Geoffrey Bartholomew - Manhattan Noir 2 - The Classics

“You probably think I’m terrible,” she said, “asking for something on your birthday. But number one, this is for both of us, our medicine cabinet, and number two...”

Babble, babble. If the Apocalypse came in their lifetime, she’d jabber right through it, then look around and ask: Did something happen? Bob lowered his head and eyed the rectangular box, the steak, that sat on his plate. A small, broiled curlicue of fat hanging from the left corner. When he glanced back at her, he saw an almost-fifty-year-old woman who not only didn’t get the meaning of life, but didn’t care whether or not there was one.

A genuinely decent person? Forget it. He was being too decent, talk about decency. Chrissie was now and always had been completely self-absorbed. And superficial? She should have her very own superlative adjective: superficialest . If she could have, she would have demoed the kids along with the kitchen and redesigned them to fit her banal vision of what was desirable. Turn Jordana into an editor at Vogue instead of an aspiring intellectual property lawyer. As Chrissie saw it, “property” was good, but “intellectual” demoted it to a topic impossible to introduce as dinner party conversation. (Jordana’s unduly hairy boyfriend Clark was a lawyer, Harvard, which made him okay in Chrissie’s view, along with the fact that the Times ’s Style section had called his father the go-to radiation oncologist at Sloan-Kettering.)

As for their son James, Chrissie would grow him five inches taller, give him some career she could drop at cocktail parties: astrophysicist, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. Actually, Bob had been taken aback when his son reached five-footeight and nothing more happened height-wise. He himself was five-eleven, but you don’t think about having your son only come up to your ear in family pictures when you marry a short woman.

She was resting her chin on her hands to hide the froggy sac that was developing. Ribbit. Ribbit. Distaste barely surfaced before it turned into disgust, and an instant later a wave of hatred rose within him and pressed against the inside of his skull until he had to stifle a moan of pain. God, did he hate her! Honestly, he wasn’t at all a violent man, but he’d like to put his thumbs right under her froggy chin and press on her... What the hell do they call an Adam’s apple in a woman?

He didn’t even try banishing these sorts of thoughts anymore, and had long stopped feeling guilty about having them. Like a sex fantasy, it gave him pleasure and it didn’t hurt anybody. “… it would give the whole room a look of... I don’t know. Solidity. Elegance.”

“What?”

Chrissie gave him her weary, stoic reaction. Flared nostrils, followed by a sigh blown through her nose. He hated her nostrils; they were isosceles triangles. “The mirror. Framing the medicine-cabinet mirror.”

No, not throttle her. Truth be told, on and off over the years he played a kind of whodunit game about getting rid of her. Not seriously, because obviously that would be immoral. His ideas were more like putting poison into those giant antioxidant capsules she took every morning with a hideous glug. Oh, and the old defective electrical appliance business, tossing it into the bathtub. If he really wanted to be nasty, he’d buy a plug-in vibrator, so the cops and people from the medical examiner’s office would snicker. No, then they might think she died because he couldn’t satisfy her. Anyway, ninety-nine percent of the time, the husband was the top suspect and he was never able to think of a way he wouldn’t be.

“Look, it’s my birthday and I don’t want to get into a whole discussion, but we did what you wanted to do. The kids’ bathrooms.” He waved his arm in a grand gesture, like a conductor introducing a hundred-piece orchestra. “The kitchen. We agreed to hold off on the master bath and do the library first. One project at a time.”

Her nostrils flared again, but she managed a smile, and that seemed to bring back her perkiness. “You’re not enjoying your cholesterol festival?” she asked.

“No, no, it’s fine,” he said, smiling back. “I appreciate the fuss.” He cut through the steak and wondered how he was ever going to get down enough of it — it must be close to a pound of meat — to stop her from asking a million times, Didn’t you like it? It looked good, as if she’d gone to one of the chic, boutique butchers on the Upper East Side. But it was good for a big-deal dinner, not for breakfast. She knew he could never eat this much, but she probably didn’t want the butcher thinking she could only afford four ounces of sirloin or tenderloin, whatever the hell it was. It was a little too well-done for him, but at least not her usual revolting, underdone beef-as-wounded-flesh. He’d thought about telling her he wasn’t going to eat red meat anymore, but of course that would mean he couldn’t order it in restaurants where people actually understood the meaning of medium-rare.

“Oh, speaking of fuss, when we go out with the McDevitts and the Schottlands Saturday night for your birthday, would you mind if I asked Jordana and Clark to join us?” Bob knew exactly where this came from: the Times . They had run something about how people with younger friends live longer and they’d run shots of a couple of gatherings where kids in their twenties were mingling with what appeared to be forty- and sixty- and eighty-somethings.

“No. It would be inappropriate. I mean, we’ve been doing birthdays with these people for years, so how, all of a sudden, can we suddenly say, ‘We want to bring our daughter along’? Anyway, they’re just dating.”

“Living together and, in my humble opinion, very, very serious. Don’t the names Jordana and Clark sound great together? Very modern but not too hip. I only wish he wasn’t so hairy. I hear his father is too. When he’s sitting down and I walk around in back of him, I can see the hair on his back kind of merging with the hair on his head, except it’s curlier...” Endless babble. But the steak wasn’t bad, and at least she had stopped salting it before putting it under the broiler, which would have turned it into striated muscle with rigor mortis. “…but he’s really very impressive, on the partner track at one of the top firms, and don’t forget he’s thirty, so he can hold his own in conversation. I was a little surprised, frankly, that someone like him would look at a summer associate, but she does keep herself in fabulous shape and...”

Bob swallowed. Good, actually good. He gave her a nod. In the old days he would have said something like, Here’s looking at you, kid, except then she’d be repeating it back to him, ad nauseum, for weeks, raising a Diet Coke to him in a toast, or as a salute when he was putting on a tie in front of the mirror, or as an overworked conversational comma to punctuate her babble. Another bite. Maybe if he ate enough of the steak she’d cut him a little slack on the eggs.

“… right before she began dating him,” Chrissie was saying, “I started noticing packages from Sephora.com. I mean, it never ceases to amaze me that there’s a generation that buys makeup online, but there you go.”

He swallowed again. A little too big of a bite, not quite enough chewing. The steak was right there, at the top of his throat, but it wasn’t going down. He tried to cough it up quietly, but that didn’t work, so he coughed harder. Except then he realized he couldn’t cough. She was looking at him quizzically: head cocked to the side so that half her chin lifted up from her hands. Maybe she had a puzzled look in her eyes, but, as her brow had been Botoxed out of commission, he couldn’t be sure.