Imaginary Friends

by John Marco

  Her eyes burned with the fierce, tiny intensity of the LEDs on the new flexible flashlight he’d gotten the week before at the Tool Shed.

  “And just what are you implying, tubbo? That I’m some kind of tramp?” Her hip was thrust to one side and her newly manicured fingers were drumming at the edge where her brightly flowered sundress met the sexy tan of her surprisingly toned legs.

  “Just . . . uh . . . just that it looks like that gym membership is paying off. You must be enjoying it.” He tried desperately to change the subject from her appearance. “Met any exercise buddies, there?”

  Her fingers stopped drumming, the pearlescent dawn rose of her nails providing a beautiful contrast to her dark, rich skin tone. “Don’t do this, Michael. Don’t let your imagination run wild. You always do this.”

  Earlier. He had to go earlier, obviously. What did he always do?

  Jealousy? Was that what she meant?

  He wasn’t jealous. He was just protective of her, of his relationship with her. After all, she had dated a lot more than he had in college. A lot more. She was pretty and vivacious and attractive and, well, experienced. And he was portly and plain and . . . well . . . not so experienced.

  She was chased and he was chaste.

  A little voice inside his head had warned him, even then, that it couldn’t last, that she would get bored with him, would leave him sooner or later (and most likely sooner) for someone smoother, better looking, better dressed, more exciting. Someone more virile, more worldly-wise, someone sexier than him.

  Kip, his best friend, had told him so point blank once when he and Jen were on a double date with Kip and Barb and the women had trekked off to the powder room.

  “You’ve got to snap her up, Mike,” Kip said, as he ogled the two women as they headed, their shapely asses swaying in unison, across the restaurant toward the restrooms. “There’s just too much advertising going on for another buyer not to show up soon, real soon.”

  Michael had always been concerned about losing Jen, but what Kip said put him on edge. Michael and Jen had their first big blow-up only ten days later . . . ten nights later, to be more precise . . . when Jen had come back to the apartment they were sharing in the wee hours after an alleged girls night out with Barb.

  The receipt had fallen out of the front pocket of her silk blouse, the one she always wore with her tight, hip hugger jeans on nights out with Barb, the one that always showed tiny strain wrinkles at the button hole two holes below where the blouse was buttoned up to when she came home in the middle of the night. The receipt was from some dance club in the city. Aside from evidencing a prodigious thirst for chocolate martinis and an overly generous approach to tipping, the receipt came with a message. “It was fantastic servicing you, Duane.”

  When he looked up from the receipt, she was posed, backlit, leaning against the doorjamb in the doorway to the bathroom, wearing nothing but her bra and panties. Gorgeous. Sexy. Alluring. Obviously trying to seduce him, to distract him, to fool him into forgetting where she had been and what she had been doing.

  He refused to fall for it. “Who’s Duane?” he said with a sneer that washed away any trace of romance from the moment, from the room, from their life together.

  She stiffened immediately and clutched one arm to the opposite shoulder, covering her bosom as she reached to the nearby hamper for her cotton night-dress. “Who?”

  “Duane.” He lifted the receipt to face her and pointed to it in the pale glow of the nightlight. “The guy who has been servicing you.”

  “Jesus, Michael, you’re imagining things.” She plunked herself down on the bed, her back to him. “Go to sleep.”

  But he didn’t go to sleep. He couldn’t let it go. And they had fought for hours, until she had stormed off in her night clothes, grabbing her keys, her laptop, and her purse, to spend the weekend at Barb’s. Or at least that’s what she said.

  The voice inside his head didn’t believe her. It said that she was going to Duane’s, to screw him again, and that if Michael didn’t watch out, he would lose her forever.

  The next day he called her and begged her forgiveness, groveling, blaming himself. It was just that she was so beautiful and sexy, he couldn’t imagine why she was living with him. And she came back to him and they made love in the moonlight and all was good.

  He proposed three weeks later near a small, unnamed waterfall, during a weekend getaway hiking trip in their favorite nature preserve downstate. They were married the next summer, just six weeks after their best friends, Kip and Barb. All their friends and family were there. Joe and Bonnie and Ted from the dorm, Kela and Brittany from the women’s field hockey team, Uncle Fred and Aunt Mary on his side of the family, Jen’s numerous relatives, and all the rest, all toasting them and kissing them and shaking hands in congratulations.

  They bought a house in a sleepy suburb near where Kip and Barb had settled and started their own version of the American dream. And for awhile, they were happy.

  But it didn’t last. Soon the voice in his head began asking questions and Michael didn’t like the answers.

  There was nothing he could pin down at first, just that she was more sullen and moody than a new bride should be. She also spent a lot of time with Barb, or so she said. And then, shortly after their first anniversary, he began to notice other things.

  She seemed to get less done around the house during the day, while he was at work in the city running actuarial spreadsheets.

  The number of local calls per month on the phone bill crept higher and higher—not really a financial issue, given their billing plan—but, still he noticed.

  She joined a gym and started to pay particular attention to her appearance, dropping all the way to her wedding weight after a year of adding on the pounds. That one had led to the fight he had just been thinking about.

  There were occasional hang-ups when he would answer the phone and conversations that seemed cut short when he arrived home.

  She played the “credit card game” whenever she went to lunch with her girlfriends, paying for the group with her credit card and collecting cash from the others so “she wouldn’t have to go to the bank so often,” or so she said. He had noticed the charges, but, of course, had no idea where she actually spent the cash, the untraceable cash, afterwards.

  He also noticed one evening that during the day she had used the shredder he had in his home office. They only used it for annoying preapproved credit card come-ons and for Michael’s business documents, so that he could destroy spreadsheets from the company when he was working from home. She said that he must have left it on from the night before, but he was too environmentally conscious to ever have done something like that. It was a waste of power.

  Things were strained. They grew apart. And everyone noticed. They rarely went out with Kip and Barb anymore. Jen’s old friends from the field hockey team never chit-chatted with him anymore before they asked him to hand the phone over to Jen. The last time Michael had tried to organize a poker night with the gang from the dorm, there weren’t enough takers to pull it off.

  It all hit the fan when he came home early one Friday afternoon because of the flu and found her on the computer in his home office, wearing not very much and looking flushed.

  “What the hell is going on?” he demanded as she flipped off the unit.

  “Jesus, you startled me, Mike.” She stood up from the desk and turned to him before continuing. “I left my laptop at Barb’s and realized during my shower after my Pilates class that I hadn’t reserved a location for the field hockey team’s booster club award luncheon, like I promised Kela. I figured I would do it before I forgot.” Her tone had started out ragged, but firmed up as she progressed in her tale. “What are you doing home? You look awful.” She started to move toward him, but he backed away.

  “You were online with him, weren’t you?” Michael was feverish and not just from the flu.

  “Who?”

  “Duane. You were having online sex with y
our lover, Duane, weren’t you?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’re delirious, Mike. Duane is a figment of your deranged, and, quite frankly, filthy imagination. He doesn’t exist. I was searching for banquet facilities.”

  “Then why did you shut off the computer when I came in?”

  “I know you don’t like it when I use your work computer. You’re always fussing about viruses and worms and Trojan horses, whatever those are. But I couldn’t use my laptop because I forgot it at Barb’s.”

  “Bull,” he said, advancing on her. “You are nothing but . . .” She slapped him, hard, with all the force that a former field hockey forward could muster, one long fingernail slicing into his cheek. He stopped cold, reaching up to feel the hot blood on his clammy face. He never could stand the sight of blood.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” he mumbled as he lurched to the bathroom to vomit.

  She wasn’t there when he came back out.

  He gave a primal scream of frustration and pounded the door to the garage, his blood pressure spiking and causing the scratch on his face to flow freely. Flecks of crimson spattered the white door and wall. He cursed both Jen’s behavior and his response, then leaned against the cool door, the pressure against his cheek stemming the flow of blood, and simply wailed. Then he pulled himself together, held down his bile, and fetched some bleach, cleaning the blood off the flat white of the door and wall. Afterwards, woozy from the fumes and the flu, he collapsed down on the couch with the remote. He was asleep before Oprah introduced her second guest. The next thing he knew, he was waking up as the late news was signing off.

  Jen wasn’t home yet and he didn’t know if she was coming home.

  He was still surprisingly tired—physically weary as if he had been working out. Emotions could do that, he guessed. He trundled into the bedroom and cried himself back to sleep.

  Michael did his best to remain calm the next morning when Jen still hadn’t returned or called, but by midmorning he had lost his composure, pacing frantically, then pawing through credit card receipts for some clue as to where she might be. When he found nothing, he started to search for the receipt she had brought back that time from the club, the one with the note from Duane. Maybe he could call the club or there was a code on it that he could ask the manager about which would identify who “serviced” her. And then he could find where Duane lived. Three hours later, the house was a mess, his flu fever had spiked to a hundred and two, and his hatred of Duane was still climbing.

  But no Jen. And no clues.

  On Sunday morning, he called the gym, thinking that Jen might still work out, no matter where she was staying. The idiot staff member who answered refused at first to check to see if Jen was there, but when Michael became more belligerent, the guy finally put down the phone and made the rounds. Or at least that’s what he claimed when he picked the phone back up, reporting in bored tones that nobody responded when he said there was a call for someone named Jen. Michael didn’t believe him and threw a tantrum, berating the clerk’s nonchalance, demanding to know the address of every club member named Duane, and asking in increasingly frantic tones how often Jen came to the gym, who she exercised with, and whether she ever left with anybody. The clerk refused to answer him and finally hung up on him when Michael started to curse.

  Michael didn’t flinch at demanding information about his wife from strangers, but it galled him to have to ask their friends about her. But, eventually, he could not think of anything else to do. Finally, on Sunday evening, more than two days after Jen left, Michael called Barb, admitting he and Jen had been fighting and asking if she’d seen Jen, perhaps when she had come over to retrieve her laptop. But Barb claimed not to have seen Jen and not to have her laptop. He hung up without thanking Barb and retreated back to the bed, where he slept fitfully.

  Finally, on the third day, he rose again from the dead sleep of the emotionally drained and shuffled back to the phone. He notified work that he was taking a sick day. Only then did he call the police to report his wife missing.

  Two detectives came over straightaway. Michael implored them to search for his wife, but they seemed more interested in the scratch on his face, on the details of his and Jen’s last encounter, and on the reasons he had delayed for so long in calling the authorities. He told them everything he knew, or that he thought he knew, about her lover, Duane, but they kept explaining that if she had simply run off with another man, that wasn’t a police matter. But even as they said that, he saw them glancing around at the disarray of the house, sniffing the faint chlorine odor than still hung near the door to the garage, and making notes in small, spiral-bound pads.

  It probably didn’t help when he started raving at them, insisting that Duane had kidnapped Jen, had stolen her, and had to be stopped, had to be found. They called into the station and arranged a trace on Jen’s credit cards and cell phone usage. Then, they left to talk to Barb and others of Jen’s friends. When they returned later that day, they said no one they talked to had ever heard of Duane. Still, they were worried that Jen had fallen victim to foul play. There was no activity on Jen’s credit cards or phone since Friday midday, which troubled them. So they agreed to begin a search, starting with the nearby forest preserve and lake.

  Michael’s and Jen’s friends and families, their entire neighborhood, two Boy Scout troops, and most of the congregation of the church they had been married in, but rarely attended, showed up for the search. It was a big story on the local television news that night and front page the next day in both the paper in their suburb and in the big city daily.

  Michael made a plea for Jen’s safe return at the news conference kicking off the search, holding up a 5” X 7”’ wedding photo, but as a “person of interest” he wasn’t allowed to help look with the others, lest he contaminate the crime scene or lead the searchers astray. He also wasn’t allowed back into their home, as police had begun carting away bags full of alleged evidence. So, Michael alternated between the police station and a local motel. He had asked Kip if he could stay with him and Barb, but Kip had said no. He had tried to talk to his old friend, to explain what had happened, but Kip had begged off the call. Michael thought he had heard Barb in the background yelling for Kip to hang up.

  Michael was a man alone. Kela and Brittany and Bonnie and Joe and Ted all joined the search, but they didn’t return Michael’s calls. His aunt and uncle were too overwhelmed with concern to even talk with him, and Jen’s family obviously blamed him for her disappearance. No one from their church volunteered any casseroles for him, although they brought sandwiches and lemonade for the search teams. Beverly, from the HR department at work, called to say that Michael could use up his accumulated vacation and sick days and that they didn’t expect to see him at work for “the duration.”

  There was nothing he could do to help. He had been warned not to leave the county. The two guys wearing suits inside the gray Ford Taurus that constantly seemed to be hanging around his motel probably would have stopped him if he tried, so he couldn’t go into the city to the bars and dance clubs that Jen and Barb used to frequent to search for Duane. Besides, his car was being dismantled by the local town’s CSI wannabes. His computer had been bagged and taken and Jen’s laptop was still missing, so he couldn’t do anything through the internet to find her—he didn’t relish using a library or cafe computer to try to track Jen and Duane, not with Channel 6 looking over his shoulder. And, of course, he was still forbidden to join the volunteer groups, which had widened their search area and increased their number as word of “the missing suburban newlywed” was trumpeted by the media and their minions.

  He called Jen’s gym again from the hotel, to see if he could pry any information out of a different clerk. But he got the same guy, who freaked out when he made the connection with what was now a constant story on the cable networks favored by the clientele working up a sweat on the myriad treadmills and stair-climbers at the gym. The guy hung up, then blabbed, first to the media and then
to the cops, about how Michael had called over the weekend, stressed out and angry, stalking Jen or maybe trying to create some kind of half-assed alibi. And that’s when Michael realized that the situation had spun out of control, that the damned media would say what they wanted, and that he wasn’t going to crack the case for the police. He wasn’t Columbo or Magnum or even Veronica Mars.

  All he knew was that he was innocent, and he would have to have faith in the system.

  He tried to relax by using the overheated and over-chlorinated hot tub at the motel. The two women already there when he arrived left hurriedly almost as soon as he got in, though, and the jets were too weak to ease the tension across his shoulder blades. The only result of the effort to ease his aching back was that he was greeted with pictures two days later in a national newsweekly with the caption “Hubby parties with unidentified women while search for missing wife continues.” The article, which referred to him repeatedly as “the chief suspect” in his wife’s sinister disappearance, contained anonymous quotes about his life and his relationship with Jen that he knew had to have come from Kip and a few, even more devastating ones, that he knew had come from Barb. “Irrational and psychotic loser” was one of the nicer ones.

  The news media camped out at the motel where he was staying. At first he thought the management would demand that he leave, but apparently the paparazzi were booking so many rooms, especially near his, that he was considered a plus from a business perspective. He found two “journalists” picking through his trash in the maid’s cart one day, so he stopped letting her in to clean.

  He became deeply depressed, lying in the sweat-stained sheets of the motel bed, watching news coverage about the case. As the search dragged on, the media spent less time interviewing Boy Scouts who had combed the nearby corn fields and more and more time dissecting Michael’s life. He had not dated much before marriage and was considered an “odd pick” for a husband by Jen’s friends. He was a loner, a loser, a possessive and jealous tyrant. He had a temper.