Your Former Ex-Lover

Published in June 2009.

She doesn’t expect him to jump up or anything, rush to her side, for God's sake; she knows that those days are over. She places her palms against the window and pushes with all her weight; another gust of wind slams against the other side of the glass. Not that he’d take advantage of this view of her. Even though she can’t see him, she damn well knows that he continues to sit on the bed behind her, rubbing at his temples maybe. She’d moan if she thought it’d grab his attention, but due to present circumstances, she knows that regardless of how sexual the sound, it’d be lost on him, especially with that distraction on the other side of the bedside wall. The window creaks open.

“Don’t worry, Stash, I got it,” she says. She lights a cigarette and though the smoke carves through the air, it is the outside pane of glass that has fogged over. “Really, it’s okay.”

There it is again, a rapid succession of thuds against the wall, an arrhythmic heart, and then the sound of iron scraping against a wood floor; a neighbor moaning, a foot bouncing against drywall.

Slanted snowfall cuts through the streetlights outside, a million little winks. Down on the street a car, half-buried in a drift of snow, spins its wheels a few inches forward then back again, the rays from the headlights bent and faded under the burden of ice. Kate wipes a sleeve across her wet cheek and turns around, exhaling through the side of her mouth; the ash of the cigarette, ignored for one hit too many, snakes to the floor. She flicks the butt out the window, the little red flame useless against the drift. The car is sideways now, buried deeper than before. Kate leans on her heels and pushes until the window slams shut.

“Kate, please,” he says. His reflection in the window tilts forward and motions behind him with a slight nod. He pats the pillow next to him as if she would actually go over there, satiate his little Aphroditian fantasy as he closes his eyes tight and pictures her, that other girl next door.

She walks over and sits on folded knees at the end of the bed, looking at the wall. There are black marks scattered across it, from back when it was their bed that was slamming and scraping. How long has it been: weeks, even months maybe, since he’d looked at her in that way of his? How he could tell you exactly what he wanted by squinting, puffing his lips, his mouth curling at the corners like they did right before he’d grab her in a tackle and throw her down to the bed, and then how she used to burrow herself into his neck, kissing and whispering back it didn’t matter what.

The clock beside Stash blinks, 11:11, 11:11, 11:11. More moaning, more kicks against the wall. Stash grabs two pillows, one for each ear. He sighs.

She picks sock lint from between his toes; he pulls his foot back.

“My God, Stash, I fucking repel you.”

“Baby, no, listen to me.” He slides his foot back and rubs it against her leg. “Jesus, why are you so paranoid? It tickled, that’s all, okay? That’s why I moved it.” He tugs on her sweats with his toes like some kind of little brother.

“Maybe if you still found me attractive, Stash,” she says, sliding fingers gentle across the bridge of her nose before settling on her lips, “we wouldn’t be paying as much attention to them.”  

He puts a hand on her knee. “It’s my head, baby,“ he says. “All this noise is killing me.” He has a headache, always has a headache when the neighbors go at it like this. Or maybe he just wants her to shut up so that he can listen to them in peace.

“If your head hurts so goddamn bad, then just go over there and say something already,” she says to him.

But since that day, in the elevator, something has changed. The woman stared at him as he stared back, how his eyes studied the way her silk floral dress, cut low into her breasts, unfurled around her knees and like a kimono floated against her bronzed body. He had never been the type, not really at least, to check out other women like this, and certainly not while she stood right there. But there he was, his eyes averted, all shy-like. Kate caught him watching, his cheeks colored with embarrassment, with longing. That space, that five-by-five space, and if she had asked him, maybe he’d have told her that there was nowhere else to look, that she was paranoid maybe. But of course he wouldn’t stare at Kate, so pale and ordinary, her wispy thighs, her unwashed hair pulled back into a lazy ponytail, and clothes not worthy of scrubbing this other woman’s bathroom. Who could blame him then, for staring like that when she was staring right along with him? And then when the doors slid open, the moment when they’d all walked out together, and the way the two of them, Stash and the woman, had shared an awkward smile, a cough, and in it, a hint of recognition. Kate had seen it, all right, the way their eyes connected for a moment and then drifted down and to the side so that not so subtly they could continue to watch one another in the peripheral. The long walk down the hall, scrambling to get the door unlocked while she, that woman, did the same to the door beside them. She’d seen this woman before, too, she knew it, somewhere, and as she sifted through her mental rolodex there was a vague but definitive connection. Like a photograph that had been held under a flame until the ink bubbled and stretched the most distinct of details. Maybe if you stared long enough you could fill in the missing pieces. Later on that Sunday she’d failed to turn off the bath water until it flooded over the sides, so distracted she was trying to place where she’d seen the woman before.

Maybe now that woman, whose moans are so theatrical, for God’s sake, so sharp as if to, on purpose, carve through the drywall, attempts to remind Stash what he’s missing. Or maybe she shuts tight her eyelids and imagines that it is Stash, and not this other lover, penetrating her. Or maybe it is all an act, a smug attempt at reminding Stash of what he used to have. Is that why she looks so familiar? It explains everything, of course it does, and so perhaps the elevator wasn’t at all important, because within that moan is a familiar mating call, a pitch that sends them both flashing into a bedroom somewhere in their collective past.

“Kate,” he says, sitting up. “This needs to stop. Like now.”

In the corner stands the other enemy, a full-length standing mirror that reflects Kate’s every blemish, despite any lighting configuration. Her oxford shirt is unbuttoned, the fabric loose against her too-small chest; she pulls it down, taut against her, the outline of her chest little more than a pointless ridge compared to the neighbor. Her hair is shoulder-length, wrapped across her forehead; she exhales and blows a few loose strands of hair that are left dangling. Her cotton sweatpants barely hang on to her hips, which jut out like slabs of rock. She pinches her nose and frowns as she traces the shape of it. Stash’s reflection massages his forehead, those sharp eyes of his nothing more than a vortex of regret.

She bites down on her lip, slaps the side of her thigh and grunts.

Stash pounds his fists into one of the pillows and looks at her, says, “You’re not fat! My God, Kate, what is going on with you?”

She walks over and grabs the afghan, wraps it around herself and holds it tight around her curled shoulders. She stands at the foot of the bed. “I don’t know. I just feel…” She covers her eyes with her hands. “I just feel like you don’t love me anymore.”

He falls forward, on his stomach now, and reaches out to touch her arm. She shivers and he draws back and looks off at the radiator, perhaps wondering as she is why the hell he’d painted it navy blue to match their wall. “Christ,“ he says, “what’s wrong with the heat in this place?”

The neighbors are laughing now and it sounds to Kate like the past, when they’d untangle themselves from the sheets and lie there sharing a cigarette as he rubbed concentric circles soft against her bare skin.

She hugs the afghan tighter. “I’m serious, Stash. Are we in trouble?”

“Trouble how,” he says, rolling his legs off the bed. He walks over to the radiator, taps it with his heel. “What a piece of garbage this thing is.”

The wind bangs against the window.

“I don’t know. We used to be so into each other. Remember? We couldn’t go five minutes without it.”

Stash tugs a cigarette from out of the pack on the windowsill and lights it- a slow inhale, exhale. She used to watch him across rooms, holding him with her eyes until he would turn and acknowledge her with a sideways glance, that way that he would wag the cigarette like a finger in the air to exaggerate a point or pause mid-sentence to take a long hit, a move so cool and smooth as to add suspense to a single sentence. But now, now the cigarette is clinched between his lips and his face is hardened, an attempt to look like he is being productive by rattling the window back and forth until it opens. Once he feels the chill, he slams it back shut. There’s nothing smooth or cool about the way he pulls the cigarette from his lips and shrugs, so disinterested he is in her at this moment, so preoccupied perhaps with that girl next door.

“There’s air coming through here even when it’s shut,” he says. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Kate turns to face the wall. “See,” she says, “this is what you do. You change the subject; you fiddle with windows. Anything to avoid me.”

Kate sits on the bed and rolls over; her knees curled to her chest, still wrapped in the blanket, she closes her eyes.

There is a scream next door followed by a series of muffled giggles.

Stash used to have an old shoebox full of photographs. He’d been in a fraternity at Stanford, had gone to an all-boys prep school in New England, and yet hadn’t one single photograph of any of his guy friends. Instead, the shoebox was filled with photos of ex-girlfriends. It’s not like Kate didn’t know about his past; they spent countless hours talking that first night after they met over a game of darts in a nameless, post-college Lincoln Park pub, and then for countless more over the course of those first few wall-thumping, sleepless weeks together. The past was the past until that night when she was buried knee deep in his closet helping him pack his life for their move to Evanston. She was throwing whatever she could grab into cardboard boxes; when she grabbed a shoebox hidden under some flannel shirts, however, it consisted of a weight that even the most well-constructed pair of shoes couldn’t contain.

The box was dominated by pictures of one girl in particular, the one he lived with for two years in Palo Alto. Dozens and dozens of this girl with her tight blonde curls and California body and each time in some different exciting location: lounging on a beach, in swanky city bars; even in the ones that were taken at home, she was stretched out on the couch, the slit in her silk robe revealing those long, tan legs. There was always some 400-page book she had just put down to look up at Stash, her curls falling around her face and dark rimmed glasses, smirking like she knew that she was the most beautiful woman Stash had ever seen. There were no photos of them sitting with dying grandparents around a card table covered with leftover Thanksgiving dinner or tchotchke Pilgrim salt and pepper shakers. There were no photos of her looking unkempt and sleepy, scowling at Stash with his camera. Never a photo with other, frumpier couples, nor with mothers wearing seasonal sweaters on Christmas morning. This girl, she stood for everything that Kate wasn’t and could never be. She told him right then and there that she wanted them gone, immediately; there would be no reminders of what he once had.

“Kate, how does this have anything to do with you? They’re just memories, okay? It has absolutely nothing to do with us.“

But when she pushed, he folded.

Six months later, though, when she was rearranging the closet in their new place, she spotted a smaller box. Inside, all that remained were the photos of this girl. Kate sat in the closet that day, holding the box, studying the pictures, each intricate detail a direct assault.

She sliced each picture and then placed the shards on his pillow. Later that night, Stash’s head hung heavy as he examined the pieces of a complicated puzzle.

“Kate? Really?“

“She doesn’t matter anymore, Stash. Right? She doesn’t matter, right?“

He grabbed a handful of pieces, rolled them over in his palm, and shook his head.

She watched in silence because perhaps in his nod there was an acknowledgement that had nothing whatsoever to do with her question.

The next day it’s a Monday and Kate, in between jobs, is sitting in the silent living room and staring at the muted television. A cutting board with an unbitten and browning apple sliced into quarters sits in front of her on the coffee table. Stash is at work down in the city where he consults about things that Kate doesn’t understand with people who she doesn’t know anything about. Ten minutes ago she’d heard water swishing through the pipes in the wall; a shower perhaps, where that blonde is probably at this minute imagining the loofah that rolls across her perfect ass is, instead, Stash's rough palms. Her tongue as it meets the water on her lips and she’s probably there right now, thinking about the taste of Stash's skin and that first sensation of her spine meeting the cold porcelain behind her as Stash's warm body presses her against it.           

Kate gets up and walks to the bedroom. She steps on a warped part of the hardwood and jumps when it creaks, turns to look back at the front door.

They have a small walk-in closet with vinyl-coated shelving that they bought from Home Depot and installed together, when they moved in two years earlier, when Stash enjoyed working on projects with her. Her side was scatterbrained, a sweater here and pair of jeans there, jackets hanging half-off of hangers and used towels covering rows and rows of mismatched shoes; on his side the hangers all faced out, khakis with khakis, button-downs organized by color and shoes side-by-side on the floor like an army awaiting marching orders.

Maybe they’d been kidding themselves. Maybe they’d had nothing in common ever except for that stint after they’d met when they couldn’t get out of the bedroom. But all couples had that, didn’t they? Why hadn’t they seen this coming? She passed weekends in high school watching action movies on her parent's polyester couch, the sides of which scraped raw her back the way some mechanic’s son named Dale‘s stubble gnashed against her cheeks, slathered from his too wet kisses; Stash, living out the ideal life on the coast, ate seared tuna drizzled in sauces infused with curry, intertwining fingers with a girl of course named MacKenzie at a table together looking out windows that overlooked gardens full of deep blue hydrangeas and spears of hollyhocks, the air heavy with the salt of Nantucket Sound.

She had never been like this, the insecure type. She’d caught women glancing at him in the past, smiling, looking him up and down, and rather than fold up she would swagger more, hold her head high, grab his hand and squeeze it. After she’d found that box of pictures, though, after the vows had been said, she couldn’t help but wonder about those girls, all blonde clichés with their tans and magazine bodies who rode their daddies‘ legacies through the halls of private education. And yet he married her, a girl with the body of a boy and pale skin and jet-black hair, a girl for whom food was a functional necessity rather than a social event, a Midwesterner with her long vowels and God-fearing conscience.

In the elevator that day, maybe he’d remembered that she, Kate, was supposed to be a sabbatical, a refreshing jaunt. Maybe that blonde had grounded him. Maybe he was there right now, in that shower, no imagination needed. He was the loofah.

She feels short of breath here in this closet as she slips her fingers through the pockets of his pants, one at a time. It could be guilt doing this, making her heart beat as if she just ran a mile, but there is something heavier here, a premonition maybe. She walks out of the closet and into the bedroom.

His chiffonier is constructed of oak and has from bottom to top five long drawers, which house his undergarments, socks, ties, workout clothes, but then at the top, in the three smaller side-by-side drawers, this is where he keeps memorabilia: ticket stubs and money clips, credit card slips, golf scorecards, and the typical things that a man can’t seem to muster the nerve to throw out. This also is where secrets would reside. Her hands shake as they shuffle through the drawer. That radiator still sits silent in the corner.

Stash had never been the type to hide things, but that’s not to say that he didn’t have a past. And he’d been patient with her that night, after they’d made love for the first time, when she’d asked about all that had come before her. They’d sat there, on that leather couch of his, drinking glass after glass of his favorite wine, an Oregon pinot noir, and perhaps it had been the way he’d touched her that had made her bring it up. How his lips scraped so close to her ear, a distance just perfect so as to tingle but not tickle, and how he’d known just where to touch her and what to say and when to say it to get her going, so experienced he was to know these things and it wasn’t until later, on that couch, when she knew that he’d been here before. She’d slept with a few others before him, boys she’d dated and had fooled herself into believing were special, but it hadn’t ever been like that. With them it was a race to the finish, a rapid succession of thrusts while she mapped out grocery lists on the ceiling and counted the seconds until it ended. And as she’d sipped that wine she’d realized that touching a woman in the way Stash had that night- so intuitive he was to know just the right moment to drum his fingers soft against her back or when to clutch her hips and pull her into him - was a learned skill, something practiced, something only a man who’d been in love could know how to do.

And he had been in love. He’d never denied it. And not the kind of love that she’d thought she’d been in with those other boys.

The phone is ringing next door and Kate stands frozen, squeezing a pair of socks balled together. It rings three, four, five times and then she hears her neighbor’s muffled voice. She places the socks back into the drawer and pushes it closed. She wipes at her eyes, walks over to the bed, and buries her face into Stash’s pillow, that old familiar smell more reminiscent of guilt than of pleasure.

He’d met her, that girl at Stanford, at just the right time, he’d told Kate that first night they spent together. He’d been falling apart, smoking pot six seven eight times a day, his hair caked across his eyes like a blindfold. And then they’d spent more and more time together, he’d told Kate, and she hadn’t judged him for being the way he was then but instead joked with her California-New-Age-dharma-quack-pot wit, and as he told Kate these stories he did so with the cigarette hanging there like an exclamation point. She was probably topless at the time, Kate was all but convinced, because girls like that have nothing to lose, just hanging out like that, leaning her cheek against an elbow probably when she said to Stash, “You’re the saddest looking fool since Stephen Dedalus.” At the time, Kate laughed a bit too loud and a bit too long, sharp jolting sounds that led her first thing in the morning to the library to find out who the hell Stephen Dedalus was. “Dedalus,” that girl called him until one day finally he realized how ridiculous and pointless he looked. And the closer they’d gotten, the less he was smoking until one day he was just sober and living with her and a dog that they’d adopted. So then there he was, barely old enough to drink, yet domestic all of a sudden. But this is all in the past, he’d told her then, and then later, too, as he flicked an ash from his burning cigarette to the floor.

Even though Kate had been punch-drunk and woozy listening to this, sitting there envisioning, chugging glass after glass of Pinot, she remembers it oh so well, the way that Stash had clutched his fist around the stem, swirling the wine so that it slammed against the sides of the glass and watching it as if the rippling blood red pool and tannins were instead that girl’s long tan legs walking further into the murky past.

It’s after lunch and the only phone ringing is the one next door. Stash hadn’t called yet today. He always called, at least two or three times, a quick hello, an “I love you,” a “how’s the day going.” But today there is nothing. She walks to the kitchen and picks up the phone and dials his office number. A woman answers.

“Hello,” the woman says again, “May I help you?”

Kate clears her throat, stutters, and then says, “Hi? I’m looking for Stash?”

Kate opens the refrigerator with her free hand. A box of turkey burgers. A pound of chicken breasts. Three bags of edamame. A bag of organic corn. A container of eggs.

“I’m sorry, he’s out of the office in meetings all day. Would you like his voicemail?”

Kate closes the refrigerator door and sighs, “No, that’s fine.”

The woman says, “Kate? Is this you?”

Kate says no, slams down the phone and then stands there in the kitchen for a few moments, rolling her thumb across her wedding ring.

There are some mirrors in which Kate finds pleasure in her reflection, though this one in her bathroom is not amongst them. She opens the medicine cabinet, scans its contents, and then taps it shut. There are four drawers on each side of the lower cabinet, under the sink. She scans these too, grunts, and then walks back out and into the bedroom closet. She grabs a few towels and tosses them over her shoulder, scoots a pair of pants from one corner to the next, pushes with the side of her hand a few t-shirts until she spots it, a black purse turned gray with dust.

In the bathroom again she flicks on the light and empties the contents of the purse into the sink: a compact, a lipgloss tube caked shut, a sample of mascara, a concealer stick smudged on its sides, and a velour powder puff frayed at its edges. Kate applies each, one at a time, like a small girl who came across her mother’s makeup for the first time. She turns and walks out on faith that she’s made over all her many flaws.

The neighbor is vacuuming, maybe rolling her palm around that corrugated hose, brushing her fingers across the ridges as she guides it into the crevices under her bed.

Kate’s clothes are downright antiquated. Stash’s the budget guy and hadn’t bought her a wardrobe in who knows how long. Shirts too tight that make her look like a little boy and sweaters snagged from back when Stash would grab at her all the time in public and pull her toward him, kissing her anywhere anytime for as long as he felt like it. Back when he loved her, which was God only knows when it’s been so long. She grabs at her collection of button-down shirts, blues and pinks and reds and greens, but they’re all three sizes too big and make her look like a blob. She drops them and kicks the whole lot to Stash’s side. Dozens of long-sleeved pullovers boring even for her mother. To the floor with them. A stack of cardigan sweaters that was cool like when, in 1987? She throws them at Stash’s perfect little line of pants, knocking a few from off of their hangers. She has khakis and wool skirts that if she wore them now would make her feel like a high school math teacher. Corduroys which she actually likes, but aren’t exactly magazine cover material. And it, all of it, is piled high on the floor and she’s on her knees now and falling forward, face first into all of these Iowa girl clothes and they’re so damn unfit to be here in this closet with Mr. Prep School’s Armani suits and Ferragamo shoes.

The girl next door is playing her music loud, and it’s something indie, something California-chic.

Standing in the front of the mirror, Kate pulls at the front of her bra, shifting the underwires back and forth until they sit below her breasts, and then yanking the thin straps, awkwardly adjusting the tiny slide at the back and then fidgeting the cups into just the right place.  She sighs and settles for what cleavage she has been able to produce beneath a turquoise blue V-neck sweater with sleeves that fall just before her wrist. She fidgets with the outside of the wool and for a moment her lips curl into a smile.

The neighbor is jumping now, maybe watching an exercise tape, building stamina.

Kate unclips the black skirt from its hanger and unzips it. Stepping into it she could feel the cool silk of the skirt‘s lining against her skin, wiggling it over her hips and then snapping the tiny metal hook into the eye of the waist, yanking at the zipper, leaning on the balls of her feet for leverage, grinding her teeth as she tries to smooth the sides. She turns to face the mirror, twisting the skirt so that the ruffled hem flounces at her knees, peering over her shoulder at the way it looks from the back, sighing, not satisfied with the image that is before her, smoothing with futility at the hips, cursing her grandmother's lasting gifts.

She pulls her favorite hair scarf from where she'd last draped it on the corner of the mirror, angling her head toward the floor so that her hair hangs down in front of her and she combs her fingers through, a desperate attempt to rejuvenate her baby fine hair. Another quality that she'd never liked: too fine, too flat, and today, more unmanageable than ever. She smoothes it the best she can and then pulls herself back upright, careful to part it on the side, sweeping it down a little over her forehead, then wraps the headband, tying it neat at the nape of her neck, pulling the long ties so that they fall just over her shoulder. She scrunches her nose at the results, deciding to try once more, parting the hair on the opposite side this time, shifting and smoothing.

This will have to do.

She lost her job a month back. Not that it mattered much, because between Stash’s income and his trust fund, they’d be fine. He told her to relax, take some time, to find the right job. Not that there is a perfect job. Not for her, someone with no discernible skills or interests or ambitions. She'd tried non-profit, counseling, writing, serving tables, administrative work, human resources, finance, and all it amounted to was extra money in the vacation fund.

And now here she is and the granite counters in the kitchen are caked in something and there is a layer of dust on the hardwood floors and Stash will be home in two hours and he’ll be hungry, and since she’s not working it falls on her to do all of it. Not that Stash would ever say that. He wouldn’t. But how could he not think it.

She could make turkey burgers, but that’s so boring and predictable and Stash is used to that kind of thing around here. The woman next door probably cooks paella with some sort of reduction something or other and exotic spices like saffron and it is complex and sexy and it takes twelve hours of slow simmer until the flavors melt into one another and tangle, like their bodies coming together in a boil.

A door slams in the hallway and then the rattling of keys.

Kate runs into the bathroom and looks in the mirror, sighs, and then runs back out. She grabs her keys from off of the filthy countertop, grabs her purse, the little gray one from Anthropologie that Stash had bought her for Christmas.  She slams shut the door behind her, runs down the length of the hall. When she turns the corner, there is the woman, drumming her manicured little fingers on the steel plate next to the down button. She notices Kate and smiles, and even her teeth are prominent.

In the elevator they lean in opposite directions against the sides of the walls. If this woman has something to hide, she does it well. Those tight blonde curls slanted across her forehead and the way she sort of swipes at them without a thought, a motion that if Kate did it would look forced, like a plain woman forcing upon herself a sex appeal that just isn’t there.

The doors open and the woman starts to walk out but then turns, almost bumps into Kate, her eyes wide. The woman says, “So hey, I’m sorry, but you live next door to me right?”

Kate smoothes the ruffled hem of her skirt, says, “I’m in 15D, yeah. You’re 16, right?” If the girl is embarrassed about the constant moaning, she shows no signs; if Kate was her, and God knows certainly she wasn’t, she’d be horrified.

“God I’m rude, you’re like my neighbor and I’ve seen you a few times, but have never introduced myself.” The woman’s extended right hand hangs between them. “I’m Jenny.” Of course her name is Jenny, of course it is.

Kate grabs the woman’s hand and balances herself. “I’m sorry, hi. It’s nice to meet you. My name, it’s Kate. I’m Kate. It’s so nice to meet you!” Kate holds on to the soft hand until Jenny’s smile fades. She giggles and it’s a sound she hasn’t heard from herself before.

Jenny steps back and points to Kate’s skirt, says, “What a great skirt. Wow. I totally love it.”

This is her. It’s definitely her. The way that she says words like “totally” and “like” and how the tone is so cool, so smooth, the way her vowels don’t cling together in that Midwestern way.

“Oh, thank you. It was a gift. From my husband. He’s got great taste in things,” Kate says, her face burning as if it were her and not Jenny who had moaned her way through the past several nights. “Not that you wanted to know any of that.”

Jenny smiles and Kate stares for something inauthentic and condescending, and when she can’t find anything but sweetness Kate wonders what it feels like to punch a person.

“So, hey, I won’t keep you,” Jenny says. “My boyfriend, Charles, he’s sick home sick from work today, so I need to get out of here for a bit, maybe head downtown for some shopping. You know what babies guys can be. It’s best just to disappear.”

Kate reaches behind her and twirls the ties of her hair scarf.

Jenny studies the ground in front of her. “We just moved in. Like a month ago? We don’t really know anyone, so disappearing usually means shopping. You know how that is.“

How many women who look like this, all tall and beautiful and tan with lips stained wine red, who speak, and look, and act Californian, have the name Jenny? Probably quite a few, but too many details match up here and the way they looked at one another in the elevator that day, for God’s sake. She believes in coincidences and all, but come on.

“Oh totally,” Kate says, talking fast, and must be speaking too loud because she’s even giving herself a headache. “We’re in the same boat. I mean, we didn’t just move here or anything, but I‘m usually on my own. Most of my friends are down in the city.”

“God,” Jenny says, “I’m like totally in your face right now, trying to jump into your program.”

“No no no,” Kate says, swiping her palm across her forehead. At least the radiators work in the common areas. “We don’t have a program.” Kate looks up and maybe it is something in the way that Jenny tilts her head or in her warm blue eyes that stare back at her that makes her talk like nonsense. Kate smiles. “Well, it’s nice meeting you. Jenny. We’ll all have to get together. Totally.”

“Well good,” Jenny says, “Done.“

Kate lifts her chin, says. “Yes, done.” She steps back into the elevator.

Jenny says, “I’ll see you soon! It’s so nice to meet you.”

“Yes,” Kate says, the elevator doors closing. “It‘s nice to finally meet you.”

It isn’t until she’s in the hallway upstairs when she realizes how silly she must’ve looked, having gotten right back into the elevator, illustrating for Jenny the fact that she never did, in fact, have a destination in mind.

How convenient: Stash has left a voicemail during the ten minutes while Kate was gone. “Hey baby, I hope you haven’t gotten too deep into dinner. This meeting, it’s running late and I’m not sure that I’ll be home until later, maybe around 8:00 or so. Love you.”

This is how it had been for months now, these late work nights. The timeline coincides quite well with both the arrival of the neighbor and Stash’s lack of interest in her. But that girl, Jenny, she was so cordial, so willing to include Kate into her program. It just didn’t make sense, did it? Unless it was all a deceptive ploy: make nice with the frumpy wife and keep her suspicions at bay. It made sense, really, and so isn’t it just another downright coincidence that Jenny is out on the town and, wait a minute, what was with all of that information about going shopping downtown, an alibi? She didn’t need to tell Kate any of that.

Kate grabs a wine glass from out of one of the cabinets, uncorks a bottle of pinot noir, and pours herself a generous portion. It’s his favorite wine, that bastard, but oh well, for God’s sake, it’s not her fault he’s never here. He’s out doing whatever it is that he does, so why can’t she enjoy herself, relax a bit? It’s not easy being here all day, contributing absolutely nothing to society.

She walks into the living room and unmutes the television; brilliant flames flash across the screen as an anchorwoman speaks of a deadly apartment fire on the city’s west side. The camera shifts back to the woman and she’s smiling as she segues into the next story about aggressive pigeons. Kate turns the mute back on and finishes her glass of wine. She can hear a drum beat next door, techno music maybe. Odd, really, to listen to such a thing when sick, unless there is no Charles there right now but instead her husband, who’s not in meetings at all but lying in his silk boxers shirtless on her bed, waiting for Jenny to return with accessories of some sort, lotions or sensual foods or something of the like. Perhaps that’s where she was going, dressed as she was for Kate’s sake on the off chance that they run into each other. Maybe Stash had warned Jenny that his wife was getting suspicious, to be a bit less conspicuous.

Kate walks back to the kitchen and pours wine until it overflows a bit, a few tannins crawling down the outside of the glass. In the living room, the same segment is still flashing on the screen, footage of pigeons landing on people’s shoulders in the Loop, one getting stuck in a woman’s hair. Kate’s never been the aggressive type, to a fault it would seem now that her sex life was nonexistent. She rolls her fingers around the stem of the wine glass and lifts it to her mouth for another long sip.

The drumbeat has been replaced by a woman’s raspy voice, someone old maybe like what’s her name, that 50’s jazz woman that Stash loves so much, and so now it’s quite obvious that it’s Stash over there, hiding out, waiting for his former ex-lover to return.

Kate finishes her glass of wine and stumbles over his shoe that is lying there by the sink, the glass cracking in two against the hardwood. Enough is enough. She can either stand here like a fool, like one of those submissive types, sitting back waiting for the phase to run its course, or she can walk over to that door and get it over with, for once she can grow some nerves and just go after the answer.

She opens the door and steps into the hallway. She pats her pockets and when she doesn’t hear the jingle of the keys, she spins around, grabbing the wall for balance, and turns the knob. The door doesn’t budge. The goddamn door doesn’t budge. The hallway smells of fish and cigarettes and that jazz woman’s voice is rattling Kate’s nerves even more.

She taps her wedding band against the neighbor’s door. She wobbles a bit, so off balance she is by the prospects of what hides behind two inches of wood. Maybe Stash will be stripped down and maybe he’ll be laughing when he opens the door, thinking perhaps that it is her, Jenny, playing some sort of game. This whole thing, it’s so goddamn trite, so cliché, really. She pounds harder with the side of one fist while her other palm is firmly planted against the wall, steadying her.

It’s not Stash who answers but instead a fair-skinned guy, mid-twenties maybe. He brushes a hand through his scruffy hair, which falls in curls against his forehead, and smiles. “Hey,” he says and doesn’t it figure that he’s got straight white teeth and dimples like little pockets. “You doing okay? I think you’ve bruised the poor door here,” he says with the same California-New-Age-dharma-quack-pot wit as his promiscuous girlfriend.

“You don’t look sick," Kate says squinting.

He wears a brown t-shirt that reads, “1982 Delbert County Badminton Runner-Up.” He shifts, his left palm holding open the door. It’s tough not to notice his arms, his legs, so strong with enough oomph to rattle walls for hours. She pushes against the door frame looking into the apartment, leaning up against his arm. There are picture frames on a bookshelf, maybe of his girlfriend, Jenny, on a California beach with college friends, with Stash even. He pulls his hand back, brushing her hip, and then grabs at the door handle. She cannot help but smile.

“Should I?” He clears his throat. “Look sick, I mean. Anyway, so when are you going to tell me who you are?”

She looks out over his shoulder and sees walls painted wine red and silver picture frames hanging to the wall just waiting to be viewed. They’d be filled with photos of the California coast, of vineyards and beaches, of Stanford football Saturdays and Giants baseball games, and maybe Jenny had been careless or carefree because in one of those photos, maybe one of a larger group, Kate would see her Stash tan, drunk with that Nantucket smile of his, unaware of how dull his life would soon become. If she could just get inside, she’d know for sure if it were the same girl; she’d know because of the books on the shelves, because of the foods in her refrigerator- avocados and grapes, artichokes and nectarines, almonds and persimmons. Maybe they could work through it; maybe it was just a phase, maybe an illicit goodbye, a goddamn closure-seeking affair. And once she knew for sure, they could talk it out, maybe move somewhere other than here, a New England beach town or a Colorado ski village, and then they could be together again. She could pretend to fit in, maybe update her styles, enhance herself somehow by reading more, listening to better music, wearing different makeup.

Or maybe it was too late. Maybe they were already gone and she’s locked out forever, stuck in this hallway staring at this new man, this different man with his tight t-shirt and perfect arms and long beautiful hair.

“Hey,” he says, shoulders folded with his palms out. “Honestly now, should I know who you are?”

She steps forward and trips over a little hemp rug strewn across the hardwood, grabbing his arm to regain her balance. An arm hairier than the one she’s grown accustomed to not feeling draped across her chest each night. “Sorry,” she says. The grains of the hardwood are different here than next door, knottier. “I’m Kate. I live next door and I’m locked out and I can’t get back in.”

He says, “That’s no good.“ He wipes his palms across his t-shirt. “The phone,“ he says, pointing, “it’s right here, if you need it.“

The jazz woman, what’s her name, is singing about longing because that’s all she ever sings about as if it’s one long embittered emotion rather than a collection of songs. Kate looks around the kitchen. It’s antique when she’d expected modern, like those in Hollywood magazines with their funky lights and stainless steel everything. “Charles, do you have wine? Please?”

His eyebrows are arched, his lips curled into a small oval. He shuffles back a few steps. “Kate, uh really now, you’re sort of freaking me out a bit here. How do you know my name? And from the looks of it, you don’t need another glass of wine.“

Her bottom lip is numb, indented. Her scarf is coming undone in the back of her hair and when she tries to fix it, her ring snags on the cloth. “Oh my God, I’m sorry,” she says. She winces. That was loud; she screamed it for God’s sake. Could she look guiltier? “I’m sorry, really, I didn’t mean to confuse your-“ She clears her throat. “Your program or anything. Jenny, she told me. Today. In the elevator. I saw her there. Earlier.”

Had she really just used the word “program?” She’d caught a reaction on that one, the way the beautiful muscles in his jaw tensed up real tight. She relaxed when he did, after she’d name-dropped his wife. It was a good move, after all. Finally.

“Now that makes more sense. I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to get all weird on you, it’s just that we’re new here, you know? J didn’t tell me that she’d made a friend.”

She steps back and takes a deep breath, then smiles. “Seriously,“ she says, her voice soft and words enunciated. “I’m fine. Just rattled. Because of the locking myself out? A glass of wine would help. A lot.“

He opens his refrigerator. She leans up on the tips of her toes and tilts her head. There is a cellophane-wrapped chipped white plate with bread-crusted chicken and some sort of yellow sauce caked to the outside, a beaten-up carton of orange juice, some wilted lettuce, a half dozen bottles of domestic beer, and one egg with more of a blemish than a crack across the middle. “J and I, we’re not really wine drinkers here, but maybe how about an orange juice? Or a Sam Adams?“

And Stash never called her “J,” that’s for sure. She’s far more to Stash than a single letter. A single exclamation point, maybe. And what’s this about no wine. My God, what a façade she’s put up for this poor guy, whose round shoulders narrow toward his lower back, his spine so defined through that t-shirt as he leans over to grab a beer. And maybe he knows, after all, about his wife’s former ex-lover; look at the way he stands here like this as if begging Kate to slide a finger down that spine and grab those beautiful shoulders from behind and maybe he’d tilt his head a bit so as to give her lips easy access to back of his neck.

She’s leaning forward when he stands and turns with two beers in hand, his arm brushing against hers. “Whoa,” he says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there.” He sets both bottles on the granite counter and for God’s sake the way his forearms bulge as he twists the caps off. “Kate? Are you okay? You’re looking a bit pale.”

They’re in this together while their respective lovers are off on their little tryst. And Charles knows it too, the way he picks up that bottle and holds it to his mouth, sipping while smirking. So seductive he is that Kate’s not sure that he wouldn’t have made his way to her at some point on this evening even had her suspicions not escalated such that she had but no other option than to come over here and bang her fist upon his door. Bang it hard against the wood the way that maybe soon they’ll thrust their feet together hard against the wall that has separated them from one another through all of these suspicious weeks, the perfect vengeance.

Charles holds his hands behind her, phantom guiding her, so gentle he is, so sweet he is to not assume that it’s okay to touch her, into the living room and onto the couch. “You’re okay?”   

She nods, takes a long sip of beer. There are pictures on the walls but they’re blurry, reds collapsing into yellows, faces absent of definition; here, from where she sits, they look as Stash’s old photos did that day when she’d released them from that box, when she’d stripped from him the identity that she’d both admired and feared. There are bookshelves here but they’re almost bare; a few books here, a few there, and stacks of magazines and CD’s. There’s an ashtray, a sewing machine, but nothing that she’d expected. There is nothing California chic here because maybe it’s all housed in boxes in an Oceanside estate off of Highway One. The beautiful stranger sitting with a leg hanging off the couch, leaning toward Kate with a frown, his eyes held in a squint; so lonely he is probably, despite the great sex and the beautiful girlfriend, because he knows, he damn well knows just as Kate does that it’s all slipping away, that the goddamn past holds more weight than they do.

There’s the look, his eyebrow arched, looking concerned. A man who knows, maybe, that he’s about to lose one thing and maybe gain another.

To hell with it already, then. She’s spent too much time sitting back and waiting for everything to change, too much time staring at unforgiving mirrors and wishing that she were someone else, someone blonde and tan, someone with a mastery of African languages, a working knowledge of quantum mechanics or literary theory. She slides her hand up Charles’s leg and lifts herself forward until her hands are clutching those round shoulders, pushing his back against the cushion. She brushes her lips against his, sliding her tongue across his bottom teeth, and then pulls back and exhales into his ear, says, “Fuck me, Charles, please, fuck me like you fuck her, like he fucks her.”

He pushes back against her until she’s sitting up staring at him, at how he judges her so wide-eyed, at how in that dark blue void lives the truth that nothing is as it seemed just a moment ago. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Kate? What is this? I don’t even know who you are.” He stands up, knocking a couch cushion from out of his way. “I live here. With my girlfriend!“ He wrestles with a fistful of shirt. “And who is he? What does that even mean, like the way he fucks her?”     

The inside of the half-empty bottle cannot help her, it seems, and it’s far too narrow to fit her too-skinny frame. She wipes at her eyes and when she pulls her hand to her lap she sees that her palm is stained blue. Who does she think she is, made up like this, wearing this caked-on garbage that is who knows how old. “Charles, I’m sorry! I thought that you knew, I just figured that you knew, and I’m sorry, I just thought that we were in this together.”

He holds his arms above his head. “In what together? I have no fucking clue what you’re saying, Kate. You’re freaking me out here, okay? What’s going on? Knew what? Who is he?“

Kate stands now too, tries to grab Charles’s hands, because maybe it’s not too late to help him get through this, to understand this mess they’re in. “Stash is my husband, okay Charles? Stash, as in Jenny’s Stash from back when they were at Stanford.”

He brushes his hands through his hair and pulls further away. He, too, is repelled by her. “I don’t know a Stash. You’re not making sense, do you understand that? You’re not making any sense, Kate. Do you know why I know that you’re not making sense? All right? Do you want to know?”

She’s standing close enough now and the colors have stopped weaving into one another and the faces in the photographs are no longer blurry. There is no Stash here. There is no Stanford sweatshirt here, no Giants games, no Oceanside estates.

“Because you know why, Kate? Because I went to high school with Jenny, okay? In Cincinnati. Ohio. In fact, we went to college together, too. At Ohio State. Not California because Jenny’s never been west of here. Not once in her life, okay?”

She takes it one step at a time, left foot back, right foot back, and there it is, the truth, and how could she be so stupid, so miserably stupid, and with each step she says “I’m sorry,” and then again, “I’m sorry. Jenny wasn’t around, Stash wasn’t around, they both had excuses and it just made so much sense, understand, just so much sense. I’m sorry!”  The balls of her feet roll backwards across the floor; his eyes look from her to the wall that separates their apartments. He’s shaking his head, but there’s concern in those eyes that wasn’t there before and she can only say again that she’s sorry but by the time she’s in the hallway she knows that it doesn’t matter to whom she apologizes because it’s too late, too goddamn late.