by Shannon Kirk
Right now, I’m in Proserpina’s, pretending to read a book of questionable genre, while listening to Kent’s wife, who just accused a woman named Vicky of sleeping with him, my love.
Fortunately, I minored in drama in college, to lift the burden of premed, so I believe I’m pulling off this reading act. Proserpina’s night shift filters in, so too, the night ambience, and so the late lunch classical is replaced by an upbeat jazz through a plug-in CD player behind the bar.
“In ten minutes, turn the volume up,” Proserpina’s manager shouts from within the music moat between our booths and the bar. I know restaurants. He wants the music change for the lingering late lunchers to be an ease into a warm swim, rather than an abrupt cold jolt reminding them they’re still eating and drinking here, late in the afternoon. Before they know it, they’ll be ordering the happy hour specials the bartender is chalking on his blackboard, and they’ll be begging for one more hour out with friends in cell-phone calls to wives and husbands. The whole world is socially engineered. As he was socially predestined to marry her and expected to stay married to her until death did them part, even though he no longer loves her and she has become morose and hypercontrolling in every sense of the term. And evil, serious evil, a truth I can’t dwell on now. I’d shudder and lose focus to think on what she holds over him, and thus, us, and specifically, me.
Instead, I concentrate on the superficial awfulness of her. How she doesn’t clean clothes or their home, only barks at him to press his pants with deeper creases and fold her underwear in three folds, not two, like she’s demonstrated for him “numerous times.” He’s Saint Jerome’s chief surgeon, yet he does this laundry charade on Sundays to keep the peace. It’s sickening. It repulses me. He tells me of the routine every Monday morning over coffee in the break room, or after a good solid fuck at the Kisstop in Back Bay. Cate could fold her own underwear, and underwear can be fist-shoved into a top drawer in a lump, because underwear doesn’t wrinkle and it doesn’t matter. He owes her, she says, because he shoots blanks and can’t plant her with kids. Which is absolute, 100 percent horseshit.
Why do I hate her so much when I’m the mistress? I should hate myself, true. And I do. But I hate her more. I have a profound and frightening reason, a validated example, but I won’t, I can’t, return my thoughts to real reasons now. I stick to these facile underwear reasons. I need to listen.
This is insane. I should leave. I should move on. I should return to the person I was before him. I am a different person now, a person I never wanted to be. Who am I? What have I become? I can’t return to who I was before. Things are different now. My life will be very different now.
I’m stuck here, transfixed. Listening. This is dangerous. I’ll listen and then leave. I’ll talk it over with Johanna tonight. Thank God my sister’s staying with me this week and not coiled up in her stifling estate in Rye, New Hampshire, our family home, the one she agreed to take over when Mom died. I don’t understand how Johanna can live in Rye with those awful memories in the walls. I guess I’m the only one with the awful memories; she skated them, because she’s blessed. I’m not.
Everything will get better after I talk to Johanna and confess to her what I’ve been hiding. I can’t believe I hid this affair from Johanna. We’ll cuddle up in the guest cottage behind my rose house, the cottage I had built for her, decorated just the way she likes, “beach elegant.” I’ll feed her a bottle of bordeaux. I’ll confess that I’m sleeping with a married man, that I’m unfortunately struck by a disease of love, I’m sick with it. I’ll give her all the details about the state I’m in, too, and my sister will still love me regardless. She’ll soothe my heart with her hand on my hair, and we’ll figure it out, like we always do. Best friends. Sisters. Soul mates. We’ve always been. She’ll fix me. She’ll listen. She’ll smack me with tough love. And we have time to ourselves before her daughter, Mop, my beloved niece, returns from Princeton for the summer. I’ll tell Johanna tonight. This is insane. I need a fucking cigarette. I don’t smoke. Who am I? Shit.
This Vicky woman orders. “I would like a plain breast of grilled chicken with nothing else on the plate, please. I have allergies.”
The waiter is in a hurry to end his shift and doesn’t inquire as to what allergies, which I think the new law requires, or at least common sense and basic decency. “No problem, madam,” he says and shuttles off to the kitchen.
Vicky must turn to Cate. Her voice is more audible, facing Cate, and thus, facing my ear. “I need to go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back,” Vicky says. “Cate, you need to calm down. We’ve been friends ten years. We live across the street from each other, for crying out loud. So I’m going to forgive you and talk—we’ll talk this out. But you need to stop this. I hope you didn’t say anything about any of this to my husband. I didn’t sleep with Kent.” The last sentence doesn’t sound very convincing to me, but then again, my antennae might be up and misfiring.
If someone accused me of sleeping with a married man, out in the open, I wouldn’t stick around. So I’m presuming Vicky sticks around for this volatile conversation only so she can control the messaging, the neighborhood gossip, and, likely, save her marriage.
Vicky reappears after a good long five minutes in the bathroom; I thought maybe she fled. She doesn’t sit, says she needs to make a phone call if they are going to continue talking, and she leaves again, back out to the black-and-white-tiled foyer. Cate gruffs and grunts and says, “Whateva,” in a heavy Boston accent, which grates and grinds my nerves, so I cringe. My shoulders are up around my neck.
It’s WHATEVERRRRRR! Enunciate, you lazy bitch!
As Vicky slips away, their waiter slinks up like a shadow creature in a Dracula film with their food. I continue to pretend I’m reading my absolutely amazing, enthralling thriller or romance or whatevER.
The waiter disappears to the kitchen, and Cate, the wife, is alone. I hear her unzipping what must be her purse. I hear crinkling of plastic. I hear a crushing, a rolling crinkle, and a slight rip of something. I do not stand to look over this leather wall. I cannot allow her to see me, or me seeing her, can’t give away my listening post. But these noises compel me; I am riveted. What is she doing? It takes all I can to not kneel on the cushion and periscope over the booth. Vicky returns. The jazz music is still soft, but I know I only have a few minutes before the volume is cranked to happy hour. I need it to remain a steady sound wall. My ears are adjusted on this side of the rhythm. I need to listen.
Cate and Vicky say nothing to each other. I hear forks on porcelain plates, some knife slices.
“So do you eat here with him, then? Is this why you’re downtown today, Vicky? The hospital’s just behind us. Is this why you know this place?”
“Cate, good grief.” Vicky pauses to cough. “I’ve never”—cough—“ugh, been here before”—cough.
“What then, after you eat here with him? Do you go to the Kisstop and fuck after your shitty chicken? I bet he orders the veal. He loves veal. Is that your routine?” Cate says and puffs loud and swallows into a drink. I hear the swish of the liquid. “Of course he would go fuck some loser with allergies. He likes his women weak.”
I’m not weak. He likes his women weak? Am I weak? No, I am not weak. I accept I’m crazy at this moment in my life, but I am not weak. I need to get up and leave. Tell my sister. Johanna, help me climb out of this hole! I am not weak. And yes, Cate, yes, indeed. He does order the veal, and then we fuck at the Kisstop, we, he and I, not this Vicky.
Vicky clears her throat, doesn’t speak. She keeps clearing her throat, a low, constant gurgle. I set my ear over a pocket in the puckered leather. Vicky has not spoken. I don’t believe she has scraped her fork across her plate since she took her first bite. She clears her throat again.
Vicky is now clearing her throat in a desperate blizzard of rising coughs. The bartender doesn’t notice; he’s moving over to the volume knob on his CD player. And when he’s one step away from blocking the voices behind me, I hea
r Cate’s virulent whisper.
“Whoopsy, are you having another one of your anaphylactic reactions, Vicky? Gee, I’m a nurse and all; I should have an EpiPen on me, but I don’t. What? There’s one in your purse? Oh darn, your purse is over here, under my jacket. How’d that happen?” Cate says, without an iota of alarm and with uncut sarcasm.
Cate stands and shouts for help. “Help, help, my friend is choking.”
The bartender shatter-drops a glass mug. The people at the bar jump from their stools; one stool tips back and crashes in a deafening bang on the floor tiles. The chef, opposite our tables and in the open kitchen, throws a steel bowl of salad in the kitchen, sending lettuce shrapnel to spin midair. The waiter flings a tray of saucy ziti and ravioli to the side, landing the pasta missile in a miracle on a table, before velocity takes over, splattering the table’s seats with murder sauce. The waiter and the chef and the bartender and two Saint Jerome’s doctors, who just walked in, surround Vicky. Her face is a bulging bubble of welts and hives, her throat swollen to the width of her jawline. Cate stands off to the side, acting the part of a shocked woman. I stand behind Cate, strategically so.
“She has a peanut allergy,” Cate is saying in such a high, forced, phony fluster, I wonder if any of the fools in this restaurant appreciate good theater. Can’t they tell she’s acting?
“There are no peanuts on her chicken!” the chef is shouting.
“I think just peanut dust can kill her,” Cate says.
So this is how this will go down. There will be an autopsy. The cops will investigate the contents of Vicky’s food, her medical history, the makeup of Proserpina’s kitchen. They’ll question Cate by visiting her at her home; no doubt by then she will have burned her purse with all the evidence. Nobody will suspect murder until much later. Nobody will be thinking about preserving any evidence in the critical first minutes, hours. Just another allergic reaction in a restaurant. There are no hidden video cameras in this joint; it’s an old-school hangout for lawyers and doctors and also some of the politicians from Capitol Hill, which is behind the Civil War cemetery. It is quite possible this restaurant fed some of those dead Civil War soldiers. No wiring for cameras, and no enterprising owner would dare drill into the original wood paneling to retrofit modern technology.
No one will be able to connect any dots beyond a reasonable doubt. No one but me, that is. I’m the only one who heard. The sound of plastic opening, Cate crushing something, only one thing that could have been: Cate, Kent’s wife, her, crushing a bag of peanuts, so as to dust Vicky’s chicken. And with no surveillance and the cops not here yet, Cate has plenty of time to play the part and hide the minuscule evidence.
Stop. Don’t do it. Leave. Stop! No.
I don’t know why I do this—it is so counter to self-preservation. Cate’s murderous act must take over my reasoning skills, which are blotted anyway given my heart’s misfortune, my mind’s weakness in love. My rage is unstoppable. Passion controlling my moves. I walk up behind her; she doesn’t see my face.
I hiss in her ear, “You killed the wrong woman.”
I slip my green sweater’s hood over my head and turn, slipping between the swarming crowd, before she can see who spoke.
Why don’t I out her? Why can’t I scream to the cops to look in her purse for the remainder of her crushed peanuts? I can’t. She would soon uncover the dirt she holds over Kent is dirt she holds on me, and I must return to being invisible. And this dirt is not our affair, nope. Rather, it is the type of dirt that’d get me fired and my reputation ruined, my Mighty Mary charity obliterated, and I’m not quite sure but maybe some jail time, I don’t know. I don’t need to nurse for the money—far from it. I have more family money than all the Kennedys ever had, combined. The Vandonbeer riches go back centuries. We’re the wealthiest New England family by several digits on the balance sheets, and to make money matters even more insane, that fortune doubles when you consider the fact that Johanna married into the second-wealthiest family, the Pentecosts. And maybe we’ll go and triple all this lunacy, since it looks like Mop is about to marry into the fifth-wealthiest family. I suspect my neighbor boy, Manny Acista, is going to propose to her when she gets home from Princeton.
La-de-freakin’-da.
Because none of it matters.
You can’t buy sanity, and I need to nurse to stay sane. I need my occupational consumption. I can’t lose my license, can’t lose my job, can’t lose my hold on reason. The dirt Cate has keeps me up at night, but it was all an innocent series of mistakes and misjudgments before Cate got involved. She caught Kent, my love, with the evidence, the very dirt in his hands.
In pushing through the clotted crowd, I consider my options: send an anonymous note to the police commissioner or handle the justice for her crime myself. Cate’s a nurse at my competing hospital, Mass General; I’m a longtime nurse at her competing hospital, Saint Jerome’s. There are ways to wage this war that don’t involve the authorities.
I slip out among the clatter of chaos, and I know Cate hasn’t followed. She can’t. She has to stay and play her part in all this, her fictional, malicious, awful part.
Away from the hell of Proserpina’s, I’m back on a green bench in Boston Common. My shift at Saint Jerome’s doesn’t start for another hour. All I want to do is go home and talk to Johanna. But I have to put in a half shift tonight—I promised to cover for another nurse. I have to, and maybe that’s good, so I can get distracted in my consumption. They’ll bring Vicky to Saint Jerome’s now, and I don’t want to go there while they confirm her body dead, so I need to sit here, sit tight in the park, and wait out this excruciating hour. And this is the worst time, time when I’m stuck and can’t move and am forced to do nothing but think. To fucking think. I’m anxious to go on and get my shift over and get home and hash this all out with Johanna.
Why—and I don’t understand why—have I allowed myself to be alone in all this? Why haven’t I said anything yet about my affair to Johanna, who would love me regardless? Or Mop, my niece, who is more like an adult daughter?
How can I connect so well with her, and with Johanna, my love, my sister, and yet neither of them knows about him? Mop came home from Princeton a few months ago for Easter, and there was a moment on a silver platter, a perfect moment in which I could have admitted to my affair, admitted out loud to my imperfections. We were at our family estate in Rye, New Hampshire. The Rye chef had made a traditional Catholic meal of ham and peas and predictable mashed potatoes, all of which we ate after saying grace, so as to be respectful to Johanna’s sister-in-law, the former nun Mary Pentecost, the only one who actually celebrates the resurrection of Christ. Full and finished with our family obligation, Johanna’s husband, Philipp, said he had business to finish in his study, so we three—Johanna, Mop, and I—returned to my rose-hued house by Haddock Point for a girls’ night. Each of us got hugs and kisses from Philipp when we left, and we gladly gave them back to him. Former Sister Mary nodded to Johanna and Mop, and nodded to me, and I returned the gesture, but neither of us could meet the other’s eyes.
The Easter night was unseasonably warm, and a sea breeze carried salt to us as we got out of the car. Crawling her wistful eyes up the clapboard siding, Mop asked, “Some ‘Die Rose,’ Aunty, in the rose house library?” referring to the Schubert classic “Die Rose,” and the color of my home in one.
Seeing as Mop’s boyfriend, Manny, was committed to his own family Easter dinner, that meant we had the night to just us three. And so, comforted in knowing we had a night in our own curated bubble, we entered my rose house in a practiced choreography. Mop and I went to the Mermaid Library. Johanna hummed her way down my bird-wallpapered hallway to the kitchen, to cut us some coffee cake and make us chai tea. I refuse to have servants in my home.
As I started Schubert’s “Die Rose,” set low for ambience and not to disturb, Mop lit all my battery candles, twenty in total, so that our reading haven became an “ancient tomb of glowing amber”—that’s what Mo
p calls it, at first in eternal drama, only to reject drama with, “I mean, a nice, soft light.”
Mop propped three books open on her crisscrossed legs, sitting on the middle cushion of one of two leather couches in the center of the library. She skipped from one book to the other; I’m not sure of her reading methodology. I took the middle cushion on the couch facing Mop, choosing a nonfiction travelogue on Chinese restaurants, because I had no appetite for any additional drama in my life.
Johanna entered the library with a tray of cut cake and three cups of tea, humming her favorite Paul Simon song and click-clacking into our subdued, amber solace like a bumbling, sparkling fashion rainbow. “You girls, already reading, my nerdy loves,” she sang. She plunked down the tray on the coffee table between Mop’s and my reading couches, kicked off her shiny Christian Diors—silver, of course, on Easter—grabbed her tea and cake, found an old Vogue, and plopped in her tulle-lined, polka-dot Easter frock into a puffy turquoise armchair in the corner, behind the couches. I set that chair there for her, because she said she’d join us in our reading if only the library’s wood and leather had a little “happy pop.” Such was born this routine we embarked on for the umpteenth time this last Easter.
Mop smiled from her leather couch to Johanna in her upholstered chair. Mop’s smile was wide and her eyes sentimental, revealing she was not bothered by her mother’s intrusion on her concentration, nor troubled by the white reading light Johanna flicked on to read her Vogue, thus shaming a corner of the room’s amber glow—a bright reminder of grounded reality. The unstated message being It is not practical to read by candlelight, my lofty loves. Johanna blew Mop, and then me, several air kisses.
