Love Is Red

by Sophie Jaff

  “Wow. Really?” He ignores my sarcasm. Just as well. I’m shaken. I don’t really mean it but I’m scared to hear what he might tell me.

  “So I went about convincing her. It took a year and a half but I wore her down. She’d been doing it for me, after all, I guess. The next time I proposed she said yes and that was that.

  “Everyone was thrilled. Everyone said, It’s about time! Fuck, people are stupid. At least Sara was happy, though. She was happy. I had convinced her and she really loved me.” He says this without self-consciousness. “She was up to her ears in wedding plans and I was content to let her do everything. I was working hard, building a business. I had a million excuses. Of course, I was hiding out.”

  Hiding out. I take a moment to look around the room. I guess I can relate.

  “It was the vows that got me. Sara had a thing about those stupid vows. I can see her now, hair up in a pony, big T-shirt, looking at me, saying, ‘I don’t want to bug you, babe, but how’s it going with the vows? Have you started your vows yet? How are they coming along?’”

  I roll back to look at him. His voice is rising but I don’t think he’s aware of this.

  “Finally I had to. We were going to practice with David the next day. He was going to officiate.

  “So I sat down. I couldn’t think of what to say. I was staring at a blank screen. Writer’s block. So I thought, I’ll start by writing about how we met. So I did that. Then it got a little easier and I kept writing, and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I had gotten into a kind of zone, I guess, and I couldn’t stop. It was like coding. Then my phone rang and I looked up. I had been sitting there for three hours.”

  Even now, three years later, telling this story in a dark bedroom, he sounds genuinely amazed.

  “I got up and took the call; then I ran out, went to the gym, picked up some milk, that type of shit. When I got back I saw there was a blue Post-it note from Sara on my computer screen.”

  Now he’s slowed down. Against my will, I’m listening.

  “She loved those damned Post-its. She was using them to coordinate the wedding. They were all over the apartment like insane neon butterflies. So I read it. It was only three words.”

  “What does it say?” I’m thinking “I love you.”

  “‘We should talk.’”

  I don’t say anything but I grimace.

  Sael seems to sense this because he answers just as if I had said something.

  “Yeah, it’s the universal way of saying, ‘You’re in deep shit.’ So I plopped down at my computer to read over my vow essay. It starts well, but as I keep reading . . .”

  “It was bad?”

  “Worse. It was honest, but brutally honest. Like, how I loved her but I wasn’t in love with her and how I felt like a fraud and a shit and I didn’t know what to do. The ultimate Dear John. And you want to know what the worst thing was?”

  Why do I always end up feeling sorry for Sael’s women? “There’s a worse thing?”

  I can feel the bed rock. His shoulders are shaking. He’s weeping. But then his head goes up. And I see that he’s laughing now.

  “She had fucking corrected it!”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, she had edited it, put in punctuation, everything. The man she’s going to marry in under three weeks has just written a long, insanely cruel letter saying that he doesn’t love her, and she corrects his punctuation and his grammar.”

  There is something so fantastically ballsy and classy about this that despite everything we are briefly united in mutual admiration. “She sounds amazing.”

  “She was.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went in there and talked with her.”

  “You did?”

  He laughs. The sound of his self-disgust is awful. “Of course not. I went right back out and got shit-faced at a dive bar.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” he says matter-of-factly and with some relish. “This is the story where you find out that I’m a useless, cowardly, pathetic, sack-of-shit excuse for a human being.” He pauses. “Well, you think that anyway, but this is the proof.

  “I can’t remember how I got home. I passed out on the couch. When I woke it was morning. I went to our bedroom, feeling like death, but she wasn’t there. For a moment I thought, Well, that’s it, she’s left me. Then I realized that day was her early-morning yoga class. I’d dodged another bullet.

  “I spent most of the morning throwing up. The curse of cheap beer, crappy vodka. Lay on the bed with my eyes closed, going in and out of sleep. Waiting for Sara, waiting for her to come home.

  “My phone rang at about quarter to twelve.”

  He falls quiet.

  I wait.

  Finally he says, so low that I barely hear him, “Do you know what my first thought was when they told me that Sara had been hit by a car?”

  I don’t think I want to hear this. I say nothing. It doesn’t matter. He’s going to tell me.

  “I thought, Thank God.” His voice is horribly flat. “I thought, Thank God, because, Katherine, I dodged a bullet. Thank God that my fiancée was dead. Thank God because we wouldn’t be having ‘the talk’ after all.”

  From outside I can hear the clank of a truck driving over a pothole. The air conditioner humming.

  “Her mother wouldn’t stop hugging me. Her father was crying and crying. He said, ‘No matter what happens, Sael, you’ll always be a son to me.’”

  I turn to him, to Sael. In the fuzzy light of this New York bedroom I can see that tears are streaming down his cheeks. He makes no move to wipe them away.

  After a moment he coughs, sniffs. “I decided then that I would never, ever let myself be in a serious relationship again. Sex was fine. Flings were fine. But love, or marriage? That was done. I thought maybe I was emotionally dead. There had to be something wrong with me. I think women felt it too. Most of them knew what the deal was—they didn’t push.”

  I think of Andrea talking about this kind of man. You don’t want to be around him when the fuse burns down.

  “Then I met you. Jesus. I was so pissed with you for pulling that stunt . . .” His voice trails off. “But I was intrigued. I felt awake somehow for the first time in years.

  “Anyway, when David introduced you as a girl he was seeing, I thought, Well, that’s that. I was determined to walk away, to have nothing more to do with you. You know how well that turned out.”

  I say nothing. I don’t know what to say.

  “And after we slept together, I thought I’d gotten you out of my system. That it was all about the chase. But it wasn’t.

  “When I found out that David was seeing you again I wanted to kill him. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. And you wouldn’t see me. I guess I went a little crazy.”

  I think of him standing on the fire escape. The glow of my phone.

  Let me in

  “I wanted to hurt you as badly as you had hurt me. I invited Margot to the gala—I knew you’d be there. It was stupid. When I saw you I knew it wasn’t going to work. Then when you left I felt worse and worse. Then when I found out—” His voice breaks, cracks. “Oh God. When I found out that that fucking monster was in your apartment. He killed Andrea. I thought, Oh my God, he could have killed Katherine.

  He swallows. “I thought, She would have never known.” He takes a breath “I thought, I would have never have gotten to tell her.”

  He turns to face me fully. For the first time he looks at me, really looks at me and I see that his struggle is over. There is no anguish, doubt, or uncertainty in his eyes. His voice is calm and quiet.

  “Katherine, I love you. I loved you from the first moment I saw you. I love you. I will always love you.”

  Then he reaches out to me. He reaches out through the dark to me and I think that maybe this is what love is. This hope, this belief, this reaching out, reaching understanding that the other person might never reach back.

  But I do.

  The Ma
iden of Morwyn Castle | PART SEVEN

  FTER THE CELEBRATIONS HAD GONE on for a great while, Sir August’s new bride said she would retire. It was her wedding night, and she alone wished to prepare for it so although her ladies protested she bade them all a good night and made her way up to the chamber. And there, placed upon a table and covered in a silken cloth, was a golden goblet inlaid with ruby and pearl, and the bride knew this for a sign.

  She thought back to a day not long ago when she and some of her retinue had been picnicking in a forest clearing. They had been laughing and braiding posies in one another’s hair when an old hag clothed in pitiful rags, with a lame gait and a stiff clawed hand, had slowly approached them. The hag called out in a cracked, high voice, “May I see the one among you who is to be married to the lord? For I have heard many tales of her beauty and honor, and wish to pay my respects.”

  The lady’s maids were much afraid of the hag, for she was spotted with age and bent and ugly, but the lady herself was brave and true of heart and so she bade her come near. The hag praised both her beauty and gentle ways, and said, “I wish to speak with you, my sweet. May I beg for a private audience?”

  Some of the maids protested, fearing for their mistress’s safety, but the lady believed only in the goodness of others and so gathered her gown and arose, and they walked a little until they reached a shadowed place where the trees had grown thick together. Then the old woman said, “I would like to give you a gift for your wedding day, which I hear is close at hand.”

  The lady blushed and made protest but the crone smiled and handed her a small parcel of grubby cloth secured with string saying, “When you are quite alone upon your wedding night, mix these herbs into your cup and say the words I am about to give you, and then drink. You will bear three sons directly, handsome of visage and noble of deed. Only tell no one for this must be done in secret. Men do not always understand such things, and if Lord de Villias should find out, he might claim that it is witchcraft.”

  The hag whispered the words into the lady’s ear, three times so that she would remember. Then the lady thanked her kindly for her gift, and the old woman turned and disappeared into the depths of the forest. The lady hid the small parcel in the band of her skirts and, as bidden, told no one of what had passed.

  Part Two

  19

  For you, refrigerators are places where small leftovers go to die. You wonder how long mayonnaise can last, or a half jar of Dijon mustard. You love a good mustard, a condiment that bites back, that puts up a fight. There’s the seventh girl’s hot sauce. You took that from her fridge. She liked her food hot and spicy. That was one of the lines she had used on you. She had read somewhere in a magazine that men will take a subliminal hint, believing that if a woman says “spicy” she will be good in bed. I love it so much I even put it on my Greek yogurt in the mornings.

  Somehow these small bottles make the fridge look more human. You smile. More human—oh, you are hilarious.

  You pour the rest of the milk down the sink. There is something amazingly decadent about this. The milk had another three days and then some, but you’ll be gone and you won’t be coming back. At least not for a while, and not to this place. Or, in fact, this time.

  You make sure all the dishes are clean and put away. Stacks of dirty dishes are so clichéd. There is no need to attract roaches. Not that you mind them, but others might. You are the sensitive type. You appreciate others’ needs.

  You move through to the bathroom to pack your toiletries. Humans are so productive even in their dullest moments: their sweat, their plaque, their filth. Many are ashamed of their uncooperative bodies, their smells and wastes, but it is all life and so it should be celebrated. To pack your toiletries and to unpack the last of your souvenirs, taking and spreading as you go.

  Here in the bathroom you place a candle. Light pink, it was given out at a baby shower. The woman’s sister said she would call when she was getting labor pains and everyone should light them and send her good vibes. The candle is light pink because her sister was pregnant with a little girl. To each her own, the fifth girl supposed, and she kept it ready to light when she got the call.

  Judgment is navy blue, it has the faint punch of mothballs, it feels like the lapel of a blazer, it sounds like the tear of thin plastic around a packet of papers, it tingles like mint dental floss.

  The call came two days after her body was found. Snuffed out. The daughter will be given the dead woman’s name. A burden as heavy as a gravestone. The little girl will grow to love her mother’s murdered sister, to consider her the best aunt of all. Fantasize about how she could have gone and stayed at her aunt’s apartment in the city, about what would have been.

  You take a toothbrush. The toothbrush is white with a green strip down the handle. It feels good in your hand. You keep her toothbrush in the little cupboard above the sink behind the moisturizers and the pill bottles. The eighth girl had a thing about people’s breath. She said most men had meaty breath. You didn’t. It was one of the many things that she liked about you. She had a toothbrush at home and a toothbrush at her office. Ironically, gum made her feel a little nauseated and also she hated the sound of it being chewed. She remembered reading about misophonia for the first time and feeling triumphant that there were others who hated these noises as she hated them. You told her you had it too. You bonded over this.

  She also liked to have her hair pulled. She liked sex but hated the noises of sex. The thick sound of a tongue in her ear and a man’s heavy panting drove her crazy with disgust.

  Obsession is neon lime, it niggles like a popcorn kernel stuck in your back molar, it whines like a mosquito in the dark, it flakes like gnawed cuticles, it smells like hand sanitizer.

  You’ve seeded this apartment with their items. You let the stories grow. The single wineglass that stands apart; the mug bearing the name of a city you never visited, that someone else chipped; a button on the desk; a box of ancient peppermints; a ticket stub for a movie you never saw in your wallet. Once you threaded other laces into your own sneakers. Women’s laces and men’s laces look much the same in this regard.

  These things are flourishing in their new environment. It becomes a game. To write with a pen that was never yours on Post-its originally bought for another’s desk. You open the freezer to see the bag of stolen frozen raspberries at the very back, behind the frozen peas. You’ve stirred a pot with a wooden spoon well worn from stirring the Bolognese another dead girl loved to make.

  You feed books to the bookshelf. From a slim volume of unread poetry to a well-thumbed romance, a secret favorite of the tough and funny feminist producer from Chicago. You wonder if her friends ever knew she read such things. Now they’ll never know.

  There are the more obvious things, a pair of woman’s socks in the sock drawer, an earring amid the this and the that. Who will adopt your plants? Will they notice the bracelet winking at the bottom of the fleshy leaves, or the tiny china ornament that belonged to a dead girl’s grandmother tucked into the soil? The grandmother and her granddaughter now both dead, leaving only her mother behind to curse at the sunny, sunny days ahead of her in her bitterly long life.

  It is a treasure hunt but in reverse, a multitude of hints and glints and gleams. Each object, used often but hardly thought about, certainly never intended as a symbolic beacon shining out to a uniformed authority. The tiny pillow of lavender, by now almost scentless, at the very back of your drawer. An umbrella hanging behind the door. It has been a challenge slipping these little objets d’art, the opposite of talking points, into this apartment so bright and clean, wood and cream. They are hiding points. They are relics of the dead used as a living tribute, if you think about it in a certain light.

  You do.

  Quantity over quality is often how men pack. Not you. You pack with care, although you will not be coming back. Still, it’s nice to fold and see what fits where. There is something lovely and sad about folding clothes into a suitcase. Jeans and shorts, T
-shirts, one or two nice shirts, swimming trunks, boxer briefs, and two pairs of socks, for hiking perhaps.

  You’ll leave the air conditioner on. It’s expensive but you know the people who will eventually enter this place will appreciate it. After all, your Ride probably won’t be paying the bill, and it’s the little things that count. People don’t appreciate the little things enough until they’re gone. The cool air, the clean dishes neatly stacked. It will take some time for them to find the objects, if they ever do find all of them. Luckily, you have left them little notes, cryptic clues. That will give them days and weeks and months of argument and analysis but still, possibly, no answers.

  The suitcase packed. The appliances unplugged. The fridge basically empty. The floors swept. The dishes put away. The mail on hold. The lights turned out.

  On your way out the door you turn back for one last look. This apartment, it had a nice view. You took pride in your decorating skills. You hope Katherine appreciated them when she was here.

  And then you close the door.

  For a time, you ate the world. For a time you took the city’s heart. You held it hot and close against your own.

  Well, the countryside will be nice too.

  20

  I’m listening to the brr, brr of the telephone.

  Brr, brr.

  Brr, brr.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Cheryl, it’s Katherine speaking. How are you?”

  “Hi, Katherine.” She’s wary.

  “Could I speak with Lucas?”

  “Lucas is out right now.”

  “Oh,” I say. I wait for her to tell me where he is or when he’ll be back but she doesn’t.

  “Is there something you were calling about? Some message I can give him?”

  I clear my throat. None of your business. This feels strange. “I was just calling to tell him that I’ll be going away for two weeks and not to worry, that I’ll call him as soon as I get there.”