The Uninnocent (24 page)

Never much of a drinker—Matthew wished she were, had more than once suggested it might loosen her up a little, in bed and out—Ellie thought to make an exception today, since this day was exceptional in its own right. Not without a little difficulty, she corkscrewed open a bottle of white wine—at least he'd left the fridge untouched—poured a healthy glassful, and placed another call, this time to her sister. Answering machine. She left a somewhat tortured message saying, in brief, that she needed to speak with her as soon as possible. “It's important,” she finished, then hung up, had another drink of wine, which was fruitier than she liked but was nicely jazzing her mind toward pushing further with the idea.

Ross was next, the only man besides Matthew who had ever meant something to her, whom she had ever loved, to use that difficult word, but it was true, loved. Ross, the man she left for Matthew. Unless he had moved, she expected to find him in his loft studio in Williamsburg. Thought of as a second-tier painter by the several critics who had ever reviewed him, Ross was a man Ellie had always believed in. In his vision, his future.

More than once over the years she found herself wondering what he was doing, what the work looked like now, if he'd had anything exhibited outside of galleries owned by friends in Red Hook and DUMBO. She had sent him a birthday card last year behind Matthew's back—another thing she would have to confess to her husband, if she could find him—but heard nothing in response. A woman answered the phone after what must have been a dozen rings. Big run-down loft, it used to take Ellie quite a while to get to that same telephone, old black rotary thing Ross had found at a thrift store, back when she lived with him. She asked if Ross was there.

“He's busy right now.”

“Painting?”

“Who is this?”

Ellie told her.

“Hold on,” she was told by a dauntingly impatient, if familiar voice.

She could so easily picture the loft with its long gallery of dirty windows, its uneven wide-plank floor, its myriad pipes like circuitry on the ceiling, every feature a legacy of its working-class, industrial history. This had been Ellie's home for more years than she'd been with Matthew. How many hundreds of hours had she posed nude for Ross? Vain as it might be, she missed those canvases with her abstracted image centering a furious hail of thick, dark, layered oils, like some exploded satanic halo. Sometimes she felt that seeing herself through his dizzying view of her was a truer act than looking in a mirror.

“What is it?” That was him all over again, abrupt as a palette knife slapping Belgian linen.

“Ross, it's Ellie.”

“I know
who
it is,
what
is it?”

“I'm calling to apologize for having left you for Matthew. I really did love you and I never wanted to hurt you but I, it was a confusing time for me and he had a career going and—”

“What, stop, are you crazy?”

“What's her problem?” the woman who had answered the phone asked in the background.

“And, listen, I need to apologize for not really being as good to you as you deserved.”

“Ellie, look. I haven't heard from you for how long, and this is what you have to say?”

“You never got my card?”

“What, are you standing on a high ledge or something?”

“Tell her to jump,” the other woman said.

“Shut up,” Ross said, perhaps to both of them.

“Listen, this is important to me.”

“It's always about you, isn't it.”

She could hear the woman still talking in excited tones and just then she placed the voice. Of all things. “Is that Dante?” she asked. “Could I speak with her for a moment? I need to tell her something.”

But Dante and Ross were now arguing with one another and her request was ignored, unheard, until Ross finally addressed Ellie again, his voice a taut snarl. “And tell that idiot husband of yours that if he so much as tries to get in touch with her again I'll kill him and paint an Expulsion from Eden with his blood.”

Ross always leaned toward violence in the ways he expressed himself. At one point she must have found it alluring to live with a tortured soul who spoke from depths few ever plumb. Now his vitriol was more depressing than evocative. She had somehow managed to forget that side of him, one of the reasons she'd left. “You mean you've heard from Matthew?”

“Good-bye already, Ellie.”

That didn't go so well. No, that one seemed to open wounds more than salve them. She took a deep breath and exhaled, shaking her head slowly as if blowing out invisible candles. With that gesture a memory surfaced, bringing a nostalgic smile to her face, of the time she baked Ross a big birthday cake and managed, pretty closely, to replicate one of his paintings on it using different-colored frostings. His response, rather than delight, had been one of outrage and insult. Ellie's smile flattened out. Lost years, those had been. Yet, she thought, shaking off the memory, hadn't she more or less accomplished what she set out to do today? One can only make the apology. What was more, she now knew where to send Dante (no last name, just Dante) a letter saying she was sorry for having been part of the reason her then-husband left her. What startling symmetry, that Matthew's former wife would be at Ross's place today. Life was more often like that than people acknowledged. Were there a God, he had a very dark sense of humor. Their quarreling sounded like lovers', she had to admit, the unbridled intensity of it being unlike any other kind of argument people shared—did one
share
an argument, like trading blows or insults,
trading
and
sharing
being terms that trembled with amicability?—and maybe they were lovers now. Two jilted people who through the agency of commiseration find in one another a promising new future? Possibly they were even married. Ellie felt a brief twinge of jealousy at this thought, but quickly put it aside. Today was not to be a selfish day, and jealousy is nothing if not a selfish emotion. What right did she have, anyway? This idea was about self-purification, not backsliding. Some apologies would not produce forgiveness. That was how things were.

Pull yourself together. She wrote Dante a handwritten letter and addressed it care of Ross in Williamsburg. Two more lines through two more names, knowing she would never hear back from either of them.

As the afternoon heat settled in the kitchen and as the now-warm chardonnay played more in her mind, an urgency began to take hold. She left messages on machines whenever she happened not to find someone at home or in their place of work. The idea was still a good idea. A sublime idea. The only idea. But she felt the pressure of it, its burden and weight, building behind her eyes. It would be best if her task were fulfilled as expeditiously as possible. No reason it couldn't be completed before she went to bed. A day of penance, like the day of the dead, except for the living. How long did baptisms take? A blessing, a brief submersion in holy water, and that was that. You were ready for entrance into heaven. Whatever heaven was and, for that matter, wasn't white the wrong color wine for a communion? It was. Anemic blood. No matter. Her quest for absolution mustn't devolve into the snake biting its own tale—tail, that is. Ellie was no Ouroboros, but a seeker of forgiveness.

She had borrowed a tiger-patterned silk scarf from Charlotte Nicosia that she never quite found it in her heart to give back. When her friend inquired, she'd allowed herself a white, or at least a beige, lie, saying she'd lost it. Of course, the whole misadventure was pointless since Ellie never wore it in public for fear of being exposed as the liar and thief she was. So she laid out the details of her subterfuge on the Nicosia family's voice mail, offered to return it, never suspecting that she had happened to tap into an old wound, as Charlotte herself had also stolen this siren of a scarf from her sister-in-law, under similar circumstances. Ellie would never know why Charlotte didn't return the call, but she was at least able to cross off one more name.

Once, when Matthew was away on bank business, on a night when she couldn't sleep, she had taken a long walk down to the river. This was in autumn, as she could remember the satisfying crunch of fallen leaves underfoot while strolling under the occasional cones of amber streetlights. Coming back up the hill, turning onto her block, she saw a group of boys vandalizing a neighbor's car. Halloween prank, she supposed. They saw her, she saw them, they ran. Next morning, when the police canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses, Ellie, not wanting to get involved, improvised that she had been asleep at the time. The children afterward, having never been caught, always gave her uncomfortable winks and smiles when she encountered them. She owed Carl Swansea an apology, and made it, setting the record straight for his wife, who asked her if she knew how to spell the boys' names. Afterward, she called the homes of the vandals and left messages apologizing that she could no longer keep their secret.

Then there was that time she kicked the neighbor's dog when he—Manny was his peculiar name, a rowdy terrier since deceased—snapped at her heels in the rain once when she cut through the Lytells' yard running home. She left a message on their machine apologizing for that and for the fact that, under circumstances not so very different from those surrounding Peter Savage's advances, she also kicked Arthur Lytell—kneed him, rather—last Christmas, in the Lytells' master bedroom, where she had gone to retrieve her and Matthew's overcoats for the walk home after the party. Though they had feigned an amicable neutrality in the months following the incident, Ellie knew things had changed somewhat, and she wanted to say she was sorry and hoped he understood she didn't mean to injure either him or his aging pet. And also hoped Mrs. Lytell didn't mind her saying so, but Arthur would have to appreciate the reason she never answered any of his private letters inviting her to meet him for a drink, to talk,
work things out
, as he put it, was because her husband would frown on such a meeting and she didn't want to make him unhappy. Lytell,
lie tell
. Another name, another line.

Her phone rang. An unexpected, jarring sound but also possibly promising. Someone was calling to forgive her, she thought, or better yet, maybe it was a reconciliatory Matthew. Instead, Randall McGibben. Had she been able to let her husband know he needed to check in with the office? She improvised, doing her best to sound businesslike. “Not as yet.” Could she give McGibben a contact number where Matthew could be reached immediately? Something had come up that required his attention, McGibben pressed, then, hearing nothing but terrified silence at the other end, said, “You don't have any idea where your husband is, do you?”

“Well, of course I do,” knowing that such a mistruth was just what she had committed to avoid under the aegis of the idea.

“Are you sure you're speaking with me honestly, Mrs. Mead? Eleanor?”

“You can call me Ellie.”

A pause, then doing his best to mask exasperation, “All right. Ellie.”

Here was a turning point she had neither foreseen nor knew how to negotiate. She swallowed, took a breath, and said, “No, sir, Mr. McGibben. I'm lying. And I apologize for that. But I'm lying for a good reason.”

“I'm sure you are. But you can appreciate my position and why I need to know what's happening here.”

“Well, if I knew myself—I mean, if I myself knew—I would tell you. Do you accept my apology? It's important that you do.”

“What? Sure. But we need to find him.”

“He'll call as soon as he—are there any problems?”

“Well, Mrs. Mead, there may be. But I need to address them directly with Matthew.”

Ellie hung up and focused on the list while distractedly meditating on what she possibly meant by
for a good reason
. She knew there was a good reason behind all this, but she could not identify what it was at that moment. Wasn't it possible she was trying to hurt others to make herself feel better? It was possible. Wasn't it possibly more possible she was doing all this to make her life, and the lives of all those around her, more truthful, more—she hated this word, but it was the one that came into her head—empowered. She was becoming powerful in the very meekness of her disclosures, she thought. But it wasn't about that. It was about the beauty of cleansing herself. Of purging a lifetime's deceit. It was about facing her demons. About making this day, this very hot day, evolve into meaning, meaningfulness, a passage from bad to better. She caught herself chewing on her fingernails—old, nasty habit.

It was about moving forward with the idea.

She dialed Will Jones down at the auto shop and apologized that Matthew hadn't been by to pay the repair bill for the transmission, brake, and body job done back in February. Yes, she was aware that a collection agency had been assigned to secure the overdue debt, had seen the mail, why else would she bother to call if not to say she was sorry for the trouble? No, she had not known that there had been a suit filed, a lien imposed. No, she didn't understand what all that quite meant, but she'd called for a different reason. But before she got to that, she mentioned her husband had gone off with his car and she didn't know where he was, and she wondered if he did.
Bastard absconded
was a little harsh, wasn't it, she asked before hanging up on him. Abrupt termination would have to suffice as a way of concluding some of these confessional apologies, at least with the argumentative and recalcitrant. She hadn't even had the chance to tell Will that the body work had to be done because she'd had a minor accident—black ice, a sturdy Norway spruce tree—and that the insurance company was reluctant to see transmission and brake problems as viable liabilities. Rather than tracing a line through his name, she bracketed him. Made her think about erasing Randall McGibben's name with its dark, excising line in order to rewrite and bracket it, too. Some of the business seemed too unfinished. But then, no, she realized her part was fulfilled. What she could do she had done and that was that.