Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence (17 page)

What's a Ring Without a Finger?

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The rain fell for the next two days. A cold, harsh rain with colder, harsher winds, it overturned, Catherine thought, all the wickedness that had come before it—the blazing trapped heat of the air and the blazing trapped heat of her anger. Every time she stepped out of the house, she pushed her face into the wet wind, breathing in the chillier air. On the third day, the rain slowed and the wind subsided, the quality of the light rapidly changing until the bruised clouds parted and the sun reappeared.

As Catherine made coffee this morning, she thought of the lightning and thunder, the great sheets of water that flooded the streets and her yard. Now, as if by magic, nothing of the storm remained, no sign except that everything looked as if it had been scrubbed clean. Standing at the kitchen window, she imagined the chill in the air and, excited, threw on a lightweight cardigan before stepping out on the deck. Yet the moment she opened the door and breathed in the soupy, turgid air, she understood that the storm had done nothing more than renew summer's hateful promise. Everything around her oozed with sweat, and looked jaundiced under the pulverizing sun. She took a sip of the hot coffee, and it was as though she were swallowing summer itself. Disgusted, she dumped the coffee out, imagining the skin of the entire town drenched not in sweat, as she suddenly was, but in an oily combustible mist. She shut her eyes, imagining lighting a match and torching the town. Her nose filled with the imagined smoke of this imagined conflagration, the fire eating its way through the present and the past. She watched as the life she might have led went up in black curls of ash. She let the flames come, to take the house, the cottage, and the town, savoring the delicious scene with a small smile.

Then, all of a sudden, she opened her eyes because she did smell smoke, and she sniffed the air, alarmed. Yet when she saw the rings of smoke rising from the bottom of the stairs, she understood that it was only Antonia, lighting a cigarette. The sight of her in the big flouncy sunhat, the sunglasses, the sandals, and the neon pink bikini made her look to Catherine much younger, an eager girl ready to spend the day at the beach. Even when she had been in far better shape, Catherine wasn't sure she would have had the sense to go around dressed like this, her whole body on display. We women do such extraordinary things in the face of calamity, she thought. A little jealous of her, she applauded Antonia's pluck anyway and called down to her.

A moment later, the girl was beside her, saying, “I just came by to see how you were doing.”

“To see how I'm doing?” Catherine asked, surprised. “I should ask you the same question.”

“Luckily, the sun changes everything,” she said, flicking ash into the air. “I guess you haven't heard, but Henry and I made up.” She glanced at the cottage. No, Catherine hadn't heard, the news of this just as shocking as Henry's own had been. Antonia released one last thin line of smoke, stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, then went rummaging through her tote bag. “Henry was supposed to come with me to meet some friends of mine at Asbury Park, but he's developed a spontaneous cold.”

From the tote, she extracted a fresh pack of cigarettes. She handed a cigarette to Catherine, who took it and slid the filter tip between her lips, thinking nothing about Wyatt, who would have been horrified, but only about her days when she had been a serious, driven student, who had endowed cigarettes with the magic ability to write her papers for her. For a moment, as Antonia struck a match and lit her cigarette, Catherine was that student again, inhaling the burning tobacco deep into her lungs and, with the tobacco, time itself. Exhaling, she remembered a line from
To the Lighthouse
in which Mrs. Ramsey said, “Life stand still here.” Unlike Mrs. Ramsey, Catherine didn't want life to stand still here. Not this life. No, she wanted this life to rush on and away, past this moment on the deck. She wanted life to offer up new summers, new falls, new springs, and new winters. She wanted this for herself, but she also wanted this for Antonia. She wanted to offer her some comforting words, yet nothing about Antonia suggested that she needed any. Success is an armor against unhappiness, Catherine mused. Perhaps she's wearing hers, after all. Well, I'm glad for her.

They chatted briefly about the heat—“I love the heat. I love summer,” Antonia said—and then it was on to her novel and her upcoming book tour. “Twelve cities in six weeks! I don't know how I'm going to do it,” she said, her voice transfigured with both excitement and fear. After reaching into her tote again, she brought up a copy of her novel. “This is for you, Catherine,” she said humbly. “I've been carrying it around with me, but I've been, well, I've been reluctant to give it to you. What if you hate it?”

“How could I possibly hate it?” Catherine asked, laughing, and thanked her for the copy.

“My agent doesn't like the cover,” she said. “The fights we had about it! Between you and me, I almost fired him, but I think he's finally coming around. It's weird how proprietary he can be about me and my novel.”

Catherine ran a finger over the dust jacket, the deep red letters of the title,
The Death of Her,
curved delicately inside a gauzy crescent moon that hung above a ramshackle cabin. Yet this was no ordinary moon—it was in the shape of a silver lunette—and Catherine shuddered against the memory of Antonia's father. Yes, the dust jacket was beautiful, but it was also shocking because it served as another reminder of what Catherine now believed Antonia to have done. The image on the dust jacket tied all of it together and told a further tale. Opening up the novel now, the spine tight and unyielding, she traced a finger down the unblemished, deckled pages, loving the feel of the imperceptibly raised words against her skin. “I can't wait to read it,” she said, though she wondered if her experience of it had already been tainted by knowing too much and becoming a player herself in the larger, more sordid story.

Antonia said, “Well, I should get going. I have a lot to do.” Catherine hugged the book to her chest and gazed past the girl to the cottage. Look, she wanted to say, you will never understand him, so I wouldn't even bother trying. Before she said good-bye, Antonia added, “You are coming to my party tomorrow night, aren't you? I think Henry's up to something, but I don't know what. I can see it in his eyes. It's like he wants to ask me—well, he's been acting very strange the last couple of days. He wrote a speech to introduce me, and I just wonder if . . . I mean, we've been together long enough, and I know how much he loves me . . . Do you think—oh, wouldn't it just be so perfect if he asked me to marry him? He hasn't mentioned anything to you, has he?” Catherine told her that he hadn't. “Well, don't tell him that I'm onto him, okay. He certainly knows how to keep a secret. It's just eating me alive.” And with that, she hugged Catherine and drifted down the steps.

The bell on the gate tinkled, and then she was gone, though not all of her. For in her wake, she'd left Catherine with some strange, unsettling news. That she and Henry had reconciled did not surprise her but that he was even contemplating marriage certainly did. Hadn't he sat at her kitchen table not a few days earlier and announced that he was done with Antonia? Fickle, fickle man, she thought, cringing at her own experience of him.

“Marriage,” she said aloud, scoffing, and went back into the house. As she dressed, she found herself talking to Wyatt, who'd asked her to marry him just a week after Henry had ended his affair with her. It was as if he had held back asking her to marry him, until he was dead certain she was free to say yes. At the time, she had found it utterly distressing to have to grieve the loss of Henry while simultaneously giving into the idea of becoming Mrs. Wyatt Strayed. She'd had to work overtime at dismantling her love for Henry, refusing, she had told herself, to believe that his leaving her had been anything other than cowardly and spiteful. Yet the more she'd tried to rid herself of her love for him, the more this love held tight. Then one day she just woke up and realized she was sick with it and of it, worrying that it had putrified inside of her. Lying beside Wyatt in the early morning hours, she worried further that she stank of it and that if he kissed her he'd smell it on her breath.

Now, on her way to the bookstore, Catherine recalled how awful it had been to abandon Wyatt and his engagement ring—a small star sapphire set in an antique platinum band—on the nightstand and sneak out of his apartment. She knew he would find her excuse—“I just can't”—inexplicable and cruel, but she also knew how much crueler it would have been to marry him. I am not a cruel woman, she had wanted to tell him as she wandered through the city and ran into the specter of him everywhere. He did not call her. After three long weeks of silence, though, she called him. She was planning to tell him everything—the whys and the why-nots—yet the second she heard his voice, she hung up, appalled at herself. There was a time and a place for honesty, but this wasn't it, she knew. She had to purify herself first, before she could even think about sleeping beside him again, think of taking his name.

Back then, it seemed that her heart was in a constant state of breaking, and it was breaking again now as she thought about Wyatt, who had wanted to marry her, and Henry, who had left her. The more she had tried to reason it all out, to make sense of her wounded heart, the more she felt the ongoing strain that she was placing on it and the more she realized that in Henry she was idealizing a man whom she never should have idealized at all. She wished she had had more self-control when it came to Henry, and then later when it came to Wyatt—and then she was quickly backing out of the drive, because she couldn't stand the sight of the cottage. She had given Wyatt the cottage out of what she had thought was her deep, steady love, although it had come at the cost of something she had held precious and dear—her mother's diamond engagement ring, a family heirloom, which Catherine had inherited and hoped one day to pass on to a daughter of her own.

Catherine had worn the ring for years and had cherished it as she had cherished the occasional compliments people gave her. Though not garish by any means, the ring did call attention to itself, the antique oval stone large and perfectly cut, the rose gold band encrusted with pavé rubies. She had worn it so constantly that Catherine forgot she even had the ring on until someone, like Jane or Louise, took her hand to examine it.

On her way to the bookstore, Catherine remembered those three weeks after she'd left Wyatt, and after Henry had left her, and how she'd wandered around the city wearing the ring, although it felt to her as if the ring were wearing her, as if it knew far more than she did—about love, about marriage, about how to find and to keep them both, not separate but a single thing. She remembered sitting in the same cafes in which she and Wyatt used to go, taking the same paths through Washington Square Park that she and Henry used to travel—in the hope of “accidentally” running into one of them. But she never did.

During one of her marches around the island—she took to calling her walks “marches,” as she stomped through the sludgy snow in her boots—she kept thinking about her parents, specifically about her father, who was only a few years older than Henry, though without any of Henry's spirit, and certainly with none of Wyatt's compassion, which she craved more than anything. As she marched, her thoughts marched with her, always circling back to Henry, which inevitably led her back to Wyatt. She wanted to talk to one of them and went to use a pay phone, then realized that Henry would be at home, with his wife, and that Wyatt was at his job at the law firm. She bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked as she marched, wondering if anything was worth the effort when it left you unhappy in the end. She focused her thoughts on Henry, because had it not been for him, she would not have undertaken such a rigorous dissertation topic. Would he still keep the promises he'd made, to help her to get her articles published and to land a good job at a good university? Probably not, she realized, flinging the cigarette into the gutter and ducking into a diner to get warm.

As she sat down on a stool at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee, she removed her thin gloves and gazed at her chafed, red hands and her mother's ring, which sparkled in the diner's fluorescent light. She took the ring off, admiring its weight and beauty again, recalling her mother, who, before her death, had handed her daughter the ring and said, “Rings are nothing without fingers. Don't let this sit in a drawer, Catherine. Find someone to love.”

And I did, she now thought. I found someone to love—Wyatt with his great big talent and his great big heart, Wyatt who initially slid the ring onto her finger, then, years later, without exactly saying it, wanted her to take it off again, which she did eventually, because she knew it was the only way to make him happy and, more than this, to keep herself happy, too.

We were happy, weren't we, Wyatt? she asked herself now, as she sat at a stoplight, absently staring down at her finger, at where the ring ought to have been but wasn't. She pictured the ring where she'd left it—at Louise's house, in Louise's possession. After Catherine parked the car on Main Street, she sat for a few moments, remembering the afternoon she'd gone to see Louise, the ring tucked in her pocket. She had already been to the bank, which had refused her a loan, and to the town's sole pawnshop, which had made a ridiculously low offer, and so there was Louise left, only Louise who could help her.

They sat in Louise's vast kitchen, at her vast kitchen table, in her vast ten-room home, and after a lull in the conversation, Catherine brought up the cottage and the renovation. “I want to do this for him,” she said, pulling the ring out of her pocket and setting it on the table.

“Just let me lend you the money, then,” Louise said. “You don't have to—”