He reached into the pantry and took a box of spoon-size shredded wheat and two drinking glasses. Under the counter he found the frying pan with the copper bottom. It was a wedding present, and therefore just over two years old: twenty-seven months, to be exact. A pang of love and sadness seized him, but he allowed himself to succumb only to a moment of worry. Last week Cynthia had complained of dizziness and blurred vision in her left eye. It had happened before, about a year ago, and again last summer, but both times it had disappeared on its own. Last week, however, she had also developed occasional tremors in her arms, then weakness in her legs. She also had complained of constriction in her abdomen. The local general practitioner had asked them if they had been spraying any insecticides in their home recently, but they hadn’t. He had suspected an accidental poisoning or perhaps an allergy and had told her to rest over the weekend, to cancel her trip to New York, and to let him know on Monday if the symptoms did not disappear.
On the refrigerator door was a crayon drawing Cynthia had attached with magnets. Warden’s four-year-old nephew, Joshua, had drawn it in honor of their first wedding anniversary. Warden envied the child’s frankness. There was Cynthia with her long blond hair, wearing a blue dress with a white smear on one side, which Joshua had explained was her handkerchief sticking out of her pocket. And beside her was Warden, long brown trousers, white shirt, and blue tie, glasses, and a big red stain down the left side of his face. The kid had a good eye for detail. Warden touched his birthmark before he reached into the refrigerator for the bacon and the eggs on the middle shelf. Even at thirty-five, Warden was not entirely free of his sensitivity over the large rough patch that had covered half his face since he was born. He still felt occasional awe that someone as beautiful and as young as Cynthia would want to marry him, could love him, and yet, he reminded himself, she did.
And what was this in the plastic container? Fried apples. Typical of Kathleen Somerville. He started warming the apples.
Cynthia entered the room. She was dragging her left foot, and she half-fell, half-descended, into the slatted chair at the table. She had put on a blue robe over her nightgown.
“What are you doing downstairs?” he asked. “And why are you limping so badly?”
“Leg’s asleep. I want to watch you,” she said. “I haven’t seen you for three days.”
He tore open the plastic packet of bacon.
“I want to hear every little thing about the trip,” she said. “How many people were there, how many autographs you signed, how long they applauded, how many job offers you declined, how many women seduced you.”
Warden had been reading his poetry at the 92nd Street Y.
“I couldn’t concentrate on anything but you,” he said.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “New York? The literati? The Upper East Side? Tell me you were dazzling. Tell me Woody Allen was there. Tell me about the argument Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag got into over which of your poems was better.”
“There were maybe 250 or 300 people there,” he said. “The term ‘famous poet’ is an oxymoron, unless you happen to be dead. I wanted to be here with you.”
She said at least he’d made both his wife and his agent happy by going.
He told her about signing a lot of books afterward, about meeting reporters from the New York Times and The New Yorker, about getting a business card from an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
“Which you immediately passed on to Joe,” said Cynthia.
“Of course.”
He waved six slices of bacon into the frying pan and punched “2” on the electric stove.
“Did you see anybody from Montpelier when you were up there?” Cynthia asked.
“Not a soul. Should I have?”
“I heard several people on the faculty talking about going. Dan Farnham was, I know.”
“Dan Farnham would not waste an evening in New York on me,” said Warden. “If you had been along, maybe.”
“Aha,” said Cynthia. “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster. . . .”
He told her to go ahead and finish the speech.
“I can’t remember,” said Cynthia. “I don’t have to. They’re not my lines.”
“You’re not going to do the play still, are you?”
“I want to,” she said. “Yes.”
Warden punched the button for the hot water and pulled two mugs from the cabinet. Daniel Farnham, one of his colleagues in the English department, had asked Cynthia to play Desdemona in Othello, the winter play Farnham was directing here at the Montpelier School for Boys. As department chairman, Warden had advised the choice of another play, one with more parts for the students—Othello has the smallest cast of any of Shakespeare’s tragedies—but Farnham had insisted that it needed to be Othello, that Greg Lipscomb, a black sophomore, was interested in playing the lead, and that all of the boys in the fourth form were reading the play for English class. Warden had not pressed the matter, but he had a sense—a sense that he recognized as paranoid and irrational—that Farnham had a more ulterior motive.
“He chose that play in order to work with you,” said Warden. “He’s got a terrible crush on you.”
“Of course he does,” said Cynthia. “They all do. He’s just like one of the boys. But I don’t have a crush on any of them.”
“It’s so transparent,” said Warden. “Picking the play that you’re writing your dissertation on.”
Cynthia flicked the zipper on Warden’s travel bag on the table.