Early Warning

ANDY SAID, “Well, don’t you think it’s mysterious?” It was three months since the murder; Lillian was still upset, and Arthur seemed beside himself. “I’ve never seen Arthur so…so…I don’t know.”

“Who was murdered again?” said Dr. Smith.

“A friend of theirs, named Mary Meyer. She was shot in the head and in the heart, walking down the towpath in Georgetown in the middle of the day.”

“Have you ever met this woman?”

“I don’t think so, but it horrified me. I had nightmares about it, and we had to come home two days early.” Andy was lying on the mat, staring at the ceiling. She didn’t often avail herself of the mat, but Dr. Smith’s facial expressions could be unpleasant. His bushy eyebrows lowered over his eyes until they seemed to disappear. Sometimes he tapped the lead of his pencil on his teeth while she talked, which she found so distracting that she fell silent. What really horrified her was a thing that she was not comfortable telling: that Lillian and Arthur seemed to be falling apart. The injustice of this disturbed her. She said, “May I change the subject?”

“There is only one subject.”

“I went to Bendel’s to get a dress for a cocktail party at the Upjohns’ next week. Frank said it had to be Dior or Chanel, but I hated the Chanel, and the Dior looked very girlish to me, though brown. Brown is so dull. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.”

He coughed as if losing patience.

“Anyway, as I came into the vestibule, but before I opened the outside door, I saw Frank pass with a woman on his arm — rather a plain thing, I must say. I stopped in my tracks. I knew it was Frank — he was wearing his gray Brooks Brothers overcoat that I picked up at the cleaners’ the day before. And he was smiling. I registered that right away.”

“You didn’t recognize the woman?”

“Never saw her before.”

“Did you go out into the street?”

“I did. I watched them, and when they turned the corner, I followed them down Fifty-seventh Street.”

“Can you tell me their exact demeanor and posture?”

Andy’s hip began to hurt, so she crossed her ankles. Dr. Smith would be taking note of this, she knew. She said, “She looked upright and self-contained. Her elbows were at her sides, and her head was straight. Her shoulders were straight.”

“And your husband?”

“First he was holding her elbow, and then he put his arm across her shoulders.”

“Was he leaning toward her?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Smith wrote busily, then sniffed.

Andy said, “She didn’t look like a prostitute.”

“Is there any reason that she should look like a prostitute?”

Andy crossed her ankles the other way. “This young man where he works, one of the sons, he asked me at a party last summer, when we were staying in Southampton, if I knew that Frank frequented prostitutes downtown.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes.”

“You haven’t mentioned this to me before, Andy. Were you telling the truth?”

“I didn’t know it.”

It hadn’t been as difficult as she’d thought it would be to tell about seeing them, the couple, Frank and the woman he loved. She said, “I did go to Bonwit’s and buy a dress. Navy-blue shantung, with a matching coat. It was last season, but on sale.”

“So the sight of your husband and another woman who was rather dowdily attired motivated you in some way?”

Andy nodded.

“Let me ask you this. Which of your physical assets do you feel that this new outfit makes the most of?”

Andy lifted her chin, almost unconsciously, then put her hand on her neck. Dr. Smith said, “Your neck. Your chin.”

“My waist. My legs and ankles. I’ll put my hair up, of course.”

“So — you plan to accentuate your slenderness, your paleness in contrast to the dark color of the dress, your, let me say, androgynous qualities, as if to say to all, once again, that sexuality isn’t your business? And so your husband falling in love, if that is what it is, with a dowdy but, let’s say, womanly rival makes perfect sense.”

Andy said, “I suppose it does, from his point of view.” She said this in a reasonable tone of voice, and was just about to say something else when Dr. Smith was right there, nose to nose with her, and apparently in a rage. Andy recoiled. Dr. Smith exclaimed, “Andrea Langdon, are you so flat and small that you have no reaction to this? Is there nothing inside you, no mote of emotion or resistance? No ego? No identity? No being? You come here to me, three days a week, faithfully. As far as I can discern, you are a wraith, floating through your own life not only with no affect, but with no response. I ask you if you drink, you say yes. I ask you if you ever get drunk, you say yes. I ask you if you embarrass yourself when you get drunk, and you say no, you just doze off or go sit in a corner. Sometimes you say you laugh at nothing. That’s the extent of your transgression.”

“I thought I was supposed to behave myself if I had too much. Frank says—”

“Your husband is cheating on you! He loves another woman! He’s been to prostitutes! But your voice trembles only when you describe the murder of a stranger.”