Bill Crider - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 1. Whole No. 797, January 2008

“The least we can do with our mistakes,” Valerie had said, with a droll downturn of her mouth, “is not keep a record of them.”

Leonard, who’d met Valerie when she was thirty-one, several years after her divorce from Yardman, had been allowed to think that the first husband had been older than Valerie, not very attractive and not very interesting. Valerie claimed that she’d married “too young” and their divorce just five years later had been “amicable” for they had no children and had not shared much of a past. Yardman’s work had been with a family-owned business in a Denver suburb, “dull, money-grubbing work.” Valerie, who’d grown up in Rye, Connecticut, had not liked Colorado and spoke of that part of the country, and of that phase of her life, with an expression of distaste.

Yet here was glaring evidence that Valerie had been very happy with Oliver Yardman in December 1985. Clearly Yardman was no more than a few years older than Valerie and, far from being unattractive, Yardman was extremely attractive: dark, avid eyes, sharply defined features, something sulky and petulant about the mouth, the mouth of a spoiled child; the kind of child a woman might wish to spoil to see that mouth curve upward in pleasure. There was a revealing Polaroid in which Yardman pulled Valerie playfully toward him, a hand gripping her shoulder and the other hand beneath the table, very likely gripping her thigh. His hair was dark, thick, damply touseled. Faint stubble showed on his jaws. He wore a white T-shirt that fitted his muscled, solid torso tightly, and what appeared to be swimming trunks; his legs were thickly muscled, covered in dark hairs. He was barefoot, his toes curling upward in delight. So this was Oliver Yardman: the first husband. Not at all the man Valerie had suggested to Leonard.

He’d thought it was strange, but attributed it to Valerie’s natural reticence, that in the early months of their relationship Valerie had rarely asked Leonard about his past. She hadn’t even asked him if he had been married, Leonard had volunteered the information: No.

And no children, either. He’d been careful about that.

It had been something of a relief to meet a woman without a trace of sexual jealousy. Now Leonard saw that Valerie hadn’t wanted to be questioned about her own sexual past.

Leonard stared at the Polaroids. He supposed he should simply laugh and replace them in the drawer where he’d found them, taking care not to snap the frayed rubber band, for certainly he wasn’t the kind of man to riffle through his wife’s private things. Nor was he the kind of man who is prone to jealousy.

Of all the ignoble emotions, jealousy had to be the worst! And envy.

And yet: He brought the photos closer to the window, where a faint November sun glowered behind banks of clouds above the Hudson River, seeing how the table at which the young couple sat was crowded with glasses, a bottle of (red, dark) wine that appeared to be nearly depleted, napkins crumpled onto dirtied plates like discarded clothing. A ring on Valerie’s left hand, silver studs glittering in her earlobes that looked flushed, rosy. In several of the photos, Valerie was clutching at her energetic young lover as he was clutching at her, in playful possessiveness. You could see that Valerie was giddy from wine, and love. Here was an amorous couple who’d wakened late after a night of love, this heavy lunch with wine would be their first meal of the day; very likely, they’d return to bed, collapsing in one another’s arms for an afternoon siesta. In the most blatant photo, Valerie lay sprawled against Yardman, glossy coppery hair spilling across his chest, one of her arms around his waist and the other part hidden beneath the table, her hand very likely in Yardman’s lap. In Yardman’s groin. Valerie, who now disliked vulgarity, who stiffened if Leonard swore and claimed to hate “overly explicit” films, had been provocatively touching Yardman in the very presence of the third party with the camera. Her little-girl mock-innocent expression was familiar to Leonard: Not me! Not me! I’m not a naughty girl, not me!

Leonard stared, his heart beat in resentment. Here was a Valerie he hadn’t known: mouth swollen from being kissed, and from kissing; young, full breasts straining against the red fabric of the bikini top and in the crescent of shadowy flesh between her breasts something coin-sized gleaming like oily sweat; her skin suffused with a warm, sensual radiance. Leonard understood that this young woman must be contained within the other, the elder who was his wife: as a secret, rapturous memory, inaccessible to him, the merely second husband.

Leonard was forty-five. Young for his age, but that age wasn’t young.

When he’d been the age of Yardman in the photos, early or mid twenties, he hadn’t been young like Yardman, either. Painful to concede, but it was so.

If he, Leonard Chase, had approached the young woman in the photos, if he’d managed to enter Valerie’s life in 1985, Valerie would not have given him a second glance. Not as a man. Not as a sexual partner. He knew this.

After lunch, the young couple would return to their hotel room and draw the blinds. Laughing and kissing, stumbling, like drunken dancers. They were naked together, beautiful smooth bodies coiled together, greedily kissing, caressing, thrusting together with the abandon of copulating animals. He saw them sprawled on the bed that would be a large jangly brass bed, and the room dimly lit, a fan turning indolently overhead, through slats in the blinds a glimpse of tropical sky, the graceful curve of a palm tree, a patch of bougainvillea moistly crimson as a woman’s mouth... Leonard felt an unwelcome sexual stirring, in his groin.

“She lied. That’s the insult.”

Misrepresenting the first husband, the first marriage. Why?

Leonard knew why: Yardman had been Valerie’s first serious love. Yardman was the standard of masculine sexuality in Valerie’s life. No love like your first. Was this so? (In Leonard’s case also, probably it was. But Leonard’s first love had not been a sexual love and his memory of the girl, the older sister of a school friend, had long since faded.) The cache of Polaroids was Valerie’s secret, a link to her private, erotic life.

Hurriedly he replaced the Polaroids in the drawer. The frayed rubber band had snapped, Leonard took no notice. He went away shaken, devastated. He thought, I’ve never existed for her. It has all been a farce.

In Salthill Landing on the Hudson River. Twenty miles north of New York City. In one of the old stone houses overlooking the river: “historic” — “landmark.” Expensive.

Early that evening as Valerie was preparing one of her gourmet meals in the kitchen there was Leonard leaning in the doorway, a drink in hand. Asking, “D’you ever hear of him, Val? What was his name, ‘Yardman’...” casually as one who has only been struck by a wayward thought, and Valerie, frowning at a recipe, murmured no, but in so distracted a way Leonard wasn’t sure that she’d heard, so he asked again, “D’you ever hear of Yardman? Or from him?” and now Valerie glanced over at Leonard with a faint, perplexed smile, “Yardman? No,” and Leonard said, “Really? Never? In all these years?” and Valerie said, “In all these years, darling, no.”

Valerie was peering at a recipe in a large, sumptuously illustrated cookbook propped up on a counter, pages clipped open. The cookbook was Caribbean Kitchen, an expensive book that had been a Christmas gift from friends in Salthill Landing with whom the Chases often dined, both in their homes and in selected restaurants in Manhattan. Valerie was preparing flank steak, to be marinated and stuffed with sausage, hard-boiled eggs, and vegetables, an ambitious meal that would involve an elaborate marinade, and a yet more elaborate stuffing, and at this moment involved the almost surgical “butterflying” of the blood-oozing slab of meat. This was a meal Valerie hoped to prepare for a dinner party later in the month; she was determined to perfect it. A coincidence, Leonard thought, that only a few hours after he’d discovered the secret cache of Polaroids, Valerie was preparing an exotic Caribbean meal of the kind she might have first sampled in Key West with the first husband twenty years ago, but Leonard, who was a reasonable man, a tax lawyer who specialized in litigation in federal appellate courts, knew it could only be a coincidence.