Bertrand Court (13 page)

Hugo leads me to the park around the corner from our cul-de-sac, where I throw a stick for him to retrieve while I sit on Sophie's favorite swing, dragging my feet. Dust smokes around my calves.

Georgia is gone by the time I return from the 7-Eleven with a box of Lipton tea bags. The dishwasher hums and a mound of soiled linen napkins lies on our kitchen table. I am sick with shame and loss, the loss of Georgia's reflection of who we were. That mirror broke tonight; its shards puncture my heart.

In a vain attempt to rinse my mouth of the foul taste of the evening, I take a swig of Listerine. I let the khakis Nikki ironed drop on the bathroom floor. I stare at the tan lines from my sunglasses, at my flat eyes and newly chiseled cheekbones. I looked younger with a little baby fat.

I sidle up to Nikki, who lies coiled on her side of the bed. I close my eyes, willing the sunrise to come early, longing for my daughters to poke their heads in our room and wish us good morning. The girls haven't woken me up in a long time; I've been too busy swimming laps. Tomorrow I'll cook up a batch of blueberry pancakes. I'll try to make things right with Nikki. And then, for no reason, I'm angry again. And horny. I stroke the side of her face, and her tears wet my fingers. I still want to have enthusiastic sex. How did I get here?

I roll away from her, and through a bent slat in our blinds I study a cluster of spindly pines backlit by the moon. It seems like hours pass before the tension of the evening drains from my limbs. Just as I'm drifting off to sleep, Nikki yanks the warm sheets from my body. I shiver. She grabs my waist, rolls me over on my back, and mounts me. I can feel her nakedness on my belly. She grabs my hands and hoists them over my head. She's going to kiss me; we're going to have married sex nonpareil. In slow motion, she lowers her face toward me. She looks like she did when she pushed out Emma and Sophie: fierce, brave, fed up with the pain. Her hair is wild and her breath caresses my face; it smells like toothpaste and Stilton and alcohol. I want her. My lips part, waiting, waiting for her to kiss me. Her mouth comes within a millimeter of mine before she jerks her head away, slapping her hair against my face. She slides one hand from my wrists down toward my throat, and then she presses her dry lips to my jugular and growls.

GEORGIA AND PHIL

Georgia Dumfries, December 2003

P
hil Scott shells pink pistachios at breakneck speed, leaving the detritus for Georgia to vacuum up later. The Redskins are winning 13-10, and the sportscaster's baritone blends with the hum of the dryer tumbling a load of Phil's whites. This afternoon the sound annoys Georgia. Without glancing up from her novel — she's reading
My Ántonia
for the fourth time — she knows the half is over by the feel of Phil's stained fingers rubbing the inside of her arm.

She puts down her book and leads him upstairs to her bedroom, where she'd made up the bed with a fresh pair of sheets (one thousand thread count) moments before his arrival. After he kisses her on the mouth, he removes her glasses. She opens the top drawer of her nightstand and hands him a condom. Six minutes later, spermicide trickles down her thighs.

“Did you go?” This is Phil's language for inquiring about her orgasm.

“Hmmm.” In six minutes? At least he asks. Nikki is right; ugly men are better in bed. They have to try harder. Phil is better-looking and younger than Georgia; he calls on schedule, wipes down the toilet basin after he pees, blogs about the conflict in Darfur, shoots the best video in town, and loops one of his ropy arms around her torso after they make love. For the past seven months, this weekly arrangement has been enough for her. She turns her head into his sparse chest hair and breathes in his scent: clove cigarettes and cat. Her nose starts to tingle as if she's going to cry. God, she's been so needy since her cat died. It's been almost seven months already.

Start to finish, they spend about fifteen minutes — roughly the length of the halftime show — in bed. Georgia times it. While she sprays Shout on the pink thumbprint he left on her new sheets, Phil sneaks downstairs to catch the second half of the game.

“Georgia?” he calls up to her in a sweet voice. “Mind taking my clothes out of the dryer?”

Georgia does not yell. Ever. She walks down the two stairs of her split-level condo in her terrycloth robe. “Got it.” She goes back up to her bathroom, washes herself, and puts on a fresh pair of panties and the jeans and blouse she was wearing earlier.

She slides her feet into slippers and pads over to the fridge. “Hungry?” She also never uses more words than she needs.

“Always, after some good loving.” Without looking away from the game, he grins at her and reclines on the couch.

Georgia loves to cook. While retrieving two television trays from her front hall closet, she muses about walking next week to the All Soul's farmer's market across from the cathedral and picking up a hearty bread and some butternut squash. She'll buy fresh gingerroot and Asian pears from the vendor with the bushy eyebrows, and come home and make a nice soup. Shopping and preparing a meal for Phil gives her Sundays structure, and the leftovers carry her through the week.

“You spoil me.” He finishes his last bite of poached salmon and pats his stomach as lean people sometimes do to draw attention to their waistlines.

“You're right.” The edge in her voice surprises her. Maybe she's going through menopause; her mother went through it in her early forties.

“You okay?”

For the first Sunday in seven months, she doesn't feel okay about their routine: cable television, bad sex, laundry, and a home-cooked meal, followed by the cell phone call on Wednesday afternoons. “I miss Willa.” This is true, but it also lets Phil off the hook.

He pulls her toward him and strokes her hair. “How long were you two together?”

She likes the way he phrases the question. “Eleven years.” Georgia and Phil initially bonded — they met a year ago when he sweet-talked her into editing his reel — over the respective pride in their cats' names: Mandu, to remind him of his travels to Kathmandu, and Willa Cat-Her, after her favorite author. Funny how such a simple exchange of information had led to their absurd coupling.

“Whoa. It's just going to take time.” He kisses the top of her head. “It took about a year after my first kitty died before I was ready for another one. Now it feels like Mandu's been with me forever.”

He strokes her hair again, wrapping a curl around his pointer finger, and his tenderness embarrasses her. She extricates herself from him. “I've got an early day tomorrow.” Tenderness is not part of the deal.

The next morning, Georgia awakens at five o'clock, unsettled from Phil's visit. Too agitated to sleep, she heads to the office to work in peace. She edits a scene for
The Mettle of a Marriage
, a reality television show that tests the strength of a seemingly happy marriage — an institution she rebuffed back in her thirties — by sending the husband or wife on a date with his or her first love.

Working on reality shows makes her feel greasy, but the day after she put Willa to sleep, she chipped a tooth and needed money to foot a hefty dentist bill. She began to suffer panic attacks over her meager savings and the prospect of growing old alone, so she swapped her earnest, broke public television colleagues for hungry young producers with hip haircuts.

She files her exchange with Phil in the back of her mind and parachutes into a stack of field tapes. Patient enough to mine footage for whispers and images, moments that would escape most editors' attention, she sculpts this material into perfectly rendered scenes. Today, she zeroes in on Wife Sheila hunting down a pair of miracle jeans that will hide what gravity has inflicted upon her rear end.

Heidi, her producer, breezes into the edit suite at nine-thirty with two skim lattes. Even though she's young, she has the look of a woman who has dated too many married men. She hands Georgia the steaming cup. “So what have you got?”

Georgia hits the space bar on her Avid, and the clip resumes playing.

When the sequence is over, Heidi whistles in genuine awe. “Fucking wizard, Georgia.” She puts down her latte. “That shot of Sheila struggling with her waistband is killer. I totally missed that.”

Georgia is disturbingly good at her job. Her editing prowess enables her to exploit this poor middle-aged woman, whose thighs look like her own, like someone stuffed a vat of cottage cheese into an old pair of pantyhose.

Heidi pulls up a chair and sits too close to Georgia. “I totally nailed that interview. What a boo-hooer! She was so into that high school flame. They like played in a band together or something. And her husband Joe is a marathon runner, he's probably Viagra-dependent from all that exercise.” Heidi natters on while Georgia continues to shuttle through the footage, willing Heidi to stop talking. “Major flippage in store for this one,” Heidi snorts.

Flippage is the network's term for the moment when the spouse moves from mild interest to obsession over his or her first love. Flippage makes fools out of perfectly normal people, makes them do crazy things.
Good job, Heidi. Congratulations on ruining another marriage.
“You sure know how to pick 'em,” Georgia mutters.

Heidi, reeking of equal parts Camel Lights, Altoids, and Clinique Elixir, laugh-hacks as she wheels her chair closer to Georgia.

“Heidi, personal space.”

“No problem.” Because Heidi respects bitchiness, she moves to the producer's chair without argument.

Heidi flits in and out of the edit suite for the duration of the morning and brings Georgia a bowl of lentil soup and a warm slice of bread from the Greek deli for lunch. At five o'clock, her cell phone and Georgia's line ring simultaneously. Georgia does not own a cell phone. What would be the point? She's only received a dozen phone calls since she began working here, mostly short ones from Phil on Wednesdays during the early evening, while he walks to Chief Ike's for his weekly beer and pool game with his soundman, Eric Solonsky. Everyone loves Eric. He delivers the cleanest sound around. He's also Nikki's favorite neighbor. Small world.

“Hey there,” Phil croons in a playful tone.

“Hi.” Georgia puts her finger over her free ear to drown out Heidi's raspy laugh.

“Would anyone object to us having dinner tonight?” He shifts to his fake debonair persona.

Dinner? “What's up?” She shuttles through footage of Sheila enduring a bikini wax.

“Can't a guy take his girl for a meal?”

His girl? Phil's use of this pronoun gives her a start. It's the dead-endedness of her relationship with him, not his dimpled smile or compassion, that appeals to Georgia. But what the hell, it's just dinner. She agrees to meet him in half an hour and hangs up.

“I'm taking off early,” Georgia announces to Heidi, who raises an eyebrow, removes her glasses, and folds her hands on her lap.

“Dinner plans.”

“But there's more, ma chérie. Do tell.” She does her best Catherine Deneuve.

Georgia considers telling Heidi about Phil; she doesn't have many girlfriends. Nikki meets her for dinner periodically, inhaling her meal without chewing, pretending that there's space in her life for more than raising her twins and helping Tad resuscitate his dead political career. Heidi is actually an articulate listener, which is why she's such a good interviewer. But confiding in Heidi, like polishing off a row of Thin Mints, would feel great while she's doing it and rotten immediately afterwards.

“I'll be in at eight tomorrow,” she says and shuts down her computer.

Georgia follows a leggy hostess to an empty table at the Basil Café and downs two glasses of Merlot while waiting for Phil to arrive. A man in a leather jacket, spiky red hair, and a strong jawline glides past the hostess with a wink;
he looks like Ed Norton. Phil.

“So sorry I'm late.” He extends his hand, and when Georgia tries to shake it, he scratches his head. “Gotcha.” And then he points his finger at her like he's shooting her and gives her arm a squeeze.

Why would anyone think it feels good to have the flesh of one's triceps pulled from the bone?

“Whatcha drinkin'?” He points to the wine glasses.

“I don't know, but it's good.” She glances to the end of the bar, at a handsome young man wearing a carefully coiffed ponytail and clogs.

“He sent you these?” Phil looks toward the man with interest.

“Gotcha.” She fake shoots him back.

“That's good. Very good.” His eyes twinkle as he motions to the waitress and orders a glass of port for himself. They eat penne out of bowls the size of Frisbees while Phil describes some footage he's just shot of a baby for a film about fetal alcohol syndrome. His passion charms Georgia, making her ache to ditch Heidi and the lucratively boring side gigs for the chance to work on a real film again. She wants to ask why they're drinking too much wine in this Italian bistro on a Monday night, just one day after their routine date, but she doesn't. Georgia is good at waiting.

The air is balmy for a Washington winter night. Phil grabs Georgia's hand as they walk from the restaurant to his English basement apartment in Adams Morgan; she can't remember the last time a man grabbed her hand. It feels good. His place smells like the clove cigarettes he smokes on occasion and less like cat pee than she had anticipated. She shrugs her sweater off, aware that he's watching her.

“They're nice.” He points at her breasts.

She can't wipe the goofy smile off her face. He lights a candle and plays an old Joni Mitchell record. She likes Joni Mitchell.

Georgia looks around the apartmeßnt. “Where's Mandu?”

“She's shy.” He disappears into his bedroom and returns with a ginger tabby under his arm. “
Hewwo
, kitty cat. This is Georgia.”

Beneath the baby talk, his voice is gentle. That uncomfortable feeling from the day before returns, but she wants to stay more than she wants to flee. She reaches for the silky fur beneath Mandu's chin and rubs the sweet spot until she purrs.

Phil nods. “She only likes special people.”

Special people? How many women have met this cat? A pang of something like ownership surprises Georgia.

“Can I get you something to drink? A glass of vino maybe?”

“Sure.” While he fusses with the corkscrew, she examines a framed black-and-white photo, Henri Cartier-Bresson–like in composition and feel. A little boy with a dirty nose and torn jeans stands amid a sea of broken glass and cigarette butts. He's holding a balloon. The lighting is perfection, and Phil's captured both the raw hope and flatness in the child's eyes. The image, like many of those she'd seen when editing Phil's reel, puts a lump in her throat.

“This is beautiful.” Georgia points to the picture.

He looks at her like a puppy who's just received a biscuit. “Thanks.”

He retrieves a wine glass from a cupboard, and she studies another photo hanging on the wall, a badly composed snapshot of a younger, goateed Phil with his arm slung around the shoulders of an older woman with enough freckles to suggest that her hair was once red like his. Must be his mother. “You two look alike,” Georgia comments.

“She passed away five years ago.”

Before Georgia can respond, he comes up behind her and kisses her neck, leaving the slightest bit of moisture on her skin. He kneads her shoulders until the tension dissolves from her body. And a full hour later, when he asks her if she has “gone,” she answers him truthfully with a yes. She drifts off with Phil's fingers resting on her wrist and Mandu's heat curling around her toes.

When Georgia wakes up the next morning, Phil is shaving in the bathroom, wearing a pair of boxers that she recognizes from doing his laundry.

“How'd you sleep, Georgia girl?” His voice is full of mischief. “You were something last night.”

She buries her head under the covers, embarrassed by all her thrashing and thrusting.

He laughs. “Hey, listen, remember that shoot in Toronto I told you about last night?” He rinses thin lines of shaving cream from his cheeks. “Do you think you could take care of Mandu while I'm gone?”