Mrs March

by Virginia Feito

  “Does that have alcohol in it?” the man asked, jutting his chin toward the peach-colored cocktail in her hand.

  “No,” she said, her voice emotional with that need teenagers have, sometimes, to be believed. “No, of course not.”

  “Figures,” he said, somehow closer to her, although she hadn’t seen him move. He was leaning on the handrail, resting on his elbows. “Kind of a boring party, don’t you think?”

  She nodded and sipped. His eyes bore into her as she desperately thought of something clever to say, when he suddenly stood up straight and turned away from her. Fearing that he had lost interest, she blurted, “Well, I’m going to the beach to see the fireworks.”

  “Fireworks?”

  She nodded. “Every night at ten. You can see them much better from down below. They reflect off the ocean. It’s very powerful.” She once heard a museum tour guide describe a painting as powerful. It struck her as a very mature way to describe something.

  The man looked at her, hands in his pockets.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m going now.”

  She abandoned her unfinished cocktail and made her way across the deck, toward the long wooden bridge that led down to the beach. She hoped that he would follow her. She was tired of being alone, and she’d have to pretend to be happy looking at the fireworks by herself in case he could see her from the deck. The whole scene would be rather humiliating.

  He did follow her, however, and they both walked down the bridge together. Once they reached the sand, she allowed herself a closer look at him. It was a dark night—the sky an inky black against the stars and moon—but they were dimly illuminated by the yellow lights strung around the bridge’s handrail. They stopped when they got to the beach and threw subtle glances at each other. He had sunken cheeks and light green eyes. She looked at his forearms, noticing gray hairs interspersed with the black ones.

  A couple strolled past them, hand in hand. The woman was smoking a cigarette and, in a brief fit of bravado, Mrs. March skipped up to her and asked her for one. The woman handed her a cigarette and lit it for her, and Mrs. March sauntered back toward her new acquaintance feeling like a real adult.

  “Tell me your name,” he said.

  “My friends call me Kiki,” she said.

  “How exotic. Exactly how old are you?” he asked her.

  “Sixteen, seventeen next month,” she said, coughing.

  “Are you excited for college?”

  She contemplated his question as if she were appraising jewelry, and, exhaling a cloud of smoke into his face, she answered, “Oh, yes. Although, you know, I’m going more for the adventure of it than anything else.”

  He grinned at that, his jaw dimpling, his nostrils flaring, and her stomach looped. “Sure,” he said. “I don’t remember much of my college days. I think I drank them all away.”

  She dropped her cigarette butt into the sand and said grandly, “That’s a pity.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  They had been slowly making their way along the dunes, leaving the bridge lights behind. For once the sea seemed mercifully quiet, the waves lapping the shore softly.

  His arm brushed against hers as they walked, but she pretended not to notice. She blew a puff of air upward and her bangs fluttered up in what she hoped was a playful yet charming manner, and he laughed, and she giggled. He leaned over and blew into her face, making her bangs flutter again. “Don’t,” she said, laughing.

  “Are you here with your parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do here all day?”

  “I’m writing a novel,” she said.

  “Are you really?” His astonishment was a burst of sweet, surprising pleasure, like biting into a liqueur-filled truffle.

  “Yes. I’m sure it isn’t any good,” she said, looking at the ground, “but I will finish it sometime next year. By spring, I think.”

  “That’s impressive,” he said. “I wish I had time to write a book.”

  “One has to make time for things that are important.” She smiled.

  The man moved closer to the water, and when she saw him removing his shoes, she asked, “What are you doing?”

  “I want to feel the sand and the sea on my feet,” he said, swaying as he pulled off his shoes. “I’m afraid I’m a little drunk. There.” He placed his rolled-up socks inside the shoes. “I hate walking on the beach in shoes, don’t you? I feel so constrained.”

  She nodded in agreement and bent down to remove her own shoes—new white tennis shoes her mother had bought for this trip, dismissing her petition for flip-flops as an unrefined fad. As she unlaced them, she could somehow sense how intensely he was looking at her. In response, she sported a furtive pose as she slowly peeled off her socks.

  “You have incredibly dainty feet,” he said, and when she had straightened up, he placed a hand on her shoulder. “Do you know how attractive you are?” he said. He leaned into her, his eyes like the green parchment of cats’ eyes. “Don’t,” she said as the lightness she had only just experienced transformed into a heaviness that rooted her to the ground.

  They were alone in a shadowy corner of the dunes between hotels, the water creeping nearer with the changing tide. The sand was cold and hard, unresponsive under her feet, so different from how it presented itself during the daytime.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t recall what had happened that night under the fireworks, it was just that she had preferred to remember it as having happened to somebody else. Some girl from her school or even a friend of her sister’s. Or it might not have happened to anyone. Maybe it was a cautionary tale she’d heard, a story of a foolish girl playing grown-up.

  Dragging Jonathan out of Central Park, she cut through the long line of carriage horses. Despite the blinders, their eyes of polished mahogany followed her, bulging, the whites streaked with vessels.

  The devil had gotten inside her that night in Cádiz, she decided with surprising aplomb, and somehow he was working his way into her home, like the cockroaches, through some imperceptible gap. He’d found the opening, and soon he would get in.

  She had not slept well. She’d endured a series of dreams in which she borrowed other women’s reflections from mirrors and stole into their homes and lives, desperate to keep up the pace of their marriages and social standings. At one point she had gotten up to go to the bathroom and realized, with crushing disappointment and pained bladder, that she had dreamed the trip and would have to make the effort all over again.

  And so the following day, when Mrs. March came to find herself standing, coat and hat on, in the foyer, she did not know whether she was about to leave or whether she had just returned. She heard Martha behind her in the belly of the apartment, moving furniture and opening windows. She attempted to construct a rough timeline of her day so far—breakfast, a shower, a conversation with Martha about beef carpaccio, all fragments—but there were too many blanks. She looked into the gilded mirror next to the coat closet. Her reflection stared back, frightened. Jazz music danced through the wall from the neighbors’—the tinkling of a piano and a cocky, elaborate saxophone. On a whim, she decided she had been about to leave, and she stepped out of the apartment.

  The day was strangely lit, like a movie set under simulated daylight, and Mrs. March briefly feared that at any moment the scenery would move and reveal itself as flat cardboard.

  She walked to the grocery store on autopilot and stepped through its automatic doors in a daze. Inside, weekly sales offered themselves loudly on star-shaped neon signs, while staff were summoned through the crackling loudspeakers and the dead fish stared at her, mouths agape, in their beds of ice. Mrs. March strolled through the cereal aisle as if she were sightseeing along the Champs-Élysées. It had always seemed to her the most curious of aisles, with all the garish colors on the otherwise uniform boxes, the cartoons threatening to leap out at you, screaming for you to choose them.

  She turned into an adjacent aisle and stopped short in front of
a woman. Her back was turned to Mrs. March but there was something familiar about the woman’s fur coat, the ample shoulders slightly hunched beneath it, arms bent and elbows out, as if the woman was wringing her hands. A sharp tap on her shoulder made her jump, and she spun around to face one of her neighbors, but she could not—for the life of her—remember her name.

  “How’ve you been, dear? How’s George? We haven’t talked in ages!” the woman said in rapid succession, no room for a reply of any kind. “I think the last time I saw you was at Milly Greenberg’s party … no, I don’t think you went to that. But anyway speaking of the Greenbergs, I don’t know if you’ve heard …”

  Mrs. March knew the Greenbergs only superficially, but as the woman proceeded to gossip, she learned that Milly Greenberg was in the midst of a shameful divorce because her husband had cheated on her (deservedly, apparently, seeing as she’d cheated on her ex-husband with her current one while he was married to his first wife). The woman—whatever her name was—gesticulated wildly as she spoke, and Mrs. March caught glimpses of her arm hair, black and thick, sprouting from under her sleeves and onto her wrists, where some of it caught on her wristwatch. This was the neighbor, she now recalled, who thrust apples at crestfallen trick-or-treaters under the pretense of preserving their dental health. The kind of neighbor who reported neighbors’ dogs for aggression solely based on their size.

  “And so that’s what’s happening, if you can believe it.”

  “But they always seemed so happy together,” said Mrs. March.

  “Oh, don’t be so naive,” snapped the woman. “I know plenty of couples who seem like they’re so in love, but they’re all lying, all of them. Now I knew Anne, or at least I thought I did, and it hurts me deeply that she wouldn’t confide in me about her troubles.”

  “Perhaps she wanted to but couldn’t.”

  “Nonsense. I told her all my troubles, about my mother-in-law’s operation—a ghastly affair—and about how I get the blues on Tuesdays because my father used to drink on Tuesdays and spit on us.”

  “Goodness.”

  “Right? Serious stuff. I bared my soul to that woman. And what did she give me in return?”

  There was a pause during which Mrs. March wondered, alarmed, whether it wasn’t in fact meant as a rhetorical question. But then the woman tutted and, thankfully, continued—“And now Anne has had to move to a much smaller apartment, and she’s really depressed and talks to nobody, apparently. Well, if you push people out, people will stay out, you know. That’s what my sister always says.”

  “How can Anne afford her new apartment?” asked Mrs. March, prompted by a genuine curiosity. “I thought she didn’t work?”

  “Oh, she’s had to find a job all right. She’s working part time at a lawyer’s office. Apparently her husband had the decency to set her up with a job there.”

  “How nice of him,” offered Mrs. March.

  “Oh no. Everyone there knows, you see, about her husband’s affair. In fact, you wait and see if his mistress isn’t working at that very office.”

  “Oh dear. I should hope not.”

  “I don’t think Anne will know how to recover from this. She could have been a great artist, you know, she is quite the painter. But she gave everything up. For him.”

  Mrs. March now wondered if she, too, could have been something. Something other than a wife and mother. She pictured herself alone in a sad, dank apartment, heading to a dreary office in the mornings, not buying her olive bread for anyone. Not knowing, really, where to go, what to do, who to be. “Poor Anne,” she said.

  “Hmph. You never know. You spend your life pitying people, and it turns out they don’t deserve your pity. Some of them are as ungrateful as they come. My sister knows this woman, about Anne’s age, who was doing very well at her advertising job. Well paid, all the perks. Anyway she decided to quit her job to pursue an acting career. Imagine that, at her age!”

  “Did it work out for her?”

  “As if!” She said this with relish, and Mrs. March, who herself had been hoping for a negative outcome to the story, savored a surge of delicious satisfaction. “What did she expect? And my sister heard rumors that she may have resorted to … you know.” The woman’s eyes widened and she leaned into Mrs. March conspiratorially. She smelled like steak and Shalimar.

  “She’s been seen with much older men,” the woman said, sotto voce. “Wealthy old men, one after the other. Listen, I don’t like to gossip, but I doubt she’s finding love with any of these men, is all I’m going to say.” She pulled back and paused. “So, your George’s book,” she said, looking at Mrs. March for the first time with any real attention after talking in her general direction for several minutes.

  “Yes?” Mrs. March was so unprepared for the intensity of the woman’s focus, thrown upon her so unexpectedly, that she almost lost her balance.

  “You know, it’s funny,” said the woman. “I left my copy right here in my cart the other day while I went to get some more sausages—Dean does love his pork—and can you believe it, somebody stole the book. Right from the cart!”

  “My goodness!” Mrs. March shook her head somberly.

  “I know! The book is certainly in demand, but for people to actually go around stealing it—”

  “I’ll speak with George and get you another copy—”

  “I already bought another copy. I read it so quickly I’m almost finished.” The woman’s eyes narrowed, her brows furrowed, as if she were weighing what next to say. “It’s a … it’s quite a special book, isn’t it.”

  “Yes.”

  The woman stared at Mrs. March in silence, while Mrs. March’s skin itched in anticipation of the dreaded question. Given the insulting nature of the inquiry, and that the woman was a neighbor, it was safe to assume she wouldn’t risk it. It would be like congratulating a woman who wasn’t actually pregnant. Mrs. March stared back, smiling weakly.

  “Well, I won’t keep you any longer,” the woman said at once. “I’m sure you’re busy. Aren’t we all, though? I’ll be sure to congratulate George if I see him around.”

  “Thank you. I’ll tell him you liked it,” said Mrs. March.

  Mrs. March walked out of the store without buying anything and braced herself against the wind on her way home, pulling her coat collar over her face as she walked past a square brick building overlooking the park with LOVE THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF engraved into the limestone over the entrance.

  IN THE ELEVATOR, she pressed the button for her floor. The doors closed and—slowly, almost dreamily—she pressed all the other buttons in one measured swoop of her hand. The panel lit up like a Christmas tree.

  A special book, the woman had said. It was quite special for an author to degrade his wife so publicly, she supposed. To expose her innermost secrets like a greedy Asmodeus ripping off roofs. She fisted her hands so tightly her knuckles protruded like molars. He should be punished for it. Taken into custody for Sylvia Gibbler’s murder, for starters. That would whip the smug smile right off his face.

  Inside 606, George sat by himself in the living room, reading a newspaper. An opera aria—Puccini—bellowed on the turntable.

  Mrs. March frowned at him from the doorway. “How are lamb chops for dinner,” she said.

  “Just fine,” he replied.

  She lingered a few more seconds before walking off to the bedroom, where she removed her heavy earrings and paced, arms crossed, eyeing the telephone on George’s nightstand. She picked up the receiver, dialed 911. Before it could ring she hung up. Ridiculous, she thought. I have nothing to go on. What would I say, that I found a newspaper clipping in his notebook? She picked up the receiver again, looping a finger from her free hand around the plastic cord, and debated over whether to dial.

  She was still holding the receiver to her ear, oblivious to the confused beeping of the line, when the floorboards creaked behind her. She turned to find George at the door and suppressed a scream.

  “Have you by any chance s
een my gloves?” he said. “I’ll need them for my trip to London.”

  “London?”

  “Yes. Remember? There’s a charity event with several other authors, and a really important television interview? It’ll just be a few days.” His tone was flat, rehearsed.

  “Oh. That’s right.” She didn’t really remember them discussing anything about it, but thought it more astute to play along.

  “Who are you calling?” asked George.

  She gave him a puzzled look, then realized that she was still holding the phone to her ear. “Nobody,” she said.

  He looked at her curiously, half smiling. “All right then.”

  “I’m trying to reach my sister, but she’s not picking up.” She returned the receiver to the cradle so clumsily and with such force that the bell rang. George continued to stare at her and, feeling the need to do something with her hands, she began folding the clothes she had tossed onto the armchair when she had entered—scarf, mint green gloves, heavy sweater—and stacked them in an orderly pile.

  “You’ll be all right here all on your own?” asked George, watching her fuss with the clothes.

  “Well, it’s not like I haven’t done it before.”

  “I know, I know. I’d ask you to come with me, but I’d feel better if someone was home with Jonathan, now that he’s going back to school. Don’t you agree?”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. March. “I wouldn’t feel right about it either.”

  Mrs. March pictured how she would spend the next few days with Jonathan back in school. Visiting museums alone, eating lunch in silence in the empty dining room. But wasn’t that what she always did, she reminded herself.

  “Besides,” said George, “I wouldn’t want to put you through such an exhausting trip. You’d barely have time to get over your jet lag before we’d have to fly back.”