“Your parents are pastors,” I’d said. “What makes you think abortion crossed their minds?”
“It didn’t. Just if I’d been given to another family maybe they would have.”
True.
She felt lucky to be alive, it was a quality we all needed. I told her that a missing appendage didn’t diminish her worth, and something lit up in her eyes. Our affair started once Macey grew comfortable enough with me to ditch the sweaters. She started coming to her sessions in low-cut tops and sheer blouses through which I could see the outline of her dark nipples. Then one day while wearing a skirt, she sat in the chair opposite me, spreading her legs so that I could see her pink panties, and asked me to meet her at a hotel nearby. I’d grown so hard it had been painful. I had thought Macey and I were on the same page: we met, she fucked like a contortionist, we texted pictures in our time apart—wet fingers pushing, a hard dick in my hand—we had fun. I’d not thought about the fact that she had one hand. Her pussy was tight, and she moaned like a whore while I pounded into her. And then she ruined our fun because she wanted more than fucking. I’d never mentioned more. What was more anyway? A relationship? A child? Nights at home watching our favorite shows on television? I had more. I wanted the extra. I should have known better, a woman who lived her life feeling inferior and broken found a man who she thought was able to look past her deformity and desire her sexually. When that man rejected her it was like waking up every insecurity she owned and forcing her to consider the fact that she was indeed too ugly, too broken, too deformed to love. My bad, all right. When I told Macey we couldn’t see each other anymore, she hung up on me. The rest of her threats came through text. I’d canceled my appointments, sent my secretary home, and paced around the office trying to decide what to do. A dead fish was floating in the fish tank, belly up. It felt like a bad omen. I scooped it out and flushed it before anyone could see.
I’d considered blackmail. Macey was the daughter of a prominent pastor, how would it look if it got out that she was fucking a married father? But, before I could throw the gauntlet, she had, filing a malpractice suit against me. I was playing with someone who valued revenge over her own reputation. All the papers had been sent to the office and Jolene had yet to find out. But, it was just a matter of time, wasn’t it? It felt like my life here was almost over. Tick tock. I thought about Mercy, how much I loved her even though she wasn’t mine. I’d been willing to raise her as my own, and I was certain that was what made Jolene fall in love with me. I had been there for her birth, her birthdays, and every moment of her tiny little life. I’d named her Mercy because that’s what it felt like being with Jolene; I had something I didn’t deserve, but oh god—I loved them both so much.
I locked up the office and set the alarm then instead of going home, I walked across the parking lot to the coffee shop. Fig was there, her laptop open in front of her, an untouched apple fritter at her elbow. She smiled when she saw me and cleared a place for me to sit.
“Hey, Dr. Suess.” She smirked. “Fix a bunch of people today?”
“People can’t be fixed, silly rabbit.” I pulled the pastry toward me and pulled off a corner. To most of my circle I was gluten intolerant, but today I was on edge. What the fuck did the shits matter when your wife was about to find out you had failed to keep the vows?
Fig was staring at me. I cleared my throat. “It’s good,” I said, motioning to the apple fritter.
“What’s wrong with you? You’re acting like me,” she said.
I licked the sugar from my thumb as I stared at her. Proof that the nutter had some self-awareness. Her abandonment of social graces and her acute perception of moods was my favorite thing about her. She’d call you crazy while being fucking crazy. It was kind of hot. My least favorite thing—her Looney Tune eyes. God, they gave me the creeps. You could almost picture fucking her until you got to the eyes. They were like those of the women I’d seen in the psych ward during my internship. Just put a bag over her head, my buddy Mike would have said.
“Just a strange day,” I said. “Ever feel like you belong and don’t belong at the same time?”
“Absolutely.” She nodded. “Like every day since I was born.” She laughed.
“We’re just two misfits, aren’t we, Fig?” I could tell she liked that. She’d probably go home and repeat it to herself. Buy me a Christmas present and engrave the word on it.
“Yup,” she dragged out the middle of the word, looking resigned. “Are you going to eat that?” She pointed not to the pastry, but to a straw wrapper. Not many people knew about my Pica. I ate things: threads from sofa cushions, the little plastic things that attached price tags to clothes, Band-Aids, the soft plastic rings around the lids on two-gallon milk jugs. My personal favorite: toothpicks. I could eat a box of those fuckers for dessert.
I picked up the straw wrapper, balling it up. For her amusement, I popped it into my mouth and chewed. She shook her head, smiling.
“So fucking weird.”
I launched into a story about how I ate my parents’ couch when I was sixteen. It took me a whole year, but the thing was threadbare by the time I was done. I told her because she liked to hear my stories. For all my shit talking, I liked Fig. She made me feel less fucked up, because let’s face it, it was hard to reach the level of fucked up that was Fig Coxbury. After all, I’d never stalked anyone. That shit was messed up.
My wife was a fool. It sounded harsh, but it was the thing I liked most about her. She married me, yeah? That was probably stupid. Old Sinatra had it right when he sang, Pity me, I need you. I know it’s wrong, it must be wrong. But right or wrong, I can’t get along without you.
Jolene didn’t make friends as much as she took friends. They arrived; she opened her arms and smiled. She was like the happy drunk you met in a club. Senseless, full of love and goodwill. There was no alcohol diluting the cynicism that was in the rest of us, she just genuinely loved. So bizarre. I could barely stand myself, never mind a stranger. She once told me that if she weren’t drunk on life, she’d see people for who they really were and go into hiding. That was true. She was all stars in the eyes, seeing people’s potential. All. The. Fucking. Time. So stupid. She had no idea what piranhas people were. She had no idea who I was. Not the me I gave her, the other me. The one I compartmentalized. I was my best with her. The guy that fucked vulnerable, semi-broken women was a separate entity entirely. She didn’t know him, but she’d certainly heard of him from my exes.
Her last venture was Fig Coxbury, and also mine. I wished she’d been absent from class that day. Fig was five layers of rotten fruit underneath a smooth, candy exterior. Jolene was too saturated with love to see the rot. I liked the rot. You had to laugh. It’s all you could do.
Figgy Pudding was a fixture in our house. I was fat with anticipation of what would come of all of it. As Jolene always said, you couldn’t put three crazy people into a story and not have their worlds teeter-totter. For right now, she was an obnoxious knick-knack in my home. You could move her from room to room, but she was always there staring at you. Sometimes when I came home, she’d be sitting on the kitchen counter, swinging her legs, whipping quips around the room faster than Jolene’s KitchenAid mixer. Other times, she’d be leaving just as I walked in, either brushing past me with aggression or stopping to chat. Highs and lows, lows and highs. I’d argue it out with my wife. Fig’s mental instability was most prevalent on social media. It was shocking if you paused to look.
“You post a black and white photo, she posts a black and white photo,” I said. “You tie a bandana around your wrist, she ties a bandana around her wrist.”
Jolene was already starting to laugh and I hadn’t even mentioned that out of the five restaurants we’d visited this month, Fig had gone to four of them—less than twenty-four hours after we’d been there. I was even getting a little creeped out, and I dealt with people like this on a regular basis. Scratch that, I dealt with complacent loonies, bored loonies. I’d not had a legit, stalke
r looney on my couch in a long time. Those people never knew they needed help.
“Come on,” she said. “I could go to anyone’s Instagram and there’d be similar pictures on their feed.”
I shrugged. You couldn’t force someone to see something. “Maybe so,” I said. “But they wouldn’t have your bandana—like the exact one you have, in the exact placement.”
Jolene’s face puckered as she thought. “I have good taste, yo.”
Sometimes I wondered if she took anything seriously, or if life was one big experiment for her.
I knew Fig. I’d been watching her watch us for months now. When you’re a shrink you’re in the habit of diagnosing people as soon as they made eye contact with you. Except Fig rarely made eye contact. She was funny. It was a defense mechanism, but still effective. I mentioned how funny she was to Jolene once and she raised an eyebrow at me.
“When? She never says anything funny to me,” she said.
That’s when I knew for sure that Fig gave different things to different people. For me, she was levity and nostalgia, listening to the stories Jolene told me to shut up about, tossing my humor right back at me. To my wife, she was a sounding board, especially about that fucker, Ryan. Ryan went to college with my wife and had recently reemerged in her social circles, reaching out more than an acquaintance would. I didn’t know how Fig caught wind of him, but she asked Jolene about him every day, wanting to know if he’d texted and what about. She pushed Jolene to talk about his looks, his personality, their background. I watched it all on Jolene’s iPad, which was synced to her cell. I’d bought it for her one Christmas, and the novelty had lasted about a week before it got lost underneath a pile of papers on her desk. She preferred to read real books and everything else she did on her phone or laptop. Lucky me. I got to sit in the front row as my wife texted our neighbor about the boy she wished she’d been interested in over a decade ago. A decade before me. I mostly caught up on their texting on my lunch break. I’d sit at my desk and eat the yogurt Jolene sent, as I scrolled through their texts, Fig’s and Jolene’s, that is. Not Jolene’s and Ryan’s—their texts were boring. He was blandly a gentleman.
Fig: Look at his lips. Great kisser!
Jolene: Could be sloppy.
Fig: Oh my god, just admit it. He’s hot.
I dropped yogurt on my phone and couldn’t see Jolene’s response, but it was already time for my next client.
Moving along…
“So, you’re acknowledging it?”
“No,” she hissed. “I’m not acknowledging anything.” She shot me a look that told me to shut up, so I did. I’d let her see for herself. It was right there lurking along West Barrett Street. I thought about all the Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers’ movies I’d watched. The crazies on your street always had talons and scary faces. West Barrett’s crazy had a manicure and all of my wife’s clothes.
We were standing at the window in the living room, the one that overlooked our strange neighbor’s house. It was cold outside, the window icy to the touch. We’d been having an argument about Fig five minutes earlier at the dinner table. Too many glasses of wine, and I was on edge with the whole lawsuit thing. Jolene was insisting that Fig was misunderstood. I was insisting that Fig was bat shit crazy. I don’t know why it was so important for me to show her what a fake Fig was, but I’d set my glass of wine down and calmly asked her to log her Fitbit steps.
A few weeks ago, in order to get in shape for the summer, a few of us had jumped on the Fitbit train. Jo and me, Amanda and Hollis, Gail and Luke, and, of course, Fig. We competed in challenges together, logging our steps into our phones at night before bed. That way we could see who was ahead and well … take more steps. At the end of the week the person with the most steps would be announced. We’d all congratulate the winner, some of us more begrudgingly than others, and try harder to win. It was working—I’d lost five pounds since I put the thing on my arm.
Jolene, a perpetually busy person who never sat down unless it was to write, was shaming the rest of us, doubling our steps before we’d even had our lunch. Her only competitor was Fig, who’d dropped thirty pounds since we’d met her. It was during the first challenge I noticed that every time Jolene logged her steps in the app, Fig would log hers seconds after. Like she was checking to see how far off she was. If Jolene was up in steps, the light in Fig’s spare bedroom would turn on and she’d hop on the treadmill until she had a lead. If she fell behind Jolene in steps later that day, she’d go for a run around the neighborhood, grim determination on her already pinched face. I saw her go on four separate runs in one day, all to beat Jolene. It became my private amusement. Everyone knew women were competitive, but Fig took it to an admirably psychotic level. Not that I blamed her. Jolene’s lack of competitiveness was infuriating. While everyone was trying so hard to win, she was barely putting in any effort. It was me who informed her when she won the weekly challenges, and instead of gloating or fist pumping, she threw out a detached “Cool” and went about her business.
Surprisingly, after downing the rest of her wine, she’d complied without asking any questions.
“Now go in the group chat and tell everyone you’re going to bed.”
She did.
I’d dragged her to the window, her cold fingers intertwined with mine, the Malbec we’d been drinking on her breath.
I held the shades open with two fingers, as she leaned forward, peering out with concentration. I could smell her, the rose perfume she wore and her skin. When I smelled her skin I got hard, it had been like that since the day we met. I kept shooting sideways glances her way to monitor her expression. She’d see it. In a second she’d see it. Then I’d be right.
“There,” I said. “Ha! I told you!” I let go and clapped my hands.
Her lips folded in and she blinked, disbelieving. Then, with a sigh, she leaned forward again and peeked through the blinds. I was excited. I didn’t care what I was right about, it felt good even if it was about something as sick as this.
We watched quietly as Fig stepped out of her front door, her running shoes on, her short hair pinned away from her face. She leaned down for a moment to double knot her laces then straightened, stretching her arms above her head in a stretch. She glanced toward the house. Jolene squealed, and we both ducked, sliding down the wall, and collapsing on the carpet in fits of laughter. Jo’s eyes were bright and happy when she looked at me. We just shared a moment, and as I stared at her I thought, I’ve never loved anything so much. I smiled and grabbed her fingers, pressing my lips against them. She stared down at our clasped hands, her brow furrowed.
“So, you’re saying that ever since we started doing these fucking Fitbit challenges she’s bent on beating me? Me—not Amanda, or Gail, or you?”
“Well, yes, sort of. She likes to win, but you’re the most important person to beat. She’s obsessed with trying to one-up you. I mean she’s obsessed with you in general, but one-upping her obsession is definitely priority.”
“That’s so fucking weird.” She looked away, and I could tell how uncomfortable it made her. Jolene wasn’t in a competition with anyone but herself. That was the annoying thing about confident people: they didn’t play your games.
She turned back to the window. There was nothing out there now but the rain.
“How often does she do this when I’m ahead in steps?” she asked.
“She waits until you log your steps, which is usually pretty late—around nine or so. Then she either jumps on the treadmill or goes for a run. Every time.”
“But, I still beat her.”
“Yeah, that’s the funny thing.”
As soon as Fig disappeared from view, Jolene left the room. “Where are you going?” I called after her.
“Are you kidding me? I’m going to whip her ass.”
A minute later I heard the treadmill power on, and Jolene’s feet beating down in a steady rhythm. I smiled to myself. Life was a game. It was fun when you were an active player.
“Please don’t ask her to come over tomorrow,” I said.
We were in the bedroom. Jolene was brushing her hair in front of the mirror, her nightly ritual. I watched the brush travel from the crown of her head to the tips: stroke … stroke … stroke. Normally, I found it soothing to watch, but tonight it was setting me on edge. She’d run five miles on the treadmill, securing her win and probably sending Fig into a fury.
Fig often texted me to complain about Jolene. It was in a sort of lighthearted, playful way—one that wouldn’t upset a husband, but I felt her resentment cradled underneath the wit. I smoothed the sheets over my lap. I’d already taken off my boxers, hopeful, but all of a sudden, I didn’t feel like fucking.
“She’s in a really bad place,” Jolene said, setting the brush down and turning around to look at me. “I think she’s suicidal. She keeps posting pictures of railroad tracks.”
“She does that to manipulate you.” My dick was limp. I’d masturbated twice today to a picture Fig sent me. I guess I didn’t have the stamina I used to have.
Jolene didn’t argue or deny it. She set to tidying her dresser, ignoring me. That was the thing about her: she had your number, and even if you were crazy, she still made the effort to care. Welcome to being married to an enabler. I patted the space on the bed next to me and she came to sit down. Her robe slipped open and I had view of her long, tan legs. I felt my dick stir. Running a finger up and down the tattoos on her arm, I pleaded with her again.
“Every time you ask her over for dinner she stays until three in the morning.” I left out the part about how I was the one always left with Fig in the living room while she went to bed. Jolene didn’t like when I whined.
“She doesn’t understand boundaries.” I was referencing more than just her staying late. “Last time we had everyone over, Hollis asked me what time we go to bed every night and Fig answered for me.”
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