You think you know someone, maybe even love them. Then, quite suddenly, you are abashed to discover that you don’t really know them at all. You spend a good deal of time figuring them out. Then you leave the cap off the toothpaste.
You argue over the placement of furniture, or they mutter an unkind word over coffee. That's when you realize that the bright flame of your desire, the glowing warmth of your affection, and the cool certainty of your love has been smothered, snuffed out under a blanket of bitterness and ashes. It’s never one instance, this suffocation of the heart. Rather, it is an accumulation of sordid disagreements, petty loathing and minor catastrophe. It happens so slowly (insidious, as inevitable as the tide going in) that you hardly notice until it’s grim finality is upon you. Nothing is as toxic as love turned to hate, nor is anything as irrevocable. That’s the way it was with Judith and I.
I awoke Saturday morning to a queer sensation, at once inexplicable and deviously concrete, that something was wrong. Everything looked the same, mind you. But it all felt different. The rose patterned wall paper concealed hideous insects with its petals, fatal poison in its coy thorns. The friendly noonday luminescence that leaked through the windows, the warmth of my luxurious bed; these were simply traps, leading me by the nose toward an unspeakable and spontaneous doom that defied definition.
Judith was already awake, pulling on a formless purple pantsuit in preparation for the days carefully planned monotonies. As a working couple, Judith and I are only able to spend time doing the things we like on weekends. For me, this entails lounging about the house and porch, smoking my pipe and becoming cheerfully outraged over various articles of news. Judith was my opposite in every way; to her, happiness was a privilege reserved for the needlessly occupied. Killing time was Judith’s favorite way to pass it. Her days were always crammed with meaningless dalliances. She attended charity auctions, church meetings, house showings and garden tours. In Judith’s book, leisure was tantamount to sloth; sloth, in turn, was equivalent to original sin.
“Do you remember what you have to do today?” Judith asked me, pulling back the comforter from the sheets, her shrill voice dragging me unwilling into consciousness.
“What? I’m tired…,” I muttered into my pillow, feeling it was the only excuse a decent man required.
“I don’t know what to do with you, Richard,” she snapped, turning on a heel and walking over to her vanity mirror.
“I don’t know what to do with me, either,” I mumbled, turning on my side.
“Don’t be clever, Richard. You know I hate it when you think you’re being clever,” she sighed, exasperated, applying dark red lipstick to her puckered mouth.
“Right,” I said, hoisting myself to sitting position, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed.
“Richard, Richard, Richard,” Judith chided, condescending, “book club.”
The two words elicited deep currents of dread throughout my body, coursing through my veins like ice water. Book club, where husbands in tight suits got drunk on white wine, their wives eating too many hors d'oeuvres and lying through their teeth all the while. The guests were older than us, richer than us. Judith hated that. It engaged an ancient inferiority complex, a nagging impulse she had long since surrendered to.
“I want everything pristine,” Judith informed me in clipped tones, fastening her false ruby earrings with practiced movements. “And you will have to go shopping, if you can manage that.”
“Yes, dear.”
“And we must be ready on time. I don’t want to repeat the disaster we hosted back in August. And Richard?” She turned on her stool to look at me, squinting with her deep set, dull brown eyes.
“Yes, dearest?” I ran my toes through the salmon plush carpet, clenching them tight as I pulled on my undershirt. When my head poked through, I did my best to smile.
“You have read the book, haven’t you?”
“Of course, dear,” I replied, “did you?”
“Obviously,” she snorted, turning back to the mirror. But she didn’t fool me. I‘d questioned her once or twice, innocently asking her opinions, and received sweeping generalities and vague thematic statements in return. You don’t stay with a woman for a decade without being able to sniff out a lie or two. What a sham I had married. What a nasty, spiteful old sham she was.
“I love you, dearest,” I called after her as she strode purposefully out the bedroom door.
Judith nagged me while I ate my breakfast, a piece of whole wheat toast and egg whites. I’m on a diet; I imagine it compensates for my growing paunch, flabby thighs and thinning red hair.
“Aren’t you going to help at all?” she asked me, hovering behind me like a buzzing insect, air hissing through her clenched teeth.
“In a moment, dearest,” I told her.
Cowardice was the glue of our marriage. Judith and I had met through work, a publishing agency we’d both been employed by called Kendrick and Moss. She’d been an office manager, and I wrote book reviews for supermarket romance novels, hating myself for it. I’d tried to write my own stuff, once, but to no avail. The ideas that had seemed so brilliant to me at the time were dross and dull on paper. Countless nights, scribbling so furiously on yellow legal pad that the ink ran through the sheets like dark blue blood. I was 36, desperate, and terrified of dying alone. Judith was basically the same, only two years younger, and so our friends had set us up. When we’d kissed the first time, we had been at an office Christmas party. I’d used mistletoe as my excuse, and she’d shrugged, agreeing out of necessity more than anything else. Her lips had tasted sour and dry, like squeezed lemons. Never marry a woman you meet at an office Christmas party. It won’t end well.
I helped Judith vacuum while she clucked with disapproval, pointing out spot’s that I had missed. Words are inadequate. They fail to describe the full range of my rancor, the sheer force of will and habit necessary to contain it.
“Haven’t you thought to go shopping?” Judith asked me, eyes wide with consternation. “They’ll be here in two and a half hours. We haven’t enough time!” She reached into her calendar, which displayed little kittens in various poses of docile subjugation, and produced a grocery list from within. “I wrote everything down, so you wouldn’t forget. Like you always do.” I got the keys, opened the door, sighing as I headed for my booger green excuse for a car.
When I returned, laden with overpriced food, I found Judith at the kitchen table. She was reading something; upon hearing me enter, she crammed a sheet of printer paper into her pocket.
“Did you get the pâté?”
“Yes, dear.”
“And the grape leaves? The good kind, not Dolmas. Miss Fitzgerald loves them.”
“Yes, dear,” I replied. I often imagined a clever taxidermy, programmed with this phrase, could easily replace me as husband.
“And the Port? You didn’t forget the Port?” A shock ran fitfully through my spine. The Port; ye gods, the Port!
“I need to use the bathroom,” I said, pretending I hadn’t heard and making for the stairs. If I could reach the shower…
“Richard!” Judith called after me, her high voice hot on my trail like a shark sniffing blood. I reached the top of the stairwell, but too late; she was there, standing behind me, fuming. “I gave you a list!”
“I forgot,” I told her.
“You forget a lot of things,” she said, smiling in a strange way.
“I’m sorr-” I began. Then she slapped me, hard. We didn’t move for a moment, my face turned aside. Then I straightened, swivled, saw her brown eyes crinkle in triumph.
Then I pushed her.
There’s a moment in every life when one measures ones dreams against reality. More often than not reality disappoints, lacking the imagined grandeur we impose upon our secret fantasies. This was not the case when I pushed Judith. Everything was perfect; the little ‘O’ of surprise her mouth made, arms flailing to grasp the banister, legs kicking. Everything was slow, intricate, contained. Then boom, fast again, reality crushing down, speeding up to compensate. Judith tumbling down the first few steps; Judith, smashing the back of her head halfway; Judith lying motionless at the foot of the stairs, legs and arms akimbo, a doll abused by a bored and malicious child.
In my mind I had murdered Judith a thousand times, and each time I had expected a rush of emotion to appear from the depths of my being. Untamed thoughts were supposed to be flitting through my ears, breathy inner whispers, like the sounds you hear when you stick your ear in a conch shell. God, it was strange, though; at that moment I barely felt or thought a thing at all.
They would all be there in twenty minutes. That’s the only thing that concerned me. They would all be here, the old rich bastards, and they’d know what I’d done. I wasn’t thinking of jail, or how bad a person I was, or anything like that. Actually, I was glad Judith was finally quiet. But I was terrified of being caught out, made to look a fool by a crotchety murder of elderly crows. That took precedence over any tricky moral stuff.
It was easier than I imagined, mostly. But for such a skinny woman, Judith’s corpse was heavy and awkward, bumping into the walls as I struggled with it. I had to readjust my grip several times. This was her final revenge, no doubt. She was inconvenient to the last. I hauled her up and brought her to our room, stuffed her in the walk in closet behind the expensive fur coats she had worn to house functions. She was quite invisible. I wiped down the stairs with sanitary rubs, straightened pictures, corrected the rug at the foot of the steps. I laid out the hors d'oeuvres, the chilled white wine, built a fire in the sitting room near the leather chairs. And quite suddenly they were there, their fine black cars cramming the driveway. The doorbell rang, an innocent chiming sound.
“Hello, Milton! Hello, Jean!” I greeted the first guests, the Hortons. Abominable people. I took their coats.
“Where’s Judith?” Jean asked, shrewish and suspicious. Mr. Horton, a tall grey monkey of a man, shouldered past me on his way to the white wine, visible in its ice bucket on the coffee table behind me.
“Family emergency, I’m afraid. You know the woman’s mother. Crazy as a loon.” Jean nodded her understanding. I felt very confident, very relaxed. It was all going well. I greeted the Fishers, the Smiths and the Fitzgerald’s, ushered them all to the sitting room.
“Where’s Judith?” the wives would ask me, the husbands foregoing such pleasantries and feasting on the pâté and brie cheese. I’d explain, taking my time with the lie, making sure the pieces fit. They’d nod, drink more, and eat grape leaves. Eventually, things settled down and the book club began in earnest. We started discussing a promising yet tedious novel by a talented young man, quite in vogue these days. I’d never taken an interest in the stuffy, pretentious bull that passed for literary conversation at our meetings, but I felt compelled to participate. After all, this was a special occasion.
“You know, this guy has really got a handle on the English language, but he needs to change it up,” I informed them, their eyes empty in nodding heads. “He can’t just write about the same thing all the time.”
“I heard that Stewart woman has another boyfriend,” Barbara Fisher informed the party, leaning forward with a critical twinkle in her eyes.
“The third one this year. Shameful,” Hannah Smith replied with relish.
“Variety is the spice of life,” I continued, raising my voice, “don’t you agree?”
“What do you think of the Jets this year?” Steven Fitzgerald mumbled through a mouthful of brie.
“Garbage,” Jameson Smith snorted, inhaling a grape leaf, “they haven’t got a chance.”
“If only Judith were here. Such insight, your wife has. It just isn’t the same without her,” Jean Horton sighed, shaking her head.
“Right, but as I was saying-”
“Do you remember what she said of Huck Finn?” Barbara Fisher said, leaning forward.
“Hm,” her husband muttered into his wine glass.
“That it was the old fashioned equivalent of this new ‘gangster rap’? Yes, I do-”
“If I could just continue,” I tried to interject, raising my voice once more. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. How could they still care about her? She was dead. Even if they didn’t know, it was absurd. Ridiculous, to worship a dead fraud of a woman!
“Doesn’t seem as dynamic without her, if you’ll catch my drift,” Hannah Smith sniffed, smirking at the Fitzgerald’s, glancing sideways at me.
“Can we talk about the book, please?” I snarled.
“What?” Mr. Fisher asks, staring blankly at me like an alcoholic fish through the dregs of his drained glass. “We’re out of wine.”
“Judith,” Marjorie Fitzgerald chimed in, “always has something to say. I admire her candor.”
“Is there more wine?” Mark Horton asked me.
“Extraordinary woman,” said Hannah Smith.
“Shut up!” I roared, rising suddenly in my seat. My fingers had clenched around my wine glass until it broke with a sharp noise, the shards digging into my palm and drawing blood. I hurled the remains against the wall, shrieking wordlessly with hatred, and they shattered violently. All eyes were on me, then, albeit widened, disbelieving, disapproving eyes. It didn’t matter. As long as I had their attention. As long as they knew the truth about Judith. “She’s dead,” I told them. “I pushed her down the stairs. I hid her body in the coat closet.”
“Good God, man-“
“Some kind of sick practical joke-”
“Totally uncalled for-”
“You idiots!” I screamed. I looked around at them with wildness in my heart. I needed them to understand.
“Richard, calm down-”
“Really out of control-”
“Someone call-”
“You doddering old fools!” I howled, “She never read the book!”
You argue over the placement of furniture, or they mutter an unkind word over coffee. That's when you realize that the bright flame of your desire, the glowing warmth of your affection, and the cool certainty of your love has been smothered, snuffed out under a blanket of bitterness and ashes. It’s never one instance, this suffocation of the heart. Rather, it is an accumulation of sordid disagreements, petty loathing and minor catastrophe. It happens so slowly (insidious, as inevitable as the tide going in) that you hardly notice until it’s grim finality is upon you. Nothing is as toxic as love turned to hate, nor is anything as irrevocable. That’s the way it was with Judith and I.
I awoke Saturday morning to a queer sensation, at once inexplicable and deviously concrete, that something was wrong. Everything looked the same, mind you. But it all felt different. The rose patterned wall paper concealed hideous insects with its petals, fatal poison in its coy thorns. The friendly noonday luminescence that leaked through the windows, the warmth of my luxurious bed; these were simply traps, leading me by the nose toward an unspeakable and spontaneous doom that defied definition.
Judith was already awake, pulling on a formless purple pantsuit in preparation for the days carefully planned monotonies. As a working couple, Judith and I are only able to spend time doing the things we like on weekends. For me, this entails lounging about the house and porch, smoking my pipe and becoming cheerfully outraged over various articles of news. Judith was my opposite in every way; to her, happiness was a privilege reserved for the needlessly occupied. Killing time was Judith’s favorite way to pass it. Her days were always crammed with meaningless dalliances. She attended charity auctions, church meetings, house showings and garden tours. In Judith’s book, leisure was tantamount to sloth; sloth, in turn, was equivalent to original sin.
“Do you remember what you have to do today?” Judith asked me, pulling back the comforter from the sheets, her shrill voice dragging me unwilling into consciousness.
“What? I’m tired…,” I muttered into my pillow, feeling it was the only excuse a decent man required.
“I don’t know what to do with you, Richard,” she snapped, turning on a heel and walking over to her vanity mirror.
“I don’t know what to do with me, either,” I mumbled, turning on my side.
“Don’t be clever, Richard. You know I hate it when you think you’re being clever,” she sighed, exasperated, applying dark red lipstick to her puckered mouth.
“Right,” I said, hoisting myself to sitting position, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed.
“Richard, Richard, Richard,” Judith chided, condescending, “book club.”
The two words elicited deep currents of dread throughout my body, coursing through my veins like ice water. Book club, where husbands in tight suits got drunk on white wine, their wives eating too many hors d'oeuvres and lying through their teeth all the while. The guests were older than us, richer than us. Judith hated that. It engaged an ancient inferiority complex, a nagging impulse she had long since surrendered to.
“I want everything pristine,” Judith informed me in clipped tones, fastening her false ruby earrings with practiced movements. “And you will have to go shopping, if you can manage that.”
“Yes, dear.”
“And we must be ready on time. I don’t want to repeat the disaster we hosted back in August. And Richard?” She turned on her stool to look at me, squinting with her deep set, dull brown eyes.
“Yes, dearest?” I ran my toes through the salmon plush carpet, clenching them tight as I pulled on my undershirt. When my head poked through, I did my best to smile.
“You have read the book, haven’t you?”
“Of course, dear,” I replied, “did you?”
“Obviously,” she snorted, turning back to the mirror. But she didn’t fool me. I‘d questioned her once or twice, innocently asking her opinions, and received sweeping generalities and vague thematic statements in return. You don’t stay with a woman for a decade without being able to sniff out a lie or two. What a sham I had married. What a nasty, spiteful old sham she was.
“I love you, dearest,” I called after her as she strode purposefully out the bedroom door.
Judith nagged me while I ate my breakfast, a piece of whole wheat toast and egg whites. I’m on a diet; I imagine it compensates for my growing paunch, flabby thighs and thinning red hair.
“Aren’t you going to help at all?” she asked me, hovering behind me like a buzzing insect, air hissing through her clenched teeth.
“In a moment, dearest,” I told her.
Cowardice was the glue of our marriage. Judith and I had met through work, a publishing agency we’d both been employed by called Kendrick and Moss. She’d been an office manager, and I wrote book reviews for supermarket romance novels, hating myself for it. I’d tried to write my own stuff, once, but to no avail. The ideas that had seemed so brilliant to me at the time were dross and dull on paper. Countless nights, scribbling so furiously on yellow legal pad that the ink ran through the sheets like dark blue blood. I was 36, desperate, and terrified of dying alone. Judith was basically the same, only two years younger, and so our friends had set us up. When we’d kissed the first time, we had been at an office Christmas party. I’d used mistletoe as my excuse, and she’d shrugged, agreeing out of necessity more than anything else. Her lips had tasted sour and dry, like squeezed lemons. Never marry a woman you meet at an office Christmas party. It won’t end well.
I helped Judith vacuum while she clucked with disapproval, pointing out spot’s that I had missed. Words are inadequate. They fail to describe the full range of my rancor, the sheer force of will and habit necessary to contain it.
“Haven’t you thought to go shopping?” Judith asked me, eyes wide with consternation. “They’ll be here in two and a half hours. We haven’t enough time!” She reached into her calendar, which displayed little kittens in various poses of docile subjugation, and produced a grocery list from within. “I wrote everything down, so you wouldn’t forget. Like you always do.” I got the keys, opened the door, sighing as I headed for my booger green excuse for a car.
When I returned, laden with overpriced food, I found Judith at the kitchen table. She was reading something; upon hearing me enter, she crammed a sheet of printer paper into her pocket.
“Did you get the pâté?”
“Yes, dear.”
“And the grape leaves? The good kind, not Dolmas. Miss Fitzgerald loves them.”
“Yes, dear,” I replied. I often imagined a clever taxidermy, programmed with this phrase, could easily replace me as husband.
“And the Port? You didn’t forget the Port?” A shock ran fitfully through my spine. The Port; ye gods, the Port!
“I need to use the bathroom,” I said, pretending I hadn’t heard and making for the stairs. If I could reach the shower…
“Richard!” Judith called after me, her high voice hot on my trail like a shark sniffing blood. I reached the top of the stairwell, but too late; she was there, standing behind me, fuming. “I gave you a list!”
“I forgot,” I told her.
“You forget a lot of things,” she said, smiling in a strange way.
“I’m sorr-” I began. Then she slapped me, hard. We didn’t move for a moment, my face turned aside. Then I straightened, swivled, saw her brown eyes crinkle in triumph.
Then I pushed her.
There’s a moment in every life when one measures ones dreams against reality. More often than not reality disappoints, lacking the imagined grandeur we impose upon our secret fantasies. This was not the case when I pushed Judith. Everything was perfect; the little ‘O’ of surprise her mouth made, arms flailing to grasp the banister, legs kicking. Everything was slow, intricate, contained. Then boom, fast again, reality crushing down, speeding up to compensate. Judith tumbling down the first few steps; Judith, smashing the back of her head halfway; Judith lying motionless at the foot of the stairs, legs and arms akimbo, a doll abused by a bored and malicious child.
In my mind I had murdered Judith a thousand times, and each time I had expected a rush of emotion to appear from the depths of my being. Untamed thoughts were supposed to be flitting through my ears, breathy inner whispers, like the sounds you hear when you stick your ear in a conch shell. God, it was strange, though; at that moment I barely felt or thought a thing at all.
They would all be there in twenty minutes. That’s the only thing that concerned me. They would all be here, the old rich bastards, and they’d know what I’d done. I wasn’t thinking of jail, or how bad a person I was, or anything like that. Actually, I was glad Judith was finally quiet. But I was terrified of being caught out, made to look a fool by a crotchety murder of elderly crows. That took precedence over any tricky moral stuff.
It was easier than I imagined, mostly. But for such a skinny woman, Judith’s corpse was heavy and awkward, bumping into the walls as I struggled with it. I had to readjust my grip several times. This was her final revenge, no doubt. She was inconvenient to the last. I hauled her up and brought her to our room, stuffed her in the walk in closet behind the expensive fur coats she had worn to house functions. She was quite invisible. I wiped down the stairs with sanitary rubs, straightened pictures, corrected the rug at the foot of the steps. I laid out the hors d'oeuvres, the chilled white wine, built a fire in the sitting room near the leather chairs. And quite suddenly they were there, their fine black cars cramming the driveway. The doorbell rang, an innocent chiming sound.
“Hello, Milton! Hello, Jean!” I greeted the first guests, the Hortons. Abominable people. I took their coats.
“Where’s Judith?” Jean asked, shrewish and suspicious. Mr. Horton, a tall grey monkey of a man, shouldered past me on his way to the white wine, visible in its ice bucket on the coffee table behind me.
“Family emergency, I’m afraid. You know the woman’s mother. Crazy as a loon.” Jean nodded her understanding. I felt very confident, very relaxed. It was all going well. I greeted the Fishers, the Smiths and the Fitzgerald’s, ushered them all to the sitting room.
“Where’s Judith?” the wives would ask me, the husbands foregoing such pleasantries and feasting on the pâté and brie cheese. I’d explain, taking my time with the lie, making sure the pieces fit. They’d nod, drink more, and eat grape leaves. Eventually, things settled down and the book club began in earnest. We started discussing a promising yet tedious novel by a talented young man, quite in vogue these days. I’d never taken an interest in the stuffy, pretentious bull that passed for literary conversation at our meetings, but I felt compelled to participate. After all, this was a special occasion.
“You know, this guy has really got a handle on the English language, but he needs to change it up,” I informed them, their eyes empty in nodding heads. “He can’t just write about the same thing all the time.”
“I heard that Stewart woman has another boyfriend,” Barbara Fisher informed the party, leaning forward with a critical twinkle in her eyes.
“The third one this year. Shameful,” Hannah Smith replied with relish.
“Variety is the spice of life,” I continued, raising my voice, “don’t you agree?”
“What do you think of the Jets this year?” Steven Fitzgerald mumbled through a mouthful of brie.
“Garbage,” Jameson Smith snorted, inhaling a grape leaf, “they haven’t got a chance.”
“If only Judith were here. Such insight, your wife has. It just isn’t the same without her,” Jean Horton sighed, shaking her head.
“Right, but as I was saying-”
“Do you remember what she said of Huck Finn?” Barbara Fisher said, leaning forward.
“Hm,” her husband muttered into his wine glass.
“That it was the old fashioned equivalent of this new ‘gangster rap’? Yes, I do-”
“If I could just continue,” I tried to interject, raising my voice once more. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. How could they still care about her? She was dead. Even if they didn’t know, it was absurd. Ridiculous, to worship a dead fraud of a woman!
“Doesn’t seem as dynamic without her, if you’ll catch my drift,” Hannah Smith sniffed, smirking at the Fitzgerald’s, glancing sideways at me.
“Can we talk about the book, please?” I snarled.
“What?” Mr. Fisher asks, staring blankly at me like an alcoholic fish through the dregs of his drained glass. “We’re out of wine.”
“Judith,” Marjorie Fitzgerald chimed in, “always has something to say. I admire her candor.”
“Is there more wine?” Mark Horton asked me.
“Extraordinary woman,” said Hannah Smith.
“Shut up!” I roared, rising suddenly in my seat. My fingers had clenched around my wine glass until it broke with a sharp noise, the shards digging into my palm and drawing blood. I hurled the remains against the wall, shrieking wordlessly with hatred, and they shattered violently. All eyes were on me, then, albeit widened, disbelieving, disapproving eyes. It didn’t matter. As long as I had their attention. As long as they knew the truth about Judith. “She’s dead,” I told them. “I pushed her down the stairs. I hid her body in the coat closet.”
“Good God, man-“
“Some kind of sick practical joke-”
“Totally uncalled for-”
“You idiots!” I screamed. I looked around at them with wildness in my heart. I needed them to understand.
“Richard, calm down-”
“Really out of control-”
“Someone call-”
“You doddering old fools!” I howled, “She never read the book!”
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