Fiction, Emma Gustafson
As she lay in the pile of memory foam, down, and white bamboo silk that made up her bed, Marcy opened the society pages to much fuss, as it always was. This time, the fuss looked to be about the young couple smack dab in the middle of the first page. How fortuitous, Marcy thought. Or how luckless, depending on the article’s contents, which she wasn’t sure if she’d read. The headline often said enough.
She peered at the photo a little closer, patting the morning blear from her filmy eyes— ocular skin was too delicate to rub. Is the fuss because he’s so terribly ugly? Marcy wondered. Her roving eyes lifted from his luckless face to the presumably similar headline. It wasn’t! The journalist described him as a “heartthrob.” Perhaps plain or displeasing would do if Marcy were feeling kind or generous. As it were, she did not— for it was neither Christmas nor Lent nor Good Friday. His parents must have known someone at the paper to get that kind of good grace. Marcy snapped the paper shut. She was tired of journalism’s lies.
She crossed her delicate wrists over one another, her fifth-anniversary tennis bracelet chiming expensively against her Rolex Oyster of a push present. Henry even opted for the sapphire encrusting after Marcy wept and wept when her modest but technically perfect 2.7 carat, oval cut diamond engagement ring popped off her finger like a champagne cork at the 33-week mark with James when a very shea-buttered Marcy tried to squeeze it on. She was an odious, swollen, and stretched woman, pumped with fluids, she wailed. She had often felt like a walking blister pushed into ham casing, especially when she tried to wedge a red, beating foot into any of her open-toed sandals when on her babymoon in the Caymans. For the balance of her pregnancy, Marcy switched to espadrilles and a fake, upsized but otherwise exact replica of her ring lest any mommies she encountered at The Mark for lunch or in the seed aisle at Westerly or god knows where else questioned troubles in paradise.
Oh The Mark, Marcy fluttered. She’d eat there once, twice, maybe three times a week. Often for lunches with Tali or Tara or a mid-week dinner with Henry one of the blessed four nights a week the nanny, Edie, took care of bedtime. Other times, when an afternoon nap or next morning lie-in could be afforded, they opted for Sistina, with long, lingering lunches over toma, artichokes, and melon or red wine-stained, heady dinners at The Polo Bar. After either occasion, Marcy allowed herself only pure liquid the following day, to flush out the rot, you see. Perhaps a bit of bone broth and leek if she were feeling faint.
But, no. These thrice-weekly lunches and dinners had dwindled to a measly dinner and lunch or two per week after she and Henry moved to the West Side. It was just too much of a hassle. Walking was not an option. Any increase in heart rate over 70 beats per minute broke Marcy into a ferocious sweat and flushed her cheeks like a pale, rosacea-ed teen. And whether the car cut through Central Park or drove all the way down to Central Park South and came back up, it took simply an eternity. An eternity Marcy did not have so haphazardly. She had to have Yoga Sculpt or Yoga Burn at 10:30 and she had to have a blowout promptly after at 11:30 and at least a full hour to get ready following was a must. At 3:30 the dog walker, Dan, came and Marcy trusted him with neither the apartment key nor Poppet’s anti-pull harness. She had a delicate rib cage and Dan was unable to get this through his thick skull. So, she had to be back at the apartment. Another eternity to get there. And then she had to have her evening cocktail at 5 and the first course of dinner no later than 7:30—otherwise, her digestion would be thrown into chaos and her REM irreparable.
So, the lunches and dinners at her very favorite, time-honored eateries dissipated, her memories and joy destroyed, or so it felt. She was stuck in this western hellhole, social life blown to pieces while women in macrame and men in sandals so boldly passed, an affront to the general senses as well as Marcy’s personal sense of well-being. Macrame was for the tropics only. Men’s toes were for near never.
But, the society pages. Marcy had finished the society pages, which she always read after sifting through world events, art, and style. But, the society pages were a piece of propaganda shit today, Marcy thought curtly. She checked her Oyster, it was only 9:17– 28 minutes ahead of schedule. To make matters worse, Marcy did not have a 10:30 yoga session as her favorite instructor, Birch, was in Bali nor did she have a lunch scheduled. James and Ruby wouldn’t be home for positively hours. Henry even longer. Marcy even found herself longing for the presence of Dan, emotionally vulnerable after her schedule disturbance.
What to do, what to do? Marcy hummed. There was the cafe she had been meaning to try around the corner. She truly needed a local cafe, the ridiculous La Marzocco Henry insisted they purchase was a headache, full of mechanisms and obfuscation. Marcy shook her head, her husband was so dorky sometimes. Oftentimes.
A new purpose illuminating the day, Marcy hopped out of bed, her cream rug welcoming the weight of her pedicured, non-swollen feet. This will be utterly West Side of her, she determined.
Marcy made her way down the groomed streets, hedges as ship-shape as a Marine’s haircut, surrounded by enough wisteria to keep the veneer of bohemia. As she entered the cafe, precisely three blocks away, a bell announced her foray into this new adventure. Marcy briefly wondered if the bell dinged for everyone.
Marcy promptly settled on a middle booth against the wall and waved over the rather alternative-looking teen to take her order. After combing through texts, emails, socials, and even a drift through photos, smiling at a photo she took of Ruby on the playground in her red rain boots, Marcy realized she had not a thing to do. She supposed she could “people watch” as they called it, Marcy thought, feeling more beatnik by the second.
Across from her sat a businessman on his phone, hurriedly typing an email. He tapped his loafer against the floor, the hard sole ringing against the wood. He equally bored and aggravated Marcy. An attention shift was required.
In the corner was an elderly couple, donned in knits and plaid despite the warming spring day. She watched as they shared a newspaper, splitting up sections and trading each back and forth when the other was finished. A comfort thick as fog was settled between them, nestling the two in their own world. Marcy’s throat grew tight at the sight. She took a sip of her sugar-free vanilla latte the likely gay teen barista served her and cleared her throat. He probably had an affair as well, Marcy dismissed. Old bastard.
The afternoon of June 11th, almost two years prior, flashed into her brain. The moment was seared into Marcy’s hippocampus, a memory she suspects she will never forget, not amnesia nor Alzheimer’s nor drugs nor alcohol could ever scour its stench. It was a drowsy, warm day, and Marcy and Henry were having brunch at Tavern on the Green in the Central Park room. Henry had stepped away to take a phone call nearly 15 minutes prior. Marcy sighed, wanting to order her lobster benedict tout de suite. She walked into the front room, determined to beckon Henry back to the table. It was so much darker with its red booths and mahogany wood compared to her beloved back room with its floor-to-ceiling windows and light, glistening marble. She slushed her way through a mimosa haze until she found Henry, standing near the entrance to the lobby. In front of him was a younger woman, brunette and petite. They appeared to be arguing. A coworker? Marcy asked herself. Business dispute? Henry was too geeky and too reliable for her to assume anything else.
As the brunette turned her head, Marcy caught sight of her face, wet and swollen. She forced herself to re-examine the scene. Her once sharp eyes lulled by years of domesticity and money zeroed in on Henry’s defensive body language. The woman’s tears. Their ease of proximity. This wasn’t a business matter, it was a lover’s quarrel.
Marcy quickly returned to her seat, grabbing her waiter on the way to order a Bloody Mary with only enough tomato juice to color it.
Henry returned two minutes later. The brunette was likely still fixing her makeup in the bathroom.
Marcy looked up as he sat down and smiled.
“What took you so long?”
“Oh, ran into an old classmate from MIT. We just got to chatting.”
Marcy offered a tight-lipped nod in return. Her Bloody Mary arrived right on time.
After that day in Central Park, she hired a private investigator. She took out $10,000 in cash from one of their joint accounts, excusing the action to her business manager as a motherly anxiety to be cash-prepared should any natural or financial disaster occur. He stopped listening as soon as “motherly anxiety” was mentioned.
From the findings of the private investigator, Marcy learned that the brunette was a 25-year-old new hire at Henry’s company. Their affair started in November of the previous year, which was also Ruby’s birthday month. That particular fact made Marcy nauseous. The affair petered out after their brunch encounter, with their last out-of-office meeting occurring July 2nd when Henry fucked her in her Kips Bay studio. Marcy was disgusted. Kips Bay. She left the company on August 1st after being recruited by another tech company based in Los Angeles. Marcy found this convenient seeing as Henry’s best friend from college owned the company. Since then, Marcy moved Henry from the position of lover and partner to strictly partner. It was easier for her to stay married for the children’s schedules and, of course, for financial reasons. She was sure Henry would give her a sizable alimony and child support payment, more than any court would order, but after that period of time, what then? Rely on a generous ex-husband that would be made less generous by time and the incurrence of new partners? Then she would have to find someone else, during a time in her life when she was no longer young and no longer shiny, a firm divorcee, and she would be right back where she started. No, it was better to be smart about these things.
Marcy never mentioned the affair and neither did Henry. He assumed she had grown cold due to age, blaming early symptoms of menopause despite Marcy being only 38. They continued their lunches and their dinners and their nights at the opera and ballet and mornings with the children at the Met and Sarabeth’s. And then Henry moved them to the fucking West Side. He didn’t consult the matter with Marcy. It was two months prior to their lease ending at The Croydon and discussions between Henry and Marcy had been growing heated. She wanted to stay and he did not. The apartment had everything they needed, she argued. It was near all of their favorite places, the kids’ schools, and, most importantly, the park— a status symbol for Marcy. Henry, ever the martyr, suggested the West Side would be better for the children as they got older. On an odd Tuesday evening when Henry was actually home, he gathered Marcy and the kids in the living room.
“Ok, guys, I know our lease is coming to an end here,” he started, mostly for Marcy, since their three and five year old had no ounce of a clue what a fucking lease was. “And I found a great new home for us! It has a pool and a playground and a patio— maybe we can get another dog if Mom lets us!” He finished, the last purely for James and Ruby, who wanted a little puppy instead of the elderly Poppet. Marcy seethed. The children were delighted, she couldn’t renege on his announcement. He was boxing her in. He cheated on her, humiliated her and now he wanted to move them all out. Perhaps from the scene of the crime, from where his disgusting dalliances took place, from his own guilt. And he trapped her, with finances and the children wanting a pool and a puppy he would never take care of and a playground he would see perhaps fifteen minutes a week.
After their move west, Marcy would spend what felt like a creepy amount of time looking at her husband’s face. His brown eyes, the freckle on his top lip, his one crooked incisor. The truth of the matter was that she loved him. She hated him. She needed him. She would dream of forgiving him, giving her all to him again. Forgetting the affair and what a giant fuck up he created.
But then she thought about the giant fuck up he created. The havoc he wreaked on her life, on that woman’s life, on her children’s lives, though they didn’t know it. Then she fumed, worried the anger would cause a cardiac event. She found a man she loved. And it so happened that the man she loved was brilliant and worked in tech! She reaped the financial benefits without the fears of adultery and cocaine addiction that the wives of private equity asses and C-Suitors faced. She married a dork, who wore flip-flops and khakis and subscribed to National Geographic. Marcy played all of her cards right and it took precious time curating that hand. Again, time she didn’t have so haphazardly. And both of her hands were bitten. He wasn’t supposed to cheat. When this simmer and swarm of her mind happened, she didn’t think about Henry’s lip freckle or his crooked tooth. She thought about his soft flesh. Of her green Bulgari handbag, she was carrying the day of that brunch. Of the black and gold snake head clasp at the front of it. She thought about swinging that pretty bag across his face. The hard, bejeweled snake eyes sinking into the soft skin around his. The chain on the handle whipped across his nose, spurting blood. She thought about bringing the bag down again and again, the weight from her phone and keys and wallet and lip gloss and compact aiding her cause. But then she looked away and ordered another drink or went to check on the kids or anything to keep her from committing domestic assault.
She tore her gaze from the couple. They weren’t right either. Her eyes drifted along the cafe, to a woman and man looking to be on their first date. Marcy scoffed internally— she would never go on a first date sans alcohol. She moved along to a table of college-looking students, books open but talking to each other. She idly wondered where they went, the cafe was too far down for it to be Columbia and she cared about no others. Then, finally, jackpot, two women entered the cafe. They sat at the table diagonal to her, next to the frenzied-typing bore. They both appeared to be in their late twenties, one was brunette, with wild, curly hair that gave her a magnetic, ethereal quality. Marcy felt an instant jealousy and resentment. She had to get a blowout each day she perspired as her hair would instantly start curling at the roots, much like this woman’s. Each day, Marcy had to tame and groom and whatever-other-verbs-a-zoologist-would-use-in-relation-to-a-lion her hair. Every day, Marcy dimmed and diluted a portion of herself out of necessity, and here was this woman, embracing it to the exact result of perfection. Rather than finding it inspirational, Marcy found it cosmically unfair. The other had platinum, spiky hair. Where the brunette's hair tumbled out and long, hers was up and abrupt. She was at the counter ordering for them, something Henry would usually consign himself to do when they were out— order at the counter, grab the car from the valet, lag behind with shopping bags— in a show of chivalry and servitude, when, in reality, he didn’t want to be the primary parent responsible for the children, no matter how lapsing.
The blonde made her way across the cafe, sitting next to her companion rather than across from her. From this angle, she could only see the blonde’s profile and the back of the brunette’s hair, a life of its own. She looked at them there, staring across from one another. What gentle intimacy curtained them, Marcy thought, like gossamer. Maybe she was just falsely intuiting that from lesbian stereotypes. She watched them. The picking up of a mug; the tapping of a packet of brown sugar; the sweeping of hair, relegating it to behind the ear. They both had such gentle hands. One had skinny, spindly fingers, with the middle joints pulling against skin. That was the brunette. The one with spiky hair had fuller, manicured fingers, the bones leisurely swathed in flesh and paint. Princess fingers, Marcy’s mother would call them, never touching a day’s work. What both had in common were the tips, which were so gentle, so fine, like an expensive pen. Marcy imagined those fingers touching her. It was both foreign and intriguing. Henry’s fingers were so rounded, so padded with roughness, his fingerprint scratching against her skin. Most men’s were, Marcy had come to think of it. At least, the ones that had touched her. She pressed her fingertips, fine like the women’s caddy corner to her, against her nerve-filled palm, needling the flesh.
In a rather strange spark of imagination, for Marcy preferred the real to the imagined, she could almost see herself at that table. Yes, that brunette was her, had she not been so caged. Had she let her hair run free and wild— herself, too. The blonde smoothed her hair— Marcy’s hair— out of her face. Marcy’s cheekbone tingled at the touch, barren spaces of skin finally receiving rain. The blonde traced the wrinkles and ridges of her knuckles, the tops of her hands where Marcy had to receive an IV for both James’ and Ruby’s births. Marcy unthinkingly adjusted the shoulder strap of her companion’s dress, giving the space between her shoulder and neck a squeeze. The skin was smooth, like Marcy’s own. She always thought that the roughness exaggerated the smoothness, but, no, it was quite the opposite.
Marcy had successfully transposed herself into that seat until she caught sight of the brunette’s wrist. Elegantly falling to almost her forearm sat a simple, gold bangle. The blonde had one too. It could’ve come from a Swiss jeweler or the Grand Bazaar, the Upper West Side’s famous flea market Marcy had been avoiding for the precise reason it was a flea market. Yet, the mystery of its origins ameliorated Marcy’s fascination. She looked down at her own wrist, at her Oyster, her tennis bracelet, and up to her staggering ring. They suddenly seemed gaudy and, worse, all confirmed Henry’s ultimate ownership of her. Gifts to pleasure, perhaps, but, also, gifts to placate, to rectify, to pacify. These women, Marcy could tell almost immediately, were so wholly themselves. As much as she imagined herself in that seat, she knew the blonde would see her as she was: a facade. Had a man sat in that seat, Marcy would take pride in her lithe body, her smooth hair, her long, lacquered nails. Similarly, if it were a woman she assumed to be straight. Competitors in a lifelong game. Instead, she felt hollowed out. As if with each pursuit of a man something had been taken from her, suitors scooping her out until empty. She imagined herself like the cicada shells she would find as a child in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Kicking them around and pressing them to pieces between her small, chubby fingers, grinding the remains between her index and thumb. She now imagined herself the shell and Henry her.
She felt like she had begun her life wrought with ambition, with hope, with desire for a big, full life. And with each pass of a man— whether it be a boyfriend, a lover, a boss, a friend, a father— something about her crinkled and crinkled until crushed. Through each of their gazes, she learned how to make herself more agreeable, more charming, more beautiful, more informed, all without being threatening and all catered to serve the right crowd— them. In a harsh, slicing thought, Marcy realized this more, more, more all resulted in the degree of less. Less Marcy, less personhood, less autonomy. All to suit their fickle, unified vision and palette. That was it: a palette— she had turned herself into a sampling board that you may try when deciding on food for a wedding, offering herself up, suggesting here, try the best of Marcy, it was made specially for you.
In another strange twist, tears pooled in Marcy’s eyes. She slipped on her Saint Laurent sunglasses and headed for the bathroom. Marcy hadn’t cried in an absolute age, hormones were the reason to blame, she had self-diagnosed. In the single-stall bathroom, Marcy cleaned the mascara from under her eyes and dropped in eye solution to quell the redness. She wondered if that was what that young woman did in Tavern on the Green bathroom all those years ago. In an outburst of generosity, forgiveness planted in her chest, like the roots of a tree, despite it being neither Christmas nor Lent nor Good Friday.
As a gift from a benevolent God, or that gay teen running the cafe, “Harvest Moon” infiltrated the bathroom. It was Marcy’s favorite song, one she wanted for her and Henry’s first dance. Henry simply hated Neil Young and suggested “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Elvis. He didn’t like Elvis either— he actually didn’t like music— but his boss at the time was uncomfortably obsessed with Elvis and Henry knew this would gain him favor for a promotion. Marcy seceded; it would mean a raise for Henry and, therefore, a raise for her.
But in the dingy, tiled bathroom, Marcy forgot about her wedding. Forgot about the men and their terrible eyes and their viciousness. Forgot about the viciousness she had done to herself. Instead, it was her and the blonde, dancing to Neil Young’s gentle voice in a time and place when and where Marcy was still Marcy, not this othered being. Marcy had put her hands up in the air, clasping the blonde’s smooth neck, prickles of hair tickling Mary’s thumbs. She spun and dipped and swayed. Oh! How she had lost it, Marcy realized. For her whole life, she was so terrified of breaking from reality, her routine, as she did now, and she had come to find that it was delightful. That perhaps, all this time, she had been living in a fantasy world of wives and husbands and domestic bliss and security and she just now came out of the cave, somehow undaunted by the harsh light.
She moved and transformed in beats of four until her black lambskin Chanel flat caught traction on an errant piece of toilet paper left on the tile floor, marking the end of her routine with a slight wobble. As she exited the bathroom, a sense of offbeat joy pervading her body, she found the caddy corner table empty. The women must have left while she danced and spun in the bathroom. Rather than emptiness filtering back in, Marcy felt hungry. She lingered at the cafe a while longer— long past the women’s departure. Long enough that she had to run back to the apartment to meet Dan. She welcomed her children home with tight, grasping hugs and repeated cheek kisses. She cooked dinner for once, rather than leaving it for Edie, hoofing it to Citarella with James and Ruby, plopping Ruby in the cart seat and James walking alongside her, clasping her pant leg. She let Edie go home to her own children for dinner and sat the kids at the counter while she fastidiously followed a New York Times recipe, chopping garlic, tomato, and onion, putting a show on for the children when the onion made her cry, and saran-wrapping chicken in preparation for the mallet.
Henry got home right as she started to flatten the chicken. She hoped he would be late, like usual. He smothered the children in dramatic, smacking kisses that were rewarded with bubbling giggles far more passionate than the ones her onion cry and supermarket run elicited. He then came towards her and, for once, she didn’t look at the vulnerable porcelain of his skin or his brown eyes that controlled her and her future but instead looked at his fingers, grasping the counter as he leaned down to kiss her. She kept her eyes open as he closed his and studied those meaty, cruel fingertips and imagined bringing the mallet down on them, smashing them to pieces like her cicada shell.
Emma Gustafson is a queer writer who is interested in themes of sexuality, identity, and rage. She has a dog named Ernest, who is not named after Ernest Hemingway but rather a stately, imaginary old man whom he resembles. She is a graduate of New York University and is currently based in Ojai, California. Find her on Instagram @emmargustafson
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