examined her naked body in months, maybe even a year or two; she couldn’t even remember the last time she performed that ritual of minute, critical, inch-by-inch dissection of flaws, ending in resolve to eat less, exercise more, use moisturizer, buy another push-up bra, maybe reconsider a long-standing personal prohibition against cosmetic surgery. Back then—happily married—she hadn’t cared.
More recently—wronged wife—she hadn’t dared.
And now? Right that second? Staring down at breasts and stomach and thighs and calves and feet against the wrinkled, disgraceful white sheets? She’d thought she looked pretty damned beautiful.
Pretty damned beautiful. (That was Hector’s voice, echoing in her head.)
Hector. She reached for the note. Nellie barked and spun in a desperate circle.
“All right, all right,” Ella said again, retracting her hand, and this time she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and rose. The movement made her head slosh. Made her belly swim. Swamped her with the seasick, full-body hangover sensation of a night without sleep, except that unlike actual hangovers, or those following all-nighters spent at work, this malady represented a small price to pay for what had caused it. If you threatened Ella with a lifetime of such wakings, she wouldn’t trade away last night. If you erased her memory of the past twelve hours, she would still know it existed, humming in her bones and skin, shimmering down the long lines of her veins, hovering like a ghost inside her—
“I think I’m going to throw up,” she told Nellie, and exactly six seconds later she was leaning over the edge of Hector’s toilet bowl while Hector’s dog watched anxiously from the door.
After vomiting, she’d felt much better, the way you did. Weak but purged. Purged of what, she wasn’t sure. Guilt or sin or something, right? After all, she was married.
Except she didn’t feel guilty. She was quite sure of that. Ella knew what guilt felt like, and this wasn’t it. This was something more complicated, like when you walked onto an airplane headed to a brand-new country and couldn’t turn back, adventures waiting before you, and yet somewhere, in the back of your skull, pounded the certainty that you’d forgotten to pack something important. She found a washcloth on the counter and turned on the faucet and wondered whether her husband had barfed, the first time he cheated on her. Aunt Julie had said that Patrick was a congenital cheater; she could smell it on him, the way you smelled garlic on someone who had eaten forty-clove chicken the night before. He’d probably cheated in kindergarten. Kissing Michelle after telling Jennifer he was going to marry her. He was numb to sin. What was that line from Dangerous Liaisons? It only hurts the first time.
Well, Ella didn’t hurt at all, that Sunday morning. She didn’t regret a minute of the night before.
Nellie’s paws grabbed her knee. Bark ended in a whine.
“All right! All right!” Ella said, for the third time. She set down the washcloth and went back into the bedroom, Hector’s bedroom, Hector’s bed, Hector’s simple wooden furniture. On the chair lay her clothes, neatly folded, nowhere near where she had left them last night. In fact, Ella could have sworn she wore not a single stitch by the time Hector carried her from the living room to his bed, and yet here sat all those stitches, reconstituted, primly stacked, bra and panties on top, just as if they hadn’t spent the night strewn all over the living room floor.
This time, Ella didn’t bother deciding whether Patrick had or had not ever picked up her clothes from the floor after a night of passion. Didn’t think of Patrick at all, in fact, as she dressed herself in the clothes Hector had peeled off her body under a high, bright moon and then gathered together again, in the hour before dawn, while Ella lay absolutely expired under the down comforter. She pulled her hair back in the scrunchie Hector had also recovered from the floorboards. Nearby, Nellie chased her nonexistent tail in a kind of canine delirium. Ella slid on her shoes, tucked Hector’s note into her pocket, and called for Nellie to follow her into the living room.
By virtue of being related to the landlord, and also by virtue of his own skill at carpentry, Hector had the entire attic floor to himself: bedroom, bathroom, open living room and kitchen. The Sunday sunshine hurtled through the skylight to land in a scintillating rectangle on the kitchen counter, where Nellie’s leash and a plastic produce bag lay together with a bottle of water and a key. By now the dog was dancing on her claws. Yipping and begging. Ella leaned down and clipped the leash on her collar. Grabbed the bag and the water and the key as Nellie dragged her like a sled dog toward the door. Together, they raced along the flights of stairs, and Ella was out the vestibule and leaping down the stoop before she realized she hadn’t even looked at her own apartment door on the way down. How crazy was that? When that apartment had changed everything. The Redhead’s apartment, now hers.
Ella had to run to keep up with Nellie, who was making for a patch of gravel surrounding a tree near the corner, and her stiff muscles begged for mercy, like that time Ella’s sister Joanie had talked Ella into joining a Pilates class. And maybe she wasn’t quite that stiff this morning, not quite so aware of just how many muscles the human body could contain; maybe her soreness today was tempered by that sense of marvelous well-being set off by the joyful firecracker in her belly, the sensation she still couldn’t name.
But something else gnawed at her flesh—even when Nellie, after some investigation, decided on a spot and hunched down in relief—and Ella, resting at last, thought that maybe that gnawing came from her back pocket, where she’d stuffed Hector’s note as she flew out of Hector’s apartment. Moreover, she decided—shifting her balance, blowing on her fingers in the brisk air—the gnawing wasn’t because she missed him, although she did. She missed him the way you might miss a bone, if you woke up to find it missing from your arm or leg or rib cage. She missed kissing him and laying her hands on him in utter freedom, in the way they had finally done last night, the dam breaking at last under the pressure of Ella’s distress, but that wasn’t all; just being with Hector, just laughing with him and playing piano with him and lying on the floor staring through the skylight with him. She could live without the sex long before she could live without any of that.
She missed him, yes, she missed everything about him.
But the thing was—and Nellie was setting off again, full of purpose, and Ella had to force her legs to move—the thing was, when she woke up this morning, alone in Hector’s bed, she was kind of glad he wasn’t there.
And the note? Gnawing from the safety of her back pocket? She wasn’t in any hurry to read it.
HECTOR HAD LEFT TWO other voice mails on Ella’s cell phone, one Sunday afternoon around the time he must have landed in Los Angeles, and one in the evening. Both of them untouched, the same as Hector’s note, and just like Hector’s note the cell phone now went inside the front pocket of Ella’s laptop bag. She couldn’t listen to Hector’s voice right now, any more than she could look at Hector’s handwriting. He was probably frantic with worry, and still she couldn’t bring herself to hear those words, read those words, return his call and hear him speak more words. Not because she was guilty. Not because she didn’t care. Not because she didn’t long to hear Hector read the entire fucking Manhattan telephone directory in her ear, in the same way she longed to breathe.
Ella tried the latte. Too hot. She set it down and checked her watch—seven forty-eight—and decided she might as well get it over with. Lifted her laptop bag from the counter stool and walked out the door, forgetting all about the latte left on the counter until she was pushing her way through the glass revolving door of the Parkinson Peters building on Fifty-Second Street and Sixth Avenue and wondered why her right hand was so empty.
TO ELLA’S SURPRISE, HER security pass still worked. She spilled through the turnstile,
