The Widow’s Husband Read online

  To be honest, I hadn’t liked Matt, either, but my God, don’t you have to be polite? Am I the only one burdened with politeness? Had Emmett cornered the market on rudeness? On bad manners? On the luxury of bluntly speaking one’s mind?

  No matter how Emmett had been at the plant, he’d been the stern old man at home. His instructions in sexual matters had consisted of shaken fists, dire warnings against “screwing around,” and orders that I do something. Take charge. Well, I had, hadn’t I? First with a talk about “saving herself,” which got me nowhere. Then I’d embarrassed us both with a halting discussion of rubbers, with vague anxious advice, fumbling instructions.

  “Rubbers!” Amy exclaimed. “Mom, they’re condoms. I know all about them.”

  So the next step was the birth control pills. Emmett never came to terms with it. The trouble was that Emmett had been the old-fashioned parent, while Amy had grown into the New Woman. I’d tried to run interference between them. In the process, I’d been worn down, like a board under a planer. More than anything I’d wanted them to get along, to appreciate each other, to bend a little. To cooperate, at least on the damned birthday, for Christ’s sake! If I could go back to that birthday in the park, I’d order, I’d command, I’d bellow at Emmett and Amy, I’d tell them in no uncertain terms to be nice, to behave, to be civil. If not for poor Matt, at least for me. Now, looking at my shorn self in the mirror, I think what a pleasure it’s going to be to live without them and their backbiting kibitzing, their constant shooting gallery.

  Then I stare into my own eyes, stung with guilt. But it’s true, I am pleased now to have this chance to be on my own. Just because I’ve chosen, so far, to live my life without actively participating in it does not mean that there is not an active person in there. My first step in discovering that person will be to define the edges of Emmett. Just as an astronomer discovers objects in space not by seeing them, but by seeing where they are not.

  Black holes, aren’t they called black holes? Emmett would have known.

  CHAPTER 4

  I make a pot of tea and bring in Emmett’s office boxes. I’ll sort through them on my teak table. I’ve restored this table, rubbed it down with linseed oil and turpentine, bringing back its finish. It’s my talisman. A wonderful table; it validates my taste, my judicious selection. I should have forced the issue, should have bought those matching chairs. Ah, well, next time, I tell myself ruefully.

  The first box is crammed with incidentals: plastic raincoat, spare shirts and socks, a windbreaker. A fancy pen and pencil set I gave Emmett one Christmas, still new, still nestled in its box. Then I become exasperated: an electric shaver, an insistent after-shave, deodorant, hand mirror, clothes brush, hair dryer, tooth paste, a toothbrush, dental floss. Nail equipment, emery boards, nail clippers. Scissors with tiny curved blades, for those hard-to-reach nasal hairs? Why, the man had become a self-indulgent popinjay! My mother once called him that. Now I see why. He’d had more beautification junk at the plant than I do in the house, and I swell with disdain, disgust. On the bottom of the box, a rattling assortment of pills: aspirins, antacids, breath mints. A spare prescription of his blood pressure medication. A half-eaten bag of pork rinds, his favorite snack but absolutely forbidden since his attack. Also forbidden, also half-eaten, Reese’s peanut butter cups, a bag of the snack size. So he hadn’t been as pure as he’d let on, that sly dog, and I unwrap one for myself. It makes me thirsty, so I pour more tea.

  The next box: another layer of Emmett, this one of the office-jokester ilk. Folders of cartoons and comic strips of the Dilbert sort, or clipped from slick magazines like New Yorker, or Atlantic Monthly. Despite my mood, which is growing irritation and scorn for the shallowness of the man, one makes me smile. The boss yells to his secretary in the next room, “That’s okay, Mary, I only need one copy,” while putting the document through a shredder. There’s a computer-generated HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner, probably from a surprise party on Emmett’s forty-sixth birthday, over a year ago. He’d been pleased. I’d been pleased for him, but would have hated it for myself. There’s a foot-tall beer stein I don’t recognize, emblazoned with MALONE and a supposed family crest. It’s full of pencils, ballpoints, colored marking pens. A cigar box of miscellaneous, rubber bands, post-it-notes, labels, paper clips—the industrial kind shaped like clamps. A dictionary for poor spellers.

  A large-scale map of Ireland, one he must have had on his wall because there are tack holes in the corners. Someone has marked out a route from Dublin to Galway to Limerick, then on to Cork. No doubt they’d planned, he and Maggie Quinn, to kiss the Blarney Stone, while some drunken Irishman held their ankles as they dangled over the pit. I am irate, I slurp my tea, but aren’t I building on air again? I still have no real proof of wrongdoing. Not yet.

  Also a large-scale joke labeled “The Chair.” It’s a series of pictures; the first shows the chair as designed, with three legs on the bottom, and one sticking straight up through the seat. The second as the chair as built, all four legs on one side. The third as shipped, now not a chair at all, but a table with legs of varying lengths. The fourth as viewed by the salesman, a splendid leather armchair, trimmed with brass studs. The last picture: what the customer had in mind—a plain straight-backed chair. Emmett had shown more sense of humor at work than he had at home. Had he ever been fun to have around? Well, of course … but when? I can’t remember.

  Feeling angry, betrayed, and deprived, I tackle the next box. It’s a terrible assortment of heavy-going paperwork. His calendar, personalized memo pads, his blotter covered with doodles and misspelled words. He’d never been particularly literate. He’d been a mechanic, a technician; had, by choice, read little, other than the paper. That black hole business—he’d known that by way of TV, a PBS special viewed, probably, from his La-Z-Boy.

  I glance through his appointment book, his time-line of pending job orders, an “at-a-glance” monthly layout. Lord, all these computer printouts, specification tables, books of regulations, order forms, invoices, graphs, diagrams—I’ll have to return them.

  Then, omit, a folder labeled STOCK OPTIONS. It, too, is full of printouts, columns of figures with dates going back twenty years and more. Down through time our assets had mounted steeply, into several hundred thousand dollars. Then a precipitous drop, with the most current date showing a balance of almost nothing. Well, a few hundred dollars. A few hundred dollars! That’s all there is? This has to be a mistake. But I know it’s no mistake. He’d been withdrawing funds. He’d been cashing in.

  He’d been selling off behind my back. What for? But directly beneath the stock folder, as if in answer to my question: a clutch of real estate literature. Brochures, ads clipped from the paper, realtor-issued lists of properties for sale arranged from cheapest to most expensive. Emmett’s left-handed check marks appear next to some in the middle-priced group, properties in the range of two to three hundred thousand dollars. Why, he’d bought a property, most likely a luxury condo, if the check marks mean anything.

  And a Miata. Because under the real estate material is another Mazda brochure featuring a red sports car, with figures in the margin, in Emmett’s draftsman hand. My stomach lurches. I stand, rotate my shoulders, pace into the den, and stare out at my back yard, at the magenta petunias under a thin film of my shorn hair. Such a long time ago that I’d cut my hair right out there under the vine maple, although it had been only this morning. But it’s a lifetime, Emmett’s lifetime. Going through those boxes has been like viewing a condensed version of his existence as he slogged along, day after day at the plant, consulting shipping schedules, packing up finished products, ordering supplies, routing mail orders. Poor Emmett. He’d been bored, and stressed. Bored and stressed. A deadly duo. I see that now.

  But beneath my unsettling, surprisingly intimate look at his routine life, beneath my shock about the stock loss, there bubbles something else. Relief. Relief from nagging guilt. Because I’d formed the theory, in spite of myself, that his death had been my
fault. I’d triggered the attack by being the kind of person I am—oblivious, self-involved, careless of his wellbeing.

  I’d been laboring under the presumption that if I’d continuously monitored his emotions, I’d have kept his heart beating. If I’d straightened up his workbench, if I’d had the foresight to share the good news of the volunteer cherry tomato crop, or the petunias, if I’d cut my hair earlier … if, if, if …

  If I’d gone back to work, full-time. Quit this hit-or-miss temp stuff. I told him I needed a steady job, but he said that starting out at my age, I wouldn’t make enough to pay the taxes on the extra income. Better I should work for “pin money.” He said that, pin money, and now I see it as disparaging, belittling of my abilities. I see it as hostile, as destructive. Because due to his sabotaging of our, of my, financial security, I’ll have to get a job, I’ll have to take what I can get. No, I need not trouble myself with guilt. Emmett sowed the seeds of his destruction by leading a double life.

  I have to talk to someone. Amy. I rush to the phone and speed-dial her number. But all I get is Amy’s purring message, “Talk to me.”

  Abruptly I hang up. What’s the matter with me! This is the time of day that Amy’s at the gym with her first after-work class of spreading secretaries. Besides, Amy has begun ennobling her father’s memory, due to some late-arriving guilt trip of her own. Could I relate to her my mounting evidence of Emmett’s treachery? No, it would not be well received; it would even be rejected. Even implied criticism, and mine is not that delicate anymore, might alienate the fragile armistice Amy’s achieving. She’d turn on me.

  Instead of Amy, I’ll call the lawyer, I’ll call Mr. Devlin who helped us make the will. Emmett had liked Mr. Devlin, a fellow Irishman with whom he’d established a convivial rapport. Mr. Devlin will counsel me.

  But Mr. Devlin, later that week, seems to have lost his joviality. “Mrs. Malone, come in, come in,” he says. He smiles, but he also sighs, an impatient, put-upon sigh, as if I’ve been demanding too much of his attention, have become a problem, like a telephone marketer who calls during dinner, selling aluminum siding, or a new windshield for your car. Nevertheless, he attempts to be cheerful. “You’ve … done something … to your hair?” he says, twirling his fingers vaguely near his shoulders.

  “Just a haircut,” I mutter. At Amy’s insistence, I’d gotten a trim at the Hairtage, Amy’s favorite salon near Fitness World. The stylist had urged more drastic action: frosting, tint, or a perm. When I failed to enlist in the program, the woman had turned cool, just as Mr. Devlin seems to have done. I must be doing something to trigger this reaction.

  For a few minutes he shuffles paperwork. “Yes, yes,” he says curtly, snapping shut his glasses. He fixes his brown eyes on me, so brown I can’t see the irises. He pushes the stock folder back across his desk. It’s a black desk, smooth and shiny, as if carved of stone. “It would appear that these assets have been liquidated. Sold. These things happen, there is a communication gap, or breakdown, and whatever one spouse intended is not conveyed to the other. After all, Mrs. Malone, ownership was listed as ‘either/or’ so one spouse could sell without the other’s signature. It’s a wise move, in the case of a death, whereby a signature is not obtainable. Probate complications, endless delays. Sometimes years. He did the right thing, in that regard.”

  Despite myself, I shiver. His office is cold, all marble and stone, wall coverings in black overlain with a glittery gold design. This reflects some light, but several lamps are turned on to dispel the gloom. Outside the June afternoon sun blazes, with almost enough warmth to create heat waves off the parking lot asphalt. “But don’t you see what this does to me?” I say, feeling absurdly on the edge of tears. “He never told me he was selling our assets.”

  Regally, he leans back in his chair, a leather chair trimmed with brass studs like the one the salesman visualized in Emmett’s cartoon. He rubs at the dents his glasses leave in his fleshy nose, then says, “Yes, I see. But you might as well get hold of yourself, quit bleeding, climb down from that cross you’ve nailed yourself to.” His tone is rough, and my cheeks burned—am I acting like a martyr? “Come on, Mrs. Malone, face facts. There’s nothing you can do. Get a grip. After all, you’re apparently healthy, you’re a relatively young woman with a home of your own. Paid for, is it not? Yes, I see that it is. So you have to get a job. Most women work nowadays. The receptionist out there in the lobby? That’s my wife. Women work. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  I straighten up in my chair, a hard straight-backed chair, the one the customer wanted in the office joke. “I’m not ashamed. I’m shocked, and afraid. And I’m … unprepared.” I regard him with new eyes. He’s a tall massive man, and weighty—as if his own good self-opinion sits heavily on him, extra poundage. The only real fat is carried around his middle, a desk-jockey’s belly, but his back and shoulders also bulge, and he looks soft and meaty in a dark jacket. He is wise to wear that jacket. I wish for my own coat. Excessive air-conditioning ices the air.

  His legs are thick, as big around as my waist, requiring pants with pleats, knife-edged pleats, I noticed, when he stood to greet me. I can’t quite make out his twinkling gold tie tack, possibly the emblem of some organization, Kiwanis, a fraternity, some good old boys’ club that sends their brothers the best business by way of the two-martini lunch, or the golf course. I recall that Devlin’s father had been a judge, the family an old one in the Valley, the kind that once owned extensive orchards and vineyards, now being paved over for shopping malls, housing tracts, and condo developments.

  Solid family background, unlike Emmett’s or mine. I think of that beer stein emblazoned with the MALONE coat-of-arms. As if Emmett’s family had had a coat-of-arms! How presumptuous! Emmett’s father had been a failed painter, a cubist long after cubism had run its course. He’d tried to support the family with odd jobs and casual labor. His mother, the main breadwinner, had worked in a school cafeteria. Family crest! My own father had been an accountant; my maiden name was Schneider. Combining my stout German stock with the Irish, maybe my mother had it right: Emmett and I had been star-crossed after all.

  But haven’t I got it backward? Regardless of our families and their bent, hadn’t Emmett been the no-nonsense square headed burgher, while I butterflied around, the impractical romantic? Yes, in many ways we’d worked a role reversal, I can see that now. Stunned by this sudden revelation, I keep my unflinching look on Devlin, as if blinking would allow him to wriggle away. A staring contest with a reptile—a snake, or a lizard.

  Devlin shifts his weight, causing his chair to creak in the uncomfortable silence. “Listen, I can do some research, but it’ll cost you $150 an hour, and it won’t take much to eat up a lot of capital. I’m telling you that right up front.” He swings around a computer monitor, a flat one, very cutting edge, so I can view it with him. “Here’s your account, itemized, the $1500 retainer to see the estate through probate, and a list of your assets. Now, I can go to the Courthouse, I can dig around in Records and sift through real estate transactions, I can go to San Francisco and search through stock records, but it will cost you, I guarantee, it’ll cost you more than it’s worth.”

  Satisfied, or at least I see him as exuding satisfaction like an extra sheen on his glossy skin, he leans back again, runs a smoothing hand over his hair. It’s dark and wavy, not curly but sculpted into rolls that ripple back from a receding hairline shaped like a capital M. He, too, wafts the scent of some cologne, a heavy musk aroma. What is it with these men and their perfume, I wonder. My own father, the accountant with a green eye shade and plastic pocket protector, had worked hard; it had been his goal, pursued with honest unadorned soap and water, to smell of nothing at all.

  By way of dismissal, Devlin turns the computer monitor back around so it faces him alone with its secrets—I’d been able to make nothing of the hieroglyphics on it. He hits a few keys, then squares his yellow pad in front of him. He’d been scribbling notes, and I strain to see what he’d written.
As with the computer monitor, I can make out nothing, it’s all gibberish, his penmanship as wild as a doctor’s. Because I’d retrieved my stock folder, the only things on his black desk now are the yellow pad, his pen, and the monitor. He pushes his chair back and stands, pulling in his gut while adjusting his shirttail in his pants. In my head I hear Amy’s voice, “Pleated pants are for guys with big butts,” and I smirk.

  “That’s the ticket, chin up,” he says.

  “Yep,” I say, which startles me. I never say yep, but he makes me want to regress into redneck-ism. I long to drop some g’s, sprinkle around some ain’ts. “Chin up, shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstone.” I rise to my feet.

  He laughs. “Well, I don’t know about all that.”

  “Me, neither. Sounds uncomfortable.”

  Now he replaces the laugh with an earnest frown. “Seriously, I know you’re broken up, it’s not a good time for you, but you’ve got to be sensible. Take my word for it, things will come out right in the end. My own philosophy is that we get to where we’re going, despite road blocks.” This he utters solemnly, as if giving me the key to life.

  I mumble inanely, “Thanks for your time,” as if he’s done me a favor, but I know I’ve paid handsomely for my twenty minutes. He walks me to the door, treading heavily on oriental area rugs. Again I smell his after-shave. I feel my stomach lurch, I become light-headed, nauseated. In the outer office I ask to use the rest-room. The receptionist, Mrs. Devlin, points the way. The woman is icily perfect with frosted hair in artful curves around her face. No bangs. Amy told me in no uncertain terms that bangs are worn only by children, or retards. Or archaic remnants of the long gone ’80s, which includes me. Mrs. Devlin’s gray business suit is carefully tailored to disguise figure flaws. Even so, I note that under it lurks a body as shapeless as a sack of potatoes. Like her husband, she’ll grow into a doughy fortress.