The Widow Waltz (26 page)

I
stand to admire my work. Chip is right. The color scheme is straight from the tween department, but my home now looks as if I give a damn.

Inside, under the letter from Westchester Hills, I find the gardening catalogs that arrived in yesterday’s mail. I open one. Plant names call out to me. Eight Mile High Daylily, Red Creeping Thyme, Cranberry Crush Hardy Perennial Hibiscus, and Raspberry Mousse Toad Lily. I want them all, and how can I get a job naming flowers?

I reach for the second catalog. As I open it to consider the 41 percent discount on the Passion Flower collection, the pieces of mail I moved aside yesterday fall loose—bill, bill, bill, letter. I rip open the last and least threatening envelope, handwritten with penmanship of which nuns would approve. No return address.

A check falls out. It is drawn on the account of Naomi DeAngelo McCann for the sum of forty-thousand dollars.

I grab the edge of the kitchen chair to sit as the numbers swim. I feel stunned and light-headed. Have I been Tasered? I look again but there is no mistake. The check is made out to Georgia Waltz.

The memo line is blank. Interest due on the loan of a husband?

I’d been able to convince myself that the six-figure check came from one of Ben’s delinquent clients. Anonymity was clean, unencumbered, and required no acknowledgment. I am stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel, afraid to look down.

Shaking, I carry the check upstairs, where I hide it under a book on my nightstand. It sits like a car bomb, waiting to explode the peace of my Jerusalem.

Over the next three days, I accompany Luey to a birthing class, mow the lawn, polish an essay about the tribulations of being a 384-pound high school senior—I thought
my
life had challenges—and plant a bed of lavender. Each night, Nat calls. Our pillow talk reminds me that I am a warm-blooded female who enjoys the attention of a male she wants to know better, yet as I come and go the check is a cryptogram reminding me that Naomi McCann and I have unfinished business.

After tonight’s dinner with Luey, I work up the nerve to at least find out what Naomi is thinking. As I dial her number, I feel the cognitive dissonance that a lung cancer victim might feel who knows that a cigarette could kill her but smokes nonetheless. “She ain’t here now,” says the hag of the Hamptons when I ask for her daughter.

“It’s Mrs. Silver,” I say, as I never do. “Ben Silver’s wife.” I recite the number and ask Naomi to please get in touch.

She doesn’t call that night, nor the following day, nor the next. I phone again. This time she answers. Even the words, “It’s Georgia Waltz,” are hard to spit out. Except when I had to let Opal and Fred go, can I remember another time when I have felt this awkward?

“Hello,” Naomi says, conveying no surprise.

“The check you sent,” I sputter, regretting that I haven’t worked up a script, “would you explain it, please?”

“What do you want to know?” I read menace in her answer, but I would even if she were singing “Polly Wolly Doodle.”

“Do you feel sorry for me?” I’ve worked hard not to throw a pity party.

“No sorrier than I feel for myself.” It sounds as if she is choking out her words. “I want to do the right thing.” The pause is as long as a semester. “Try to understand. I loved Ben, too.”

He was mine to love, mine alone. I don’t want to understand. I refuse to try. “If I’d known the first check was from you, I wouldn’t have deposited it.” Menace is most definitely in my tone.

“Yet you did. You need the money, correct?”

“You can have it back. I haven’t spent a cent.”

“It’s yours.” Naomi’s voice is controlled, though not cruel. “I’m sure you think I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a thief.”

Except when it comes to my husband.

“Cookie?” peeps a small voice at the other end. “I want a cookie.”

“What’s the magic word?” Naomi asks.

“Please,” the child squeaks.

Please let me figure out what’s going on. What’s the magic word for that?

“You have to wait a minute, Theo,” she says. “Be patient, sweetie.”

“It sounds like this isn’t a good time.” Though I’m the one who made the call, I have exhausted my courage and would gratefully postpone our conversation.

“You’re right. I’m putting Theo to bed, and then I’m going out. Can you speak tomorrow?” she asks.

“Sure.” I tell myself I want this resolved.

“How’s nine?”

“Okay, I’ll call you.”

“Georgia, it would be better if we’d talk face-to-face.”

“Why?” Better for whom? Will it be a duel? Do I get to bring a second?

She says only, “Let’s meet at Main Beach. I’ll wait near the entrance.”

I agree.

The dire occasion for which I’ve hoarded my last Ambien has arrived. I tell Luey I have a headache and not to wake me, even if Nat calls. Blessing pharmaceutical voodoo, I set the alarm and swallow.

S
even hours later I wake to fog. At this time of year it doesn’t roll in on little cat feet. It arrives like a shroud catapulted from the heavens. By noon the sun may burn through, but now the sky is a dirty windshield. I dress in clothing that is equally drab, with the exception of my wedding ring, which I remove from its hiding place in a wooly sock and put on my finger for the first time since the day I left Wally’s office.
Ben, what kind of fool’s errand is this?
I think as I drink strong black coffee and mindlessly putter while I wait to leave.

Out of season, even on a Sunday morning, Main Beach is coldly empty, home to a scattering of walkers, often robotically tossing their retrievers a stick. It’s devoid of sunbathers who have never heard of melanoma, sandcastle-building children whose parents are convinced they are the next I. M. Pei, and tourists searching for beach glass—beer bottles shrapnel they value like pirate doubloons. I park my car close to the entrance, tighten Ben’s worn trench coat against the damp, and pull down my hat as if I am trying to disappear.

“Good morning,” Naomi says, waiting at the edge of the parking lot. Her hair is too strawberry blond for her ruddy skin, but she’s gone to the trouble of blowing it dry and waves frame her face. In a police lineup, you wouldn’t pick her as a perp, though she might look familiar from church or the day care center. She’s dressed in a barn jacket exactly like one of Ben’s. I wonder if she bought his jacket as a gift, or vice versa. I am glad Ben’s jacket now belongs to Fred, along with most of his wardrobe.

“Theo, not so far, honey!” she shouts into the mist.

A child in red trots toward me, a comet with rosy cheeks, and offers me a handful of shells.

“Why, thank you,” I say, accepting the gift.

Theo giggles and turns to Naomi, grabbing her hand. “Do you mind this weather?” she says, touching my arm.

I pull away, but answer, “Not at all.” Bracing air is what I need. My boots sink into the sand.

“There’s so much I want to tell you,” she says.

I’m not sure I want to hear it, but I surprise myself by saying, “Start at the beginning.”

She takes a deep breath, as if she is going to blow out fifty birthday candles, and says, “Ben and I met in Hawaii.” At Theo’s pace, the three of us begin to walk down the beach. “It was a flirtation. Period. We didn’t ask each other many questions.” I look ahead into the nothingness. “I didn’t know he was married, only that he was a runner from New York City. After the marathon, I never expected to see Ben Silver again. We didn’t exchange numbers or emails and I didn’t try to track him down.”

Does Naomi McCann want a salute? Moisture is beading on my coat. I feel colder than I did all winter and am glad for Ben’s leather gloves that I find in my pockets, though when I slip into them, I imagine Ben wearing them and holding her hand.

“Then we saw one another the following summer on this very beach, when I was out jogging.”

I turn to look hard at Naomi’s face. I see no softness in this woman. “Had I realized this was holy ground,” I say, “I wouldn’t have agreed to meet here.”

“Please hear me out,” she pleads against my sarcasm. I give consent by slogging straight ahead. “Something clicked. I was happier to find Ben again than I ever expected, and he felt the same way.”

How can she know that? I refuse to believe she didn’t seduce him like one of the leggy, high-heeled working girls I used to see in their fishnet stockings every night going in and out of the hotels lining Central Park South.

“We started seeing one another.” Naomi pulls a tissue from her pocket and wipes her eyes. Mine stay dry. “I violated my rule of never dating married men.”

A woman of scruples.

Naomi goes on, oblivious to my feelings or my reaction, an emotional bulimic, purging. Like the Ancient Mariner, she needs to get her story out, and as if I am anticipating every soppy detail, like the wedding guest, I listen while I put one foot in front of the other. I am oblivious to stalking seagulls and the detritus washed up by the sea. I can only listen.

“I kept telling myself to end it, and weeks and even months would go by when we’d be apart. Then he’d call or I’d call and it would start up all over again. After every split, we found a way back to one another. He was a drug and I was an addict.”

Where was I during all of this? Content and oblivious, trusting my husband; making plans and dinner and love; being a wife and a mother and a daughter and a docent and a dope.

“I was tortured, but it was worse for Ben. He didn’t want to hurt you—he never said he didn’t love you.”

The chop of the water blows and stings. That my husband talked about me to this woman is a violation that slices into my heart. I bark out, “I get it! I’ve heard enough.”

“I think you need to hear more. Please. Ben started suggesting how I could improve Adam and Eve
.
He thought I was a pretty good businesswoman.”

Ben loved to give people gratis legal advice, help kids get into Brown and Columbia, find them jobs, and connect buyers with sellers. I loved that my husband could be generous, without agenda—but not to her.

“And then I got pregnant.”

She bends to pick up Theo as I feel myself turn into a shadow that the wind will surely whisk into the sea.

Then she got pregnant.

I want to wail. I want to run back to my car. I want to stop listening to this treason, which my bullshit detector uncovered long ago, yet all of me denied. Naomi goes on. Does she think if I hear everything, I will forgive her? I wish I could make myself stick my fingers in my ears and scream.

“I missed a few periods and figured, okay, menopause. Forty-two is young but it happens. I was three months gone by the time I saw a doctor. When she said ‘pregnant’ . . .”

Naomi’s sentences drift into the wind.

“I never asked Ben to take care of the baby. I didn’t want him to break up his family for me—for us—not that I ever thought he would. Then he had the idea to invest in my business. It wasn’t just a way to help me and the baby. . . .”

Ben was expecting a baby. We slept together every night, laughed over dinners and sitcoms and our daughters’ foibles, worried about my mother, celebrated holidays and birthdays, planned a trip to Japan, all while he had a child on the way with a woman he loved. And he’s not even here for me to kill.

“He expected to get a return on his investment when Adam and Eve became profitable—knock wood.”

She says “knock wood” exactly as Ben does.

“A handsome profit.”

“Naomi, stop!” I say, standing still. Theo starts to cry at the shrillness of my voice. Naomi scoops him up. “Did you ever wonder where all that investment money came from?” I didn’t intend to grab her arm but I did, squeezing tightly.

She flinches. “Ben led me to believe he had deep pockets.” She tries to pull away but I hold tight through Theo’s wailing.

“That money ate up all of our savings, our investments. Ben took out second mortgages. . . .” To impress this woman?

“I didn’t let myself think I’d taken it from you and your daughters.”

I am incredulous. We had been comfortable, but not wealthy enough to bankroll a whole business, and even if Ben considered Adam and Eve to be a risk-free venture on which he’d see a significant return, it was
our
money, not his to spend without consulting me.

I am changing dance partners. My anger shifts to Ben, though I recognize this man, who always tried to do right by everyone he loved. This was something I adored, as long as the loved ones were people I loved, too.

“After Theo was born, I moved into my mother’s house and with her help and Clem’s, I’ve managed,” Naomi is saying. “Clementine and I don’t have many friends—it’s fair to call us loners. Most folks think the baby is hers. Out here single moms don’t turn a head. No one asks questions.”

I take in her story, sordid and ordinary, except that it involves my own husband. I try not think of how the life of Luey’s unborn child began, and whether it’s any nobler to get impregnated by a single man during a one-night hookup.

“When did Ben give you the ring?” I look at her hands, which are free of gloves, and the jewelry in question.

“Last year on Theo’s first birthday. I knew by then Ben would never leave you, so it was instead of an engagement ring. I only wore it a few times, because once he told me how much it was worth—’’

“Which was how much?” Is it wrong to ask your husband’s mistress such a question? Hell, no.

“Plenty, though a fraction of what Ben thought. He was pissed at your brother’s appraisal—that much I know. He wanted to use the ring as collateral for a loan. So he got it appraised by another jeweler who must have been a swindler, swapping out the original ring for another. Of course I didn’t know that until last week. But what does it matter? Frankly, I never loved it. Where would I wear something like that? I’m usually up to my elbows in manure.”

“Mommy, I’m cold,” Theo says, his teeth chattering.

Naomi holds him close. I stare into the toddler’s tiny face to search for Benjamin Theodore Silver. I find innocence and my husband’s puckish smile, which almost makes me forgive Ben. But not quite.

“I’m with Theo,” I say, sorry for making this little boy suffer. “This is no place for any of us”—the wind slams a wet chill against my face—“and I’ve heard enough.”

We tramp in silence on the hard sand back to the parking lot. I feel dazed and as heavy as wet laundry, when Naomi says, “Now I hope you understand why I sent you whatever money was left in the account. The last check was from selling the ring.”

“Restitution?”

“Call it whatever you want—it was less than I expected it to be.” She laughs, a short, caustic snicker. “Ben was ripped off. What does it matter? He’s dead, poor guy. And I miss him.”

I don’t, I think, less today than yesterday, as we walk to the parking lot. My life is going forward without him, with its own problems to wrangle and solve. Luey. Her baby. Nicola. My mother. Me. The money from Naomi can buy me time. If I’m frugal, I could stretch it for two years. But whether I keep it or not, I’m in the same three-penny opera as when I woke up this morning, although now I also need to decide whether to tell Nicola and Luey that they have a stepbrother young enough to be their child. And who am
I
to Ben’s son? Perhaps there’s a term for it in French.

“Are we done here?” I ask, tired in every way.

“I’m hoping we’re not,” she says. “I want to show you something. It’s not far. We could drive together.”

“No,” I say. “I’ll follow.”

She walks to her van, I to my car. Naomi drives slowly, a responsible parent, as we travel roads slick with drizzle turning to ice. The fog is more socked in than before; I was wrong about the sun burning through. I’ve been wrong about so much.

I consider going back home, but my car is propelling itself. Naomi makes a right turn, then another, and travels down a newly graveled road lined with blue spruce and scrubby pines. At the end is a sprawling gray-shingled building attached to large, empty greenhouses. She slows and stops.

“You can park here,” she says, as she gets out and unbuckles Theo from his car seat. He runs to the building’s door, Naomi two steps behind. She reaches into her pocket, unlocks the door, and with a smile that turns her tense face pretty, says, “Welcome to the new home of Adam and Eve.”

I follow Naomi and Theo into a wide open space and breathe in the clean aroma of sawdust and freshly cut wood. The room is crowded with carpentry equipment and unopened cans of polyurethane. Floor-to-ceiling shelves and deep, glass-fronted refrigerated units that line three walls, waiting for plants and tall, galvanized steel buckets of cut flowers. The ceiling is high, with two industrial fans. Theo runs around the room, his arms spread like wings.

“Terrific, yes?” Naomi says. Before I can answer, she says, “There’s more,” motioning me to follow through a door. There is pride in her voice as we enter a space with wide casement windows and a view of a large field. “I’ll plant sunflowers this summer,” she says. “Imagine.” She points to another window. “Trees and shrubs and topiaries and garden ornaments will be for sale out front and back here.”

White wooden cabinets have already been installed in what is clearly a kitchen. Appliances stand by in large cardboard boxes and a slab of soapstone has been fashioned into a sink. “If you walk through here”—she points to a door—“there’s a living room with a wood stove, three bedrooms, and a bathroom. The apartment’s not fancy, but what do you think?”

I peek into a room with unpainted wainscotings. I think, this is where my family’s security has gone, into hardwood floors, skim-coated walls, and Naomi’s dreams. I think, this is agony. I think, that’s a God-awful plastic light fixture. I look out the window. I don’t see a ripe golden haze on the meadow. I’ve seen enough.

“It should be done by July. My contractor friend Vince and his crew are working six days a week.”

What can I say? You know contractors—good luck with that.

“I was planning to move in with Theo and Clementine, but I’ve changed my mind.”

“Are you going to sell?” Because if you do, those proceeds are mine. Winner takes all.

“It would break my heart to sell. This is everything I’ve ever wanted,” Naomi says.

Did she want Ben—or just what he could buy her?

“Georgia, what I’m saying is, it’s yours.”

Naomi McCann is insane, conceivably. “Excuse me. You’re giving away your business?”

“I haven’t made myself entirely clear.”

“No, you haven’t.” I am determined not to like Naomi but in our tug-of-war, she is putting everything into trying to make me believe that inside her lives a fair and almost saintly woman.

“I want you to run the store—there will be a shop here—and start a business selling houseplants. I’ve seen what you can do, and I’ve heard more from Ben. He would brag about you a bit. I hated it. . . .” She burbles on about how she would handle the landscaping and I, indoor plants; how we could build the business together; how she’s been thinking about this ever since she saw my double amaryllis and how she can continue to live in her
Three Little Pigs
brick house with her mother and Clem.