*Fiction — April 20, 2019
Afternoon
ON THE DAY OF the party, Jack and Stella finished all their errands by noon, so they got cheeseburgers and went home to get stoned. In the living room of the basement apartment, Stella packed the pipe with a strain of marijuana called Helluva Heaven while Jack collected accoutrements in the kitchen: plates, knives, forks, glasses, two of each; the large bottle of corn-syrup-free ketchup; thick stacks of paper napkins; the pitcher that filtered water as it poured.
Pinkish sunlight throbbed around the edges of the windows that faced the backyard, a gray patch where they sometimes smoked at night when it wasn’t too cold out. Jack had pulled the curtains shut as soon as they’d gotten home. Now he arranged the items he’d brought in from the kitchen on the low coffee table and turned to the window, trying to force the fabric to blot out the extra light.
“I wish we could make it so no light got through,” he said. “So it was totally dark.”
“I don’t,” Stella said, scraping little bits of green off her fingers with her thumbnails. She tried to push the bits into the pipe, but they mostly fell on the floor. “I like light. It depresses me to pull the curtains during the day.”
Jack’s shoulders slumped. He dropped his hands to his sides. “Did you not want to get high and relax with something on TV?” he asked the floor. “After working so hard all week?”
Stella sealed the canister of Helluva Heaven. “No, of course I do,” she said quickly.
“I don’t know that I want to anymore,” Jack said, staring at the brown curtain. “It’s not fun if I know you don’t like it.”
“I do like it,” Stella said. “I do, Scout.”
It was one of the ways they were nice to each other. Jack called Stella Lacey because she had told him, early on, that as a little girl she’d thought lace was the most beautiful thing in the world, had cultivated it in all her effects—parasol, gloves, even the bolero over her confirmation dress. Later, her mother had told her that lace was created to look like pubic hair, and lacy became what she wanted to be: sexy, like a princess. When they got married, she’d worn enough lace to cover her body five times over.
Stella called Jack Scout because he had made Eagle Scout by rehabbing the septic system of a remote shelter for abused women and their children in the high eastern Oregon desert where he had grown up. It was a project she had learned about on their first date, just moments before she decided they would be married. They’d been twenty-three on that day. Her hair was bobbed and dyed bright red; he wore a green button-down shirt printed with silver paisleys. They went together to an island on a ferry that cost only a dollar.
Once she was stoned, Stella didn’t care so much about the curtains, and she was happy to see Jack relax. The food disappeared quickly. Without speaking she got up, floated into the narrow kitchen behind them to refill the water pitcher from the kitchen faucet, and floated back onto the couch, feeling pleasantly immaterial. Jack didn’t turn. When they watched TV together, he took on a contemplative, focused expression, like a detective working out a case on one of their favorite crime dramas. A pensive, studied attention—somehow both alert and relaxed. Over the course of a given evening in front of the television, his features settled into a gaze of sleepier and sleepier analysis, until finally she could feel his muscles slacken beside her.
At the commercial break he reached over and patted her hand, saying, “Lacey,” in a tone of encouragement.
Marijuana helped Stella in all kinds of ways. It made her genuinely hungry and rendered the experience of eating glorious. It heightened her ability to evoke the early stages of orgasm by doing kegel exercises on her end of the couch. It smoothed ambiguity and fear. When she was sober, she sometimes worried that her correspondence with Paul was inappropriate, a kind of vague infidelity, but stoned she was confident that Paul was in fact the good and caring friend she believed him to be, an offbeat but crucial element of her unusual, artistic life. She liked to test the marijuana’s power by directing her mind to something worrying just before smoking and then revisiting it once stoned, to see how she felt about it after the drug had taken effect.
The episode they were watching ended. Stella stretched her legs straight out in front of her. In the kitchen they had a whole container of the chocolate tea biscuits she liked. There was a documentary she wanted to watch. Jack looked nobly handsome at his distant end of the couch. This was great. This was fine. She felt good. She felt alive.
“Scout? Do you want to watch that new movie about seals?”
He leaned his head back in an exaggerated yawn. “It sounds so boring. Can we watch Hat Hour?”
Stella loved intelligence. Revered it as a benevolent and reliable deity, a quality that could order the universe, if she let it. Jack was the smartest man she had ever met—had taught himself Polish! Had been a chess champion, once! Had earned dual degrees in philosophy and math at a college famous for its high rate of student suicide, had graduated alive!—and so she had married him. But despite his intellectual bona fides, his fine education and great taste in literature, his ability to explain any idea to her with a total clarity she had never found in the communication of another person, Jack had a tremendous love for trash.
In large part this was fine, because through Jack, Stella had discovered her own long-buried love for trash—in her case, reality television shows charting the largely false minutiae of friendships between wealthy women. With their squawking soundtracks and indefatigable vulgarity, these ugly programs spread a shimmering relaxation all over her body, worked out the knots that built in her shoulders from hunching as she graded papers. Stella was grateful to Jack for indulging and even encouraging her love of them. For her thirtieth birthday he had somehow procured a baseball cap made to adorn the crew of Wives’ Lives, a gift so thoughtful and unlikely it had brought tears to her eyes when she opened it. And yet she could hardly stand the trash he needed to survive his days: saccharine romantic comedies in which preternaturally sweet and unique heroines won over abashedly grumpy men. Which half of these turgid romances, Stella wondered, did Jack identify with? He wouldn’t tell her. She never asked.
Stella looked at her husband. Spending two hours consuming the tale of a milliner’s daughter finding the grit to rescue her family store and win over a taciturn accountant sounded almost as appealing as returning to campus and teaching for another six hours. But she saw Jack’s hopeful eyes and remembered her tentativeness around the marijuana, the way it had hurt him, her hesitation.
“Scout,” she said. “I can’t think of anything I would rather do than watch Hat Hour with you.”
“Lovely jubbly,” he said, then busied himself setting it up. She tapped a fat joint out of its plastic test tube. Jack brought the cookies from the kitchen. The package was empty before the opening credits ended.
The film held Jack’s attention completely and Stella’s not at all, so she propped her left knee up to shield her crotch and turned to her phone behind it, first resisting and then giving in to reviewing her most recent exchange with Paul, whose contact was stored under the name Margaret O.
Margaret O: You must realize that you are a creature of unusual sensitivity and sophistication. The incredible refinement of your person and all that crackling wit and vinegar in you makes it difficult for others. They envy and fear you but also desperately want your approval.
Stella: Really? What?
Margaret O: Take it from me. The truth! I wouldn’t lie to you and get myself in trouble.
Margaret O: And then you’re so stunning on top of it. Oh brother.
Stella: I just feel like people are mad at me a lot. Like they resent me.
Margaret O: Well now beautiful girl many people feel small next to you. That’s a fact. And plenty want you more than they can stand, not that too many will ever look that in the face. Some overlap between the two. A Venn Diagram; remember those? But the ones who can stand next to your tsunami without fear feel just warm and lucky. Those are the people to seek out.
Stella: I know. I do. I feel really lucky to have found you.
Margaret O: !!!!
Margaret O: Dear. You are dear.
Margaret O: I am thinking of your sweet desire for others to know your kind self. They will. So many admire you already. You are Pure Water.
Margaret O: Be back in a bit. U returns from HH dance and dinner is afoot—
The exchange had taken place over the course of a few hours, three days before. She had received the last text in the evening, after Jack had already fallen asleep beside her. It was an hour later where Paul was, due east—late for his daughter Ursula’s hip-hop dance class to end, she had thought. But their talks were like that. A man with four children and a wife could be called away at any time.
Stella was proud of her relationship with Paul. In him, she felt that she had found a soul friend: someone who understood her, with whom she could discuss her frailest thoughts, the ones that worried and upset Jack. Stella was the tree from which Jack hung his rope swing, the ballast that enabled him to sail straight. He had told her as much in their wedding vows. It wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t be hers.
She read the texts from Paul again, checking Jack in her peripheral vision. He was utterly absorbed in the movie. She pushed the bad feeling down into her stomach. Paul would get back to her soon. He was just a busy man. One who always made time for her. She knew she was riding some kind of line with him, or maybe had crossed all the way over it. But her life was so much fuller with Paul in it. The hours of dancelike feeling his sage and loving words gave her. The way he saw her: glimmering, worthy. His unexpected veneration had become sun and water in her life. They had known one another a full year now, she realized with warm gratitude. They’d met at a pedagogical conference in Grand Rapids, where they had been seated together, at an otherwise empty table, for an interminable awards dinner at which neither was honored.
Paul was not the kind of man to whom Stella was ordinarily attracted. Thirty years her senior, he was sturdily built, nearly exactly her height—one inch taller, he insisted, which she found charming—with long silver hair he wore in a plait down his back. He wore cowboy boots, and, with little coaxing, emitted a reverent self-mythopoesis touching on his family (beloved children, deceased troubled parents, extant-but-never-spoken-of wife), early experiences (something in Saskatchewan, the Coast Guard), students (geniuses rapt by his generosity all), and other passions (wine, amateur shoemaking, prairies).
All her young life, Stella had been compelled by tall, wan, sadeyed boys who wanted oblivion and succor, had wanted to drink in red-lit bars with them and cradle their heads in her lap, to smudge their tears against the pad of her thumb and lift it to her mouth to taste. That was what she knew desire to be: the winsome swoon of wanting to make someone feel better. She liked to give what she had always wanted to receive: a curated sort of nurturing that left her boys feeling like brand-new schoolchildren, bathed and put to bed at an appropriate hour, held tight, tucked firmly in, and allowed to keep the light on.
But with Paul she felt something new, a nascent type of desire that had crystallized only several months into their neverending conversation, shocking her. There was something lurid and dirty in wanting to straddle Paul’s gut—she imagined it a hardened leather dome beneath chest fuzz that matched the braid—and let him suckle on her dangling teats. For him, in her fantasies, her breasts became sagging dugs, ready or perhaps overripe for an infant. Dried out. Used up. Like her, like she would be, but he would still want her. Bleat for it like a lamb, like a little baby boy. Let him worship her harder, give her more. Let her feel him rude and hard under her, beneath her. Let him denigrate and consecrate her, his never-spoken lust simmering just below until it surfaced in a tall and indomitable flume.
They texted about books and dreams and funny happenings and assholes at the coffee shop, and sent each other pictures of all of these things, but also of their faces and occasionally of her body. She felt no shame about any of it, none at all. She was sure.
To keep safe, Stella dropped harmless details about Paul into conversation with Jack, who remarked sympathetically that he sounded like a good guy. He was glad she had found someone in her field to mentor her. He reserved his hope solely for her work now. Jack’s office management job required a two-hour daily commute and was such a total repudiation of his youthful ambitions that he had structured their life around total forgetting whenever he was not at work: the marijuana, the entertainment, the snacks, an increasingly early bedtime. Stella had never slept so much in her life. Sometimes they laid down to read before dusk was over. It was good for her, she thought. Stella worked four adjunct jobs and needed her rest. Sometimes she argued with Jack, told him that life had more in store, urged him to keep going—apply for new jobs, do a hiking meet-up, get a bike. But she didn’t like to argue, at least not Jack’s way. He had a special talent for setting the room red with his breaths and the silences in between, withholding their secret language and pet names. He let Stella figure out for herself how much she really wanted to be right.
Jack laughed until he wheezed at something on the screen. Holding her phone so that it looked casual, able to be put down at any moment, Stella typed a message to Paul.
Stella: I’m watching the latest romcom nightmare and wondering how these things get made. Do people like them? A simpering woman, a disciplinarian man from whom affection must be coaxed. Ugh! Who wants to fantasize about that? I feel ill-fit to the world, sometimes, really. Except when I talk to you. Too many cookies, I think I will have sugar tummy. Class went well today, maybe going to dye my hair soon, thinking about you and wishing you a wonderful day. Remind me to tell you about my new dress.
Sugar tummy was what she and Jack called it when, stoned, they ate so many sweets that they were sick in the morning.
Sometimes Paul would write back immediately. This was not one of those times.
The movie ended incomprehensibly; even after Stella forced herself to shove her phone between the couch cushion and the armrest and train her eyes on the screen, she couldn’t make herself follow. The articulation of the offense she took at it was basically the thesis statement of the complaint every man she had ever loved had eventually come up with: that she was a snob, a scold, a harridan who couldn’t let people have their idiotic dopey fun of doglike submission to the worn-out, soppy ideas of patriarchal capitalism. She was an effete slut for whom everything had to be complex and dark and meaningful.
Once, she and Jack had gone to see an action movie on opening night, and Stella had had a good time there in the dark, laughing alone, whispering to Jack about plot contrivances, until he’d turned and said to her with unexpected vehemence, “I’m enjoying this, okay? I like this kind of movie.” Stella had been stunned. She’d believed them to share an acid sense of humor. But when Jack wanted to be comforted, the acid departed. Then, like almost everyone else Stella had ever known, he required niceness; wanted calm, a restful evening at home, time to unwind. How unwound could one person be, she sometimes wondered, before they became completely undone?
“That was a cute movie,” Stella said, stopping Hat Hour’s final credits and returning to the main menu. She remembered, with horror, that these were the exact words that the vapid cheerleader had spoken during a hospital visit to the recently paralyzed quarterback on a smalltown football drama of which she and Jack had watched every episode, in a scene that epitomized the girl’s failure to apprehend the severity of her high school honey’s fate.
It wasn’t, on the whole, a great idea for a person with Stella’s stingingly clear memory to watch as much TV as she did.
“Want to watch the seal one now?”
Jack yawned. She averted her eyes from his open mouth and looked at the gold splotches on the wall behind him. Why was he so tired? He hadn’t had to work today. It was still so early. Not even four o’clock yet, the sun fighting its way in against the margins of the window.
“Maybe you stay up and watch it, Lacey,” he said. “I’m just so beat.”
No! Stella wanted to yelp. I’m the one who got up at five to grade before I taught my morning weekend class! It is three goddamn o’clock! Look alive!
But she had gotten good at squelching yelps, stopping them before they got to her mouth. And she wanted to be able to go to the party that night—wanted them to go together.
“It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll watch it some other time.” She turned off the TV, trying not to seem petulant. Jack didn’t seem to register any of it.
He put on his cozy voice. “Do you want to just maybe go lie down, in the bedroom? Just for a little bit?” He stretched towards her like a vine.
Stella scrutinized her husband’s face. If he were a sitcom husband, this would be a come-on. But Jack genuinely wanted to sleep. To go to bed in the middle of the day. Her hands nearly flew up, so badly did she want to wrench open the curtains, the door—to let the air in, run outside, smear her face with all the makeup she owned and go to a bar and drink until she didn’t know her name. Let anything at all happen to her.
She smiled. “That sounds nice!” she said and followed him to the bedroom.
Here, too, Jack carefully drew the blinds flat against the windows. “Still so bright,” he muttered, taking off his clothes without ceremony, tossing his pants and shirt into the hamper, as if he was done for the day. A gentle nausea kept Stella upright. Her husband’s body was a pale rectangle, a blank known space. She placed her phone on her bedside table, screen down. Disrobed. Drew back the covers. Crawled in.
Being close to Jack like this still made her senses flare. Each rejection had made the specifics of his body more painful to consider, but she could still enjoy his smell, his nearness. His was the body with which she had spent the most time, even if she was circumscribed in the range of acceptable actions she could make upon it. She nuzzled into his shoulder, closed her arms around his chest. Pushed against him to feel the slack hang of his penis on her thigh. It was hot and sticky under the covers. She knew, outside, the afternoon was bright.
As soon as he was asleep, Jack’s body produced a quarter-erection, which Stella snuggled determinedly against. She shifted her arms so that her breasts lay on his arm. She closed her eyes and thought of cameras, of men with cameras, of a man making love to her while another filmed, of a place where there was only a man and only his desire to put his mouth on hers, and she thought of being with two men, three, of taking drugs with them, drugs she had never done just as she had never been with more than one man. Cocaine, meth even, things that would make her crazy and rough, dangerous things just as she was a dangerous girl, something meaningless and small, so little that it hardly existed, that it was hardly real at all.
It—it—it—she was an it—
She did not exist.
And what if—what if it were to receive Paul’s silver hair across its face like a whip, what if she were hurt like that. What if he took it out of the braid for her. What if it was silky, like a cat’s tail, what if it was rough like leather, what if he shamed her that way, if he forced her down, if he forced—
“What are you doing?”
Stella’s hands flew from between her legs. She went rigid. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t look at him. “No.”
Jack rolled over, not pretending to believe her. Gave a grandiose sigh. “Uh, okay. I’m trying to rest.”
She couldn’t see his face. Why wouldn’t he show her his face? She couldn’t stop the tears, stupid as they were. As she was. At least she had learned how to make them quiet.
“Get some sleep, Scout,” she whispered to his back. “I’m just going to read a little bit.”
In response he moved farther away from her. Fractured light spread against the far wall. She felt the weight of the ceiling on her body. A useless thing. Her useless thing. No—the useless thing was her. I, useless, she thought, and cracked herself up, right up to the edge.
Okay. Okay! What time was it? Probably five now? Maybe five-thirty, if she was lucky. Maybe the day was rushing by. They tended to, when she could lose track. That meant they had only two hours to spend before she could busy herself getting ready for the party. Smoke another joint and play some music and spend half an hour, forty minutes painting her face, arranging her hair, picking out an outfit. Jack could sleep the whole time and then how could he be too tired to go to the party? She would wake him up all ready to go and he’d have to rally. How lucky were they to have a whole day to rest like that. She had a pretty blue dress. She had a pretty green dress. A red crop top she had sent a photo of herself in to Paul. A True Flame, he had replied.
Her bed was a spaceship and she was out there in the firmament, floating in the dark, and it was cold, and she wondered if she would ever land. Everyone had only so long to be alive, and she was on a clock. She was ticking down. Now that she was over thirty, she understood that as she hadn’t before. And everyone had the right to do as they liked with that clock, with that time. She knew that. That was good and right. If Jack wanted to sleep his days away, she was no one to blame him. She understood. The bed was soft and warm. But in it she was frozen, coated in space dust. How would she become anything that mattered by the time she died? She had made a pledge, a vow, and it was hers to carry and live out if she was worth anything at all.
Deep breaths. It’s okay. Breathe the yoga way, not the scared way.
Okay.
Okay!
She pinched her eyes tight against the tears and when she knew she’d won, had squeezed them back down, she let herself lift her phone from the table. She’d turned off all of the alerts, but when she went into her texts she saw that Paul had written her. Oh! Her hero. He saved her. A gallant man, a crusader for her heart. Fearless. When she was down at the bottom he sent the submarine.
Margaret O: Busy busy here. Bouillabaisse. A dinner party! Later Kyle’s Big Game. Going to have a lot going on, next few days. Thinking about pulling back from the screen life. Getting outside more. Have a great Saturday with your movie!
She wished she was the kind of person who could whip her phone at the wall. Break it, break everything on it. Stand on the bed next to Jack’s body. Douse him with lighter fluid. Find a match.
“Who’s Margaret O?”
She blacked her phone’s screen and slid the hand holding it tight against the opposite side of her body, under the covers. Turned to look at Jack’s face.
His furry eyebrows. Once, long ago, she had licked one. Called it his kitty cat.
“A lady from work.”
Stella had four jobs, and none of them involved coworkers. But Jack didn’t press. He stared at the ceiling, didn’t respond.
She turned toward him, willed herself soft. “Are you almost ready to start getting ready for the party, Scout?”
He moved his head so that they saw each other dead on, their features mirrored. They looked and looked, for longer, it seemed, than ever before. Than anyone ever had, ever before.
This was it, she knew: the moment after which everything would get better.
Jack wiped his face down the middle. One left-handed stripe. In the dimming sun, his skin was shadowed with rosettes. They lay so close that Stella forgot they were separate people. Two bodies in space.
His mouth seized, tried to right itself, failed, pried itself open. “What party?”
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 8. View full issue & more.