Chapter 5
MELODY
The whole way back across the bridge, in the warm dim back of a cab whose driver had not asked where she was going until she was already inside it, Melody told herself that her husband was going to apologize.
Her husband had a mind that processed information in real time.
Her husband had walked out of that suite without giving her a chance to defend herself, yes, but her husband was also the man who had read three sentences about a Korean shipbuilder against the top of her wet hair on the sofa the night before.
Her husband was the man who had said there you are.
Her husband, somewhere between the slamming of the suite door and the elevator ride down to the lobby, was going to do the math.
That was what she told herself. He would be waiting.
He would not be composed. He would be the version of him that had existed on a balcony in Capri at one in the morning, the one whose voice had cracked on the word love.
He would say the thing first. He would say I'm sorry, Melody.
I'm so sorry, sweetheart, I don't know what happened to me in that room.
She would put her bag down on the entry console next to the pothos.
She would let him hold her. She would cry into the front of his charcoal suit, and tomorrow they would be a couple who had survived one bad night.
That was the version she carried in her chest the entire way home, like a small warm cup of something she did not want to spill.
She had even let David pour her into the cab himself.
He had appeared at the door of the suite ten minutes after Alexander had slammed it.
He had taken one look at her face, and he had said, very quietly, I'll handle Howard.
Don't think about Howard tonight. I've got it.
He had walked her down to the lobby. And then the door had shut and the cab had pulled away from the curb. Melody had let her head rest back against the warm leather and started telling herself the story of her husband waiting for her at the window with a drink in his hand.
It was a good story. She held onto it the whole way over the bridge.
It lasted right up until she let herself into the penthouse.
Melody let herself into the penthouse and knew, before she had taken two steps into the foyer, that something in the apartment had been rearranged in her absence.
The lights were on. That was the first thing. The bright overhead lights, the ones the cleaning staff used, the ones that turned the marble cold and showed the room as it actually was, which was a place she had been a guest in without ever being told.
A sound was coming from the bedroom — the soft regular zzz of a zipper being closed and reopened, the small rustle of fabric being folded by hands that knew how to fold fabric.
Agnes, the housekeeper, came around the corner from the hallway with one of Melody's sweaters folded over her arm, and a look on her face that Melody had never seen there in any of the months they had known each other.
"Mrs. Winters." Agnes stopped. The sweater was the cream cashmere Alexander had given her last Valentine's Day. Agnes's hands tightened slightly on it. "I — I didn't think you'd be here so soon."
Melody set her keys down on the entry console next to the pothos.
She did not say anything yet. She was waiting for her body to catch up to the room.
Her body was running about half a beat behind, the way it had been running half a beat behind since she had opened the door of the suite, and she had learned in the last few hours not to make her mouth move until her body had caught up.
The things her mouth wanted to say while her body was still behind were not the things she would want to have said tomorrow.
"Agnes," she said. Evenly. "What are you doing?"
Agnes's eyes moved past her, toward the front door, as if checking whether anyone else was coming in behind her. Then back to Melody. Then down to the sweater on her arm.
"Mr. Winters called me," she said quietly.
"He asked me to come and pack a suitcase for you.
He said the bag should go to your sister's address in Brooklyn.
He said the car would take it. He said I should be finished and gone before midnight, ma'am.
So that the apartment would be empty when he got home. "
Melody put her hand on the entry console.
She kept it there for a second. The marble was cool under her palm. The story of the man at the window with the drink in his hand fell, very quietly, off the small shelf inside her chest where she had been carrying it, and broke without making a sound.
He had not come home to face her.
"Okay," Melody said.
She did not know yet what okay meant. She walked past Agnes, down the hall, into the bedroom.
Her suitcase — the large one, the one she had not used since her honeymoon — was open on the bed.
Agnes had gotten about a third of the way through it.
She had been packing carefully and neutrally, the way Agnes did everything: the cream cashmere, the navy wool dress Catherine had picked out for her at Bergdorf's last spring, several pairs of the careful expensive shoes she had bought in the first months of her marriage, the gold bracelet Alexander had given her for their first anniversary laid out in tissue paper on top of the folded clothes.
It was the bracelet that did it.
Agnes had been told to pack the bracelet.
Agnes had been told, by Alexander or by someone Alexander had instructed, that the gold bracelet should go with her.
Which meant Alexander had thought about the bracelet.
Which meant that her husband had sat down and made a list of which of the things in this apartment were hers and should leave with her.
The bracelet had been on that list, and the implication of the bracelet being on that list was that everything not on the list was his.
He had inventoried her.
Melody stood at the foot of the bed, looked at the suitcase, and felt, for the first time since the door of the hotel suite had opened, a sound start to come up out of her chest. Something smaller and uglier than a cry, the sound an animal makes when it has been hit a second time in a place that was already bruised.
She put her hand over her mouth.
Agnes had followed her into the bedroom and was standing very still by the door.
"Mrs. Winters." Her voice was soft. "I'm so sorry."
Melody nodded behind her hand. She did not trust her face yet. She lowered her hand.
"Agnes. Please stop packing. I'll finish it myself."
"Mr. Winters said —"
"I know what Mr. Winters said. You won't be in trouble. I'll tell him I sent you home. Please go. Please go now, Agnes — I don't want you to have to be in this room while I do the rest of this, and I don't want to have to be in this room while someone else does it."
Agnes hesitated. Then she set the cream sweater down on the bed, very gently, on top of the other folded things. "Yes, ma'am."
Agnes walked out of the bedroom, and Melody listened to her bare-soled flats cross the marble of the hallway. The front door of the penthouse opened and closed, and then there was no one in the apartment but Melody.
She sat down on the edge of the bed next to her own suitcase.
Melody looked at the bracelet on top of the folded clothes.
She picked it up and held it in her palm for a moment.
Then she walked it back to the small velvet box in her dresser drawer where it had lived, and she put it back inside the box.
She set the box on top of the dresser where Alexander would see it when he came home after midnight to his empty apartment.
She did the same thing with the navy Bergdorf's dress, and the careful expensive shoes, and the cream cashmere from Valentine's Day.
None of it was going with her. None of it had ever, she understood now, been hers.
They had been costumes. They had been the wardrobe of a woman she had been performing, and the woman she had been performing them for had decided, tonight, that the performance was over.
Melody was not going to take the costumes with her into her real life.
She took out the small overnight bag from the top shelf instead.
The one she had not used since they had gone upstate a few weeks ago.
Into it she put her own things: the jeans she had owned since before she met him, a couple of soft sweaters she had bought herself, her toothbrush, her face cream, the small amber bottle of perfume her sister Angelica had given her for her last birthday, the soft cotton pajamas with the blue flowers her mother had given her in the hospital.
She put in the book she was reading, which was a novel about a woman in postwar Naples, and the small leather notebook she carried for the foundation, and her passport, because some animal part of her said take your passport, and she had learned in the last several hours to listen to her animal parts.
Twelve minutes. The whole of her real life in this apartment fit in twelve minutes of packing.
She zipped the bag.
Melody walked back through the long bright living room with her overnight bag in one hand.
She did not turn off the lights. Let him come home and find them on.
Let him come home and find every single one of the lights on in his beautiful empty apartment, the way Agnes had left them, the way he had told Agnes to leave them — finished and gone before midnight, so the apartment would be empty when he got home.
Empty. The word was a small bright knife in her chest. Empty. He had used the word empty about an apartment that contained his wife.
In the foyer she stopped at the entry console.
The pothos sat in its terra-cotta pot, the new pale leaf still tightly furled against the older ones.
She had bought it for nine dollars at a bodega on Atlantic Avenue the month before her wedding.
It had lived on a fire escape in Crown Heights, and then on the windowsill of a sublet in Cobble Hill, and then in the back of the moving van that had brought the last of her old life into Alexander's apartment.
It had sat on this entry console the whole of her marriage without being inventoried by anyone, because no one in the Winters family had ever considered a nine-dollar pothos to be an asset.
Melody picked it up. Pot and all. It was heavier than she'd expected.
She balanced it against her hip, took her keys with her free hand, and opened the door.
In the hallway, with the door still ajar behind her, she paused for one second and looked back into the apartment.
Every light was on. The marble was very bright.
From here you could see the long living room and the cream sofa at the far end of it, the cream sofa where she had sat in her husband's lap with the city behind her and let him say there you are.
She closed the door.