Deadly Beloved Read online

  “I don’t understand how you got this way,” Evelyn’s mother would say, visiting from Altoona. “Nobody in our family ever got this way.”

  Evelyn kept chocolate-covered marshmallow pinwheels and long thick sticks of pepperoni and big hunks of blue cheese under the winter jackets in the window seat on the half-landing at the front of the house. Sitting there, she could hear Henry as soon as he started to move around in the master bedroom at the top of the stairs. She could also see out onto Winding Brook Road. She saw Patsy MacLaren Willis pack her Volvo full of clothes and get into it and leave. She saw Molly Bracken come off her porch and go down her walk and get the morning paper from the end of her drive. Evelyn sat there for hours, thinking about all the other women on this street, thinking about herself. Between six o’clock and quarter to eight she finished six and a half pounds of pepperoni, three and a half pounds of blue cheese, and thirty-four chocolate-covered marshmallow pinwheels. She also came to this conclusion: Nice little working-class girls from Altoona should not go to Bryn Mawr, or marry their medieval literature professors, or move into places like Fox Run Hill. They would only end up afraid of their own houses, and so hungry they would never get enough, and so frantic they would never be able to think straight. Like her, they would sit around wondering how long it would be before their husbands decided to hire good lawyers and get themselves divorced.

  It was now five minutes to eight. Evelyn had stopped eating ten minutes earlier, when she had heard Henry get out of bed and go to the shower. She had put away all the packages and dusted crumbs off the polished oak of the window seat. Now she heard Henry get out of the shower and pad across the wall-to-wall carpeting to the dressing room. She got up and started to make her way downstairs, slowly and painfully. All movement was painful for her these days. Her feet hurt so much when she stood up on them, she wanted to cry. They had become big too, so large and wide she had trouble finding shoes to fit them. She had started buying expensive men’s athletic shoes made of black leather and decorated with brightly dyed stripes meant to look like lightning.

  “Your feet will get smaller when you lose the weight,” Henry would tell her. “They won’t hurt so much either. Believe me. I know.”

  When Evelyn had first met Henry, he had been massive, impressive, beautiful. Now, thinner, he seemed diminished to her. His mouth was always pinched tight. His flesh hung slackly against his bones no matter how much he exercised. When she saw him with the other men on the stone terrace of the country club, drinking gin and tonic, hefting tennis rackets, Henry was always the one who looked fake, phony, totally out of place.

  “Marriage is a crapshoot,” Evelyn’s mother always said, and: “You have to take men the way you find them.”

  I would be happy to take Henry the way I found him, Evelyn told herself. I just don’t want him the way he is now.

  There was a professional doctor’s scale in one corner of the breakfast nook. Henry had put it there to check Evelyn’s progress every morning. He had also locked up the coffee and the tea and the Perrier water, so that she couldn’t drink them before he got up and blame any weight gain on fluid in her system. He made her take off her shoes and stockings and dress and stand in the nook in her underwear, her big breasts spilling down over the rounded swell of her belly, her thighs lumpy and veined and mottled blue and red with fat and age.

  “Look at you,” he would say as she stood there, a breeze coming through one of the open skylights, feeling cold, feeling stupid, feeling as ugly as she had always known she was inside. “Look at you.”

  Upstairs in the bedroom there were mirrors now, all along one wall, so that she couldn’t escape looking at herself. If she tried to close her eyes, she fell. If she fell, she had a hard time getting up. Henry would have to get up himself and help her. Then the questions would start. What are you doing up and dressed this early in the morning? Where are you going? Where are you hiding the food?

  “Look at you,” he would say, spinning her around so that she was forced to face the mirrors. He would grab at the front of her dress and tear. The dress would pull away from her body and hang off her shoulders in tatters. In the mirror a grotesque fat woman with bulging eyes and pussy red pimples along the line of her jaw would stare back at her, hateful and angry, as hateful and angry as Henry had gotten to be.

  “Look at you,” he would say, and one day, provoked beyond endurance, finding a trail of crumbs wound along one of her massive breasts, he had torn at her bra too. He had torn it right off, snapping the elastic painfully on her back, dragging the spike of one bra hook into her flesh until she bled. Her breasts bounced up and down and side to side, and that hurt too. Her nipples and the area around them were as thick and dark and dry as leather. There was a mountain of crumbs in her bra, between her breasts. It popped into fragments as soon as her breasts came free and scattered over the white wall-to-wall carpeting like ashes blown into town from a distant forest fire.

  “Look at you,” Henry had screamed loud enough so that Evelyn was suddenly glad of all that central air-conditioning, all those sound buffers placed on all the properties, all those illusions of space and grace. Her breasts were shaking, hurting, bouncing. They were so big now that she even wore a bra to bed. Henry’s face was so red, she thought he was having a heart attack. His eyes seemed to be coming out of his head. The knuckles on both of his hands were white. Suddenly he reached out and snatched at her underwear. He grabbed the elastic waistband in his fists and pulled with all his might. The elastic tore and the nylon tore after it. A second later Henry had shreds of underwear in his hands and Evelyn was standing naked. The only thing Evelyn remembered after that was that her pubic hair seemed to have disappeared. It was hidden by the curtains of flesh that had draped themselves around her, hanging like an apron from her waist.

  Look at you, Evelyn thought now, listening to the sound of Henry’s footsteps on the staircase. A second later he was in the kitchen, dressed in white chinos and a bright red polo shirt and deck shoes, his hands in his pockets, his hair combed to make maximum use of the fact that it was every bit as thick now as it had been when he was twenty. I really hate this man’s face, Evelyn thought as she waited for him. I hate it so much, I would like to boil it off with acid. Then she was just glad that she hadn’t been sitting down when he came into the room. More and more lately, she didn’t quite fit on a single chair. More and more, Henry tended to notice it.

  “Well, Evelyn,” he said, sitting down in one of the breakfast nook chairs, “are we going to find any surprises on the scale today?”

  Evelyn suddenly thought of Patsy MacLaren Willis, out in her driveway with all those clothes. There had never been a divorce in Fox Run Hill as far as Evelyn knew. It was the kind of place men moved with their second wives. Still, she thought, there was a first time for everything.

  3.

  MOLLY BRACKEN WOULD HAVE been divorced years ago if her husband Joey had had anything to say about it, except for the fact that Molly was the one who happened to have all the money. It wasn’t serious money, the way money is judged serious in a place like New York—not enough to go into real estate deals with Donald Trump or to try a hostile takeover of IBM. It wasn’t old money the way Philadelphia liked old money either. Neither Molly nor her family knew of any ancestors who had come over to America on the Mayflower. One of Molly’s grandfathers had been a shoemaker and the other had worked in the steel mills in Bethlehem until he’d had an early heart attack at the age of thirty-six. Molly’s money came from her father, who was that horror of horrors to progressive people everywhere, a commercial contractor. He had put up tracts of houses in every town on the Main Line and finally he had put up this tract of houses, Fox Run Hill. The elegant Victorian had been Molly’s wedding present from him, complete with four round turrets and a wraparound porch big enough to hold a high school graduation on. There was even a tower room in one of the turrets, reached by a hidden staircase, with leaded stained glass in the curved windows. Everything about this hous
e was perfect, exactly the way Molly had imagined it would be, back when she was still in grade school and cutting fantasies out of bridal magazines. These days, Molly had heard, girls weren’t allowed to do that kind of thing. They had to be serious about their schoolwork and ambitious for careers. They had to want to be doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs instead of chatelaines. Molly sometimes wondered what happened to those girls. She was forty-eight years old, and all the women she knew who were doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs were both drab and divorced, as if the two things went together. They were drab because their clothes always seemed to hang wrong and they never wore enough makeup. They were divorced, Molly thought, because they could never just relax and talk about the weather. They had to discuss stocks and bonds, or the Clinton health care plan, or their feelings.

  Molly’s feelings ran mostly to self-satisfaction. In the kitchen of the elegant Victorian, in the circle of light cast by the sunroom windows, she finished reading the women’s page of the Philadelphia Inquirer and put her head up to listen for sounds of Joey getting ready for work. It was ten minutes to nine, but that didn’t matter much. Joey worked in the customer service department of a bank on the edge of Philadelphia. He wasn’t usually expected in until nine-thirty. Molly smoothed the paper out under her fingers and then reached for the coffee pitcher on the trivet in the middle of the table. On the whole, it was shaping up to be a very good day. The weather was going to be bright and hot, Molly’s favorite kind. The newspaper had been full of the kind of news she loved best, what with Princess Di having a new lover and Cher rumored to be hidden away in a plastic surgery clinic somewhere. Even the book section had been a blessing, because the book reviewed there was a novel by Judith Krantz, whom Molly not only read and liked, but understood. Sometimes the book review section caused her trouble because, unlike most of the other women at Fox Run Hill, Molly had never been to college. If the book of the day was something philosophical or historical, Molly would be forced to sit quietly all through lunch at the club, just so she wouldn’t say anything stupid that would make them laugh at her.

  Molly heard the door of the master bedroom suite opening and closing. She nodded to herself with unconscious satisfaction and patted at her hair. Her hair was the same bright blond it had been when she was in high school. She used the same home dye product now that she had used then. What she was really proud of was her figure, which was still a size six. Part of that was diet. Part of that was exercise. Part of that was abortions. Molly had had her first abortion at fifteen, illegally, at a terrible place in New York that Joey had known about from the cousin of a friend of his. She’d had her latest at a polished steel and bright-tiled clinic in Philadelphia, just two and a half weeks ago. She had had eight abortions in all, and if she had to, she would have eight more. Children could ruin your life. Her mother had told her so. Besides, she could see it, all around her, the way children ate up their parents and never gave anything back. Fathers made out all right. They escaped to their offices and their poker games. Mothers were devoured whole and spit back dead. Molly didn’t think she had ever hated anyone as much as she hated her mother.

  The French doors to the kitchen swung back and Joey came in, his face looking only half shaved, his neck looking too red where the barber had cut his hair too close to the skin. The face and the neck didn’t go with the suit. Razors and haircuts were things Joey was required to buy for himself. He always bought the cheapest kinds available. The suit was something Molly had bought for him. It was a good summer wool, custom-made at Brooks Brothers, and it looked much too good for someone who worked in the customer service department of a bank. When Molly was being critical, she had to admit that Joey never looked as if he worked in the customer service department of a bank, or any other department of a bank, and not because he looked too good for it. Joey had been the town hood when Molly first met him, and in some ways he still was. No matter how many times he got his hair cut short, it still wanted to form a ducktail at the nape of his neck. No matter how many times he put on good suits and wing tip shoes, he still walked with the hip-jutting swagger he had learned in tight jeans and shitkicker boots. Molly sometimes thought of that, of the way they were together when they first met, and always surprised herself. She could even remember being happy, in an abstract way that had nothing to do with her emotions. The only emotion she could feel, looking back, was an anger so hot and wild it threatened to drown her. It took in everything: the motorcycles and the cars and the sex and the taste of warm Pabst Blue Ribbon stolen out of somebody’s mother’s pantry; the abortion in New York with its mingled scents of sweet anesthetic and sour gin; her wedding with its six bridesmaids in shell-pink gowns; this house; this furniture; these dishes; this silverware; this latest abortion; this life. Anger, Molly always thought, was a traitor and a trick. It could ruin your life faster than children could.

  Joey sat down at the table and folded his hands in front of him, like a child waiting for class to begin in a Catholic school. Joey had never gone to Catholic school, although Molly had. Her father had given the biggest contributions to the Parents’ Education Drive every year, and Molly had been chosen to play Mary in the Christmas pageant two years in a row. Joey was four years older than Molly was, and his face was lined and pitted, ragged and slack. Some wild boys grow up to be wilder men. They harden and plane down. Their faces take on an individuality wrongly supposed to belong only to the American West. Joey was the other kind. He would have run to fat already if Molly had let him. Even with all the working out she forced him to do, Joey had a pronounced pot on his belly and jowls hanging off the curve of his jaw. He was white and pasty too, as if he never got any sun—as if he never spent his Saturdays on the terrace at the club, dressed in golf shorts and a sun visor, talking to all the other men about sports.

  Molly pulled the paper toward her again and folded it one more time. It was now too tightly squashed together.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Well.” Joey cleared his throat. Then he rubbed his hands together. His hands were fat and white, just like his belly. Molly had a sudden vision of him as a gigantic jellyfish, slick and slimy, curled up on her bed like a piece of animated ooze. She looked away.

  “Well,” she said again. “There’s a dinner tonight. At the club. A planning committee dinner.”

  “A planning committee for what?”

  “A planning committee for a benefit thing. It’s Sarah Lockwood’s committee. I told you about it.”

  “Sarah Lockwood,” Joey said.

  Molly got out of her chair and went to the sunroom’s wall of windows, to look out on the pool in the backyard. Sarah and Kevin Lockwood lived in the French Provincial with the curlicue roof. They were the people in Fox Run Hill whom Joey liked least. He disliked them, in fact, for all the reasons Molly wanted to know them. Before her marriage, Sarah Lockwood had been an Allensbar, a real live member of real live Philadelphia Main Line Very Old Money family. Sarah had come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies and had her picture in the paper with a crowd of other girls, all wearing white dresses and carrying red roses. Kevin Lockwood was the president of his own brokerage firm in Philadelphia, one so small and exclusive, it didn’t even advertise. There were rumors all over Fox Run Hill that at least one of his clients was a former United States president, and that another was a member of the English royal house.

  “I don’t want to go to dinner with Sarah Lockwood,” Joey said. “She makes me uncomfortable. She talks down to me.”

  Molly didn’t turn around. “It’s only for a couple of hours. And all the other husbands will be there.”

  “All the other husbands are shits. I don’t know why it matters so much to you to hang around with shits.”

  “Everybody we’ve met since we’ve moved here is a shit as far as you’re concerned,” Molly said. “We couldn’t have gone on hanging out with bikers forever.”

  “We should have had children,” Joey told her. “That’s what would have made a difference.
We should have had some kids you could worry about so you could stop worrying about them.”

  “It isn’t my fault we couldn’t have children, Joey.”

  “It isn’t my fault either. Jesus Christ. I mean, I did the best I could at the time. I did what you asked me.”

  “I asked you to find me someone safe.”

  “I found you someone safe. As safe as it got. It was 1962.”

  “Other people got pregnant in 1962.”

  “Other people died in 1962, from what I hear,” Joey said.

  Molly bit her lip. “That was God’s judgment,” she said primly, her teeth clamped together. “This is God’s judgment. We committed a murder and now we’re being punished.”

  Molly heard rather than saw Joey stand up. The legs of the chair squeaked against the tile when he moved. Molly made a hot wet mist on the glass of the window in front of her and traced a curving line through it with her finger.

  “I know we committed a murder,” Joey said. “You’ve convinced me we committed a murder. That doesn’t mean I have to go to dinner with Sarah Lockwood.”

  “It’s at eight o’clock,” Molly told him. “In the Crystal Room at the club.”