The Death of Harold Cassidy

Colton Huelle

__________

In the days following Harold Cassidy’s death, Joy’s Facebook feed was clogged with lengthy tributes to the late novelist and links to even lengthier blog posts about his contribution to American literature. Writers and critics of all stripes crawled out of the woodwork to mourn their late mentor in overly-poetic elegies. Joy suspected that many of these were composed by hacks who had only met Harry in passing. One article she read was titled, “Saying Goodbye to the Architect of Postmodern Morality.” Joy herself had tried many times to pen some such outpouring of grief, but each time she tried, she was paralyzed by feelings that cried out from a remote and alien past.

            Joy met Harry in the early eighties after being hired to teach Victorian literature at the university where he helmed the creative writing program. Their affair had caught them both off guard, and in the years that followed, they often bickered over who had initiated it. Matters were complicated by Joy’s friendship with Harry’s wife, Evelyn, which predated the affair. Joy regularly dined at the Cassidys’ Greenwich Village loft, attended Broadway shows with Evelyn, and summered with them at their lake house in New Hampshire. The guilt was nearly unbearable, but she and Harold were powerless to defy the magnetism that drew him time and again to her bed.

            Then, three years into the affair, Harold accepted a visiting professorship in Galway, and they agreed to seize the opportunity to quit each other cold turkey. A few days after his departure, however, her body aching in the agony of withdrawal, she typed up a smutty letter, sealed it in an envelope, and tucked it between two of Harry’s novels on her bookshelf. She started sleeping with an Anthropology grad student who once had made a half-hearted pass at her. This held her over for a time. But one night, spurred on by a bottle of Reisling, she took down the envelope, scrawled the address that Evelyn had given her before they left for Ireland, and marched out of her apartment to the mailbox at the end of the street.

            For weeks, she moved through her days in terror, fearing that in his response, Harry would remind her that they had agreed to move on and ask her not to contact him again. Or worse, he would not respond at all. Or worse still, it would be Evenlyn who would author the response, having gotten to the letter before Harry. But Harry’s letter finally came, flush with gratitude and pent-up desire. He wrote that his longing for her had been torturous and instructed her to address future correspondence to his office at the university.

            Harry had been dead for a week, and now Joy sat in the living room of her Brooklyn brownstone, brooding on those letters. Harry once told her that he’d kept them tucked between old manuscripts and letters from his editor in a filing cabinet at the lake house. Joy wondered now if he had told her this in anticipation of this very moment.

            Evelyn had called earlier that morning, as she had done every few days since Harry’s death. As far as Joy knew, Evelyn had never suspected anything between her and Harry. During one of these calls, Evelyn told her, “I think you and I are the only living souls who knew Harry as a man and not a demigod.” But this morning, Evelyn had called with exciting news: a professor from Dartmouth College would be sorting through Harry’s old papers at the lake house for a special collection in the library’s archives.

It was just after two in the morning when Joy pulled into the driveway of the lake house and parked in front of the boat shed. Her eyes followed the path of white stepping stones that led down to the dock. She stepped out of the car and closed the door behind her as quietly as she could manage. The silence of the night was disarming. The vivid soundscape of lake nights had always been the best part of her summers with the Cassidys. The frogs, the crickets, the owls, for starters. But there were softer notes: a wind chime from the opposite shore, or trout leaping from and plopping back into the water. All that Joy heard now were the boughs of pine trees shivering in the wind. The sound of off-season.

            She got in through the window of the guest bedroom, which for years had been without a screen or lock. She followed the thin beam of her flashlight up a narrow flight of stairs. Harry’s office was in the attic, a cramped room made all the more cramped by stacks of books that lined the slanted walls. Pushed up against a window that overlooked the lake was a small desk, barely spacious enough to accommodate Harry’s old Underwood typewriter and a few framed photos: Harry and Evelyn posing collegially with the Obamas; Harry in his Army fatigues laughing with another officer; and, finally, Harry with his arm around a teenage boy she recognized as his nephew.

            Beside the desk were twin filing cabinets, waist-high. It took only fifteen minutes to find the letters, eight or nine in all, bound by paperclip and wedged between two type-written drafts of a story that she remembered reading in The New Yorker long before they had met.

            Joy thumbed through the letters to make sure they were all there. At the bottom of the stack, she found carbon copies of Harry’s responses. The few phrases that leapt off the page as she skimmed the letters brought hot flashes of remembrance to her face and temples. Had she really once been this person, so well-versed in the language of desire? Had the words not appeared in her own handwriting, she might not have believed that she had ever been so certain of her power to arouse. She sat down at the desk and began to read the letter on the top of the stack. She had just started Harry’s response when she heard a car pull into the driveway.

            From the office window, she could see the bumper of a red station wagon spotted with patches of rust. New Hampshire plates. Up and down her body, nerves were firing off distress signals, and her ears rang with the white noise of panic. She took three steps to the door and froze on the landing of the staircase. The front door swung open on squealing hinges. She looked around the office: there was nowhere to hide. 

            “Hello?” a voice called out. The overhead light in the living room flooded through the open door at the bottom of the stairwell. Joy turned off her flashlight. She could hear the stranger’s footsteps carry him from one end of the house to the other.

            “Anybody there?” the voice called out again. A young man appeared at the bottom of the stairs and flinched upon seeing her. For several seconds, they regarded each other in silence. The young man wore a tie-dyed denim jacket and gray pajama bottoms; and, though he was older and more haggard than the teenage boy in the photograph, Joy placed him at once. Harry’s nephew Bryan.

            Harry and Evelyn had not been able to have kids. Once, shortly after they returned from Galway, they had come close to adopting, but something fell through at the eleventh hour. Then, on Harry’s fiftieth birthday, his younger sister gave birth to Bryan. Harry was mad about the boy, Joy recalled. Harry’s own father had walked out on him before he took his first steps. He once confided in Joy that he often worried that his desire to be a father came from a place too selfish, too rooted in his own pain. When Bryan was born, he and Evelyn moved up to New Hampshire full time to witness Bryan’s first years. It was then that his and Joy’s affair finally sputtered out.

            It occurred to Joy now, looking down at this gaunt and lanky twenty-something, that it had been several years since Harry had mentioned his nephew.

            “So, who are you?” Bryan asked.

            “My name is Joy Livingston. You must be Bryan. I was a close friend of your uncle’s. I’m just here to pick up some things that your aunt wanted me to come get for her.”

            “How did you get in?”

            “She gave me a key.”

            “Nah, you came in through the guest room. You left the window open.”

            “Well, I––” As she stammered, Joy caught a whiff of pot floating up the stairs.

            Bryan took one step up the stairs and titled his head. “Seems kinda weird, you being here at two in the morning. You drove here from New York?”

            “Well, yes. I just––I suppose I needed to say goodbye to him somehow.”

            “Right.” He smirked and started moving up the rest of the stairs, raising his arms above his, as though Joy was aiming a gun at him. “What are you holding?”

            Joy looked down at the packet of letters trembling in her hands.

            “You’re not trying to steal any papers of his to make a quick buck, are you?” Bryan asked.

            “Of course not,” Joy said. She took a deep breath and commanded her voice to come out steadier. “These belong to me actually. I spent a lot of time here over the years. They’re my papers.” Bryan had now reached the stair below Joy, and they stood eye to eye. “Your uncle talked about you quite a lot.”

            “Oh yeah?” Bryan raised his eyebrows, and Joy stepped back to allow him to pass into the office. He bowed as he walked by her. “So Aunt Evie doesn’t know you’re here?”

            “She doesn’t,” Joy conceded, huffing impatiently.

            “Long drive to make on a whim. You knew you could get in through the guest room?”

            “I’ve stayed here many times.”

            “Good enough for me.” Bryan shrugged and ambled over to the bookshelf. “Hey, you want some weed? I know Harry kept some around. Ah!” He reached up for a red leather spine on the top shelf and pulled it down. He placed the book on Harry’s desk and opened it up to a cavity in the pages from which Bryan took out a plastic bag and a glass pipe.

            “Oh please, Harry didn’t smoke dope.”

            “Hell yeah, he did. Good shit, too. I used to swipe from his stash all the time when I was a kid.”

            Harry had never mentioned a secret pot habit to Joy. She could see keeping it from his wife, but smoking pot felt like something a man is supposed to do with his mistress. Of course, she would have turned him down, if he had offered it to her, but it stung to know that he had not. Did he secretly think of her as a square? She knew he had experimented with drugs in his younger years. He had been buddies with Kesey, after all. But well into his fifties and sixties? It was absurd.

            “Did Evelyn know?”

            “Oh yeah, this one time she caught us on the dock, and I overheard him catching hell from her about it later on. She didn’t care that he did it, she just thought it was irresponsible to do it with me.”

            Joy didn’t know what was harder to believe: Harry smoking pot or Evelyn condoning it. And how could Harry have kept secrets from her? But she could worry over that later, on the drive home. First she had to extricate herself. Of all the people who could have caught her breaking into Harry’s summer home––a neighbor, the police, the archivist––his pothead nephew was probably the best case scenario.

            “So what’s the deal with those papers?” Bryan asked.

            “Oh, nothing interesting. Just some letters I wrote him. I just wanted them to reminisce, that’s all.”

            “Read me one.”

            Joy laughed nervously. “I don’t think so.”

            “C’mon, why not?”

            “Because they’re private.”

            “So private that you drove six hours to get them before anyone found them. What, were you guys fucking or something?”

            Joy felt the muscles in her forehead spasm.

            Bryan covered his mouth with his hands, and his eyes popped open. “Oh my god, you little minx! You were boning my uncle.”

            “What? No. That is––just––completely out of line.” But Joy felt her expression swirl into an admission of guilt. “I got what I came here for, and now I’m going to leave.” She started moving toward the stairs, but Bryan stepped in front of her.

            “Wait. Look, I loved the guy. He was like an idol to me. I just want to know about him.”

            The smirk on Bryan’s face was gone, replaced by an earnestness that caught Joy off guard, made her forget the urge to flee. She had not once, in all these years, confided in a single person about her relationship with Harry.

            “Fine,” she said. “But you have to understand there are many different types of love, and I never asked him or even wanted him to leave your aunt. I can’t justify it, and I won’t try, but there was something between us that––”

            “Was he like an absolute stallion in the sack?”

            Joy surprised herself by laughing. “Well, the affair lasted for ten years, if that answers your question.”

            “All right, Uncle Har! Come on, lemme just read one.”

            The muscles in Joy’s neck and shoulders relaxed for the first time since Bryan had arrived. The boy had a levity about him that demanded to be mirrored. The manic pride he exhibited in discovering the sordid details of his uncle’s love life now swelled in Joy’s own chest. For decades she had lived in panic that somebody would find out. Now, that very nightmare was being realized, and she was…giddy? After all, she had slept with the architect of postmodern morality! For ten years! And, if it was dishonest, it was also passionate, and life-affirming, and beautiful.

            She could sympathize with the kid’s desire to glimpse into the back pages of his uncle’s storied life. Now that Harry was gone, she too was greedy for more of him. It was a comfort to be around someone who felt the same. She handed Bryan the packet of letters.

            “When were these written?” Bryan asked as he scanned the first page of the packet.

            “Eighty-five or eighty-six. Harry spent a year in Galway as a visiting professor. We were supposed to use the time apart to call it quits, but I couldn’t help myself.”

            “I can see that,” Bryan muttered as he continued reading the letter.

            Joy laughed. It was almost enough to make her want to tell the world. Would it really be so bad? But then she thought of Evelyn, and her giddiness petered out.

            “I hope you understand that Evelyn can never find out. I was good friends with her––am good friends with.”

            Bryan didn’t look up from the letter. “I can’t believe this.”

            “Bryan, do you hear what I’m saying? Evelyn can never find out.”

            “Yeah, yeah, gotcha.” He handed the packet of letters back to her. “I have to go take a piss. Take a hit from that if you want,” he added, gesturing to the pipe he had left on the desk.

            “No, thank you, I have a long drive ahead of me.”

            She crossed the room to the filing cabinets. What other secrets were swallowed up in their drawers? She started leafing through the folders, and as she did so, she brushed aside the thought that, if she kept snooping, she may not like what she found. But all she did find were more manuscripts and stories by other writers clipped from magazines. What could she find, she wondered, that would truly shock her? How would she feel, for example, if she discovered letters from another mistress? It had never occurred to her that he might have kept lovers besides her. She imagined herself catching Harry in bed with one of these imagined lovers and saw herself dragging the woman out of bed by the hair and––but no, that was all wrong. She was the other woman, and if Evelyn had ever caught them, it may very well have been Evelyn’s fist clutching at Joy’s hair.

            The fury of a woman scorned. Joy had felt it for only a moment, brought on by a flight of her imagination. Had there been moments, when Harry told a sloppy lie or had come home smelling of Joy’s perfume, in which Evelyn had felt this rage coursing through her? Joy felt a sting of shame remembering that, just moments ago, she had actually been proud of herself.

            Bryan’s voice, faint and unintelligible, drifted up the stairs. She was about to call out for him to speak up before realizing that he was talking to someone on the phone. It occurred to her now that she hadn’t thought to ask Bryan what he was doing at his uncle’s lake house at two in the morning. She tip-toed closer to the stairs to make out what he was saying. But when she got there, his voice was replaced by his footsteps approaching the stairwell. She shuffled back a few steps and sank into Harry’s easy chair.

            “Everything all right?” she asked when Bryan reappeared in the doorway.

            “What?”

            “You were on the phone.”

            “Oh, yeah. That was just my girlfriend. She drove by my apartment and saw that my car wasn’t there, so she assumed I was with another girl and freaked.”

            “What did you tell her?”

            “That I was at my uncle’s looking for some unpublished shit I could sell to someone.”

            “Is that really why you’re here?”

            Bryan shrugged. “Something like that.”

            “That’s despicable! And at any rate, it wouldn’t work. All of his writing belongs to his estate now, so there’s nothing you could find here that you would be able to sell without Evelyn signing off on it. There’s an archivist coming in the next few days to gather all of his papers for a collection at Dartmouth. That’s why I came for the letters.”

            “Yeah, I can see why you wouldn’t want those in an archive. That shit blows my mind.”

            “Well it’s certainly not something I’m proud of.”

            “Bullshit.”

            “It is not! It was a horrible thing we did, and I’m sure he regretted it too.”

            “All right, all right, fine! You’re a shitty person,” Bryan said, with a wink and a thumbs-up, which forced another laugh out of Joy.

            “You get that from him, you know? Being able to walk into a room and diffuse any tension or bad feeling. Not enough people saw that side of him. It’ll serve you well.”

            Bryan walked over to the desk and looked out at the moonlit lake. “Well, it hasn’t really come in handy when I needed it.”

            “Oh?”

            “I’m just not on really good terms with my family at the moment. Like, at all.”

            “Why is that? Come to think of it, it had been awhile since Harry had mentioned you.”

            Bryan’s expression soured. “Makes sense,” he said. “Aunt Evie told him that he had to respect my parents’ decision. See, I got busted selling ecstasy in college and got myself expelled. After that, my parents kicked me out and cut me off. You’ve made your bed and now you have to lie in it.” Bryan accompanied this impression of his parents with a scolding finger.

            “I can’t imagine Harry cutting you out of his life so completely.”

            “No, he didn’t. We kept in touch, and he sent me a thousand bucks every month. That’s how I’ve been paying rent. I’ve got a dishwashing job, but that all goes to food and shit. So yeah, I’m really fucked now without him. You know that minimum wage in New Hampshire is $7.25? I bet it’s higher in New York, right?”

            “I’m not sure.”

            Bryan picked up the pipe and took a long toke. “Man, Uncle Har was a hell of a guy,” he said, exhaling smoke. “Can you just, like, tell me a story about him? Your best memory of him, or whatever.”

            “Oh, God, let’s see… Did he ever tell you about the night he met Dennis Rodman?”

            “Are you fucking kidding me? He chilled with the Worm? How did I not know this?”

            “We were in Detroit for this MLA conference, and one night we went into this nightclub that was I guess pretty posh, by Detroit standards anyway. And we’re sitting there in this booth, and a few people recognize Harry, ask him for an autograph, the whole thing. And then this bartender comes up to us and tells us that Dennis Rodman heard that Harry was there and wants to see him in this backroom. I’m sure you know that Harry was a huge basketball fan, so naturally he was over the moon. So we go into this backroom, and there’s Dennis Rodman, surrounded by a couple of bodyguards. And this was, oh I don’t know, ‘88 or ‘89, and he hadn’t taken on the crazy hair and piercings look yet. I mean he was just wearing jeans and a t-shirt. The only odd thing about his appearance was that he was barefoot. Turns out, he was a huge fan of Harry’s first book, which of course was about his father running off when he was a kid. I remember Dennis was really excited to hear that it was being made into a movie.”

            “That movie sucked,” said Bryan between coughing fits. “Missed the whole point of the book.”

            “I agree. But anyways, they got to talking about the book for a while, and then Dennis goes, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He doesn’t tell us where we’re going, but Harry and I crawl into his Ferrari, and he takes us to this amusement park an hour outside of Detroit. It was probably three or four in the morning, so we had to hop the fence. We walked around for a while, and then we all sat down on this pirate ship ride. Harry breaks out a flask of whiskey, and we’re passing it around, taking turns talking about our fucked-up childhoods. We were all crying by the end of it, but it was truly one of the most beautiful nights of my life.”

            “That’s the craziest shit I’ve ever heard,” said Bryan. “You’re fucking with me.”

            “Cross my heart, hope to die.”

            “Are you still in touch with him?”

            “No, I never saw him again. But he and Harry kept in touch. They were sort of kindred spirits. They both had dads who ran off on them when they were kids. But they also struggled with their celebrity in relatively similar ways. Dennis talked a lot that night about feeling that he had to shut out all these parts of himself to fit the mold of a pro athlete. Obviously, he found his way out of that later. And, as for Harry, he really resented his image as this literary giant, this political hero of the left. People saw him as some hyper-moral intellectual, which he was, in a way. But few people got to see how much fun he was to be around.”

            “Fuckin’ A. He told me about being at the ‘96 finals, but I had no clue he was tight with Rodman. I was gonna tell you about my best memory of him, but how can I follow that shit?”

            Joy sank into Harry’s easy chair. “Go on, I want to hear it.”

            Bryan smiled, and then pulled the collar of his T-shirt up over his nose. At first, Joy thought that he might be crying, but he soon started laughing and unburied his face.  “It’s nothing, really, it’s just, he used to sit with me in his lap, at that desk, you know? And we’d use that typewriter over there to write these stories together. I would tell him what to say, and then he’d type it. But on every other page, he left me space to color illustrations in crayon. It’d just be nonsense––talking animals, aliens, shit like that. It was pretty cool though.”

            As Joy listened, she stared at the three pictures of Harry on the desk and smiled. Every piece of the mosaic was sliding into place. The avuncular old man bouncing a toddler in his lap; the blubbering fool in an amusement park at dawn; the husband; the soldier; the lover who came when he was called. A sadness, familiar but long repressed, began to take hold of her. There were so many pieces of the man she loved to which she would never have any claim.

            “Jesus, what’s wrong?” Bryan said when Joy began dabbing at tears with the sleeve of her blouse.

            There was a knock at the door. Joy flinched and jumped to her feet. Bryan walked over to the window and gasped. “This is not good,” he said.

            “What? Who is it?”

            But before Bryan could answer, a voice below called out, “Bryan, this is Sheriff Stone. I’m going to need you and whoever else is in there to come to the door.”

            Joy watched in horror as Bryan winced and began pacing across the office. What could explain the sudden arrival of the Sheriff? Had a neighbor seen her crawling through the window? No, the lot was walled off by trees. Nobody could have seen her.

            “How does he know you’re here?” she asked.

            “He knows my car. He and I have a bit of a history.”

            Well that’s just perfect, Joy thought. What was she caught up in now?

            “I’ll do the talking,” Bryan said. “But first, give me letters.”

            “The letters? Why?”

            “I’ll hide them. Somewhere that Dartmouth guy won’t come across them.”

            Without waiting for her to offer them, he snatched the letters out of her hand. Joy watched as he folded them in thirds and slid them into the inner pocket of his jacket.

            “All right, we’re coming out,” he yelled down the stairs. Then, in a whisper to Joy: “I know how to handle this guy.”

            As she faltered down after him, another memory of Harry appeared dimly at the edge of recollection. It was nearly in her grasp when Bryan opened the door and said, “Good evening, Sheriff. What can I do for you?”

            At this, the Sheriff, who appeared to be well into middle-age, wiggled his immense eyebrows and frowned. “Son, you called me twenty minutes ago to report a break in,” he said. “So why don’t you cut the crap and tell me what’s going on here?”

            Joy, who had been shifting her weight from side to side as she listened, now froze. Bryan had been on the phone twenty minutes ago. But that was after they had already been speaking for some time. It made no sense. The Sheriff leaned forward slightly to get a better look at Joy.

            “That’s right,” Bryan said. “I got here around two, and I saw a car I didn’t recognize in the driveway. Then I noticed that the window in the guest room was open, so I searched the house, and I found this woman rummaging through my Uncle’s filing cabinets.”

            “What are you talking about?” Joy demanded. “That is the most fantastic drivel I have ever––”

            “Your name, ma’am?” the Sheriff asked.

            “Joy Livingston. I’m a friend of the owners’ I’m here to grab something of mine that I left here when I was visiting in August. Evelyn is well aware that I’m here.”

            “Do you have a key to the property?” the Sheriff asked.

            Dumbfounded, Joy shifted her gaze to Bryan, who refused to meet it with his own.

            “And what, may I ask, is your business here, Mr. Crossen?”

            “My aunt called me earlier this evening to ask me to come turn on the water and straighten the house up. There’s a man from Dartmouth College coming by tomorrow to sort through my uncle’s papers.”

            The Sheriff ignored this and turned back to Joy. “Ma’am, unless you can provide proof that you have the owner’s permission to be here, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me until we can sort this out.”

            “Come with you?” she repeated. “This is ridiculous. Call her! Call Evelyn.”

            “Ma’am, it is almost four in the morning. I am not going to call Mrs. Cassidy.”

            “So, what am I, under arrest? For what?”

            The Sheriff sighed and adjusted the brim of his hat. “Ma’am, I can book you right now for trespassing on private property. Now, I’d rather not do that, so if you’ll just come down to the station with me, we can just hang tight until tomorrow morning.”

            “Fine,” Joy said. She combed her hair back over her ears with her fingernails. “But first, I’d like Bryan to give me back the papers that he has folded up in his jacket pocket. They belong to me, and I’m not leaving without them.”

            Bryan pulled the folded letters out from his jacket and waved them at the Sheriff. “This is an unfinished manuscript from my uncle’s office. I believe she was going to try to sell it.”

            “That is ludicrous. Harry was a dear friend, I would never––”

            “Did they come from the house, ma’am?”

            “Well, yes, but I’m telling you––”

            “Then they’re going to stay here until we hear from Mrs. Cassidy. Now, please come with me, Ms. Livingston. I’ll try to make this as painless as possible for you.”

            Joy hesitated a few moments longer, then stepped over the threshold. The Sheriff turned and started for his car. Joy followed for a few steps and then stopped and turned back to face Bryan. He was still refusing to meet her eyes. Coward, Joy thought.

            “I don’t know what it is you think you’re going to do with those letters,” she began. She wanted to follow this up with a threat. But what leverage did she have? If blackmail was his plan, she would have to comply. No question. Outside of her friendship with the Cassidys, she had lived a solitary life. She had no family, no other friends. Without Evelyn, all she had left were her self-absorbed younger colleagues and a small cadre of sycophantic graduate students. “Harry hated meanness,” she added before turning to follow the Sheriff into his car.

            At the station, the Sheriff offered to let her sleep in the on-call bed instead of the holding cell. As she was falling asleep, she tried to recapture the memory of Harry that had come to her, nearly, on the stairs. In the morning, the Sheriff called Evelyn and asked her whether she could vouch for one Joy Livingston, which, of course, Evelyn did. But when Joy asked the Sheriff if she could speak with Evelyn, he hung up the phone and spit out a peanut shell he had been chewing on.

            “Says she can’t talk right now.”

When Joy got back to Brooklyn, almost a full day after she had left for the lake, she fell into her bed and slept for sixteen hours. She woke up to a missed call from Evelyn and stared at the notification for a few minutes before shoving her phone back under her pillow. She did not get out of bed for several hours, and only then to use the restroom. She was on her way back to her bedroom when the doorbell rang.

            The sound startled her. Her knees buckled as though she were suddenly burdened by an immense weight. She stared at her front door and imagined Bryan standing outside of her brownstone, his thin frame shivering in that awful jacket. He was there to demand payment for his silence. From now on, it would be Joy sending him thousand-dollar checks each month.

            But when she pushed aside her blinds to peek out onto her stoop, it was Evelyn who stood there, a bottle of wine tucked underneath her arm. She rang the doorbell again, and Joy moved in slow, deliberate steps towards the door.

            “Evelyn.” Her name tumbled out of Joy’s mouth, both a greeting and a question.

            “Joy, dear,” Evelyn answered, drawing Joy into her arms. As they embraced, Joy’s face brushed against the cold metal of Evelyn’s earring, sending a chill down her back. “May I come in?”

            “Of course,” Joy replied, stepping aside to let Evelyn in. “Let me grab your coat.”

            “I hope I’m not intruding.”

            “Don’t be silly. I was just tidying up.”

            Joy led Evelyn into the dining room and pulled out a seat for her at the table. She went to fetch a corkscrew and wine glasses, and when she returned, she found Evelyn playing with the knot of her silk scarf. The room’s only source of light was a small casement window that looked out on the alley behind her building. There was a brass floor lamp in the corner, but the bulb had burned out weeks ago and Joy had not replaced it. So they sat half-in and half-out of shadows, and Joy poured them each a glass of wine.

            “It sounds like you had yourself quite the adventure the other night,” Evelyn said.

            Joy looked down into her wine and made herself laugh. “Yes, I did, and I owe you an explanation.”

            “And you met Bryan?”

            “I did.” Joy’s temples began to throb at the sound of Bryan’s name.

            “I’m sorry about the mix-up. I can’t imagine why Harry would have given him a key.”

            Joy shifted in her chair. Evelyn was toying with her, that seemed certain. But she didn’t know how much Evelyn knew or what exactly she suspected. She took a long swallow of her wine and shrugged.

            “Joy,” Evelyn said when the silence carried on too long. “I know why you were at the lake house.”

            Joy opened her mouth to speak, but her throat tightened like a clenched fist.

            “I found the letters a few summers ago. Such beautiful letters. Strange that I could appreciate that, isn’t it? Harry wanted to burn them after I confronted him about it. Oh, he was just beside himself, completely unhinged. I wouldn’t let him. I can’t say why, exactly. If he had insisted on keeping them, I probably would have made him burn them. He swore that it had been over for years, swore that he would cut off all ties with you. But I didn’t want that either. I hated you, don’t get me wrong. But I felt that I would have hated you even more if I just let you disappear from our lives. So I made Harry promise that he wouldn’t tell you.”

            When Evelyn had finished speaking, Joy took a deep breath and pressed her fingers into her eyelids until she saw white. She could not make sense of what Evelyn was saying. Her mind roared with the echo of certain phrases: burn them, cut off all ties, disappear from our lives. She understood only that what little remained to her of Harry had been taken from her.

            A minute or two passed in silence, and then Evelyn sighed and patted Joy on the knee. “I suppose I should be going. Do take care of yourself, dear,” she said. Dumbstruck, Joy watched as Evelyn stood up and left.

            A week later, she received an email from a staff writer at Vanity Fair who was working on a story about her relationship with Harold Cassidy. He, the staff writer, had obtained a series of letters that Joy had written to the late author, and did she want to comment on the content of those letters?

            Knowing that she would give no comment, Joy nevertheless tried, if only for herself, to come up with some pithy summation of what Harry meant to her, what she’d given of herself, what it had cost her. She recalled that, throughout the affair, she’d often tortured herself by imagining, in excruciating detail, what getting caught might look like: Evelyn storming into her office (sometimes in the presence of a student), raised voices, books thrown from shelves, wailing, insults, violence. Such was the extent of her fear then––how small the imagination can be sometimes!

            “You make me feel known,” Harry had once told Joy while they lay in bed in a hotel room. She nuzzled her head into his armpit (how well she remembered his smell after all these years) and told him that she felt the same. It was beautiful, it was wrong, but everybody needs to be known. And from then on, that was how they justified it. But if Harold Cassidy’s death made one thing clear, it was the abundance of his known-ness. The small fraction of which that came from their romance was no more essential or comprehensive than any other. How was that for a comment?

            A few weeks later, a colleague sent Joy a screenshot of the Vanity Fair article. The headline read, “Harold Cassidy’s Secret Love Letters.” Below the headline: a black-and-white photograph of Harry and Joy, posing together at some book release or another. She remembered that evening well. Here was Harry, fresh off a National Book Award, all surly because his mistress had beaten him at chess earlier.

__________

Colton Huelle is a friendly neighborhood fiction guy from scenic Manchester, NH. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire, where he also teaches composition and creative writing. His stories have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, and Drunk Monkeys.

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