Tag: serial fiction

Small Cuts (5) James Again #fiction

~ Meg ~ 22 Comments

This is a continuation of a series I started a long time ago. Maybe you remember it: two couples out for dinner together, the internal thoughts of each one? Read the opening thoughts of each of them: James, Elaine, Oliver and Genevieve. And now back to James again…

It always begins with words. Some will try to tell you it’s the sight of someone that brings on those first feelings of love, but that’s just lust, hormones, chemicals. Love, genuine affection, true feelings —they begin with words. The problems arise when the words are lies.

The ride home from the restaurant was quiet. I made several attempts at conversation, but gave up after receiving one or two word answers in return. I thought Elaine would say something about the way Genevieve and I talked for once. I wondered if she had noticed our hands touch across the table, or if she had been too enthralled with Ollie’s fawning. Whatever the case, she had no more words for me. Not tonight anyway.

I stole a quick glance at her out of the corner of my eye. Her pretty face was lighted from the glow of her phone’s screen. Facebook or Instagram, no doubt. She could spend hours scrolling through the newsfeed. Watching cooking videos for recipes she’d never try, taking trivia quizzes and commenting on all her many friends’ posts. Everyone’s highlight reel. I couldn’t understand it. It was fake life. By the time we got home, she would have posted photos of our meals, the selfie she took as soon as we got to our table and maybe a shot of me when I wasn’t looking. It was our fake life, too.

I met Elaine the old fashioned way —in a bar. I had gone out with a couple of other guys from the firm to celebrate winning a hard fought and highly lucrative settlement for our clients. The Bar was so named to attract the lawyers who had situated their offices strategically near the center city courthouse. Tonight my colleagues and I bought rounds of drinks for the house, toasted each other on our performances and got joyfully wasted in short order. So that was the state of things when Elaine and her friends walked in and settled at a table in the back. She was lovely. Flawless skin, dark hair she had piled in a loose bun with tendrils framing her face, dimples that appeared when she smiled —and she smiled often as I watched her.

For a man who needs to display unassailable confidence in front of the court, I am not especially outgoing when it comes to people in general. I am not unfriendly, just choosy about whom I decide to call a friend. So if not for alcohol fueled courage, I might never have approached the table of four women. Might never have talked with Elaine way past the time our friends had left for the night. All those words…

Sometimes, when that initial lust, those hormones and chemicals make the brain function poorly, you pretend. You pretend that every word the other person says to you is the most interesting thing in the world. You agree about everything. You like all the same things. You fake your way through topics of conversation in which you haven’t a clue. You hope the other person doesn’t notice.

I didn’t notice. Out of character, I did most of the talking, Elaine smiled, nodded, agreed, seemed genuinely interested. In retrospect, I realized that she asked questions to keep me talking —a deflection so I would’t catch on that she knew nothing about history, the law, classical music, Renaissance art. When last call came I was besotted. I asked her if we could see each other again and she readily agreed. I kissed her goodnight as she got into a taxi.

On our first date, I took her to the art museum. She had seemed enthusiastic that night at The Bar when I told her about the exhibit I wanted to see. She played the part perfectly that day and the next time we went out and for all the times after that as well. We fell in love. I proposed. We got married.

When in a relationship do the blinders come off? Or for that matter, when do we take our masks off and show our true selves? It’s never abrupt, rather more like a subtle slippage over time. Begging off on the gallery opening, staring at her iPad instead of the film on TV, playing her streaming music instead of mine. I can’t remember ever really noticing, not until I saw how she was with Oliver. It was the way we used to be in the beginning. Except this time, it didn’t feel like she was pretending.

Small Cuts (4) – Genevieve

~ Meg ~ 38 Comments

Find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

Beautiful Elaine. I watched her through my lashes. Beautiful, curvaceous, fecund Elaine. No wonder Oliver couldn’t keep his eyes off of her. His hands, either, for that matter. In comparison, I was a sallow, insubstantial, specter. Whatever fleeting and foolish love Oliver had felt for me in our early days had been completely and unabashedly transferred to the wife of his best friend. I shot a look across the table at James. He’d taken my hand in a gesture of understanding —as Elaine basked in Ollie’s attention— that he was in the same position as I. I turned my hand to link our fingers and whispered, “Thank you.”

“No, Gen, thank you,” he replied. And after a gentle stroke of his thumb to mine, he let it go.

He returned to his meal and I to mine, though I had little appetite. My stomach rolled at the sight of the medium rare red meat. I should’ve ordered something light like the soup. But in an attempt to feel ‘normal’ among all the other normal people, I’d ordered the steak. Oliver had been making snide remarks about my recent weight loss, as if I was doing it just to spite him.

He really had no idea…

For years I had counted on my career to supply the ammunition for my arsenal of arguments against reproducing. I really did see the most horrid side of humankind. But now I didn’t even have that any more. Three missed deadlines, three major screw-ups and I had lost one of the biggest donors the non-profit had on their list. I hadn’t told Ollie, even though it had been a week since I’d been ordered to clean out my desk. I still got up every morning, showered and dressed and left at the same time. However, instead of heading to my Center City office building, I bought coffee at the cafe and I walked. I walked and walked and walked for hours.

Failure. I was a failure. At everything.

That was the reason I didn’t want to have a baby. God, I was barely able to take care of myself. How was I supposed to care for another human being? A little person who had to depend on me for their very existence? It scared me to death. And yet my unwillingness to have a baby was just one more loss on my score card.

I was thoroughly convinced that my parents had had children out of a sense of achievement. As if it was another box to tick off in the accomplishments of life. And now they were exerting that pressure on me. If I didn’t fulfill this duty —this obligation— to produce offspring, it would be yet another demonstration of my incompetence. Yet, the more pressure they put on me, the more resistant I became toward the idea. I’d be damned if I was going to become Oliver’s brood mare just because it was expected of me.

Mother sent emails with articles about how much more difficult it was for women to get pregnant after a certain age —the age I now approached. My sister was an oblivious conspirator in this battle, in that mother had insinuated to her that Oliver and I were trying but failing to conceive. Allison now tried to offer comfort in not so subtle ways. She made remarks about my taking time off work to rest and get my health back —if she only knew— and how stress interferes with all sorts of things, especially fertility. I would laugh and say that would only be a problem if I was trying to get pregnant. And she would tsk and nod with pity and a knowing look.

I hated them all for their self satisfied, ‘I know better than you’ attitudes. It made me want to scream. I was never enough for anyone. No one was ever happy with just me. Why was I so unlovable? Did I not offer enough all on my own? I was a bad daughter, not playing by the rules. I was a bad wife, not yielding to my husband’s desires. I suppose my own desires were of no consequence in comparison. I was a freak of nature. A woman who ignored her biological and evolutionary purposes. I had failed my species.

And now I had even failed at the one thing I counted on for validation —my job.

And so I didn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep and I found myself I staring into an abyss of perpetual misery. I had no practical answers, no solutions to this predicament. I dreaded talking to Oliver. He would view my newly unemployed status as an opportunity. Or at least he would have a few months ago…

But now I watched him, gazing at beautiful Elaine, his eyes full of tenderness —he used to look at me that way long ago— and the emptiness and despair that washed over me was physically painful. As I looked across the table at James once again, the first tear spilled over and rolled down my cheek.

Continue reading here.

Small Cuts (3)-Oliver

~ Meg ~ 34 Comments

Find part one here, and part two here.

I had gone too far. I saw the look of pity in Elaine’s eyes and I knew. She knew. To this point, she had probably thought it was harmless flirting. But the truth was, I was in love with my best friend’s wife. And now with a few softly spoken words, I’d let her see the depth of my feelings for her. Maybe I could get out of this. I was a bullshit artist, after all. As a salesman, I dealt in bullshit every day of my life. I grinned.

“You know I can’t stand not to be the center of attention, Lainey,” I said, with a wink.

She let out the breath she had been holding. “Oh, Oliver,” she said, giving my hand a playful smack. “Go on. What were you saying?”

I picked up the story from where I’d left off. Elaine’s husband James, had reached across the table to squeeze my wife’s hand and it hadn’t gone unnoticed by either myself or Elaine. But I was past giving a shit what Gen did.

Cold hearted, self centered bitch. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking getting myself tangled up with the ice queen, but here I was. In the beginning I was smitten. She was everything I admired– smart, beautiful, artistic, cultured, and socially conscious. We’d met at one of the gala functions my company sponsored for its clients. Genevieve had been pressed into attending to win additional funding for the liberal think tank she worked for. As the top salesman for financial products, it was a given that I would attend.

When Genevieve entered the room, all eyes turned. She was tall, a natural blonde, with blue eyes the color of arctic ice. When I introduced myself, she was polite but didn’t smile. That should’ve been my first clue. Nevertheless, I pursued her with the same dogged determination I would have used on a million dollar investor.

When I finally won her over, I had felt like I’d won the lottery. I had a beautiful wife with an important job. She was a brilliant conversationalist with opinions on all the current issues. We’d stay up late debating politics, social issues, philosophy. She, of course, being better informed on all those topics always won the argument. But at the time I had enjoyed the banter.

We’d been married for three years when I raised the subject of children. She had off-handedly remarked while we were dating that she didn’t want any children. I didn’t take her seriously. And, I had thought, if she was serious, she would change her mind. So on our third anniversary, when we had come home from our favorite restaurant, I had taken her to bed, made love to her and afterwards, as she lay in my arms, said maybe it was time we thought about having a baby. She looked at me like I had just asked her to cut off a limb.

“A baby?” she asked with a snort. “You’re funny, Ollie.”

I had pulled her close and kissed her. “No. I mean it. I want us to have a baby.”

She pushed away, holding me at a distance. “You’re serious.”

I nodded.

She slid from beneath the sheets and grabbed for her robe. “Oliver, I told you long ago I didn’t want to have children. Nothing’s changed.”

“Why?” I had asked, propping myself up on one arm.

“Oliver, do you know what I deal with every day when I go to work?” It was a rhetorical question. I wasn’t meant to respond. “Suffering.” She began pacing. “Suffering, poverty, disease, famine, the effects of war on ravaged populations. I read reports of men raping and killing young women in the name of their cause. I see the same young women who have been raped being put to death because they ‘dishonored’ their families. I see pre-pubescent girls having their genitals mutilated in the name of religious tradition. I see young boys being sent to fight in militias before they even reach their tenth birthdays. I see the disobedient being beheaded. I see the faithful strapping suicide bombs to their bodies and walking into crowded marketplaces. That’s the world you want to bring another child into?”

“Gen,” I said softly. “Children are the future. Our future.”

“Not my future.” She turned her back on me.

“Can we at least think about it? It doesn’t have to be now. We have plenty of time. Maybe in a few years….”

She was shaking her head. “Absolutely not. I will never, ever change my mind, Oliver.”

I dropped the subject. I hadn’t meant to ruin our evening, but I had. “Gen, come back to bed.”

An entire year passed before I tried again. We had visited her family for the holidays. Her brother had sired two children, her sister had borne three more and her parents hinted with hopeful expectation, that their youngest child would soon follow suit. Gen had joked with them light-heartedly and laughed it off. With just that tiny sliver of encouragement, I foolishly raised the subject in the car on the way home. It had once again led to an argument, with Gen giving all the same reasons she had before. Suffering. Violence. Poverty. War. Disease. Every word was another small cut in my heart. I loved kids. I wanted to be a father. I never imagined that I wouldn’t have that chance.

It became a wedge between us. A wedge so divisive that even images of happy families on television or in the movies would have Gen stiffen and brace for an argument. Not talking about having a family devolved into not talking at all. Gen lost weight as if to emphasize her already boyish figure. It was like she was saying, “See, Ollie? I’m not made for making babies.” And I began to suspect the real reason she didn’t want a baby was vanity. God forbid, she added a little flesh to those bones.

And that’s when James introduced us to Elaine.

I looked across the table at her now. She was everything Genevieve was not. Her dark eyes shone with warmth and humor. She smiled wide and often. She was animated, outgoing, and effortlessly sexy. Luscious. Curvy. I couldn’t help but touch her. I’d even kissed her once, when the four of us were saying goodnight after another dinner together. It had been dark so I was sure James hadn’t seen. I tried to make it appear playful but I had needed to taste her sweet lips. She hadn’t seemed to mind. Or at least she hadn’t objected. Not having her was an agony.

“Ollie?” Elaine said, breaking my reverie. “Now who’s ignoring who?” She smiled and her adorable dimples appeared. “You’re a million miles away.”

I took her hand and played with the ring on her finger. “Maybe you should join me.”

Continue reading here.