Mrs March

by Virginia Feito

  Mrs. March went straight to her medicine chest to fetch one of the herbal pills to calm her nerves, and, pacing in the foyer, fearing it was not working at all, took an entire chalky fistful before leaving for the dentist.

  “Hello, I have an appointment, under ‘March.’”

  Mrs. March swayed slightly as she clutched the reception desk with her fingernails, her coat unbuttoned, her shirt untucked.

  “Oh yes! You’re George March’s wife,” said the blond receptionist brightly. “We do love your George. He’s a charmer, that one. I’ve always told him he could get away with murder!” She grinned, revealing a blindingly white set of veneers.

  Mrs. March cleared her throat. “May I see the dentist now?”

  The receptionist’s face fell. “Please have a seat in the waiting room. He’ll be with you shortly.”

  Mrs. March slumped into one of the chairs, and her fellow patients’ faces flashed her grim salutes. She waited and waited, looking up at the ceiling, then down at her shoes, then at other women’s shoes. A woman sitting in front of her smeared lipstick onto her lips while peering into her compact: such an intimate act that Mrs. March looked away.

  She checked her wristwatch and was disappointed to see that only eight minutes had passed since she’d sat down. She sighed and leaned over the glossy magazines fanned out on the table. She picked one at random and flipped through it halfheartedly until she came across George, staring at her from the lacquered pages. The headline read AN ODE TO UGLINESS, OR HOW GEORGE MARCH MADE UGLINESS BEAUTIFUL. A fawning article followed, extolling the refreshing complexity of the novel’s main character Johanna, “not intelligent enough to be evil, not chic enough to distract from her many physical flaws, but deliciously abhorrent in a hundred nasty little ways.” Upon reading “the reader is drawn in immediately, a gleeful, almost active participant in her downfall,” Mrs. March snapped the magazine shut and threw it back on the table, then hid it under the other publications. Closing the neck of her shirt as if she had been ogled by a stranger, she stood up and approached the receptionist’s desk.

  “Excuse me. Will it take long? I’m very nervous.” Her words came out a little slurred, but the receptionist didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’m going to tell him you’re having a hard time, see if we can get you in a little earlier,” the receptionist said, and Mrs. March felt ever so sorry for herself, a hard lump like a moist teabag forming in her throat, tears prickling her eyes.

  “Would you care for some water, Mrs. March?”

  Seconds later Mrs. March returned to her seat holding a plastic cup of water. She looked into the cup to see her own eye reflected back at her. When she sighed, it came out in a distorted tremor, like a mirage invoked by a heat haze. She took out another pill from her pocket and gulped it down with the water.

  When her name was finally called, she was ushered out of the waiting room through a pair of swinging doors and into the room with the dental chair where she was to sit. Here everything was white—white walls, white machinery, and white leather dental chair. In a place that saw so much spit and blood and yellowed enamel, it was suspicious, almost, how white everything was.

  The dentist appeared—overly tan, with grayish blond hair and immaculate fingernails—and asked her to open her mouth. She did so obediently and he peered into it, holding her chin to steer her face with authority.

  “Now, Mrs. March, we’ve ignored this problem for too long, haven’t we.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. March as best she could through an open mouth. The dentist let go of her chin and she added, “I’m sorry, Doctor. I should have had it looked at sooner, but dentist visits make me quite nervous.”

  “I heard all about your nerves today,” he replied, getting up and reaching for his rubber gloves, “but don’t you worry. This won’t hurt a bit. It could hurt, mind you, but we won’t let it. There’s absolutely no reason for you to suffer if we can avoid it. That’s what medicine is for. We’re here to help you, Mrs. March, not hurt you. Nurse. Root canal.”

  Mrs. March began to cry quietly as the nurse tied a paper apron around her neck and the dentist readied his tools. “This won’t hurt a bit,” he repeated, and the nurse pulled the rubber mask onto her face, and for a wild second she thought this was all a trap, that George had set it up to make her death look like an accident. This was her last thought before she lost consciousness—Ariadne losing her ball of thread, and herself.

  THE PILLS she had taken must have reacted with whatever the dentist had given her, for she was terribly dizzy and disoriented on her way out of the white room, and even more so when she stepped outside into the cold, veering senselessly across the curb. Her head felt full, as if the dentist had drilled a hole in it and then filled it up with cotton. The freezing wind whipped at her face and hair. Spring hadn’t arrived after all; it had lied to her, to them all.

  She was clutching her coat closed with one hand and her hair with the other, weaving down the side of the street in search of a cab amidst the oncoming traffic, when she heard a man say, in a cool dispassionate voice, and as clear as if he were right next to her: “She walked down the street.”

  She spun around, almost losing her balance, but she could not locate the source of the voice. He spoke again, in a plummy English accent: “She walked further down the street.” Then, as she turned around, “She turned around.” She tottered in another attempt to look around her, her loafered feet stepping over themselves.

  She hailed a cab as the mysterious narrator described her very action, and—with the slam of the car door—found immediate solace in the silence of the backseat. She looked out the window at the pedestrians, searching for a clue—anything—about what was happening. Her eyeballs vibrated as the cab sped past blurs that were people—or were they people that were blurs? She touched her swollen cheek with a cold hand, which soothed her. From the backseat she glanced at herself in the rearview mirror to see someone else—another woman sitting in the back of the cab—and she thought there’d been a terrible mistake, for if another woman was in her cab, it stood to reason she must be in the other woman’s. Upon further inspection, however, she realized that the woman was indeed Mrs. March, only she was smiling quite aggressively, and when Mrs. March clamped her lips shut, her reflection did not follow suit. She looked out of the passenger window for the remainder of the trip home.

  Once she paid the driver, she stood on the sidewalk, looking up at not one, but two apartment buildings in front of her, wondering which one she lived in. When she finally made up her mind, it was with the buoyancy that often comes with clarity, and she skipped into the building on the left, cheerfully greeting the uniformed doorman.

  In the mirrored elevator, her multiple reflections refused to meet her eye, turning their faces away at her every attempt.

  The elevator doors opened onto the sixth floor, but it took her some time to exit, for she wanted to determine which of the women in the mirrors was her; when she lifted a hand to her face in an attempt to find herself, all the other women thwarted her by following suit.

  In the hallway she turned right, checked the numbers on the doors, but the numerals were absurd, as if they had been made up by children. She stood facing what she hoped was 606 and turned the doorknob.

  The apartment on the other side of the door throbbed in time with the pulse behind her eyes. As she rubbed her knuckles into the sockets, she heard the sounds of labored breathing, as if someone were in pain. She followed the groans to their source in the living room, shuffling unsteadily. She attempted to brace her hand along the wall for support, but every time she did so it moved further away from her.

  When she reached the living room, the daylight blinded her despite the half-drawn curtains. The sound was louder, more urgent. Once her eyes adjusted, she saw George on top of Sylvia, his hands on her neck, on her naked body. Mrs. March screamed and George and Sylvia both turned to her. Sylvia gasped, gulping for air, and George gasped in turn, then said, “Oh damn it, honey,
you weren’t supposed to see this.”

  Before Mrs. March could respond, she felt herself falling from a great height. Her landing was surprisingly soft, and she looked up at the ceiling and wondered how she could replicate Sheila’s modern cove lighting, although really, what was wrong with lamps, she thought. “Really, what’s wrong with lamps?” she asked George, who was yanking up his pleated trousers as Sylvia lay there, unmoving, her dark hair spilling over her breasts.

  Oh damn it indeed.

  In this strange Labyrinth how shall I turne?

  Wayes are on all sids while the way I misse

  —Mary Wroth,

  “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love”

  Mrs. March awoke in her bedroom. Though the heavy curtains were drawn, she sensed it was now evening. George sat on his edge of the bed, holding his head in his hands. The room was dimly lit and he sat in shadow, and she doubted, at first, that he was there at all. She slowly lifted the bedsheets and found that she was still in her day clothes. The rips in her flesh-colored pantyhose looked like scarred lacerations across her legs.

  Her movements alerted George, who turned his head. When he saw that she was awake, he stood up and walked to her side of the bed, as she pushed herself up to lean against the headboard.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  A sudden anger at George flared within her, but she wasn’t sure why. She untangled herself from the bedsheets and stood up, teetering a little.

  “Honey?” said George.

  She walked to the bathroom and turned on the light. In the mirror she could see that her jaw was only slightly puffy. Nothing that a bit of ice couldn’t help, she told herself, and just in time for the party tomorrow. The rest of her face, however, was a blow: the skin on her chin was flaking off; her powder had faded, revealing several blemishes; rivers of black mascara streaked her cheeks.

  “Honey?” George called from the bedroom. She peered out at him through the doorway. He stood at the foot of the bed, hands in his pockets. “I think we need to talk. About what happened today. About what you saw. About everything, really.”

  She already had begun to retouch her face, wiping at the mascara with a moist cotton ball, then covering a pimple scar with an ample slathering of foundation.

  “Listen,” George insisted, “you were completely out of it when you got home, so I’m not sure what you saw, or what you think you saw, but the truth is, I’ve been having an affair.”

  She stopped in mid-dab, powder puff halfway to her face. As if in solidarity, her heart, too, felt like it had stopped beating to listen to George’s words. She felt George’s gaze on her, but she did not turn her head to look at him.

  “I’ve been seeing someone for a while now,” George said. “And you caught me—us, I mean—this afternoon, and I’m terribly sorry that you had to find out this way. I thought you’d be back later, I …” He shook his head. “Or, I don’t know, maybe I wanted you to find out. The subconscious mind is a funny thing, isn’t it?”

  Mrs. March lowered the powder puff to the sink.

  “I’m so sorry, honey. I really am. At first I brushed the whole thing off as a fling, a physical thing, a midlife crisis if you will. But I’m afraid I … I have developed real feelings for this woman.”

  “Gabriella?” she said, tentatively. Her voice came out low, gravelly, so different from its soft timbre that she glanced at the mirror to check that it was really her.

  “No, it’s not Gabriella,” said George. “She’s a woman who works for Zelda at the agency. She’s been interning for a while—”

  “A temp?” Mrs. March said, in more of a screech this time, throwing her compact to the floor and stepping into the bedroom. “You mean to tell me that you’re having an affair with a temp?”

  At her exaggerated pronunciation of the word, a fleck of spittle landed on George’s face. The fact that he seemed almost relieved by her visceral reaction angered her even more. She wished she could return to her elegant apathy, to retouching her makeup without an ounce of feeling, without an ounce of weakness, emulating her mother’s graceful insouciance, which she had never seen break. But she couldn’t rebuild the wall, which only enraged her further.

  “I’m sorry,” said George. “I really am. I’ve been so unfair to you. But …” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose, “we’re in love.”

  Mrs. March pressed her hands, curled into fists, to her temples, and squatted, fearing that she was going to be sick. What came out of her instead was a rumbling, guttural moaning. “No, no, no, no, no … you SWINE!” she said. Then, worried the neighbors could hear, she said, more quietly, “You swine.”

  “I know, I know, it’s unjustifiable, so I’m not going to even try to justify it, but I am going to say that in the last few years you have been distant and I have tried—”

  Here she stopped listening, while her mind revised all the instances where George might have been cheating, rather than killing women. Was it possible? Could it be? Surely this was just an excuse—a perfectly plausible one—to cover up what he had done.

  “Those times I told you I was with Edgar at his cabin and instead I was—”

  “What?” she hissed, her sore gums throbbing. “Like when?”

  “A few times. Like before Christmas, when I came back empty-handed … the truth is I was right here in New York, at the Plaza—with Jennifer.” Mrs. March shuddered at the name. “I’m not proud of it, you know, wasn’t proud of it then, either. That’s why I came back early. I wanted to tell you then. I almost did.”

  It was all beginning to make terrible, screaming sense. George’s stained shirt—lipstick, not blood. George’s odd looks—conflicted, not threatening.

  “But you said,” said Mrs. March, pointing her finger at his stupid face, his stupid tortoiseshell glasses, “you said the police asked you about that girl who’d disappeared. You said there were flyers all over the place. You said the police were there and asked you about her. About Sylvia.”

  George shook his head, his eyes moist. “I don’t even know what I said. I wanted to admit it all, right there in the hallway. But I didn’t because, well … because the funny thing is, you seemed to know I was lying, and it got to the point where I almost felt like you would rather I lie to you than go through a scandal. I know how important appearances are to you. But I’m tired of pretending. Aren’t you?”

  She gasped at this, her heart hammering so hard that she pressed a hand against her chest for fear it would burst through her ribs.

  “I didn’t know what we were playing at anymore. It didn’t seem honest,” he continued.

  “But, but …” Mrs. March pulled at her hair with both hands, squeezed her skull in her fists. “What about the newspaper clipping?” she said. “You had an article … in your study. About Sylvia Gibbler.”

  “That was research for my next book,” said George. Then, as if remembering something, he asked, “Did you take that from my study?”

  “Oh, stop pretending, George. Stop pretending.” She laughed. “You knew Sylvia. You signed her books for her. She had signed copies of your books, George!”

  “What? But how would you …?” His frown faded. “What did you do?”

  Mrs. March thought fleetingly of the night-shift doorman and how kind he’d been to her, and how he had to have known about George’s mistress, had witnessed George kissing her as the elevator doors closed or placing his hand up her skirt as she climbed into a cab. How he must pity her! She paced in circles, distracted by this acute embarrassment. What would become of her now? Mrs. March pictured herself coming home to an empty apartment. Would she manage to keep this one? Or would she have to move? Would she have to raise Jonathan alone? Though he’d surely choose his father, as would their entire circle, most of whom were George’s friends to begin with. She could see herself at the supermarket, avoiding everyone—or everyone avoiding her—and she almost split open right there and then on her bedroom floor.

  But there was still a chan
ce, she told herself, that he was guilty of the greater crime. He had hidden the newspaper clipping in his notebook—Jonathan could attest to that—and the signed books were on display in Sylvia’s room—Amy Bryant could confirm. Then there was the proximity of Edgar’s cabin to the body. It was all too much of a coincidence not to be investigated. She could take this information to the police. She could destroy him, even if he wasn’t convicted. “I know you killed that girl, George!” she growled, shaking a finger in his face.

  George raised his eyebrows in surprise. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said, his lowered voice trembling slightly. “You’re scaring me.”

  “You killed that poor defenseless—”

  “Listen, I know I’ve hurt you, but I want to help you. For your own sake, for Jonathan’s sake—”

  He raised a hand to touch her, but she leaned back out of reach. “You are not going to end me,” she spat, her jaw jutting forward, her lower teeth bared. She pushed him and ran to her side of the bed, contemplating throwing herself through the window. George put his hand on her shoulder. She screamed. He tried to reason with her. She pushed him again, looking for an exit—any exit—as she tugged at the curtains, considering strangling herself with them.

  “This doesn’t have to be the end of the world,” George said, over the keening moan pouring from her throat. “It can be a new beginning. We weren’t happy. We deserve to be happy. We can have it all. Just not with each other.”

  She shoved and shoved him, clawing at his face, swatting off his glasses. When he bent down to retrieve them, she pushed him again. He fell to the floor. She slapped at the walls, wailing, and as he picked himself up and made his way to her, arms outstretched, cheeks bleeding, her ears began to ring. George started talking but he was on mute now—all she could hear was her own paused breathing, loud and enveloping.