A Dressing Gown by Janet Young
Meredith's relationship with Philip is progressing, but she has hidden a big secret from him.
The evening had been ideal, Meredith thought. Dinner at the new restaurant, Torino, in a private room hung with landscapes of the Italian countryside, uplighted by antique wall sconces. The walls were painted deep orange, with a rich texture like terry cloth. Philip had worn his gray silk shirt and silver shantung necktie, and he and the waiter had urged her to order both a cheese plate and a dessert, chocolate hazelnut tartuffo garnished with raisins wrapped in lemon leaves. The waiter, really Italian from Italy, complimented her on knowing that she should drink espresso, not cappuccino, after dinner. Philip held her free hand while she drank, and although it might have been correct to toss the espresso back quickly, she pecked like a bird at a rain puddle to make the experience last longer.
Back at her apartment, she relaxed on the couch while Philip popped a Harry Connick CD into the stereo. "Another coffee?" he asked.
Meredith kicked off her high heels and curled her legs beneath her while Philip brought the coffee on a Chinese lacquer tray, with tiny spoons, a dish of brown sugar cubes, and two neatly folded cloth napkins. He had removed the jacket of his dark suit and loosened, but not removed, his tie. And now she was finding out why: he had left the tie on because he wanted to look good for the very moment when... Why was he not sitting down? Was he going back to the kitchen for something? No, he was in front of her. He was sinking down. Sinking to one knee. A little box - no! Good God in Heaven! He was doing it! He was proposing!
He began by saying how much she, Meredith, meant to him, and how the past three years had altered his life. How he had been doing perfectly fine before - his real-estate appraisal business was successful, he had no obvious problems - but how when she came on the scene he realized how much he had been missing. How much joy was possible when two ideally suited people found one another. How each moment of his day seemed more meaningful because he would save up the highs and lows to share with her in their phone conversations. How everything he tried to do in life had become more rewarding because he had realized it was for her too, for both of them.
While he said all this he looked lovingly into her eyes and smiled, saying her name again and again - "Because of you, Meredith," "Meredith, I want to tell you," "I want to say so much, Meredith" - as if her name were a hinge or turning point that must begin or end every phrase, as if without her name being said, no new thought could be formed or progress made. She ceased to hear what was being said in the middles of each phrase - very kind things, no doubt; it would have been wonderful to listen to and remember them all - and heard only her name, over and over. She couldn't hear the rest because she was thinking, wildly, panic-stricken: How could she tell him? How could she possibly tell Philip now - now that he was proposing, offering her everything, his future, his very life - the truth?
That she was already married.
That he was asking for the hand of a married woman.
Meredith met Armand when they were both students at a regional college in rural Pennsylvania. The only child of foursquare, silent parents, she had craved color and high emotion, and found it in movies and plays - although rarely in the communal experience of a theater; mostly she enjoyed them alone, in front of the television.
At Hochsnett Valley Community College, she found a niche in the theater department as a soft-spoken, second-tier member of the costume crew. Armand was the most talented performer at Hochsnett: with his midriff-exposing tops and long fringed scarves, he was the charismatic center of any theater gathering, and his huge smile - sustained even in the middle of the most demanding dance sequence - earned him the nickname "Megawatt." He first spoke to her when she was on her knees fitting his chaps for the role of Curley in Oklahoma!
"We both know you're really overweight," he said, "but you have incredible hair."
They married right after graduation. It was admiration, not love, on her side, and they both regarded the marriage as a practicality: Armand told Meredith that given the times they were living in (the early 80s), being married might help him be considered for roles that he generally would not get. He practiced a smaller smile in front of the mirror. "Less, less," she could hear him whispering to himself in the bathroom when she passed by with clean trash bags or the vacuum cleaner.
Meredith found work as a bookkeeper and, though struggling with an extra sixty pounds, kept herself tidy as well as the apartment. But Armand, growing increasingly frustrated with directors' tendencies to cast the same actors in local theater productions - a group he called "the Hochsnett Valley Mafia" - began to criticize Meredith much more than he had when they first met.
"There have to be some changes around here," he said bitterly. She came home from work one day to find him kneeling in front of her closet with a cigarette in the side of his mouth, bundling up all her clothes "except for your one decent outfit" for Goodwill. The next day, he moved the bathroom scale to the kitchen, directly in front of the refrigerator. "Each time you lose a pound, then you may eat something," Armand told her.
On their first anniversary, once Meredith cleared the dinner plates from the table, Armand presented her with a large gift box from Alfred's, a fancy department store two towns over in which she almost never shopped. The box itself, of mirrorlike gold cardboard, was well worth saving. Meredith undid the broad royal-blue ribbon and spread the wings of liner paper: inside was a magnificent silk dressing gown all the way from Japan. (The manufacturer label said "Kyoto Tailors." Looking for a size label, she was unable to interpret the numbering system, which ran much closer to 100 than the American system did.) Figured in blues and reds in a pattern resembling kimono, the floor-length robe was mostly black, the perfect color, as Armand was always telling her, to set off her shoulder-length black hair, which was raccoon-thick and glass-shiny due to diligent oil treatments.
Before bed that night, Meredith wrapped the dressing gown around her and tied the sash. She sucked in her stomach and tossed back her hair. But when she thrust her hands into the deep pockets as a way of elongating her torso, she found a handful of used tissues in one pocket. Meredith was confused. Was this not a new garment? Was it not really from Alfred's? Or had Armand himself...?
"Armand?" He appeared in the bedroom doorway, and Meredith held up the wad of white tissues.
That was the night he left.
Meredith grew nervous - or perhaps excited. She lost fourteen pounds in five days before her weight stabilized again. Armand had taken only a small suitcase, some cash and credit cards, and her car. She decided not to call the police or file a missing person's report. She continued to attend theater in the Valley. One night she sat behind two men who were loudly criticizing an admittedly sexless performance of Cabaret. During intermission they mentioned Armand's name. Pretending to search the floor for her purse, Meredith leaned forward so that her head almost touched the back of one man's chair. What was he saying? Armand had either moved in with or run away with one of the other actors midway through rehearsals for Cabaret. No, the director. The assistant director.
Several months went by while Meredith continued to live alone. That fall, although Meredith had not heard from Armand again, he appeared in the role of Lomax in Shaw's Major Barbara. He did well, she thought. The playfulness of the role absorbed Armand's natural energy, allowing him to give a performance of appropriate scale. He did not shout look-at-me-I'm-thrilled-to-be-onstage. His British accent was good, too, and he had always struggled with that. Obviously, he was finding the right influences. During intermission Meredith sipped a Champagne cocktail in the packed lobby of the community center. She made no attempt to locate him, at that moment or after the play.
Soon afterwards, the granary at which Meredith was a bookkeeper was bought by a larger agricultural concern. The new owners brought some of their own people in, and Meredith became friendly with two other bright, hard-working young businesswomen who were unmarried themselves, socialized with few Valley locals, and knew nothing about Meredith's marriage. She decided not to tell them anything, just to enjoy the warm but superficial time together - at a long lunch once a week at the Conservatory, their favorite wicker-and-fern restaurant; on shopping trips to the town with the good stores; or while keeping up with the latest romantic or biographical films.
Meredith and the two other women, Eileen and Vera, loved advising one another on clothes. They made a pact that they would always dress one or two levels above the jobs they currently held. Eileen and Vera were both older than Meredith - she was not yet twenty-five, and they were twenty-eight and thirty - but they acted younger. Whenever they shopped at Alfred's, Meredith made a point of speeding by the sleepwear/lingerie department while the other two checked to see what was on sale. But for the most part, by imitating them, pretending to faint over the price of a handbag within view of the salesclerk or nudging the others when an attractive man passed their booth at the Conservatory on his way to the bathrooms, she felt that, for the first time ever, she was acting her age. Maybe, like Armand (who increasingly became just a figure of curiosity in her mind - more an idea than a person), she was leveling off, finding her appropriate scale.
Life for Meredith as a single woman kept getting better. She giggled with Eileen and Vera and listened to their Monday-morning debriefings but always stopped short of dating anyone herself. Meredith knew that the other two would attribute to her extra weight any hesitancy about spending time with men.
Then one day a frowsy little man with combed-over hair appeared at the front desk of Agri America, demanding to speak to Meredith. When she walked into the reception area, the man thrust a manila envelope into her hands. Both his suit and the envelope smelled of stale smoke.
Back at Meredith's desk, Eileen and Vera hovered ingenuously. "What is it? Who wanted to see you? Was it a man?"
Meredith had a bad feeling; when the man had used her last name, Armand's last name, the name had bitten and stung. "Just some mail," Meredith said, tucking the envelope into her purse to review later in the ladies' room.
When she opened the envelope, under the acoustic cover of running and flushing water and the emery-board sounds of moving pantyhose, a photo fell into her hands, of a small girl in pink overalls, her head heavily bandaged under a baseball cap, and complicated braces on her legs. The accompanying correspondence stated that Armand had been driving at ten o'clock on a weekday morning in the mountains of West Virginia and struck six-year-old Jeannie Ruffner "in the normally safe confines of her own front yard" while she played with the family dog. The dog had been killed instantly. Armand, the letter said, had just kept driving. Since he had not been found, the family was suing Meredith (the owner of the car, on which she was still making payments) for sixty thousand dollars.
Anxious to the point of tears, Meredith marched back to the waiting area and told the receptionist to redirect all her calls; she would be out for the rest of the afternoon. Holding the big envelope with the tiny girl inside it, Meredith made a decision. It was time to stop pretending and cut the cord. If not for herself, then for this little girl. Whatever it took, she was going to get a divorce, and she was going to make things right with the Ruffner family. She just had to decide which she wanted to do first.
Meredith drove (in a new car, on which she was also making payments) to the center of town, to the office of a lawyer. She said she didn't want to make an appointment, she had to see someone right away. During a lengthy consultation with the founder of the firm and one of the senior partners, they laid out a plan for locating Armand, bringing him to justice for the hit-and-run with the help of the Pennsylvania and West Virginia police, and then dumping him with an efficient divorce.
"I don't care what it costs," Meredith said. "Just get this over and get him out of my life."
Over the next two months, Meredith spent most of her breaks on the phone with the two lawyers and a private investigator.
"Who are you talking to?" Eileen and Vera asked. "Why are you being so secretive?"
The private investigator spent three weeks "nosing around" near the accident site in West Virginia (he had a good lead, he said, that Armand had been DUI), then a month interviewing everyone who had known Armand at the college and around town. No one, not even the assistant director he had recently been involved with, seemed to know where Armand was now living.
"He's an actor, right?" Meredith's lawyer asked. "Could he have changed his name?"
In the end, because the legal and investigative fees were mounting, the senior partner took Meredith to lunch and quietly advised her to settle the case out of court. You don't have all the time in the world, he told her, pushing an Old Fashioned toward her worrying hands. Don't let this take over your life. Just offer them a check for thirty thousand. She wanted to send something more - a personal card or gift, a new dress or stuffed animal - to little Jeannie, but he advised against it.
Once the personal-injury suit was settled, Meredith dove into her financial work. She became impatient with Vera and Eileen because now she felt much, much older than they. She was promoted at the large company, but at times she noticed a carved-out feeling in her abdomen, as if all the goodness had been taken out of her. She began to wonder whether she still had the ability, if she had ever had it, to bear children. Only on the weekends, blinking in the dark-blue afternoon as the trio exited a matinée, did she briefly feel like herself again, weighted by a new story and slowed by the crowd.
One evening two years later, Meredith was surprised to receive a letter from a doctor treating Armand. Armand was apparently in rehab. "Your husband is working very, very hard on his recovery," the doctor wrote, "and it's best to take it slowly. Therefore, the staff recommends, and I wholeheartedly agree with their decision, that he not see you until he is absolutely ready. I hope you will understand that this is why the location of this recovery center must be confidential. Armand has expressed a wish to write to you, but of course he is still angry. He will write you only on his own time."
There was no return address on either the doctor's stationery or the envelope. The name of the rehab facility had been blacked out with a marker. Meredith waited with growing anxiety and curiosity for the second letter, the one from Armand. But nothing came.
Years went by.
On Meredith's thirtieth birthday, she checked the mail in the lobby of her apartment building. Her parents had sent a card with their customary ten-dollar bill. Also in her mailbox was a second envelope. Shifting her purse onto her shoulder, hoping for another birthday treat, she opened the envelope on the way upstairs. Inside was a homemade-looking trifold brochure printed with purple ink. It said:
HOMOSEXUALS ARE NOT 'TRASH'!
WHY?
CAUSE GOD'S LOVE CAN 'RECYCLE' 'EM!
Meredith recognized Armand's handwriting on a sheet of lined paper.
"Dear Meredith," the letter read. "I am writing to let you know that I am finished with ALL THAT. Now that I have found Carole and we will be starting a new life together, I despise the person I once was. Carole has helped me to realize that my past life was evil and that I can be so much more. Carole prays daily that you will see the wrong you caused by allowing me to live the way I did. But you must never give up on yourself because you, Meredith, are not personally bad, only your sins are bad. Carole and I love you very much.
"You must pray for forgiveness for the part you played, not only in the abominations before God, but the cocaine, the amyl nitrates..."
There had been amyl nitrates? There had been cocaine?
Once again there was no return address. The back of the brochure said
The envelope bore the postmark of an Ohio town.
Shortly afterward, she got a phone call at work. "Cut the crap. You know who this is," the familiar voice said on the phone. Armand talked over her questions and confusion. He needed money to make a home with Carole. A stipend, because despite the talents they had each started out with, Meredith was more successful than he. Shocked, Meredith nearly dropped the phone, but she tried to write down everything he'd said. He hung up without providing an address for wiring the money. She brought her notes, along with the two mailings, to the private investigator. The PI started sending Meredith bimonthly reports, often containing hypotheses followed by question marks, for which he charged three hundred dollars apiece.
Once, in Philadelphia for the weekend, Meredith saw Armand walking ahead of her. His hair was blond and prickly with gel, and he had developed a new, twitchily impatient gait. She rushed forward and grabbed his arm, the brown denim of his coat, but he tried to punch her, so she let him go.
Meredith's life ceased to feel that it was expanding in any way. She no longer spent time with Vera and Eileen, although she sometimes caught them watching her quizzically from across the room at Agri America. She needed to make more money, so she went to a headhunter, who found her a managerial job at one of the big financial-services firms in Hartford, Connecticut. On the new salary, she purchased a condominium with a river view. Black was still her signature color, as Armand had suggested so long ago. She wore well-fitting black dresses with luxurious touches like velvet cuffs or a beaded neckline, and always bright red lipstick, and she collected expensive shoes that showed off her plump, small feet - in these ways drawing the eye both up and down, ignoring the large idle expanse in the middle.
The phone rang at two a.m. in her new condominium. A woman's voice croaked, "I - Will you - ?" before a man's voice shouted "Carole!" and the receiver on the other end struck a hard surface.
While Armand's exact location was difficult to determine, charges appeared on her credit card statements from time to time. She resumed the habit of paying some of his bills, way after the fact but otherwise just like when they were married (correction: married and cohabiting). She began to think of "Armand" the same way she thought of her utilities: phone, electricity, cable, Armand. My contribution to the arts.
Some of the statements revealed not just amounts but types of expenses - leather jackets; vacations in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and Palm Springs - and in that way created a fragmentary view of what Armand's life must be, like a town seen from a plane but obscured by scattered clouds. Meredith dutifully passed the patchwork info to her Pennsylvania investigator, who included the data in virtually unchanged form in his reports.
She was still an attractive woman. The year Meredith turned forty, the Monica Lewinsky scandal hit the press, and despite the twenty-year difference, people in the office, at the food store, in shops kept commenting on how much Meredith resembled the wayward intern. Meredith had already noticed that they shared a transgressively complacent beauty. She was pleased every time Monica appeared on TV. She didn't listen to the news or commentary on the case, from either side. She just sat with a plate of chicken à la king on her lap and nodded to Monica as if they shared a secret language.
Except for the one time Armand unexpectedly returned - he appeared in the courtyard outside her condo in Hartford bellowing and waving a pistol (she was too freaked out to mention the credit card charges or summon the private investigator; when questioned by the police she pretended not to know who he was, and he was eventually taken away while she watched the scene unfold, drowned into pantomime by police sirens, from six stories above) - she mostly stopped thinking about her marriage because, as she told herself, It will never come up. She dated this one and that one that she met through business, but she kept her social life light and friendly, never letting an attachment develop too far.
Once, at the movies with a group of new acquaintances from the Hartford office, she noticed Armand in a bit part as a high school track coach. "Way to go," he said to the handsome, troubled young boy who was the lead character, clapping him on the shoulder. Meredith popped a malted-milk ball in her mouth and sucked on it until it collapsed, then slid her lipsticked lips against one another while she swallowed. She smiled and said to herself, "That man is my husband." Despite his chaotic lifestyle, Armand had clearly hewn to the acting lessons. He was much better. Contained. Giving less.
Philip's expression as he waited for Meredith's answer was the same one he'd worn when she was finishing her income taxes late at night (married, filing individually - always a headache) and he had stopped by with warm oatmeal cookies and a bottle of cold milk. Now she could imagine how her old co-workers Vera and Eileen might react to the idea of her just inches from a supplicant diamond-bearing male. How, if she were still on such terms as to call them the minute Philip left, each would scream. How if she were back at Agri the two single girls would spend tomorrow morning at her desk, raising her hand and dropping it as if the ring finger weighed a ton and saying, "Nice little sparkler!"
Any minute now his face would fall, and he would say, "Is there... someone else?" He knew her as cleaner and simpler than she really was. He didn't know that she and Armand were like a pair of conjoined twins. One had drowned as they forded a river. The other clambered a towering embankment, then gasped as she stepped dripping onto the crest, while the music soared into the credits.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
Back at her apartment, she relaxed on the couch while Philip popped a Harry Connick CD into the stereo. "Another coffee?" he asked.
Meredith kicked off her high heels and curled her legs beneath her while Philip brought the coffee on a Chinese lacquer tray, with tiny spoons, a dish of brown sugar cubes, and two neatly folded cloth napkins. He had removed the jacket of his dark suit and loosened, but not removed, his tie. And now she was finding out why: he had left the tie on because he wanted to look good for the very moment when... Why was he not sitting down? Was he going back to the kitchen for something? No, he was in front of her. He was sinking down. Sinking to one knee. A little box - no! Good God in Heaven! He was doing it! He was proposing!
He began by saying how much she, Meredith, meant to him, and how the past three years had altered his life. How he had been doing perfectly fine before - his real-estate appraisal business was successful, he had no obvious problems - but how when she came on the scene he realized how much he had been missing. How much joy was possible when two ideally suited people found one another. How each moment of his day seemed more meaningful because he would save up the highs and lows to share with her in their phone conversations. How everything he tried to do in life had become more rewarding because he had realized it was for her too, for both of them.
While he said all this he looked lovingly into her eyes and smiled, saying her name again and again - "Because of you, Meredith," "Meredith, I want to tell you," "I want to say so much, Meredith" - as if her name were a hinge or turning point that must begin or end every phrase, as if without her name being said, no new thought could be formed or progress made. She ceased to hear what was being said in the middles of each phrase - very kind things, no doubt; it would have been wonderful to listen to and remember them all - and heard only her name, over and over. She couldn't hear the rest because she was thinking, wildly, panic-stricken: How could she tell him? How could she possibly tell Philip now - now that he was proposing, offering her everything, his future, his very life - the truth?
That she was already married.
That he was asking for the hand of a married woman.
Meredith met Armand when they were both students at a regional college in rural Pennsylvania. The only child of foursquare, silent parents, she had craved color and high emotion, and found it in movies and plays - although rarely in the communal experience of a theater; mostly she enjoyed them alone, in front of the television.
At Hochsnett Valley Community College, she found a niche in the theater department as a soft-spoken, second-tier member of the costume crew. Armand was the most talented performer at Hochsnett: with his midriff-exposing tops and long fringed scarves, he was the charismatic center of any theater gathering, and his huge smile - sustained even in the middle of the most demanding dance sequence - earned him the nickname "Megawatt." He first spoke to her when she was on her knees fitting his chaps for the role of Curley in Oklahoma!
"We both know you're really overweight," he said, "but you have incredible hair."
They married right after graduation. It was admiration, not love, on her side, and they both regarded the marriage as a practicality: Armand told Meredith that given the times they were living in (the early 80s), being married might help him be considered for roles that he generally would not get. He practiced a smaller smile in front of the mirror. "Less, less," she could hear him whispering to himself in the bathroom when she passed by with clean trash bags or the vacuum cleaner.
Meredith found work as a bookkeeper and, though struggling with an extra sixty pounds, kept herself tidy as well as the apartment. But Armand, growing increasingly frustrated with directors' tendencies to cast the same actors in local theater productions - a group he called "the Hochsnett Valley Mafia" - began to criticize Meredith much more than he had when they first met.
"There have to be some changes around here," he said bitterly. She came home from work one day to find him kneeling in front of her closet with a cigarette in the side of his mouth, bundling up all her clothes "except for your one decent outfit" for Goodwill. The next day, he moved the bathroom scale to the kitchen, directly in front of the refrigerator. "Each time you lose a pound, then you may eat something," Armand told her.
On their first anniversary, once Meredith cleared the dinner plates from the table, Armand presented her with a large gift box from Alfred's, a fancy department store two towns over in which she almost never shopped. The box itself, of mirrorlike gold cardboard, was well worth saving. Meredith undid the broad royal-blue ribbon and spread the wings of liner paper: inside was a magnificent silk dressing gown all the way from Japan. (The manufacturer label said "Kyoto Tailors." Looking for a size label, she was unable to interpret the numbering system, which ran much closer to 100 than the American system did.) Figured in blues and reds in a pattern resembling kimono, the floor-length robe was mostly black, the perfect color, as Armand was always telling her, to set off her shoulder-length black hair, which was raccoon-thick and glass-shiny due to diligent oil treatments.
Before bed that night, Meredith wrapped the dressing gown around her and tied the sash. She sucked in her stomach and tossed back her hair. But when she thrust her hands into the deep pockets as a way of elongating her torso, she found a handful of used tissues in one pocket. Meredith was confused. Was this not a new garment? Was it not really from Alfred's? Or had Armand himself...?
"Armand?" He appeared in the bedroom doorway, and Meredith held up the wad of white tissues.
That was the night he left.
Meredith grew nervous - or perhaps excited. She lost fourteen pounds in five days before her weight stabilized again. Armand had taken only a small suitcase, some cash and credit cards, and her car. She decided not to call the police or file a missing person's report. She continued to attend theater in the Valley. One night she sat behind two men who were loudly criticizing an admittedly sexless performance of Cabaret. During intermission they mentioned Armand's name. Pretending to search the floor for her purse, Meredith leaned forward so that her head almost touched the back of one man's chair. What was he saying? Armand had either moved in with or run away with one of the other actors midway through rehearsals for Cabaret. No, the director. The assistant director.
Several months went by while Meredith continued to live alone. That fall, although Meredith had not heard from Armand again, he appeared in the role of Lomax in Shaw's Major Barbara. He did well, she thought. The playfulness of the role absorbed Armand's natural energy, allowing him to give a performance of appropriate scale. He did not shout look-at-me-I'm-thrilled-to-be-onstage. His British accent was good, too, and he had always struggled with that. Obviously, he was finding the right influences. During intermission Meredith sipped a Champagne cocktail in the packed lobby of the community center. She made no attempt to locate him, at that moment or after the play.
Soon afterwards, the granary at which Meredith was a bookkeeper was bought by a larger agricultural concern. The new owners brought some of their own people in, and Meredith became friendly with two other bright, hard-working young businesswomen who were unmarried themselves, socialized with few Valley locals, and knew nothing about Meredith's marriage. She decided not to tell them anything, just to enjoy the warm but superficial time together - at a long lunch once a week at the Conservatory, their favorite wicker-and-fern restaurant; on shopping trips to the town with the good stores; or while keeping up with the latest romantic or biographical films.
Meredith and the two other women, Eileen and Vera, loved advising one another on clothes. They made a pact that they would always dress one or two levels above the jobs they currently held. Eileen and Vera were both older than Meredith - she was not yet twenty-five, and they were twenty-eight and thirty - but they acted younger. Whenever they shopped at Alfred's, Meredith made a point of speeding by the sleepwear/lingerie department while the other two checked to see what was on sale. But for the most part, by imitating them, pretending to faint over the price of a handbag within view of the salesclerk or nudging the others when an attractive man passed their booth at the Conservatory on his way to the bathrooms, she felt that, for the first time ever, she was acting her age. Maybe, like Armand (who increasingly became just a figure of curiosity in her mind - more an idea than a person), she was leveling off, finding her appropriate scale.
Life for Meredith as a single woman kept getting better. She giggled with Eileen and Vera and listened to their Monday-morning debriefings but always stopped short of dating anyone herself. Meredith knew that the other two would attribute to her extra weight any hesitancy about spending time with men.
Then one day a frowsy little man with combed-over hair appeared at the front desk of Agri America, demanding to speak to Meredith. When she walked into the reception area, the man thrust a manila envelope into her hands. Both his suit and the envelope smelled of stale smoke.
Back at Meredith's desk, Eileen and Vera hovered ingenuously. "What is it? Who wanted to see you? Was it a man?"
Meredith had a bad feeling; when the man had used her last name, Armand's last name, the name had bitten and stung. "Just some mail," Meredith said, tucking the envelope into her purse to review later in the ladies' room.
When she opened the envelope, under the acoustic cover of running and flushing water and the emery-board sounds of moving pantyhose, a photo fell into her hands, of a small girl in pink overalls, her head heavily bandaged under a baseball cap, and complicated braces on her legs. The accompanying correspondence stated that Armand had been driving at ten o'clock on a weekday morning in the mountains of West Virginia and struck six-year-old Jeannie Ruffner "in the normally safe confines of her own front yard" while she played with the family dog. The dog had been killed instantly. Armand, the letter said, had just kept driving. Since he had not been found, the family was suing Meredith (the owner of the car, on which she was still making payments) for sixty thousand dollars.
Anxious to the point of tears, Meredith marched back to the waiting area and told the receptionist to redirect all her calls; she would be out for the rest of the afternoon. Holding the big envelope with the tiny girl inside it, Meredith made a decision. It was time to stop pretending and cut the cord. If not for herself, then for this little girl. Whatever it took, she was going to get a divorce, and she was going to make things right with the Ruffner family. She just had to decide which she wanted to do first.
Meredith drove (in a new car, on which she was also making payments) to the center of town, to the office of a lawyer. She said she didn't want to make an appointment, she had to see someone right away. During a lengthy consultation with the founder of the firm and one of the senior partners, they laid out a plan for locating Armand, bringing him to justice for the hit-and-run with the help of the Pennsylvania and West Virginia police, and then dumping him with an efficient divorce.
"I don't care what it costs," Meredith said. "Just get this over and get him out of my life."
Over the next two months, Meredith spent most of her breaks on the phone with the two lawyers and a private investigator.
"Who are you talking to?" Eileen and Vera asked. "Why are you being so secretive?"
The private investigator spent three weeks "nosing around" near the accident site in West Virginia (he had a good lead, he said, that Armand had been DUI), then a month interviewing everyone who had known Armand at the college and around town. No one, not even the assistant director he had recently been involved with, seemed to know where Armand was now living.
"He's an actor, right?" Meredith's lawyer asked. "Could he have changed his name?"
In the end, because the legal and investigative fees were mounting, the senior partner took Meredith to lunch and quietly advised her to settle the case out of court. You don't have all the time in the world, he told her, pushing an Old Fashioned toward her worrying hands. Don't let this take over your life. Just offer them a check for thirty thousand. She wanted to send something more - a personal card or gift, a new dress or stuffed animal - to little Jeannie, but he advised against it.
Once the personal-injury suit was settled, Meredith dove into her financial work. She became impatient with Vera and Eileen because now she felt much, much older than they. She was promoted at the large company, but at times she noticed a carved-out feeling in her abdomen, as if all the goodness had been taken out of her. She began to wonder whether she still had the ability, if she had ever had it, to bear children. Only on the weekends, blinking in the dark-blue afternoon as the trio exited a matinée, did she briefly feel like herself again, weighted by a new story and slowed by the crowd.
One evening two years later, Meredith was surprised to receive a letter from a doctor treating Armand. Armand was apparently in rehab. "Your husband is working very, very hard on his recovery," the doctor wrote, "and it's best to take it slowly. Therefore, the staff recommends, and I wholeheartedly agree with their decision, that he not see you until he is absolutely ready. I hope you will understand that this is why the location of this recovery center must be confidential. Armand has expressed a wish to write to you, but of course he is still angry. He will write you only on his own time."
There was no return address on either the doctor's stationery or the envelope. The name of the rehab facility had been blacked out with a marker. Meredith waited with growing anxiety and curiosity for the second letter, the one from Armand. But nothing came.
Years went by.
On Meredith's thirtieth birthday, she checked the mail in the lobby of her apartment building. Her parents had sent a card with their customary ten-dollar bill. Also in her mailbox was a second envelope. Shifting her purse onto her shoulder, hoping for another birthday treat, she opened the envelope on the way upstairs. Inside was a homemade-looking trifold brochure printed with purple ink. It said:
HOMOSEXUALS ARE NOT 'TRASH'!
WHY?
CAUSE GOD'S LOVE CAN 'RECYCLE' 'EM!
Meredith recognized Armand's handwriting on a sheet of lined paper.
"Dear Meredith," the letter read. "I am writing to let you know that I am finished with ALL THAT. Now that I have found Carole and we will be starting a new life together, I despise the person I once was. Carole has helped me to realize that my past life was evil and that I can be so much more. Carole prays daily that you will see the wrong you caused by allowing me to live the way I did. But you must never give up on yourself because you, Meredith, are not personally bad, only your sins are bad. Carole and I love you very much.
"You must pray for forgiveness for the part you played, not only in the abominations before God, but the cocaine, the amyl nitrates..."
There had been amyl nitrates? There had been cocaine?
Once again there was no return address. The back of the brochure said
WEDNESDAYS 7 P.M.
FELLOWSHIP HALL ST. OPIAH CHURCH
The envelope bore the postmark of an Ohio town.
Shortly afterward, she got a phone call at work. "Cut the crap. You know who this is," the familiar voice said on the phone. Armand talked over her questions and confusion. He needed money to make a home with Carole. A stipend, because despite the talents they had each started out with, Meredith was more successful than he. Shocked, Meredith nearly dropped the phone, but she tried to write down everything he'd said. He hung up without providing an address for wiring the money. She brought her notes, along with the two mailings, to the private investigator. The PI started sending Meredith bimonthly reports, often containing hypotheses followed by question marks, for which he charged three hundred dollars apiece.
Once, in Philadelphia for the weekend, Meredith saw Armand walking ahead of her. His hair was blond and prickly with gel, and he had developed a new, twitchily impatient gait. She rushed forward and grabbed his arm, the brown denim of his coat, but he tried to punch her, so she let him go.
Meredith's life ceased to feel that it was expanding in any way. She no longer spent time with Vera and Eileen, although she sometimes caught them watching her quizzically from across the room at Agri America. She needed to make more money, so she went to a headhunter, who found her a managerial job at one of the big financial-services firms in Hartford, Connecticut. On the new salary, she purchased a condominium with a river view. Black was still her signature color, as Armand had suggested so long ago. She wore well-fitting black dresses with luxurious touches like velvet cuffs or a beaded neckline, and always bright red lipstick, and she collected expensive shoes that showed off her plump, small feet - in these ways drawing the eye both up and down, ignoring the large idle expanse in the middle.
The phone rang at two a.m. in her new condominium. A woman's voice croaked, "I - Will you - ?" before a man's voice shouted "Carole!" and the receiver on the other end struck a hard surface.
While Armand's exact location was difficult to determine, charges appeared on her credit card statements from time to time. She resumed the habit of paying some of his bills, way after the fact but otherwise just like when they were married (correction: married and cohabiting). She began to think of "Armand" the same way she thought of her utilities: phone, electricity, cable, Armand. My contribution to the arts.
Some of the statements revealed not just amounts but types of expenses - leather jackets; vacations in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and Palm Springs - and in that way created a fragmentary view of what Armand's life must be, like a town seen from a plane but obscured by scattered clouds. Meredith dutifully passed the patchwork info to her Pennsylvania investigator, who included the data in virtually unchanged form in his reports.
She was still an attractive woman. The year Meredith turned forty, the Monica Lewinsky scandal hit the press, and despite the twenty-year difference, people in the office, at the food store, in shops kept commenting on how much Meredith resembled the wayward intern. Meredith had already noticed that they shared a transgressively complacent beauty. She was pleased every time Monica appeared on TV. She didn't listen to the news or commentary on the case, from either side. She just sat with a plate of chicken à la king on her lap and nodded to Monica as if they shared a secret language.
Except for the one time Armand unexpectedly returned - he appeared in the courtyard outside her condo in Hartford bellowing and waving a pistol (she was too freaked out to mention the credit card charges or summon the private investigator; when questioned by the police she pretended not to know who he was, and he was eventually taken away while she watched the scene unfold, drowned into pantomime by police sirens, from six stories above) - she mostly stopped thinking about her marriage because, as she told herself, It will never come up. She dated this one and that one that she met through business, but she kept her social life light and friendly, never letting an attachment develop too far.
Once, at the movies with a group of new acquaintances from the Hartford office, she noticed Armand in a bit part as a high school track coach. "Way to go," he said to the handsome, troubled young boy who was the lead character, clapping him on the shoulder. Meredith popped a malted-milk ball in her mouth and sucked on it until it collapsed, then slid her lipsticked lips against one another while she swallowed. She smiled and said to herself, "That man is my husband." Despite his chaotic lifestyle, Armand had clearly hewn to the acting lessons. He was much better. Contained. Giving less.
Philip's expression as he waited for Meredith's answer was the same one he'd worn when she was finishing her income taxes late at night (married, filing individually - always a headache) and he had stopped by with warm oatmeal cookies and a bottle of cold milk. Now she could imagine how her old co-workers Vera and Eileen might react to the idea of her just inches from a supplicant diamond-bearing male. How, if she were still on such terms as to call them the minute Philip left, each would scream. How if she were back at Agri the two single girls would spend tomorrow morning at her desk, raising her hand and dropping it as if the ring finger weighed a ton and saying, "Nice little sparkler!"
Any minute now his face would fall, and he would say, "Is there... someone else?" He knew her as cleaner and simpler than she really was. He didn't know that she and Armand were like a pair of conjoined twins. One had drowned as they forded a river. The other clambered a towering embankment, then gasped as she stepped dripping onto the crest, while the music soared into the credits.
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