Here we go! Setting things up. Making moves. Ect. Ect.
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1.
Margot comes to Jasper’s home twice in a week, once invited and the other unexpected.
The first is after her lecture at his college, after the realization of her husband’s affair had settled in her stomach as a hard stone, after she lied to her friend Henderson and inquired about an artist with a curious last name. She comes to his door, a bottle of wine as a gift clutched in her fine hands, soft, bruised paper-thin skin under her bright eyes, secret agendas on her breath. If Jasper recognizes the look he doesn’t have the foresight (how could he?) to apply it to himself.
“Mrs. Davis, come in … please.” He holds the screen door open and when he leans his body against the open door to let her pass the hinges whine in protest.
Her body brushes against his as she passes, entering into the apartment, heat already an exchangeable property between them. She moves slowly, but with purpose, and she waits the appropriate amount of time before asking to take a seat.
There’s a three-foot glass bong poorly hidden in a corner. It’s one of those contemporary creations, brightly painted with swirls of blue and green designs. She points to it halfheartedly and tells him that she could never figure out how to use bongs - when to light, when to breathe, where to place her hands. Jasper looks at her suddenly, caught between surprise and embarrassment, but he grins, mouth curving slowly, when she asks if he can roll a joint.
The second time she comes to him his eyes are thick with sleep, the hour dark and fit for wrongness. It is not like a dream, a cinematic moment caught in slow motion. It is like the rainstorm that woke him, the kind that leaves you fearful and doubting yourself through the stretch of the day.
The second time she visits, uninvited, unexpected, he takes her wrist in hand. That second time he takes a lot of things from her. He takes everything she offers.
2.
Kenneth always answers the phone the same way.
He will say, “This is Davis,” his voice pitched dark and low, suspicious.
“It’s Margot,” she will say, and then offer him a question. About dinner (always dinner), about what time to expect him, about some insignificant home repair that will go unfixed.
After a time Margot realizes that she needs to invent reasons to phone him. She does not call simply to talk. She has nothing to share.
Sometimes, she invites Henderson to dinner, although he can rarely find the time to drive out to the suburbs, to take a night away from grading. She’s made friends with a young doctor in the neighborhood, a strawberry-blonde with a doll’s face. Regina is in the middle of her first year of residency. She’s either stressed or starving or some combination of both, so Margot invites her to dinner too. She does this often, neighborly and charitable, offering her a seat at their table. But Margot can count on one hand the number of times Regina eats at that table with her and her husband and her food. Kenneth is close to always absent, so the two open wine and push rice pilaf around their plates with silver forks. More often than not, they let the dinner sit on the table, picked at, and the two move to the patio. Margot bums cigarettes from Regina, both of them guilty over the habit, but bonded by it.
It is one of these nights that Margot shares her secret. It spills from her mouth in a breath of smoke. She curls her fingers around her necklace, suddenly self-conscious, and waits.
Regina blinks her blue eyes and chokes on a laugh. It isn’t meant unkindly. “What are you going to do?”
“What would you do?”
“Was it a one-time thing? Or is he having an affair? Has he done this before?”
Margot isn’t sure how to answer this, so she lets the silence speak for her.
Regina whistles, soft and low. She lights another cigarette with the burning butt of her first one and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “Well … hm. I guess you have two options, Magpie. Forgiveness or revenge, right?”
“I don’t think I know much about the nature of revenge.”
“Hey, I’ve read your book. That’s a boldfaced lie. Aren’t you writer types supposed to be creative? Use your imagination.”
Margot catches their paired reflection in the darkened window behind them. She laughs, hummingbird soft, and sips her wine.
3.
She wears: simple cotton underwear in off-shades of white. T-shirt bras that are nude and soft, the fabric seamless and hidden beneath her downy sweaters and cashmere cardigans. She wears subdued shades, conservative skirts that leave her legs pale and bare beneath. Margot wears her hair loose, lightly curled, and sometimes Kenneth used to call her beautiful.
4.
She loves to cook. She hates to cook. There’s a terrible loneliness she has come to associate with her kitchen. The phone tucked under her chin as she drops peeled potatoes into a pot. After they boil she will mash them. She does not report this plan to her mother or Regina or whoever else is on the other side of the telephone tucked beneath her chin. She says instead, “The landscapers have finished planting the front hedges. Finally. We added violets to the flowerbed by the mailbox. Oh, and it looks like the downstairs bathroom needs to get remodeled. Something about the pipes. It’s getting a little old not having the house to myself much.” She’ll say it without knowing if she believes herself.
Maybe the house deserves and demands her loneliness. Maybe it is her penance for making poor decisions, for trusting blindly, for losing a child and never having another.
She lets her mother or Regina or whoever chatter on in a feminine voice, but she doesn’t think the conversation merits much more than an occasional huff of a response. She’s only partially listening. She keeps mashing potatoes. Like a collector of unwanted and discarded things an old quote will float back to her:
If I can’t dance then I’d rather be dead.
5.
“This is delicious,” Kenneth says, a forkful of meatloaf at his mouth, eyes never breaking from the Sunday football game. “You made this?”
“Sure,” Margot lies. Kenneth nods in approval and she finds she hopes he secretly does not believe her. That he knows she bought it ready-made at the store, her effort with this dinner as half-hearted as her lie.
Neither speaks after she replies. Their silences have come to say more than actual words could. Not for the first time, Margot thinks if they had succeeded in having children then maybe the sound of their sons filling the table with their bright chatter would be a buffer for these silences.
But maybe not.
Her husband is still handsome despite his deception. It’s a cruel fact. He looks better now that his hair is short and he keeps his beard trimmed, stylish. Manly but not rigid. He is tall and lean, his arms muscular, his abdomen still creased with the lines of muscles. He works hard to look younger than his age, but she supposes she does too. Margot runs daily. She spends an hour before each breakfast in their at-home gym, her limbs burning from pilates, sweat dampening her shirts. The difference, she now knows, is that she was never crafting her body into a weapon. She was not shaping her thighs and stomach for the sight or touch of another.
They married too young. Margot initially kept expecting to hear this about her and Kenneth, from Regina, from Henderson, from her mother. But those words never came, not from anybody but herself. She kindled that expectation within her, craving the validation. Because they had been too young. She had been all skinny long legs and boyish hips, summer freckles over the bridge of her nose, long messy unkempt hair, her boldness attractive and encouraging. She had been young.
And so had he.
Kenneth and his impotent masculinity. She doesn’t mean sexually, but she’s grown since nineteen and what she has grown to learn, and perhaps even mourn, is that there is a vital piece missing from her husband. Self-awareness, a vital piece it takes to be a man. Kenneth does not keep secrets from himself. How can he, when he doesn’t even know they’re there?
He had been the first man she ever loved, and without meaning to, she had made the intuitive leap that meant he’d be the only man she’d ever love.
Kenneth cleans his plate. With a triumphant grin shaped like a challenge he reaches for seconds.
6.
From the chair beside her, Jasper stares at her. He is minutes away from grabbing her wrist, but the tension crackles between them, mounting. Margot sips the beer he had given her. It’s too bitter. Her hands are shaking. Her hair is wet from the rain and sticking to her cheeks, her neck. She feels cold and hot at the same time.
Jasper pushes his hands through his dark hair, and she gets the impression that he does it to get a clearer view of her. But she can see his face better now too. She’s struck by how young he is, and how his face doesn’t hide his youth. He doesn’t look like Kenneth. He doesn’t have his fairness. Jasper’s mouth is a little too feminine. He has a broad jaw but well-defined cheekbones. His nose is similar though and the cut of his brows. But Kenneth never stared so intently, so deeply focused. If he had, it had never been at her or she simply can’t remember.
“What?” She asks, pushing hair off her face. She fights the urge to look away, to shield herself from such scrutiny.
He shakes his head, a tiny measured movement, a faint smile almost trying at his parted lips. “You look just the way I imagine you look.” He says it like a riddle; he doesn’t talk like other boys his age, she’s learning.
But immediately Margot can tell he regrets what he said. She smiles in confusion (and flattery, something terrible, something else), a laugh building. “So … I only exist because you will it?” It’s meant as a tease, but a note of incredulity bleeds through her tone.
The light in him shutters out for a beat, and she knows that wasn’t what he meant at all.
She likes that.
“No,” he says softly, patient. His fingers are wet and they tense against his knee. “When I think of you,” he says, and if he leaned further in their knees would touch, if he said it any softer it’d sound less like a truth and more like an emotion, “I picture you. Like this.”
She likes that too.
7.
When she stands to leave, apologetic about the absurdity of her visit, about the hour, about a secret she hasn’t told him, he grabs her by the wrist. His fingers are tight at first, his grip without mercy. It’s unexpected, but when she looks him in the eye, thinking to find his gaze somewhere else, unfixed, miles and years away from her, she sees that he is there. He is with her. He looks at her wrist before he looks to her face. His fingers loosen, play over the pop of bone, paper-thin skin at the base of her palm, the blue network of veins converging there, beneath. Margot holds her breath.
But it’s her that kisses him, tentative, kind, her lips brushing over his. Jasper takes her face between his hands and deepens it, his mouth inquisitive and demanding. He leaves a smaller, tinier kiss on her bottom lip when he pulls away, suddenly strict and bashful at once.
“You’re married,” he tells her, like she may have forgotten.
The flush of goodness in him makes her smile. It should make her feel guilty, but it doesn’t. Not yet. She pushes her hand through his hair, feels the way he leans into the touch, reluctance dissolving by the time she slips from her chair and into his lap. She crawls above him, the weight of her a solid thing, emanating heat, and catches his mouth again.
His hand slips beneath her shirt, palm heavy on her bare stomach, more intimate than it should be, pressed against the shelf of her ribcage. Holding her together and cataloging her at the same time.
8.
In the future Margot will not remember most of the context for all the fights she ever had with Kenneth. She will remember bits and pieces, which, when cobbled together, could illustrate a larger picture. A larger fight.
She will remember Kenneth saying, “Wanting a person to ... to touch you sure isn’t the same thing as love.”
Margot with her hands clasped in her lap. Margot sitting on the edge of the bed. Margot regretting the concept of forgiveness. She will remember all of that. That Kenneth had been drunk, he had been late, she had been awake, she had yet to hear the name Jasper.
“Sometimes it can feel like it is,” she had said.
Margot will remember less than she forgets.
In the near future, she will wonder how many people they have shared their marriage with.
When she comes home to an empty house from visiting a college apartment, she will realize: they, as a marriage, will always number at least three - Kenneth and Margot and whoever threatens, tempts, successfully comes between them.
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