In the Night Kitchen

Lana had long been in the habit of reading Terry’s mail, particularly at Christmas when the cards came. She never made a secret of it, and he never complained, even when he found the envelopes slit along their pale white throats, splayed like rash feathers against the green felt of his desk. Terry didn’t like to be bothered with details—bank statements, charity requests, formal correspondence. He trusted Lana, in fact, to take care of all such customaries, all but the sentimental things, for which no particular action was required. If the envelope was empty, a small sigh invariably escaped his lips. Done! he thought, satisfied, as though he had done it himself, and tossed the thin, paper sheaf into the drawer.

This night, in mid-December, Terry arrived late and had not thought to call. Lana knew she should never wait dinner for him. By this time, she would be curled up in bed with one of her novels, the lights dimmed, perhaps a mulberry candle burning, and Trudy having nosed her way under his pillow again. Terry turned onto the street, its nostalgic lanterns rimmed with red bows. He turned down his own well-shoveled drive—Lana would have tipped the man well, he was sure—and slipped into the house by the side entrance, leaving a faint trail of snow-dust along the freshly polished floor.

Lana startled him, her silhouette backlit and ghostly before the kitchen window.

“What are you doing up?” he asked.

When she didn’t answer, he laid his briefcase on the countertop and spread his coat like thick, woolen wings over one of the Italian silk chairs.

“It’ll mold if you leave it there,” she murmured.

“What’s that?”

“The chair. It’s fabric. Wet coats should be hung up to dry.”

He lifted the coat, confused. “Where should I put it then?”

She approached him slowly. Her robe was sheer and stretched behind her like a sheet of ice. He wasn’t sure he had ever seen it before. “Where do you think you should put it, Terry? Where would common sense tell you a coat goes?”

“On one of those—” he hesitated—“the rack or the tree. Whatever it’s called.”

“The coat rack,” she pronounced, taking it from him.

When Lana returned, she found the kitchen bathed in a soft, violet light. She loathed anything fluorescent, any bright yellow bulbs. Terry was foraging through the refrigerator, and she watched him, silently refusing—her arms crossed, her toes pointing and flexing in her pliable shoes—refusing to explain again where the cheese was kept, the sauces and the crusty bread. This he knew, or sensed, and so he didn’t ask. They carried on a long time this way, Lana studying him, and Terry avoiding her eyes.

“Was it an unpleasant day for you?” Terry inquired at last.

“It was an unusual day for me,” she replied.

When had her words become inflected this way? he wondered. Was she presenting a code he was meant to decipher? Surely not. Lana knew that Terry didn’t like deciphering codes.

“Define unusual,” he said, loosening his tie. Terry was aware, though he tried not to let on, that Lana had not smiled once at him since he returned home.

“I woke this morning thinking I knew you,” she replied. Now their eyes met and held, a long, wavering line between them. He left the knife in the mustard jar. She backed away slowly, skirting the table.

“What is this about really, Lana? Did I forget something—a birthday? An anniversary? Some plans we made to meet for lunch in town?”

When she stopped retreating, he stopped advancing. Lana thought how different Terry was from other men. He was the one who played hard-to-get. He was the one who wanted to be sought, the one who needed perhaps to be tended and consoled. If she left him, she had no illusions: she knew he would not come after.

These were hard things to realize about her husband of twenty-four years. But they were not the hardest things, not by far.

“A card came for you today,” Lana told him, withdrawing it from her pocket and laying the glossy print—some little snow scene in the style of Currier & Ives—on their staunch, mahogany table. Then, she sat down with her legs crossed and visible, looking in that soft light like an adolescent girl riding side-saddle on a horse she was vaguely afraid of. Terry receded behind the counter and continued fixing his sandwich.

“Are you not at all curious who it’s from?”

“I’m tired,” he said. “It’s been a long day. If it’s important, why don’t you just tell me?”

“I can do better than that,” Lana said, though she worried that her voice would crack. She worried that she wasn’t strong enough for this forced nonchalance and would split somehow—would give way.

“I can do better than that,” Lana said, though she worried that her voice would crack. She worried that she wasn’t strong enough for this forced nonchalance and would split somehow—would give way.

“Dear Terry, can it be that we’ve reached the silver anniversary of our friendship? Is it fair to call it that? I don’t know. I’ve been a terrible correspondent these many years—resisting every holiday the temptation to look you up, knowing I could find you if I wanted to, wondering if it was wrong how much I wanted to.

“This year, I plan to be in Boston again, visiting my mother. Sheryl and I have decided to part ways. Everything is amicable so far, and certainly I can’t claim to have been the most devoted husband. 

“I assume that you and Lana have gone on, and I hope that you are happy together. Believe me when I say it, Terry. You should be happy. It would make me happy to know that you are.

“On this note, I won’t ask you to meet me. I will only say that if you want to meet me, for any reason, I’m easy enough to find. My mother still lives in her place on Sycamore—the same place we looked after that Christmas. I hope it’s not wrong to say, not over-stepping, that that Christmas was the sweetest of my life.”

Lana’s hand trembled, but her voice stayed firm and low. “Always, Tom.”

Terry stood behind the counter, eating his sandwich. He had rolled his sleeves up, and Lana resented him for it—resented the way she admired his forearms, how taut and lean they were, the green veins raised and visible against the smooth, olive skin. He was a handsome man, more so now than when she had married him. If pressed, she knew Terry could not say the same about her.

“So Tom Shepherd sent a Christmas card,” he replied between bites. “Well, I guess that is rather unusual after all these years.” What Lana couldn’t see, obscured as he was by the island, was the way Terry’s knees shook a little as he pronounced Tom’s full name. Why should he have said both names at all? What solace was there in that formality? Terry saw these questions knitting through her brows—dark and full and beginning to silver—and wished there was a way to silence her, to halt whatever came next.

“This isn’t a Christmas card,” Laura said. “This is a love letter disguised as a Christmas card.”

There it was, all on the table. His stomach churned, the sandwich suddenly contemptible, and nothing to wash it down. Why was she doing this? She knew how he hated confrontation.

“Lana—”

“Terry—”

She had blocked his passage. He understood now that she would not let him escape, would not leave him even a crawlspace in the language for wriggling through. Terry watched her bare legs keeping time to an invisible music. The motion was not unlike shuddering. Yet they were lovely, long legs, he thought, despite the webbed, purple places that suggested a small explosion had taken place beneath her too-pale skin. Why did she never go to the tanning bed the way the other wives did?

“I assume there’s something you want me to say.” Terry’s throat tasted of chalk, and his pulse drummed unpleasantly in his ears.

“You know, I remember that Christmas,” Lana began. “You had proposed to me over Thanksgiving, and I was so reluctant to go away with my family as planned. I wanted to spend our first Christmas together.” He watched her speaking but tried not to hear. He thought how she always wore her hair a bit too short, a bit too severe, and had it cut again just when it was reaching the right length—the most flattering length. He remembered how much he loved milk as a child—what a rewarding beverage it was—and felt sorry for a moment, almost regretful, that they never had milk in the house. What could he drink?

“But you wanted me to go on that trip. You were insistent. You said how much I’d regret missing my chance to see France and Italy—how you’d be waiting for me when I returned—how absence would make everything fonder.” She laughed a little, a low, guttural laugh that unnerved him. “Why couldn’t I see then that I was the only one who came back?”

Lana saw that Terry was shaken. Her last words had slid past his composed exterior, sliced through his sharp, clean-shaven jaw. She had become a chisel carving away at his most brittle bone. “Are you going to tell me I’m wrong?” she asked. “Are you going to tell me you’ve been here all along?”

“I’ve been here,” Terry said. She felt the heat of his words, the anger driving his breath. “I’ve always been here—late for dinner sometimes, but here in this house every night.”

“And the AA meetings?”

“You asked me to go!”

“And you never went.”

“Of course I did! I told you—I couldn’t go in town. I couldn’t risk seeing someone I knew.”

How was she so calm now? Why did this feel so much like a story, like a book she would finish reading in bed without being surprised by the ending, without being sorry even when she had reached the list of other books by the author?

“You never went to those meetings.” It was not a question. “I’ve known for years. I never let myself think about it too much. I imagined—I hoped—that you were simply embarrassed to admit you had a problem. I pictured you driving around in your car, listening to Vivaldi, listening to a recording of the Boston Pops, stopping for coffee maybe, or at a bar. I didn’t even mind the thought of you stopping at a bar as long as you weren’t stopping—”

He couldn’t listen anymore. Her words chafed his skin like the worst kind of wind—cold, relentless. Yet he couldn’t turn down her volume, reduce her fevered pitch. He tried to focus on the glass of milk, the glass of milk that now subsumed his childhood. And hadn’t there been a book too, where a little boy went swimming in a glass of milk, gleeful and naked and not ashamed? Terry remembered that book, yet even in memory, he could not turn the page.

“I haven’t seen Tom Shepherd in 25 years!” he spat.

Then, Terry felt the warm silence descend. He had done it. He had stopped her, mid-sentence. The refrigerator’s hum turned sacred. The faucet dripping acquired a mystical sound.

Lana stood up, cinching the scalloped robe closer like the shell of a clam. “So there have been others,” she groaned.

“No, of course not! That’s not what I meant. But—to your accusation—from before. There’s nothing between Tom and me. Nothing.”

Lana stepped to the counter, leaned against it, her head down, her body swaying. “Tell me you didn’t go to his house that Christmas. Tell me you didn’t spend the sweetest Christmas of your life with him. That’s how Tom remembers it. What do you recall?”

“We were—just kids,” he murmured. “School chums. We wanted to drink and play cards and have the place to ourselves.”

“But no women?”

Terry suddenly remembered his tie and tore it so fast from his neck that he seemed to slap the air with it. Perhaps he wanted to punish someone—Lana, or Tom, or himself.

“Of course no women. We were engaged, Tom was already seeing Sheryl…”

“And because you had everything you needed there in that house, just the two of you.”

“I’m warning you, Lana!” Terry leaned in close, met her eyes, wagged his finger in a weak parody of his father.

“Would it shock you to learn I slept with a woman in college?”

He bristled but said nothing.

“Would it shock you to learn that I did not enjoy it?”

Terry went to the freezer, took out a piece of ice, held it between his teeth, said nothing.

She saw the list of other titles coming into her mind. To her dismay, she had read all of them. Nothing was new.

“Would it shock you to learn that I’m leaving?”

“Don’t!” The urgency of his response touched her. Terry held the ice now inside the pocket of his jacket, his right arm stretched forward as if to restrain her. Lana hadn’t moved.

“This isn’t the ending I wanted,” she said, “but I think this ending has been—” she took a certain pride in knowing the term—“foreshadowed for some time.”

“Don’t,” he said again, faintly, and it was the last word she heard before walking up the stairs. He would not follow her, she knew. It was just as well.

Terry turned up the lights and walked to the table. His feet had begun to hurt. Suddenly, it was as if his shoes were strangling him, cutting off his circulation. He sat down to remove them, to allow his toes to stretch and flex, to strip them free of even their thick, woolen socks. Terry’s hand slowly moved to the letter, lifted it, glimpsed Tom’s scrawny, schoolboy script, his overwrought capitals bearing down on the lower cases. Terry did not want to read the words himself. He wasn’t sure he could bear the sound of his own voice speaking aloud inside his head. Instead, he slipped the glossy snow scene into his pocket, felt it pressing there against his heart. How silly after all these years… But maybe—Terry took in this thought like a long draught of milk, cool and refreshing and quiet on his tongue. Maybe he would stop by.