She also liked to do this when she was wearing the tights with the pretend color comics that looked as if they belonged in a Sunday newspaper. She and her parents had gotten that pair at a museum’s gift shop a few blocks south on Fifth Avenue. The images were actually paintings by some famous modern artist. But her very favorite tights to be wearing when she was lying like this were the ones with the covers of old children’s books on them. Her father had brought them back to her from a business trip to London. She recognized most of the covers, but some were British editions: she knew all of the stories at least a little bit, but it seemed the English used a different image on the front of a lot of their books. They had a different Alice. A different Harry. A different Otter and Badger and Mole. Some of the covers were upside down, but it didn’t matter: she would study the characters and designs and recall the stories. She wished the covers didn’t stop abruptly near the tops of her thighs.
She was, of course, wearing her pajamas now. Not any of her tights. They were the pajamas she kept at Grandmother’s for visits such as these. Red check flannel bottoms. A Snoopy top.
She decided that she should paint her toenails. One of these days when they were in the city, her mother was going to take her for a pedicure. It would be her first—at least her first real one. She had been painting her toenails for years. Before that, her mother had painted them for her. Today they were pink, but the polish was chipped on a few of her nails. Perhaps when she and her mother went to the salon, they might even get what girls on TV called mani-pedis, where you got your toenails and fingernails painted. Very glamorous.
The assistants at her dance studio, the girls who were juniors and seniors in high school, always had their toenails painted. She noticed when they were climbing in and out of their ballet slippers or jazz shoes.
She tried now to hear what her mother and grandmother were saying, but even when she concentrated she could only pick out an occasional word. Clearly they were speaking softly because they didn’t want to wake her. Or, perhaps, because they didn’t want her to hear. If she were to guess, she would assume it was more because they didn’t want her to hear. Her mother was vague about what had happened last night at their home, but Melissa understood two things with certainty: first, something awful had occurred at Uncle Philip’s bachelor party, and people had died. Second, her father had done something very, very wrong. Moreover, the combination of awful and her father’s behavior had changed the landscape between her parents, and it was—she was sure—a shift that was dangerous. Dangerous for their marriage in ways that she didn’t quite understand, and dangerous for her in ways that she did. It threatened the stability of the life that she knew and took for granted.
What precisely had her father done? She had her suspicions. They were as hazy as her mother’s explanations, but she knew the basics of sex. She wasn’t a moron. She was in the fourth grade. And last night there had been a naked woman in their house. And the men, she conjectured, had fought over her. But was Mom upset because Dad had looked at this other woman? Or had her father done something more? And did that mean he had had sex with her? Or was it Uncle Philip?
She noticed that a strip of the wallpaper was starting to peel where it met the ceiling a couple of feet from the window. There was an ancient water stain—mildew-brown—a few inches above the top of the bedroom’s other window. The room, when you gazed at it from the bed, looked a little tired. This weary ceiling was so different from the one in her bedroom at home.
Once more she stretched, elongating her arms and legs—her fingers and toes. (There was some kid song about fingers and toes that they all used to sing in preschool. Perhaps even in kindergarten. She wished she could retrieve it right now, but it was floating somewhere just beyond her mind’s reach.) She guessed she should join her mother and grandmother and have some breakfast. Learn what she could. She might even hover for a minute or two just outside the kitchen, in the entryway to the apartment, and eavesdrop.
As she was on her way there, however—as she was walking silently past the apartment’s front door—she heard the bing of the elevator on the other side of the door, and then her father’s keys. A second later, there he was, opening the door. For a long moment they just stared at each other, neither saying a word. She saw that he had Cassandra with him in the animal’s cat carrier. Then he knelt, put the cat carrier on the floor, and wrapped his arms around her. She detected a trace of an unfamiliar perfume—definitely not her mother’s. She didn’t think he had ever looked worse.
…
Kristin asked her mother to make Melissa breakfast and then led her husband back to the guest bedroom, where only a few minutes earlier their daughter had been fast asleep. The only chair in the room was a violin-shaped monster that must have been designed by Torquemada—usually it just held clothes when they were visiting, and sometimes Melissa’s backpack—but this morning Richard sank into it, as if he were shrinking with shame into the seat. But perhaps, Kristin thought as she watched him, she was reading too much into his body language and projecting onto him what she thought he should feel. Maybe he was just hung over. Maybe he was just tired. She noticed that the stubble on his chin was flecked with white. He had bags under his eyes, and her heart opened a little to him. God. What he had seen. There was no eyewash in the world that could make that go away…
“Have you slept?” he asked her, his voice weary.
“Not since you called. I presume you haven’t either.”
He shook his head. “I almost fell asleep on the train. But not really.”
“So, tell me everything,” she said. “I don’t want to know, but I don’t think I have a choice. And maybe it will help you to talk about it.”
“Why don’t you sit down? You look like…”
“I look like what?”
“You look like you’re about to interrogate me.”
His tone surprised her. He probably hadn’t meant to sound hostile, but he had. “Well, you would know what it’s like to be interrogated, wouldn’t you?” she countered.
“Kris, please.”
She sat down on the bed. She rested her hands in her lap, a conscious attempt not to appear adversarial.
“You know how sorry I am,” he said. “I know what a disaster this is. All I thought…all I thought was that I was giving my idiot younger brother a bachelor party. I’m the best man. It’s what you do, right?”
“I know. And he is an idiot.”
“And I thought it would be more…wholesome…having it at home. Our home. I mean, I could have had it at someplace sleazy. But I didn’t.”
“No,” she agreed, “you didn’t”—though inside she was wishing now that he had.
“You know? Home delivery wings? A vat of guac? Beer? It just all went crazy. And it went crazy so weirdly fast.”
“Of course, that is your brother’s modus operandi. If you have a choice between partying like a grown-up and partying like a frat boy on spring break, he will always pick the latter.”
“It’s so true…”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
“The beginning of the party? Or when the strippers arrived?”
“Please: stop calling them strippers. They weren’t strippers.”
“Okay.”
She glanced down at her pantyhose and her skirt. It seemed hours ago that she had gotten dressed. In the half darkness, she had put on the skirt and the blouse that she had planned to wear that Saturday anyway. It was a matinee sort of skirt. Broadway pantyhose. Black with little pin dots. She liked it when she spent a day or a night (or a weekend) in Manhattan; she could dress in ways that she never could when she was teaching American history at a suburban high school. Half the time when she went to work, she was dressed as casually as the kids in her class.
No, that wasn’t quite right. The girls dressed considerably more provocatively. She recalled one of her first days at the school, another teacher—a history teacher named Amy Doud—had asked Kristin to accompany h
er on crack patrol. Initially, Kristin had been horrified, presuming this was some sort of drug interdiction. She found the very idea that there might be kids doing crack in a suburb this tony a little chilling. But it wasn’t about drugs at all. It was about enforcing the dress code. Kristin had watched as Amy walked softly up behind a pretty, coquettish young thing at her locker, the girl’s navy thong riding an inch or two up on her hips and above the top of her immaculate white jeans. There was the upside-down triangle of fabric at the very small of her back, the girl’s flesh around it shaped into a pair of perfectly formed meringues below the elastic band and a belt-wide strip of skin above it. Amy had deftly—and with preternatural speed—given the girl a wedgie so sudden and so pronounced that the student had been lifted up onto her toes in her flip-flops and squealed. “Dress code,” Amy reminded the girl. “Pull that shirt down and those pants up.” Then she had turned to Kristin and shrugged. “The glamorous life of a schoolteacher on crack patrol,” she said, smirking ever so slightly. “In truth, I do get a little pleasure from this. I really do. Once upon a time, I guess, I was kind of a mean girl.”
Now Richard cleared his throat and began. At first, Kristin found herself occasionally interrupting him with a question or a need for clarification—Was it Eric or this Brandon person who first ran his fingers under the front of the girl’s G-string? Did Spencer know he was buying sex and not stripping? Did Philip?—but soon it was a blur. It was a rush of images, her mind unsure which she found more nightmarish: her husband naked in the guest room with a whore or a pair of dead men in their house. Her composure unraveled. Suddenly she was crying, her shoulders caving in as she hunched over into her sobs, and she was vaguely aware that Richard had risen from the chair and wanted to sit beside her on the bed. To put his arms around her. But before he could, she swatted at his hands and stood, her posture erect and her back flush against the closet door.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, weeping in a way that she hadn’t in years. “Please, Richard, don’t touch me. Not this second.”
“Kris—”
“Just tell me the truth. I don’t think I want to know, but I have to. I have to. Did you fuck that girl in the guest room?”
“No. I swear it: I did not.”
“But she touched you.”
“She tried. I stopped her.”
She took a breath, sniffled. “So you expect me to believe that you went upstairs with her and took off all your clothes, but you didn’t fuck her? Didn’t allow her to…” and the words trailed off. She could bring herself to say the word fuck, a verb in this case of anger and aggression, but somehow she could not verbalize any other act of sexual intimacy. Her mind thought them: Hand job. Blow job. But she could not say such things. It was, pure and simple, too nightmarish for her to bring those visions to life in this room.
“No,” he was saying. “I remembered myself. I love you. I love you and I knew this had crossed a line. So I stopped. I swear to you: I pulled back from that sort of…adultery.”
“Did you kiss her?” she pressed him, her jaw tightening.
He paused and she looked across the room at him. And she knew. Even through her tears, she knew. She could see it in his eyes. Of course he had.
“For God’s sake,” she cried. “I can still smell her on you.”
…
Richard knew she was right, but hoped desperately that she was wrong. His wife probably could smell the girl on him. Had things not ended so badly, he would have showered—two, three, God, maybe four times—before Kristin and Melissa came home on Sunday morning. Obviously. He would have scrubbed from his skin all traces of the sordid debauch. But, of course, that hadn’t happened. On his way to his mother-in-law’s with Cassandra—a man and his cat, how strangely tame he must have appeared to the train conductor and cabbie—he had deluded himself into believing that he stunk only of the random odors of any party. Alcohol. Nachos. Sweat. Cigarette smoke. The pungent aroma of field grass and blueberries just starting to rot that he associated with marijuana. But his wife was right. The perfume and musk of the girl lingered. He carried it on his clothes like pollen.
Now he met Kristin’s eyes for a second as she leaned against the closet door like someone about to be shot, but then he glanced down at his shoes. It wasn’t her eyes, as sad as they were, that caused him to look away. It was her face: it was so drained of color, it was as if she had the flu. It was the tears he saw running down her cheeks. It was the fact that she didn’t want him to touch her. He noticed that he was still wearing his black wingtips; he couldn’t recall the last time he had been wearing his wingtips on a Saturday morning. Probably never.
He had kissed the girl. Of course he had. He had kissed her a couple of times, and he suspected that if the night hadn’t ended so disastrously badly, he might never have forgotten their first kiss. She had taken him to the den, away from the party because he was the best man and was going to get something special—something different from the lap dance he had received on the living room couch—and she had sat him down in the easy chair there. She had switched off the light, but the door was open and he could see the side of her face in the light from the hallway. They could still hear the music from the living room. She stepped from her thong so she was naked and climbed into his lap. He was aware—blissfully, if he was honest with himself, blissfully—of the way she was rubbing herself against him, which made the moment seem not merely consensual, but mutual; it was as if she wanted him, too. But he was focused as well on the half smile on her face when he looked up at her, and the way her lids had grown a little heavy with pleasure. Or, perhaps, with feigned pleasure. Still, it sure as hell seemed like she was in the zone with him. And then she locked those dark eyes on his and kept bringing her mouth within a millimeter of his, bobbing her lips beside his and shielding them from the whole world, it seemed, with her hair. She was brushing her cheek against him over and over, as if she were a cat marking him with the side of her face. He could feel her breath on him (peppermint), and it was warm. He never planned to kiss her. He certainly wouldn’t have initiated a kiss. After all, he was married. Happily married. He had a beautiful wife. But she seemed as into it as he was when she brought her face down to him again, so wanton and desirous; he could feel her yearning, too. No stripper was this good an actress, he told himself. And so this time when she was teasing him with her half-open mouth, he arched his back and met her. Their lips touched and it was…electric. He felt her tongue against his; he felt her fingers on the sides of his face and her breasts against his collarbone.
“You’re shaking,” she’d whispered into his ear a moment later.
“It’s fine,” he had whispered back.
They would kiss again before going upstairs, and they would kiss again on the stairs themselves. Each kiss had left him breathless, the air abruptly gone from his lungs. Had his first kiss with Kristin been like this? Of course it had. It had. It had just been such a long time ago.
But then again, had it really been that…hot? Their first kiss had been a few yards from the corner of Fourteenth and Fifth, after he had taken her to dinner for the second time, the kiss just beyond the sight of the doorman for her building. She had not invited him upstairs, both because it was only their second date and because she was one of three young schoolteachers in a two-bedroom sublet. She shared a bedroom with one of the other women. The kiss had been clumsy and brief; neither had been sure when he bent to kiss her on the lips whether their mouths should be open or closed. In the end, the kiss had been a little of both, an awkward hybrid. He remembered walking to the subway a little afraid that she would think he was a bad kisser. They’d never talked about that kiss or laughed about it; he wished, in hindsight, that at some point they had. But then again, maybe not. A few nights later he took her to a Radiohead concert, and they had kissed there. And that kiss had been rock concert hot. They were on their feet amid the noise and the bass, and their kissing grew into the most beautiful, wrenching torment imaginable, and sudde
nly she was grinding against the thigh of his blue jeans and his hands were under her shirt. Even now whenever either of them pulled some Radiohead vinyl off the shelf, it was a prelude to sex—an aural aphrodisiac, the strawberries of sound.
He took a deep breath and looked up from his shoes at his wife, and he lied. “We kissed once,” he said, “sort of. Before I knew what was happening she had kissed me. I pushed her away. It felt wrong and she smelled of cigarettes. It was all too…too intimate. I was a little disgusted.”