Even So

by Lauren B. Davis

  She cocked her head and smiled sweetly. “You know, because you’re just so proud of her, right? Of how she reached out and took what she wanted, even if what she wanted had nothing to do with you? At least Connor knows I’d never move away and not care if I ever saw him again, right?”

  As soon as she heard them, she wanted to stuff the words back in her mouth. It was too much. She wanted to chew them up and swallow them, bitter as they were. Philip’s eyes widened for a second, as though he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.

  “You bitch.”

  “Yes. I probably am. I’m one unhappy bitch and one mean bitch and I wouldn’t blame you at all if you wanted out of this marriage.”

  Philip straightened and crossed his arms. He looked big and, Angela thought, like some feudal lord about to hand down an edict.

  “Me? Want out of this marriage? And give you all the money I’ve worked my ass off for? No way, sweetheart. And you’d come after me for it, wouldn’t you? I’ll make sure Connor gets every cent and you get nothing. Am I clear? Nothing. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “You never wanted anything else.”

  Oh, his eyes were like scalpels, stripping away every layer of skin and muscle, down to the cold hard bone truth of who she was.

  “That isn’t true.” She had to say that. It was what one had to say. “You’re wrong,” she said.

  “I wish I was. You don’t know how much. You think you’re such a fucking mystery, don’t you? You and your Danish bastard.”

  Wasn’t it odd how time slowed down in such moments, how it crystalized and thickened, at once drawing outlines around everything, like chalk marks at a crime scene, and holding one in place, forcing one to look and not avert the gaze?

  “Philip … look …” Oh, there was no point in denying it. She didn’t want to, although there was no defiance, no pride, no relief, which she thought there might have been, when considering this moment. None of that. Only a desire to hide, as though she were in one of those dreams when one suddenly realized one was in the midst of a crowd, completely naked. “It can’t come as a surprise to you. We haven’t been happy.”

  “I was happy.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “You mean did Deedee tell me? Yes, she did. We had a little chat. Quite a few, actually. She’s got heart, that woman, which is more than I can say for you.”

  Rage sparked then. Exploded like a landmine beneath the suddenly unstable earth. Deedee? Why hadn’t Deedee told her? Warned her? She’d had quite a few chats with Philip? Betrayal, a word she shouldn’t have been able to use, given who she knew herself to be, but still, a flesh-searing brand of a word.

  Philip’s stance had widened, and his hands had gone to his hips. He looked like a cartoon version of a cop or a football coach and in other circumstances Angela might have laughed at him.

  “I thought she was my friend. Wrong about that, I guess.”

  He laughed, and the bitterness sprayed from his mouth. “What the hell would you know about friendship? About loyalty? Nothing. I’ve watched you, my girl.”

  Girl? His girl. No time for that. The idea he had been lurking around, following her and Carsten, sent an electric shock up her arms. What had he seen? Them kissing? Embracing? Did Philip know where Carsten lived? Would there be violence? A shooting, a stabbing, a fistfight in Trenton?

  “You’re wondering, aren’t you,” he said, “how much I know. Well, I know it all. I know about the house in Mill Hill. You should close the fucking curtains. I know about his business. I know how much he’s worth, or not worth, to be accurate. You want me to go on?”

  “No.”

  “Look, I really think you’re having some pre-menopause breakdown or something. It’s hormones, and I don’t mean to be condescending when I say that. I’ve read up on this. It skews the perceptions. I’m not condescending, okay? I’m trying to understand you.” He pulled out one of the stools and sat down. He motioned for her to do the same.

  “Is that what you think? That I’ve lost my mind? How very Victorian of you,” she said, not moving.

  He clasped his hands in front of him. Calm. Controlled, in charge. He was the principal at the school, the vicar in the refectory, the vice-president of human resources, so full of understanding, but clear about the rules. She considered how much she hated him.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “But we are going to talk about this. We are going to come to an agreement. To an understanding. I think you need help and I want to be that help for you. Even now, Angela. Even so. Understand that.”

  Oh, how she understood what he wanted, what he expected. She should be humbled by her guilt. Lowered. Debased. And then he would be magnanimous.

  “Philip, I’m sorry. This isn’t going to turn out the way you want it to.”

  His chin raised up an inch, but his eyes were steady. “Honey, it’s not going to turn out the way you want it to, either.”

  “Well, I guess that’s up to me.”

  “Don’t do this, Angela. Don’t let a few minutes of stupidity ruin your whole life.”

  “I’m done. I’m just done.” Saying that was like dunking her face in cool water. It cleared up everything. It silenced the doubt. It was as if she was writing the phrase on a concrete wall in indelible marker. I’m done, I’m done, I’m done. “I’m sorry, Philip. I really am.”

  And as she said it she was already walking out of the kitchen, her mind on her suitcase, and on what she would take (lingerie and photos of Connor and cosmetics) or leave behind (books and cookware and bedding), knowing that whether she took them or left them, each thing would be a fishhook in her skin, pulling her back into the life she wanted to leave behind, and that the pain of the tug and skin-split would be enough to keep her from ever coming back.

  His cry was sharp. Like a wolf in a trap. Like the bear who has fallen into the staked pit when he might have so easily stepped around it. It might have been different. It was a screech, high-pitched and ragged, and two things at once: acceptance and refusal. It cannot be. I cannot lose this. I am lost. And at the end of the yowl: I will die from this. I will die from love. Wordless. But no less eloquent for that.

  With this sound in her head she ascended the stairs and entered the bedroom and opened the closet and took out her suitcase, the small one, not the big one. It all felt terribly formal, composed, scripted, even. There ought to be a soundtrack, she thought. Something sweetly sad but with a note of urgency. Her only obligation now was to see the story through to its inevitable conclusion. She’d come back for the rest of her things later, and a part of her considered calling Carsten now and telling him what had happened and that he was no longer unknown to her husband, but that none of that mattered and she would be with him and they would be together forever now. She ripped off her pajamas and pulled on leggings and a denim tunic. Thrust her feel into sandals. She threw things into the case … underwear and jeans and a pair of sneakers and T-shirts and toothbrush and what did it matter? She would be with Carsten, and that was all she could think of, even while the sounds of her husband’s mourning clawed up the stairs and clung to her clothes.

  She was a monster. She was a monster broken free.

  As suddenly as it began, the yowling from below stopped and was replaced by the sound of his heavy body moving quickly, in full charge. She slammed the case closed and held it up in front of her as though it would stop a bullet or a knife blade and only then did she realize she was afraid of Philip, and then he was in the doorway, filling it, leaving no space for her to slip by. His hands were on either side of the jamb and he was panting, his face red and wet. In a small part of her mind she wondered if he’d have a heart attack. An attack of the heart. A dreadful choice of words.

  “That’s it?” he said, the words clogged with his huffing. “Just like that? You think you can just pack a bag and leave?”

  “That’s exactly what I think. It’s what I’m doing.” She took a s
tep toward him, but he didn’t move, and she stopped. “Philip, let me out.”

  “And what if I don’t? I’m not finished talking. We’re not finished.”

  She shifted the suitcase to the ground, pulling up the handle so she could roll it before her, use it like a plow to break ground if she must. She grabbed her purse from the bed and slung it over her shoulder.

  “I don’t want to talk any more right now. We can talk later.”

  “You’re going to his fucking house.”

  “I don’t know where I’m going.”

  “Liar. Lying bitch.” He moved toward her; fists clenched.

  He hated to lose. Philip did not lose. Philip got what he wanted.

  Well, not this time.

  “Are you going to hit me? Lock me in the house? Do you think that will help?” Her heart pressed up into her throat and felt almost like hands around her windpipe.

  “I should hit you. I should knock this stupid shit right out of you, you ungrateful bitch.”

  “Let me out, Philip. Don’t make this into more of a cliché than it already is. You’ll only look more foolish.”

  He blinked, frowned, opened his mouth, and then closed it. “Jesus,” he said, “you really are as heartless as that, aren’t you? You just don’t have a scrap of heart in you. All these fucking years I made excuses for you, for how hungry you always were, wanting more, more, more. And there was me, thinking I could change you.”

  He had gone soft in the midst of his speech, deflated, wilted, and he let her push past him. His voice followed her down the stairs, but he stayed where he was.

  “You’re nothing but a starving ghost, Angela. Hollow inside. You’re going to be miserable. Mark my words.”

  She was pulling out of the driveway when she looked up and saw Philip watching her from the upstairs window. His face was as closed as a drawn curtain.

  Her hands were shaking. She drove a few minutes, toward Trenton and Carsten. Would he even be there? He’d be on a job. It was morning. That’s right. It was morning. Early morning. How was it possible that so much had happened and it wasn’t even … what? She glanced at the clock on the dashboard … 9:00 a.m. That explained the traffic. Rush hour. People dashing off to their jobs, their desks, their obligations, their to-do lists, and inboxes as though nothing had changed at all, when only everything had changed. A school bus was stopped in front of her and she had to brake more forcefully than normal. The car behind beeped at her. She waved an apology in the rear-view. Yes, her fault. Sorry.

  She pulled into a drugstore parking lot and called Carsten.

  “Hello, beautiful.”

  “Something’s happened. Philip knows. I’ve left him.”

  “What? What do you mean you left him?”

  “Deedee told him. I can’t believe she did that. I’ve left him.”

  “Where are you? Where’s your husband?”

  “I’m on my way to your house. I left Philip at the house. Where are you?”

  “Driving to that job in Far Hills. My God, Angela, are you all right? What are you going to do?”

  The parking lot was nearly empty, since the drugstore wasn’t yet open. Three turkey buzzards were pecking at something next to the big metal dumpsters at the side of the building. Pizza crust? Bread? One of them clacked its beak and regarded her with its bright black eye amidst the red flesh of its face.

  “What do you mean, what am I going to do? Aren’t you going to come back? I have to see you.” She was dangerously close to tears.

  “I will see you, yes, of course. But I must go to work.”

  “Call them. Tell them you’re sick.”

  He sighed. She heard it, the held breath. She could imagine so easily the look on his face. The patience he was trying to muster.

  “I will try to be back midafternoon.”

  “I, I, what should I do? I can make dinner. For us.”

  “Yes, to eat is good when there is trouble. There is food. Steaks, I think. We will talk then, tonight.”

  “This afternoon, if you can.”

  “When I can, yes.”

  He was gone. Angela sat in the car and stared out at the trash bins and the buzzards and the worn-down little businesses on the street next to the drug store, the nail salon and dry cleaner, the Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robbins. She stared and stared, while in her mind the scene with Philip played over and over and over again. She heard a car door slam. A couple of cars must have pulled into the lot while she was sitting there stunned and were parked near the door to the now-open drugstore. She hadn’t even noticed. People went about their business, their errands, their obligations, they went between the rooms of their houses and the shopping malls and their offices and schools and talked of what? Michelangelo? Reality stars? A man with his jeans slung low beneath his belly exited the drug store carrying a small bag. He walked over to a rust-scarred red car with duct tape holding on the side mirror. He glanced at her and nodded as he got into it. She turned away.

  It was important to get to Carsten’s. She rephrased that in her mind. It was important to get to her new home. She was not a homeless woman sitting in a parking lot, albeit in an SUV. She was a woman on the way to starting her new life with a man who understood her, enlivened her, enflamed her.

  The last thing she wanted was to be alone right now. But what was she going to do? Call Deedee? Oh, yes, she’d call Deedee, but not from the car. Stores were open. She’d pick up a few things. She’d forgotten her tampons and she’d have her period in a day or two. Jesus. Did she have her birth control? Yes, she remembered tossing her diaphragm in her bag. She pulled into traffic. She mustn’t let her mind run riot. One thing at a time.

  Why had she pulled out of the parking lot? If she needed tampons, why not get them at the drugstore. Fuck it. She’d go to the grocery store. They had everything a girl could need, right? She turned around, hit the highway, and headed to the big box store.

  A place like this was always packed. Already the lot was nearly full. This had been a mistake. She should have gone directly to the house. She’d think of it that way, as The House. Simpler. But she was here now. Out of the car. Lock the door. Nod at the woman thoughtfully returning her cart to the corral. Try not to judge the woman with the Juicy sweatpants straining across her mammoth rump. Wait for a car to pass so as not to get run down entering the store. Simple things, the sort of things one would do on any day. Inside the store the air was icy. She grabbed a small cart and realized she wanted special things, goat cheese with fig and cognac, lamb chops, plump raspberries, Devon cream. Rich and fatty. Sweet and decadent. She would begin her new life with a seduction of the senses. The tongue. The nose. The lips. Licking off the fingertips. Oil and pine nuts.

  She went from one aisle to another, picking up things by intuition. She tried not to make eye contact. She refused to. She was a thing skirting shadows in the brightly lit bastion to suburban gastronomy. Scurry. Scurry. She made her way quickly to the back of the store, where the alcohol was sold. Champagne. They needed champagne. At the cash register, she handed her identification, a requirement for the purchase of alcohol, to the clerk, a girl with what Angela thought of as a rather alarming architectural hairdo.

  “I’m having a celebration,” Angela said.

  “That’s nice.” The clerk looked past her, to the clerk at the next register. No, not past her. Through her. She might as well have been a screen door.

  “I was in at five,” the girl said.

  “You stocking?” said the other girl, this one tiny, with painted brows arched high above her eyes.

  “But they said I could move off the register, right?” The clerk put Angela’s purchases in bags, a special sectioned one for the champagne bottles. “You okay,” she said, pointing at the credit card reader. “Darryl says I should try to move to the bakery, you know. But that’s getting up at four every day.”

  Angela opened her mouth to ask, who? But thankfully realized her mistake before she spoke.

  While the g
irl kept talking to her friend, Angela left, wondering if the world had always been like this, a place in which she had so little solidity. Perhaps, or perhaps it was merely a question of transformation. She was vanishing from one life and hadn’t quite appeared in her new one.

  She would be at the house in twenty minutes, and then it would begin.

  THE HOUSE WAS QUIET. She plopped the bag of groceries on the counter and checked her phone. No messages. Not from anyone. This felt wrong. Surely a crisis like this warranted phone calls and conversations and someone — Carsten — should race to her side. Something clicked. She jumped, and then realized it was the dishwasher shutting off. He must have run it before leaving.

  This was fine. This was her home now. She would begin as she meant to continue. She would begin living the life she envisioned. An elegant house in an edgy, up-and-coming neighbourhood full of artists like Carsten, who certainly qualified as a landscape artist. She would work with him and side by side they would help create a new Trenton. The light shone in from the back garden, dappled by the trumpet vine, the fleshy orange blossoms hanging heavy and bee-laden beyond the window over the farmhouse sink.

  She pushed aside the silver fruit bowl on the counter and emptied her shopping bags. She put the champagne in the fridge. A bottle of Chablis, three-quarters full, stood in the door shelf. She pulled it out and poured herself a generous portion, admiring as she did the pretty, etched Depression glass, and its colour, like a lake in fog. She had found six of them in a vintage shop in Lambertville and bought them for Carsten as a gift. They were perfect, special, unique, nothing like the fancy, but blandly respectable, Bavarian crystal handed down from Philip’s mother.

  She didn’t care it wasn’t yet noon. On this day, there was no noon, no night. It was a day unlike all other days and all the rules were gone, blown up in the explosion that had ended her old life. She drank, and the wine tingled on her tongue. She unpacked the making of this evening’s meal, the lamb chops and mint and goat cheese and pistachios, the Bibb lettuce, grapes and pomegranate seeds (figs were out of season, alas), the blackberries and brie and frozen pastry (she’d make tiny tarts). She drank her wine and poured more.