A month after their wedding, Eleanor dropped by his office, late in the afternoon. “Do you mind?” she said as she locked the door behind her. She opened her coat. She was wearing her mother’s pearls, a wedding gift, red high heels, and nothing else. He could barely stand up. She lay down on the floor by his chair. Afterward, she said, “We’ve baptized it.” “Baptism” became one of their sexual tropes. They had sex in every room in their apartment, except the boys’ rooms and Rupert’s private bathroom. They had sex in every office he ever had. They had sex in his hospital rooms. In hotels, before they unpacked, they had sex. “Quick and Dirty” was another trope. “I want sex with you every way,” Eleanor whispered to him at their engagement party. “Let’s try quick and dirty.” After the toasts, when most of the guests were drunk, she took him into a powder room. “Don’t let’s waste this occasion.” She opened his fly. He kissed her neck and pulled down her underpants. At parties, when the attention she was receiving from other men became too exciting to him, he’d signal to her. They’d meet in the powder room. Afterward, she’d say to other guests who made inquiries, “I needed his help. No. Nothing’s wrong.” At home, they often had sex half-dressed. She liked to come up behind him unawares and reach into his pants in front, whispering all the things she wanted to do with him; he would sink to the ground, pulling her with him. She would try anything he wanted at least once, and nothing disgusted her, though he always felt she held herself back, just a little, adding, perversely, to his pleasure. She was a sexual adventurer. He would never tire of her. In all their thousands of couplings, she failed him only in failing to be submissive.
Rupert had known she wasn’t a virgin when they first had sex, and he wondered, after her tubal ligation, whether she might be sleeping with other men—gamekeepers or cardiologists or Italian lawyers—when she said she was at the movies; the thought aroused him. He was sure the children were his; she was too honorable to cuckold him. Did he love her? He couldn’t imagine life without her. Did she love him? Did anyone?
Their marriage hit a bump in its fifteenth year. They had been together a long time. At the office, Rupert was discontented; at home, Eleanor was at loose ends. Neither acknowledged their unease, waiting for the other to speak, hoping the skies would clear. Rupert couldn’t remember why he had wanted to be a lawyer. His work had become boring, his partners irritating. He thought of teaching instead, perhaps at Yale, and started coming into the office late and leaving early. Eleanor had too much time on her hands. She went to the movies almost every day, sometimes twice in one day. The boys were growing up. The youngest was in kindergarten. The older ones had secret lives. The trip to England made things worse. Rupert hadn’t wanted to go; Eleanor had insisted. “You need to go the first time,” she said. His mood was unhappy the whole time they were there, his premonitions all fulfilled. He hated England and the English. For the first time in their marriage, they didn’t baptize the hotel room. Everywhere he went, he felt exposed and derided for the fraud he was. He was sure everyone, the hotel concierge, the ma?tre d’ at Simpson’s, the taxi drivers, knew he was an orphan and an outcast, their English antennae always alert to the striver, the parvenu. He felt everyone blamed him for not having parents, for not deserving parents, for not being able to keep them. He blamed himself too. And he blamed Eleanor. She had taken all the relatives for herself, generations of Phippses, Deerings, Livingstons, and Porters, going back past the Mayflower Compact to the Domesday Book.
Jim Cardozo’s wedding, coming on the heels of the English debacle, was the trip wire. Rupert wasn’t sure why he had wanted to go. The food was delicious, unheard-of at an English wedding, and the company lively. He liked the Strauses especially. I’m better with Jews than with Christians, he thought. The problem was the groom. His slavering over Eleanor, while offering minor satisfaction, excited jealousy where he hadn’t thought it existed. When he asked Eleanor that evening, whether she’d ever had an affair, she didn’t answer but unzipped his fly, slipped off her underpants, and lay down in her silk dress on the floor, in front of him. “Do you want me to touch myself?” she asked. He nodded. “God is in the details,” he thought, watching her. Afterward, lying on the floor, he remembered lying clothed on his bed in Greenpoint with Vera sitting on top of him, naked, aroused, yielding. He tried to conjure her physical memory but his skin had shed it, leaving behind only the visual, unspooling in his mind as soft-core porn, slightly out of focus. He felt a shaft of terrible longing and loss.
Over the next few weeks, every time he and Eleanor had sex, he thought of Vera. Before long, he was thinking about her all the time. The subway ride became torture. Every blurry young blonde on the train reminded him of her, making him ache. He fought the urge to rub against them from behind, to clutch their breasts and breathe into their necks. After a month, he decided he would have to find her. There was no other resolution.
He wanted to look for her himself, but the risk, he knew, was too great. He wouldn’t be careful enough. He hired a private investigator. He gave him her name and the Greenpoint address. “I want to know everything,” he told the PI. “Where is she living? Where is she working? What does she do? Is she married, divorced, engaged? Has she ever been married? Is there a man in her life? If so, who is he, what does he do? Does she have any children? Did she have any children? And get me a picture. I’ll give you two weeks. I’ll pay for three weeks if you can do it in two. I don’t think she’s strayed far from Leonard Street.”
The PI was back to him in ten days. His report was vague on some points. He had been diligent. Vera was careless:
Vera Wolinski, aka Vera Wolinski Koslowski, still lives at 536 Leonard Street, Greenpoint, with her mother and her widowed sister. She has often claimed that she too is a widow. When she was very young, she told neighbors, she married an old Polish man, Adam Koslowski, a boarder in the family home; he died six months after the nuptials, leaving her $10,000. There is no record of that marriage or any other. There have been many men in her life since then but no certified husbands. She has no known children and no verified pregnancy or birth, though there was gossip that she married the Pole because she was pregnant. Her current boyfriend, Stefan Malinowski, is the director of the Greenpoint YMCA. He seems a decent fellow. Apparently he’s been her on-and-off boyfriend ever since the death of the Polish husband. He always comes back. He’s given her three diamond engagement rings. The first two went missing, likely pawned. She’s a waitress at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. She’s worked there for at least a dozen years. She works both the lunch and rush-hour shifts, coming in at 11:30 a.m., Tuesday through Friday, leaving at 8:30 p.m. Her lunch hour is from 3:30 to 4:30. She makes good money as a waitress, mostly in tips. She also makes extra income on the side. She dates some of her customers, only regulars. The Hotel Coolidge, across the street from Grand Central, is a regular rendezvous spot for illicit couplings. She is known to the clerks, not by name but by her photograph. She makes sure they are tipped regularly and well by her dates. She is very beautiful, as you will see from her picture. She has never been arrested. She does not use drugs. Over the course of the investigation, I was given multiple accounts of events in her life as people heard them from her. Other PIs are said to have investigated her. She was named reportedly as correspondent in two New York State divorces brought on the grounds of adultery, most likely as the designated doxie. I have not found records identifying her as such. She is 37 or 38 years old.