Anne took to visiting the studio when Jim was out of town, at a conference or convention. She would move around the room, touching the furniture, taking a book from the shelves, never sitting. If she used the toilet, she would lift the seat before she left. Once she saw a note on his desk: “Do you want me to wash the sheets? It’s been a while. Doreen.” Another time she saw a riot of pink and magenta peonies in a crystal vase sitting on the mantel. Sometimes, there were tulips—red, purple, and orange—gorgeously tangled together in a silver pitcher on his desk.
Nine months into their marriage, Anne discovered that Jim had changed the lock to the studio. She wanted to call a disreputable locksmith but hadn’t the spirit. Snooping was shameful enough. The following Sunday, as he dozed between first downs, she took his keys to the local locksmith and had them all copied. None of them worked on the studio door. Locked out, she started calling the studio from pay phones. If he answered, she stayed on the phone, not saying anything. The fifth time she called, Jim asked, “Who is this? What do you want?” What do I want? she asked herself. The next time she called, she found the phone had been disconnected. She waited three weeks before saying anything to Jim.
“Your telephone at the studio has been disconnected,” she said.
“I was getting obscene calls,” he said. “I don’t need a phone there. Call me at work if you want to talk.”
The next morning, when Jim was showering, she went through his wallet, looking for receipts. There were lunches at the Madison Deli and E.A.T. and one at the Four Seasons. After he left for work, she rifled through his desk, looking for his American Express bills. When she couldn’t find them, she decided they still went to his studio address. I’m like a woman in a Russian soap opera, she thought.
She joined the 92nd Street Y and started exercising: weights, rowing machines, step machines, stationary bikes. She got a trainer, Ted. She had always liked games—she had played softball for Vassar—but she’d never liked gym workouts. They made her feel like a hamster on a wheel. Ted changed all that. He was very encouraging. Soon, she was seeing him five times a week, early in the morning. These sessions were the best part of her days. Jim noticed.
“You’re looking thinner, stronger. What’s up?” he asked.
“Decathlon prep,” she said.
He stared at her, then tousled her hair. “Don’t lose too much weight,” he said. “I’d miss your breasts.”
Ted made a pass at her. “Not yet,” she said.
Ted was dark-haired and dark-eyed like Jim, but shorter, sturdier. She had never known a man so comfortable in his body. He likes himself, Anne said to herself. He’d look at his body sideways in the mirror, and if she caught him, he’d smile and say, “C’mon. Feel my muscle.” He never made the self-deprecating remarks that Jim and his buddies made about their bodies, looking to their women to reassure them: “I need to lose this belly.” “My backhand’s going to hell.” “I gave Greg a good game for an old guy, losing only by two points.” Ted’s interests were narrow—cross-training, fiber, Pink Floyd, and the Godfather movies—but his conversation was effective, mostly movie lines. “?‘In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns,’?” he said in a gravelly voice that made her feel she might be dangerous. It was a new and startling feeling. Has there been a dangerous Jewish girl since Judith? she thought. In the locker room, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her underwear, which her mother ordered specially from France, was made of heavy white silk and lace. It looked like the underwear nuns, schoolgirls, and grandmothers wore; it covered her navel and hid her cleavage. I’m thirty-one years old, she thought. Why am I wearing Nana’s undergarments? That afternoon, she bought herself bikini underpants and push-up bras to wear to the gym, beige and pink and lavender lace. Ted picked up on the change. A hint of danger, Anne thought, feeling almost happy. “Let me know when ‘yet’ arrives,” Ted said.
—
Jim sent Anne twenty-four pale yellow long-stem roses for their first anniversary, and took her to dinner at La Grenouille. No peonies, Anne said to herself, no tulips. The next week, she began following him. She would call him around two thirty in the afternoon to check on dinner plans. If he said he might be late, she’d make her way to the lobby of his building at five p.m. and take up a post of discreet surveillance. She wore a brown knit hat with a visor that hid her face; she buried her head in the Post. She wasn’t hiding from Jim, but from the staff. Jim, on his way out, wouldn’t notice her—or anyone else in the waiting room. Like most doctors, he avoided eye contact in waiting rooms, fearing he’d be accosted by a patient or, worse, a patient’s relative.
The first three weeks were uneventful. Jim came home on time, stayed late working, or went to dinner with colleagues. Twice he stopped by his studio in the early evening, but both times he stayed only a half hour or so. “Pay dirt,” as she dismally called it, came in the fourth week.
Jim called Anne at one thirty in the afternoon to say he would be home late. “Don’t hold supper for me.” She immediately left the lab and took up her position in the lobby. At two forty-five, she saw Jim leaving the hospital. She followed him out, giving him a ten-second lead. He got into a cab. She got into the one behind. “Follow that cab,” she said. “You’re kidding, lady,” the cabbie said. “I never kid,” she said. “If you don’t lose it, I’ll give you an extra ten dollars.” Jim’s cab took off down St. Nicholas Avenue; Anne’s raced after it.
At Broadway and Fifty-Eighth, Jim got out. Anne had her driver pull over and gave him twenty dollars. Jim walked slowly across Fifty-Eighth, on the south side of the street; Anne followed on the north side, five feet behind, clutching the Post. At Sixth Avenue, as he waited for the light to change, Jim started whistling. Above the traffic, Anne heard the wistful strains of “These Foolish Things.” Jim often whistled as he walked down the street, but not love songs, not with her; with her, he whistled jaunty airs, marches, anthems, snappy show tunes from Oklahoma! or Guys & Dolls. Is this madness? Anne wondered as she skulked past the Plaza Hotel. “Am I going off the rails?” Jim stopped under the marquee of the Paris Theatre. He looked around expectantly. Anne lurked at the edge of the fountain across the street. Jim looked at his watch. She looked at her watch. It was three fifteen. They waited.