Edited to Death (7 page)

He stopped before I did. “Do you want lunch first, Margaret,” he said, “Or shall we
go directly to bed?”

“Are we going to talk about it over lunch?” I asked. My voice echoed in the hallway.

“No,” he said.

“I think I want lunch, anyway,” I said. “I have to show off my new hat.” I was trying
to buy some time to think, of course, but wouldn’t say so. That was me, the Queen
of Bravado.

So we had lunch and wine and very good coffee. I called Anya and asked her to preside
over dinner and tell Michael I was having dinner with an out-of-town writer. The lies
came easily. Years of coming up with creative leads on tight deadlines served me very
well.

After lunch, we stood in the Sutter-Stockton Garage and Quentin watched me look for
my keys.

“Aha!” I held them up. My hand was trembling.

Quentin took the keys, ushered me into the passenger side, settled up with the garage
attendant, and headed my station wagon up the hill.

“Tell me,” I quavered, “have you ever had a mistress who drove a station wagon before?”

Quentin smiled. “I don’t have one now,” he said, without taking his eyes off the road.
“I have a very good friend who suddenly looks quite delicious to me. And do you know
how I think I look to her?”

“How?”

“Dangerous and interesting. You look at me the way children look at boa constrictors
in the snake house. You’re fascinated and you’re horrified.”

He was right. So we didn’t talk anymore.

I’d never really given much thought to adultery before. But when I had, I’d always
assumed the appropriate setting was a cut-rate motel room. I had hazy fantasies about
people ripping each other’s clothes off, heaving and panting, sobbing in remorse,
and driving home their separate ways—till the next week. Sort of a low-rent
Same Time, Next Year
.

Quentin’s version of adultery was civilized. At his apartment, he took my coat and
hung it up in the closet, taking time to button the top three buttons so it sat squarely
on the hanger. He poured me a glass of Beaujolais, escorted me into the bedroom, and
left the door wide open.

When you’ve been married for years and years, you begin to think there’s only one
way to make love. Michael makes love as he does everything else—easily, casually,
playfully, cheerfully oblivious to phones ringing, dog or cats scratching to get in
or out of the bedroom, books piled on the bed.

Over the next several months, I learned that Quentin knew other ways. He knew about
complete, silent concentration on the task at hand. And he knew about context. He
knew about eating smoked oysters on water biscuits and doing Double Crostics in bed,
in ink. He knew about listening to scratchy recordings of Richard Burton reading John
Donne’s love poetry. He loved to brush my hair. Sometimes, he’d stand at the foot
of the bed with his tenor saxophone and play. Naked. “Listen to this, Margaret,” he’d
say, and I’d hear almost anything; blues, jazz, and his own improvisations on Bach
and Scarlatti.

Quentin was too cool for me by half. Though he liked Michael, it never seemed to occur
to him to feel guilty. It was clear, however, that he took some pleasure in stirring
things up. At a summer barbecue at the home of Glen Fox,
Small Town’s
managing editor, Quentin followed me into the bathroom and unbuttoned my sundress.

“Quentin, what are you doing?” I whispered fiercely.

There, in the tiny bathroom hung with signs from Glen’s beloved Irish pubs and crowded
with kid paraphernalia, Quentin turned me so that we both faced the mirror. His hands
reached in front of me and cupped my breasts. “Just checking. Couldn’t imagine what
you’d wear under that neckline.” Then, he was gone. When I came out of the bathroom,
he and Michael were sitting side by side on the couch watching the A’s dispatch the
Red Sox and puzzling about Jason Giambi’s odd batting stance. Without taking his eyes
from the screen, Michael patted the couch between them, “Come on, Maggie, your heartthrob
Stairs is on deck.”

Quentin raised his eyebrow as I settled between them.

“Stairs, hmm? Wouldn’t have identified him as your type, Margaret.”

Michael picked up his beer, “Oh, our Maggie is full of surprises. She still misses
Bruce Bochte.”

“I like a ballplayer who looks like an aging Marxist,” I said defensively.

“Indeed,” said Quentin.

Michael turned to me and frowned, smoothing the hair back from my forehead, “Feeling
okay,
cara
? You’re a little flushed.” I felt like a dangerously triumphant felon, wicked but
pleased because I was getting away with something.

Finally, a year almost to the day after Quentin bought me the hat, we stopped. I’d
grown to love the afternoons in bed. But although I was exceedingly skilled at covering
my tracks, I never got graceful at adultery. It was the slightly dangerous intrigue
I liked, the feeling that I was different from all the other moms doing car pool.

And, when Stuart moved in with Quentin, I felt mindless, deep-as-a-well jealousy.
That was enough.

Quentin and I saw each other almost as often as when we had been lovers. I wrote for
him, did my very best work. We had lunch, traded books, kissed hello and goodbye.
Occasionally, if we were alone—in his office, in my kitchen, he’d turn those social
kisses into something else. But then he’d let me go. He never pressed for a return
engagement. The Queen of Bravado thought she had escaped without a scratch.

But when I remembered the sight of Quentin’s lifeless hand, the one I’d kissed so
impulsively at the hat counter at Saks, the one that had edited my copy, and challenged
my notion of myself as a smug and moral wife-and-mom, I felt ill all over again. In
the steamy bathroom mirror my face was miserable and flushed. No “A” on my forehead,
just guilt and regrets. I toweled off, swearing softly. “Dumb, careless, selfish bitch.…”
And then, through the post-shower mist and the remorse, one niggling little thought:
How had Michael known? And why hadn’t he confronted me? “Men,” I said aloud, happy
to be back on the path of self-righteousness. “All action, no talk.”

There was a pounding at the door, “Mom!” Josh shouted, “I can’t find my shinguards.
Where are they?”

“Coming, honey,” I said, refusing to wonder just what kind of action might have replaced
Michael’s talk.

7

Of Whom Shall We Speak?

Quentin’s memorial service made the front page of the
San Francisco Chronicle
.
Everyone was there. Well, almost everyone.

The mayor was off in Central America, cementing yet another sister city relationship
with an urban economy built on tourism and failing banks. So he had to miss the festivities.
But he sent the chief of protocol. She made some fulsome remarks. Something to the
effect that one of the city’s literary lights had gone out. Quentin Hart, who grew
up with the disaffected literati of the sixties, the experimentalists of the seventies
and the brave young writers of the eighties and nineties, who had brought style and
panache to a dying city magazine, and so forth and so on. You get the idea. Quentin
would have hated every word of it. He once told me he had exorcised the word panache
from his vocabulary when the French gave a sweet aperitif that name. Inspector Moon,
sitting alone three pews back, caught my eye. He nodded pleasantly and raised his
hand in a half wave to Michael.

“Should we see if he wants to sit with us?” I whispered to Michael. Michael shrugged,
“Leave him alone. He’s probably scanning for suspects.”

Claire was there, swathed in politically incorrect fur. “Is that black mink,” Michael
whispered during the service, “or did a dozen skunks lay down half their hides for
the grieving widow?”

I gave him a token rap on the arm with a rolled up program. Fact was, I felt so grateful
he was joking with me I could have thrown my arms around him. True to the tight-lipped
statement he’d made in front of the mirror, he hadn’t discussed my relationship with
Quentin again. Instead, he treated me with the slightly distant formality you reserve
for familiar, if fragile and rarely seen, maiden aunts. When I’d faltered an opening
to the subject, his eyes had turned cold and distant. He had answered my single question—how
had he known—with the kind of clinical distaste I’d only seen employed when he had
to remove dead roof rats from our gutters. “The boys needed change for video games
when they were going to the pizza parlor with Lily’s family. I didn’t have much. And
your purse was on the kitchen counter, so I went looking for quarters.” I knew what
was coming. “I wondered why your diaphragm was in your purse. I didn’t even think
you had one anymore. I mean, we didn’t need it.” Michael, ever the dutiful husband,
had responsibly had a vasectomy after Zach’s birth. He shook his head. “I was going
to ask you,” he said, “but then I decided to wait.”

“Michael—” I started. He held up his hand. “I may be a tax lawyer,” he continued,
“but once upon a time, I did very well in Evidence. I’m not a fool.” He continued,
“Events came together for me. I noticed that the diaphragm seemed to show up in your
purse the night before you were going to
Small Town
, or you were meeting Quentin for lunch. Then it disappeared.”

He looked at me in disgust and began unloading the dishwasher. “Where’d the diaphragm
go, Maggie? Or did you and Quentin call it quits?”

I chose to answer the second question. “We called it quits. It was a stupid mistake
and we stopped. Almost a year ago. But why.…”

“Why what?”

“Why didn’t you ask me about it?”

Silence. “I think you’d know me better than that by now, Maggie,” he said. “I’m a
man who can watch and wait when I need to.”

“And that’s what you’re doing now?” I said.

“Maybe I am.”

And that was the end of the conversation. The diaphragm hadn’t disappeared; of course;
it had simply taken up residence at Quentin’s. I began to worry about retrieving it.

Josh, with his impeccably visceral sense of something amiss, had started every single
day since Quentin’s death with an upset stomach. I was beginning to think it was either
back to the specialist or simply buy stock in Pepto-Bismol. Or perhaps, I observed
to myself as we left the house for the service, Josh’s mom could simply stick to the
straight and narrow and not create tension and drama in the house. “Guilt, guilt,
guilt,” I muttered under my breath.

Alf Abbott, Claire’s uncle and
Small Town
’s owner, escorted the widow to the service. As always, he had the well-oiled look
of a man who spends too much time under the hands of a masseur. From the gently glazed
look in his eye, my guess was that the inside of Uncle Alf was equally well-oiled.

The memorial service was held at the city’s grandest Unitarian church. Of course,
even grand Unitarian churches are pretty spare, which was, I felt sure, Quentin’s
exact taste in liturgical spaces. Against a backdrop of white French tulips on a gray
stone altar, a parade of luminaries took turns behind the pulpit to tell affectionate
stories about Quentin. I sat between Stuart and Michael, anchored to both. Stuart
clutched my hand, and Michael kept his arm draped along the pew in back of me.

The proprietor of Hot Licks, a south of Market jazz club, talked about how Quentin
used to drop in with his sax and sit in for a set. “He didn’t sweat, he didn’t smoke,
he didn’t even drink much. But that man could blow.”

His tailor told an elaborate story about Quentin’s proposal for smuggling Cuban cigars
out of Hong Kong and into San Francisco by sewing into the lining of double-breasted
suits. And he recounted, seemingly with admiration, Quentin’s horror of fashion, how
he’d changed neither his blazer size nor his style for twenty-five years.

Glen Fox,
Small Town
’s managing editor, tight-lipped and dry-eyed, talked about Quentin’s standards at
the magazine. At the end of his witty, carefully prepared remarks, he folded his hands
on the index cards and fought back tears. “Quentin and I were boys together,” he said,
“both of us strangers in a strange land. An American at Oxford, and a country Irish
lad. We came together over Yeats and nearly came to blows over Thomas Wolfe.” He stopped
and bit his lip. “You’re still wrong about Wolfe’s puny talent, man, but I hope to
God you
can
go home again. And that you’re there.”

Michael leaned over to me and whispered. “Does everyone sound better dead than alive?”

I looked at him. His face was impassive. “Just wondering,” he mouthed silently.

A fresh-faced, crewcut young man in a blue denim shirt and khakis talked about Quentin’s
willingness to cover AIDS in a chic city magazine early on, before anyone wanted to
talk about it.

Finally, the art director of
Small Town
, an elegant Vietnamese woman named Linda Quoc who was dressed in a silver-belted,
turquoise silk jumpsuit, explained how Quentin taught her to play five card stud to
fill the interminable hours during midnight press checks.

Madame sang Berlioz’s “Sur les Lagunes.” It was perhaps a trifle beyond her instrument’s
capabilities, but touching, nonetheless.

Then, Stuart let go of my hand and walked to the front of the church. He pulled a
softcover copy of
The Complete Poems of Hart Crane
out of his jacket pocket. Crane was Quentin’s favorite poet. I was never sure whether
he was attracted to his controversial genius, his mysterious, tragic death, or just
his eclectic romantic tastes. At any rate, I’d helped Stuart select “And Bees of Paradise.”
He steadied himself on the pulpit, looking very young and a little frightened. He’d
played basketball as a kid, and despite his grown-up devotion to offbeat, slightly
theatrical clothes, always looked as if he’d be more comfortable wrapping his long,
rangy frame in the shorts and jersey he’d worn on the court. He ran a hand through
his dark, stylishly cut hair, gripped the book, and began: