by Nicky Webber
Maddy still smarted from Fred’s earlier anger. She remained silent. It was her default strategy to avoid conflict, to maintain balance and to encourage the survival of their marriage. With his sneering word, Honey still ringing in her ears, her inner voice arbitrating between his sarcasm and her guilt. It’s not worth commenting, she thought, we’d have an argument over something that’s never going to happen. Holding in her silence would ensure the issue dissipated. And it did, and she finally escaped into a deep, satisfying sleep.
Fred approached domestic chores with patriotic American male DIY Duct-tape enthusiasm. His sketch of the hot-house had already resulted in a rough pencil drawing, which included scribbled measurements in the margins of pages torn from a spare notepad. He had already assured Maddy his Duct tape would smooth over any problematic joins. The next day he had staked out the floor plan in the corner of their small backyard.
Maddy was astonished Fred willingly undertook the project. She suggested they buy a small glass or plastic kit set hothouse. But Fred would not consider this. He will build it himself. She raised various objections, but Fred overcame them all. Maybe this was his way of expressing his love by meeting her desire for a green-house? The thought eased her frustration with him. Before guilt could seep into her heart, she hugged him close and thanked him.
Later, her thoughts ran to Logan. Where was he, Mila mentioned he was returning home in the next couple of days? He had chosen corporate business for a living, just like she had, both their lives saturated with being in middle management buried in cumbersome global businesses. It paid well and had afforded a good lifestyle but left her wondering about the blood, sweat, tears and sleepless nights delivering to the bottom line for faceless shareholders. Logan seemed to enjoy it. She thought about hugging him close, feeling his face against hers. She stopped herself. Ridiculous! She had to hold her ground, not weaken, and fall back into her doomed love obsession.
She was up early, swimming in the vinyl lined pool, counting her diagonal laps, curling up at each corner and back again. It was the only way she could bring her mind into focus for another day, arguing with staff and clients. Logan kept creeping back into her mind. It had something to do with the meditative state of swimming in the early dawn. Her naked skin, free and caressed by the water, enveloping her and hugging every part of her body. She felt secure in her water element. Some years ago, at a low ebb in her life, she had imagined walking into the ocean and giving herself up to Nature’s watery sleep. She sunk to the bottom, sat on the sand, with the gentle ocean waves above. Holding her breath, she imagined how easy it would be to exchange lungs full of air for lungs full of seawater. It seemed a comfortable, peaceful escape.
But in recent months she associated swimming with Logan. Strange, she wondered. The water, close and calming, gave her what Logan did. His calm, safe, loving and happy nature mirrored her fluid connection to the act of moving effortlessly through the cooling water, lapping at her face and shoulders. Suddenly the association seemed obvious. Thoughts of Logan and swimming were her tranquil escape from the day-to-day mayhem.
As the season grew colder and Autumn turned to winter, Maddy took out a membership at the local heated public pool, so she could continue to swim laps without freezing. Even in the relaxed confines of the safe indoor pool, thoughts of Logan continued to preoccupy her every stroke.
Completely out of character and unbidden, Fred suggested going to a movie on Friday night, and he had already bought two online tickets, much to Maddy’s surprise and delight. She and Mila often went to movies without their disinterested husbands. Fred’s choice was ‘Nocturnal Animals’ with the opening shots of two obese women slowly dancing like sad Las Vegas strippers. Their bodies burdened them with layered aprons of fat from the neck down. This concept by the Director, Tom Ford, cleverly designed to shock the audience, easily claimed everyone’s attention. Everyone except Maddy. As the naked images flittered across the wide screen, they barely distracted her from dwelling on the possibilities of returning to Logan and their wayward affair. She would have to break her heart’s promise to her mind and Mila. She kept turning the idea over, like a shiny new penny glinting in the sunlight, guilty restraint grinding down her unrepentant love.
CHAPTER 14
Not So Sweet Revenge
It was a lonely, lazy Saturday like most weekends when Logan and Fred went out cycling for several hours. They used the weekends for half-day training sessions while their wives stayed at home. Maddy and Mila met with their children in the local park or at one another’s house and chatted for several hours, sharing lunch and local gossip. This time, their husbands returned to Mila’s home after three hours of cycling in the San Fernando Valley, a favorite trail. Exhausted and in recovery mode, their husbands remained unmotivated other than eat, down a few cold beers and retreat to the sofa. Logan and Fred were typical competitive males and continued to compare suffer-scores and average speeds across relative distances, challenging one another’s previous ride times and achievements.
The next day, Maddy, bored and alone, contemplated calling Mila for a walk along the beach when the phone rang. It was Maddy’s friend Jess, an ex-neighbor, calling to catch up after a busy week away in New York.
‘Can I come over?’ she said.
‘You Okay?’ Maddy asked, already alerted by Jess’s trembling voice.
‘No. I need to talk. But only if you’re free,’ Jess said.
‘Sure. Fred’s out cycling with Logan, and they won’t be back for hours. I’ll put the coffee on.’
Jess was larger than life, with wild, dense, curly blonde hair and alert, intense brown eyes. Her hair acted like an early warning system, a signal of the next electrifying round of unfolding madness. She jumped from one outrageous idea to another to entertain her friend. Unpredictable and emotional, Jess had married twenty-two-years ago, which miraculously produced three happy, marginally well-adjusted children. Marital tension plagued the eldest daughter with similar hysterical tendencies and had, in one inflammatory fight too often, screamed at her mother and left the country. They had not spoken for three years, and it looked like there was no chance they ever would. Maddy had listened to hours of maternal angst from Jess over those interceding years and realized that her friend was not entirely blameless.
Jess, her thick fair hair held back with a decorative slide, wore little makeup. She believed she looked youthful and fortunately, her smooth skin belied her age. But her cheeks were forming into jowls. Deepening marionette lines from the edges of her nose to the corners of her narrow lips added a puppet quality to her appearance.
She could be attractive when she put some effort into her appearance. The problem was she believed her bare-faced visage was beautiful enough, even now, when sunspots and fine lines were ravaging her forty-two-year-old face. She measured her bold approach to life by an often quoted, ‘the ends justify the means.’ This was no idle mission statement, given her manipulations over the years. Her past provided indicators of a borderline personality, convincing Maddy to keep Jess at arm’s length.
Jess’ confused and often silent husband, Sven, had given up trying to understand his wife. He struggled to understand her anger and hysteria over what seemed minor domestic transgressions. What little love they started out with, over two decades earlier, had now devolved into an all-out war. They slept in different rooms, with Sven mainly on the living room sofa. He made sure he left for work before 6am each weekday morning to avoid another insurrection from his bitter wife. Fate had another plan for the tall, Belgium husband, and in a moment of broken upset and misunderstanding, he found himself submerged in an affair at work. Sven didn’t start it. He was emotionally barren and incapable of reading the flirtatious actions of the married secretary in the office next door. Lana, with short straight hair and a slim figure, thought Sven was all she needed to cure her of life’s shortcomings. After she gave up hinting at sex with him, she steeled herself and fronted up with a direct proposition. She tapped on his office d
oor and walked in.
‘Sven, are you working late again tonight?’ she smiled.
He briefly glancing up at her in the doorway. He didn’t notice she had removed her pantyhose and unbuttoned two more of her white shirt buttons, exposing her generous cleavage. It was late on a Friday afternoon when most of the factory staff had already gone home for the day. He was the logistics manager, aloof and mysterious. Lana found his disconnectedness a challenge, and the more she thought about him, the more she flirted. When she understood she wasn’t getting anywhere, she spelled out her desires.
‘I know you’re alone a lot Sven and I am too. I was thinking…’ she trailed off as Sven hadn’t looked up again from the detailed spreadsheet sprawled next to his company laptop. She stepped up to his desk and tapped the edge. Sven immediately swung his chin upwards in a shocked response, blinking and trying to pigeon-hole her unusual action. She continued with her one-sided conversation.
‘We’re both consenting adults, and our spouses need never know.’
‘Never know what?’ Sven frowned, looking at her more intently. Something was different about her, but he couldn’t make out what had changed.
‘Well, hypothetically of course, if we were to have sex here in your office.’ There it was. Out for both to hear. She was sick of him not taking any notice of her. There was no mistaking what was on offer.
‘I… errr… I guess that’s okay if no one knows,’ he said, blinking and looking uncomfortable. He hadn’t had sex with his wife, Jess, in years, and the very thought was enough to give him a hard-on. ‘Do you mean right now?’ he asked, concerned he wouldn’t have enough time to finish the spreadsheet calculations.
She nodded. ‘Yeah, I sure do!’ She smiled reassuringly. ‘I mean RIGHT NOW!’
Sven sprung up from behind the desk and grabbed her shoulders, planting kisses over her face and lips, panting. He couldn’t believe his luck. Free sex and no one would find out.
In typical fashion, over several months, he had perfunctory sex in his office with Lana every Friday night after the factory closed early for the weekend. A regular poke at the end of each busy week was all he required. He was a man of rigid routine and Lana made no protest, so they continued their subterfuge without incident.
They never went out in the evenings on a date or made romantic arrangements for a dirty weekend away. It was just sex in Sven’s office once a week. Afterwards he zipped up his flies, straightened his hair, and went straight back to work in the hours until midnight, seated at his desk. Of course, all good things eventually come unstuck. It’s Rule forty-six in the Book of Life.
After an uneventful two years of this dissociated affair, Lana’s husband telephoned Jess at home early one evening to tell her about her husband’s activities outside their marital bed. Ironically, Jess went utterly berserk with wild screaming, and hysteria. She had enjoyed the pleasures of an adulterous relationship herself only a few years earlier and had conveyed the illicit details to Maddy during the three years the affair had continued.
Now Jess sat sipping coffee on Maddy’s sofa, unloading the details of her husband’s affair and what she had done about it. It was with some shock and disquiet that Maddy listened to Jess’s sobbing anger and hysterical reaction to the situation. Maddy wanted to say to her friend, ‘what’s good for the goose is equally good for the gander,’ but she could tell there was no way she would dare make light of the situation. Maddy decided uninterrupted silence while to her friend racked through all the dirty little tribulations was the wisest approach. Finally, Maddy had to speak.
‘But Jess,’ Maddy tried to counsel. ‘He’s done no worse than you have. It’s just that he is in complete ignorance and doesn’t know about you and Jim, so you haven’t had to face his fury.’
‘He’s a pig!’ Jess spat back. ‘That son-of-a-bitch is completely useless. He doesn’t know what love is!’
‘Yeah, yeah. I understand,’ soothed Maddy. ‘But he has problems. He’s emotionally stunted, so you can’t really expect more from him than what you already have. We’ve talked about this so many times.’
‘That bastard! Every freaking Friday and telling me he’s working late.’ The tears were drying on her cheeks, but the anger in her voice was red hot and rising.
Maddy was losing patience. ‘It is what it is. You can’t change it. You could be very French about it, darling, and simply pretend you know nothing?’
Jess looked downcast and let out a heavy sigh. ‘I know. I guess it’s too late for that.’
‘You need to decide if you want out or can work through things and maybe it’ll calm down.’
Jess pursed her lips together and rolled her tearful eyes at Maddy. ‘Really? What’s that thing about a broken vase always having cracks even when glued back together? But what choice do I have? I can’t afford to leave.’
‘Umm, I know,’ Maddy responded. They both sat silently. Maddy reached out to her friend and hugged her. Jess sobbed uncontrollably. Maddy remained still and continued to hold her, stroking her hair and shoulders. She whispered in Jess’s ear, ‘It’ll work out. Be patient, and things will be okay.’
But it wasn’t. Jess confessed she had driven over to Lana’s family home, in Lompoc, near Falcon Park in Vandenberg Village, while everyone was at work. The house, in a quiet suburban street with a tall hedge surrounding the ordinary-looking home, provided perfect cover for Jess to take revenge. She smashed a side window in this regular three-bedroom suburban house and climbed through the broken window frame.
Maddy had to control her reactions while Jess continued talking. Maddy wondered what Mila would have to say. She watched Jess’s red, angry face, her arms gesticulating as she described her actions in Lana’s home. Maddy looked down, feeling a mixture of remorse and upset that she, too, could cause a level of emotional turmoil for her best friend similar to this. But surely her love for Logan was something different, something more profound and had a lifelong history of commitment, however intermittently.
Once inside the house Jess had looked around, breathing hard and not sure what she wanted to do next. Her impulsive and overactive emotional response was working overtime. She needed to do something destructive. Something that would maximize the impact and teach that bitch a lesson.
She glanced outside, through the kitchen window and across the lawn into the yard. A tall timber slatted fence enclosed the garden, securing the family’s two Golden Retrievers playing with a ball along the boundary wall. They didn’t seem to notice the stranger inside their owner’s house. Jess opened the kitchen cupboards and found dog biscuits. She grabbed a handful and slowly opened the back door. The dogs happily ran towards her as she threw the cookies down and they quickly guzzled them up, wagging their tails enthusiastically. It was clear they were friendly. She walked outside and patted both dogs, gently talking to them. They both waited keenly for more dog biscuits. Greed. One of many other deadly sins, she thought.
Jess found two plastic shopping bags hanging on the inside of the kitchen pantry. ‘These won’t be single-use plastic!’ Jess chuckled to herself as she took them outside with another handful of tasty pedigree biscuits.
A shovel was leaning against the small garden shed. Jess picked it up and began lifting copious amounts of dog shit scattered across the lawn and shovelled it into the two supermarket bags. When they were almost too full to pick up, she carried the heavy bags into the house, closing the door behind her. Jess roughly emptied one bulging bag onto the white duvet covered king size bed in the master bedroom. The eye-watering stench made her gag a few times, and she walked out into the yard to catch her breath. She spread the other stinking bag of excrement over the beige and navy lounge suite. She ensured an even distribution with the help of the garden spade, looking away from the filth as she blindly patted her revenge into the cushions with the back of the shovel.
She could barely control her overwhelming sense of nausea. The place reeked. Jess’s eyes were watering, and she continued to gag at the stench, g
asping for breath. Grimly determined, Jess finished what she started. She walked around the house, closing all the windows before thoroughly washing her hands three times in the bathroom. Jess quickly left through the back door. With her heart racing, overcome with excitement, she hurried towards the front street, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose on a handful of toilet paper.
She imagined the shock and horror on that bitch’s face when she stepped inside her front door. Not that she had any idea what the bitch even looked like. But it was gratifying to know she would suffer too. She crouched behind the hedge, close to the low white painted front gate, and peered out into the quiet suburban street. No one was around. She quickly stood up and strode out onto the sidewalk, scurrying around the corner, and climbed back into her parked car.
Maddy put her hand on her Jess’s forearm. What could she say or do? She understood her friend’s turmoil, but also worried about her being caught.
‘Jess, are you absolutely sure no one saw you?’ Maddy asked, repressing her alarm.
‘No one,’ came Jess’s emphatic response.
‘What about security cameras on the neighbor’s house?’
Jess made steady eye contact with Maddy, and they both exchanged that moment when each knows what the other person is thinking. ‘I didn’t… think of that,’ Jess responded in a quiet, horrified voice.
CHAPTER 15
State of Play
When Maddy told Mila about Jess’s revenge the next day, Mila shrieked with laughter, imagining that Maddy was describing what Jess would like to undertake. A fantasy attack on her husband’s lover’s home. It took a few moments and some interrogation for Mila to understand that Jess had already savaged Lana’s property with wall-to-wall dog excrement. Mila stopped laughing.