heart thuds, too hard and too fast, as if it is trying to rev up the momentum to run away. It will calm down soon, as it always does; the thought of coffee helps. A latte, warm and bittersweet, soothes the jagged edges of her nerves. She will walk to the coffee shop and have somebody make one for her. She allows herself this luxury a couple of times a week, on days when she needs to feel cared for.
She resolves that today she will put all thoughts of Micajah from her mind. The name draws her back to that Shakertown and its naive, decorous purity. Since sex was forbidden, the sect grew only by conversion. No wonder it died out.
She hears Larry in the hallway, his door opening then shutting. They too sleep separately, but in resentful, repressed inequality rather than in equable, asexual peace. The bathroom Larry uses is not en suite; it also serves the room that Eve still thinks of as Allan’s. Though he keeps his bedroom door closed unless he’s actually walking through it, he leaves the bathroom door open. It’s a territorial power play that Eve accepts as a quid pro quo for his acceptance of the lower-status bedroom. She won’t go into the hallway until she hears his footsteps on the stairs.
The rasp of the blender drifts up from the kitchen. Larry is making his morning smoothie. Its ingredients are kept in a special drawer in the fridge into which nothing else is allowed, and which he has requested her not to open. Maybe he’s putting raw meat in it, she thinks, but the joke—if it is a joke—isn’t funny.
She’s hungry. Her stomach is clenching. Feeling treasonous for not wanting to see him or talk to him, she waits for the businesslike bang of the door. Then she will get up and revel in the empty house. He’s going to Arizona for work this week, and she’s looking forward to a few days of solitude.
Things are easier now that he has his own room. In the last years when they shared a bed, they would wake and turn away from each other if they weren’t turned away already. They would exchange cursory good mornings and she would ask, “What do you want for breakfast?” and dutifully she would have cereal, or eggs, or French toast, waiting for him when he came downstairs. The secret smoothies are a blessing too. Until she stopped doing it, she had no idea how much she resented starting her day by serving him.
She asked her son the same question, every day until he left home. She mulls it over as she lies in bed: how she has perpetuated the servitude by training the next generation to expect it. But isn’t that what a good mother does? When her mother said it to her, it was different: training by example, the flip side. She got breakfast for her father and her brother on the days when her mother lingered in bed.
Until the moment he left her, Eve’s mother served Eve’s father. She brought him a drink when he came home from work, she asked solicitously about his day, she never questioned that he did nothing to help with the cooking or the cleaning up, when she had had a far more stressful day with five children to care for than he could have had, in his well-appointed office with a well-appointed secretary. The details have changed, not the dynamics. The serving has become subtler: buying Christmas presents for Larry’s mother, praising him for taking any small share of the housework, making “Daddy time” the family priority. As the years tick by, Eve is starting to understand why in more brutal days old women were reviled, exiled, burned as witches: they’d stopped worshipping at the shrine. They could see that it was all just smoke and mirrors.
As Eve sits at the kitchen table, eating a slice of the apricot tart she made for dessert last night but didn’t serve, her phone pings. She gets few texts now that Allan is out of the country. Mostly they’re from Deborah. But this is too early for Deborah. She doesn’t open her store until noon so she can lie in bed late.
“Mornings are the best,” she said lasciviously once, enjoying Eve’s discomfort. “I get to spend time with my little friend. Actually, a really nice big friend! Poor Ted, he never measured up, but then what man does? No man around here, anyway. Once you go wired, you never get tired. You should try it, Eve. Stop being such a born-again virgin!” Deborah knows about Larry’s move into the guest room.
Eve has thought about it in a desultory way, but the idea of going to a sex shop is repellent. She’s afraid that if she searches online, ads for sex toys and hookup sites will haunt her screen forever. At times, she has wondered if she has any libido left. Menopause hasn’t really started to show yet, but maybe loss of interest in sex was the first sign.
The text is from a number she doesn’t recognize, with an area code she doesn’t recognize.
Hi, Eve. Send me a photo maybe I can help. M
Micajah.
For a crazy moment, her imagination spirals into naked selfies, compromised celebrities and politicians. She laughs out loud at herself. The tumultuous return of her libido, yesterday, is disturbing and intoxicating. She’s tired of feeling guilty over Larry. For now, she will put her guilt aside.
Micajah is simply offering to help. Or rather, it would be simple, if not for that “M”.
She knows she doesn’t actually need help. The instrument was an impulse buy, and she can easily absorb the sixty dollars it cost. She can stash it away and forget it. Allan can throw it in the garbage when she’s dead.
She goes to the dining room and opens the case. The choice is plain: save it or send it to its grave. Strange, how this inanimate object has the quality of a living creature. She picks it up with both hands and turns it over, where the splintered wood is pale and raw against the golden varnish that, in this clear light, has the mottled depth of centuries. She cannot trash this; it’s impossible. She wants the wound mended.
She sets it on the table where the light shows it best and snaps four photos: a wide shot, close-ups of the carved vines and the leaf-blinded Cupid, and the horrible gash in the back. As she waits for the whoosh that tells her the last text has gone, she fits the instrument back into its case. The vines seem to be reaching toward her, to pull her in, to twine her together with Micajah.
He phones twenty minutes later. She feels her heart pound as the number lights up her phone. She lets it ring, willing herself to calm down, but any longer and it will go to voicemail, so she swipes her finger quickly across the screen.
“I think I can help,” he says.
“You know someone who could fix it?”
“Yes.”
“Can you give me his number?”
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“He’s . . . tricky.”
“Oh,” she says.
She feels like a stammering teenager, and hopes he can’t tell. She used to love to picture the physical connection between herself and Larry as they talked: the receiver held against her ear, the spiraling cord linking it to the phone, then the wires and cables threading through the miles to where Larry was, another spiraling cord, and the receiver touching his ear. But the electrons whizzing between her and Micajah leave no trace. She imagines an airy chain of particles and waves, with millions and billions of other chains whizzing through it, as insubstantial as magic.
“Meet me,” he says.
She’s on the verge of saying, Can’t you just give me his number? Instead, she says, “When?”
They
