“I don’t want to play soccer this year,” Charlie told his father, who coached the team.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like soccer.”
“But you signed up again last year. You’ve played for two years.”
“But last year I forgot how much I don’t like it.”
* * * * *
Beth was not a diva, but she remembered what her son had said when he was eight, and she agreed with the sentiment. She had said yes to a trip alone to Manhattan for a reading. There was a time when the university sponsoring her would have put her in a new modern hotel, but because times were tight, she was in the basement of The Invictus in Greenwich Village. And she had forgotten how much she didn’t like this kind of travel.
Here she was in a “garden level” room in someone’s 150-year-old former home in the Village. Where before they would have put her in a boutique hotel, now, for actually probably not much less money, she was booked into someone’s low-ceilinged basement. She’d had to make two trips to get her suitcases, a carry-on and a bag she had checked, down those narrow stairs. She had to make two trips because she’d learned to be careful after the lymph nodes under her left arm had been removed ten years earlier in a brush with breast cancer. If anyone could ever be said to brush up against cancer.
The room, down impossibly steep and narrow stairs, was decorated with expensive kitsch, a miscellany of things that might have been culled from neighbors or parents breaking up housekeeping after finally falling and cracking a hip: a soup tureen with a lid in the shape of a cabbage, a small plush Pottery Barn rug, intentionally mismatched dishes with country scenes.
What she didn’t like was the disorder: knowing she had packed her short half-slip but being unable to find it; having no place to put her makeup but on the sloping edge of the pedestal sink; realizing she hadn’t packed deodorant. She had, like Charlie and his soccer, forgotten how much she disliked this kind of travel.
She’d stayed in a place like this in the Village with Charlie’s father, the boy’s soccer coach, before they were married, before Charlie. They’d been a secret romance, so wild about each other that the wet smell of the fireplace, the windows painted shut, the mushy bed shoved up against a wall, had only slightly irritated her. An actor, he’d been in New York for three days to film a commercial, and the place in the Village seemed hidden, a place so secret his vindictive wife Millie would never find it, find them. She had, of course.
Beth had time alone during the day while her lover worked in a small studio in midtown, done up in a checkered shirt and apron as the manager of an East coast hardware store chain. She waved at the man behind the desk on her way out. He had forgotten to comb his thick white hair and it stuck out around his face.
She hailed a taxi and went up to Macy’s on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Thirty-Sixth Street, where she bought a short black dress to wear to dinner. She walked to the Drama Bookshop to confirm that her collection of plays was still on their shelves. She had coffee and a croissant in a small shop that also sold scarves and silver pins. Then she took a taxi back to the Village.
“You can let me out here. On the right,” she said, handing the driver his money. And as she walked down the block toward their hideout, there was Millie ahead of her, her unmistakable backside moving slowly past their secret place. Beth stood paralyzed until Millie disappeared, at least temporarily, around the corner.
“Someone was here to see you,” said the old man behind the counter. He smirked knowingly as she hustled by him to their room; “She said she was your friend’s wife.”
Once in the room, she turned off the light and looked out the window in time to see Millie appear again and enter the bakery across the street. Beth had no way to warn her lover, to call him or let him know what was waiting for him when he returned. So she stood watching. And when he got out of his cab, she watched Millie rise from her table in the bakery, bustle out the door, and cross the street to intercept him.
He and Millie stood three feet from each other, one talking, then the other. Finally, Millie turned, gave the finger to the unseen Beth in the darkened bedroom, and then stomped off.
After that, things happened quickly: a mean, messy divorce; a marriage and pregnancy—or the other way around; Charlie growing, hating soccer; cancer coming and going. And now, fifteen years later, all of those people were gone. Charlie was away at art school. The lover-actor-husband-father-soccer coach started out loving her more than she loved him. But that slowly changed.
When he left her for a younger shorter blonde chippie, Beth received an insufficiently anonymous hate message from an obvious sender. The front of the card was a reproduction of Ingres’ “La Grande Odalisque.” Inside, in precise handwriting, it read, “Live by the sword. Die by the sword.” The postmark was New Orleans, where Millie had bought a house in the French Quarter with the money from her divorce settlement.
Unthinkingly, Beth had packed for this trip the same black dress she had bought that day fifteen years ago at Macy’s. She would wear it for her reading. Short skirts on women her age had become fashionable again. There would be a reception, dinner, her reading of the monologue that opened her latest play, another reception. But first, in this small and oppressive knick-knack-filled basement room, she had to find the slip she knew she had packed.
Deborah Ann Percy (Johnston) earned the MFA in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University. Her two books of short fiction are Cool Front: Stories from Lake Michigan (2010, March Street Press) and Invisible Traffic (2014, One Wet Shoe Press). Traffic was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a 2015 Independent Publishers Book Award.
