To his surprise, Oscar heard himself laugh. He could relate to that. “Yes, of course,” he said. “Lyds, too.” He felt a bond forming where the ice had been.
Victor nodded vigorously. “I remember the first time she discovered I was fooling around. She went running to her folks. Her mother and sisters advised patience and tolerance, and even thought up excuses for me. It’s because we didn’t have a child, they said. Oh, they were sympathetic, but they told her they’d endured miseries more terrible than hers.”
“Typical,” Oscar made a dismissing gesture with his hand. Despite the remark’s lack of originality, Oscar felt it carried them both a long way toward reciprocal understanding.
“Right,” Victor agreed. “But it’s really more than that. You see, I don’t think her family would be so tolerant if I were an absolute monster.” His voice assumed a new softness. “I’ve been better than most husbands, if I may say so myself. Her career grew and flourished, and I never complained. Of course, I always came first. When I woke up in the morning, everything was ready. My cigarettes and the morning paper beside my coffee cup; it was enough to make me believe God was at work while I was asleep. When I came home after work, there was cold beer in the fridge, and a new pack of cigarettes and the evening paper on my coffee table.”
“Enviable,” Oscar said, quite sincerely, remembering how, in the first years of his marriage, every detail at home spoke of needs anticipated, of wishes met even before they had been expressed. But that seemed as distant as the Middle Ages.
“Yes, I guess you can say I really had no reason to complain. None, that is, until I learned about the other man.”
The words were so casually said, without roughness, without haste, that a few moments passed before their meaning hit Oscar like a vicious uppercut. He forced himself to look at his host, who smiled at him lazily.
Oscar’s heart pounded. He broke out in gooseflesh and cold sweat. He resisted an impulse to loosen his tie. The bastard, he thought. I should never have come. I should get out of here before he makes a fool of me. Yet he could not move. Victor’s eyes seemed to impale him. Finally, with what felt like an actual wrench of the muscles, Oscar dragged his eyes from Victor. He lighted another cigarette, both to blur the other man’s face and to hide his own. A poor wretch on a witness stand couldn’t have felt worse.
“How did you know?” Oscar finally found his voice, then knew right away it was the wrong thing to say. Never admit, Victor himself had told him once, even in the face of the strongest evidence, always deny.
“You’ll never believe it,” Victor now said, “but Emily herself told me. Not his identity, though. She only said there was another man. Although I had known it long before she deigned to tell me.”
Oscar held his breath to suppress a deep sigh, afraid to betray an overwhelming sense of relief.
“In fact,” Victor went on, “I should have suspected it right from the start, right from that Monday months ago when she said she had worked over the weekend, and came home with her sandals gritty with white sand.”
Their tryst in Boracay! The guy had more sense than he’d given him credit for. Fear gripped Oscar again, sending prickly chills along his nape and iciness in his gut. But Victor’s monotone gave him fresh assurance. Oscar took a big swig from his mug, and regained his self-possession almost at once; years of lawyering had trained him to quick and masterful control of face and voice.
“What would you do if Lyds had an affair?” Victor asked.
With a soundless laugh, Oscar made a gesture of slitting his throat with his forefinger. Victor nodded emphatically, like a teacher who got just the answer he wanted. Tilting back his chair, he said, “I’m glad you see it my way. My sisters wanted me to sue Emily, but no, I’d sooner die than make this public. So I did what I thought was best. I am your client now.”
“I—I’m not sure I know what you mean. If you don’t want to go to court…”
“Oh,” Victor waved away his protest. “Of course, it’s only to make sure. I’m very methodical. I don’t want to leave any loose ends.”
This cryptic remark drew from Oscar, in the state of his nerves, a flash of impatience, but he chose to wait. A shiver rippled through him, no longer caused by fear but by a sense that some mystery was about to unfold.
“I used ricin,” Victor said. “It’s deadlier than cobra venom, but virtually impossible to detect. An autopsy would attribute the death to a stroke, heart attack, or uremic failure. Emily’s family has a long history of heart ailment. She herself had a heart murmur. So I don’t even think we’d get as far as an autopsy. I’m almost sure you won’t have to work for me, but in case you have to, you won’t have a difficult time keeping me out of jail. I’ve made things easy for you. I’m the ideal client.”
The chanting next door ceased suddenly, as if stopped by a wave of a conductor’s arm. A vast silence followed, and Oscar could have sworn the intricate clockwork mechanism of the universe had ceased ticking. Victor consumed his beer in a series of big loud gulps, as though his long narrative had parched his throat.
“So, Counselor,” Victor’s voice cracked in a valiant effort at jollity. “Can I count on you? Do we have a gentlemen’s agreement?” He extended his hand for the handshake that would seal their pact. The look he gave his guest was uncertain, then, as Oscar accepted his hand in silent consent, Victor leaned back, his arms dropping to his sides, suddenly looking very, very tired.
Oscar looked at his new client with an air of indecision. His heart had begun behaving normally. He raised his mug for a big swig, but his arm stopped in mid-air, and he felt his blood congeal with what seemed like belated horror. He murmured a flurry of apologies to Victor, who didn’t seem to hear him, and dashed out of the house, straight out into the black, rain-smelling night.
Only later, much later, after Emily’s funeral, could Oscar admit to himself that his horror that night stemmed not from his client’s crime, but from the fact that he did not, could not, blame the poor guy.
X
By Karissa Chen
I slide the damp sponge over my ex-husband’s body and think about how close his heart is. His torso used to be barrel-like, but these days it more closely resembles a cage with latex stretched across its bars. I could poke a hole in his chest and reach in. In inches, his heart would be in my fist. It would be easy to rip it out, wave it in front of Paul’s eyes and shout, Finally!
One organ can hold so much weight. If I were a better artist, I would illustrate what I mean through a cartoon scale. On one end would be a pile of money, broken glasses, a pair of snotty lawyers, tears. On the other would be an ugly heart, purple and veiny, blood spurting out of an artery like a broken faucet. The two sides would be in balance.
When I touch my fingers to his chest, I can feel the beating. Paul’s so thin, I’m surprised his skin doesn’t pop with every pulse.
#
There is a tornado warning in effect for the next twenty-four hours in New York City. Strange, this city isn’t known for its tornadoes. I thought tornadoes only whipped across wide empty plains in the middle of the country. I was wrong. People are boarding up their houses, hiding in basements, or just retreating indoors and hoping for the best. I remarked to a friend that I thought everyone was overreacting. She told me it was because nobody ever expected tornadoes, and so nothing was bolted down. She was worried her roof might fly off. In the hospital, nurses constantly reassure me that the building is safe and sturdy.
#
I found out about Paul’s cancer through his best friend. “You should visit him,” Rob had said over the phone. He lives in Japan, and the line had emitted a faint echo that distracted me as I tried to find a response.
The less forgiving of my friends are angry with me for playing caretaker. But twenty years of marriage is no easy thing to forget. I am one of the few people who knows how sensitive the backs of his thighs are, for instance, and how easily they cramp. No nurse would handle them gently enough. Besides, it sa
ddens me to think of him dying alone.
#
One of the men I dated after Paul and I separated turned out to be a believer of apocalypse predictions. He kept referring to the 2012 doomsday, citing Nostradamus’s predictions as scripture. Every earthquake, hurricane, landslide, or tsunami became evidence that the world had indeed begun to collapse in on itself. He became very defensive when I told him I thought 2012 was Mayan and had nothing to do with Nostradamus. I wasn’t trying to be cheeky; I was honestly confused.
We dated for five months. Kookiness aside, he was actually quite sweet and intelligent. The sex was good, since one of the upsides to his fatalism was that he made love as if he truly believed we’d both be dead in the morning. After a while though, his obsession got to be too much. I worried he would rub off on me. I was forty-three and still holding out hope that I might find someone who would one day accompany me to an assisted living community.
#
As I circle the sponge over Paul’s shriveled gray nipples, it’s hard not to think about the countless number of times I’ve swirled my tongue around the exact same spot. His were extremely sensitive nipples, almost like a woman’s. It embarrassed him, so even though I knew he enjoyed it, he always pushed my face away after I’d lingered too long. Once, early in our relationship when we were still just dating, I joked that twisting a nipple was all he needed to reach orgasm. He flushed and stayed irritated at me for hours.
The sponging of his chest does nothing for him now. He just lies there with his eyes closed. His breathing is even, if shallow.
#
Everybody grows up familiar with some variety of disaster or other. In my case, it was earthquakes. I lived on a fault line in Los Angeles, and tremors were a frequent thing. When I was young enough, maybe around seven or eight, I looked forward to the small quakes. They gave me a feeling of being on a boat. I believed it would be exciting to have the ground crack open and watch our house part ways with the rest of the country. I had the thought that we might be able to row our house to India.
In New York they have blizzards. Before I moved here for college, I saw pictures of waist-high snow mounds and thought them terrifying. I wondered if it was possible to drown in snow. Or maybe it wouldn’t have been drowning, but suffocating. Or being crushed. It was hard to tell. I had never touched snow before coming out here. My first snowstorm was every bit as terrifying and magical as I imagined it would be.
The tornado is frightening because it is an unfamiliar disaster. What I know of tornadoes comes from Hollywood’s Twister, and even then, all I remember from the movie is a levitating cow. I talk to Paul about it, even though he mostly sleeps. I make a bad joke referencing The Wizard of Oz, a movie that scared him as a child in a way he’s never fully grown out of. “It’s the munchkins,” he told me once. “It’s how blasé they are in the face of the witch’s feet. I mean for god’s sakes, her shoes didn’t even fall off! How can they be so calm?”
When I think about how much I know about him, I cringe.
#
He had a mistress once, a woman who briefly became his wife after me. I know where she lives now, with her new husband and little boy. With the internet, nothing is that difficult to find. I thought about contacting her to tell her about Paul, but then thought better of it. She’d been the one to leave him, after all.
Her boy is five and looks like his mother. I’ve seen pictures. I asked Paul a few weeks ago, when he was on some analgesic painkiller, if that child was his. I’d heard somewhere that these drugs help loosen the tongue. But Paul just babbled incoherently about the problems we’d encountered having children. He began to cry. I had to look away when he started calling the miscarried babies by the names he’d given them.
#
I wish I were artistic. Then I could draw a picture of the storm lashing at the hospital windows to show people how intense it is. Or I could photograph Paul lying on his bed in black and white and title it, “Portrait of a Dying Man”. Or I could compose a song for Paul to hear in his sleep. But all I’m good at is watching and listening.
The nurse comes in and sees me staring. “Talk to him,” she says. “He can hear you.”
Can he? Has he ever?
#
As Paul and I were separating, he became very cruel. He stopped trying to hide where he’d been all night, and sometimes would not come home for days. He always smelled thickly of berries and sex when he walked through the door. If I happened to be in the living room, he’d look at me smugly before retreating into the second bedroom. My friends thought him a monster. “You should find a lover too,” they told me. I didn’t want a lover. But I didn’t want Paul either.
Long before I’d found out about the mistress, Paul and I had ceased sleeping together. I don’t know precisely when it was. These things never happen definitively. We’d done it less and less and it became less and less enjoyable for either of us, and then it was only the day that I’d read an email carelessly left open on his laptop that I realized I couldn’t remember the last time he and I had made love. It’s hard to blame him for this; we were both afraid of getting pregnant again.
Sometimes when Paul came home from one of his rendezvous, I would turn on the television quickly, pretending I hadn’t been staring out at the wraparound windows of our apartment. We had the tiniest sliver of the Hudson if you craned your head all the way to the left, and that’s where I was always looking. During this time, I often had dreams of waking up to a Manhattan engulfed in tsunamis, our twenty-seventh-floor apartment looking out at the horizon as if it were level to the sea. I never saw fish or boats in these dreams, but many, many bananas floated by.
#
After the divorce, I went back to work. Before Paul had made enough at the agency to support both of us, I’d been a kindergarten teacher, so that’s what I returned to. It was hard, having been out of it for so many years, but eventually I found a small private school that was willing to hire me. The children are exhausting. I had forgotten how loud a room with twenty small humans could be, how every area of the room became a threat. Pencils in noses, plastic cars as weapons, corners to hide under and cry. I come home tired, but this is a welcome thing. I sleep early, dreamlessly.
I asked the children the other day what their fears were, asked them to draw pictures. Most of the kids drew pictures of different monsters, of the dark. But one girl drew a picture of her parents lying dead with X’s in their eyes. She was the one whose older brother had been hurt in a bike accident. She was a quiet, serious girl, a little bit shy. I didn’t ask her to explain her drawing to the other kids.
#
My mother was fearful for me when I was growing up. She was a nurse, hyperaware of disease and acts of God, the two likeliest ways you could die. She tried to prevent either of these things as best she could. I was made to wash my hands constantly; I wasn’t allowed to go to school during flu outbreaks. She was wary of putting me in situations where accidents might occur; I wasn’t permitted to go swimming or ride my bike on the streets. But even then, she recognized that the world wasn’t controllable. Once, before she died, she remarked to me that the greatest sacrifice of motherhood wasn’t so much the time or effort or money it required to properly care for a child. It was the loss of your sanity. For the rest of your life, fear buzzed along the periphery of your thoughts, fear that your child might be shattered when you couldn’t see her, fear that today might be the day the earth swallowed her away.
What I never told her, and what I realized would hurt her immensely if she ever knew, was that I was more frightened that my child would be like me—the kind of girl who was scared of approaching trains not because they might hit her, but she found the idea of stepping onto the tracks beautiful.
#
The sky has turned a sickening green color. There was rain and then there wasn’t, but now I can see debris swirling furiously from the window of the room. Back in the early days of our relationship, Paul and I clasped our hands tightly when forced to
brave storms together. The joke was that if we were struck by lightning, at least we’d be fried simultaneously. It’s hard to believe we were ever so naïve and melodramatic, but we were young when we married, only twenty-three.
The hospital nurse comes in to check on Paul’s IV drip. “They’re reporting the twister is more like a violent funnel of water,” she says offhandedly.
I nod, though I don’t know how this is different than a hurricane.
“But don’t worry,” she says, even though I haven’t said I am, “there are backup generators. We won’t evacuate unless we have to.”
“Hear that?” I whisper to Paul when she leaves. His eyes are still closed. “There’s a small chance we’ll get to evacuate.”
Paul doesn’t look like Paul anymore. His hair’s so sparse. His cheeks are caverns. His skin is turning a boozy kind of yellow. This is what loss is, I realize; small, slow deaths, like shredding skin with paper cuts.
#
Paul complained that I was hard to know. He started saying this towards the middle of our marriage, somewhere between zygote two and zygote three. He got poetic on me, comparing my heart to a sea. I laughed whenever he said that, which made him angry. When I called his heart an open book, he told me I was being cliché. Besides, he said, that wasn’t even true.
It was true, though. Paul was a terrible liar. He couldn’t play poker because his glee and disappointment both shone through. His attempts to throw surprise parties were always a disaster. On the day he proposed, he couldn’t stop his fingers from dancing over his pocket every few minutes. He dragged me through Central Park, barely speaking, and when I saw his hands shaking as he pulled out dollar bills for the rowboats, I decided to put him out of his misery. “Yes,” I said once he’d started paddling the boat, and when he asked me what I was saying yes to, I said, “That question you’re too nervous to ask me.”
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 6