Ela's Performance: A Romantic Wife-Watching Novel

by Arnica Butler

“But...you're coming back here, right? To...for dinner?”

  She slung her violin over her shoulder and picked up a garment bag. “Nope,” she said. “Not enough time. Oh.” she said, reading what must have looked like disappointment on my face. “I'm sorry. We'll have fun tomorrow, I promise.”

  And she skittered out the door.

  T HE CONCERT

  A strange thing happened as I watched the concert. Almost as if my stomach was the first to see what I saw. It went cold, and the cold spread out through my gut and into my limbs as ice. But when the cold reached my groin it turned hot, and stabbed at me like a poker.

  And all the while my mind went slowly through my memory, like everything in my mind had been placed, instantaneously, into a Rolodex. As if I could flip through it, finding exactly what I needed. Exactly what I needed to build my case.

  When I build a case, I make note cards in my mind. I lay them out, as though on a bed. One color for each piece of damming evidence. One color for each counter-argument.

  I did this now, as I watched the feed for the concert on the music conservatory's website. As another ensemble played, I stared at the screen and built my case against Ela, piece by piece.

  And then, when her ensemble came on stage, I saw it all. I made a mental “card,” and then another, as I watched everything unfold before me. I squinted.

  How did it all connect?

  As the group filed on stage, my eyes brushed away everything else on the stage. The wild, curly hair of the conductor, a true shit I had met several times. The stands, the fat cellist. The loserly viola player, the empty chairs, all of it. Until there was only Ela, snaking across the stage, her violin in hand.

  And him.

  Now he appeared to be alone on the stage with Ela, because I had mentally brushed away everything else but the two of them. He was walking behind her. He towered over her, and his lips moved. Ela's mouth smiled. Her body turned ever-so slightly behind her, and she said something. The same infectious happiness managed to crack the man's stern face.

  A man with a clean-shaven head, hiding baldness.

  “...like Bruce Willis...” Ela's voice drifted up from the past.

  “not only was he a prof, he was a big, manly man...”

  “In fact, he was once in the Mossad.”

  My fingers were sweeping over my phone, with no guidance, to the web page with the program for the concert.

  My eyes were on the screen, though. I followed the two of them, the way they were talking quietly, but clearly, to each other.

  I dropped my eyes to scan the names, my eyes bouncing around, out of order, seeking first what I expected and then what I did not.

  John O'Connor. John.

  Graciela Pineiro-White. Ela.

  Kim Lee. Real. Go figure.

  Ian Villanova. Weird cellist. Fat.

  Then my eyes came to rest on a name.

  Weird foreign guy.

  The usual crowd.

  Ari Zurer.

  Everything, suddenly, came together for me with a vacuum-like sensation filling my head.

  The pain that fluttered in my chest was sweet and debilitating. I held my hand to my chest, hoping to feel that my heart was still beating, because it felt like my heart had stopped.

  A big man, like Bruce Willis. And I was his muse.

  The idea that this man, this invention of mine, this fantasy-man I had created to fantasize about in the past, for my own perverse, pleasurable jealousy – the idea that he was real, pressed on my temples and my chest. Not only real, but here and now. It was too much to imagine; it changed everything, forward and backward in time. It made things that Ela had said to me completely different: some things lies, some things half-truths.

  And now, it made her more...what? Vulnerable? Likely to actually be cheating?

  Everything I had been imagining had been kept bubbling on a back burner in my mind, a place where I knew it wasn't really all that real. And now it was boiling over, gushing on top the stove, burning through the floor and splattering all over me: there really was a big man, a man like Bruce Willis, and she spent nearly all of her time with him now.

  All along, it had been none of these others. Not Ian, not John, not her fucking professor.

  Was this him? The man from her past? The not-TA or the other TA?

  And then, settling over me like snow, the worse question:

  If it was – and oh, how it seemed to be – then why hadn't Ela said anything about him?

  Why hadn't she said: Oh remember the Bruce Willis guy from my past, the guy I fucked, the one you always joke about? He's in my ensemble.

  He'll be in London.

  I began to slide on the polyester bedspread, and I remember thinking I should stop myself. But I just slid and slid, until I fell onto the floor. The screen went blank with the power saver just as the quartet lifted their bows and they hovered above the strings.

  Ela with her eyes forward, but her body and her heart attuned to the small movement from Ari fucking Zurer, that would tell her to begin.

  The concert ended at 10:00pm.

  The hour turned from ten to eleven, to twelve, to well past when the pubs would be open and only clubs remained.

  I made myself a drink, and then another, watching the street and thinking about where she was right now. What she was doing.

  Who she was doing.

  I knew it was futile, but I texted her. We had agreed not to use our phones here, to avoid excessive charges. She had turned it off and popped it into her suitcase. I knew it was still there, not even displaying my messages. Messages she would get later, and laugh off.

  The ensemble had left, and only she and Ari remained. Packing things up, deliberately slow, backstage. Until they were left alone on the scarred black floor, the curtains swaying lightly with the departure of the last person.

  “I have to get back,” Ela would say.

  The big, Israeli-Mossad man who looked like Bruce Willis moved closer to her, sucking her in with his dominating eyes. She would feel her bare cunt, the one she had shaved for him, well up with desire.

  “Okay,” she would say, her eyes darting around. “But let's make it quick.”

  But Ari Zurer would not be quick. He would push Ela to her knees and let her taste him first, and then he would push her up against a wall, holding her with his enormous arms. Her feet would flap uselessly in the air as he pounded her senseless with his big, thick cock...

  The door clicked.

  “Oh,” Ela said, and she seemed surprised and disappointed. “You're up.”

  “You're late.”

  I watched her carefully now. I watched her features, frame-by-frame, for traces of guilt or for hesitation.

  “Sorry,” she said. “We-”

  “You said you weren't going out.”

  She sighed.

  She did not finish her sentence. She did not respond to me. She sat down on the bed and began to remove her strappy shoes.

  I waited. What the hell?

  “Did you watch the concert?” she said.

  She turned to me. Her face was flushed, her cheeks lit up by an inner glow.

  Her eyes were glassy.

  “Are you drunk?”

  She giggled. “A little.”

  Rage began to boil inside of me. I pressed my lips together.

  Ela's face changed. She rolled her eyes. “I'm sorry. Just...everyone decided to go out for a drink because Martin Czeczok was there,” she said. As if I knew who Martin Czeczok was. One more lover, probably.

  “You could have called,” I said icily, only realizing as I said it, that it was true. She had my number, after all.

  “We turned off our phones.” Her eyes moved over my face. “Jesus, what is your problem?”

  “I watched the concert,” I said.

  She cocked her head. I had said it like an accusation, and she heard the tone in my voice. She said nothing, just blinked, waiting for whatever I was going to say next.

  When I didn't s
peak, she raised her eyebrows.

  “And?”

  “And maybe there's some reason you came home late?”

  It was unlawyerly. I didn't know the answer to this question. Never ask if you don't know the answer. It's the first thing they teach you.

  I watched her, and I knew my face was turning into something terrible. Like a bird of prey, ready to pounce on anything.

  She harrumphed. “You know what? You are acting like a fucking crazy person. I'm sorry I went out. Jesus, I knew this would fucking happen. I knew you were going to get all...possessive of my time when I went back to school. Didn't I? I said that!”

  The fiery, raging Ela was building up. Coming out of her. She was like the fucking Hulk.

  I watched her. Was she being defensive? Or had I just pissed her off?

  Then I remembered.

  I had no conclusive proof, of course. I had a purely circumstantial case, the foundations of which were largely my own craziness.

  Still, I went in for it.

  “Ari Zurer.” I said.

  Ela's face, jagged with her own self-righteousness, arched upward and somehow looking down at me all this time, appeared to fall like a souffle. Her skin went pale and she snapped her mouth shut.

  I could see her amber eyes struggling to hold still, not to move with her mind, searching, searching for the right lie to tell.

  I felt a wave of satisfaction. I had been right.

  It was followed by a wave of cold fear, and a wave of lust.

  I had been right.

  Shit.

  What did that mean?

  Ela's was the face of someone who had been caught, and something about it – the guilt on her features, the desperation with which she was looking for a way out – was incredibly alluring. I drank it all in.

  She found the answer, and her mouth turned up in a bitchy little smile and she folded her arms over her chest.

  “What about Ari?” she said. Her haughtiness came back, flaring up and over her face like the light of a bonfire.

  I felt unsure again. Maybe there was nothing about Ari.

  I kept talking anyway. I was too invested in my paranoia to stop myself.

  “He's the one, isn't he? Mr. Mossad? The instructor you never told me about?”

  I watched her face carefully. It had to be carefully, because I was under the distinct impression that Ela was either not at all a liar or a very good liar, and there was virtually no way to detect if she was telling a lie or not.

  Or if there was a way, no one on earth knew what it was.

  Her mouth twitched. “Mr. Mossad?” She cocked her head. “You got all this from...what? Because he's a Jew?” She threw her hands up in the air.

  But there it was. The tell. I worked an internship with the district attorney's office, back before I realized I hated the courtroom as much as I do, and so I spent a lot of time just shooting the shit with investigators. A lot of things they had said stuck out in my mind, like when you throw out a hypothesis you have like it's the real thing, and you get the person you're interviewing to tell you everything without telling you anything at all. Ela hadn't told the truth yet, she was still trying to lie: but she had revealed one very important thing to me by choosing to say “he”, and that was that Ari Zurer was indeed the topic of this conversation, for her and for me. And that my reference to the Mossad was not buried in her mind, where it should have been if Ari Zurer and Mr. Mossad had nothing to do with each other. She should have had to search a lot longer to find it.

  It all spelled out that I was on the right track. The cold-hot sensation slithered inside of me.

  “No,” I said cooly. “No, that's too exaggerated, Ela. Too racist for you. No, you've shown your hand. Now you tell me, why didn't you mention that Ari Zurer was in your ensemble? You mentioned everyone else.” I began to compile the evidence and build my own case as I spoke. “Everyone but Ari. And there was someone all along, someone else besides me, and I let it go, all the evidence of it, but I know there was someone -”

  “It was a joke,” she said, but even by the end of her own sentence she lacked conviction. She deflated. She closed her eyes. She changed her tack, and decided to make a joke and confess, all at once. “That he was in the Mossad.” She threw her hands up and collapsed into the couch. “And it was never any big thing, we – you and me—only made it into something sort of...more than it was. So when he turned out to be...I just...it seemed easier than telling you about it. To just...not mention it. Because there's nothing there.”

  Her eyes were still closed, which made me suspicious.

  But the story made sense, actually. It had the ring of truth to it. It even hung together.

  I studied my wife when she opened her eyes. She looked like she was telling me the truth now. But then, wouldn't Ela always look like she was telling the truth? The same way she looked sweet?

  I folded my arms over my chest.

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  Ela's anger, always there, under the surface like gasoline, ready to blow, ignited.

  “Did I sleep with him? Now or then? What's your question?”

  She was almost spitting.

  Sometimes, if Ela went this far into anger-mode, there was no return. I gave the room a quick sweep to make sure there was nothing she could break. She threw things if she got mad enough.

  But she sucked in her breath and let it out, a sign she was reeling herself back in.

  I quietly thanked the universe.

  She looked down at her hands. “Look. You know I slept with him. A long time ago. Before you. You've always known that. It was a mistake, and it never turned into a big deal. It just became...something the two of us joked about.”

  “There certainly seems to be something between you,” I said, accusingly.

  Why wasn't I letting this go?

  Ela narrowed her eyes, but something changed in them. The spark of anger in her seemed to flicker and die, and turn to amusement. “Does there.” It was a statement and not a question.

  She lifted her hand and clasped the couch behind her, rubbing the fabric between her fingers. She slid a little on the cushions, and the slit of her dress, tantalizingly, slid up her legs as she did so, revealing nearly all of one thigh.

  Feelings clashed inside of my chest: anger, pain, lust, strange desires.

  “To tell you the truth, Peter, I don't think you dislike that idea so much,” she said.

  The words dripped into my bloodstream like a drug. Cold like the outside air. Then snaking through me, right to my heart, where they beat inside of my chest and radiated outward, until all of me high on their potency.

  She was looking right at me.

  I think I might have stopped breathing. I wasn't even sure I heard her right. Her tone was confusing: almost angry, but also teasing. Was she seducing me with that idea, or laying some kind of trap? Her face told me nothing. Her cheeks were flushed, but they became that way with any strong emotion she felt – which was essentially any emotion she felt. Her lips were neutral, her eyes, like her flushed cheeks, were on fire, but they told me nothing.

  My brain was trying to race through all of the possibilities, all the things I could say and all the possible outcomes of saying them. Trying to choose the best one.

  Ela's gaze drifted down, like something sinking in the water, swinging from side to side with the disturbed momentum of a fall. Down, down, from my eyes to my mouth, along my chest, and to my trousers.

  Where they stayed, revealing nothing, and observed for what seemed like a full minute.

  Then her eyes snapped back to mine.

  I knew my cock was hard, but I didn't know if she had seen that -

  surely she did, Peter, you fucking idiot

  - and so I just remained, awkwardly dumb, staring at her.

  Her hand folded over, and she touched her mouth. She bit her finger and smiled. “In fact,” she said. “It would seem that you almost like that idea. That you almost like being jealous.”
<
br />   Her eyes narrowed again.

  I knew from her face that she was shuffling through her memory, and then her eyes dilated as she pounced upon something in it. She bit into her finger again, and her lips closed around it, very sexually, very much the way she might suck my cock...a cock...

  Then she totally surprised me:

  “I saw you, you know.”

  My eyes were still on her fingers, touching her lips now in small, seductive strokes. My mind was producing image after image of her lips grazing my cock, or another man's. Poised in front of Ari's great massive body, her hand on his member, her lips pursed just as they were right now but right next to his dripping cock...

  I saw you, you know.

  What the fuck did that mean? My mind went to everything I was guilty of lately. Following her in my mind; watching her concert on the internet and thinking she was having an affair with a man because he was talking to her near her neck; imagining her fucking her professor late at night. But nothing I had done had been visible. It was all in my mind.

  “Wha..?” I said, and I narrowed my own eyes to emphasize my confusion. I shook my head. I didn't know, I really didn't know what she was talking about.

  She shifted in her seat, returning her hand to where she could rub the fabric of the sofa between her fingers again. “I saw you,” she repeated. Her voice was low, and a smile turned the right corner of her mouth upward. “In Copenhagen.”

  I blinked, very slowly.

  She bit her knuckle. “Look,” she said. “Maybe we just need to..talk about this. You have your things, I know you do, things that turn you on. And so do I. I think we need to talk about them. I saw you.”

  My head was moving slowly now.

  Copenhagen.

  “Why didn't you say anything?” I finally managed to say.

  She let her head tip to the side. “Why didn't you?”

  We looked at each other for a moment before we both laughed. A small laugh, a still-uncomfortable laugh, but it lightened the mood just enough.

  Just enough, to make me see that she was actually on my side about this. Whatever it was. There was something unfolding between us and we weren't at opposite ends of a table, fighting it out. Maybe we could be complicit in our desires.