Glad Rags Sheba

She wore the green dress to the Carradines’ because she knew what it did to a room, and because her husband was in Paris, and because her husband had been in Paris all summer, and because the green dress was the only thing in the apartment that had not begun to feel, by August, like a piece of him.

It was the colour of a bottle held up to a lamp. It moved when she did not move. It had cost a great deal of money, which was no longer the kind of thing she had to think about, and which her husband, in Paris, was not thinking about either.

She arrived at nine. By half-past she was at the bar. She did not need to ask. The bartender, who had been at three of her husband’s birthdays and one of her miscarriages, made the drink without speaking — the bourbon poured long, the mulled wine going down through it in a slow ribbon, the granny apple muddled until it gave up its small green soul, the foam laid on top like the first snow on a road one had been intending to leave by.

“What do you call it,” she said.

“I haven’t yet.”

“Call it after me. Everything else is.”

He named the drink for her on the spot. He wrote it on a card and slid it under her glass. She did not look at the card. She looked at the room.

The first one was a painter. He had been famous in 1922 and was on his way back from it now, and he stood too close at the bar and told her about a house in Antibes he wanted to take her to in October, and she said yes, October, why not, and he kissed the inside of her wrist where the green sleeve ended, and she let him, because the inside of the wrist was a place her husband had not touched since spring.

The second was a banker. He was younger than her husband and richer, which was a difficult combination to be, and he proposed breakfast at the Plaza the following Tuesday with the air of a man proposing a merger. She said yes to that too. He gave her a card. She tucked it into the top of her stocking, where, in another life, her husband used to find things.

By midnight she had agreed to two breakfasts, one weekend, and a small unspecified afternoon in a borrowed apartment on East Sixty-Third. She kept none of the appointments. She had not, when she made them, intended to. The agreeing had been the point. The agreeing was the dress.

She wore the green dress home in a cab at three. The cabbie, who had driven her before, did not speak. The doorman, who had also driven her before in a manner of speaking, took her arm at the kerb and did not let go until she was at the lift. She thanked him. He said, “Mrs Halloran,” because he was a good doorman and knew when to use the name and when to use nothing.

Her husband called from Paris the following morning at eleven, which was five there, which meant he was at the Ritz bar, which meant a woman was sitting two seats away pretending not to listen. She knew all of this without being told. She had been the woman two seats away, once, in 1919, before any of this.

He asked about the weather. She told him about the weather. She told him the streets had been wet, and that the lilacs in the park had gone over, and that the Carradines had had a small thing on Saturday but nothing to write home about. She told him she missed him. She told him to be careful crossing the Place Vendôme, where the traffic, in her opinion, had grown wild.

She did not tell him about the drink. She did not tell him about the painter, or the banker, or the doorman’s hand on her arm at the kerb. She did not tell him about the green dress, which was hanging now on the back of the bedroom door, going slowly out of shape in the morning light, the colour of a bottle nobody had thought to put back on the shelf.

She told him she loved him. She did. That was the worst of it.