Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Staring at him, her eyes went black and depthless and she seemed physically to swell, as though with malevolence. Ray expected a shout, but her voice was the confident whisper of a killer whose victim is helpless. “I know I should say I wish you well, but I wish you ill with all my heart. I’ve made it easy for you. I hope you suffer now with that woman who’s taken you from me. These women that carry on with married men are demons.”

She sounded like her mother, Gilda — Ermenegilda — sour, mustached, habitually in black, pedantically superstitious, Sicilian, always threatening the evil eye. He told himself that Angie was bitter, cruel for being grief-stricken, demented by the breakup, she didn’t mean this. They had no children; they divided their assets in half, the proceeds of his more than thirty years of dentistry. Angie got the family house, the dog, a lump sum; Ray the vacation house on the South Shore — he’d commute to his office from there, Shelby by his side. Shelby wasn’t greedy. She said she’d never been happier. Ray did not divulge to Shelby the vindictive curse Angie had uttered. He now had what he wanted, a new life with Shelby.

She was a treasure, unconventionally beautiful, not the fleshy new graduate she’d been when he first hired her but with the lean feline good health of the jogger she now was, tall and sharp-featured. Her mouth was almost severe — she hardly parted her lips when she spoke, and then always in a low certain voice that got his attention, as in, “What about Angie?”

With the unwavering judgment of someone untested, someone innocent and upright, Shelby was young, alert to the obvious. Her eyes were gray, blinkless, cat-like. Ray had desired her from the first, but thought that his feeling would diminish as he got to know her better. Time passed and his desire to possess her became a physical set of symptoms, like hunger, a swollen tongue, a droning in his head, a tingling in his hands.

Now she was his. He could not believe his luck, how she had come into his life, to lead him confidently into a future he’d hated to contemplate. He sometimes eavesdropped on her working on a patient in her concentrated way and he was almost tearful with gratitude that she was his wife. People said how a second wife was often a younger version of the first one, but she was in every way the opposite of Angie.

They had never argued, and so their first argument, a few months after their marriage, came as a shock to Ray. It concerned his high school reunion, the fortieth. Ray wanted to take Shelby. She protested that she’d feel out of place. Everyone knew a high school reunion was hell for a spouse. She said, “I think you’ll regret it.”

But Ray became a big smiling boy with a boast, and Shelby agreed, even to their staying the night at the hotel in his hometown, where the reunion would be held in the ballroom.

Medford had changed: it was denser and now divided by the interstate, much busier, but still full of memories, as he told Shelby on their tour through the place, the two brick façades that had once been the entrances to single-screen movie theaters, the National Guard armory that bulked like a granite citadel, the basement stairs that had led to Joe’s poolroom, the Italian cobbler, the Chinese laundry, the post office with the old murals of shipbuilding in its lobby. Now Medford had a new hotel, with a ballroom large enough to accommodate the high school reunion.

“One night, nonsmoking, king-size bed,” the clerk said at the reception counter, tapping the check-in card with her pen, but she kept glancing at Shelby, uneasily, almost with pity, as though suspecting an abduction.

They drew stares later, too, as they searched the table for their name labels.

“I don’t really need one. It’s your night,” Shelby said.

But as she said it, Ray peeled the paper backing from Shelby Testa and stuck the label to her beaded jacket.

A woman in a black shawl approached them as Ray was patting the label flat. The woman flourished a large yellow envelope and drew a black-and-white photograph from it, saying, “Miss Balsam’s class. Third grade. Do you recognize yourself?”

“That’s me, third row,” Ray said. “And that’s you in the front with your hands in your lap. Maura Dedrick, you were so cute!”

“Aren’t I still cute?” the woman said.

Twisting her fingers together over the old photo, she was small and thin and deeply lined, with weary eyes. No makeup, with a trace of hair on her cheeks, fretful lips, her open mouth like a grommet in canvas.

“Of course you are,” Ray said.

Smiling sadly, as though he had satirized her with his sudden answer, appearing to dare him, wanting something more, she seemed to go dark with defiance. And she turned, because two other women had come to greet her.

“You remember Roberta and Annie,” Maura said.

Ray said “You married Larry” to Roberta.

“He left me,” Roberta said.

“I’m divorced too,” Annie said.

All this time, Ray was aware that while they were talking to him they were eyeing Shelby. Annie was bigger than he remembered, not just plump and full-faced but taller — probably her shoes — and she was carrying a handbag as big as a valise. Roberta was heavily made up, wearing ropes of green beads, Gypsy-like. Ray had known them as girls. They were old women now — older than him, he felt, for their look of abandonment tinged with anger. When they became aware of his gaze they recoiled in a way that made him feel intrusive. They were fifty-eight, everyone in the room was that age, though when he surveyed the growing crowd he could see that some had fared better than others.

“May I introduce my wife?” Ray said. “This is Shelby.”

The women smiled, they clucked; but Ray saw that Maura had narrowed her eyes, and Annie had leaned closer, and Roberta seemed to snicker. Putting his arm around Shelby, he felt her tremble.

Maura said to Shelby, “Angie was so mad when I went to the junior prom with Ray. Angie was my best friend — still is.”

Roberta hovered over Shelby and spoke in a deaf person’s shout, “He took me to Canobie Lake. He got fresh!”

“Remember what you wrote in my yearbook?” Annie said. “‘You’re the ultimate in feminine pulchritude.’”

“I guess I had a way with words,” Ray said.

“You had a way with your hands,” Roberta said, shouting again.

Maura said to Shelby, “I’ve known Ray Testa since I was seven years old.”

Everything that he’d forgotten was real and immediate to them — the prom, the lake, the yearbook, Miss Balsam’s third-grade class. He had lived his life without looking back, and he’d been happy. But had their disappointment made them dwell on the past, as a consolation?

He said, “Shel and I need a drink.”

Maura said, “I’ll get it.”

“Don’t bother.”

But she insisted, and after she slipped away they spoke with Annie and Roberta. While they chatted about changes in Medford, he remembered the rowboat at Canobie Lake, the fumbled kiss, his clutching Roberta, the way she had snatched at his hands. And Annie — the summer night on her porch, her arms folded over her breasts, and “Don’t, please.” And when Maura returned with the drinks he recalled the back seat of his father’s car at the drive-in, the half-pint of Four Roses, and “Cut it out.” Horrible.

Maura handed over the two glasses of white wine. Ray sipped his, but Shelby held hers in both hands as though for balance, not raising it.

“Drink up,” Maura said.

Shelby put her glass to her lips, and Ray did the same. The warm wine had the dusty taste of chalk and a tang he couldn’t name, perhaps a metal — zinc, maybe, with the smack of cat piss — and he found it hard to swallow, but to please Maura he swigged again, and he knew he was right in thinking it was foul, because Shelby did no more than sip. And seeing Shelby struggle, Maura looked on with what he took to be satisfaction.