For the first time in weeks, I became painfully alert and was aware of the workings of my heart, a hard thumping that made me put my hand to my chest. I moved silently to my favorite hiding place (a window behind the Chinese grass chair that was often shrouded in darkness) and peered in. I pressed hard on my chest with my fist.
Phillip Asher sat sideways to the small table, one arm thrown back over the ladder-back chair, the other reaching for a teacup. His legs were casually crossed, and he seemed relaxed, as if he had been in this house before, as if he had often been welcomed here. Indeed, Clara remained unconcerned in a corner with her music stand and her flute; between the muted bits of conversation (I seldom ever heard a specific word, so it was mostly a silent movie I watched those many nights), I could hear the notes of the practice lesson. Etna was sewing on the davenport, and it was as if Phillip Asher were a brother or a cousin who had interrupted a domestic scene simply to say hello. I looked over to the sink and saw the remnants of a meal that had not yet been cleaned up. I strained to count the plates and the silverware, for I wished to know if Asher had had his supper with my daughter and my wife.
Had Etna lied to me? Had she and Phillip Asher all along been lovers? (I could hardly be expected to monitor the cottage by day.) Had he been there all afternoon, while Clara was in school, and simply lingered longer than was usual, enjoying the easy company of an arresting woman and her child? But then I had a truly terrible thought: Had I caused Etna and Asher, with my foolish decrees, to come together after my wife and I had separated? Yes, I thought, I had. Asher, under the guise of concern for my well-being and in his position as Dean of the Faculty, would have driven to the cottage to discuss the matter, would he not?
I exercised that night the utmost self-control, for I wanted nothing more than to enter that room and haul the man out and send him sprawling across the driveway. How dare he sit in such close proximity to my daughter! How dare he insinuate himself into my family!
Asher took another sip of tea, which had to have grown cold in the time it had sat on the table; I had been watching this cozy domestic scene for nearly a half hour. Clara put down her flute and asked her mother a question. I could see from the considerate but firm shake of the head that Etna was denying Clara’s request to quit her practicing early. Clara, with pained expression, went on, and I could again hear the labored notes of a flute badly played. I watched my daughter stretch her legs in an indecorous manner, a gesture that immediately caught her mother’s watchful eye. Asher leaned forward in his chair, as if making a point in his ongoing conversation with my wife. (My wife). He leaned his elbows on his knees and seemed insidiously relaxed. I was afraid that my furious and steamy breaths of air in the frigid night might be noticeable through the window.
To calm myself, I looked away. I shot my gaze up through the tall pines to the stars, wondering why the gods were treating me so badly. I had never before felt such violation. The man had taken my position, and now he was taking my wife?
I turned back to the window, and as I did, Asher and Etna rose simultaneously.
I have played and replayed this scene a thousand times in my head, and I think the paired rising was purely coincidental in its initial moments. Perhaps Etna had been about to go to Clara; possibly Asher was merely stretching. As if in slow motion and with faint smiles playing upon their lips, they were carried forward by the momentum that had made them stand, first two and then three steps, causing them to meet directly beneath the white chandelier, that extravagant monstrosity. Their hands rose — her right, his left — and quickly, lightly, clasped, as if by the same impulse that makes people who speak the same phrase simultaneously smile at each other in amusement.
That I might have borne. The clasped hands I might have endured and forgotten. After all, the entire incident lasted only a second, perhaps two. But in those moments, I glimpsed something else, something that has stayed with me all these years, that is more vivid to me sometimes than the remembered visages of my children. It was the expression on Etna’s face, an expression that was — how can I describe this? Radiant is the word I must use. Giddy with delight. An ecstatic expression of happiness that seemingly required the participation of the entire body, as if the body were moving forward at great speed. It was a look I had seen on Etna’s face only once before, on the sleigh on that late-winter afternoon so many years ago when the horses, nearly out of control, had sped toward the barn. She had reached for my hand, and I had gone rigid with joy.
Asher and Etna swayed a bit. The moment dissolved in laughter. From the corner, Clara watched, her eyes wary and humorless. My own eyes were dry with anger. I longed to snatch my daughter from that tableau.