The woman poured herself another splash of bourbon. The bottle was maybe a third full now. “We walked home,” she said. “I wouldn’t get into a cab with Bill, wouldn’t go down the subway stairs with him, so we walked, a hundred blocks, more. Freezing, my breath white in the air and I couldn’t feel the cold. All my thoughts were about walking, how to do it. Thinking heel toe, heel toe, heel toe. Thinking now right, now left, now right, now left. Bill pulled his hand out of my hand and after that I wouldn’t touch him. For the first twenty blocks I wouldn’t speak to him. He said, Honey, come here, and Baby, it’s going to be okay, and Look, I don’t know what happened, but we’re fine, we’re going to be fine”—she was speaking more quickly now—“and Man, what a party. I took my heels off, my stocking feet were on the cracked concrete now, and when he tried to put his arms around me I pushed him away, pushed my heels—my shoes had these sharp heels and I pushed them into his chest. He made a sound, a grunt. The noise scared me, I don’t know why but it scared me, and I screamed. Somewhere around block thirty he said, Okay, I give up, what do you think happened, and I stopped and turned toward him and he stopped and turned toward me and I spit in his face. And then we kept walking. At some point I said, Bill, your friend Norman stabbed his wife. And he said, quickly, he said, Did you see a knife, and She said she fell on broken glass, you must have heard that, and I said, No, I heard someone tell her to say that. I said, Bill, if she dies, your friend Norman will have killed her and he will be a murderer, I said, You will be friends with a murderer how do you feel about that, and Bill said nothing. By the end I couldn’t feel my feet. Finally I stopped and tried to put my heels back on but I couldn’t force my toes in so I took my gloves off, white gloves, spotless, elbow-length, and I jammed them onto my feet. I left my shoes on the sidewalk. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat and I walked the last few blocks like that.”
She exhaled and sipped from her glass and I exhaled too, I hadn’t known I’d been holding my breath. “Bill said it one more time, quietly. We were inside our building, walking up the stairs, him in front and me trailing, the gloves on my feet flapping and folding and tripping me up, and because he was in front of me I only barely caught it, he mumbled it under his breath, he said, You don’t know what happened. And then he was turning the lock in the key of our apartment and we were walking in.”
I paused the video. I’d finished my gin and tonic, my second I think, no, it had to have been my third, and I walked to the liquor cabinet to make myself another, stopped, went over to the sink, filled my glass with water and drank it down, filled the glass again. I stood there for a minute, my back against the sink, sipping and thinking. Thinking, Adele, you were such a good girl. Thinking, No one imagined. No one could have imagined what a good girl you would be.
I sat back down, clicked the video. “I didn’t go to sleep that night,” the woman said. “Bill went straight to the bedroom but I wasn’t tired and it was morning already anyway, past six. I poured myself a glass of bourbon, a tall glass, no ice, and drew myself a bath, waited for the feeling to return to my feet, to the tips of my fingers, to the end of my nose. Then I put on a clean white blouse, brushed my hair, tied it back, slipped on low heels. Bill was lying on top of the sheets, fully clothed. He was snoring. I grabbed gloves, gray cashmere. There was a small hole between the fourth and fifth fingers of the left hand. I remember noticing the hole. I remember thinking, I’ll have to mend these. I crossed the street and bought a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee at the newsstand. I bought copies of the Times, the Daily News, and the Post. In the apartment I read each cover to cover. Not that I expected to find anything, the papers would have already gone to press, just I wanted—now that the sun was up and it wasn’t so cold and outside I’d seen a family, father in a suit and coat and hat and mother in gloves and children in patent leather, it seemed possible I’d gotten carried away, let my emotions get the— But then I remembered the father’s grip on the mother’s wrist, hadn’t it seemed too firm, shouldn’t they have been holding hands, not—Maybe I was becoming hysterical, women are prone to hysterics after all, this is a well-known fact.” She took a breath. “After I read the papers cover to cover I threw them away. Then I found a pair of scissors and cut up the gloves I’d worn the night before, cut them up until they were just small squares of fabric. They were useless now that they were no longer white. I threw the small squares of fabric away. I sat on the couch and smoked. By the time Bill woke up I’d finished the pack.”
The woman cleared her throat. “I bought the papers on Monday, too, but there wasn’t anything until Tuesday. Buried halfway through the Times, a column and a half, barely, plus a half-column-sized picture of Norman. It did make the front page of the Daily News. I remember the headline. Wife Stabbed, Novelist Held. I remember it specifically because I read later that Adele’s father was a typesetter at the Daily News, that that’s how he found out.”
She took a sip from her drink. “Bill apologized to me later. And he broke with Norman. Or he said he did. There were nights, later, nights when I wondered, when he didn’t come home, or came home drunk, nights when I lay, still, waiting, eyes open in the dark.”
She paused. Raised the glass then lowered it. “Years passed,” she said. “Years passed, as they do, and Bill and I got married.” She laughed. “Got married. I want to say that if he hadn’t apologized, if he hadn’t stopped seeing Norman, I wouldn’t—but I can’t because that’s not how it happened. Bill was a copy editor, then he was an assistant editor, then he was an editor, a senior editor, editor in chief. I was a secretary at an ad agency and then I was an assistant copywriter and then for a long time I was a full copywriter and then I was head copywriter and I had my own office. No kids. Bill wanted them and I didn’t care one way or the other but it just never happened. We kept trying, a year, two years, three, and then we stopped trying and then Bill got a twenty-two-year-old pregnant, so I guess the problem was me. There was a quickie divorce, out of state, and then I went back to my office.”
The woman shifted in her seat. “I wasn’t,” she said, “you know, I wasn’t going to do this interview. And then last week, Thursday, I got the paper. The Times. And I read, I was eating my half a grapefruit, drinking my coffee, and I read that the man who hired me, who promoted me, who gave me my office, was a—” She paused. “Was a rapist. That’s what the women say. Four of them. His assistants, assistants I remember, young girls, bright girls. That on business trips he told them to come to his hotel room and that in the hotel room he poured them drinks. That they said no but that it didn’t matter, he didn’t listen. The same story, with slight variations. One of them had bruises. One of them, a different one, went to the police, but it was a couple days later, she’d taken a shower. The detective she talked to said after seventy-two hours there wouldn’t be any evidence left, told her to go home. I read this and thought, I was older when these assistants were hired. I thought, He never tried anything with me. I tried to remember, were there times when he called his assistant into his office, kept the door closed too long. When he asked his assistant to stay late. But I couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember anything I would swear to.