My fridge was consistently
stocked with a box of white wine.
Dry white wine. Everyone
thought it would always be this way.
I always thought I’d be the one with the spacious apartment that was
built during the last Great War, the tangled Christmas lights tossed into the
closet haphazardly, the stack of varied magazines as a coffee table. I always figured I’d be able to drink
coffee throughout the day and only have my own lack of appetite to worry about. But, as I quickly learned, things don’t
last.
It
began with John. He was handsome;
I was stubbornly independent. I
met him while working in the office of a construction company, filing papers
and conducting company wide surveys.
I was a pragmatist of sorts; I was set on a certain track of owning a
closet full of shoes, of drinking too much, of eating sushi out every Thursday
night. I worked early mornings,
caught the bus at six to make it to work for seven. There was laundry on my floor, a cupboard full of candy,
rows of dresses in my wardrobe.
This wasn’t what I’d always be doing, I knew that; I had not gone to
university for four years to study English only to become an accessory to fork
lifts. I did not necessarily
desire to be another gear in the mechanisms of highway construction and
arrogant architects. I always
figured I would enjoy things now, while I’m young, I could worry about having a
real career later. That’s what
they always said, You’re young, worry about it later.
“Hello
love, you look dashing in that dress.
I brought champagne.” John
had a crooning voice, a sort of lilt at the end of his sentence, like
everything was punctuated with a question mark. His deep receding hairline was
handsome on his face, the narrowness of his cheeks and greenness of his eyes
serving as a reminder of his novelty.
I suppose he was a sort of cookie-cutter man, the type I went mad for:
intellectual, sensual, well-dressed.
I had dated several other versions of him before.
“Good. I hope it’s dry”
New
years had come around again, full circle, imposing its overinflated ego on
everyone. There was always so much
pressure on this day, this evening, to be fantastic. It was considered an indication of what the New Year would
bring; often, much of the same. Resolutions
would be formed, and then broken a week later. Weight-loss memberships would inflate, then plummet two
months later. Closets would be cleaned thoroughly, then oversized coats and
broken vacuum cleaners would resume their original positions. The year would masquerade as being
something New, something Fun, would call itself Opportunity, only to reveal
itself later as having the same receding hairline as the year before.
John and I had been invited to a party on the top floor of a
hotel. The penthouse, I suppose it
was. His friends were of the
yuppie variety: mad with entitlement and thin silk ties. I can’t say I wasn’t drawn in, but I
liked to think I played the detached card well enough to fool them.
“Johnathan,
do you think my lips are too red, or are they just the right kind of red?” It was an answer I didn’t care to hear,
but they were words to fill the cab.
“They
are just the right kind, like blood red strawberries. They’re much too much for my heart, really.” He reached over and took my chin in his
hand and kissed me wetly on the mouth.
His teeth were like jagged hedges, neglected by the despondent homeowner. I entertained myself by running my
tongue along each crevice, imagining how the overlaps and pointy eyeteeth
formed each word. His mouth was a
math equation I was busy solving.
“Yum. Cordova and Abbott, please.” I instructed the cab driver, anxious
for a glass of champagne. I didn’t
particularly care for New Years, and planned on spending it drunk and spouting
off movie trivia.
The
room was filled with the Chemical Brothers and I made a beeline for the
cocktails. Johnathan gathered
around his co-workers, recently married and perfectly groomed. He was anxious because his best friends
had all been married in the past two years, plucked off, one by one, like
flower petals. His bachelor sensibilities tended to repel all things domestic
and comfortable. His sofa was
leather and stiff and modeled after the sixties and his liquor cabinet was
unlocked; he wasn’t planning on having children anytime soon. This suited me fine. Children and marriage were things I
knew I’d want to do later, but later being a far distant future, perhaps in
another dimension, a place where I wore flower-print aprons and rolled
dough. That place was not yet
here.
I
poured myself an extraordinarily strong corpse reviver just as one of the wives
sauntered up to me. Janice was
tall and blond and had the kind of eyes that made you wonder if she had a soul
or not.
“Felicity!
Darling! Tell me, where did you
find your dress? It is absolutely darling!” She was also the kind of woman that
sugar coated insults with compliments.
“Ah,
this. I found it second hand. Fit like a glove.” I think I saw her
choke on her tongue in slow motion.
“Just
Lovely! Now come dance with us!”
The
rest of the evening found vodka giggles, sore feet, flirtations and weekly
gossip. I amused myself seeking
out faces in my champagne bubbles, and I revealed to whoever would listen that the European release
of The Shining was actually twenty-four minutes shorter
than the American version. I sat
with the other women as they commented on whatsername’s whorish ways and
whatserfaces’ out-of-control shoe shopping habit, paying each topic a generous
heaping of false attention, just so I wouldn’t be sought out as the
traitor. I didn’t care to argue
myself out of being a communist tonight.
I
was beginning to regret agreeing to come to this party. I had told Johnathan I had nothing in
common with anyone, and I had been anticipating this intense need to get
intoxicated.
“Mmm,
it’s almost midnight.” I felt Johnathan’s breath on my neck before I heard him
speak. I was ready to just leave
with him now, go back to my apartment and make love to him on the leather couch
until two am. I didn’t care about
the procedures or protocols New Years insisted upon; the Newness of it all demanded
something of forgiveness and review, and I wasn’t particularly partial to
sentimentality.
“Ten…nine…eight…seven…”
The husbands and wives began to
chant together, converging upon each other with the greedy eyes of a bureaucrat. For them, the stroke of midnight held so
much importance, so much weight.
The way they spent tonight is the way they would spend the rest of the
year.
“Six…five…four…”
The women grinned and the men put
down their drinks. Feminine hands
ran up suit arms and rested at the elbow.
This moment was frozen as a moment of significance for them all.
“Three… two…”
Johnathan pulled me in front of
him, looking into my eyes with such intensity, I couldn’t tell if he was drunk
or not. He reached into his front
pocket and began to kneel down.
“One! Happy New Year!”
I saw him mouthing something, but
couldn’t hear what words were formed over the horns and clinking of
glasses.
“What?” He pulled me down to his level and I felt his lips before I
heard him say, “Will you marry me?”
Felicity closed the trunk at the
foot of her bed with a final thud.
Glancing around her barren apartment, she maneuvered her way through the
maze of boxes and grabbed the bottle of wine sitting on the bed-side table and
screwed off the cork, pouring a generous amount into her glass without
looking. Her eyes never left the
top far corner by the front door.
The white washed walls were more like a tinge of gray now, tiny holes
remained as reminders of old calendars and photographs that had been pinned
there once. She took a large sip
of her wine. It could have been
water. That one spot, up on the
left, bothered her. Between the
edge of crown molding and dark wood doorframe, there was an inch of green
tape. The doorbell rang, and she
didn’t even flinch. She couldn’t
remove her eyes from that green tape.
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