Good Little Wives (2 page)

It was a small, square room
—
not a big, open
one like the one George Kimball had been escorted into so he could receive Monday night visitors.

There was a lone table the same size as the cozy kitchen table in the split-level where Dana had grown up—not a configuration of bureaucratic, banquet-style tables shaped into a “U” with inmates parked on one side and visitors directed to the other.

It was almost friendly—not at all like in Indiana.

Dana waited in the room alone, looking out a window that had wire honeycombed inside the glass. She clicked her fingernails together and wished Kitty would get there before she
spent too much time thinking about her father and wondering if he was still alive.

A heavy door creaked open.

Kitty stood in the doorway. Her jaw went slack; her eyebrows knitted into a waxed “W”. “Dana,” she said.

Dana wrung her hands. “Kitty. Are you all right?”

She didn't look all right. Her muddy brown hair was sticking up as if she'd had an electric shock; her skin was pale, in grave need of a good foundation and a little blush. The body that Kitty used to hate (no matter what diet or exercise regimen she followed, she could never quite flatten her tummy) had grown thin and frail since Dana had last seen her.

But Kitty said, “I'm fine,” because that was what the women of New Falls had been trained to say. “The bed's not very comfortable, but I didn't feel like sleeping anyway.”

Dana sat down because her legs were suddenly weak. “Are you cold?” she asked. “You can have my jacket.”

“That would be nice. I'm freezing.” She wore only linen pants and a short-sleeved sweater, which must have been the outfit she'd had on yesterday when they'd found her standing over Vincent,
a trickle of blood oozing from his left ear, a gun slack, still smoking, in Kitty's right hand.

Short sleeves and linen, Dana thought. No wonder Kitty was freezing.

Dana unzipped the jacket and wondered how Caroline would have known that. Did she, too, have a father in another state that she didn't talk about? She handed the jacket over to Kitty, who slipped it on quickly and huddled against its warmth. A guard in the doorway didn't seem inclined to take it away. In fact, he didn't seem to be paying attention to them at all.

“Your arraignment's scheduled for one,” Dana said as if Kitty didn't know. She lowered her voice. “Has your attorney been here?”

Kitty sat down across from her. “I don't have one.”

Surely Dana misunderstood. “What do you mean? Of course you have an attorney.”

“Only a court-appointed one. A young girl right out of law school. I'm her first murder case.”

Dana leaned closer. “Kitty, that's ridiculous.”

Kitty shrugged.

“What about the man who did your divorce?”

But Kitty shook her head. “Sean isn't a criminal lawyer. I don't know any of those, do you?”

Dana could hardly say the only one she knew was back in Indiana. “No. But if you need help…”

Kitty shrugged again.

“What about your children?”

“I guess they're too busy making funeral arrangements.”

Dana wondered what her boys would have done if she'd been arrested for killing Steven. Would they rally to her side or his? She stared out the window again.

“It's nice of you to come,” Kitty said. “Thank you for the jacket.”

“It was Caroline's idea.”

The eyebrows scrunched back into the “W”.

“We're all concerned about you, Kitty.” She said it as if all the women who'd been at the rite-of-spring luncheon were now lined up at the barbed wire with fleece jackets of their own.

Kitty didn't respond, perhaps because she knew better.

“I'll come to the arraignment,” Dana said. She didn't say she'd post her bail because even tolerant Steven might draw the line at that. “In the meantime, is there anything I can do? Call your kids? Anything?”

“You can find Vincent's killer,” Kitty said.

“Pardon me?”

“I said you can find Vincent's killer. You don't really think I murdered him, do you?”

 

“Mrs. DeLano killed her husband?” It was Sam, calling from Dartmouth. He sounded anxious, the most sensitive of Dana's boys, the one who cared too much about other people.

“Mom?” Michael was next. “What's going on?” He was between meetings, had heard the news on Wall Street.

Steven did not call. Apparently the Kitty/Vincent saga hadn't made
USA Today
yet.

She had just finished assuring Michael that Mrs. DeLano was fine when the doorbell rang. It was Bridget.

“You went there?” she accused as she pushed past Dana and moved into the living room without being invited. She wore a pink jogging suit that accented her round boobs—“all-natural, no implants,
merci beaucoup,”
Bridget was fond of saying. (Unlike Lauren, Dana, and Caroline, who wore sizes four, six, and eight respectively and had heights according to that, Bridget, at five-five, was a twelve on the top, six on the bottom; so much for French women being scrawny.) She also wore too much Chanel for this time of day, not even lunchtime. She went to the twin love seats by the fireplace and made herself at home.

“Coffee?” Dana asked.

Bridget shook her head. Her black curls danced and bounced. “Answers. I want answers. How is our dear Kitty?” She pronounced “is” like “ees” and “Kitty” like “Keety.” Sometimes her accent was more than annoying.

Dana dropped onto the sofa across from her. “She didn't do it,” she said.

The phone rang again. That time it was Lauren.

“Whatever has happened?” Lauren cried in tiny, childlike sounds.

“I'll tell you both at the same time,” Dana said. With her eyes on Bridget and the phone to one ear, she drew in a long breath and said how she'd gone to see Kitty and how she'd given her the jacket and how Kitty said she didn't do it. She did not tell them how terrible Kitty had looked. That fact seemed too much like the gossip that Dana detested.

When she was finished, she handed the phone to Bridget. “Talk to Lauren if you want. I'm going upstairs to get ready for the arraignment.”

Neither Bridget nor Lauren offered to go with her.

 

Caroline sat at her vanity table, pulling her short, sun-colored, painted hair under a terry headband. She studied her reflection, pleased at the absence of the finest lines around her amber eyes, her now-full, coral lips. She wondered if she'd need another facelift when she turned sixty-four. Would twelve years be too much time between her second and her third?

“Everyone is different,” Dr. Gregg had said. “You have exceptional skin tone. You may be able to wait fifteen years.”

It wasn't as if he needed to drum up more business. Though his waiting room was like a therapist's—with an entrance
and an exit positioned so patients did not see one another—Caroline knew that, in addition to the women of New Falls, Dr. Gregg had amassed a clientele of men who wanted to be nipped and tucked, too, who were desperate to avert the onrushing train of that hideous thing called time.

One would think we lived in L.A.
, Caroline mused as she picked up the silver pot of face powder and dabbed the sable brush.

“Do you think New Falls will make the evening news?” her husband, Jack, said as he entered her dressing room, the
New Falls Journal
in his hand.

“Doubtful,” she said, curving the brush from nose to ear with a swift, circular sweep. “It's not as if Vincent was an up-and-coming player.”

She knew, because Jack had told her in confidence, that Vincent's client list had begun to shrivel a year or so ago, that his edge had lost its sharpness, his drive had slowed its pace—a lethal combination when money was at stake. It had happened around the time that he'd met Yolanda and, according to Kitty, his brain was lobotomized by his dick.

Still, Vincent DeLano had found a way to survive until now.

Setting down the pot of powder, she picked up a light brown eye pencil and started to enhance the half moons above her eyes. In the mirror, she saw Jack sit on the velvet side chair and cross his legs as if he were a girl.

“I don't think I have to suggest that it's best if you stay out of this,” he said.

He had on a light blue shirt, a gray-blue tie, and gray flannel pants. He was dressed for the office today (an increasingly rare occurrence), though he wouldn't leave for the city until noon, leaving rush hour to the “amateurs” and lunch to
the hungry. Jack Meacham, after all, no longer hungered for anything. He had started his own mutual fund a number of years ago, sold out when mutual funds were hot, made a great fortune, and only dabbled now and then for fun: a few million here, a few there. Mostly Jack played golf.

“I do not intend to get involved,” Caroline replied. She noted that Jack looked older in his reflection, his face showing wear, his eyes downcast as if he were tired. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Me?” He raised his head. He stood up. “I'm fine, Caroline. I just find this sort of thing extremely sad.”

“That a friend of mine is in jail?”

“No,” he said. “That a friend of mine is dead.”

It was about the men, of course. It always was.

“Oh,” she answered, and resumed the task of her makeup.

She was aware he still stood there, though she didn't expect he was looking at her, thinking about her. When they'd been young she'd often thought his pensive moments were spent in obsessive thoughts about her; how she was the most regal of all their friends; how she strode so elegantly into a room and paused to be admired; how only Jack knew that beneath her silk and satin, she wore nothing at all; how they'd had awesome sex the night or the week or the month before (he especially loved to watch while she masturbated, an act that always engorged his member and resulted in power-thrusts she did not understand).

It had taken a few years for Caroline to realize that in those pensive moments, her husband had not been thinking about her at all, but about his next mega-deal, the next client he would land, the next eagle/birdie/hole-in-one he would score.

“Well,” he said, “I'm off to work then.”

He left the room without kissing her good-bye, no doubt because he hadn't thought of that, either.

She set down the eye pencil, picked up the palette of blush, blended peach with rose, and applied it to her cheeks, wondering what Jack would say if he knew that, not so long ago, she had considered having him disposed of, not unlike the way Vincent was disposed, deposed, yesterday.

Kitty's son, Marvin, showed up at her arraign
ment and posted his mother's bail. Then he asked if Dana would mind taking her home. “I must get back to work,” he said, pushing his round, black-framed glasses up onto the bridge of his sloping nose. Though not quite thirty, he was a top proctologist at Cedars-Sinai. It was a profession so fraught with innuendo that most people didn't say a word, they just tried to hide their smiles.

Kitty kissed her son and thanked him for the bail. As dispassionate as Dana's life had become, she was grateful that she was not Kitty.

“Shall we stop for lunch?” Dana asked, once they were seat-belted inside the Volvo.

Kitty sort of nodded. “If you'd like,” she said, her head tipping curiously to one side, her arms wrapping themselves around her too-thin middle, her gaze fixating on the dashboard.

They went to The Chocolate Flan because it was on the way to the apartment where Kitty had been staying since the movers had absolved the marital house of its furnishings. Like the apartment, the restaurant was in Tarrytown, so it would not matter that Kitty looked like a zombie, or that she wore Dana's Polarfleece with linen pants.

They ordered salads. Kitty also ordered wine.

“You need a real attorney,” Dana said.

Kitty flinched as if she only just then realized that they were in the restaurant and not still in the car. “It won't matter,” she replied. “I was the one who was holding the gun. No one's going to believe I didn't do it.”

Dana spread the mocha-colored napkin across her lap. “What happened, Kitty?”

Kitty zipped the fleece as if it were as cold in there as at the jail. Her eyes did not meet Dana's but attached themselves to the small sunflower in the center of the table. “I went to the house to meet him.” The waiter brought her wine. She took a long, slow sip. “Vincent was already dead. Right there in the living room.” She took another drink. Dana wished she'd ordered wine, too. “I got scared,” Kitty added. “I took out my gun.”

“Your gun? I didn't know you owned a gun.”

“Vincent bought it for me. He was so worried about all the cash he always carried. He was afraid someone would think I carried a lot of money, too.”

Dana didn't ask why a futures trader—or his wife—would carry a lot of cash. Steven rarely had more than a hundred dollars, relegating the space in his wallet to American Express. Dana wasn't much different.

“But…” Dana stumbled for the words. “The article said the gun was still smoking.” Since the boys had grown and gone and Steven was traveling so much, Dana spent too much time home alone, watching too many
Law & Order
reruns. She supposed it was a throwback to her early years as a cop's daughter and her brief journalism dreams. But even before Lennie Briscoe and Jack McCoy, Dana would have known that when a gun was “still smoking,” it had just been fired.

Kitty lifted her glass again. “Ah,” she said, “a smoking gun. Right out of a Sue Grafton novel.”

It was the first spark of life Dana had witnessed since seeing Kitty that morning.

Then, lowering both her eyes and her voice, Kitty said, “I heard a noise. I thought the murderer was still in the house. I took out my gun and pulled the trigger by mistake. I shot the Oriental rug.”

“Excuse me?” Dana asked.

“The rug,” Kitty said, lifting her head again, this time her blue eyes wet with tears. “I shot the bloody rug that we bought when we went to Istanbul for our twentieth wedding anniversary.”

Dana frowned. “Isn't the house empty?”

“Yes. Except for the rugs. A dealer from Newbury Street in Boston was coming to give us a price. Vincent promised to split the cash with me. Keep it away from the lawyers, you
know. They already were charging the net worth of the house and the villa combined. Anyway, that's why I went there. To meet Vincent and the rug dealer. We have nine carpets, in all. Scattered all over the house.” She waved her hand as if she were talking about dust mites and not valuable antique rugs.

“Did you tell the police?”

“Tell them what?”

“That you shot the rug?”

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“They told me I had the right to remain silent.”

The salads came, the waiter left.

“And did you?”

“I didn't think I had a choice. What with the way it looked and all.”

The boys from
Law & Order
no doubt would have agreed.

 

Bridget had tried to be a good wife to Randall Haynes, a
joyeux fille
who would make his life a pleasant one. She did not care that some people thought she was a trophy: That was an American slang term; Americans could be so
grossier
, so
visqueux
.

Last year she had made certain her daughter was finally going to school in Provence—Ecole Ste. Anne—where Bridget would have gone if her parents could have afforded it. But Aimée was an only child, and Randall had finally agreed to send her, though he lamented that three times a year—Christmas break and spring and summer—would not be often enough to see his fourteen-year-old daughter.

Still, he'd allowed it because he knew his wife was from Provence. Luckily he did not know the rest.

But Bridget had tried to be a good wife. They'd had their ups and downs, like when he'd wanted more children and she'd said absolutely not, that she had not liked being pregnant, that she'd thrown up all the time. His good nature had vanished like a blip on a screen. He'd threatened to send her back to France without their daughter and without a dime. He said that in America the courts always sided with the parent with the money, especially if he could prove that prior to meeting him, she'd merely been a waitress and not a good one at that.

She hadn't known if his caveats were true; she hadn't known how to find out.

She hated Randall during that horrid time, hated him
très terriblement
. She thought of kidnapping Aimée and running away. But Bridget had nowhere to go, no longer anyone to go to.

She decided if she couldn't have a good life, at least her daughter could. So she pretended to change her mind, to agree with Randall that another child would be worth a few months of illness. His humor, his love, returned. For several years she pretended to be trying to get pregnant, but instead she took the pill. Lucky for her, Randall was Catholic. As time went by he began to think that God had intervened (Bridget paid off a wayward priest to delicately plant the suggestion). When she turned forty, Randall woefully gave up, and now they only had sex on occasion, like Christmas and birthdays and when the Dow broke twelve thousand.

Through it all, Bridget had not once thought of shooting him.

She stood in the middle of her daughter's enormous walk-in closet now, surveying the skirts and shirts and pants and cotton sweaters Aimée might want at school in the next couple of months. It had been a thin excuse for not accompanying Dana to Kitty's arraignment. But the truth was, she couldn't fit one more drama into her life.

“So sorry, darling,” Bridget had whined when Dana emerged from upstairs, dressed for the courtroom, keys to her Volvo in her hand. “But I'll be leaving in days to get Aimée—I have so much to do!”

She could have lied and said she had a doctor's appointment, but she'd had enough of those lately and didn't want to jinx her diagnosis.

“Most women survive cervical cancer,” her doctor had told her.

No one else, of course, knew. Not Dana or Caroline or Lauren. Not Aimée. Not Randall.

When Bridget had her hysterectomy, they'd thought she'd gone into the city to have some work done on her thighs (liposuction wasn't just for fat people anymore) and her tummy (tucking was so easy). It was amazing how the latest patient rights' legislation helped you burrow like a little mole in a medical backyard, helped you keep your private things truly private, God bless America.

Radiation treatments were even easier to pull off: She'd claimed to be a volunteer for a French program at the United Nations. Every day for seven weeks, she took the train into the city. No one questioned, not even Randall, why she was exhausted. Nor did anyone question why she was having god
awful hot flashes because no one knew her body had been hurled into menopause ahead of its natural time.

Still, the doctors wanted Bridget to have chemotherapy. But she wanted to put it off until she'd told Luc.

Luc, after all, had been her first husband, though her second didn't know it; he'd fathered her son, whom Randall didn't know about, either. Luc was the man Bridget had loved forever, the man who lived across the sea, not far from where Aimée now went to school,
quelle coincidence
. Bridget needed for Luc to know she still loved him, in case she was not like “most women” and did not survive.

Plucking a pretty pink sweater from a cubbyhole, Bridget smiled. She folded it, dropped it into the suitcase. She'd leave for Provence this coming weekend to spend a few days in the country before bringing her daughter home. While she was there, she'd tell Luc about the cancer. Maybe then he'd tell her that he still loved her, too.

With slow, deliberate motions, she packed the suitcase. If she finished early enough, she might go back to Dana's and ask how Kitty had made out.

 

It was after five o'clock when Dana finally arrived home. She went into the living room, poured a glass of wine, and sat down on the love seat, propping her feet on the low coffee table, the way she'd often admonished her sons for doing.

She'd hated leaving Kitty. The apartment Kitty was renting (two bedrooms, two baths, no ambience) was partially filled with the landlord's unimaginative furniture, poorly framed floral prints, and thin window blinds that at least blocked the
view of Interstate 287. She said she'd be fine but Dana wasn't convinced.

Nor was she convinced Kitty hadn't shot Vincent.

It had been nearly a year since Kitty had been one of “them,” nearly a year since Vincent had left her and snatched her credentials the way the Queen of England had once revoked Princess Di's “HRH” just because her husband couldn't get his priorities straight. It was abominable, Dana thought, the way men could be the screwups, yet emerge the victors.

Her cell phone and the house phone rang simultaneously. Dana closed her eyes and considered answering neither. But she'd spent too many years as a mother to be comfortable with that (“Michael”—or Ben or Sam—“fell on the playground and split his forehead open”) and too long as a New Falls wife to expect such a luxury (“Honey, my driver can't get to LaGuardia. Do you feel like taking a ride?”).

So she opened her eyes, checked caller ID (Caroline, not the school, and Bridget, not her husband), and answered them both anyway.

“We all need to do lunch tomorrow,” Caroline said, and Dana agreed and passed the query over to Bridget.

Lunch, of course, was not about food, which none of them ate much of anyway. It was, instead, their justification to talk, their venue for resolving the persistent issues that had a way of creeping into their lives.

The issue, right now, being Kitty, though Dana was surprised Caroline was feigning interest.

“She called me,” Caroline said.

“She called her,” Dana relayed to Bridget, who was on the cell.

“She wants the name of an attorney.”

“She asked Caroline for the name of an attorney.”

“She doesn't understand that I can't get involved.”

Dana wasn't sure how to translate that to Bridget, so she merely tucked the receiver between her neck and her chin and took a drink from her glass.

“What time?” Bridget was asking. “And where?”

“Where?” Dana asked Caroline. “What time?” She'd have to reschedule her pedicure, but this was more important. Steven wouldn't be home for another few days, and it wasn't as if anyone else saw her toes.

“Twelve-thirty. At Calabrese.”

“That's in Tarrytown,” Dana said.

“Yes. It's near where Kitty lives. She'll join us there.”

Dana passed the information on to Bridget, who asked, “Shall I call Lauren?”

Dana turned from her cell back to her landline. “What about Lauren?”

“No,” Caroline said. “I already called her. She said she can't make it.”

Can't.
Won't
was more like it, Dana suspected. Lauren, after all, was afraid of her own silly shadow.

“Shall we meet at the restaurant?” Dana asked.

“Yes,” Caroline replied. “I have an early appointment at the museum.” She was on more boards of directors than seemed physically possible.

“We'll meet her there,” Dana told Bridget.

“I'll pick you up,” Bridget said to Dana, which would happily allow for pre-and post-lunch discussion.

They said good-bye all around, then Dana hung up both phones, stared at her wineglass, and wondered how it happened that life did these kinds of things, that as soon as you felt restless and bored, along came a distraction to keep you from losing your mind.

 

She thought she was going to go crazy.

Lauren sat on the window seat in the master suite, looking out at the rolling green lawn and the towering oak trees and the flower beds that had been tended by Jeffrey, the gardener, who once worked for Martha Stewart but now worked for her and for Caroline, too, doing twice the work for four times the price. He had, after all, married Lauren's stepdaughter Dory, and the women took care of their own.

Lauren sat on the window seat, toying with her triple strand of pearls, her eyes stinging with tears, her throat closing with fright.

She was alone in the “big house on the hill,” as Bob called it because of the way it was perched, overlooking (over
seeing
) the town as Bob liked to do. Bob and Mr. Chang had gone into the city, after Mr. Chang said he'd very much enjoyed his visit to their home.