Roger hears from Danny a year after his wife dies — an email sounding more like a high school kid than the fifty-five year old man he is:
Rim-Bomb,
Long time. How’s bout you 2 cum out to the Cape this weekend and meet the new babe? I’ll drink you under the table, you wimp.
Danny, Spawn of Satan
“You want to go to Cape Cod this weekend?” Roger asks his wife at dinner.
“And do what?” she asks.
“See Danny. Meet his new wife.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I really hardly know the man.”
“Come on,” he says. “August on the Cape. It’ll be fun.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know what the tanning index is going to be?” she asks.
Annmarie, Roger’s wife, is fifty-six but thanks to an intense exercise regimen looks much younger. She works from home, a day trader—stocks, currencies, equity index futures—and if she doubled her hours to twenty, would free Roger from the shackles of his liquor store. Roger, though, knows not to push.
Roger calls Lincoln and asks him to work Saturday. He drinks a Bud, shakes salt and pepper on his food, watches his wife rearrange her own small portions.
“Can we talk about something?” she says.
“Like what?”
“Like this whole thing is just not working for me.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning don’t you think it kind of senseless to stay married if it isn’t working?”
***
The drive to Massachusetts is quiet and uneventful. Roger broods over his marriage being deemed a failure, wonders if they can mend bridges. Annmarie, silent, diddles away on her laptop. They stop for gas and Roger asks her if there’s somebody else.
“What are you talking about?” Annmarie says.
“Are you sleeping with somebody else?”
“No.”
Roger has never cheated on his wife, although he’s had his share of chances. Women come into the store all the time. They’re bored, drunk, or they just don’t give a shit. But none of them has ever taken him to the point where his vows were at risk.
They’re back on the road when Roger says, “Shit.”
“What now?” Annmarie asks without looking up from her keyboard.
“The goddamn GPS is telling me to take Cross Highway. Cross Highway has been closed all summer.”
“You should have updated your maps,” she says.
“I guess I should have done a lot of things,” he says.
They get to Danny’s around eleven, and he meets them in the driveway. He looks great — thinner, happier.
“Megan’s still in the sack,” Danny whispers unnecessarily. “Put on your bathing suits and let’s meet out at the pool.”
By lunchtime, Danny and Roger are side-by-side in chaise longues, a pitcher of gin-and-tonic and a tray of cold cuts between them. Annmarie, in a black one-piece, is doing laps in the pool. She look fit, sexy, and—to Roger, at least—detached.
When he first sees Megan through the sliding glass door, Roger mistakes her for Danny’s daughter, Lauren. But no. This woman is raven-haired and big breasted. She’s wearing a bikini, and Roger figures she can’t be over thirty. (She’s twenty-eight, he later learns.) Her body is tight, not from exercise, but from relatively little wear.
“’Morn-ing,” she sing-songs as she steps outside.
“Megan,” Danny says as he gets to his feet, “this is Roger.” He nods toward the pool. “The salmon swimming upstream is Annmarie.”
“Hi,” Megan says to no one in particular. “Welcome.”
Megan walks over to the side of the pool and drops in. Annmarie stops abruptly, finds her footing. Megan offers a dripping hand.
“Hi,” she says. “I’m Danny’s wife.”
“Hi,” Annmarie says. “I’m flabbergasted.”
They hang out at poolside the rest of the afternoon. The men drink and reminisce, the women swim and sun. At five, they go inside, clean up, dress for dinner. Danny offers to treat at a place called Deep Sea Grill, tells Roger his money is no good.
At the restaurant, Danny and Roger commence their second drinking episode, Megan making every effort to catch up. They all order “the special:” wild striped bass with coconut-guava sauce, which the husbands devour and the wives pick at. Just before desert, Megan says, “Our bedrooms are kinda back-to-back. I hope we don’t keep you up.”
“Not likely,” Annmarie tells her. “We’re still pretty beat from the trip.”
“I’ll try and keep it down,” Megan says loud enough for people at other tables to hear. She smiles, puts a hand on Danny’s shoulder.
“Danny smiles and says, “Viva, Viagra,” and Roger’s not sure if his friend is embarrassed, flattered, or both.
They go back to the house for more drinks, which Annmarie excuses herself from. By midnight, the three survivors call it quits. Roger goes upstairs, stumbles around in the dark guest room, his wife asleep or pretending to be, and slides between sheets as crisp as cardboard. He lies there, drunk and awake, in a strange bed. It’s not twenty minutes before he hears the first sounds. Megan makes noises Roger’s never heard before, this young woman, starting out like someone having her feet tickled, ending like someone having her head forced under water.
Roger turns toward Annemarie who sleeps with her back to him. He wraps an arm around her waist, becomes aroused by the feel of her soft, cotton shirt. He raises himself up on his elbow, bends toward her, kisses her on the ear.
“Yes?” she says, sounding fully awake.
He smiles in the dark.
“Roger, please. Go to sleep.”
Roger gets up, tries to dress in the dark, but can’t find his shoes.
“Are you okay?” Annmarie asks.
“Peachy,” he tells her.
Roger makes it downstairs and out to the pool. A half-moon lights the night. He lies on one of the chaise longues, finds a slightly damp cocktail napkin on the snack tray next to him, unzips his pants, and masturbates.
He wakes around six, hung-over and disoriented, his back sore.
Inside the kitchen, he’s surprised to find Annmarie and Megan toasting bagels.
“Oh wow,” Megan says as she takes in his bare feet, his wrinkled slacks, his clammy undershirt. “What got you?”
“Where’s Danny?” he asks.
“His turn to sleep in,” Megan says.
“We should probably take off,” Roger says to Annmarie. “Beat the rush.”
Without looking over, Annmarie forces a bagel down into the toaster. “I’m not going,” she tells him.
“Excuse me?”
“We’re going into Boston,” Megan says. “Get some lunch, maybe look around a little.”
“I’ll take the Amtrak home tonight,” Annmarie says.
Roger wants to punch her in the face. He’s never had this urge before, but now it’s on him like a rash.
“Can I have a word with you?” he asks his wife.
Megan, no fool, takes her bagel and a cup of coffee outside on the deck.
“So what happened?” Roger asks Annmarie.
“Well for starters, you got up in the middle of the night to go god-knows-where and do god-knows-what, while I –“
“I’m not talking about that!” Roger says too loudly. “I’m talking about when the fuck did all of this start to go wrong?!”
”These things don’t just start,” she tells Roger. “These things develop over time. Like a tree that rots from the inside out.”
“You never even gave me a sign,” Roger says to her.
“I’m sorry,” Annmarie tells him. “I thought it was obvious.”
In the car on the way home Roger hits traffic. He listens to a radio program, Salvation Sunday, on which a rabbi, a minister, and a priest kid around with one another. Still, they always come back to the topic of God’s perfect, unconditional love. “We may differ in our various interpretations,” the rabbi reports, “but in the end, the Word is the Word.”
On the Bourne Bridge, Roger’s GPS instructs him to take an exit that doesn’t exist anymore. It would send him over the side and plummeting into the shadowy water of the Cape Cod Canal. Maybe this thing knows more than I do, he thinks to himself, but stays with the traffic as it makes its way back to the mainland.
About the author:
Z.Z. Boone’s fiction has appeared, or is scheduled, in Smokelong Quarterly, Annalemma, The MacGuffin, FRiGG, Wigleaf, decomP, and other terrific places.
