Helen had not known the Hon. William Reinhoward—friend to her husband, colleague to her friends, chairman of many committees—she had not known him long, you see, before deciding to sleep with him. The honorable judge gave no objection. A date was chosen, a hotel room reserved. While waiting for the judge’s arrival, Helen drank a black coffee to fight off a migraine, then took a breath mint to mask the coffee, then sat cross-legged on the Best Western mattress and watched the Weather Channel.
Let the record show she was not bored. Nor was she uncared for. Her husband, Paul, was the opposite of uncaring. He was a romantic, a spiritual sister to her. If he had a flaw, it was only that he liked to clip his nails in bed, lining up the clippings on the nightstand. Over time, the piles of dead nail strips assumed a maritime quality. Something to the masses of twisted and crumbling nail-flesh called to mind coral reefs, horseshoe crabs, all the secret architecture of the ocean. She would wake in the middle of the night and picture it there, the strands and heaps of it, the gatherings and amassings, like the shells of murdered sea creatures. She would wake next to Paul and imagine his dead sea clippings surrounding her in the dark. The corpses of assassinated shellfish. The claws of silently screaming crabs. Besides this, her husband was the soul of courtesy.
When Judge Reinhoward arrives, he is carrying a bottle of Armagnac and two red plastic cups. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s a twist-off.” He is a tall man, taller than her husband, though not as tall as her, the perpetual giantess. At thirteen, she had begun a growth spurt that seemed never to want to end, her traitor body raising her up above her siblings, until she could barely fit into the school deskchairs.
“You’re a twist-off,” she says, which does not make sense, but feels playful in the way she wants to be. “Come on in. I’ll give you the tour.”
The way they had met was this.
Christmas Eve. She and Paul had driven to Troy, NY, to have dinner with her family, and Paul had asked if he could invite his old friend, his law school buddy, Bill Reinhoward, who was doing a guest lectureship at Skidmore and—would you believe it?—had nowhere else to celebrate the holiday. To which her mother had said of course, absolutely he should come, because even if Paul had not vouched for this stranger, who would turn someone away on Christmas? And so the judge had joined them.
At the table, two seats down from Helen, he had pronounced himself delighted, delighted with everything. The green beans. The macaroni salad. He showered her mother with compliments for her slow-cooked maple glazed ham. But mostly, he stayed quiet. It was Helen’s family that did the talking. They were in fine form that night. Her dumb brothers were telling jokes. Her dumb father was laughing at the wrong moments. Her dumb sister had brought a dumb fiancé for their dumb mother’s approval.
For the last few months, Helen had been working on herself through therapy (or was it with? In? She could never be sure of the right preposition). She was trying to use better adjectives in her thinking. The photo album that her mother passed around the table was not a Rockwellian exercise in settler-colonial nostalgia. It was cute memories. It was heartwarming. If she could not remove all adjectives from her thought-stream, she could at least choose better, more desirable ones. Her therapist—a sphinx-faced woman in a room lit by lava lamps—had suggested that she used all these unkind thoughts as a way of keeping people at a distance. “If I wanted to keep people at a distance,” said Helen, “I’d dress and talk like my sister.” She had thought this was pretty funny—was it funny? Would an objective observer have found it funny?—but the sphinx hadn’t smiled.
At dinner, her mother was telling a story about knee surgery. “They don’t even replace the knee anymore, they resurface it—like a patio—they use elastic or I don’t know what.” Her mother’s stories were replete with technological advances. She no longer had to swipe her card at the grocery. Now all she did was tap. She no longer had to memorize the passcode on her phone. Now her face unlocked it. In her mother’s mind, all technical breakthroughs were made by a group of handsome young men of marriageable age. Her father hung on her mother’s words, eager to learn the ways of this strange new technopolis. To see your parents in love was a psychologically devastating experience. It meant you must hate both of them, or neither. A prisoner’s dilemma. She had tried explaining this to the sphinx, hoping to amuse her. “I’m sorry,” the sphinx said. “I’m still thinking about that thing you said about your sister. Could we circle back to that?”
Laughter, laughter, laughter. It seemed her mother had just made a joke. Her mother was a great raconteur, queen of the punchline. Family friends were always telling Helen what a funny mother she had. On this matter, Helen had her own opinions, but she did not share them. Through/with/in therapy, she had learned not to judge.
Someone had just asked Helen’s sister, Ruby, a question. Ruby was discussing stock derivatives. It seemed she worked in finance now. The last Helen had heard, Ruby was studying for a public health degree and waitressing on the weekends. No one else seemed to have noticed the inconsistency. While she talked, Ruby gripped her fiancé’s elbow with both hands, as if afraid of him attempting a getaway. From their body language, it was clear who would initiate the divorce.
On her other side, Paul and the judge were discussing family court. Paul was telling a story about one of his clients—a foster child requesting emancipation. In Paul’s stories, he was always defending foster children, always fighting tirelessly and decisively on behalf of photogenic widows against the deprivations of the System. While he talked, he gripped Helen’s hand. This was a sweet gesture, and also useful, because if his palms ever became sweaty, as they sometimes did at social occasions, he could use her to dry himself. The wifely sponge. “NATO,” said her husband. “AUKUS. ASEAN. BRICS.” He was reciting acronyms now, but she could not be sure why, having lost the thread of the conversation.
“And what do you do?” said the judge. He was looking at Helen and it took her a moment to realize he was speaking to her as well. “I don’t think Paul’s told me.”
“Nothing important,” she said, because although she had spent years memorizing simple compounds and stochiometric equations, discussing her job now had become a kind of humiliation ritual. “I teach chemistry.”
“Chemistry,” said the judge. “How interesting.”
“Oh no, it’s not, I promise.”
But the judge was still going. “I was terrible at chemistry. Good for you. Which university are you with?”
Here, Paul cut in. “Helen works for a tutoring company, doing SAT II stuff, so she makes her own hours.”
“Ah.” The judge was still regarding Helen. His pale, mild eyes were slightly magnified by his glasses. “How nice.”
“Isn’t it?”
“She’s lucky—you’re lucky—to have that kind of flexibility.”
“Helen is our resident genius.”
“Now all we need are some grandchildren,” said her mother from across the table.
Helen imagined dousing her mother in gasoline and striking a match. The image was grotesque, uncalled for. Her mother had done nothing wrong. It was a sign of how abnormal her brain was that she could even think such a thing. She would have to write all this down in her journal for her therapist to read. If not, her vow would be broken. She would end up lying to her therapist. The punishment she had set herself (entering therapy) would recapitulate the crime (her dishonesty with herself, the world, etc.). She would be making the opposite of progress. She imagined dousing her therapist in gasoline and quickly omitted the thought. It was important to cut these things off early, to unimagine them. If it became an official thought, she would have to write it down. Her mind was a lunar surface. She could feel the craters in it, the places it would be unsafe to tread. The craters had different valences, auroras. There was a hole (burning) that was her mother, a hole (freezing) that was her father, a hole (white-hot, gold-dark, radiant-red) that was her husband. One wrong turn and she could end up trapped down there, in the sunken spaces. The depressions.
“Are we doing the roof this year?” said Ruby.
“Yes, the roof!” said the others. Already they were out of their chairs, bundling themselves in coats and scarves, putting on hats with earflaps. “The roof! The roof!”
Helen followed them to their flat-topped roof, breath steaming, to fulfill the final tradition. It was snowing. The streets were blanketed. At five minutes to midnight, the city of Troy was like the interior of her brain. Sterile, lunar. Standing among her family, the tallest of them all, she had the feeling she always had. That she had been abducted from some other life. Dorothy among the Munchkins.
“Thirty seconds,” said her father.
Flakes were falling in fantastic silent patterns. The cold felt satisfying on her skin. Like scratching an itch. She feared Paul would take off his coat and try to drape it over her, as one of his manly gestures, and indeed he was unzipping the anorak, but then the zipper—her real savior—caught, and Paul, embarrassed from struggling with it, turned away. Nearby, the judge stood, face tilted upwards, observing the sky. He was letting the snow fall on his cheeks and eyelashes, his mouth open to taste it.
“Fifteen seconds,” said her father. “Here it comes.”
Stillness had descended. She could not even hear the others breathing. Perhaps the snow muffled it. Perhaps they were holding their breath. The seconds ticked by and still they all waited, tense and silent, on the edge of the roof, counting down to the moment—the trigger—the event.
In the Best Western, Judge Reinhoward sets out his cups, removes the twist-off. While she sits on the bed, across the room from him, he pours brandy.
“Do you know how they make Armagnac?” he says.
“How’s that?”
The judge tells her it is a very long and beautiful process that begins in France. “First they smash the grapes,” he says. “Not mash, but smash.”
“Smash, okay,” she says.
“Then they marinate and stew.”
They are two people alone in a hotel room and you do not have to be Dr. Freud to know what happens next. But Judge Reinhoward is still talking about Armagnac. He takes her through the evaporation, the oxidation, the maturation. He stores his grapes in the dark and lets them age a hundred years.
“Why don’t you come sit here,” she says.
For several seconds, the judge does not move. He is gazing into his cup—the spectacular interplay of light and liquid. He seems to be pondering something. When he finally comes and sits beside her, the box springs crunch. She can smell his aftershave, a salmony essence. She waits for him to put an arm around her, but instead he goes for her wrist, holding it, lightly, between two fingers. “Did you know there are 42 bones in the human hand?” he says.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Do you know how many there are in the human body?”
She knows. It is one of the facts she memorized, back in undergrad, but she lowballs her answer to play along. “A hundred?”
“206.”
“No way,” she says. “I can’t believe that. So many.”
“Your body is a complicated and beautiful machine.” He is a tanned, rawboned, salmon-smelling man, and also not a bit—not even a little bit—her type. In the whole history of her entanglements, there has never been a man who was her type. Whatever she feels for Reinhoward is only the old endorphic blood-rush that accompanied acts of particular shittiness.
The judge is still holding her hand. He is looking at the carpet, not at her. A bashful seducer. “I like you a lot,” he says.
“I like you too.” For some reason, they are whispering. Ridiculous how middle schoolish all this feels. Upsetting, perplexing. Here she is, alone for the night with a man who is not her husband, and the best he can come up with is “I like you.” She feels worse than unallured. She feels demoralized.
The judge’s head is bowed. He seems to be contemplating something painful. “I really, really like you,” he says. She knows only the barest details of his history. Divorced. A daughter in Vancouver. She fears he may start talking about his ex-wife soon. If he begins to cry it will be embarrassing.
“Take off your shirt,” she says.
She has always had a way of jumping into things. When she first met Paul, in college, they spent a whole night together, prepping for a chemistry exam. In the library GSR, they rehearsed Boyles’ Law and Charles’ Law. Sitting across from each other, with no part of their bodies touching, they discussed Dalton’s Law of Partial Pressures. They were married a year later. “Plan for failure,” her mother told her, the night of the wedding rehearsal, and Helen was shocked, not just because it seemed so cruel, but also because who planned for failure?
People like her parents, obviously. People who bought rental car coverage and hedged against the market and went to mass out of actual fear of God. But she would not have a marriage like that. She and Paul would be the opposite of each other’s parents. They had decided this. And she was going to be a chemist! Or a chemistry professor! She would wow the world with her chemical accomplishments. She would be nothing like her criminally boring mother and father, who had come to resemble each other in their old age. “Where did you come from?” Paul used to say, after a weekend in Troy, playing Bananagrams with her folks and listening to them recite old sitcom plots at dinner. And hadn’t it thrilled her, hearing those words? Her handsome husband, muscled and tender, full of brilliant accomplishments, always knowing the right thing to say . . .
Let the record show the Hon. William Reinhoward is now unbuttoning his dress shirt. He has undone his tie. He is scrawnier than her husband, and covered in hair. There is a kind of teenage slenderness to him, a cadaverousness that calls to mind the Soviet era. Was he handsome? Would an objective observer have considered him handsome? She felt if she’d done a poll of housewives within a hundred mile radius, from Syracuse to Saugerties, the results would have been kind to him. Initiating a kiss, she ventures briefly outside herself to consult the image. From a hypothetical viewpoint, it looks enticing. The housewives of the Upper Hudson Valley agree.
Judge Reinhoward makes a noise in his throat like he is suppressing a cough. “Want me to get the lights?”
“Sure.”
The judge slips from bed, dims the lights, crawls back in beside her. At some point, in the calamity of kissing, he has taken off his glasses. He seems to blink more without them—face strangely defenseless. She can see the young Reinhoward in that face—a sad delicate boy with the beginnings of a mustache—a winner of poetry prizes—a collector of Dutch pennies—the king of neither track nor field. When you go to bed with someone you are sleeping with all versions of them, past, present, and future. This is what infidelity is like, in the fourth dimension.
The judge’s lips make contact with her neck, just below the jaw, and she is in the crater now. She is passing into another world, one in which there are no more piles of dead nail strips, no more shared thyroid creams, only the judge working his way down her neck, lower and lower, his lips producing a leech-like sensation, until he reaches her collarbone and she feels her head spasm. Suddenly the vision in her left eye has become distorted, pixelated. Sparks flicker. An alarming aurora.
“Are you all right?”
She is not aware of having made a noise, but Judge Reinhoward has drawn back. He is peering at her, nearsightedly, in the dark.
“Yes, fine.” She tries to kiss him again, to cut off further conversation, but he is pulling away now, shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he says.
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t know—I don’t know if we—”
“There’s nothing to know.”
The room is pulsing around her, like malevolent jelly. Amid the blur, the judge’s face seems distorted. She imagines digging her fingers into that face, ripping and tearing, blood swelling under the fingernails. She imagines clawing open the bones of his hand and counting them, one by one, to verify his estimate. “Excuse me,” she says, because her parents had drilled this kind of language into her, because she has not forgotten her manners, and she rises and goes into the bathroom. The lights flicker on, revealing hand towels on the rack, an oceanscape above the toilet. She notices a woman in the mirror in a state of semi-undress, hatefully tall, and hits the switch so the room goes dark again, leaving her alone with her breathing. When she closes her lids, she sees explosions, bioluminescent lily pads, crazy amoebas of light.
The door is not locked, but Judge Reinhoward knocks on it anyway. Perhaps he is afraid to enter. “Helen?” he says.
She does not answer. She is trying to trace it all back. She is trying to remember a time before this feeling.
“Helen, please come back.”
With eyes shut, she focuses on breathing. She breathes in and out, ten simple times.
What is she thinking about? Not about the lunar surface. Not about her mother. Not about her sister, or her sister’s fiancé, or her husband at home waiting for her. She does not think about the moment, standing on the roof with her family, when the clock in the Greek Orthodox cathedral finally struck twelve and they began to shout “Merry Christmas!”—her brothers, sister, father, mother—all the Munchkins from Munchkin-land lined up on their roof, calling out love and good tidings, their voices echoing through the silent streets of Troy.
What she thinks about are presidential appointments. And chemistry terms. Secretaries of Treasury and Transportation, Energy and Education, Agriculture and Interior, Defense and State.
And, incredibly, outside the door, the Hon. Reinhoward is quoting poetry to her now. He is attempting a carpe diem, drawing upon the works of the masters. “You and I are old,” he says. “Death closes all. But something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming men who strove with Gods.” The EPA. The OMB. The SBA. The NLRB. And this gray spirit yearning in desire. The Labor Secretary. The Commerce Secretary. The Secretary of Homeland Security, of Health and Human Services. (Her head is pounding.) To follow knowledge like a sinking star. Molar mass: g/mol. Molar volume: 22.4 L/mol. Molarity: M = mol/L. That which we are, we are. The electron, the lepton, the proton, the neutron. The gluon, the pion, the kaon, the boson. (On her tongue she tastes shellfish.) To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
