His only hope tonight was that he would come home to find the house empty, stretch out on the sofa and stop thinking, stop wondering how it was possible that one little misstep could have brought on disaster, how his day had been completely botched because, remembering his anniversary with Penny a day late, he had had the brilliant idea, at the last minute, to change the card on the flowers. He had sealed the envelope with tape so that no one else could read it, but then Imogen had given the courier his own address by mistake, instead of Penny’s, and he had tried to catch up with him on the stairs but his jacket had caught on the banister and he had dangled, one foot in the air, and for those few seconds as he gazed down into empty space, all he could think of was the irony of his fate, because that very morning Carla had complained that he never sent her flowers and now she would receive or probably had already received an enormous bouquet with that card. Luckily I didn’t break my leg falling down the stairs, he thought with a final effort to see the situation in a positive light. He wiped his shoes on the mat and opened the door.
The house was lit up. He could hear voices coming from the living room. He looked around carefully, hoping to find some trace of the extravagant bouquet with its crepe tissue and purple velvet bow. If Carla had answered the door, he was lost, because Carla would have unwrapped the flowers right away and put them in a vase. But maybe, if Moufinda had answered, she’d taken the flowers then hurried off to another chore and left them lying around somewhere. Somewhere…
Aris tiptoed down the hallway, trying to reconstruct Moufinda’s likely steps from the front door to the kitchen. Then he went back, following the same path. Passing by the desk, he inspected the basket with yesterday’s papers, the umbrella stand. Nothing. If someone had opened the envelope, she would have left the card here. Unless someone had opened the envelope, read the card, and kept it. That someone could only be Carla, he thought, and shuddered at his bad luck. If he had at least left the first card, Happy Anniversary, My Sweet Posy!, he could have invented some date from their past, could have finessed the situation, quietly gazed in Carla’s eyes or suddenly clasped her in his arms and picked her up, with a spontaneous display of love reawakened in the spring that would explain that Sweet Posy. He could have patched things up and the ending would have been completely happy. But there was no way to explain a bouquet of thirty-seven Black Baccara roses (that was the number of months of their affair, including the first month of flirtation) accompanied by the card, Happy Anniversary, My Sweet Pussy! Unless he was crazy, he thought as he gripped the doorknob. Unless he had completely lost his mind. Sometimes it happens to men in midlife crisis, he said to himself, and he began to construct another scenario, though the idea of a midlife crisis didn’t appeal to him at all. The odds of convincing Carla that he had a sudden, uncontrollable urge for sex, and especially that she was the object of his desire, were about as remote as his hope of having the house to himself tonight.
While he’d been lingering in the hallway, the cluster of voices in the living room had grown louder, every so often a door would open and let slip a nervous wave of exclamations and garbled words, then the door would close and silence would fall. Still wearing his overcoat, with his hand on the doorknob, Aris wavered. Perhaps he ought to go back outside and peek in the window to see what was happening in the living room, so he could prepare himself for any situation. It was still possible just to open the door and leave for good, a possibility that vanished as he heard footsteps approaching behind him.
“You leaving?” asked a voice. He froze in his tracks, gazing longingly at the door, stalling for a second to decide just what expression to wear as he turned to face Carla, a bare-shouldered Carla in an amber silk dress, who was that very moment smiling at him, a martini in her hand.