The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [81]
In the distance, a telephone rang.
How, Kathryn wondered, had Jack possibly managed it? The lies, the deception, the lack of sleep? One day he had left Kathryn and gone to work, and then within hours was standing in a church at his own wedding. What had Kathryn and Mattie been doing on that day, at that precise hour? How had Jack been able to face them both when he came home? Had he made love to Kathryn that night, the next night, that week? She shuddered to think of it.
The questions bounced with tiny pings from wall to wall, repeating themselves endlessly. Then she remembered, her stomach lurching, the twice-yearly training sessions in London. Two weeks each.
If you never suspected someone, she realized, you never thought to suspect.
She stood up quickly, her eyes skittering around the tiny powder room. She splashed water on her face, dried it with an embroidered towel. She opened the bathroom door and saw across the hallway a queen-sized bed. From downstairs, Kathryn could hear Muire talking on the telephone, the words rising and falling in her foreign lilt. If Jack had not been dead, she would perhaps not have had a right to enter the bedroom, but now nothing could matter. This house was hers to see. Knowledge of this house was owed to her. After all, Muire Boland had known all about her, hadn’t she?
Kathryn ached to think of that reality. How many details exactly had Muire been told? And how intimate were those details?
She walked through the doorway and thought of the effort she had made to please Jack, of the accommodations she had made for him. Of the way she had created an entire theory of diminished sexual intimacy. Of the way she had once confronted Jack with the fact of his withdrawal, and he had denied it, made it seem beneath his consideration, beneath hers. All of this she had thought normal, within the bounds of a normal marriage. She had, in fact, thought they had a good marriage. She’d told Robert they had had a good marriage. She felt foolish, exposed for a fool, and she wondered if she didn’t mind that most of all.
This would be the master bedroom. It was long and narrow, oddly messy, actually extraordinarily messy considering the neatness of the downstairs rooms. Piles of clothes and magazines were strewn about the floor. There were teacups and a container half full of yogurt on a bureau, ashtrays overflowing with butts. Bottles of makeup on a dresser, which was spotted with liquid foundation. One side of the wood-framed bed was not made. Kathryn noted the expensive linen sheets, the embroidered hem. There were bits of lacy underwear on the comforter. The other side of the bed, still intact, had been Jack’s — she could see this in the bedside stand with the white noise machine, the halogen lamp, a book about the Vietnam War. Had Jack read other books here than he had read at home? Had he had different clothes? Had he actually looked different in this house, in this country, than he had at home? Looked older or younger?
Home, she thought. Now there was an interesting concept. She walked to Jack’s side of the bed and yanked back the covers. She bent her head to the sheets and inhaled deeply. He was not there; she could not smell him.
She crossed to the other side of the bed, Muire’s side. On the bedside table, there was a small gold clock and a lamp. As if conducting a search, she opened the drawer of the table. Inside, there were scraps of papers, receipts, tubes of lipstick, a jar of skin cream, loose coins, several pens, a television clicker, an object in a velvet bag. Unthinkingly, Kathryn picked up the bag and slipped off the blue velvet pouch. She dropped the object as if it were hot. She ought to have guessed simply from the shape. The vibrator fell from her hands and into the drawer with a clatter.
She knelt to the floor, laid her face on the bed. She put her arms over her head. She wanted the questions to stop, and she tried to empty her mind, a futile effort. She rubbed her face back and forth, back and forth against the sheet. She lifted up her face and saw that