He asked if she had maternal feelings for him. She said she was not sure what he wanted to hear. She told him she felt an erotic mix of passion and tenderness. If he wanted to think the tenderness maternal, let him.
When they met, he said, he had not hidden the fact that she looked like his mother, a glamorous woman who had been cruel to him and died when he was a boy. He had not said this to underscore her age, nor did she think it a fixation. She would have heard it as she felt it was intended: as a compliment, an added opportunity to bind them together. She would have been happy to be the good mother as well as the ultimate sensate. And see how her pleasure seeking brought pleasure to those around her!
A thing between them: green apples. Never red, always green. I knew when my husband had entertained Mrs. Greed because a trio of baskets in the kitchen would be filled with polished green apples. My husband claimed to like the look of them; I never saw him eat one. As soon as they would start to soften and turn brown, I would throw them out. And there would be the basket filled so soon again.
He told me he got them from the Italian market in town. But I checked, and the Italian market does not carry green apples.
What the green apples meant to them, I don’t know, don’t want to know. But she brought them each time she entered our house, and I felt that if I had not thrown the rotting ones out, he would have held on to every one of them. The way he fetishized these apples—it made him less attractive to me.
Mrs. Greed convinced her young lover, my husband, that she was “not the type” to have “work” done, but she had had work done. She must have had a high threshold for pain. She could stay out of sight for the month or more of healing after each procedure. She had less success hiding the results of surgery on her spine. She claimed her athleticism had made it necessary, claimed a “sports injury” to lessen the horror of simple aging. But she could not hide the stiffness that followed, a lack of elasticity that marked her an old woman who crossed the street slowly in low-heeled shoes. I watched her cross the street like this, supported by my husband.
Maybe that was why she liked to hear complaints about his other women, that they were spoiled and petty, gossips who resented his involvement with her. Because he would not keep quiet about such a thing. At first, she felt the others had “won” because they could see him at any time. Then she saw that their availability guaranteed he would tire of them. They were impermanent, and she knew it before they did. So however much he pleaded with her to leave her husband, or at least see him more often, Mrs. Greed refused. It galled me that he wanted her more than she wanted him.
I listened to them often. I hooked up the camera to the computer when I was at home alone. For two hundred dollars I’d bought a hidden surveillance camera that was fitted into a book. I did not expect it to work. I left it next to the clock on the nightstand. I did not pay the additional seventy-five dollars that would have showed them to me in color. But the 90-degree field of view was adequate for our bedroom, and sound came in from up to seven hundred feet. Had this not worked so well, I would have stood in line for the camera that came hidden in a ceiling-mounted smoke detector.
Usually the things they said were exchanges of unforeseen delight and riffs of gratitude. But the last time I listened to them, my husband said something clever. Mrs. Greed sounded oddly winsome, said she sometimes wished the two of them had “waited.” My husband told her they could still wait—they could wait a day, a week, a month—“It just won’t be the first time,” he said.
How she laughed.
I said to myself, “I am a better person!” I am a speech therapist who works with children. Parents say I change their lives. But men don’t care about a better person. You can’t photograph virtue.
I found the collection of photographs he had tried to hide. I liked that the photos of herself she brought to him were photos from so long ago. Decades ago. She wears old-fashioned bathing suits aboard sailboats with islands in the faded background. Let her note that the photographs of me that my husband took himself were taken in this bed.
Together, they lacked fear, I thought, to the extent that she told him to bring me to dinner at her house. With her husband. Really, this was the most startling thing I heard on playback. Just before the invitation, she told him she would not go to bed with the two of us. My husband was the one to suggest it. As though the two of us had talked it over, as if this were something I wanted! I heard her say, “I have to be the queen bee.” Saw her say it.
She would not go to bed with us, but she would play hostess at dinner in her home.
I looked inside my closets, as though I might actually go. What does one wear for such an occasion? The corset dress? Something off the shoulder? Something to make me look older? But no dress existed for me to wear to this dinner. The dress had to do too much. It had to say: I am the sexy wife, and I will outlast you. It had to say: You are no threat to my happiness, and I will outlive you.
* * *
Down the street from our house, a car waited for Mrs. Greed. I knew, because I had taken note before, that a driver brought her to see my husband when I visited clients out of town. Was there a bar in the back of this car? I couldn’t tell—the windows had a tint. Maybe she would not normally drink, but because there was a decanter of Scotch and she was being driven some distance at dusk, maybe she poured herself a glass and toasted her good luck?
This last thought reassured me. How was it this felt normal to me, to think of her being driven home after a tumble with my husband? I guess it depends on what you are used to. I knew a man who found army boot camp “touching,” the attention he received from the drill sergeant, the way the army fed him daily. It was a comfort to him to know what each day would bring.
I felt there could be no compensation for being apart from my husband. Not for me, and not for her.
I knew I was supposed to be angry with him, not with her. She was not the first. She was the first he would not give up. But I could not summon the feelings pointed in the right direction. I even thought that killing her might be the form my self-destruction took. Had to take that chance. I tried to go cold for a time—when I thought of him, when I thought of her. But there was a heat and richness to what I conceived that made me think of times I was late to visit a place that my friends had already seen. When you discover something long after others have known it, there is a heady contentment that comes.
What I heard on the tapes after that: their relaxed relentlessness, impersonal intimacy, the air of resuming a rolling conversation that we had not been having. As though living in another dimension, a dimension I thought I could live in, too, once. Just take me there. Just teach me the new rules.
Watching them on camera I thought: What if I’m doing just what I’m supposed to be doing? And then I thought: I am.
The boys said they would give me a sign.
It was money well spent. With what I saved not needing to film in color, and knowing I would not need the standard two-year warranty, I had enough to pay the thuggish teens a client’s son hung out with. The kid with the stutter had hinted he needed m-m-money. I will even give them a bonus—I will let them keep the surveillance camera hidden in the book after they send me the final tape.
Mrs. Greed does not live so far away that I will miss the ambulance siren.
And what to make of this? The apples my husband “bought,” the green ones from the Italian market that does not carry green apples—I ate one on the front steps of our house and threw the core into the pachysandra. The next morning the core I had thrown was on the top step where I had been sitting when I ate it. I threw it again, this time farther out so it lodged in pine needles alongside the road in front of our house. The morning after that, today, the core was back in place on the top step.
Boys.
I thought: Let’s see what happens next.
We have so many apples left.
Deer
JANICE Y. K. LEE
THEY CAME IN through the long, wooded driveway
, opening the gate, struggling with their weekend bags, to find a deer at the bottom of the pool.
“What the fuck,” Charlie said.
Boxer ran around the edge, barking at the large dark shape shimmering under the blue.
It had struggled. Part of the pool’s vinyl siding had come off and was bobbing in the water. There was blood too. You could see it trailing from the wooden decking to the edge and then the water, slightly tinged around the carcass.
“Jesus,” Maggie said. “It’s Friday night. Who do we call?”
“Deerbusters?” said Frank, who was always making jokes that were not quite funny.
“What about 911?” Maggie said, ignoring him.
“Is this an emergency?” asked Frank’s wife, Stella.
“I’ll call the police,” Maggie said.
They dropped off their bags in the kitchen and Maggie called information. Information always knew everything.
While they waited for the police to show up, Maggie showed Frank and Stella their room while Charlie made vodka tonics. They greeted the police with drinks in hand, Boxer barking his head off, and watched as the men darted their flashlights across the pool. It was beginning to get dark.
“Oh, I’ll get the pool lights,” Maggie said. She darted up to the house. She still wasn’t quite familiar with where everything was, but she finally located the switch by the barbecue.
“Poor thing,” Stella said, when Maggie had come back down. She was looking at the deer. “What could have possessed it?”
“Deer aren’t particularly smart, ma’am,” said an officer dressed in some kind of brown uniform. The pool lights had come on and the deer was illuminated. It was sprawled at the bottom, with no visible sign of injury, other than the blood that clung around it in a slight mist. Boxer, bored with the nonactivity—all these delicious strangers and no action!—went back into the house.
After some hemming and hawing, the policemen, there were three in all, who had come in two cars—things must be slow up here—decided they would have to deal with it later.
“We’ll call someone to pick it up,” they said. “In the morning.”
“Glad we could provide excitement,” said Charlie. “Thanks for coming by.”
After the cars left, Maggie and the guests went inside and sat around the dinner table while Charlie hosed off the deck.
“Should we eat?” Charlie said, coming in.
“It’s so late already,” Maggie said. “Let’s just drink.”
She was sitting across from Stella. Tired of smudgy brows and chalky pencils, Stella had recently gotten her eyebrows tattooed and now she couldn’t go into the sun without a gigantic hat. Her forehead was still slightly inflamed, puffed out like there was excess fluid underneath. Maggie wondered if she pricked it with a pin, pus would seep out. Stella was pretty in a Snow White sort of way, with coal hair and porcelain skin and lips she slathered with red lipstick every five minutes. Maggie didn’t really like her. The first time they had all met, some time last year, they had had dinner at a small restaurant and Stella had made a big deal about ordering three Gulf shrimp. “Just three shrimp,” she had said imperiously to the waiter. When he had tried to explain that they only came in sixes, as in half a dozen, a dozen, et cetera, Stella had waved her heavily gold-ringed hand. “You figure it out,” she said. Maggie had jumped in, saying she’d eat three too, so then they ordered a half dozen and she’d had to eat three shrimp that she didn’t want to eat. Later, Charlie got mad at her, saying that she should have just left it alone, that Stella could have just eaten three and left the others. “Why are you always butting in?” he said. “Shut up,” she said, but she knew he was right. She let people like Stella bother her.
“I like your shirt,” she said to Stella by way of delayed apology for her uncharitable thoughts of the last year.
“Thanks,” Stella said. She looked surprised.
“You’re welcome,” Maggie said.
“What about Scrabble?” Charlie said.
“No,” said Maggie.
They sat in silence for a bit.
“Why not?” asked Stella cautiously.
“Oh, fine,” Maggie said. “It’s just that someone always gets in a fight.”
They got out the Scrabble board and set up. Stella went into the bathroom. When she came out, she sidled over to Maggie.
“I changed the toilet roll,” she said. “I mean, so that the paper goes over instead of under. I hope you don’t mind.”
“What?” Maggie said. She wondered if Stella was insane.
“It’s just neater that way,” Stella said. “It’s easier to pull.”
“Okay,” Maggie said.
“You know, you can’t mess around with people’s housekeeping,” Stella said confidentially.
“Oh, yes,” Maggie said. “My housekeeping is very important to me. And to others,” she added.
“Well, anyways,” Stella slid into her seat. “The house is adorable.”
“Shall we commence?” Frank said.
Stella was annoyingly good, one of those players who knew all the two- and three-letter words and kept racking up double digits in every turn. Maggie felt her competitive spirit kick in.
“Isn’t it interesting,” she said, “that one does not need a big vocabulary to be good at Scrabble.”
Charlie shot her a warning look, but she didn’t care.
“I’m not good at much of anything,” Stella said placidly. “But I’m okay at Scrabble because I figured out all the tricks.”
Frank spelled aurora.
“Nice,” Maggie said. “That’s a pretty word.” Stella spelled xray, decisively plunking down the x last, with her crimson-nailed fingers.
“Very dramatic,” Maggie said. “The way you put down the x last.”
Charlie spelled tax. Maggie put her hands on her face in mock despair.
“I have all vowels,” she said.
Charlie got her another drink.
“Take it easy, tiger,” he said.
“What is it that graphic designers do?” Frank asked. “It’s one of those jobs I hear about but never really understand what the day-to-day is like.”
Maggie looked up.
“Well, it’s a lot of sitting in front of Macs and fiddling around,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Frank said.
“It’s all on computers now,” she said. “So it’s quite different from the old days with glue and paste.”
“Oh,” Frank said. “I don’t own a computer. Can you believe that?”
“No,” Maggie said. “Actually, I can’t.”
Stella spelled quick on a triple word score.
“Sorry,” she said, looking at Maggie.
Later, the game lost, Stella decidedly the victor, they all retired to bed. It was almost one.
Charlie massaged Maggie’s shoulders like she was a defeated wrestler, hopeful of rewards.
“She’s horrible,” Maggie said. “And Boxer hates her too.”
“Oh, give her a chance,” said Charlie. “She’s not that bad.”
“Excuse me,” Maggie said. “Gi is not a word.”
But she gave in anyways. It wasn’t Charlie’s fault.
Part of the reason Charlie had asked Frank and Stella up was because he needed a favor from Frank. A favor called twenty thousand dollars. Frank was a childhood friend of Charlie’s and was making a bundle of money in real estate, even in the current downturn. He hadn’t gone to college but straight into his father’s lumber business, and then he’d bought a small strip mall, which grew into a dozen. He had moved to the city last year from Baltimore and was trying his hand at property development in the Big Apple, as he called it. Maggie was on the fence about whether that was endearing or not. They lived in an enormous postwar condo on Seventieth and First Avenue. Maggie and Charlie had been to dinner there once, and all the furniture had been black.
Maggie and Charlie had been financially stable, but they had gone a little, okay, a lot
, overboard in the stock market and now they were hurting. They were behind in their mortgage payments and maxed out on credit cards and family goodwill. The rental, paid for before the big, big crash, when the market cratered on that terrible Thursday, had sent them hurtling toward actual, real insolvency, and the rental had been nonrefundable. If Frank said no, they didn’t know what else they would do. Maggie was not on board for asking him, but Charlie was insistent, saying that it wouldn’t be a big deal, that Frank would do it in a second, without any strings or weirdness. Maggie wanted to believe him. She liked to believe in her husband.
Charlie was easygoing, lovely. They had met six years ago—he was that rare thing, a lawyer without an ax to grind, and she was charmed. “I don’t know nothin’ about culture,” he drawled sarcastically on their first date. He thought her job was creative, something she hadn’t thought in years. He taught her about calmness, closeness, and, often, human decency.
Over lunch the next day, Frank told them about what a good shopper Stella was.
“She can tell from the actual clothes what size it is. She never has to look at the tag!”
“Only at certain stores,” Stella said. “Like at Banana Republic, I know which one is mine, from like a distance of six feet!”
They had set up a little deli line next to the pool, with ham and turkey, white bread, pickles, and mayonnaise. A partially unwrapped Camembert was melting in the sun. Maggie was not a natural host.
“Lunch al fresco,” Charlie said. “With a view of the deer. We can go swimming after lunch—it’ll be just like nature, swimming with dead things and chlorine.”
“Only after fifteen minutes, though,” Maggie said.
Everyone looked at her.
“I mean, after our food’s digested? Like mothers always say?”
Frank stared at her, then continued to mayonnaise his bread.
“Is there any onion?” he asked. Charlie went in to slice some.
Maggie’s jaw ached. She wondered if she had cancer. “I have a canciferous jaw,” she said to herself. Canciferous. Surely that wasn’t a word. She chewed on her sandwich. Boxer came over and sat heavily in front of her. She gave him the rest.
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