Tom
The way she undressed in front of me—yanking the blouse over her head, opening her bra, letting herself fall out of it, tossing it to the laundry hamper, unsnapping her pants, stepping out of them, hanging them in the closet, stripping off her panties, dropping them into the hamper too—and then loitered for a moment before pulling on a yellow cotton nightie with pink flowers, told me she hadn’t truly made up her mind that she’d had it, that she couldn’t stand it anymore, that she was leaving me.
There’s something about nakedness, I think, between a man and a woman, that imposes a level of intimacy that no quotient of hostility or anger or venom or disgust can completely quell, and though the excitement, intrigue, and conquest have been tempered by years of repetition, familiarity, and availability, still, when an attractive and sexual woman (and she was, I assure you, still attractive and sexual) puts herself on display for her husband like a flower opening for a bee, (though in this case, it was she who was wielding the stinger) it is impossible not to conclude that her willingness to give herself and thus her feelings of love, passion, or whatever it is that binds a man and woman together, have not yet been fully extinguished.
Of course, when she called me a fucking asshole and slapped me, I was forced to reconsider.
Heather
Tom had always been a pedantic pain in the ass, but now it had become intolerable. He picked at everything I did. His complaints were never-ending. His cynical color commentary on life was enough to make me scream. His intransigence. His dour face—about the only thing that made him smile anymore was his snickering over the reports of governmental incompetence as he pored through the newspapers. Anything that let him find fault with somebody, something, or someplace. I was sick of hearing it. Couldn’t he find something good in the world, something positive, something that had gone right, something that somebody could smile and be proud of?
I felt as though he were a weight harnessed to my shoulders, as if I were a sled dog without a team, mired in mud. I was forty-one and he was fifty-three, but it wasn’t a question of chronological age. On the contrary, I’d always been attracted to older men, drawn by the allure of their wisdom, manners, and sophistication. Their authority. Their certainty. But now his temperament had turned so negative that it was as if hopelessness had become a terminal malaise and I was afraid that if I didn’t get away, I’d catch it too.
Tom
She snatched a pillow from the bed. I asked where she was going. Before long we were yelling. Silent aggression was more our style, spiced with nasty barbs, snipes, and sarcastic swipes, but this time our pent-up hostility came spurting out like blood from a severed artery.
She’d come in late from work, which wasn’t unusual. Often, she worked till six-thirty or seven, her job as an investment banker requiring her to be available whenever there was a deadline on a deal. But on the evening in question, it was close to nine when, without so much as a kiss or a hello, she slammed the door from the garage, stomped through the kitchen, ignored the dogs, threw her bag on the counter, and proceeded into the bathroom. When she emerged, I asked if something had come up. It seemed like an innocent enough question.
Instead of answering, she strode to her dresser and began removing her jewelry, first her earrings, then her necklace, her bracelets, and finally her rings. She tried to tug off her wedding band, but it wouldn’t budge.
Heather
God, it felt good to hit him. I didn’t want to stop. If only he had hit me, so I could have retaliated. It would have been ecstasy to stand toe to toe, slugging it out, pummeling each other, blood and pain marking the end of the torture that our marriage had become. For a second, I thought he might. After I slapped his face, his eyes went crazy, as if they’d short-circuited, and his hands rose up as if to clutch my throat. But he was too weak to hit me, too much of a coward.
Ronny, my first husband, hit me. Mostly he pushed me around, shoved me against a wall, held me immobile, my arms pinned to the wallpaper, his face contorted, his spittle spraying my face as he cursed me. Usually, it happened when he was drunk, after I’d brought him his beers, ever the obedient wife. He’d call me a whore, threaten that once he had the proof, he’d kill the guy or me or us both.
Ronny hated that I was working my way through college while he was a tree monkey. He nearly went berserk when I enrolled in Rider’s MBA program. He said I should stay home and make babies. No wife of his was going to travel with other men, stay in hotels, and fuck them if I wasn’t too busy sucking their dicks. Wasn’t it bad enough that I was a slut already without being a master bitch authority—that’s what he said MBA stood for.
The funny thing was that he had it all wrong. I married him when I was twenty, and back then there was nothing I’d rather have done than stay home and be a mother. But he didn’t make enough for us to live on. He never had any ambition, never did anything to make something of himself. I was a secretary at Merrill Lynch in Plainsboro. They paid for me to go to school at night. With my degree, I got promoted, and then with my MBA, I landed a job as a research analyst. Eventually I was named a vice-president, though that was long after I’d left Ronny.
He was wrong about me being a slut. He claimed I was out to fuck my way to the top, but I only cheated on him once, and that was more or less a technicality, as I’d already decided to leave him.
Tom
Her eyes were wild, her hands up beside her head desperate to hurtle something. Her breath radiated alcohol.
Her drinking had become a problem. Every night, she sucked down a cocktail or two before dinner, then wine with dinner, then a glass of Scotch in bed. More on special occasions, and there were lots of special occasions.
More troublesome was her overarching need for a drink. By the time she trudged through the door, she was like a flower that had wilted, desperately craving liquid. She changed clothes, and then it was into the kitchen, and I’d hear the ice cubes hitting the glass. She required alcohol like a nuclear power plant needs water to keep from melting down and exploding.
The first few drinks had little discernible effect other than easing back her throttle as if she’d exited the highway onto a pleasant country road. As she grew drunker, her speech became less precise, less coordinated, less proficient. She’d stumble over sentences, unable to adequately express herself. She’d resort to fixed phrases that she’d repeat emphatically, often amplifying them with volume and disjointed facial expressions in a failed effort to enforce clarity.
Now, as she flailed at me and I demanded to know what I had done to deserve her threatened desertion, she kept accusing me of arrogance (one of her favorite words, which might mean anything from sarcastic to contemptuous to indifferent), selfishness, and stupidity.
I didn’t like her when she verbally stumbled. I didn’t like her when she grew obdurate and unreasonable. Any argument I mustered would be met with, if I’m so terrible, why would you want to be with me—perhaps it would be best if you were alone. We’d had this fight so many times, I’d wearied of it. Surely, she had too.
When she escalated to physical blows, it was as though she was daring me to respond in kind. More than once, I’d heard her speak with disdain about men who were pussy-whipped, as she called it. What kind of man would let his wife get away with shit like that, she’d ask. Her first husband had resorted to corporal punishment. Was that what she wanted—for me to set her straight martially, to treat her like a child and physically discipline her?
Heather
The first couple of years I knew Tom, I couldn’t stand him. He was arrogant and condescending, dead certain he was smarter than everyone else. He was director of research for REITs—real estate investment trusts—which were relatively new back then, and he prided himself on getting to know his companies from the bottom up—physically inspecting buildings, talking to tenants, tracking markets city by city, making sure he understood the investments brick by brick. I was a junior analyst, and my job was to run the numbers based on the information given to me by the more senior analysts. Tom, the boss, was strictly business, never joking or kidding around. As much as I disliked him, it was amazing watching him work. He could digest a thirty-page draft report in minutes and pinpoint the one error in calculations or the fatal hole in the logic or projections.
The other analysts and the bankers approached him with respect for his intellect, seasoned with fear of his tongue. No one wanted to be the object of his scrutiny. Even experienced researchers squirmed under his interrogation.
Fortunately, I’m not easily intimidated. When I was a little girl in Ewing’s Catholic schools, the nuns told me that my disrespect for authority would get me into trouble. My mother admonished me that I had a smart mouth. Perhaps that’s why I married young, to get out from under their control, to show them I was my own person.
The first time Tom called me into his office to go over a report I’d drafted, he asked if I’d always had difficulty with English grammar. I snidely retorted that my preference was to concentrate on substance and leave the style to others, such as him. I spun on my heel and waltzed out of his office, leaving him to gape at my ass. After that, we had an uneasy truce.
Then everything changed. Merrill Lynch was holding an incentive trip for their top brokers at Whistler, in British Columbia, and Sales invited Tom to give a presentation about REITs. Coincidentally, Tom had been talking for months about the need for a West Coast swing—the office and research building market in the San Francisco area was exploding, the Los Angeles and San Diego markets had turned around, the Seattle apartment market was in a growth spurt, and Vancouver was poised to take off. As I’d never been in the field for such an extensive trip, he thought it would be a good idea for us to go together, so I could watch and learn. I approached the journey with trepidation. I’d resolved that the first time he spoke rudely to me, I’d set him straight about whom he was dealing with, but that turned out not to be necessary. Away from the office, I saw another side of him. He behaved like a gentleman.
The Whistler meeting was in the middle of our tour. We flew from Los Angeles to Vancouver, and a private car drove us the two and a half hours north along the ragged scenic coastline, twisting and turning on a two-lane road that left me carsick. We were staying at the Fairmont, right at the bottom of the two ski mountains, which, as we heard at least a dozen times, cover skiable terrain four times the size of Aspen’s.
It was the first time I’d seen Tom address a group that large, and I was impressed. He had a no-nonsense style, speaking with confidence and clarity, free of hyperbole, rattling off facts and statistics in a manner that connected them coherently, guiding the listener inexorably toward his conclusions. His arguments were so simple and compelling that you felt as if you’d known them all along.
There was a power in his control of his material and his audience. I felt it drawing me to him, lured by the safety in his strength. I saw the ballroom full of portfolio managers and executives, hundreds of them, every pair of eyes intently focused on him, absorbing his words, under his spell, and I felt as though I was a teenager and he was a rock star whose poster I’d hung on my bedroom wall.
Tom
The first time I saw her drunk was at that Whistler meeting, the evening after my presentation. The company had arranged a reception and banquet at the top of the mountain. The gondola was reserved for our group. The entire mountain was ours.
We walked to the gondola from the hotel with a group of fund managers and their spouses and squeezed into the car with four of them. At the station halfway to the top, the door opened, and a waiter in a tuxedo stood at attention holding a tray of flutes of champagne. We all laughed and helped ourselves.
At the summit, a jazz trio was playing, and the bar was open. Drinks in hand, we strolled out onto the stone patio in the evening air, cool even in August. The vista spread in every direction, mountains rising out of the clouds below us that hid parts of the village. Off to our left, a long green lake nestled in the valley, and to our right, there was a chair lift to the highest peak, which was now rocky, barren, and forbidding. A photographer was posing couples off the edge of the patio, so they seemed to float on the mountains, and clouds were laid out like a rumpled quilt behind them, a blue and white streaked sky framing them from above.
“Come on,” she said, and hooked me by the arm.
It’s our favorite picture—the two of us, arms around each other’s waists, smiling happily as if we already knew, standing on top of the world. It’s hard to imagine that we hadn’t so much as kissed yet. And we were both married.
Heather
I spent most of dinner talking to a couple from Denver about skiing and their kids and the usual stuff, and he was caught up in conversation with Lance Berkman from the home office, something about business, the economy, or politics, I imagine. After dinner, there were more drinks, a band, and dancing. The crowd seemed to be thinning out, so I asked if there was a certain time for departure. He said we could go anytime.
The gondola was adjacent to the restaurant, but in the dozen yards from one building to the other, we were already chilled. The gondola car stopped. We were the only ones waiting. The door opened. The attendant held it while we climbed in. Tom got in first, and I slipped in beside him. The attendant handed us a woolen army blanket. The door closed. I unfolded the blanket. Tom put his arm around me, and I draped the blanket over us. The gondola moved away from the station into the darkness. The only sound was the mechanical whining on the wire. We were suspended in black, the lights of the village half a mile below us. He kissed me.
Tom
There we were, floating through the darkness, wrapped in a woolen cocoon, half drunk, her head on my shoulder, my hand on her waist. I kissed her and she responded as if she’d been expecting it.
She was wearing a blue pants suit. The jacket was open. I unbuttoned her blouse. The pearls of her necklace were dimly white against her skin in the ambient light, like raindrops ready to melt. I fumbled with her bra. She smiled and opened it. I unbuttoned her pants. She leaned onto me so I could slide them down.
“We’re almost at the halfway station,” I said.
“Can’t we tell them not to stop?”
“Tell who?”
“Whoever’s driving.”
“Nobody’s driving.”
“I want you to drive. I want you not to stop.”
We sat up and wrapped the blanket around us. At the halfway station, the gondola kept going.
“See,” she said. “I knew you were driving.”
She kicked off her shoes, shed her pants, and leaned back against me as I touched her, her legs spread, one foot up on the seat, the other braced against the wall below the window.
“You have to get dressed,” I said when I saw the twinkling lights of the base station. “Right away.”
“What? Oh shit.”
She scrambled to collect herself, barely buttoning her blouse as the door opened. She climbed out. I grabbed her purse and followed her.
Heather
We went back to my room and finished what we’d started. I’d like to tell you I was racked with guilt. I was cheating on my husband, but good God, it felt good to be unrestrainedly, unequivocally, repeatedly, and thoroughly fucked.
Ronny had a problem with premature ejaculation. And I do mean premature. He did his best to take care of me other ways, when he felt like it, and I knew it wasn’t his fault, but still, I can’t tell you how wonderful it felt for once to be physically fulfilled, especially when it was by someone I now deeply respected, admired, and wanted to be with.
The next day, the car drove us to Vancouver, where we met with managers of two REITs and toured their buildings. Then we walked for hours along the waterfront, south to north, cutting through Stanley Park, ending up at a restaurant overlooking a marina where we had drinks and grilled BC salmon. We cabbed back to our hotel and had drinks on the balcony of his suite. We made love in his bed. I was afraid to ask him what was going to happen in New Jersey, if this was a dream, a fling, a comet in the night, or if we were on the edge of falling into something deeper. I kept reminding myself that he was a businessman first, an automaton, cold and heartless, no believer in romantic love, certainly not someone who was about to turn his life upside-down over some chick a dozen years his junior, who reported to him at work, who was married, who he barely knew, when you came right down to it.
Tom
The timing was perfect. A week earlier, my wife and I had decided to split up. Or rather, I should say I had decided. It wasn’t only that Connie had let herself become as round as a pumpkin or that she nursed our youngest until she was three or that she let any of them into our bed on a nightly basis or that she had transformed herself from a smart, up and coming product manager at a major packaged goods corporation with an MBA from Northwestern into a nagging nursemaid obsessed with who had spit up or had a bad day at preschool, or even that we’d drifted so far apart that we had nothing to talk about, nothing to hug about, nothing to have sex about, nothing to do anything about. Actually, it was that. It was all of that. I needed her to be more than a mother. I needed a wife, a woman, a lover. And, truth be known, it was mutual. She’d lost interest in me too. She never asked about my day, about work, about anything. I wasn’t sure she knew what I did anymore. I was merely a provider of the necessities and conveniences of domesticity. This, I’d decided, was a package I could deliver in absentia.
When I told her, she gawked at me as if I was crazy.
“Who is it?” she demanded. “Some bimbo at work?”
I confessed to a whole series of affairs. I claimed to be in the midst of two of them. Caught up in the moment, I spun a horrendous lie, figuring it was more humane than the truth—that I was lonely, despondent, and in desperate need of physical and emotional companionship.
“So fuck them,” she declared. “What do I care? Just stay away from me. And try to be a decent father. That’s all I want of you.”
At first, Heather and I pretended that our relationship was purely physical. She referred to me as her sex toy. I called her my concubine. We spent weekends together, then added a night during the week. Within a few months, we were more or less living together. I was still her boss, and we knew something had to change.
I’d been thinking about leaving the firm anyway, and the situation gave me the push I needed. REIT IPOs and secondaries were hot, and I’d been rewarded with huge bonuses. I was ready to move on, and the logical next step for me was the buy-side, either a mutual fund or a private equity group. Heather and I might find ourselves on both sides of a deal, but that sort of thing went on all the time and nobody cared.
Meanwhile, negotiations with Connie over terms of our divorce were going badly. My lawyer’s advice was to be unemployed. If I went to a new firm while we were still technically married, Connie would be entitled to half of whatever I made. For now, the smaller I kept the pie, the less there was to fight about.
I went ahead and resigned, figuring I’d take some time off while the lawyers sorted things out. Problem was, Connie said no to every offer. Her lawyer told my lawyer in confidence that he’d never seen anyone so hardheaded. She was out for revenge, and anything short of everything wasn’t good enough. She’d grown accustomed to my being an indentured servant and saw no reason to change. It took close to two years for her to wear down to the point where she’d agree to terms. By that point not only had my network grown stale, but I’d come to rather enjoy my retirement. I did a little consulting, but before long, I said the hell with it.
Heather
It wasn’t that he quit working. I was fine with that. We were living together in my townhouse, and it made life easier having one of us home. I didn’t mind that he was forever watching pennies or that I was paying for practically everything. The deal breaker was the way he withered over time, lost interest in business, withdrew into himself, relinquished his confidence, became a follower, drifted through life. When I met him, he was someone who made things happen. Now he was content to be a spectator. When he did comment, it was invariably negative, as if the world he had left behind was nothing but corrupt greedy fools. Instead of participating, he was observing and passing judgment, none of it favorable. Life must sure be easy when all you have to do is make fun of those who are living it.
Tom
She started treating me like a housewife. I don’t know how else to put it. In the morning, she’d present me with a list of tasks. Shopping, laundry, changing the bed, making dinner, whatever. As if I had nothing else to do. She placed no value on my activities because they didn’t generate income.
Sure, I’d played my share of golf for a while, and I still tried to get out on the course once a week, but mostly I was determined to make the world a better place. Maybe I felt guilty. But really, I was only doing what anyone given the opportunity would have. Once a week, I drove down to Trenton and helped out at one of the food pantries. I’d become active with the Sourland River watershed association, assisting with fundraising, grant requests, and other administrative and operational issues. I served on the township landmarks commission and historical society. I spent time with my kids, though it wasn’t easy as Connie regularly lectured them on what a monster I was.
Heather
Omar Jennings was the CEO of a company we were taking public, the first REIT to specialize in animal health. They built animal hospitals and leased them to veterinarians, a niche that was stable, profitable, and essentially free of competition.
Omar was in his early sixties, but he was the eternally youthful, high-energy type, with long gray hair tied back in a ponytail. At his office, he favored jeans, corduroy or flannel shirts, and hiking boots. He walked in long bouncy strides and perpetually seemed to be about to do or say something. His skin was lined, but fresh-looking, his face lean and sharp, his nose slightly bent, his expression constantly alert and ready to give orders.
The IPO road show ended in Boston. We flew into Logan after a day of meetings in Chicago and had presentations scheduled the next day with Fidelity and John Hancock. There was general mumbling about having room service and going to bed, which sounded good to me. I’d only been in my room for a couple of minutes when the phone rang.
“How do you think it’s going?” Omar said.
“The book’s full. The deal’s oversold. There’s going to be some haggling over price, but I’d say it’ll go near the top of the range.”
There were a few seconds of silence. That was a habit of his. He pondered and nodded before replying, and then sometimes he simply said okay, and that was that. “It’s the last night,” he said. “What do you say we celebrate?
Too tired to go hunting for a restaurant, we ate at the bar at a Legal Sea Foods. We had a couple of drinks, split a bottle of wine, and had a cognac for dessert.
He was a talker. He told me about his life as a hippie living on a commune in Oregon, protesting Vietnam, and working a series of jobs in construction and building maintenance, until in his mid-thirties, he went back to school, got a BA at Berkeley and an MBA at Stanford. He tried a number of ventures until he realized that buying and renting buildings was what he was good at. Sitting in a vet’s waiting room with his Weimaraner, he hit on the idea for his latest company.
His eyes had been wandering around the restaurant while he spoke, sneaking peeks at the television, but now he focused his attention on me.
“That’s the long-winded story of how I met you,” he said.
He took my hand and held it between his, as if they were our bodies exploring each other. He traced his fingertip across my palm. I shivered. He was asking me, and I answered him with a quiver.
I let him pick up the tab, even though we were already taking six percent of the deal and I should have expensed it. At the hotel, we stepped into the elevator together. He pushed the button for his floor. When the door opened, I went with him.
Tom
Growing up, my family had a whole series of dogs my father brought home from the pound, usually older dogs who never seemed to last more than a year or two before they got hit by a car or died of some disease. Since then, I’d always wanted a dog, but never had time. So, when one evening at a landmarks commission meeting, someone mentioned that she ran the Irish setter rescue, I thought I’d take a look. The next day I adopted Seamus. He was five or six, already gray around the muzzle, and so starved for affection that he couldn’t take his eyes off of me. When I’d take him to the park he’d run and run until he finally dropped to the ground at my feet, his tongue hanging out like a wet sock from a clothesline. Next, I adopted a basset hound. Then a mutt.
The Sourland pet shelter was horrendously crowded, broke, and in need of a larger facility. I offered to help. Within a year, I was chairman of the board of the organization and in charge of finding a place to build a new home for the animals and the money to make it happen.
Heather
Tom and Omar knew each other, thanks to Tom’s stupid dog pound. The pound had no money, so Tom’s strategy was to find someone else to build it. Then all he had to do was raise enough money each year to pay the rent. Of course, no REIT wanted to get into bed with an underfunded charity, so Tom convinced the largest multi-specialty animal hospital in the state to open a satellite clinic in the building under a long-term lease, which made it more palatable. Even so, I suspected that Omar cut the deal with Tom as a way of making a statement to me.
It wasn’t hard to decide which side of the deal I wanted to be on. One of them was getting rich, especially now that I was taking him public, and the other was doing it for free. One had the power and the control, while the other was making phone calls begging for money. For one, this was an inconsequential deal out of a hundred. For the other, this was his whole life. And one made love to me as if my skin were made of champagne, while the other had fucked me a thousand times as if he was filling up on meatloaf and mashed potatoes because he was hungry.
Tom
All I did was ask Heather if she’d been held up at work and now she was threatening to leave me.
“It’s you,” she screamed. “I’m not listening to your insults anymore.”
“No, it’s you.” My finger stabbed feebly at the air. “I didn’t call you anything.”
Her face contracted with hatred. “You said I was drunk. Three times you made your snide insinuating comments. You and your arrogance.”
“Tell me what I said. You can’t. I didn’t say anything. You’re imagining it.”
She slapped at my finger. My fist clenched.
“Go ahead, hit me,” she yelled. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
She shoved me hard. I was off balance and stumbled backward onto the floor, tackled by the corner of the bed. I was up and grabbed her.
“You don’t have the balls,” she hissed.
I wanted to smash her face. I squeezed her wrists.
She struggled. I held her. She kicked my shin. It hurt. I let go. I slumped on the bed, defeated.
“I’m sleeping on the couch,” she said and was gone.
I lay on the bed staring at the ceiling for an hour, maybe longer. I hated her. I loved her. I couldn’t stand to be with her. I couldn’t imagine life without her.
I forced myself up off the bed. She was in the living room, on the couch, on her side, head on a pillow, a blanket tucked under her chin, pretending to sleep, a lamp on in the corner. When I sat beside her, she opened her eyes too quickly to have been asleep. They were the eyes of a stranger I had lived with for a decade.
I massaged her shoulder, her neck.
“I’m not in the mood,” she said.
I stopped.
The strap of her cotton nightie had slipped down, and I could see the freckles on her chest.
“Are you leaving?” I said.
“I can’t live like this anymore.”
“Like what?”
“You’re a miserable person. You want me to make you happy and I can’t do it. Nobody could. I’m tired of trying. I don’t want to be miserable anymore.”
Something about the way she said it and I knew.
“There’s someone else?”
“This isn’t about anybody else. It’s about you.”
“Someone rich and successful? You always wanted someone rich and successful.”
She sighed. I lay beside her. We wrapped ourselves together, front-to-front. I felt her crying. I knew the body I was pressed against was no longer mine.
Heather
He wore me down. I followed him back to our bed. We each opened our own sides and got in. I was too worn out to care or fake it. Then I found myself thinking of Omar. I pretended it was Omar touching me. I pretended it was his mane of gray hair tickling my belly. I pretended Omar was on top of me.
It was a long sad night. Tom couldn’t sleep and every time I dozed off, he’d wake me to turn me onto my side so he could snuggle against me, nuzzle into the back of my neck.
In the morning I went to work as if everything was normal.
Tom
After she left, I sat for a long time at the breakfast table with a mug of cold coffee, the three dogs sleeping nearby. On the table, beside the coffee, was a corner of a wrapping from a hamburger with Brandi’s cell phone number in rounded, enthusiastic, script.
It was hard to know what to think of Brandi. In many ways she wasn’t an adult yet, but she was as old as Connie was when we started dating and far more mature. She knew what she wanted, she had drive and determination, she’d set goals, and she was serious in her demeanor.
She answered with a hello in her small voice as if asking a question. It made her sound like a teenager.
I said hi, paused, and told her who it was.
“I know,” she said.
“I didn’t think you’d recognize my voice.”
“I have caller ID.”
Her laugh was a stuttering titter, like a little bird with hiccups.
I hadn’t known what I was going to say, and I found myself speechless.
“Is something the matter?” she said after a long silence.
“Well, yeah, sort of. I mean, I guess so yes.”
“Do you want to talk?” There was that laugh again. She was nervous too, which was unusual. Though she came across as deferential, she never lacked for certainty in her opinions. “Yes, you want to talk. Why else would you have called? I’m going to be at the shelter from one to three. Meet me there?”
Since her sophomore year in college, she’d been volunteering at the shelter, which was where I’d met her. After graduation, she’d worked for a couple of years in retail to pay off her debts, and now she was studying toward a master’s degree in nonprofit management at Thomas Edison. She seemed to look up to me, almost as a mentor. We’d spoken at length about her desire for a career in non-profits, and I’d suggested she pursue an advanced degree. We talked, joked, and sometimes went out to lunch together.
Heather
Omar was in town. He called to ask if I wanted to get together for a drink after work. I readily agreed. He was staying at The Four Seasons in New York. I took a car in and met him at the bar. We had a couple of drinks and a long leisurely dinner with two bottles of wine. By the time he led me up to his room, I was happy and horny and couldn’t wait to have him inside me.
Tom
I found her in back, hosing down one of the cage areas. She was suited up in rubber leggings, boots, and a baseball cap with her hair dangling from the back. She didn’t hear me come in. I stood for a few minutes watching her before she noticed me. She smiled and waved but kept working until the job was completed. She turned off the water, coiled the hose, and returned it to its rack near the door to the outside exercise area.
“When I’m CEO of a non-profit, do I still have to hose down the cages?” she said.
She had a sharp nose offset by calm round eyes. Her expression was gentle and receptive, unusually at peace for someone her age. For someone any age.
“That depends on how good you are at fundraising.”
“How about if I hire you to help?”
She’d asked that question a thousand times and though it was a joke, I’d always said no. This time I said, “You know, I might take you up on that.”
“Really? Are you okay?”
“You think I could spend the night with you tonight?”
“Really?” She laughed, glanced around to make sure no one saw, and gave me a quick kiss, the brim of her baseball cap poking me in the forehead. “Now I know something must be seriously the matter.”
Heather
I was on top, perpendicular, riding him hard, ready to climax when the phone rang. We stopped. Our eyes met. He shifted his weight to reach for the phone. I came down on him, my hands on his shoulders, my mouth locking on his. He lifted me roughly, practically tossing me aside. He snatched the phone and fled into the sitting room.
“No, no, nothing,” he was saying into the phone, “watching some television. Catching up on paperwork. Must have dozed off….”
Tom
Brandi had a second-floor garden apartment in West Windsor with a living room, bedroom, kitchen, and a long, narrow balcony overlooking a retention basin and behind it a shopping plaza. She’d done her best to make it homey with flowery drapes that matched the bedspread.
We’d had long conversations over fast food lunches, and we’d kissed in my car enough times to know how we felt about each other, so as we stood beside her bed, we were more eager than nervous, curious to see if our expectations would be met.
“This means I won’t be able to hire you?” she said.
“As a consultant might still be okay.”
“I don’t know. My ethics professor would say it’s a conflict.”
“Fine. Then don’t hire him.”
Afterward, we dozed for a while, and she made us spaghetti. I offered to go pick up a bottle of wine, but she said she had to study after dinner.
I told her Heather was leaving me. She asked me why. I told her I wasn’t sure. I don’t think she believed it.
“I was sort of hoping it’d be you leaving her,” she said. She was at the sink scrubbing pots, and I was drying.
“Brandi, when you’re my age, I’ll be … well most likely I’ll be dead.”
She pushed a colander at me. Her face was a smiling smirk. “Sounds perfect, don’t you think?”
After we’d finished cleaning up, she moved into the bedroom to study. I sat in the living room flicking channels, but there wasn’t anything on. I felt trapped in the small apartment and in need of my computer, my books, and the dogs.
Then it dawned on me. I’d been assuming Heather would take care of the dogs, but I’d better check. I called the house. After four rings the machine picked up.
That might mean she was there but not answering. I tried again. Still no answer.
Brandi was on the bed, her back against the wall, her legs bent, a book propped on her knees, serious, precious, and perfect.
“I have to go let the dogs out and feed them.”
“Want me to come? I’m a professional.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Are you coming back?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I don’t want you ever to leave.”
Heather
I’d always assumed he wasn’t married. He’d never mentioned his wife. He didn’t wear a ring. He never referred to any sort of home life. He didn’t hesitate to bed me.
But more than that, it was the way he did it. It felt as though he was courting me. He comported himself like a gentleman, holding doors, ordering for me, ogling me, telling me how pretty I was, kissing every inch of me as if I were made of gold.
I dressed in the bathroom and called myself a car.
Tom
It was nearly eight o’clock. The dogs were frantic. I opened the back door and there was a mad scramble. I made their dinners. I let them back in and they raced to their food bowls. I sat with them for a while, petting one and then the other, sorting the day’s mail, flipping through the paper.
I called Brandi.
“You still want me to come back?”
“Definitely.”
“She’s not here.”
“You said she’d left.”
“I said she was leaving.”
“Good, then there’s still time for you to leave first.”
The door to her apartment was unlocked. She’d said she liked the idea of me coming in without knocking.
She was in the same position as when I’d left. She closed the book, dropped it onto the floor, and held her arms up to me.
E.G. Silverman‘s fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, South Dakota Review, Cold Mountain Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Berkeley Fiction Review, and many other literary journals. Silverman’s short story collections have been finalists, semi-finalists, or long-listed for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Ohio State University’s Non/Fiction Award, Snake Nation Press’s Serena McDonald Kennedy Award, Livingston Press’s Tartts First Fiction Award, and Regal House Publishing’s W.S. Porter Prize. Silverman’s novels have been finalists or semi-finalists for Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize, Columbus State University’s DL Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, the Blue Mountain Novel Award, and Kallisto Gaia Press’s Joshua Tree Novel Prize.
Visit https://egsilverman.com/