Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

not make out her facial expression or even her features, only the lines of her silhouette. He wished he had a pair of high-end binoculars. She could be a bird, he thought, and he could be a birdwatcher. He had always thought there was something furtive about birdwatchers, mainly the ones who kept “life lists”—something voyeuristic and calculating in how they observed and catalogued their quarry.

The young man Robert stood in the room also, further away. His head moved slightly: he must be talking, Hal thought. He turned and opened a file cabinet. The free love. The free love.

But no: the free love was not yet in evidence. Wait, he told himself. Only wait. The free love was bound to rear its head. Eavesdroppers heard no good, or something. Almost because he was here, his wife had to be guilty.

Susan and Robert were currently in Stern’s office, which was large and stretched from the east, or back, side of the building to the west. The main window in that office was the ocean window, a large picture window, he thought. He had been in the office several times, though rarely when Stern was. The large metal cabinet backed up beneath this eastern window, out of which Stern had probably seldom deigned to look, was a little lower than shoulder-height. It contained large flat drawers for large maps and the like. Hal felt he was fortunate the vertical blinds were not down; they might be, so easily. No one needed to look out this eastern window. And yet if Susan did so now, she might see him watching, if she could make him out in the dimness behind his windshield.

The young man was behind Susan now as she looked down at something, possibly something in a drawer she’d pulled out. Look up, thought Hal, but she would not—there it was. The young man Robert was facing the window as Susan turned; their heads were aligned. Hal could see the back of her head and this obscured the young man Robert’s face completely. Jesus Christ. Were they kissing?

He had asked for it—at this point he believed he deserved it, even—but still he resisted. He sat there feeling a scream rise in him, trying to suppress it. Robert’s hands were up on either side of Susan’s head, blurs, moving. His own hands shook. He waited for Susan to turn, to adjust how she stood. They could be conversing face-to-face, having a close discussion. It was by no means a foregone conclusion. . . .

Suddenly their heads went lower. He could barely see them beneath the upper edge of the cabinet. Robert’s head, of which chiefly a sweep of dark hair was visible, seemed to be gobbling, aggressively gobbling up his wife’s lighter-brown head; the two blurred ovals, conjoined, sank even further as he sat without taking a breath—not believing, refusing to credit the sight. He could barely move. Now they sank down below the cabinet edge and were gone.

He felt queasy. He touched the steering wheel: his fingers were clammy on its grainy plastic. It traveled his mind that he had wanted to set up Robert with Casey. Sickening.

Guy rowed for Yale, went through his head, though it was a phrase he had constructed himself in the first place and had no concrete relevance. For all he knew Robert had attended community college. He was a paralegal, after all, not a lawyer, barely even a white-collar professional. He must be a faux-preppy, come to think of it: an impostor. A guy who rowed for Yale would not end up as a paralegal. Likely he aspired to be seen as Hal saw him. Hal had given him the benefit of the doubt, WASP-wise.

He had never read Robert’s résumé, of course. It struck him now that he should have insisted on seeing it. There must be something there he could wield against him, some indication that he was wrong for the job, that he was far, far from qualified.

On the other hand it might be better to be cuckolded by a Yale guy, in a sense. A level of exclusivity, at least. Better a Yalie than a guy off the street. Wasn’t it?

The paralegal got up again, was standing looking down, then turned to walk away from the window. His torso was all pale now; his jacket must have come off. Then the yellow rectangle of the room disappeared. He had flipped the switch.

Hal felt a stab of outrage. Susan was doing this right when she pretended to be so concerned about the specter of death. Here she was simulating an oppressive, pervasive concern, going to great lengths to demonstrate her worry about her possibly deceased employer—crying at dog kennels and getting choked up in the homes of Alzheimer’s ladies, when really all she wanted was to sink down on her back and get it on with a good-looking guy in his twenties. It was the duplicity that gnawed at Hal. Because it was not free love anyway, was it, if you hid it, if you went around sneaking and concealing, if you lied and lied and covered up and were devious about it. It was not the hippie style of free love then, but something sleazy.

He could drive right to Casey’s and tell her what he had seen. Right? Right? And how would Susan feel then?

But no, of course. Never. Not ever in this world.

He needed to get away: in place of the prurient need to know he felt only a disgusted, almost frightened proximity.

He backed up the car and found himself in a contest with Robert, a contest for Susan’s loyalty—actually priding himself on the fact that it was still he who had been chosen to go to Angela Stern’s house, that it was still he, the husband, the worn shoe, the swaybacked old mule, who fulfilled this supportive function—who had, in fact, been expressly chosen for it. Since Robert worked in the office with Susan she could easily have asked him to