Now they both stalked the premises like irritable old housecats, watching each other, waiting.
"You are leaving me," Betty said late one morning. "Hadn't you better leave, then?"
"Hadn't?"
"I think a certain formality of address is required under the circumstances, don't you? Unless you want to call the calling off off, of course."
There were times when Joe did want to call the calling off off. But that day was not one of them. Betty was being insufferable. She was vamping mercilessly, wearing her bathrobe, speaking in an arch yet melodramatic voice, and, perhaps most alarming of all, drinking shots of single malt in midmorning.
"That's a sipping whiskey. Not a gulping whiskey."
"I'm distraught."
"You're being ridiculous, Betty. You look like something out of The Lost Weekend. This is not healthy, moping around the apartment, drinking."
"My husband of fifty years is leaving me," she said.
Forty-eight, he thought.
As if she'd heard him, she said, "Bastard."
She threw her glass at him.
"All right, Elizabeth Taylor," he said, getting a towel from the bathroom.
"Wrong movie," she screamed.
"It's not a movie, Betty," Joseph said. "That's the point."
"Bastard," she said again. She sat down on the couch.
The buzzer rang, and Betty stayed where she was, staring straight ahead at the fireplace. She had discovered the mantel with its towering mirror and decorative gesso detail at a salvage yard decades ago. How could Joseph expect her to leave her Greek Revival mantel? Her hearth, as it were? She saw her reflection, sullen, in the mirror. The matching busts of impassive Greek Revival women adorned with gold leaf gazed back at her from either side of the mantel. She heard Joseph's footsteps. What a heavy tread he had. How she would miss it when he was gone, when she was alone with the mantel's two white wooden busts. Through the intercom, she heard the doorman announcing Miranda. As a child, Miranda had talked to the fireplace ladies, sometimes staging elaborate tea parties with the disembodied heads as her guests.