it. On Riverside Drive. Oh, I know, but Daddy didn’t know that and he spent a great deal of money on it and I just couldn’t hurt him that way. I mean, what would I say? No, Daddy’d never believe Howard wanted to live on the East Side. Daddy says Howard would be happiest in a log cabin.”
“I’m gonna put this letter on her highness’ dresser,” Rosanne said, placing it there.
“Oh, fine.”
“And here’s some coffee,” she added, walking over and handing him a cup.
“Thanks.”
Rosanne walked toward the door, stopped and turned around. “Mrs. C’s over twenty-nine,” she announced.
“Oh, yeah?” Howard said, smiling.
“Go back to work,” she said. “But remind me, Howie, before I leave I wanna talk to you about Tuesdays.”
Howard swallowed some coffee. “You want to switch days?”
“Naw,” she said. “I wanna talk to ya about Amanda, but I gotta finish the oven first.”
Howard leafed through the pile of short proposals in his lap, sighed, and let them fall back in his lap. His eyes were on Melissa’s dresser now. He rubbed his chin, thinking. It would be a low thing to do. And yet, knowing how meticulous Melissa was, he was sure the letter had been left in the couch for him to find. “Rosanne?” he called.
One second, two, three…
“Better make it short if you want an oven left!”
“Where was that envelope?” he called, rising from the chaise longue.
“The couch!” In a moment, she appeared at the door, wiping her forehead with the back of a rubber glove that was brown with gook.
“In it or on it?” Howard asked her.
“Sort of stickin’ up between the cushions.” She blew a strand of hair away from her eye. “Finished, Mr. Mason?”
Howard offered a half smile and slid his hands into his pockets. “Yes.” When Rosanne returned to the kitchen, he went over and read the letter.
Dear Melissa,
I don’t know what I would do without you these past months. No one told us it would be like this, did they? Forgive me when I say that I can’t help wondering what would have happened if we hadn’t met Howard that night. We’d both be a lot happier, I know. You told me Barbara wasn’t clever enough for me, and I told you that Howard would disappoint you—so I guess we both got what we deserved for not listening to each other.
I just wanted to thank you for listening to me the other day. My success at Beacon Dunlap would mean nothing without someone to share it with and, as always, you understand the importance of everything.
Not long until Fishers Island! (I’m seeing your father next week for lunch.)
Melissa, dear friend, you are all that is keeping me going.
Love,
Stephen
The first night of their honeymoon, spent at the Plaza, Howard had accepted that Melissa was too exhausted to have sex. So exhausted, in fact, he excused her when she pushed him away when he wanted to hold her as they fell asleep. Her excuses the next night, in London, and the next and the next and the next, were all quite reasonable. Melissa was of course shy; it would take time.
As it turned out, they did not consummate their marriage until they moved into the Riverside Drive apartment. Melissa had lain there, eyes closed, chin up, enduring Howard’s touch as though it were a prelude to being shot. When it came to actual penetration, Melissa cried and pleaded and begged Howard not to do it because it was killing her. Howard stopped, but then he thought of Mrs. Collins and Daddy Collins and the wedding and somehow he knew that if he didn’t just push ahead and do it, it might never happen. After he—ever so gently—managed to come inside of her, Melissa jumped out of bed, locked herself in the bathroom, and stayed in the bathtub for nearly an hour. Afterward, robe firmly knotted around her waist, she curled up with the telephone on the living-room couch and called, of course, Daddy. “Everything’s fine,” Howard overheard from the hallway. “Remember how you used to wake me up when you couldn’t sleep? It’s like that, Daddy.”
Howard racked his brain about how to help Melissa. (God, how to help himself.) When therapy was dismissed as ridiculous, Howard pledged his faith in time and gentle reassurance. The only problem was that Melissa seemed to hate reassurance more than she hated sex. (“Just please stop talking about it!” she would wail, clapping her hands over her ears.) But time did bring a change, a compromise, they had lived with since: Melissa used sex (a loose term, considering what it was like) to force Howard into doing whatever horrible thing she had her heart set on. If they spent the weekend in New Canaan with Daddy, if they went to Daddy’s reunion at Schnickle State College in Tennessee, or if Daddy came in and spent the weekend with them, then Howard could look forward to sex the first night after the ordeal was over. And summers! That was an interesting game, renting down the road from Daddy. The three or four weekends a summer that Daddy was not there were the weekends Melissa gave the signal, “I’ll be ready for you in twenty-five minutes, Howard.”
Howard had never cheated on Melissa. Amazing, but true. But then, life with Melissa was not all bad. No, far from it. The Stewarts enjoyed a way of life for which Howard never ceased to be grateful. They had this wonderful apartment (where Howard had the large library/study he had always dreamed of); they had their tennis and squash club memberships; they had their BMW (replaced biannually by Daddy); they had their annual three-week trip to Europe; they had their ballet and theater tickets and they had their big old rambling house in the summer (subsidized in part by Daddy).
Did anyone know what it was like for Howard to walk into Shakespeare & Company or Endicott Booksellers and buy four, five, eight hard-cover books? Did anyone know what it was like for Ray’s son to be greeted by name in Brooks Brothers? To give his family a VCR for Christmas? To quietly send his sister a thousand dollars when she got “in trouble” and tell her she never had to pay him back? Did anyone know how Howard had felt when he told Melissa of his mother’s admission of the terrible year Ray was having, and Melissa wrote out a check for ten thousand dollars, telling Howard exactly how to “invest” it in Stewart Landscaping in a way that his father could accept? Did anyone know what it was like to live like this and be an editor in trade book publishing?
Melissa was generous. The strings were long and complicated, but yes, Melissa was generous. “Just work on becoming publisher, Howard, and I’ll take care of the rest.” And she was. Melissa was now, in 1986, a junior vice-president at First Steel Citizen, pulling down some seventy-five thousand dollars a year (not counting bonuses, which, last year, had come to almost thirty thousand dollars—two thousand less than Howard’s entire salary).
Melissa’s energies and abilities—in Howard’s and everyone else’s eyes—bordered on the supernatural. (“It’s the Daddy in me,” she would say.) Dinner party for twenty—tonight? Billion-dollar loan to Madrid? Fifty pairs of tickets to the Cancer Ball? “I’d be delighted to handle it,” she would say without hesitation. And she would be delighted, moving and managing people, money and events in discreet euphoria.
But Melissa had a temper, too. And some nights Howard literally barricaded himself in his study against the sound of her tirades. “Layton Sinclair has been promoted past you!”
