ends of the road, but then a blue light and a red light joined them, and another blue and another red, flashing silently, red, blue, red, blue.
“What on earth?” said Maggie, leaning against the window of our fishbowl. We watched as the lights veered onto the street and then across the curb of their driveway.
“Shit,” yelled Gregory from the other room. Furniture clanged; a chair was toppled. Greg sprinted down the corridor into his office where we could hear the sliders bang open. The floodlights lit up the front yard.
“Greg! What’s happening Greg?” shouted Maggie, as we rushed around the corner, but it wasn’t desperate or frightened, it was accusing.
Ezra looked at my husband, a silent decision was reached, and they rushed to the office where a shredder whirred and drawers rattled open.
“We should turn out the lights,” said Geraldine, gripping her stomach. The three of us fumbled with the switches, making a mess of things. Lights went on here and off there, quivering the home like a haunting. A pounding began at the door. I blew out the candles on the table. My heart beat like a brick—the whole thing was thrilling. There was more pounding, a command. Maggie paced the foyer. By the glow of the office computer, I could see the dark husk of the husbands bending and feeding paper after paper. In a moment of complicit brilliance, I sprang to the den where Reggie was howling and released him. He bound down the marble hall and leapt at the door with his oversized paws.
The police were threatening now, they would break down the door, they said. I pictured a line of men swinging a log, heave-ho, heave-ho. The shredder choked. A wine glass had been abandoned on the antique demilune. I picked it up, took a sip. It tasted of someone else’s mouth; someone else’s husband.
“Just a minute! Let me put away the dog!” said Maggie, tugging at the loose, leather collar. Reginald’s silky paws slipped across the waxed floors. “There’s a dear. Good boy, Reggie,” Maggie said. “It’s alright, Reggie.” Geraldine parroted, following behind. They put him in the laundry room where he slammed and whimpered at the door. Maggie combed her hair with her hands and lifted her chest as she reached for the lock, the prize queen emerging, the invisible sash, the strident air. The husbands shuffled into the foyer with their hands in their pockets. My husband, I thought, looked changed. Before he closed the office doors, Greg chewed and then swallowed a paper-sized glob. The wine was still in my head and when the police burst in with their flashlights, in with their gruff authority, there was a silvery haze to the room, as if dusted in the evening’s remnants.
We stood on the curb with tartan blankets over our shoulders. Not on the street, not on the sidewalk, but on the curb, teetering like caught-out children. The moon was dipped in yellow. Jack-o-lanterns blinkered from the columned porch at the house across the way. Our statements were sawdust; we were ladies, we were gentlemen, nothing could be constructed from them. Even our momentary series of obstructions had been treated like fanfare; the culpability no sturdier than twigs. Maggie sobbed softly from the yard as they ransacked the house, her satin slippers ruined in the grass, but I didn’t go to her, none of us did. Gregory remained inside, but we could see him pacing from room to room, flapping his arms like giant, indignant bird. Every now and then he would put his head in his hands and fold into a chair until a surge carried him up to his feet again.
A pair of officers flipped the Jacobean chairs and pulled the leaf from the dining room table. They peeled back the edges of the wallpaper and Maggie kept saying, “Thank goodness the children aren’t here.” I stood at the edge of the jasmine, feeling the night drain, thinking about Greg eating that piece of paper, thinking about the carnality of candy necklaces and the horrible lore of razor blade apples and all the tropes we are taught to fear.
An hour later, they perp-walked him down a pathway that only nights before had been run through with costumed children, with princesses and knights, skeletons and witches. Greg even managed to summon a smile and a wave as he was ducked into the backseat like a promise for more evenings.
When their lawyer arrived, he was wearing running clothes with a university hat. I thought he looked like Clinton. He was a good lawyer, but Gregory still went to prison, five years was what we heard. Securities fraud—a crime that could have carried twenty. The rest of us walked away, went home. My husband drove us home slowly that night and I held my breath when I stuck the brass key into the front door.
Their house was put up for auction, the fine furniture; the courts squeezed money out like a lemon. Many months later, as the world dove into lockdown, and the prisons became an infectious blaze, Maggie and the kids went to live with her parents at their sprawling, stone-walled estate in Vermont. Greg dodged the virus like a matador, and now that restrictions have lifted, it’s been rumored she drives across state-lines to visit him once a month. I imagine her cleaning the plexiglass with disinfectant, placing her manicured fingers against it like a spider, matching Greg’s on the other side. She might be adjusting a fine brooch on her shirt, latching and unlatching the clasp of her purse, talking about field hockey and the petunias in her mother’s garden. Their marriage, in many ways, has never been better.
We live in the suburbs now, in an enviable Tudor with wood-trimmed rooms that witnessed a period in which my husband came home, stripped to the bone and scalded himself in the shower before we were allowed to greet him. A period in which our separate bedrooms became permanent, in which our daughter, with the oddest of timing, burst forth from her interior cage and began testing sourdough starters and taking long walks with me in the evenings. On TV, we watched the streets burst with people. We watched those Confederate statues in the park near The Fan—those bygone men as they were torn down, disassembled, carted away in pieces.
“Why did we do it? Why did we help him?” I had asked my husband that night. Even now, I felt a flush of shame when I thought of it—as if we had been brought in, touched by their troubles. I didn’t know how to explain what we had witnessed or how I felt about it. Or why, in the sudden turn of the world, it had seemed like an omen. But every time I reached for the appropriate sadness for Maggie—I found it missing. All that remained were the alarms of my own life, ringing like bells.