Lawrence Block - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

“Well, nice meeting you,” Buddy said, stepping off the porch. “Guess I’ll just try to catch up with everyone.” Then halfway across the yard, with a quick turn, walking backward for a moment: “Hey, wanna join us?”

“No, I’ve—” Philip started to hold up his book and explain that he was working, or protest that he was only wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, but then realized that he wasn’t expected to say yes. Buddy had never even stopped walking. “No,” Philip called after him. “You all have a good time.”

“Oh, I’m sure we will,” said Buddy, and he thumbed the cigarette butt into the street as he climbed in the truck. A wave from the window as he rounded the curve.

Philip started to turn back inside, but instead walked out and sat for a while on the porch swing he and Catherine had only recently found time to install. Soon the sun would go down, and even now there were few people on the street — a pair of joggers, a couple pushing a stroller, a bicyclist in Spandex shorts. The chains supporting the swing creaked, the grass in the yard had begun to wither, paint peeled on the perimeter of the porch — little chores neglected. From somewhere in the neighborhood came the dull, distant roar of a lawnmower, or perhaps a hedge trimmer. Philip’s thoughts wandered back over the conversation with Buddy, and he found himself troubled by the cigarette butt in the middle of the street. The joggers, the couple with the stroller, the cyclist — none of them seemed to notice it. Finally, he walked out to pick it up, deposited it in the trashcan on the side of the house, and then came back to the porch. He opened up the Chekhov collection.

The theater scene in S— Gurov and Anna rushing away from the crowds at intermission. They walked senselessly along passages, and up and down stairs, came to rest on a narrow, gloomy staircase.

“I am so unhappy,” she went on, not heeding him. “I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you. And I wanted to forget, to forget you, but why, oh, why have you come? ”

On the landing above them two schoolboys were smoking and looking down... Gurov drew Anna Sergeyevna to him, and began kissing her face, her cheeks, and her hands.

“What are you doing, what are you doing?... I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you... There are people coming this way!”

Someone was coming up the stairs...

Philip closed the book in mid scene, bothered as always that the “someone” never arrived. Who was that someone? And why had he or she stopped? A similar event in Yalta — Anna and Gurov sitting at breakfast: A man walked up to them... looked at them and walked away.And this detail seemed mysterious and beautiful, too. But what more did the detail signify? What did Chekhov intend? Simply some reminder of the outside world barging in, ever-threatening to discover the affair? And how early would Von Diderits himself have known that his marriage had gone terribly wrong?

Evgeniy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Anna Sergeyevna glanced toward him, away from the stage, her furrowed brow asking, Is there something wrong? He smiled and shook his head, patted her knee. His wife smiled in response before turning her attention back to the scene before them — the Tea House of Ten Thousand Joys. A parade of kimonoed figures with thickly powdered faces danced in unison, strummed lutes, poured tea for lounging British sailors. Evgeniy’s wife tapped the tip of her fan against the bridge of her lorgnette, the latter a trifle he had bought her — unnecessary since their regular stall was on the third row, but she was always pleased by such precious accessories. “Men make love the same in all countries,” the Frenchwoman on stage had said. “There is only one language for love.” And when the wizened Wun-Hi replied, with those troubled r’s, “Yes, me know — good language before malliage, after malliage, bad language,” everyone laughed.

Evgeniy had paid little mind to the plot — a stew of misguided passions, flirtations, jealousy... a song about a goldfish. It was easy enough to let one’s attention wander.

Evgeniy turned his eyes once more toward the governor’s box, but still saw no one but the governor’s daughter seated in front, leaning forward, her elbows on the coping. He had nodded in the direction of the box during the bustle before the start of the play, aware from the parting of the curtains behind her and the partially glimpsed hand on the sash that the governor himself stood back there watching — that perhaps the governor had in turn seen him. Evgeniy hoped that at the interval between acts he would have the opportunity to speak with the man. There seemed little harm in reminding a superior that you were there, that you existed at all.

At last the first act ended. The curtain fell.

“Excuse me, my darling,” Evgeniy said, standing. “There are several people I must speak with.” And he stooped over quickly to kiss his wife’s cheek before leaving her in the stall, proud that everyone could see what a model marriage they had. She was indeed his darling, his plum, his precious baby bird. In the aisle, he encountered Pyotr Alexeitch, and the two men began speaking as they walked toward the door outside, where several other gentlemen had already gathered to smoke.

But he had barely caught the smell of tobacco drifting through the door when a brisk movement across the room seized his attention — a woman rushing hurriedly through the crowd. A mere flash of a moment, but enough for him to recognize his wife’s gown, the particular way she pinned her hair back, and that familiar, though now hurried, gait. Had a problem arisen? Perhaps she had suddenly taken ill. Was she searching for him?

“I beg your pardon, Pyotr,” he said, with a slight bow. “I fear there is something I must attend to.” It was, he considered, no breach of manners to look to your wife in her time of need.

He walked through the laughing, chattering crowd, heard a person humming one of the refrains from the play, saw another stifling a giggle as she stiffly mimicked the bow of one of the geisha girls.

His wife had gone through this door, surely, he thought, and it opened up onto a busy passageway leading around the auditorium. A glimpse of her gown to the right, and as Evgeniy moved in that direction, he saw that another man was following closely on his wife’s heels.

“Excuse me,” he said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He eased as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention — casting a quick smile or a friendly nod to those he knew, striving at the same time to keep his eyes on the figures ahead. They seemed to move endlessly along passageways, and up and down stairs. At times Evgeniy gained on them, at others he fell behind, until at a last turn he reached the base of a narrow, gloomy staircase, hidden from the crowd. The sounds of his wife’s voice echoed down the stairs — “I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you” — and Evgeniy mounted the first step hastily, primed to defend his wife’s virtue, his own honor, until he heard an unexpected tenor in her next words: “There are people coming this way!”

He stopped in mid step. There was an urgency in her tone that had struck him strangely, a desperation, a passion, a—