by Chris Mattix
She was sipping at a Bloody Mary and I ordered the same. I was so used to letting women make my decisions for me, I couldn’t see why it should be any different with Pat. Still, she crooked her full, red lips to one side and said, "You can get whatever you want."
"This is fine."
"You’re tense."
"Hannah," I said. It was all that needed saying.
"Divorce her."
"Pat—"
"I know."
"I can’t."
"I know."
I signaled the girl behind the counter for another one. Pat fired up a long, slim cigarette and exhaled like a femme fatale from some old noir movie. She certainly looked the part. Red hair, shoulder length, skin like alabaster. I didn’t have a type, and even if I did Patricia probably wouldn’t be it. But still, we fit.
A couple of weeks earlier I told her I loved her. Damnedest thing, didn’t mean to say it, even if I was thinking it. Of course, just thinking didn’t necessarily mean it was true. All the same, I said it, and she parroted it back to me. I loved her and she loved me. We were in love. And I was married to somebody else. What a bastard.
"I want you," Pat said, slipping off her sunglasses to gaze at the stream of blue-gray smoke spilling up from her cigarette’s ember.
I checked my watch, said, "I’ll have to get back."
"I mean you, all of you. No more ‘swordfish.’"
It was a fun enough game, but she was getting tired of games. I guess I was too. I clenched my jaw and thought about the blonde from the party. My eyes watered, and Pat took that to mean I was reacting to our situation. She touched my hand and smiled sadly.
"What are we going to do?" she asked. Make a decision for once in your life. Put your goddamn foot down.
I said, "I don’t know, Pat."
4
At night they were always quiet. The day wore them out, wore them down. The voice was whittled down to a scratchy whisper, the muscles didn’t want to obey the commands to keep struggling, keep trying. Nevertheless, I never slept.
For the longest time I lay in bed, flat on my back with my arms crossed on top of the sheets, my eyes wide open. Listening to Hannah breathe. She never snored, but her sleep-breath was whistley, soft as cotton. When the digital clock hit two in the morning, it is as if I could hear it turn over, a sequence of heavy locks like the unleashing of a dam. Hannah whistled on. I got out of bed, twisted my shoulders, and pulled a tee shirt down over my torso.
My objective was a glass of water and a slice of toast. I stared at the toaster oven while the heating coil went lava red and the bread yellow, then brown. I slathered two slices with peanut butter and nibbled them at the kitchen table, swallowing water when it got too thick in my throat. Across the table from me was the basement door, as plain and unassuming as ever, apart from the steel lock keeping the status quo. Beyond it, down the uncarpeted steps, around the corner and into the paneled, 1970s room some previous owner used for his "man time," a blonde woman waited for it all to start up again. I didn’t even know her name.
I was willing to bet she knew mine.
Halfway through the second piece of toast I gave up on it and went for a glass of milk. The jug was hiding behind a metal bowl of ground beef mixed with onions and breadcrumbs, a taut layer of plastic wrap overtop. I pulled the milk out, my mind flexing hazily on the meat; tomorrow’s supper, no doubt. Hannah was the house chef; she would never have dreamed of putting anything I prepared in her mouth.
I drank straight from the jug—what my wife didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her—and returned it to the fridge, careful to position it just like I found it. My gaze lingered on the ground beef a second longer before I closed the door.
An idea was percolating.
5
Patricia wasn’t the first. Though now, in the fullness of time, I was coming to love Pat—actually love her—the first was what some people might call a fling. An error in judgment. A wild woman in a bar, flitting around me like a housefly, my subconscious screeching at me to get the hell out of there before I made a mess of things. I didn’t listen. I made the mess.
Her name doesn’t matter. I’ve tried to forget it and, for the most part, I’ve convinced myself that I have. I am quite certain that it is engraved on her grave marker, that she probably had a sweet middle name like Rose or Eve, and that even now, all these years later, somebody still comes around with fresh flowers once a month. It’s a nice thought. No consolation, but nice.
In the wake of my error, I learned quickly just how magnificent a detective Hannah was when she needed to be. Perhaps a lot of wives possess this particular set of skills, at least the betrayed ones. Men are what they are, and what they are often isn’t very good. Some wives know that going in, I suppose. Hannah sure as shit did. So, when she came home from her weekend in Little Rock (the old homestead), her bloodhound nose started to flare before the door squeaked shut behind her. Sex is like blood to a detective wife: no matter how hard you try to scrub it all away, you can never eliminate all the evidence. It remains in a twitch of the face, a dodged touch, a renewed vigor, a guilty confidence. My eyes could not connect, hold true and steady and meet her gaze head on. There were lies behind my eyes, and to look into them was to see my crime as if through a glass, and not so darkly. She with her family, sipping iced tea on the porch like the good old days, and me in room 325 of the Lonestar Motor Lodge, rutting between gray sheets like a hog searching out rotting corncobs in the mud. With her. Whatever her name was. Didn’t matter—she was dead, and I might as well have killed her myself.
I could practically hear the screams clear across town, sitting in my cubicle, knowing how soon her lithe, golden-brown body would quit on her. Knowing that I had lured her into that web, asked her to meet me one more time.
Jackie was her name. I wished I didn’t know it.
6
Pat lit a cigarette and blew the smoke straight up at the ceiling. She was unabashedly naked, lying on top of the comforter, and so was I. A small, dull-blue tattoo of a butterfly hovered at her left hip, a youthful indiscretion I hardly noticed anymore. Both of us had other lives, before and even now, that had nothing to do with what we had between us. That pervading sense that I was taking part in some manner of international espionage rarely settled in until I was on my way back to the office, or home. With Pat, I was strangely, stupidly calm.
My thoughts were not even invaded by the young woman in my basement. She had no place here, in Pat’s bedroom, with me.
But something did, a vague notion tugging at my brain and ruining the afterglow. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stepped into my trousers. Pat tamped her cigarette out in the jar lid on her nightstand and wrinkled her nose.
"There’s still time," she said softly. "It’s only a quarter ‘til."
I was already buttoning my pants when I realized my drawers were bunched up on the carpet.
"Damn."
"This doesn’t sound good."
"It’s just something I have to do, before I have to get back."
"All right."
She turned on her side, watching me get my clothes situated like I’d never gotten dressed before. There was a dappling of sweat on her upper lip that made me stumble.
"It’s nothing," I said. "An errand."
She whispered my name as I peered under the bed in search of my tie. It was lime-green, a random gift from Hannah for no reason in particular. She sometimes did kind things like that. I favored that tie to remind myself of it.
"Maybe," she began, but her voice trailed off. She swallowed, pursed her lips.
I smoothed out my shirt, realized I was holding my breath. I let it out with a question: "What is it?"
"Maybe I can see you this weekend," she said, twisting her mouth up to one side like an awkward kid, asking me out for the first time.
The answer, of course, was I can’t, you know I can’t, it’s impossible, but instead I said, "I’ll see what I can do."
For once, I wasn
’t lying.
7
The contraband was in my briefcase by the front door, and I could have sworn its odor filled the entire house. I wore my best poker face, a skill learned over time by liars who want to keep on lying, the peace of a man who did not, in fact, have a veritable ticking time bomb just a few yards away. My wife kissed me on the lips, a dry peck, and asked me how my day was. Practiced sitcom dialogue. Did everybody engage in charades like this at home, or only when the tension was so taut the backs of their necks tingled?
"Joe Allen called," she informed me, her voice sing-songy, victorious. I could tell she’d been busy. "He and Kathy are doing a sort of potluck thing next Friday. Wanted to know if we were interested."
"What did you tell him?"
"I said I’d ask you."
I absently poked at a yellow onion on the kitchen counter. Next to it sat the metal bowl from the refrigerator, the plastic wrap taken away and the red-brown meat warming to room temperature.
"Let me think about it," I said, loosening my tie, which felt hot in my hands. Then, as if it only just occurred to me: "Damn, forgot to grab the mail on my way in. Be right back."
It wasn’t Pat in my mind during the long walk up the driveway to the mailbox at the curb, nor even her (Jackie). They might as well have occupied my thoughts, because this—all of this, what I was doing—concerned them every bit as much, but she was gone and Pat was safe in the fiction that what we had was a regular, garden variety extramarital affair. It was Joe and Kathy’s friend (for Christ’s sake, did they even know she was missing?) who, for all I knew, was already attracting flies in the basement or whatever landfill my beautiful bride selected for her final resting place. A stranger to me, just some girl who laughed at a silly man’s wine snafu and doomed herself in the process. Sorry, lady. I should have worn a sign around my neck: DON’T TALK TO ME ON PAIN OF DEATH.
Bills, a circular, a postcard from some plastic-faced car salesman running for city council. Nothing more in the mailbox, apart from the black widow I invented to set my evening in motion. I dropped the mail on the ground and marched breathlessly back to the house. There was no stopping this now.
Naturally, Hannah furrowed her brow upon hearing my breathless explanation of the terror in the mailbox, that familiar Are you kidding me? expression. It was supposed to be the other way around. I was disappointing her again.
"I’ll take care of it tomorrow," was what she said. No dice.
"I left the mail."
"It can wait."
"I’d really rather—"
She screamed my name: a shrill, up-from-the-soul scream that made my eyes water. There was a long minute that stretched by after that, her shriek still tearing through my ears, during which I watched her jaw tremble and eyes glow hatefully.
"I put up with a lot, you know," she said, each word a chore to pass through clenched teeth. "You—hurt—me, you know."
I couldn’t determine if she meant it in the past tense or the present. Some verbs are funny that way.
"I don’t mean—"
"Don’t."
"It’s just the spider, I—"
"Don’t."
I breathed a sigh and fixed my eyes on the food spread out between us, anything to keep from meeting her glare.
"It’s like having a dog with a bladder problem," she went on, shaking her head. "So many messes, and nobody to clean them up but me. Sometimes I get tired of your messes, do you know that? Sometimes I wish you’d just quit pissing on the goddamn floor."
I nodded, submissive and contrite. Hannah sucked a long, angry breath into her lungs and then stomped past me, disappeared into the little hall leading to the garage. She was going after the black widow. I had two minutes at most.
Two long strides returned me to my briefcase by the door, from which I extracted my weapon of choice: a single, medium sized banana, overly ripe. Twelve years I’d known my wife, and if there was one thing that gave her chills the way I’d acted about my imaginary spider, it was her deep-seated terror of her one and only deadly allergy. Her throat, I recalled her telling me while I rapidly peeled the fruit and mashed it hard into the ground beef, would close shut in a matter of minutes, completely shutting off her air supply. Anaphylactic shock, I supposed; a death sentence if she wasn’t administered an antihistamine or broncho-dilator immediately. Easy-peasey, and lingering darkly at the back of my mind for years by then. My secret weapon. I kneaded the hell out of the banana-infused beef until every trace of the fruit’s color was absorbed. The peel I hurled out the kitchen window in the seconds before immersing my hands in hot water from the sink, scrubbing the offending material away with a wire brush. Finally, just as I caught sight of Hannah stomping back down the driveway, angrier than ever, I grabbed a can of air freshener from beneath the sink and sprayed it liberally to mask the scent of my crime. Vanilla bean, allegedly. It smelled awful.
"It was gone," she growled upon returning inside. "If it was ever there in the first place."
"It was there."
"Well it’s not there now."
I was sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the blood thumping in my ears. Hannah slammed the mail down in front of me and huffed for the counter when she stopped, mid-step, and sniffed at the air like a dog.
"The hell did you spray that crap for?"
"I, uh…"
"Never mind. Jesus, you men."
She frowned and went back to work on supper. My work was done thanks to an imaginary spider and, now, an imaginary fart. Twenty minutes later we were seated across from each other with tacos on our respective plates. Did I taste the banana in the beef? I imagined I did, but would I have recognized it if I hadn’t known it was there?
Hannah didn’t.
Killing one’s wife is a tense business, as it happens. She sipped at her tea and picked at the lettuce and shredded cheese, like a bird. Normal people shoved the whole damn thing in their mouth and bit down. But Hannah wasn’t normal people.
I was working on my second taco by the time she finally stopped picking and crunched into the shell, meat and all. Just then, a whimper wafted up from the basement. Hannah’s eyes widened, connected with mine. Up until that minute, I had no idea if the woman down there was still alive. Now I knew she was. I swallowed. Hannah did, too.
And she made a face. Her eyebrows came together and she puckered her mouth. She glanced down at the stuffed taco shell in her hand, and then up at me. I tried to smile. I think it ended up looking like a grimace. Next thing I knew, she was knocking her chair back with the backs of her knees and clawing at her neck. Sweat beaded on her forehead and she started to wheeze. I gaped like an idiot, an idiot who had no idea what could possibly be the matter.
It was working. My plan to murder my wife was working.
I said, "Hannah? Hannah, what’s wrong?"
She swept her arm out and knocked the Waterford vase off the counter. It shattered against the linoleum floor and she staggered away from it, into the living room. I followed, pawing at her, faux-concerned.
"Talk to me, Hannah."
She collapsed onto the couch and undid the top few buttons of her blouse. Her face and neck had gone blotchy, her eyes leaked tears. It happened just as quickly as she’d told me, all those years ago. I wondered if she’d sussed out the why of it. I decided it didn’t matter.
"I’m going to get you something," I lied. "Try to stay calm."
I bolted from the room, but I didn’t head for the medicine cabinet. Instead, I went straight for her purse, right by where I’d dropped my briefcase. Inside, I found her keys, and I quickly sorted through them for the one I needed. The one that unlocked the basement door.
8
She wasn’t dead, but she was close to it. Gone was the attractive blonde woman in the sheer summer dress from Joe and Kathy’s party—replacing her was a sunken-faced woman in her underwear, spattered with dirt and blood and sweat, her wrists cuffed behind her back and connected by a length of steel cable to a ring bolted into the
wall. The skin on her arms and shoulders was striped with deep lacerations, crusted over with new scabs. Some of her hair had been torn out in clumps, leaving pink spots of bald flesh all over her scalp. When she saw me, she gasped and scrambled backwards until she was up against the paneled wall. The carpet was spotted with blood. I smelled her urine and didn’t see anything resembling a chamber pot. Good old Hannah.
"I’m not going to hurt you," I said, because it seemed like the right thing to say. The woman only sobbed in reply.
I asked her what her name was, and she whispered, "Jennifer."
For a fraction of a second I thought she was going to say Jackie, the name I wished I did not know, and my stomach lurched. I reminded myself that it was all over now, all this madness, and that Jennifer was going to be all right.
"She’s dead," I said as matter-of-factly as I could while flipping through through the keys, so many damn keys, looking for the one that might unlock the handcuffs. "My wife, she’s dead."
It felt good, saying it. I wasn’t at all sure that it would—I was somehow afraid that it would hurt, that despite everything, the vocalization of what I had done would undo me too. But it didn’t. It felt terrific.
Jennifer’s eyes were swollen and red, her face shiny with grime and tears. She muttered, "Help me."
"I’m sorry," I said.
It wasn’t enough.
9
Jackie, not Jennifer, died on the fusty basement carpet in nothing but a filthy tee shirt several sizes too big for her. The shirt was mine: an old Arkansas Razorbacks championship tee I used to mow the lawn in. It ended up at Jackie’s apartment, where Hannah found it with my extramarital fling packaged snugly inside. I guessed it had some kind of significance for her, the other woman wearing her husband’s treasured shirt, so Jackie got to die in it.
