The Winter Girl Read online

  She looked at me with such a detached, sad expression that I had the dreaded feeling she had made a marital decision. I could see her mouth opening and I could already hear it. I think we should get a divorce. We haven’t been close for a long, long time.

  But that’s not what she said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This has been awful. I know you two don’t even get along.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “That doesn’t even matter now.”

  It did, but I was just happy we weren’t getting divorced, on top of everything else.

  “Do you want to fool around?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said, grabbing another sheet of newspaper, crumpling it. Trying to look useful and productive.

  She walked up to me and leaned over, giving me a kiss on the top of my head, and I could feel all the cold she had brought with her from outside. A layer of it still hovering around her face.

  By the time I finished perfecting the fire and found my way upstairs, she was lying crosswise on her father’s bed, sound asleep. She’d managed to pull off her sweater and boots, but her black tights were still stretched halfway across her calves. I tugged them off and tossed them in a corner of the room, then I lifted her legs so that they lay comfortably on the bed. I found myself staring at her pink bra for a moment, and then I watched her stomach rise and fall. On the right side, about three inches below her breast, was an old appendectomy scar. She’d gone under the knife before she met me and had always been a little bit self-conscious about it. It had healed as well as it ever would, leaving behind a whitish, raised thread of extra skin. Before I turned off the light, I kissed her there, right on the scar, then on the valley of her stomach and once on her hip.

  “I’m sleeping,” she said, running her hand quickly through my hair.

  “I know,” I said, turning off the light.

  —

  Besides my steadily growing affair with the house next door, there were other disturbing developments that week in December. Whenever I came back from one of my expeditions to the house—I got as far as touching its windows, pictured myself scaling a drainpipe—her father’s voice could be heard when I hit the play button on the answering machine.

  “You son of a bitch,” he said. “Pick up. I know you’re there.”

  At first I thought he might be addressing an old colleague, mistakenly dialing his own number in a morphine haze. But there were many messages. Eight of them that particular day, his seething rage crackling on the phone’s small speaker.

  “Pick up.”

  “How does she let you touch her? You’re a piece of shit.”

  “Pick up, scumbag. You fucking coward.”

  It went on like that till message seven, and I felt almost reassured. I was hoping there was someone, somewhere he liked even less than me.

  The eighth message cleared that up. He prefaced this one with my name and then told me that if he found me in his house he was going to drown me with his own two hands, right there in the bay. And he’d enjoy every minute of it.

  “That’s enough, now,” a voice said, tearing the phone away from him.

  When Elise came home that night, she shook her head before I could even tell her what I had heard.

  “I was there,” she said. “The nurse was too. Apparently, it’s typical. Their thoughts become disordered.”

  “Actually,” I said, “they sounded very orderly. He wants to drown me in the bay.”

  Elise arched her lip as if she would laugh, but then she must have remembered how crazy he looked when he said it, and the humor vanished.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She looked miserable as she stared down at the floor. Lines of mascara blotted under her eyes.

  “Do you want to hear the messages?” I said, reaching toward the answering machine.

  “No,” she screamed. “Just turn off the phone. Why did you have to listen to them?”

  She went upstairs and I thought the night would end there, but she was awake when I walked into the bedroom later. I could see glistening white dots where her eyes were.

  She’d been crying in the dark.

  I’d always suspected that she had an uncomfortable secret regarding her father. A friend of hers had hinted at it, years before, at a party. The friend had told me that she remembered one day in particular, when they were little girls. Elise’s dad had pretended he was a monster and chased both of them around a playground. When he caught Elise, he whispered something in her ear and then gave her a long kiss on the neck.

  That night, Elise told me about some of the other things he’d done to her, and then she told me she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s not worth repeating any of it. It’s sick and it’s sad and a father who does that to his own child deserves a far worse death than being drowned in a bay.

  I remember standing at the window at one point, watching the lights in the house next door. Even though we’d been married only four years, I thought we already knew each other’s biggest secrets. But I told myself that one day, when she was ready, she’d tell me the rest, and I’d listen patiently, and then everything would be all right. I wouldn’t force her to tell me the things that hurt her most just so I could move on. Otherwise, I’d be just as bullying as her father.

  A steady wind was blowing across the bay, and the limbs of the pines on the hill erased the light for a few moments, then snapped back again. Precisely at 11:00 p.m., the lights went out. After that there was nothing much I could see in the darkness. Neither of us slept much that night.

  In the morning, I waited to see what Elise would do. I listened to her shower. I listened to her brush her teeth and spit. I listened to her zip on her boots. I listened to her softly close the door, even though she must have known I was only pretending to be asleep, and then she left, once again, for the hospital.

  —

  That day, exhausted, I tugged on my sweatshirt and climbed up the deer path to the house next door. A coil of thorns sunk into my jeans and I leaned over and fished them out. I took another step and another coil fastened itself around my ankle. On that particular afternoon it seemed like the house was protecting itself. I made my way around a dark, pebbly mound of deer shit, and walked up the slight hill toward the pool. I knelt by the rusted pool heater and scanned the windows above me, the pale backs of chairs just visible through the kitchen window. The placemats just where they were the day before. That porcelain pig, still holding its optimistic sign.

  After a few minutes, I stood up and walked around the fenced pool, up to the patio. Anyone could have seen me there, if they happened to be sitting on a boat in the bay. But there were no boats, just more gray waves rippling toward me, landing on the beach with a sweeping sound.

  I remember that moment clearly, because I hadn’t really done anything wrong yet. In fact, when I saw a door open on the balcony of a house across the road, I didn’t wait to see who would come out. I ran back down the slope and found the deer path, tearing through the thorns that leaped toward me again.

  —

  “I have an idea for a great photograph,” I told Elise that night.

  She was bent over a bowl of butternut squash soup I’d spent three hours making, tilting her spoon and watching the orange gruel slide off. She was wearing a Breast Cancer Awareness pin on her pullover. When you spend every day at Southampton Hospital, you get some freebies.

  “The soup’s a little thick,” she said, eating another spoonful.

  “I thought you liked it thick,” I said.

  “It’s fine,” she said, pushing the bowl a few inches away. “I’m just not hungry after the hospital. I can still smell his room.”

  She picked up the remote control and turned on the television. We watched The Bachelorette.

  I never got around to telling her my great idea for a photograph that day, but I’ll tell you. I was going to have her pose naked on the front steps of the empty pool of the house next door. I felt lik
e it could be the beginning of a series. Naked Wife Trespassing, or something like that. As she sat watching television, I could imagine myself standing in the shallow end of that pool, my camera level with her naked kneecaps, goose pimples raised on her arms and legs. She would wrap her arms around her legs and squint at me slightly in the sunlight.

  It would have been a great photograph. Even though I never snapped it, the image sticks in my mind, is always the same beautiful thing, just as real as the mundane facts of what really happened that night. We argued a little, lightly, over things we couldn’t care less about. We poured ourselves more wine and sat silently through muted commercials.

  I’ve never really taken my best photographs, but I can tell you what each one is:

  A boy who fainted at the Fourth of July parade and was carried away by his father. The look of protectiveness, anxiety, and love in his father’s eyes. The way the boy’s sneakers dangled over his father’s forearm.

  Elise smiling at me from across the table, that day I brought her to meet my parents in Boston. A warm haze visible around her face, because we had been swimming in the ocean all day long and the salt was still drying in my eyes.

  The curving road and the river of turning leaves above us, the net of shadows thrown over our laps, as we drove back from the Catskills one afternoon in October.

  And then there are the ones I really would take a few days later. The ones that would change everything.

  —

  At 10:58, I stood by the bedroom window, watching the same lights in the same window of the house next door.

  “Two minutes,” I said, looking at the clock on the bedside table. Elise was flipping through Elle Decor, already in her nightgown.

  “Two minutes to what?”

  “Two minutes till those lights shut off automatically. That’s real great security. Same time every night.”

  “I don’t think they were counting on a guy who spends his evenings watching the house,” she said, tossing the magazine on the nightstand.

  “One minute and forty seconds,” I said, standing closer to the window.

  Elise turned the bedside lamp off.

  “Don’t you want to see this?” I said.

  “I believe you,” she said, turning on one side and pulling the blankets up to her neck.

  At 11:00 p.m. on the dot, the lights in the window of the house next door shut off. My breath stretched an oval on the cold glass as I watched, and I wandered through a succession of dark, unknown rooms in my mind before finally returning to the one I was in. I took off my clothes and climbed into bed.

  In the morning, I took the half-full coffee cup that Elise had left behind before going to the hospital, and I microwaved it until it was scorching. I turned on CNBC and aimlessly watched stock symbols crawl by, which reminded me of my own dwindling checking account. No matter how much pasta we ate, we were still going through our money. Her father hadn’t paid for a thing. The phone rang, but I didn’t pick it up. I listened to her father’s scratchy voice on the answering machine.

  “Where is she?” he demanded. “Where’s my daughter?”

  I listened to him hang up, involuntarily replying.

  “She’s on her way,” I said out loud. “God knows why.”

  The phone rang again. It was Victor, just beginning to get himself worked up. His voice had a thick, clotted sound, an almost sexual tint to it, as if anger and arousal had crossed wires a long time back.

  “You think you’ve got it made,” he said. “You’re in for a surprise. You’re in for a very nice surprise when I die. You don’t know anything, yet. You don’t know what’s going on right under your nose, do you?”

  I didn’t care about the colon cancer and the drug-addled state he was in. I’d had enough. I picked up the phone.

  “Hi, Victor,” I said, almost casually.

  “Who is this?” he said, sounding meek and disappointed that I had dared to answer in real time.

  “Your fucking son-in-law,” I said.

  I had a long list of things I was going to say to him. A surgically dismissive treatise of his entire life up to then and the awful things he had done to his daughter. I was going to pry it all open one last time and then slam it shut. I was going to close the case on him while he was still alive.

  “It’s my turn, Victor,” is what I said first.

  But I didn’t get my turn. Victor hung up.

  —

  There’s a note somewhere, deep in some landfill, that I wrote to myself that day. I remember the words exactly. It said:

  STOP BEING YOUR SAME OLD SELF.

  I remember writing those words, and then I remember being my same old self and crossing them out. I crumpled it up, threw it in the garbage, and pulled on my sweatshirt. The last place I wanted to be that day was in Victor’s home. Surrounded by his mothballed sweaters and Dunlop tennis rackets and old shoes and pill bottles, and deeper in his closet, an old shotgun zipped up in a beige bag. One afternoon, crushingly bored, I had been tempted to pop two shells into it and bring down one of the endlessly gliding seagulls that always floated over the property. I stood there for a few minutes, raised the gun, but I didn’t pull the trigger. I preferred my Nikon.

  The house I was living in would never be mine. It was dry, with overgrown ghost grass leading to a deer path and another alien house. It was as if I were standing on a bridge that was being burned at both ends. I told myself that if her father would just die and we could get back to Park Slope, I’d feel settled again. But what roots did I really have there? I was a laid-off photographer of Asian newlyweds. It depressed me just remembering the hand signals I had to use, the frozen smile on my face, the frozen smiles on theirs. I might as well have been living on Mars.

  To think that I had arrogantly put off having kids just so I could focus on photography. I told Elise we had plenty of time. We weren’t even thirty yet. What would the child we might have had thought of that elm and the bridal parties I led across its scattered, bright yellow leaves? The worst decisions never let you go. They come circling back, even on the best days, to find you.

  As I made my way up the deer path, camera in hand, attacked by the usual gangs of thorns, I tried to trace the lie of my talent. It might have started with my fifth-grade teacher, who, frustrated and a failure himself, had encouraged me and ordered me to always put art first. It might have started further back, when I laid out my drawings like stepping stones, so my mother would be forced to admire my one-hundredth version of a fire-breathing dragon when she came home.

  As I stood on the patio of the house next door, the bay flashing beneath me, I pictured hurling my nine-hundred-dollar Nikon D70 as far as I could. It would crack through some branches below and disappear in the brush, along with a memory disc full of photographs the world could probably do without.

  But the camera stayed strapped around my neck as I leaned up against the cold windows of the house, cupping my hands to eliminate the glare. Inside, in the enormous living room, I could see the staircase winding down. A low coffee table. The fake ficus, its leaves blown across a tan, wooden floor. A stack of coffee-table books tilting behind a chair, the top one blandly titled Impressionism. It looked a little like a stage set. Later, I would sometimes think of everything that happened in that house as a kind of play. A performance that neither of us knew we were capable of.

  I tried the usual door, pressing down that half-inch before I felt the lock. I sensed my curiosity change. I was becoming impatient. I wanted to find a way into the house that was much more subtle than breaking a window. I tried each door on the bay-facing side and then I walked toward the driveway, stopping to press my face against another window. The master bedroom. Three photographs on a dresser: a plain-faced middle-aged man and a blond wife, but through the screen I could barely make out their faces. Some photo with a horse in it. One on a beach. I cupped my hands again and peered in another window. A pink Jacuzzi bathtub. Bath-oil beads in a jar and designer shampoos. A terry-cloth robe hanging o
n the door.

  Under a pine tree about twenty yards away, more lawn furniture had been piled up, the plastic covered with a fine layer of dead pine needles. There was a Weber grill, uncovered, with a pair of rusted tongs hanging from its side. There was something about trespassing that aroused me in a slightly disturbing way.

  I walked around the front of the house, my feet crunching on the blue gravel, and suddenly heard a noise in the dry leaves. I immediately thought someone was watching me, but it was a deer, bounding away. I took a deep breath and continued walking toward the front door, wondering what I would have said if I had seen a person there instead.

  The clouds, which had been thick for two days, split enough to momentarily whiten the driveway, and the sun briefly flashed in the windows above me. I waited a moment, and then I walked up to the front porch steps, surprised that the iron railing was slightly loose. I tried the front door and was actually half turning to walk away when I realized it was unlocked.

  I don’t know why I did this. But I shook my head as I walked into the house for the first time. If someone were watching me, they might think I was silently cursing myself for forgetting my keys.

  Once inside, I carefully closed the door, my heart knocking against my chest, blood fizzling in my ears.

  “Hello,” I actually said, panting. “Is anybody home?”

  —

  My first visit didn’t last more than five minutes. I felt as if, at any second, someone might appear behind me and ask me what the fuck I was doing. I think everybody should have a what-the-fuck-are-you-doing? moment in their life. I highly recommend it. All my overrefined worries dropped away as I stepped into the living room.

  I had not been invited into this house, so at first I stood there, like a deer, waiting to hear if there was anyone there but me. There wasn’t a sound. Not inside, or outside, only the bright afternoon light shifting slightly over the furniture in the living room. For days I had been wanting to touch these objects, and now I did. I walked slowly across the living room floor—it was a parquet floor, painted white—until I reached the glass coffee table where the small black statue of Cleopatra sat. From the window, I hadn’t been able to see her upturned breasts and wide, hollow eyes. I leaned over and touched the top of her wooden head, smiling to myself.