In place of my heart, two angry fists beat at my chest.
I wanted to get out of the house. I should probably see to the garden, I mumbled.
I took care of that while you were sick, Frank said. I hope I didn’t ruin the system. Step on your toes.
In the vegetable patches, I saw where she had plucked up fistfuls of under-ripened vegetables, ripping them out at the root and then leaving them forlornly in the soil to rot. Deliberate. Spiteful. Or was it all just in my head.
I gathered a few carrots and a head of lettuce that the slugs hadn’t gotten to yet and brought them inside to rinse.
The baby looked up and stuck out his tongue. Baa, he said. Everything solid turned to water.
Frank
I am in the middle of a puzzle, and too many pieces do not belong.
I’m trying to make sense of it all, this curious reality that is revealing itself to me, piece by piece. The Japanese have a whole art form devoted to cracks. Kintsugi, it’s called. They gild the broken pieces of porcelain and make the reconstructed whole precious—beauty in the brokenness and all that.
Well, perhaps the cracks I am seeing in Merry’s life will reveal some beauty to me too.
She emerged from her week of convalescence in a foul mood. She’s always been so ungracious. Not a Thank you, Frank for looking after things, for mothering her son, for keeping food in the fridge and dinner on the table.
Never mind; Sam is full of gratitude. Full of praise. I see him watching me in wonder, the way I am with Conor, the way the child is thriving under my care.
Naughty me! I stole Merry’s copy of The Ultimate Guide to Baby’s First Year from her bedside table while she was sick and read it cover to cover in an evening.
Some days later, I suggested to Sam that we do core strength exercises with the baby to help get him crawling.
It’s just that now’s when he should be reaching that milestone, I said. I noticed he’s a little behind.
I didn’t mean to be intrusive, but these developmental stages are crucial. Everyone knows this.
Sam looked slightly put out.
Sorry, I apologized. It’s probably not my place.
No, he snapped. Merry should be better at this.
Well, now he and I sit cross-legged on the floor with the baby every morning, getting him to lift brightly colored balls out of a plastic bucket. This is supposed to strengthen his upper body, which will encourage him to try to crawl. It’s too adorable to watch. Conor loves this game—and others. Hide-and-seek under a blanket; where’s Bear? Or roly-poly—we play for hours.
Such a natural, Sam says to me, over and over again, and slowly I understand why.
Because Merry is not. No. She is the furthest thing from it.
She had me convinced for the first few days. But now I see it all. Remember those Where’s Waldo? books, how hard it was to spot the first Waldo in those busy illustrations? And then once you did, you’d be able to find him anywhere. The beach, the zoo, the streets of Paris—he’d pop right out at you, the first face in the crowd. It’s the same with Merry. Suddenly it is all blatantly obvious. I can see everything.
Merry, Merry, the unmerriest of them all. My poor, desperate friend. Her life is a ruse. She dials it up if Sam and I are around, but when I spy her alone with the child, it’s a different story altogether. Nothing maternal, not even a flicker of it.
It’s all an act. Or a trap. Merry playing at motherhood like she’s played at everything else over the years. Merry the innocent, Merry the party girl. Merry the drama student, Merry the poet, Merry the yoga instructor, Merry who became Amira for a year after she went to Pune to take sannyas. Six different colleges she tried. Six! Two separate gap years, traveling the world with Gerald’s credit card in her pocket, trying to find herself. What nonsense! As though there were ever anything to find.
And worse, the countless casualties along the way, the brokenhearted souls who fell for her act hook, line, and sinker, who took her at her word and believed she was who she said she was. I knew many of them, ran into a few in their post-Merry pain, saw the looks of devastation and ruin. How well I know the feeling. This is what happens when you play with people, isn’t it? When you lead them on. When you allow them to believe that you are everything they have been looking for.
I shouldn’t be angry. It’s just how she is. This is her fuel. This is how she feels most alive, I suppose. In truth, it is more worthy of pity than rage.
Sam doesn’t see any of it, or doesn’t want to. But I know her too well. Inside out. How could I not after so many years?
This has always been a thorn in her side, that I of all people can see her with such clarity. Unmasked, no matter which one she is wearing. No matter how splendid the disguise, she can’t hide from me. Anyone else might put her behavior down to some kind of postpartum depression. Of course it’s not. This is just Merry. Merry being Merry.
The love inside her stuck. Trapped in a fist in the pit of her belly.
Or maybe that’s wishful thinking. Maybe she doesn’t have any love to give at all.
Certainly after today, I could believe it. We’d been sitting outside, eating lunch together. Merry took the baby inside to change, and I dashed in a few minutes later to use the bathroom. I passed the baby’s room on my way, looked in. He was on the changing table, whining and kicking. He was having a bad day, poor lamb, sore and grumpy from the teething, as they get.
Merry I saw standing over him, watching him silently, stiff like stone. I stood in the doorway, mesmerized by the sight of her, by her coldness, by the sheer absence of warmth or maternal love. How she was looking at Conor with such loathing in her eyes. As though there was only ice in her veins. As though he was some monstrous, terrible aberration, and not her very flesh and blood.
I shuddered inside. But it took an even worse turn. As Conor cried, Merry held out a hand and hovered it over his naked belly. I watched as she clenched and unclenched her fist. He squirmed. Then she took the hand to his thighs.
The fingers tensed. He let out a cry. I held my hand over my mouth to stop myself from crying out too. Why, I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t yet know what I was seeing—how it could be real, this whole wretched scene unfolding nightmarishly before my eyes. Maybe somehow I thought if she were caught in the act, it would unleash even more violence.
So I did nothing but stand and watch. I watched as the fingers gripped his flesh, tensing, tightening, squeezing. Harder and harder, digging in, full force. My brain could not compute her intention to hurt him, to cause him suffering and pain. Her son! Her child!
My heart was breaking, my thoughts a scramble of why and how—you cannot make it logical or fathomable—you can do nothing but shatter inside. It was the dawning of the very worst truth, the collapse of all I know to be right and decent.
I watched the hand, still there, as his face pulled and twisted with hurt, as his little body writhed beneath the cruel fingers of his mother. Merry did not flinch.
At last I could take no more and walked silently away. In the bathroom, I splashed cold water on my cheeks, flushed the tears from my eyes. I tried to stop the shaking of my hands, but they would not hold. I looked at my face in the mirror. Stricken. It was one of the worst things I have ever witnessed.
By the time I returned outside to the sunny garden table, Merry was sitting with Conor on her lap, smiling and sipping her lemonade, just as carefree as you can imagine.
There you are. She smiled warmly.
Sam held up the wine. You look like you could do with another glass.
He turned to Merry. But none for the wife, he teased. We might have another Hurley on the way.
Merry held up the hand she’d just used to abuse her son.
Fingers crossed, she said.
I went cold.
Sam
The women. The women are in heat. It’s pretty amusing, I won’t lie. The pair of them vying for my attention like two bristling lionesses. At some point, I think I even laug
hed out loud.
Maybe it’s the isolation that’s heightening it all. The feeling that we’re the last three grown-ups in the world. Course, there’s only ever room for two.
I should be in my element. Merry, pliant like putty, falling all over herself to be wifely and obliging. Think she might actually be pregnant; last time around she had the same look about her in the early weeks. Something wild and uncontained, bordering on feral. Pregnant Merry. There’s no better thing. Round and full, bursting with life. It’s too soon for the test, she says, but it has to be. We’ve been at it long enough. Even more so now that Frank’s around. Merry’s pushing herself at me every chance she gets.
And Frank. Dear old Frank. All peeking nipples and miniskirts, always braless and scantily clad, showing off that body, every inch of it if she can help it. She’s caught the sun, bronzed and ripened. She smells of citrus and sandalwood and that familiar scent of a woman longing to be consumed. The way she looks at me, as though I’m the messiah himself; shining eyes, quickened pulse. You feel it in the air, desire, hot and electric like a building storm. I don’t discourage her. Old habits die hard.
She leaves her underwear to dry over the bath rail. Every night, I move them aside to climb in. Black and lacy, red and sheer.
Sometimes I pick up a pair to examine them more closely. Thin stains of white against the black lace; the smell is soap and salt. I breathe them in.
In the bed, Merry purrs against me. Sometimes I shift her over to her front, push her head down into the sheets; imagine she’s not Merry but the woman in the other room. The voice in my head issues a warning. Everything else is happy to play along.
I should probably know better than to engage in any more of these games. They have their inevitable endings. It’s always the same. Already I can imagine Malin’s face. Merry’s, too, crumpling with betrayal. The wife always feels it as her own shame. If I were enough, he wouldn’t need to go elsewhere. They’re not always wrong.
I know, I know. I shouldn’t, especially with Frank. Too close. Like a sister.
I won’t. I wouldn’t.
I’ll just play. No harm, no foul. She’s enjoying it too. Of course she is.
At night, after Merry goes to bed, the pair of us sit out under the stars, share a cigarette, maybe another bottle of wine. Stolen pleasures. Why not, we say, why not.
I flirt, I tease. Tell her things she wants to hear. Look at her in the way she wants to be seen. She laps it up; milk for a thirsty kitten. I dish out more. Here, and here’s some more.
Touch her sometimes, feel the current hit my skin. Her eyes, they’re begging for it, her whole body is, arched towards me and just waiting for the cue.
Desire is there for me but it’s only part of it. It’s the tease. The torture of the tease. So comfortable, like an old pair of slippers. This again.
Tess, I remember, her naked limbs wrapped into mine. She told me my goal was to punish women.
You’re a misogynist, she said, disguising yourself as a player.
I’d laughed, put my hands under the sheets, into dark and warm places.
Nonsense, I adore women. Can’t you tell?
She moaned; she could tell.
She blamed my mother, whom I’d only spoken of once in her company.
If every woman is a bad woman, you’ll always be hers. Classic, she said.
Jesus, Tess.
It’s true, Sam. It’s a common pathology.
She was doing a double major, anthropology and psychology. She was intense; she’d had herself sterilized at twenty-one, made her mother drive her to the clinic to do it.
I’m not like other women, she said. You don’t have to play with me like you play with the others.
I love my wife, I told her at the end, and she shook her head sadly.
No, Sam, you despise us all.
Maybe this is why she reported me to the dean.
I imagine Frank’s an animal. Nothing she won’t do. Beautiful women aren’t always the best to fuck. You fuck them anyway, for the conquest. The vindication of being the one to close the deal. But Frank I bet would be a pleasant surprise.
I try to reel it in, shake it off. Lift some of those free weights I’ve got lying around in the barn. Five sets, ten repetitions. Burn, hurt. Come on, it’s just playing. I’m restless. Bored.
I need the distraction.
Sorry, Malin. Old dogs, new tricks.
I told Merry I booked another job. She gave me a kiss.
Making it work, didn’t I say I would.
She nodded. Proud of her husband. Suitably reassured.
What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.
Merry
Orla in Donegal leaves the cupboard with the bleach and the oven cleaner unlocked. Eloise in Bordeaux makes sure to fold back a small corner of the pool cover and leave it untied.
What’s wrong with you, Sam asked this morning when he saw me fetch a box of tampons from the cupboard.
I don’t know, I said.
Last month, I invented a visit to the gynecologist. All clear, I reported. It will happen soon.
I suppose it must eventually. This is what he wants from me. This is what he needs me to be.
Another email from Christopher received and deleted. No subject line, just the same three words inside. I ought to block him but I don’t. It’s that flicker of something every time I see his name on the screen. A reminder of something I once had. Power, perhaps. I can’t bring myself to excise it altogether, least of all now, with Frank here and everything thrown into disarray; upside down and wrong way around.
We all took a late-morning walk to Sigtuna. On the return, we ran into Elsa and Karl on the trail.
Oh, we must get together, Frank said. I really want to get to know some real live Swedes.
Now they are here for a light dinner. Sam is grilling meat on the barbecue. Frank is inside making her potato salad, which is famous around the world. She regaled us with a story of a New Year’s trip with friends to Sri Lanka, how she absolutely had to make the potato salad and absolutely managed to track down capers for the recipe, despite no one on the island knowing what a caper might be.
Her life as she describes it is very colorful. Friends, so many friends. So many exotic trips. Headhunted left and right. Everyone wants Frank’s head. It is a perfect life, to hear her describe it. And still she is intent on inserting herself here.
I’m reminded of that feeling I had once before, after Frank’s father lost everything. They had to sell the house in Brentwood and move out to her grandmother’s two-bedroom place between Mid-City and Koreatown. Frank was mortified; she hated it there. So she got herself out.
She’d take the bus to my house, arrive on the doorstep, win my mother over by telling her how great she was looking, how glamorous her hair was, how fashionable her shoes. She would stay for days on end, weeks, it sometimes felt like, with me sulking in my bedroom and Frank a smiling surrogate daughter my mother could take on shopping trips and spa days. I was always invited. They knew I’d say no.
It felt like Frank was always there. Taking up space. Trying to be a better version of me. Maybe she is.
There is music playing, some African jazz Frank picked up on a trip to Ghana.
Oh, it’s just wonderful over there, she said earlier, before she and Sam and Karl discussed at length the fascinating burial traditions and elaborate carved coffins. Of course she went to a funeral; of course she has a very good friend living in Accra who showed her the best of his country. No run-of-the-mill sightseeing for Frank. Seventy-two countries she’s visited. Always room for more, she adds.
She brings out the potato salad as Karl is telling us about an incident at one of the refugee centers in Gotland. Right-wing extremists setting fire to a young woman in a hijab.
Jesus, Sam says. Didn’t think that could happen here.
Well, Karl says, the Swedish people have a right to protect their way of life.
Elsa nods solemnly, and I wonder if I should sa
y something in defense of the charred Muslim woman on life support. I study Karl. His eyes are on Frank’s cleavage, amply displayed in a tight, crimson-colored dress that looks vaguely familiar.
I am holding the baby awkwardly in my lap. Elsa is watching him closely. She is less beautiful today. I notice fine lines at her mouth, a dryness to her skin. When she bends down to pick up a napkin she’s dropped, I see a patch on her scalp where a clump of hair must have fallen out.
I touch a hand to my own face.
You’ll see, my mother always said. It goes quickly.
Or maybe all women pale next to Frank.
I watch her entertain my guests, my husband. In my twenties, I dated a choreographer for the San Francisco Ballet. His prima ballerina was injured before opening night, and as the understudy curtsied to thunderous applause during the curtain call, I watched her face, transfixed by her reaction to the adoration that had been meant for her all along.
I take the baby every day and I run. Farther and farther. As far away as I can get. I breathe in the air of freedom, great gasps of it into my shocked lungs. I try to take it with me, to keep it close. This feeling, this feeling. It will not stay. Frank offers sometimes to watch the baby, but I make a great pretense at bonding. Mommy-son time, I say, to deter her from coming along, to stop her from taking even more away from me.
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