The First Husband
1.
It began innocently: he was searching for his wife’s passport.
The Chases were planning their first trip to Italy together. To celebrate their tenth anniversary.
Leonard’s own much-worn passport was exactly where he always kept it, but Valerie’s less frequently used passport didn’t appear to be with it, so Leonard looked through drawers designated as hers, bureau drawers, desk drawers, the single shallow drawer of the cherrywood table in a corner of their bedroom which Valerie sometimes used as a desk, and there, in a manila folder, with a facsimile of her birth certificate and other documents, he found the passport. And pushed to the back of the drawer, a packet of photographs held together with a frayed rubber band.
Polaroids. Judging by their slightly faded colors, old Polaroids.
Leonard shuffled through the photographs as if they were cards. He was staring at a young couple: Valerie and a man whom Leonard didn’t recognize. Here was Valerie astonishingly young, and more beautiful than Leonard had ever known her. Her hair was coppery red and fell in a cascade to her bare shoulders; she was wearing a red bikini top, white shorts. The darkly handsome young man close beside her had slung a tanned arm around her shoulders in a playful intimate gesture, a gesture of blatant sexual possession. Very likely this man was Valerie’s first husband, whom Leonard had never met. The young lovers were photographed seated at a white wrought-iron table in an outdoor cafe, or on the balcony of a hotel room. In several photos you could see in the near distance a curving stretch of wide white sand, a glimpse of aqua water. Beyond the couple on the terrace were royal court palm trees, crimson bougainvillea like flame. The sky was a vivid tropical blue. The five or six photographs must have been taken by a third party, a waiter or hotel employee perhaps. Leonard stared, transfixed.
The first husband. Here was the first husband. Yardman? Was that the name? Leonard felt a stab of sexual jealousy. Not wanting to think, And I am the second husband.
On the reverse of one of the Polaroids, in Valerie’s handwriting, was Oliver & Val, Key West, December 1985.
Oliver. This was Yardman’s first name, Leonard vaguely remembered now. In 1985, Val had been twenty-two, nearly half her lifetime ago, and she hadn’t yet married Oliver Yardman but would be marrying him in another year. At this time they were very possibly new lovers; this trip to Key West had been a kind of honeymoon. Such sensual, unabashed happiness in the lovers’ faces! Leonard was sure that Valerie had told him she hadn’t kept any photographs of her first husband.
“The least we can do with our mistakes,” Valerie had said, with a droll downturn of her mouth, “is not keep a record of them.”
Leonard, who’d met Valerie when she was thirty-one, several years after her divorce from Yardman, had been allowed to think that the first husband had been older than Valerie, not very attractive and not very interesting. Valerie claimed that she’d married “too young” and that their divorce just five years later had been “amicable,” for they had no children and had not shared much of a past. Yardman’s work had been with a family-owned business in a Denver suburb, “dull, money-grubbing work.” Valerie, who’d grown up in Rye, Connecticut, had not liked Colorado and spoke of that part of the country, and of that “early phase” of her life, with an expression of disdain.
Yet here was evidence that Valerie had been very happy with Oliver Yardman in December 1985. Clearly Yardman was no more than a few years older than Valerie and, far from being unattractive, was decidedly good-looking: dark, avid eyes, sharply defined features, something sulky and petulant about the mouth, the mouth of a spoiled child. In one of the more revealing Polaroids, Yardman had pulled Valerie toward him, a hand gripping her shoulder and the other hand beneath the table, very likely gripping her thigh. The man’s hair was dark, thick. Faint stubble showed on his solid jaws. He wore a white T-shirt that fitted his muscled torso tightly, and tight swim trunks; his legs were covered in dark hairs. In a kind of infantile sensual delight, his bare toes curled upward.
Leonard felt a thrill of physical revulsion, anger. So this was Oliver Yardman: the first husband.
Not at all the man Valerie had suggested to Leonard.
At the time he’d thought it strange, though not disagreeably so, that Valerie hadn’t asked Leonard about his past (by which is meant, invariably, a sexual past). Unlike any woman Leonard had ever met as an adult, Valerie hadn’t even asked Leonard if he had ever been married.
It had been a relief, to meet a woman so confident in herself that she seemed utterly lacking in sexual jealousy. Now Leonard saw that very likely Valerie hadn’t wanted to be questioned about her own sexual/marital past.
Leonard stared at the Polaroids, frowning. He should laugh, shove them back into the drawer as they’d been, taking care not to snap the frayed rubber band, for certainly he wasn’t the kind of man to rifle through his wife’s private things. Nor was he the kind of man who is prone to jealousy.
Of all the ignoble emotions, jealousy had to be the worst! And envy.
And yet: he took the photos closer to the window, where a faint November sun glowered behind banks of clouds above the Hudson River, seeing how the table at which the young couple sat was crowded with glasses, a bottle of (red, dark) wine that appeared to be nearly depleted, napkins crumpled onto dirtied plates like discarded clothing. A ring on Valerie’s left hand, silver studs glittering in her earlobes, which looked flushed, rosy. In several of the photos, Valerie was clutching at her energetic young lover as he was clutching at her, in playful possessiveness. You could see that Valerie was giddy from wine, and love. Here was an amorous couple who’d wakened late after a night of love; this heavy lunch with wine would be their first meal of the day; very likely they’d return to bed, collapsing in one another’s arms for an afternoon siesta. In the most blatant photo, Valerie lay sprawled against Yardman, glossy hair spilling across his chest, one of her arms around his waist and the other part hidden beneath the table, her hand very likely in Yardman’s lap. In Yardman’s groin. Valerie, who now disliked vulgarity, who stiffened if Leonard swore and claimed to hate “overly explicit” films, had been provocatively touching Yardman in the very presence of the third party with the camera. Her little-girl mock-innocent expression was familiar to Leonard: Not me! Not me! I’m not a naughty girl, not me!
Leonard stared; his heart beat in resentment. Here was a Valerie he hadn’t known: mouth swollen from being kissed and from kissing; young, full breasts straining against the red fabric of the bikini top, and in the crescent of shadowy flesh between her breasts something coin-sized gleaming like oily sweat; her skin suffused with a warm, sensual radiance. Leonard understood that this young woman must be contained within the other, the elder who was his wife: as a secret, rapturous memory, inaccessible to him, the merely second husband.
Leonard was forty-five. Young for his age, but that age wasn’t young.
When he’d been the age of Yardman in the photos, early or mid-twenties, he hadn’t been young like Yardman, either. Painful to concede, but it was so.
If he, Leonard Chase, had approached the young woman in the photos, if he’d managed to enter Valerie’s life in 1985, Valerie would not have given him a second glance. Not as a man. Not as a sexual partner. He knew this.
After lunch, the young couple would return to their hotel room and draw the blinds. Laughing and kissing, stumbling, like drunken dancers. They were naked together, beautiful smooth bodies coiled together, greedily kissing, caressing, thrusting together with the abandon of copulating animals. He saw them sprawled on the bed that would be a large jangly brass bed, and the room dimly lit, a fan turning indolently overhead, through slats in the blinds a glimpse of tropical sky, the graceful curve of a palm tree, a patch of bougainvillea moistly crimson as a woman’s mouth . . . Leonard felt an unwelcome sexual stirring in his groin.
She lied. That’s the insult.
Misrepresenting the first husband, the first marriage. Why?
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Leonard knew why: Yardman had been Valerie’s first serious love. Yardman was the standard of masculine sexuality in Valerie’s life. No love like your first. The cache of Polaroids was Valerie’s secret, a link to her private, erotic life.
Hurriedly he replaced the Polaroids in the drawer. The frayed rubber band had snapped; Leonard took no notice. He went away shaken, devastated. He thought, I’ve never existed for her. It has all been a farce.
• • •
In Rockland County, New York. In Salthill Landing, on the western bank of the Hudson River. Twenty miles north of the George Washington Bridge.
In one of the old stone houses overlooking the river: “historic,” “landmark.” Expensive.
Early that evening, as Valerie was preparing one of her gourmet meals in the kitchen, there was Leonard leaning in the doorway, a drink in hand. Asking, “D’you ever hear of him, Val? What was his name, Yardman . . . ,” casually, as one who has only been struck by a wayward thought, and Valerie, frowning at a recipe, murmured no, but in so distracted a way Leonard wasn’t sure that she’d heard, so he asked again, “D’you ever hear of Yardman? Or from him?” and now Valerie glanced over at Leonard with a faint, perplexed smile. “Yardman? No.” And Leonard said, “Really? Never? In all these years?” and Valerie said, “In all these years, darling, no.”
Valerie was peering at a recipe in a large, sumptuously illustrated cookbook propped up on a counter, pages clipped open. The cookbook was Caribbean Kitchen: Valerie was preparing flank steak, to be marinated and stuffed with sausage, hard-boiled eggs, and vegetables, an ambitious meal that would involve an elaborate marinade and a yet more elaborate stuffing, and at this moment involved the almost surgical butterflying of the blood-oozing slab of meat. This was a meal Valerie hoped to prepare for a dinner party later in the month; she was determined to perfect it. A coincidence, Leonard thought, that only a few hours after he’d discovered the secret cache of Polaroids, Valerie was preparing an exotic Caribbean meal of the kind she might have first sampled in Key West with the first husband twenty years ago, but Leonard, who was a reasonable man, a tax lawyer who specialized in litigation in federal appellate courts, knew it could only be a coincidence.
Asking, in a tone of mild inquiry, “What was Yardman’s first name, Val? I don’t think you ever mentioned it,” and Valerie said, with an impatient little laugh, having taken up a steak knife to cut the meat horizontally, “What does it matter what the name is?” Leonard noted that though he’d said was, Valerie had said is. The first husband was present to her; no time had passed. Leonard recalled an ominous remark of Freud’s that in the unconscious all time is present tense, and so what has come to dwell most powerfully in the unconscious is felt to be immortal, unkillable. Valerie added, as if in rebuke, “Of course I’ve mentioned his name, Leonard. Only just not in a long time.” She was having difficulty with the flank steak skidding about on the wooden block, so Leonard quickly set down his drink and held it secure, while Valerie, biting her lower lip, pursing her face like Caravaggio’s Judith sawing off the head of the wicked king Holofernes, managed to inset the sharp blade, make the necessary incisions, complete the cut so that the meat could now be opened like the pages of a book. As Leonard watched, fascinated, yet with a sensation of mild revulsion, Valerie then covered the meat with a strip of plastic wrap and pounded at it with a meat mallet, short deft blows to reduce it to a uniform quarter-inch thickness. Leonard winced a little with the blows. He said, “Did he—I mean Yardman—ever remarry?” and Valerie made an impatient gesture to signal that she didn’t want to be distracted, not just now. This was important! This was to be their dinner! Carefully she slid the butterflied steak into a large, shallow dish and poured the marinade over it. Leonard saw that Valerie’s face had thickened since she’d been Oliver Yardman’s lover; her body had thickened, gravity was tugging at her breasts, thighs. At the corners of her eyes and mouth were fine white lines, and the coppery red hair had faded. Yet still Valerie was a striking woman, a rich man’s daughter whose sense of her self-worth shone in her eyes, in her lustrous teeth, in her sharp dismissive laughter like the sheen of the expensive kitchen utensils hanging overhead. There was something sensual and languorous in Valerie’s face when she concentrated on food, an almost childlike bliss, an air of happy expectation. Leonard thought, Food is eros without the risk of heartbreak. Unlike a lover, food will never reject you.
Leonard asked another time if Yardman had remarried and Valerie said, “How would I know, darling?” in a tone of faint exasperation. Leonard said, “From mutual friends, you might have heard.” Valerie carried the steak in a covered dish to the refrigerator, where it would marinate for two hours. They never ate before 8:30 P.M., and sometimes later; it was the custom of their lives together, for they’d never had children to necessitate early meals, the routines of a perfunctory American life. Valerie said, “‘Mutual friends.’” She laughed sharply. “We don’t have any.” Again Leonard noted the present tense: don’t. “And you’ve never kept in touch,” he said, and Valerie said, “You know we didn’t.” She was frowning, uneasy. Or maybe she was annoyed. To flare up in anger was a sign of weakness; Valerie hid such weaknesses. A sign of vulnerability, and Valerie was not vulnerable. Not any longer.
Leonard said, “Well. That seems rather sad, in a way.”
At the sink, which was designed to resemble a deep, old-fashioned kitchen sink of another era, Valerie vigorously washed her hands, stained with watery blood. She washed the ten-inch gleaming knife with the surgically sharpened blade, each of the utensils she’d been using. It was something of a fetish for Valerie, to keep her beautiful kitchen as spotless as she could while working in it. As she took care to remove her jewelry to set aside as she worked.
On her left hand, Valerie wore the diamond engagement ring and the matching wedding band Leonard had given her. On her right hand, Valerie wore a square-cut emerald in an antique setting that she’d said she’d inherited from her grandmother. Only now did Leonard wonder if the emerald ring was the engagement ring her first husband had given her, which she’d shifted to her right hand after their marriage had ended.