The Senator's Wife Read online

  “Ah,” Tom said, straightening up after he'd read it. “They've left the old fogies behind.” He'd made his voice cheerful, but she could hear the disappointment in it.

  THEIR ROUTINES FOR Christmas Day were so inflexible as to be ritual. The only thing that had changed over the years was that now Delia and Tom woke well before their children did. This morning they shuffled around the kitchen together in their slippers and bathrobes, making coffee, drinking it, talking in subdued tones. Delia set the dining room table, and Tom put out the ingredients for the breakfast he always made Christmas morning—bacon, French toast, orange juice, coffee.

  When they went upstairs to get dressed, Tom went to the closet and brought out a professionally wrapped box, what they called his real gift to her. This was ritual too, that he gave her this present in private. It was always something intimate or sentimental, something he didn't want the kids to be embarrassed by, or, in their embarrassment, to make fun of, which they'd done when they were younger. This year it was a jewelry box made of a dark polished wood with ivory inlaid in a floral pattern on its lid.

  “Oh, Tom, it's beautiful,” she said. She was seated at her dressing table, facing the mirror, the box on her lap. “Thank you so much.” She ran her fingers over it. “It's gorgeous.”

  “Which is why it was the right gift for you.” He got up from the chair opposite her. He bent over her from behind and kissed her cheek. She looked at their reflection in the oval mirror—her own watchful face looking back, the top of his head as he bent down next to her, his arms making a frame around her, his hands on her elbows.

  Then he stood up and was gone from the glass, off to his closet. All Delia could see behind her was their empty bed. After a moment, she leaned forward and began to fuss with her hair.

  No one was stirring by ten, so Tom put on some music—the Christmas portion of the Messiah. He turned the volume up high. After a little while, they heard the showers running upstairs. Tom started breakfast—Delia was already fixing the vegetables for dinner, and the lamb was ready to go in the oven.

  When the young people came downstairs, everyone gathered in the dining room to eat. The morning sun poured in through the tall windows, glinting off the glasses and silverware. Stars of reflected light danced on the walls and ceiling as they ate. Evan asked Carolee what she thought her parents were doing, and she talked about that, and about the way she'd spent Christmases in her childhood. Her favorite was in Norway, where she'd lived for two years. She got to be Santa Lucia at her parents’ Christmas party. She wore a crown—a wreath with lighted candles in it. “I loved that. It was partly the risk, I think. The idea of fire so near your hair, your head.”

  When they were done, the kids cleared and cleaned up, and Delia reset the table for dinner. As she put the china, then the silverware down in place, she was thinking how much the holidays reminded her of the way her life had been when the children were all small—meal after meal after meal. Why hadn't she gone mad? How had she given over to it as completely as she had? Who had she been then?

  As soon as they were through with their chores, they trailed into the living room, one by one. Tom started a fire in the fireplace. Delia had turned the tree lights on, even though their glow seemed anemic with daylight from the windows behind them streaming in through the evergreen branches.

  Evan took Brad's usual role this year, moving around under the tree, picking out presents and bringing them to each person, trying to keep the balance even so that everyone would have something in each round. Delia had bought extra gifts for Carolee, small things, to make this possible—a lipstick in a color that looked like the one she wore, a little net bag of foil-wrapped chocolate coins, a pair of mittens, a paperback copy of The Bluest Eye.

  Evan was businesslike in the distribution at first—an efficient elf, Tom called him. But as he got more into it, he began to make an elaborate show of the presentation to the girls, especially Carolee. He would spin in front of her, bow before her, call her “Your Highness,” or “Mademoiselle.” She played along with him the first few times, and then pretended irritation. She and Nancy began to throw balls of wrapping paper at him whenever he gave either of them anything. Their voices grew shrill, they were all laughing.

  When Delia or Tom opened a present, the game would fade, but it surged again when it was Carolee or, now, Nancy's turn. They seemed like teenagers to Delia, like kids—children playing together.

  “You are such a jerk,” Carolee said, pelting Evan again.

  “Ah, the Christmas spirit,” Tom said, smiling at Delia. She smiled back.

  Dinner was a slow, ceremonial meal, with a different bottle of wine for each course, and a long pause between them. As they moved into dessert, coffee, cordials, the light was fading and then gone from the windows in the dining room.

  Once again, the kids offered to clear and clean up. The girls went upstairs to change their clothes first. Tom retreated to his study—the phone had rung several times in the afternoon.

  Delia went to sit by the fire and write a letter to Brad. She told him about the weather, about their Christmas Day without him, about her plan to learn to ski with Evan, about what his siblings were doing. She visualized him reading the letter three or four weeks hence—which is when it would arrive in his mountain village in Guatemala. She could imagine his face, so round and boyish. She recalled the way his hair curled down over the nape of his neck. She missed him. She heard the girls in the kitchen, Tom's intermittent voice in his study, Evan's music upstairs.

  By the time she finished, everything had quieted. She got up and poked at the fire. The last log crumbled into disparate sparking embers. She put the screen up in front of it.

  As she was about to step into the front hall, she saw Carolee halfway up the stairs, just making the turn out of sight. At that moment, Tom walked forward into the hallway too, coming from the kitchen. He saw Delia and smiled. “Darling . . .” he said, in his light, urgent voice; and Delia watched as, invisible to him, Carolee turned back on the stairs, her face lit and expectant.

  Delia stepped into her sight line and answered him. “What?”

  As Tom began talking—something about business in Washington—Delia could see Carolee in her peripheral vision, quickly vanishing around the corner to the second floor. Even as she heard Tom out, keeping her voice calm, she felt her heart racing. She was seeing again the eagerness—no, the avidity—in the girl's face when she heard Tom's endearment, and she knew, she felt it as an undeniable certainty, that something had already begun between them.

  Tom was going to have to go back early, the next day, that's what he was saying. There was some trouble with a bill that had passed just before Christmas, some negotiating he needed to be there for.

  “I see,” she said.

  “And so it goes.” He lifted his hands, palms up, helpless. His mouth made its small, self-mocking smile. “I'm sorry, really. I thought we'd have a nice long vacation together.”

  Delia was certain he was lying, but she willed herself to believe him, she willed it to be true. There was a meeting, there would be a meeting, he was sad to go. Just as she'd willed it to be true that yesterday Carolee had a big batch of xeroxing to get done in town, that there'd been other work lined up ahead of hers, so that they'd decided to go for lunch while they waited. To go for lunch, to buy the groceries Delia needed, and, yes, to tour the town. And even then they'd had to wait a little longer when they stopped back to pick the xeroxing up.

  He packed that night since his flight was so early the next morning. He'd arranged for a car to take him to the airport. She lay in bed and watched him move around the room. The suitcase was open by her feet, and there was a little bounce she could feel each time he added something to it. He was quick and efficient. He'd done this hundreds of times before.

  As he was getting into bed beside her, he said, “When will you come back, you think?” There was something too casual, too relaxed in his tone.

  “To Washington?” she said.
“I don't know. Evan is staying all this coming week, so I'll want to be here for him. And then there were a few invites I said yes to, though that was for both of us. I'll figure it out.”

  “Will you let me know?”

  “Of course. I wouldn't spring myself on you.”

  “Though that sounds kind of interesting, actually.” He kissed her lightly.

  When he left the next morning, he warned her that he'd be out late at meetings, and “pretty unavailable,” he said, by phone. “I'll call you when I can.”

  Later in the morning Carolee unexpectedly left too, a day earlier than she and Nancy had planned. She had some stuff to prepare for work that she just hadn't gotten done over the weekend because she was having such a good time. She needed to get back and just push through it. An all-nighter, she thought. Evan and Nancy drove her to the train station and put her on.

  Delia didn't call Tom that night, or the next, or all that following week. She didn't want to hear the telephone ring and ring in the empty house in Washington.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Delia, Spring Through Fall, 1972

  IT WAS NANCY who discovered definitively what had happened. Carolee was embarrassed and nervous around her when she got back a day later. When Nancy pressed her, she said no, no, nothing was wrong, nothing at all. But she was hardly at home after that, and on several occasions, she stayed out all night and was mysterious at work the next day about where she'd been. A few weeks later she moved out. She told Nancy that she'd decided to live alone for a while. She said she thought she needed some space.

  But if Carolee wouldn't talk to Nancy, she did talk to various other people—people who were friends of Nancy's too. In fact, in her excitement about the romantic and erotic adventure she was launched into, in her bemused delight with her own charm, she talked and talked and talked. She talked, and then she swore the listener to secrecy, every single one of them.

  So Nancy heard, of course, and in her turn she told Delia what Delia had known anyway, the moment she stood in the hall and saw the beautiful young woman on the stairs turn so eagerly to Tom's voice.

  And after the winter of trying, after discovering that Tom was still seeing the girl long after he'd sworn it was done; after he told her then that he couldn't, or wouldn't, give Carolee up, Delia had fled, fled to Paris where none of it could touch her for a while, where she could try to think clearly about what it was she wanted to do.

  · · ·

  IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON, about a week after she'd moved into the apartment in the seventh, when she decided that she would go to the Rodin museum, one of her favorite public buildings nearby. The day was warm, too warm for late April, and she thought she would sit in the gardens and cool off. Yes, she would walk out and sit on a bench in the shade among the beautiful roses as a way of marking her arrival in the city, her new life—celebrating it.

  And she did. She bought her ticket and went around the side of the beautiful old hôtel particulier that was the museum, out the long walk under the trees to the fountain. But it was too warm even in the garden, and she began to feel almost groggy sitting there. She got up and slowly walked back up the gravel path to the building. She mounted the stairs to the wide back terrace. She entered the museum through the tall glass-paned doors that opened out onto it.

  The crowd inside was thin this late in the day, standing in little shifting circles around one work or another. She joined them, admiring the marble figures, the clay maquettes. But it was even warmer in here than outside—the rooms faced south, and the sun was pouring in. Delia could feel sweat forming at the roots of her hair. A trickle slid down her back, then another.

  There was a doorway to a darker space at the end of the last room facing the terrace. She walked over to it and went into a small room with dim lighting. It was cooler instantly, though airless—the room had no windows.

  There weren't any sculptures in here, just glass cases of drawings and small pictures hanging on the walls at eye level. Delia leaned over the nearest of the cases. Several quick sketches in it were studies Rodin had done for one or another of the massive sculptures. They were drawn in pencil, or a narrow-nibbed pen—the lines were so light, so quick and thin you had to bend close in this light to make them out. There were paintings too—watercolors. Delia moved from one small, vague sketch or wash of color to another.

  And then stopped. She wanted to turn away, but didn't.

  It was a woman, lying down, seen from the foot of a bed. Her legs were spread wide, her almost hairless sex open. Her genitals were penciled in, and there was a pale wash of watercolor spread over her—the honey color of her flesh; and another wash, of a deep green, over the bed she was lying on. It was lovingly, attentively done, and intensely erotic. It was impossible to imagine that the person who drew this, who painted this, hadn't stood up when he was finished and crossed the room and fucked this model.

  That's what Delia was seeing at any rate, what she felt she had been brought here to see, what she was being punished by having to see. The flesh, the youth, the beauty, the sex, of another woman as Tom would see her, as Tom would respond to her. The inevitability of his desire for someone else made visible.

  A couple—young, hippie, with backpacks—began to enter the room. Seeing her there, an older woman alone in the dim light bent over one of the glass cases with tears streaming down her face, they stopped. They whispered something, and then stepped back and disappeared quickly around the corner into the bright light of the room behind them.

  IT WAS ONLY a few days after this when Nancy called and wanted to join her for the week's vacation she was taking from her job in early May. Delia's first impulse was to say no. Her visit to the museum was still fresh in her mind—she'd been stunned by how easily she fell apart, by how fragile she was. And she knew it would be hard to be with Nancy—it had been hard all winter. Sometimes her daughter had seemed to be almost physically thrashing around the house in Williston in her powerless anger, in her profound sense of betrayal. Once, yelling at Delia, “How can they do this? How can you let them?” she had risen so abruptly from her seat that she knocked over the glass and plate sitting on the little table next to her. And then, looking at the shards of glass, the pieces of china lying on the floor, she'd reached down and deliberately shoved the table over too. It was as if the betrayal and the end of her parents’ marriage had happened fully as much to her as to Delia.

  And perhaps, in some sense, they had, Delia thought. Nancy had been an adoring adolescent daughter, caught up in her father's importance. She was always far more likely than Brad or Evan to let her friends know whose child she was—the daughter of the distinguished Senator Naughton. She hung on him when he was home.

  For his part, Tom was more flirtatious with her than with the boys, more seductive, as if he didn't know another way to be with a female, even if that female was his daughter. She was the one of the kids he asked to talk to first when he called home. When she went to college, he visited her often, he took her out for expensive dinners, just the two of them. For her birthday, there was usually jewelry.

  And so when he fell in love with Carolee, her closest friend, when it seemed that he had left the family for her, Nancy felt shocked in a way Delia wasn't capable of anymore, and Delia had to spend the first few months of the end of her marriage comforting her daughter. It made her aware of how empty, how dried out and exhausted she was. During that period, she sometimes felt that if she thought she could have prevented it, she would have struggled to more for Nancy's sake than for her own.

  But once she'd escaped from her family life, from Williston and Washington, escaped to where no one knew her, she thought she was done with that. She thought she could be selfish, think only of herself, of getting better. The idea that Nancy would come into her life again, and bring with her her rage and grief, was almost more than she could bear.

  But Nancy was her daughter, after all. She was suffering, and Delia understood and loved her. And so she said yes. Yes. Come.
/>   For the first few days the visit was sweet. A pleasure, Delia would have said. She discovered she had missed her daughter's company—or perhaps just company itself: she'd been too much alone in the month or so she'd been in Paris. It felt good to talk. To have dinner with someone, to say good night before you went to bed. To touch someone you loved.

  Delia had told Nancy she would have to continue through the visit with the language classes she'd started at the Alliance Française, and she did, leaving the house early on Monday morning, clutching her notebooks to her chest like a schoolgirl, walking past the Algerian and Moroccan street cleaners pushing rinse water into the drains with their odd arrangement of bits of old carpet—while Nancy, on a different clock, slept heavily on.

  After the three-hour class, Delia met her daughter for lunch in a restaurant they'd agreed on. It was a place Delia felt comfortable in, small and of the neighborhood, run by a middle-aged couple who greeted Delia cordially by now. There were half curtains, lace, across the front windows. No one spoke English and the menu was in French—Delia translated for her daughter. Nancy was charmed by all of it.

  That first lunch was pleasant. Delia was exhausted by her class as usual, and as usual also, she was lighthearted in the relief of its being over. They split a bottle of wine between them and talked and laughed easily.

  But the next day, as the meal ended, Nancy brought the conversation around to it—to Carolee, to Carolee and Tom and the outrage she felt, the outrage she thought Delia ought to feel.

  Delia tried to change the subject; she told Nancy it wasn't something she wanted to talk about anymore, that she couldn't talk about it anymore; but even back at the apartment Nancy kept on about it. It wasn't enough for Delia to say that she wasn't going to live with Tom again, or that, like Nancy, she found his behavior reprehensible. Nancy wanted him punished, exposed, through a very public divorce, which she argued for. She was incredulous at Delia's apparent lack of venom, at her inability to say what it was she was going to do.