Laura Lippman: The Most Dangerous Thing

In general, Gwen might have a little more empathy. The problem is, she thinks she does. But Gwen’s idea of empathy is that she knows how she would feel in any given situation. If she fell down and broke something, she would throw herself into physical therapy, do everything right, so why won’t Clem? If she were Karl, she would pursue her runaway spouse, do whatever was necessary to woo her back. Gwen has a good heart, but a person can have a good heart and be self-involved to the point of blindness.

Yet it is Clem who does not register, not right away, how much distress his youngest daughter is in when she enters his room with a lunch tray.

“I thought I heard someone at the door,” he says.

“You did. Tim Halloran stopped by.”

“What did the lummox want?”

“He’s not.”

“What?”

“He’s not a lummox, actually. Not really. He can be crude and coarse, and he was kind of a bully as a boy, but he’s smart and surprisingly… ” She does not find the word she’s looking for. “We have to go out later. Tim and I. We need to…” Another sentence left unfinished, and Clem finally realizes his daughter is agitated, pale and drawn.

“Gwen, I feel you haven’t been telling me everything.”

“Everything?”

“About Karl. Why did you leave?”

The question catches her off guard. Her thoughts are far from her husband, her domestic situation. She seems almost relieved by the change of subject. She sinks on the chair next to his bed.

“There was infidelity,” she says.

“You said Karl was insistent nothing happened, that he didn’t even realize what that woman on the Facething was trying to do.”

“No, not Karl. I cheated. Just once-no, that’s a lie. I still can’t tell the truth about it. More than once, but it wasn’t what you would call an affair. It was something really stupid I did, but something I can’t take back. Last summer, with someone at the office. Someone much younger. I don’t know what I was thinking. I could be fired over it.”

“And Karl threw you out?”

“No. He doesn’t know, doesn’t even suspect.”

“So why did you leave?”

“Because I don’t want to tell him, but I don’t know how to go forward if I don’t tell him. Yet if I do tell him-”

“He will throw you out.”

Gwen shakes her head. “Worse. He’ll forgive me. If only for Annabelle’s sake. But I’ll be in his debt forever, then. It will be official: I’m the bad one and he’s the saint.”

“Husbands and wives aren’t working off a balance sheet, Gwen. Look, I think it would be OK not to tell him. I really do. This mania for honesty-”

She catches her breath, almost as if she has been hit unexpectedly.

“I’m just saying that people don’t have to tell each other everything.”

“Easy for you to say, with your perfect marriage.”

He takes her hand. “Really? That’s what you saw? A perfect marriage?”

“Yes. You never quarreled. You adored her. You saw her, encouraged her, praised her. My husband can’t even pretend to be interested in what I do. And perhaps by the standards of what he does, it is shallow and trivial, and perhaps people shouldn’t have to pretend…” Her voice trails off, her point lost even to her.

“Gwen, I’m not even sure your mother truly loved me.”

“How can you say that?”

“We got married because she believed she was pregnant.”

“That makes no sense. Miller was born more than a year after you married.”

“I didn’t say she was pregnant. She believed she was pregnant, but she was terrified of going to a doctor anywhere in Boston, assumed there was no way she could keep the secret from her parents. She all but asked me to marry her.”

“Well, of course you did the right thing.”

“No, you don’t get it. She didn’t tell me she was pregnant. She was proud. She didn’t want anyone to think she made a mistake, that she wasn’t in absolute control of her own destiny. So we married-and she lived with her mistake the rest of her life.”

“She loved you.”

“To the best of her ability, yes. And she stayed with me after she realized she was wrong. We never spoke of it. She had no idea that I knew. But I did, and there was always that seed of doubt there. I had to wonder if she loved me as I loved her.”

“She was so young,” Gwen murmurs. Excuses, always excuses. Tally trained everyone to make excuses for her. “Karl is older than I am, allegedly a grown-up. But he never thinks about anyone but himself.”

“Gwen-most people don’t think about anyone but themselves and maybe their children. Your mother would have walked through fire for you.” A pause. “As would I. But we don’t ask that of our spouses. Oh, we can ask, but we’re sure to be disappointed.”

Gwen shakes her head. “I’ve lived my whole life believing my mother to be happy, someone who struck a perfect balance before anyone even worried about such things. And now you’re telling me it was a lie.”

“Not a lie, exactly. But I don’t think she ever stopped thinking about the life she might have-what might have been. If she had gone to Wellesley, as she planned, if she had studied painting seriously-well, she couldn’t know who she might have been. The generation of women who came up behind her, girls barely a decade younger, were encouraged to do whatever they wanted. She ended up abandoning the painting she thought would be her masterpiece.”

“The painting of the young couple in the woods. What happened to that?”

“She painted over it, gave up.”

“I sometimes wonder about those paints, their toxicity, that poorly ventilated shed. And then there was all that diet soda she drank. Do you think either one could have caused her cancer?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care, Gwen. Knowing the cause means nothing. She was the love of my life, and I never regretted how our marriage came to be. But I’ll never know if she would say the same thing.”

“What should I do? About Karl? Go home and tell him everything? Go home and tell him nothing? For all the time we’ve been together, I’ve had the small comfort of being the good spouse, the one who made everything work. If I tell him about the affair, I won’t even have that anymore. I’ll just be the one who cheated.”

“I’ve had only one marriage, Gwen. You’ve had two. Perhaps you should be advising me.”

“I felt old,” she says. “And unattractive.”

“Dearest Gwen, there are only so many details I can handle.”

She looks down at her hands, and Clem’s eyes follow. They are shaking. The veins stand out in sharp relief, the skin is dry. He thinks about Gwen’s baby hands, cupping his face. Annabelle’s hands. Tally’s hands, dry and a little coarse from being denuded of paint every day, how she hated to leave a speck behind. His daughter’s hands make him feel so old.

“It’s easier to talk about Karl, what I’ve done, than the thing that’s really bothering me. Daddy-do you remember the night of the hurricane?”

It’s a double blow-the use of “Daddy,” the mention of that night.

“I wouldn’t be likely to forget that.”

“Tim and I-we’ve learned some things since Go-Go died.”

Blabbermouth Doris. Who hasn’t she told by this point?

“It wasn’t true,” Gwen says. “It didn’t happen.”

“Go-Go didn’t die?” He is honestly confused, and that one moment of confusion scares him, as it always does. The inability to follow a conversation-that’s a far more serious indicator of a failing mind than mere memory lapses.

“He wasn’t molested. Not by the man in the woods. He lied, he and McKey.”

“Who?” He decides it’s the sheer anxiety that he feels at the mention of the hurricane that is making it hard for him to focus.