Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  ~~~~~

  Leila’s cell phone chime-chirped and she stumbled in her dark apartment, blind-searching under scarves and knit hats on her entryway table before she found the contraption. “Hello!”

  Conroy’s voice, buzzy as if speaking through an empty soda can, said, “I’m here.”

  “Where?” She crammed the cell phone between her shoulder and ear, shrugged her white shirt over her shoulder, and buttoned.

  “My new apartment.”

  The sandbag stupidity of my-new-apartment smacked Leila. “What?”

  Static. “Down by the university, off Woolf Road.” Whirling screech. “Can you come?”

  “Those white townhouses?” Her own voice echoed out of phase, houses?

  “Yes. Number fifty-one.”

  Leila clicked on the Tiffany lamp. Jody looked over Leila’s shoulder at the cell phone, and her blonde eyebrows dipped. She pulled her dark blue sweatshirt over her moonlight skin that glared in the floral-toned lamplight.

  Leila asked Conroy, “Did you leave your wife?”

  Jody’s mouth opened like she was grunting a disgusted uh!

  Conroy’s voice squeezed through the cell phone’s signal. “I left her a note.”

  The idiot. The idiot. “Conroy, don’t do anything stupid. I’ll be right there.”

  ~~~~~

  Bev waved good-bye to the girls clambering into Laura’s earth-shaking SUV. Dante stood behind the open door, his shirt open, and she toyed with his bare chest with her out-of-sight hand. Wine insinuated among her nerves, sparking sensation in her fingertips and drifting in her head.

  Warmth slid up her bare arm, and she shut the door. Dante massaged her forearm and bicep. “You exercise?”

  “Some. I golf.” She unwove her arm from between his fingers, grabbed his hand, and led him up the stairs to the darkened bedroom.

  He shoved her and she bounced on the quilt-covered bed. The pillow crackled. One of the girls had probably planted a crayoned picture.

  “Hold on a minute,” she said, but Dante was already on top of her in the dark, his mouth growling on her neck, his hands pulling at her blouse and pants.

  Under the pillow, her hand found three pages of paper, stapled together.

  Dante’s leg forced her knees apart, and he mouthed her collarbone. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” She flicked on the lamp, rolled her head to the side, and looked.

  The writing was typed, and the first line read, Dearest Beverly.

  Something from Conroy. Unease flitted, as if he was somehow present through his note. She dropped it, and it fluttered beside the bed.

  Dante asked, “What is it?”

  “Nothing.” Her belly heated as his warm body insulated her. She reached to turn out the light.

  Dante crawled across her and lay cross-wise, his hard stomach pressing her, looking over the edge of the blue-draped bed.

  “Wait.” He sat up and handed the paper to her. His expression softened, turning remote and priestly. “You should read this.”

  ~~~~~

  Selections from Conroy’s note:

  Dearest Beverly,

  It’s not you and it’s not the girls, but I need some time alone to think. My life has taken some turns lately that I hadn’t foreseen, none of us could have. I’ve rented an apartment, just to have some time alone. I won’t be home tonight, or for a few nights.

  51 Vita Place.

  Three pages of meaningless drivel about obligations and commitment and meaning well and Beverly had become unsympathetic and something about the priest making him feel cornered and claustrophobic and under surveillance.

  And:

  Don’t be surprised, but there will be some papers delivered tomorrow. Legal things, for both of our protection.

  Legal separation.

  I know you’ll understand.

  Love Always,

  Conroy

  ~~~~~

  Bev’s heart knotted, and her fist shivered, shaking the dry paper. A pulse thumped her temples like being cuffed on both ears.

  She swung her legs around, grabbed the bedside phone, and dialed Conroy’s cell phone.

  The phone clicked, and Conroy’s distant voice muttered, “Yes? Beverly?”

  The weight of air crushed her chest when she tried to breathe. “What is this?”

  “You’ve found the note.”

  “Why?” Her voice echoed in that crappy cell phone of his, Why. “Dearest Beverly, and you’re leaving me? Love Always, and you want a divorce?”

  “Beverly, we need some time to think.” His speech was metered in tone and tempo like he was reciting the damned note.

  She said, “Come home.”

  “Beverly, we should take some time to think.”

  “Fine. I’ll come there.”

  Conroy’s voice squalled, “Beverly, no!” through the air like a flying bug as she hung up the phone.

  She said, “I can’t believe this.” She pressed her palms to her eyes and blue dots marched in regiments across the dark field of her vision.

  Dante, his voice huge and dark after the squeak of Conroy’s cell phone, said, “He has made a mistake.”

  “You bet he has.” She buttoned the blouse over her chest.

  His voice strengthened, and he sounded more like a domineering doctor. “You shouldn’t go.”

  “I want to talk to him.” She stepped into her shoes.

  “You cannot change his mind. Do not go. You should not go tonight. You should not drive tonight. You have had several drinks.”

  Bev stood, buttoned her shirt and, despite Dante’s fingers plucking at her clothes, she walked downstairs, coatless, into the February-cold garage and started her chilly, sensible car, next to the empty space where Conroy parked his stupid Porsche.

  A black oil blot the shape of an elephant with an extended trunk stained the cement. That damned old car was always half-broken. It drank money and leaked dirty oil.

  He couldn’t just leave her.

  She revved the car’s engine.

  ~~~~~

  Dante followed Bev to the garage. Cold air sucked into his shirt and clung to his chest. His white collar flapped beside his cheek. He leaned on her car window. “Bev! Wait!”

  Bev thumbed the tab on her door handle, and all the car doors thump-locked in unison. Her staring brown eyes were wide, tearless and dry. She looked shocky.

  “Bev!” He ran around the car to the passenger side, flipped the handle uselessly, and pressed his hand against the car window as if he could keep her there. “You have been drinking. You should not drive.”

  She flipped levers on the dashboard. Her hair floated around her face from blowing air.

  “Do not go,” he shouted through the glass and the locked door and above the car engine and fumes. “Don’t go!”

  The garage door rattled and clanked like a drawbridge, flooding the garage with freezing air. She grabbed the back of the seat and wrenched herself around to look behind the car as she reversed.

  The car rolled away into the icy night. He stepped aside, blown back, and she drove away.

  The garage door clattered down, leaving Dante in the harsh neon light.

  She had left him to go to that bastard.

  In the note, Sloan had typed his address. Dante sprinted up the stairs. The carpet thudded under his feet and he found the papers beside the bed, scrambled through them trying to find the number, and wadded the whole mass into his pocket.

  ~~~~~

  Leila started yelling when Conroy opened the apartment door. “You idiot! What the hell are you doing?”

  Conroy’s thin body jerked. “Come in, come in.”

  She flung her gray coat on the rose-flowered couch. The colonial-cliché townhouse was a decorating parody. A bowl of red wax apples sat on the cherrywood veneer coffee table. The shining gold guts of a black-lacquered grandfather clock swung back and forth. Blobs of chintz pretended to be furniture. The kitchen was probably stocked with television-sold
knives and peeling non-stick skillets.

  Her father would have set fire to it and danced around the flames.

  Leila asked, “Did you leave your wife?”

  Conroy’s blue eyes were too wide. “I needed a place of my own.” He spread his arms as if he expected her to hug him, as if she had ever hugged him. “I needed a place to think about us.”

  “You don’t think about fucking. There’s nothing to think about.”

  Conroy sat on a chair and covered his eyes which one vein-riddled hand. “Beverly and that priest ganged up on me. He’s helping her find evidence for a divorce.”

  Leila’s rigid, indignant knees kept her standing. “Priests don’t help people get divorced, and so what? We aren’t fucking anymore, and you broke up with wifey-wannabe, didn’t you?”

  “Peggy’s gone.”

  “Conroy, if you had sat tight, your wife and her lawyer wouldn’t have had anything on you. But now, this,” she whipped her arms around to encompass the generic townhouse. A brass and brittle glass lantern-like fixture glimmered above her head. “You’ve screwed it all up now. You’ve given her the perfect excuse. At best, you’ve got a love shack. At worst, you’ve abandoned her in the legal sense. She’s got you by the heuvos now.”

  “No, no,” Conroy said. “They ganged up against me. That’s the important part.”

  “No, the fact that you left is the important part. When she caught you fucking around, she forgave you. After she found Peggy’s panties, she didn’t throw you out.” Leila settled into the creaky couch. The cushions rustled as if there were plastic under the chintz, a sensible precaution in a rental. “Women don’t leave when men screw around. Women leave if men fall in love with another woman. Did she ask if you loved the other woman?”

  Conroy nodded.

  “And when Beverly found Peggy’s panties, you told her that the screwing was nothing and that you didn’t love that Peggy chick or anyone but her, right?”

  “She still would have dragged me to counseling.”

  “Conroy, you’ve fucked this up. You need to go home, right now, pray to God that she hasn’t found that note, a note, a note! You coward.”

  “I think she already found it.” Conroy rubbed his hands over each other, like washing.

  Leila was ready to kick him in the ass if he didn’t start walking to his car. “And you tell her that you love her and that you’ll never, ever do this again, and that none of your screwing around ever meant a damned thing, because it didn’t mean anything.”

  Conroy looked away from the smeared art print, and his eyes acquired a melancholy, lugubrious, sentimental sheen, somewhere between a basset hound and a needle-startled mouse, and Leila started swearing at herself, calling herself a whore and a hungry cunt.

  He said, “But it did mean something to me.”

  She punched her hand. “Stop it. Stop it now.”

  “You’re the only one who hasn’t turned against me. No one else cares about me.”

  “Shut up.”

  His hands fell to his sides, palms forward, a studied gesture of baring one’s soul. He said, “I want us to be together.”

  Leila should punch that idiocy right out of his head. “Shut up. This was nothing but casual fucking, Conroy, nothing more.”

  “We could have children.”

  “You’re fucked in the head. I don’t want kids.”

  “Everyone wants children. They’re fun.”

  “Children are not fun. The world is a vale of tears that destroys people. Children are people who you create to suffer for your own amusement. Creating new people to watch them suffer smacks of sadism. If you want fun, get a Ferrari. A Ferrari is cheaper.”

  “Listen, you can have it all. The career, science, me.” His eyes were wistful, religious.

  “I don’t want it all.” Even though she had told him that it was all casual fucking, explicitly, at the beginning, in the interest of full disclose, he had still fucked it up. “Think, Conroy. Even if we did shack up in this insipid condo, how would shagging one of your grad students look to the department chair committee? You wouldn’t get the chair, and you wouldn’t get the resources, your grants will be stripped, and you’ll never make it out of this pretty good university. You’ll have wasted it all for fucking.”

  He blinked, as if released from a thrall that he had cast on himself.

  She said, “If you ever, ever talk like this again, I’ll switch labs. You won’t have my research. Everyone will wonder why I switched, even if I never say a word.”

  He sat on his chintz chair and looked confused, glancing away and around, as if he didn’t understand how he had arrived at the cheesy little townhouse. “But, I love you.”

  “Go back to your wife before you fuck everything up.” Leila scooped up her coat.

  Conroy grabbed her arm. “I love you.”

  Leila dropped the coat, pulled her wrist out of his grip, and punched him in the face. His flesh around his left eye compressed between her knuckles and his skull. He fell down heavily on the floor and held his eye.

  “I warned you,” she said. “I warned you never to grab me again.”

  He covered his face with both hands. “Why would you have an affair with me?”

  Leila gathered her coat off the floor. “We were nothing but a casual fuck. I thought you understood that it was just fucking around. I always end up in bed with men, every time. From the way you drooled on Valerie Lindh at every conference and the two of you strutted around arm in arm blabbering in French, I figured you were fucking her already.”

  He nodded.

  “Then why did you do it, if it wasn’t just fucking? You’re the one who’s married.”

  “It was just screwing around, but when you said you wanted to break it off, I couldn’t stand it.” He prodded the flesh around his left eye. “I want more, and I want you.”

  Shrieking filled her throat at this net he was throwing around her, trying to drag her down into the rip tide of everyone else’s life, but she widened her eyes and, though her breathing rattled in her chest, she said, “Stay away from me.”

  She walked out into the February night that had turned ice-floe frigid, leaving him alone in that asinine townhouse.

  ~~~~~

  Conroy stood at the front window and watched Leila stalk between the dead bushes and cold-charred grass toward her car. He touched the skin around his eye. A ring on her hand had abraded his temple, and the skin was sore over the orbital.

  Blindsided. She had blindsided him. She hadn’t seen that he was free, unencumbered, and ready to face the world.

  Outside on the sidewalk, Leila stretched her fingers into her gloves.

  A harridan’s clawing hand grabbed Leila’s arm.

  Conroy stepped back and watched from a slit between two vertical blind slats.

  The window turned the sordid scene into a silent movie. Beverly’s face dilated and released a howl that popped back Leila’s head, but Leila shook Beverly’s hand off her arm. Leila drew herself up like climbing into her own slender, dusky skin, glared down at Beverly, and mouthed something that infiltrated Beverly and twisted down her body to her feet. Beverly, coatless, hunched against those words and the cold, turned away, and ran to Conroy’s door.

  Leila started forward, but she saw Conroy peeking through the slats in a reflection of their eyes as tangible as a touch of fingertips, and she retreated. Headlights from the parking lot beyond illuminated her like a lighthouse beacon.

  The doorbell chimed. The door thundered.

  No use making her stand out in the cold and angering her further.

  He turned the cold knob.

  ~~~~~

  As soon as the doorknob clicked, Bev shoved the door open.

  In less than three weeks, the whole sham had fallen apart. Her whole marriage, her whole life, every choice she had ever made, all sucked away.

  She shoved that cheap door in his bony face. The door thumped Conroy, and he stumbled and reached behind him, flinging one a
rm to the ceiling.

  He should stumble, damn him. He should fall. He should fall and keep falling like she was falling and there was no one to catch her, though she prayed Hail Mary full of grace, be with us now and at the hour of our death under her breath into the silent ether.

  Conroy slammed his open hand against the wall. “What the hell?”

  Bev grabbed the doorjamb to steady her shaking legs. “Why?”

  Conroy squirmed like poison wormed in him. “You and that priest thought you could catch me. You two were working together.”

  “That Leila is your mistress, too, isn’t she?” Nerves alongside Bev’s eyes spiked into her temples, and she rubbed the left one, trying to rub away the stabbing. “You’re screwing her.”

  “What if I was?” Conroy slammed his palm against the wall. “Would you tell the priest? Would he go to Leila’s apartment again and interrogate her again?”

  Bev’s horrified eyes hurt, leaked heat. The stone of her heart pounded in her chest, battering her ribs.

  The lantern-shaped light fixture above Bev threw glassy light on the two-story ceiling of the living room. If she had a golf club, she would piñata-whack that brassy light fixture.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the violence swayed her.

  Our Father, who art in Heaven, she tried to pray but her thoughts seemed to go nowhere, like talking into a dead phone. The flesh of her back felt striped, and she tried to reach around to feel if blood were soaking through her white shirt, dripping crimson slashes. She shut the door behind her and walked through the gray and white rental.

  The condo came equipped with the fake apples on the coffee table and shiny, framed Impressionist prints on the walls, an artificial milieu, a play house.

  The coffee table was stacked with entertainment magazines, diverting digests, popular ephemera. She picked up one of the slick, fake apples. A velvet leaf dangled from the plastic stem. She wanted to throw it at the staircase wall with a sideways whip of her right arm that would have smacked a golf ball in a duck hook, wanting a splatter of red molten wax, but it would probably pop and roll down the stairs intact.