He added, “But the father, Clyde Trask, he got married a year later to a woman named Marilyn Smith.” William spoke the word “Smith” with disdain. “And he stayed married to her for fifty years. They had some boys together.”
I reached and squeezed his hand. I said, “Pillie, we’re going to get this all figured out. We’re going to deal with everything, don’t you worry.”
He said, “Well, you deal with things, that’s for sure.”
I said, “Are you kidding? I don’t deal with anything!”
And he said, “Lucy. You deal with everything.”
* * *
In the taxi on the way back to my apartment that night I thought how I had left William in a similar way, only with more warning. And I had not taken anything except for some of my clothes. But I had told him I wanted to move out. I had told him that I had an image of myself as a bird, folded up in a box, living with him. He could not understand that, and I do not blame him. I got a small apartment just a few blocks away from the brownstone we lived in in Brooklyn then. But I did not move out for almost a year, and then when he was at work one day—it was a Monday and I picked up the phone and I called a mattress store and within two hours a mattress had been delivered to my tiny apartment, and I thought: Oh God, Lucy. Or maybe I didn’t think anything. I was just terrified. So I put a bunch of things in a garbage bag and I walked the garbage bag over, and I bought one pan at a drugstore and also one fork and one plate. And I called William and I told him I had moved out.
I always remember his voice that day. He said, “You have?” His voice was so small. “You’ve moved out?”
* * *
—
It was good of him, I thought in the taxi, not to remind me of this today.
* * *
—
I also thought about Estelle, and I thought—I assumed this—that she could not have done this if she was not involved with another man. I had not mentioned that to William. I wondered who he was, if he was the theater fellow she had said to that night in the kitchen, “Are you bored to death?” It made me angry to think of her. Jesus, I thought, I can’t stand you. She had hurt William, and I couldn’t stand her for that.
* * *
—
About Catherine, I did not think a great deal right then. I was more concerned with that empty apartment that William was inside right now. Although in my distress for him, some kind of unpleasantness I felt toward Catherine emerged as well.
* * *
The night I found out about William’s affairs—he had been having more than one—our girls were in bed, they were teenagers by then, and it was around midnight, and he finally told me, in small bits of information and then larger ones. Two days earlier I had found a credit card receipt that I had taken from his pocket to prepare the shirt for the cleaners; it had been for a dinner for apparently two people—this is what the price seemed like to me—at a restaurant in the Village, and he had told me that he was working late that night. I was scared as I showed him the receipt and asked him about it. When he saw the receipt he （I thought） seemed taken aback, but he said that a woman he worked with was having trouble so he had had dinner with her. Why hadn’t he told me? I cannot now remember what he said, but it was reassuring and it had assuaged me—sort of. （For a few years at that point I had had dreams that he was cheating on me, and every time I told him William would speak to me kindly and say, “I have no idea why you would be dreaming that.”） But that evening we had had friends over and the woman of the couple went up on the roof with me to have her cigarette and she told me she had been having an affair with a man in Los Angeles. “The sex is great,” she said, inhaling. “The sex is amazing.”
And when she said that to me I knew. About William. I don’t know why, but that was the moment I knew, and when we came downstairs I looked at William and I believe he saw in my look that I knew, and we waited for the guests to leave and then the girls to go to bed, and I told him what the woman had said, and after a while he confessed. First to one, and then to a couple of others. There was a woman that William worked with that he seemed to care for especially, although he said he was not in love with any of them. But he did not tell me about Joanne for another three months. And when he told me about Joanne I thought I might die. I had already thought I would die hearing about the other women. But this woman, Joanne, had been in our house countless times, she had brought the girls to see me in the hospital one summer when I was sick, she had been a friend of mine as well as my husband’s.