January 8, 2012

A Lost Cause

His hands reminded her of her father’s hands, the fingers stout, the nails flat and clipped, peeling slightly at the top. They felt soft against the side of her face though, gently pressing half moons into her cheek.

“This is the last time,” he said, and kissed her. Was he reassuring her or reassuring himself? Perhaps it didn’t matter. She returned his kiss just as hungrily, her hand at the back of his neck, fingers sinking into his hair.

The morning light was beginning its slow awakening outside, and she knew that if they didn’t fall asleep before it soaked through the ivory curtains all the way she would not have slept all night.

Right before he left he held her hands in the doorway and looked at her. “What?” She asked, laughing. “I want to remember you,” he said and brought each of her fingers against his lips.

“Goodbye, Claire.”

“Goodbye.” She said. She would shower and dress, in her pressed white blouse and tweed pencil skirt, the sensible patent leather pumps with the kitten heel. She would wear a tinted lip balm and put on a swipe of mascara. Silvia, the receptionist would ask her about her weekend and she would answer, too short, and her desk would greet her, the drab gray of the cubical walls and the faintly buzzing computer.

No one will know, she had whispered, the first time. It was dusk and they were walking to the train after dinner, a mediocre Italian restaurant in the West Village, mediocre and expensive. Their hands had accidentally touched across the table and she thought the candle made a particularly good display of his wedding band.

“I can’t,” he said. But on the subway platform as they stood side by side, she glanced up at him and he grabbed her hand. His palm was hot, slightly damp. He held on until it was her stop.

*

 No one really noticed her, at the office. She  was a copy editor at a lifestyle magazine where glamorous women paraded by every day, with curled hair and lined eyes and structured designer purses. Once, she had thought that she would be one of them. In college she had been the girl who went to her early morning classes with lipstick and a bright smile and ideas about the minute details of Dorothea’s wardrobe in Middlemarch. In high school she had lost her virginity in the back of a car with a boy with greasy black hair and a badly drawn tattoo of a rose and dagger on his upper arm. Her girlfriends had been shocked when she told them with a nonchalant shrug. In fact both of she and the boy had been unsure and the whole thing had been short and painful.

But sometimes after she graduated, after the parties and the stilettos she had spent all of her money and grown tired, she moved back to her home in Virginia. For a year she tried to write a novel. She fell in love (or at least that was what she told people) with a man who owned the neighborhood bar and moved in, talked of marriage. She spent many evenings, drunk, letting him marvel over her body and call her beautiful. She kept it up until she learned that she was pregnant, and the future she would have with him came to her in a series of nightmares that woke her up, screaming.

The doctor at the abortion clinic had kind blue eyes and the operating room smelled familiar, like the fancy pill boxes her grandmother kept. She never told him. She packed a few sets of clothes and moved back to New York.

The job hadn’t been hard to find. She simply asked the women who were her friends in college, all of them with neat mid-level jobs and smart haircuts. The one at the magazine, Amanda, had greeted her with barely veiled pity, and paid for lunch at a sushi restaurant that had just been reviewed in the New York Times. It’s so good to see you back, Amanda had hugged her goodbye, a light, loose hug. When she started working she rarely talked to Amanda, simply met eyes and smiled.

There was a calming sense of repetition to her job, the worm like black letters squirming across the page, the tiny errors she could correct. It was a good chance to listen in to the conversations around her, too, which almost always followed a caricature like pattern of predictability, talk of men and sex and shoes and cooking. 

(to be continued…)

(Source: paintedfictions)

#fiction #short story
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