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The Lady in Red: The Exegesis of J. D. Van Cleef, Husband and Realtor

Go on, find it on your phone. “The Lady in Red” by Chris De Burgh from his seminal 1986 album Into the Light. Now standing at the kitchen island, hover your finger above the play icon. But don’t press it yet, make yourself really earn it. See, you have to be hungry to really eat well.

Crap. You forgot to connect to the Bluetooth!

You take it with you everywhere, the Bose Soundlink speaker which came so highly rated on Consumer Reports and which you only bought last month after tracking sale options for weeks. Connect to the speaker—for real this time, buddy!—and switch back to the song. Then cherish the moment all over again as a mellow percussion, at last, starts your journey for one measure, now two, and the keyboard kicks in. All in one avalanche of harmonious swell.

Ah yes, at long last—you collapse to your knees.

On the blonde hardwood of the open floor plan between the kitchen and the den, with the light from the window walls pooling around you while the stories above—that’s right, count them, two!—in this lovely colonial, really a steal with its seashell-pink paint job, loom in silence. Bow your head beneath the assured, alpha bass of de Burgh’s composition, only lifting your head once again by degrees in a feminine, graceful, swanlike maneuver. It’s as though you yourself were the Lady in Red, practicing Yoga in this very room, what some call Upward-Facing Dog, and her husband (you, too!) had just happened to enter, stunned by her in Lululemon, watching her stretch without saying a word. In this way, you can be both within and without, participant and observer, the Lady in Red and her steadfast, good husband, watching yourself, watching her—as one does.

You find you have to clear your throat.

You really wish this house was yours. Not just to sell, but yours to keep.

You haven’t seen your daughter in such a long time—almost as long as your Lady in Red, who at one point in time, an eternity now, had conceded to be called your wife. Just as you now concede to imagine her there, descending the stairs in her shimmering gown, summoned into your arms by your shared favorite song. You compliment her looks. Her dress. How her hair, freshly highlighted, catches her eyes. Such a gentleman, yes. Help her off the last stair.

Ask her if she’d like to dance.


A knock comes at the door of the house. You press pause. Must be your ten-thirty. She’s ten minutes early but no harm, no foul. The client is always right on time. Retrieve your speaker from the island. Comb your hair with your fingers and straighten your slacks. Wait a sec, better yet, check yourself in the mirror. You never know what you might miss.

From where you’re standing—sigh—not much. Your face is still a bit too round. Boyishly round, other people have called it, which is why you grew out a short beard. It lends your face some shape. Some gravitas, even. You need that in your line of work, which is basically marketing people their futures. And your manicured beard of gravitas had seemed to help in that regard because after you grew it, your stats took a climb. But only when you kept it trimmed. Aggressively trimmed, more stubble than beard of the Hugo Boss undereye-shadow variety, with the pattern of growth hugging tight to your jawline, making your neck appear pale and unguarded.

The Lady in Red never takes off the dress.

You suppose your ears are something else. Which isn’t to say they stick out or are large. No, you’re happy to say they’re of regular size but lie so flat against your skull it appears that you may’ve had some sort of surgery to make the unruly cartilage behave. And in fact, in the past, other people have asked if you have elected that very procedure, yet when you tell them no, they shrug, as though they’re not wholly prepared to believe you. Your forehead is broad. You get lost in it sometimes, an unbroken beige cosmos. Your best feature, in your view, is probably your eyes. Long-lashed and sly and impossibly blue. Certain others, including your Lady in Red, have described them as piercing. These days, to emphasize that fact, you wear just a touch of black liquid eyeliner. This is not to appear overtly female—in your view a male should resemble a male—but (1) to emphasize those eyes and (2) to court a smoky mystery that would probably appeal to some Lady in Red, if not to your Lady in Red, gone away.

You’ve always lacked confidence in your appearance, but today you acknowledge you look good enough. Still holding the Bose in your hand like a lunchbox, you approach the front door where the knocking has been replaced with a galling and harsh dialect which you see, in the process of opening the door, belongs to a young woman taking a work call. “You bet your ass that we’ll get an injunction. Oh, please, it’s so weak it would fall in a breeze. No, uh-uh—no. No way in hellll. You can tell him. Politely. It’s all in the brief.”

Her narrow behind splits your view of the street. While waiting for her to be done with the call, you doublecheck the fresh yard signs you planted in the grass this morning—a skillfully blocked informational sandwich.

Edmundson Realty Group on top—

Those chunky FOR SALE letters wedged in the middle—

J. D. Van Cleef, A.B.R. at the bottom.

There’s even a little picture of you in the top right corner of the sign. You wonder if Ten-Thirty noticed this detail. Apart from her car (a Honda Hybrid) and yours (a white Cadillac Escalade Sport), the suburban street is largely empty.

“I’m so, so incredibly sorry,” she says, slipping her iPhone in her purse and stabbing a thumb at her chin. “I’m a lawyer.” She dazzles your ears with a peal of her laughter. “Just in case you couldn’t tell!”

You go to shake Ten-Thirty’s hand and formally introduce yourself as though your name’s not already clear from the sign and the texts on your phone you’ve exchanged confirming and then reconfirming today; you’ve always been a nervous talker. Or rather, uh, thinker—you’ve always been nervous. To soothe yourself now, you divert to the fridge (LG Avallon with French Doors and icemaker, also highly rated on Consumer Reports) and extract from the barren expanse of the shelving an ice-cold Diet Mountain Dew. Beside it is every woman’s favorite: a chilled bottle of Topo Chico.

But don’t hold back on her account! One swallow, two swallows—ah, much better. Now you can watch her walk into the house and, really and truly, she isn’t bad-looking. A professional lady of neatness and class. A “boss lady,” as some might say. She doesn’t compare to your Lady in Red who, along with your daughter, moved in with her parents in a totally different, far-off city in the wake of last year’s complete misunderstanding, but you guess that she could be a Lady in Red with a little reshaping, a little finessing. Some “polish,” as they saying goes.

Same fine brown hair and bright green eyes.

Same obliviousness to the shock of her beauty which is, you suppose, the definitive thing that separates a lady from a Lady in Red, who coquettishly hides in the plain light of day, blind—as the man in the song has been blind—to the many eyes that watch her go so languidly now through the house’s foyer, trailing her manicure over the plaster, and then into the open floor plan. This Lady in Red, if she can be, perhaps (even though she’s wearing blue!), she presses a palm to the counter. “Real marble?”

“Granite,” you tell her, “with marble epoxy.”

“So it’s fake marble, then?”

“Just a trick of the trade. Edmundson Realty Group keeps no secrets.”

She smiles at you good-naturedly. “Except for the fact that the marble is fake.”

You smile back at Ten-Thirty. Everybody’s so smiley! “If you say so, sure,” you respond through the smile and drink throatily of your neon-green soda. You sense this isn’t going well and you’re going to have to pivot sharply. You’re dying to offer the sparkling water but something tells you it’s too soon. “And will Mr. [redacted] be meeting you here?”

Ten-Thirty’s eyes range as she circles the island—living room (minus the Samsung widescreen), staircase (minus the Lady in Red). “God, these open floor plans are so trendy these days but so much of the time they just feel like—” Ten-Thirty starts snapping to summon the word. “Arctic tundra, I guess?” She mock shivers with cold.

You gesture at the floor’s midpoint. “You could put a bar cart here to break up the flow.”

“Improve the feng shui?” Now she’s being facetious. “But a bar cart sounds nice, I do love a good bar cart. You know this lady needs her wine!”

It was her, and not you, who had used the term Lady.

You pry a little. “Single parent?”

“Of a fat tabby cat—Mr. Suds!”

That’s a shame. Potential for a family squandered. If only she realized how much you missed yours. “So I guess Mr. Suds will pay half of the mortgage?”

Just short of the stairs, she turns around and fixes on you as though for the first time. You feel suddenly vulnerable under her gaze and a numb, lifeless feeling afflicts your groin region. “What is that?” She points to your right hand. “A speaker?”

You look down at the Bose as though shocked you still have it. “It’s nice to have music while I’m setting up.”

 “So—what were you listening to?” she asks. Looking down, you rotate the black Bose in your hands. “I promise I won’t laugh, okay? I listen to ABBA every day from the minute I wake to the minute I leave.”

“Just a song that I like,” you tell Ten-Thirty.

Now who’s being cagey?” she presses. “What song?”

You charge at Ten-Thirty across the hardwood. Preemptively, she flinches from you, only dropping her shoulders once you pass her by for a little Gene Kelley display on the stairs, hanging off the banister while brandishing a fake umbrella. “It’s called the upstairs song!” You offer your hand. “Milady, won’t you sing along?”


Go on, put it on again. You need to listen more than once to truly understand. In spite of the layered, acute sense of longing in the Lady in Red’s opening verse, where the song’s Gentleman sees his Lady in Red swanning through the formal gala, rival gentlemen begging her hand for a dance, it’s the chorus that most people tend to remember. Iconic. Poignant. Luscious, even, not to mention just being a certified earworm, this chorus marks a shift in the emotion of the song from bemused and awestruck to entranced, vaguely mournful. With the faintest dip down on “is dancing with me,” the Lady in Red is the Gentleman’s quarry.

You’re aware this part is sort of cheesy. Come on, you’re not a total noob! But the chorus strikes you as sincere in its declaration of love and romance in a sneering, post-ironic world. Some plebes have labeled the song’s chorus “creepy.” From the Gentleman Speaker’s repeated insistence that he and the Lady are there alone, to the character-driven metaphor that the Gentleman Speaker “hardly knows” her. But you like to think the best of people. Maybe you’re reading too deep into things. Your Lady in Red had said you did. This was part of the reason she chose to cut ties in the (so often) doomed seventh year of your marriage—not to mention the constant texts and calls to ensure that she was being faithful, the ruthless e-snooping, the stalking and following, the line in the sand she had seen fit to draw when the Spark Nano 7 with Real-Time 4G (which was overrated, clearly, on Consumer Reports) was one Tuesday morning so long off the grid you had gone to the Lady in Red’s last location, your daughter Amelia’s kindergarten, Academy of the Sacred Virgin, where, absorbed in the work of repairing the tracker beneath the chassis of her car, Amelia and Amelia’s class and the Lady in Red had emerged from the school for their weekly “wild space exploration” only to find you grappling red-faced and covered in detritus under the car—infelicities all best consigned to the past. If all that was “reading too deep into things,” so sue you, you’re a careful reader. Plus, the Lady in Red guards her secrets like rubies. `

Before she can be courted, she’ll need to be known.


Be a gentleman. Lead the way upstairs. Don’t even entertain the thought of allowing the Lady in Red to go first. She’ll know what you’re doing back there. That part of you is in hibernation. But the Lady in Red doesn’t have to know that.

And neither, frankly, does Ten-Thirty. How desire, as it were, is a delicate muse. And how unbeknownst to the Edmundson Group (shhhhhhhh), you’ve been living in one of their Magnolia Chalets until you get back on your feet; there, among food trash and empty Dew bottles, you light the wall-sconces and crank the de Burgh and stand in your yellow, seersucker pajamas with your eyes on the humps of the sectional couch that you pulled from the shipwreck of last year’s divorce (now shielded and enhanced with vinyl) in order to find a sort of rhythm. A bit of foreplay, if you will. Only then can you unpack your Lady in Waiting from her plastic sarcophagus in the hall closet.

Oh please, don’t be vulgar. You’re not jacking off. That implies something wasteful and, frankly, unfeeling. It’s way more like you’re jacking in to some furious, radical state of self-care.

The guestroom. The office. The “master bedroom,” a phrase your Edmundson colleagues have warned you against, supposedly referencing “slavery times.” Well, okay. Certain words summon up certain thing, and you see no reason to be imprecise. In the hallway, you’re so close you smell her shampoo: Garnier Fructis, Sleek and Shine. “This room,” you inform Ten-Thirty, “could be for a child—late in life. Or maybe a niece from out of town!” You gesture to the bedroom’s ceiling where an invisible mobile turns in your mind’s eye. “Plus, the windows are high,” you say, leveling your hand, “so that—”

“Sorry.”

You frown at Ten-Thirty. “Beg pardon?”

But she’s smiling so broadly it makes you confused. “Whatever you’re doing, I’d like you to stop.” Ten-Thirty’s smile settles into a line. “I mean, what if I couldn’t conceive? What if I’d had a miscarriage? You don’t know my reasons. It’s none of your business.”

Ten-Thirty holds her hands palms up like the Shrugging Emoji you perhaps overused when your Lady in Red would fuss by text. You’re quiet—reflective. You gaze at the floor with your hands clasped before you. “I’m sorry,” you say, “I overstepped.”

 “No, I’m sorry,” she tells you. “I shouldn’t have snapped. You’re only making conversation. “

“No, really,” you tell her, “the onus is mine.” It’s time to bring things back to earth. You arrange your face into a sober expression; after all, the face says, you’re the bigger adult. “Let’s do another sweep downstairs.”

The half-bath. The mud room. The two-car garage, even though, in her case, there’d be only one car. You try to give her a sense for the half-finished basement that boasts laminate floor tiles a few meters in before sheering away on a raw, grey concrete and dark chambers that stretch for yards—but this time she declines to follow. She just nods and smiles from the top of the steps. With the weight of a non-sale upon you, you trudge back up the basement stairs.

“So, what are we thinking?” You wiggle your brows.

 “I think that I need a few days to consider.”

“Asking price is three-point-five. That’s probably the lowest that it’s going to go. And you’ll probably want to get in now before outsiders circle and drive up the price.”

“Outsiders?”

“Folks from out of town.”

“Like I said,” says Ten-Thirty, “I’m really not sure. More showings tomorrow—all this week.” Then she suddenly seems to remember herself. “Which doesn’t mean in any way I’m not super grateful that you took the time!”

Holding up prayer-hands, she dips her waist slightly—another emoji in the flesh. She’s in lawyer-mode now, balancing every outcome in hopes it will reveal the truth. “I’ll make sure your offer’s the third one they get.” You cup a hand over your mouth for effect. “You never want to be the first,” you stage-whisper at her.

“You know,” she blurts, “work call at noon!”

You check your watch. “It’s just eleven.”

“I mean, noon eastern time. Always screwing that up.”

But you still have showstopper held in reserve. “Here,” you say, peeling away from the island and dodging around her to the fridge where, with a finesse that recalls young Tom Cruise, you grab the Topo Chico bottle and carry it back to where she stands. “Settle in, have a beverage. Take your work call. Get to really know the space. Then tomorrow—”

“You’re leaving me here?” she says.

Ten-Thirty’s always interrupting. “I actually also have a thing? It’s across town, but I’m going to leave the door unlocked. See, I really want to let you get acquainted with the space. Big decisions like this don’t get made under pressure.”

She appears to consider this, shrugs. “Okay, sure.”

You approach her again. “Before I go . . .” It hurts worse than you thought to see her step away, like you’re going to go all Harvey Weinstein. It reminds you of the scraped-out feeling you had in the weeks following the divorce and the legal sequestering of your daughter in the old people’s house with the brocaded couches and the terrible cat dander known as your in-laws—a grief and self-pity that never stopped growing until one day you woke up to find them replaced with a white-hot swirling orb of rage.

When you gently take the Topo Chico and pop the top off on the edge of the island, Ten-Thirty releases a sharp, pent-up breath. “See,” you say, “was that so bad?”


You get in your Escalade, circle the block. The A.C. is set to a punitive level, and the song is up so loud it shakes the car’s windows. When you come back around to Ten-Thirty’s colonial, you see she’s decided to shirk your advice and is taking her “noon conference call” on the porch. You park a couple houses down and watch her through the tinted windshield. Striding in her pencil skirt she makes hand gestures that strike you as awfully casual for the professional meeting she claimed. Perhaps she’s talking to a friend. Doubtless some other unmarried cat person.

You’re sure she is discussing you. Your sizable, portable Bluetooth speaker, your odd behavior on the stairs. Well at least she’s enjoying her sparkling water, which you can see is almost gone. Watching her throat jump, you’re easing the seat back when, suddenly, you get a tingle. You check for your wallet, your keys. Both are there. You check your fly. All tucked away. And then you remember—your new Soundlink speaker!

You’re rooting around in the SUV’s floorspace when you hear a sharp knock on the glass of the window. Ten-Thirty’s out there in the street, dangling the speaker (thank God!) in the air. You smile in a way that you hope conveys nothing but a realtor benignly waylaid in his car and power down the driver’s window, only to discover it’s dead, the car off. Mouthing, Sorry, so sorry, you push the start button. Finally get that window down. The chorus of “The Lady in Red” balloons from the trap of the car; you turn the volume way down. She floats you the Bose through your car’s open window. “You left this on the kitchen island.”

“Wow,” you tell her. “Thanks so much.”

Her phone’s still in her other hand and she checks the time on it. “You’re going to be late.”

“It’s actually totally fine?” you announce, gently shaking your head. “Now the showing’s at noon? The clients had to push it back.”

You expect her to nod and walk away, but she says there a moment, examining you with the same nigh-inscrutable resting expression she’s been smearing all over her beauty all morning, like she’s peering at you from far away. “The Lady in Red,” she says.

“What?” You’re still smiling.

She points at the Sirius track. “It’s your song.”


For the next several hours, you sit in the Escalade, watching the house. You sit through the showings, actual and invented, through three incoming calls from the “family lawyer” adjudicating your divorce. You watch the sun drift past the yardarm. The spottily occupied street of good families relaxes into rosy twilight, scattered cars pulling into scattered garages, lonely kids pumping bikes down the freshly paved street. Your face, on the sign, winks at you in the gloaming, your eyes more piercing blue than ever.

The song plays on repeat, a peaceful susurrus. When full dark descends, you get out of the car and do some lunges near the bumper. Ah, much better. Limbered up, you proceed to the trunk, which you disappear into, extracting your tools. The unworn red dress of your Lady in Red, still in its box, which you found under the living room couch the day after your wife and your daughter absconded at some deceitful hour of night. The non-perishables you purchased that morning at a chain grocery store a full hour down the freeway. Zip-ties, masking tape, and an old burlap sack, which in happier days your daughter used when the two of you went trick-or-treating. Your travel companions— an American Girl doll (mediocre rating on Consumer Reports, but you caved and bought it anyway) and she of the plastic bin under the bed, your hard-ridden Lady in Red of the moment. You inflate her by mouth and stuff her into a pantsuit to allow her the dignity both of you owe her.

Wow, you’ve missed the family life! You take them out on expeditions. With the Lady in Red in the passenger’s seat, dolly dearest gets the booster. Just like this, you’ve done mock school drop-offs, Date Night with the Lady, promenades in the park—but only in the dead of night! When a passerby spotted you on a park bench sitting serenely between your two ladies, you had to think fast, crying out, “Oh my lord!” before pushing the dolls from the bench in disgust, as though you’d just happened to blindly sit down in the midst of some night-pervert’s hidden cache. The man had nodded, gone right past you.

You’ll have none of those pitiful hiccoughs tonight. You have Ten-Thirty’s name and address on your phone from the Edmundson Group’s digitized database, and you program it into the car’s GPS. Hey now, don’t get the wrong idea! Whatever you’re planning to do, it’s not that. A finishing school is what you have in mind, though this one’s not for girls, but women. In the finishing school, you will be the Magister. Ten-Thirty will be your pupil.


The Lady in Red never takes off the dress. The Lady in Red lives to please and be pleased. The Lady in Red takes the bad with the good. The Lady in Red keeps her fears to herself. The Lady in Red is a wonderful mother but she wanders in daydreams of being a wife. The Lady in Red hears the song on her mattress. The Lady in Red climbs the stairs to the kitchen. The Lady in Red knocks twice to enter. The Lady in Red gropes through candlelit gloom to the Gentleman Speaker ensconced by the fire. The Lady in Red turns coyly away as the Gentleman rises to savor her beauty. The Lady in Red wills her hand to be taken. The Lady in Red never takes off the dress. The Lady in Red feels herself swept away. The Lady in Red never takes—


Kill the engine. Sit a while in the ticking suspension of night with your eyes on the windows of Ten-Thirty’s house. Inhale for four seconds. Hold for seven. Release until the count of eight.

The Lady in Red wills her hand to be taken.

Though you’d understood the colonial house with its open floor plan and commodious basement would serve you as the perfect classroom, Ten-Thirty’s squat, blue bungalow in the elitist zip code near the college is not without its creaky charm, albeit without any trikes in the yard, its storm gutters absent the touch of a husband. It makes you feel—melancholy. Also, oddly relieved. This way, there’s less of a chance she’ll be missed.

Right now, though, you need to be more than just patient. You need to be present. Or better yet, mindful. Play some games on your phone. Do the (now lukewarm) Dew. Pet the shimmering silk of the dress in the box.

Wowzer, there she goes now, through the house’s front windows! She’s dressed in her comfy clothes, drinking some wine. She carries her laptop. Always working. In your lessons, you’ll have to address boundaries first. Mr. Suds pads around like some witch’s familiar, lording over the plush of the sectional couch.

You can feel a change coming, a shift in the boundary that separates you from the woman inside. For the first time, you understand that the next forty-eight (okay, sixty!) hours will be as much a becoming for you as for her. Then, perhaps, there can be other Ladies in Red in all good communities all through the nation. One day, they will understand what you’ve had to surrender so they can be loved. 

Midway across the room she stops. Then she goes to the window and peers through the night. With her face pressed flat against the glass, you know she can’t see you out there in your car with the silhouettes of your wife, your daughter. You’re too far down the block. Plus, your windows are tinted. Still, something out there seems to draw her attention: weird shape near the trash bins, mischievous tree branch.

Her white face pools against the glass. No more resting bitch-face, her features are different. Eyes wider, mouth slacker, hand hitched at her brow. You might even think that Ten-Thirty was scared. It renders her warmer, somehow more appealing. You want to remember her this way forever before any potential unpleasantness mars it. Make a square with your fingers. Hold the square to your eyes. Tap with your pointer finger: click.