Middle Age by Joyce Carol Oates

best interest to close the cabinet door with dignity, and retreat. But Marina tugged at the box, ignoring Roger Cavanagh who offered to take it down for her, and ingloriously the box toppled over, and its contents spilled on the floor: a cache now of cards, perfumed letters, and glossy photographs.
    Even now, Marina might have retreated with a modicum of dignity.
    Yet there she was kneeling amid these lurid scattered things, hair falling into her face. From a distance, she might have resembled a greedy penitent.
    Adam’s women. So many? It should not have surprised Marina, yet it surprised Marina, for (she would understand this later, in a calmer time) she’d long refused to think of Adam’s life as it failed to touch upon her; Middle Age: A Romance
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    she’d long refused to consider that, if he had not been her lover, he must have sought other women sexually, and even romantically; not for Adam Berendt the role of celibate, yet she’d wished to imagine him that way.
    Now, here was evidence to refute her delusion. A packet of handwritten letters from—was it Camille Hoffmann, Lionel’s wife? These were dated over the past seven years and were signed Love, Camille . On pale blue sta-tionery, wispy as lingerie, a lengthy handwritten letter dated May of that year signed Love, Abigail . Marina’s friend Abigail Des Pres! Marina quickly looked away, not wanting to see even a fragment of what Abigail had written to Adam. There were many birthday cards, holiday cards, Thank you and Thinking of you! cards which Marina didn’t wish to examine. There were numerous postcards, and many of these were reproductions of works of art, for Adam’s women would have wished to indicate their good taste. In dread Marina turned over a card that looked familiar, a surreal landscape painting by the German Caspar David Frederich, to discover her own handwriting on the back, and Love, Marina . The card was dated two summers ago when she’d traveled in Europe. Wincing, Marina thrust the card away, not wanting Roger to see. But probably he’d seen.
    Those eyes missed nothing! Marina would have ripped the card into pieces except it belonged to Adam’s estate.
    Thinking Of all utterances of the past none are so painful as those written in the hope of winning another’s love .
    Snapshots of Adam with Salthill friends, and with strangers. So many smiling people! So much happiness! Marina snatched up to examine closely a luridly colored picture that resembled a publicity photo, a ruddy-faced Adam Berendt in sports clothes, with an unfamiliar moustache, in what might have been a casino; Adam was looking just slightly embarrassed, in that one-eye-squinting way of his, while a heavily made-up blonde in a red sequined dress leaned familiarly against him, resting her upper arm and part of her ample bosom against his shoulder. Adam looked like a winner. He might have been in his early forties, with still thick graying hair and a relatively unlined face. The glamorous blonde might have been a high-priced hooker. On the back of the photo was stamped The Dunes, Vegas . Nov. ,  .
    And what was this? Several soft-filtered photographs of a naked, fleshy woman reclining on a sofa in the pose of Manet’s Olympia; with alarmingly full roseate-nippled breasts and a swath of dark pubic hair; extravagant pearls around her neck, and an insolent-looking flat-faced white
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    Persian cat at her feet. The woman wasn’t young, though still very attractive; like the Vegas hooker she was heavily made up, and rings glittered on her fingers; her smile was studied and lascivious. One of her plump hands rested on her round little belly. Marina felt a tinge of disgust, and dismay, for her sex; the female sex; how pathetic we are, offering ourselves like meat. Marina saw suddenly that this woman was—Augusta Cutler? She recognized the Persian cat.
    “This is hateful.”
    Adam Berendt, striding like a