Cleopatra and Frankenstein(76)
“I know, I know. It’s just, I work hard. Life is hard. I don’t want to come home and have … The fighting, you know. I don’t like it. And you being upset with me all the time.”
“But why is the onus on me not to be upset? Why can’t you come home earlier? Or not spend every other night out? Why can’t you … I don’t know, be better?”
Frank cupped his forehead with his palms and looked down.
“What?” she asked. “Too many feelings for you, Frank?”
He looked up at her from between his hands.
“It’s not fun, you know,” he said quietly. “Always being wrong.”
He’d stood up stiffly and left the room, and it was like all the light left with him, leaving Cleo in the shadowed world of her own thoughts once again.
Cleo turned the tap on and ran water over the ashes in the sink, scooping the black mess down the drain with her palm. A soap opera, the neighbor had called them, and it was true.
She knelt on the kitchen floor and punched herself once, twice, in the stomach. She fell forward onto her hands and knees, breathing heavily. She could feel her breasts and stomach pulling toward the floor. She balanced on one palm and punched her fist into her stomach again. It was pointless; gravity worked against her, softening the blow. She wanted the anger knocked out of her, to be left feeling quiet and still, but the punches had been too dull to dislodge it. It surged on.
She pulled herself up to standing and looked blankly around the kitchen. She and Frank had been given a block of chopping knives for their wedding, with beechwood handles. They never used them, of course, never cooked, never did anything remotely domestic. The whole apartment was full of practical objects turned purely decorative—an elaborate wine aerator, a miniature trampoline, expensive musical instruments neither of them could play. They owned a theremin, for goodness’ sake. They couldn’t even own a pet without … Cleo shook the thought away. It was too painful to remember.
Cleo pulled a knife from its wooden block. She stretched her arm stiff in front of her, resting the back of her hand on the kitchen countertop, and made a fist. The underside of her forearm was very pale, tawny skin gradually blanching to soft exposed white, like the belly of a dog. She needed to be shocked out of this feeling, control it so it would stop controlling her. She lifted the knife and did a couple of practice swipes. It made a satisfying swoosh through the air. She closed her eyes and inhaled. The trick was not to hesitate.
But she did. She opened her eyes. She put the knife down and walked back to the bedroom, to the unmade bed and its creased plane of sheets, and lay down. There was the ceiling again. The anger was ebbing away, but in its wake was a hollowness that could be filled by anything. She closed her eyes and waited. She imagined feathery slivers of ash falling from the ceiling. Silvery and soft, they depressed her body to the bed. Flakes caught on her eyelashes and gathered in the hollows between her arms and chest and legs. She was muffled under a mound of silver ash, it hushed all sound.
Only then, in the quietness beneath, did the new feeling arrive. It was shame. Shame that she had quit her job, shame that she did not paint, shame that she had married Frank, shame that he was in love with someone else, shame that she had run to Anders for comfort, shame that he had discarded her, shame that Frank drank like he did, shame that they let Jesus die, shame that Frank had let her tear apart the whole apartment looking for her before coming clean about what he’d done, shame that she’d covered for him and told everyone that Jesus had escaped, shame that it was her secret now too, shame that she was too afraid to leave him when she said she would, shame that her mother was dead and she could not ask her for advice, shame that her mother didn’t want to be her mother enough to not be dead, just shame, shame, shame.
She wanted to pull apart the threads that held the last twelve months together, unpick the stitches like a dress being let out for someone new. She wanted to be the someone new. She lay there while sunlight filled and retreated from the apartment. Her phone rang once, then again. Cleo endured the sound for ten shrill rings, then pulled herself up from the ash heap and answered.
“There you are. Why do you pretend to be busy? I know you’re not.”
It was Quentin. He was going to pick up a vacuum he’d found on Craigslist and wanted her to come with him in case the seller tried to murder him.
“What makes you think they won’t murder me too?” Cleo said. She was surprised by how natural and light her voice sounded. It frightened her how easy it was to fake her own happiness.
“Well, he won’t be expecting you,” said Quentin. “And it’s much harder to murder two people at once.”
The fact that Quentin was buying a vacuum secondhand was typical of his peculiar mixture of extravagance and frugality. He could happily drop thousands on a lambskin trench coat or Japanese anime figurine, but spending money on anything remotely useful, like cleaning supplies or cable, grieved him deeply. He was perhaps his pharmacy’s most dedicated card member, collecting points with a fanatical enthusiasm. It was the side of Quentin she was oddly most fond of, however; the same side that meant he almost exclusively wore the socks given free on airplanes, the side that hand-drew a birthday card for her every year, that smoked cheap Polish cigarettes and ate cereal he bought in bulk off the internet. The other Quentin—scornful, rich, invulnerable—was harder to tolerate.