The Wrong Man

10

Hope was in the kitchen, working on a recipe she had never tried before, waiting for Sally to get home. She tasted the sauce, which burned her tongue, and she cursed under her breath. It just did not taste right, and she feared that she was destined for a failed dinner. For an instant, she felt a helplessness that seemed far deeper than a kitchen disaster, and she could feel tears welling up in her eyes.

She did not know precisely why Sally and she were going through such a rocky period.

When she examined it all on the surface, she could see no reason for their extended silences and stony moments. There was no real anxiety at either Sally’s legal practice or Hope’s school. They were doing well financially and had the funds to take an exotic vacation or buy a new car, even redo the kitchen. But every time one of these indulgences had come up in conversation, it had been shunted aside. Rationales were given for why they shouldn’t do one or the other. Hope thought that almost always whatever obstacle made whatever adventure impossible seemed to be raised by Sally, and this worried her deeply.

It seemed to her that it had been a long time since they’d shared something.

Even their lovemaking, which had once been both tender and filled with abandon, had been tempered of late. Its perfunctory quality unsettled her. And the occasions for sex had become far less frequent.

In a curious way the lack of passion suggested that Sally was seeking affection elsewhere. The notion that Sally was having an affair was totally ridiculous, and yet, completely reasonable. Hope gritted her teeth and told herself that to fantasize emotional disaster was to invite it, and to dwell on one suspicion or another only made her more anxious. She hated doubt. It wasn’t really a part of her makeup, and to allow it in now, unbidden, was a mistake.

She looked up at the clock on the wall and was suddenly overcome with the urge to turn off the stove, grab her running shoes, and head out on a really hard, fast run. A little bit of daylight was left, and she thought that even if she was completely exhausted by the school day, and by soccer practice, still, a couple of miles at a near sprint was a good idea. When she had been a player, the one thing she could always count on near the end of a game was that she would have more energy than her opponents. She was never sure that this was really the result of extra conditioning, as her coaches always thought. She believed it had something to do with some inherent emotional capability, something that drove her, so at the end, when others were weakening, she had some extra strength that she could summon. A special reserve, perhaps, that became the ability to run hard when others were gasping, as if she could put off the pain of exhaustion until after the game.

She turned down the heat on the stove and quickly rose to the bedroom, taking the steps two at a time. It only took her a few seconds to strip off her clothes, throw on some shorts and an old red Manchester United sweatshirt, and grab her shoes. She wanted to get out the door before Sally came back, so that she wouldn’t have to come up with an explanation why she felt driven to run at an hour when she was generally preparing dinner.

Nameless was at the bottom of the stairs wagging with mixed enthusiasm. He recognized the running outfit and knew that he was rarely included now. At one time he would instantly have been at her side, circling with enthusiasm, but now he was more than willing to escort her just as far as the door and then settle down and wait, which, she thought, seemed to be how Nameless interpreted his dog responsibilities.

Hope had paused to rub his head when the phone rang.

What she wanted, in that second, was to get away from all the troubles that were coursing within her, if only temporarily. She guessed the call would be Sally, maybe saying she was going to be late. She never seemed to call anymore to say she would be early. Hope didn’t want to hear this, and her first instinct was to ignore the ringing.

The phone rang again.

She started toward the door, pulling it open, but stopped, turned, and took a dozen quick strides into the kitchen and seized the phone.

“Hello,” she said briskly. No-nonsense.

“Hope?”

And in that second, Hope not only heard Ashley’s voice, but a world of trouble behind it.

“Hello, Killer, ” she said, using a joke nickname that only the two of them knew about. “Something wrong?” She put a liveliness in her voice that belied not only her own situation, but the emptiness that she suddenly felt in her stomach.

“Oh, Hope,” Ashley said, and Hope could hear the vacant echo of tears in her voice. “I think I have a problem.”

Sally was listening to the local alternative-rock station on the car radio when the late Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” came on, and for some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, she felt compelled to pull to the curb, where she listened to the entirety of the song frozen in her seat, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel with the beat.

As the music flooded her small sedan, she held her hands up in front of her.

The veins on the backs were standing out, blue, like the interstates on a travel map. Her fingers were tight, maybe a little arthritic. She rubbed them together, trying to regain some of the suppleness they once held. Sally thought that when she was younger, much about her had been beautiful: her skin, her eyes, the curve of her body. But she had been proudest of her hands, which seemed to her to hold notes within them. She had played the cello growing up and had considered auditioning for Juilliard or Berklee, but at the last moment had decided to pursue a more general education, which had somehow evolved into a husband, a daughter, an affair with another woman, a divorce, a law degree, and her current practice and her current life.

She no longer played her instrument. She couldn’t make the cello sound as pure and as subtle as she once could, and she preferred not to listen to her mistakes. Sally could not bear to be clumsy.

As she sat there in the car, the song began to wind down, and Sally caught a glimpse of her eyes in the edge of the rearview mirror and reached up and adjusted it so that she could look at herself. She was just shy of turning fifty, which some thought of as a milestone, but which she inwardly dreaded. She hated the changes in her body, from hot flashes to stiffness in her joints. She hated the wrinkles forming at the corners of her eyes. She hated the sag of skin beneath her chin and in her buttocks. Without telling Hope, she had taken a membership at a local health club and pounded away on the treadmills and the elliptical machines as often as she could get away.

She had taken to reading advertisements for cosmetic surgery and had even considered sneaking off to some fancy health spa, using an ostensible business trip as a cover. She was a little unsure of why she hid these things from her partner, but was smart enough to recognize that that in itself said all she needed to know.

Sally took a deep breath and turned off the radio.

For a moment, she thought that her entire youth had been stolen from her. She felt a bitterness on her tongue, as if everything in her life was predictable, established, and absolutely set in stone. Even her relationship, which in some parts of the country would have set people to whispered gossip across backyard fences and would seem exotic and dangerous, in western Massachusetts was about as boringly routine as the inevitable arrival of the seasons. She wasn’t even much of a sexual outlaw.

Sally gripped the wheel of the car and let out a quick, angry shout. Not quite a scream, more a bellow, as if she were in pain. Then she glanced around rapidly, to make certain that no passing pedestrian had heard her.

Breathing hard, she put the car in gear.

What’s next? she asked herself as she pulled back into traffic, aware that once again she was late for dinner. Some disease? She thought to herself that perhaps it would be breast cancer, or osteoporosis or anemia. But whatever it was, it wouldn’t be harsher than the uncontrolled anger, frustration, and madness that she felt ricocheting about within her and that she felt helpless to fight.

“So, the two women were having trouble?”

“Yes, I suppose you could say they were having trouble. But that wouldn’t begin to capture the moment that Michael O’Connell arrived in their lives, and how his mere presence redefined so much that was happening.”

“I get it,” I said.

“Really? It doesn’t exactly sound like you do.”

We were seated in a small restaurant, near the front, where she could look through the plate-glass windows out onto the main street of the small college town we lived in. She smiled for an instant and turned back to me.

“We take a lot for granted, in our nice, safe middle-class lives, don’t we?” she asked. She didn’t wait for my answer, but continued, “Problems sometimes occur not only when we least anticipate them, but at moments when we are least equipped to deal with them.” The edgy decisiveness in her voice seemed out of place on the fine, mostly lazy afternoon.

“Okay,” I sighed, “so Scott’s life wasn’t exactly perfect, although, on balance, it wasn’t that bad. He had a good job, some prestige, a more than adequate paycheck, which should have compensated at least some for middle-aged loneliness. And Sally and Hope were going through a difficult time, but still, they had resources. Significant resources. And Ashley, despite being well educated and attractive, was in something of a state of flux, as well. That’s more or less the way life is, isn’t it? How does it-”

She cut me off, lifting one hand like a traffic cop, while the other reached for a glass of iced tea. She drank before replying.

“You need perspective. Otherwise, the story won’t make sense.”

Again, I remained silent.

“Dying,” she said finally, “is such a simple act. But you need to learn that all the moments leading up to it, and all the minutes afterwards, are terribly complicated.”