Part 3 — Arm in the Glass
I did not sit down. I have sat through forty years of Walter being about to explain, and I decided at the table that I would stand for this one. The room was quiet. Buddy was still looking at the reflection in the glass of the balcony door, at the arm of a woman holding up a phone.
“Say it, Walter,” I said. “Who took the picture?” Rhonda covered her face. Walter looked at the ham, then at the purple beads on the tablecloth, and then at me. “Her name is Deborah,” he said. “Deborah Lyle. She works the register at the feed store.”
I will tell you what I felt, because people expect fury. I felt a cold, clear stillness, like the hour before a storm. Everything I had refused to see for ten months arranged itself in a neat row: the Saturday errands that took four hours, the new cologne, the phone face down on the porch rail. I had run a switchboard for thirty-three years. I knew what a hidden call sounds like.
It came out of him all at once. Last summer Walter had begun seeing Deborah, a widow of fifty-eight, and in March he took the room that I had booked for our anniversary and made it his. He told the hotel to change the name. He took Rhonda along, so that if anyone saw the pictures, it would look like a birthday trip for a sister and a brother. Rhonda had agreed because Walter had paid her car payments for a year.
“She believed it was finished, Roz,” Walter said. “I told her we lived like roommates.” He heard himself as he said it, and he stopped. Buddy gave a short, humiliated laugh. Rhonda, who had told the trip story twice before the deviled eggs, did not say a word.
I had known for three weeks that something was wrong, and so I had done what I do. I called the hotel as the cardholder, not as a wife, and asked for the record of the room I had paid for. The manager on duty, a courteous man named Mr. Boudreaux, sent it by email within the hour. It showed the room changed on the fourth of March to the names of Walter and Deborah Lyle, with two dinners at a restaurant in the Garden District, one carriage ride, and a spa appointment. Nothing in the name of Rhonda. She had come for one night only.
I took the record out of the pocket of my cardigan, where it had been since Thursday, and laid it beside the photograph. I took out a second paper, the statement of the hotel showing my deposit and the full cost of the room, paid from my Christmas money. And I took out a third: a letter from a lawyer in Hattiesburg, Mrs. Delacroix, whom I had visited on Friday. The envelope had a stamp. It was addressed to Walter.
The letter explained, in the calm language that lawyers use, what I had decided. Mississippi does not require anyone to endure a marriage like this one. It also says that money spent on a person outside the marriage is a matter a court can look at, and that the cost of the room should be restored to me, with an accounting of the trip. I had asked for a separation of the household, a fair division of what we owned, and the return of my money. I wanted nothing else.
Buddy stood up very slowly. He put his hand on the shoulder of Rhonda, and then he took it away. “You told me you were at a conference,” he said. “You told me you were at the eye doctor. You told me, for ten months, a hundred things.” Rhonda said she had only wanted to help her brother. “Then help him,” said Buddy, “in the car, going home. We will talk tomorrow.” He went to find his coat.
Walter said my name once more, in the old voice, the one that used to work. I walked to the china cabinet and took out the two wedding glasses we had toasted with in 1986, and I set them very gently on the table. “Walter,” I said, “you promised me, forty years from that night, that you would take me back there. I forgave you some things this year before I knew about them. This one I will not. Please take your coat.”
A promise made on a balcony in the spring of youth belongs to the one who kept it, not to the one who broke it.
He moved into the camper behind the house of his brother that night. In July a judge in Hattiesburg signed the order that divided the house and the savings fairly and returned the cost of the room to me. Walter paid it from his retirement without a word of complaint. Rhonda wrote me a letter in her round, careful handwriting, and I read it twice, and I have not yet answered.
In September, just after my seventieth birthday, I flew to New Orleans with two friends from the switchboard, Odessa and Mae, both widows, both louder than I am. The hotel manager had read my letter and upgraded us to the corner room, the one with the iron balcony. We stood out there at dusk, wearing the purple beads from 1986, while a parade went by on Royal Street and the trumpets echoed off the old brick.
A man on a float tossed down a fresh strand, and Mae caught it with one hand and draped it over my head. I laughed until I cried. Odessa took a photograph, and in the glass of the balcony door behind us you could see three women with their arms around each other, holding up a phone.
