Victoria May Collett
Has Always Hated Champagne
The moon is a beauty—pinioned by the night in temporary captivity. Cottonwood leaves shimmer. One-seed Junipers glisten. Sycamores whisper in the night breeze. Shadows cascade. Night sighs. Stars shimmer. Snakes slither. The road stays heated at night, and a Western Diamondback rattler would definitely enjoy the solitude and warmth of the blacktop. All he has to do to have a successful outing is to cross the road without becoming road-kill. Of course, his slender and beautiful body would be a fabulous snack for the Turkey Vultures the next day. Natural recycling.
Right now, it is so night-time. The resident mortals are holed up in respective homes—the visiting mortals, the birders, the hikers, and the herpetologists are holed up in the town’s only motel. Which is where Martha McMahon’s birding group is staying. And she’s in a dilemma.
“Who's there?” Martha asks, trying to keep panic out of her voice. She’d been sitting on the bed, diligently adding the day’s birds and mammals to her “Life List”. “Who's there?” she repeats.
No answer. Just the Screech owls whinnying like possessed ponies released from some ritzy, albeit expensive, mental institution for whacked-out equines.
Martha McMahon’s motel room door is double-locked. The key lock and the chain. But there is a humungous space between the AC unit and the wall, where anything flattish and narrow could make an unannounced entrance to her room. An unlikely scenario to be sure. On the other hand, Martha is still learning to be alone. She is in the Chiricahua mountains—at this “lodge” where visiting birders stay. In a town where the main street is the length of a long-winded sentence, and the creature comforts are five star—for the creatures—and two star for the humans. Evidenced by the gaping gap between the AC unit and the wall—along with a supply of toilet paper hard enough to damage a delicate crotch; a bad mattress; a single too-thin blanket; and a sachet of body lotion with not enough lotion to hydrate the skin of a visiting gnat. With all of this, there is the room key—a key with issues. Issues. Like her dear, departed husband—a man with issues—issues that only came to the fore when he was six feet under.
Land sakes, was that her, perfectly-coiffed Martha, a trim, well-mannered doctor’s wife, a woman who wears a cardigan and has two “genius” children, who is having facetious thoughts about her totally devoted husband of twenty-two years?
When he died fourteen months, five days, twenty hours ago—not that she’s counting—she was inconsolable. Like her left arm had been amputated (she’s a leftie). Neil had been an Adonis. A veritable beauty of a man. No matter, he’s gone. She’s still grieving—in a different way. They’d been together since before she put him through medical school in Guadlajara, Mexico. Every anniversary they’d sipped (sometimes guzzled) champagne out of the same flutes, arms intertwined—starry gazes into each others bloodshot sclera. With every advancement in his field of medicine, the champagne grew more expensive. Near the end, Neil had advanced to Champagne Krug Collection—caisse bois 1976—at the hefty amount of seven hundred and thirteen buckaroos per celebration. Throughout their marriage, Neil always had a magnum of Champagne Krug Millésimé in the fridge. Because the wine critic, Monsieur Parker, gave it five little wine glasses in his reviews. Martha believed the cost of a magnum made Neil feel strong, as if he were a better provider. The kicker—Martha is not fond of champagne. Though Neil never knew nor did he bother to ask. Martha just sucked in her breath and took the hit.
Nonetheless, she’d been a model wife. Not stuck up. Not pretentious. Not too proud to clean her own house or pick up after her husband. She had not minded one iota sweeping up his body hair off the bathroom floor—or picking up his jockey shorts—always with a little brown stain at that strategic location. Which periodically begged the question if he did indeed wash his hands with soap and water after he peed—and the other as well...When asked this question, Neil would roll his eyes as if she were a simpleton, followed by the type of smile she could not distinguish from a sneer. Lord, the man was a doctor. Let that sink into her housewife’s brain. At moments like those, he called her a “housewife”—during sex, she became a “domestic goddess”.
On the positive front, she has a huge house on five acres of nature and two gorgeous kids (his sperm). Thankfully, they are now in college and as well-adjusted as teenagers can be. Martha worshipped the ground her husband walked on. Despite the fact, it was occasionally littered with his cigarette butts. He’d purportedly given them up, but she knew better.
For all those years she felt Neil and she were like white on rice—except in the bedroom—where the pressure to perform always wore her thin.
Naturally when he suddenly bit the dust one Sunday morning while she was still in bed dreaming, it came as a giant stab wound to her chest. But back up a bit. She’d been awake when he’d left that morning. It was what he’d said to her that made her pretend to be dead to the world.
“Bye, darling,” he’d whispered, a bit too loudly, and grazed her forehead with a kiss. “See you later on this morning. I’ve taken a Cialis. We’ll have sex when I get back. Think of a good slutty story to tell me.”
Too bad her children were spending that day with friends.
Nevertheless, she did not want to have programmed sex with him and a “good slutty story” meant talk dirty—excessively dirty. Lord, she was forty-nine years old, peri-menopausal and ready to do a Lorena Bobbit on his precious, drug-induced snake, just to take the pressure off her. So please, give her a break, try not having sex for a week or so, then be happy with “oh baby, baby”.
And how spontaneous is taking some drug to get your peter petering?
“Bye, darling,” he repeated—again—and a bit too loudly now. “Want to feel it before I go?”
Martha lay as still as the dead. Her eyes serenely closed as he gently steered her flaccid hand to his crotch. She refused to react. Just played possum.
“We’ll drink some champagne, so get the flutes ready,” he’d whispered distinctly in her ear, then added, “See you later, alligator.” And the man had reluctantly let her hand drop from his spandexed crotch. Even with her eyes shut Martha could envision Neil’s idiotic spandex, cycling outfit—trés expensive to be sure.
He did not see her later-alligator. However, Martha certainly saw him later that morning, and she was a wreck. Mumbling and stumbling and talking to his body right there where all the emergency room staff could hear her loud and clear. His entire face was the color of a nasty bruise. Navy blue. The rest of him appeared strangely warm. Until she touched his flesh. It turned out to be icy and white as the driven snow. Instinctively, her fingers recoiled from the dead flesh. Instantly overridden by guilt, she forced herself to touch him again and hold her fingertips on the mortal remains of her dearly departed husband.
From that moment on, she’d wanted to slit her wrists longitudinally along the radial arteries or at the very least, swallow a couple of dozen Vicodin and chase it with a magnum of Dom Perignon or Krug or Louis Roederer. Lucky for her she hated the sight of blood and she was out of Vicodin. Because Martha wanted to feel closer to her dear departed, she went for the champagne magnums. Numerous bottles of Krug did sufficient brain-numbing until a goodly number of hideous hangovers made her reassess her life choices. Definitely reconfirmed her opinion on the taste of champagne. She chose to take control of her life—especially the financial part. She’d go through Neil’s papers. Collect his life insurance (please god, let there be a valid policy). See if there was money hidden in the wings. Pay off his bills. Stop his subscriptions to cycling, fitness, and home gym magazines. Terminate his malpractice insurance. Fish through his mutual funds. Wade through his computer files.
Yep, wade through his computer files, and Martha was not even computer-savvy. All she knew about computers she learned from her very savvy son. She took care of all Neil’s paperwork, secured his life insurance, shed a billion tears and began seeing a shrink. Perhaps something unconscious warned her to wait until her children were back in their schools. No one was around when she tested her computer skills solo.
To look at her now, with her binoculars and her bird list, you’d never guess what she’s been through. Now, she knows exactly who she is. Among other things, she’s a major bird-watcher—a birder. Taken up an activity she never dreamed of doing in her wildest domestic moments. She can advise you on your binocular choice (Swarovski is her favorite), your birding guide (she’s partial to the National Geographic Birds of North America guide), the correct etiquette for birders (no trespassing on private property, that’s for sure), appropriate clothing (a many pocketed fashion statement). As well, Martha can tell the difference between a Broad-tailed hummingbird and a Broad-billed hummingbird, between a Crissals and a Bendire’s thrasher, knows the diet, the foliage, and the level in the foliage specific birds forage at. More importantly, she can recognize a goodly number of songs and bird calls. Thanks to the thousands of hours spent in the bathtub laced with lavender essential oil listening to her Cornell Ornithology Lab bird calls on her trusty iPod. For example, the squeaky-toy call comes from her favorite flycatcher, the Sulphur-bellied flycatcher. And the Inca dove sings, No hope, No hope. Elegant trogons sound rather like a softly barking dog—arf, arf—not her dog of course, he’s a mastiff.
She’s gone two thousand miles across the continent, for a birding tour with a group of strangers who have already proven themselves to be worthy of friendship, and who would willingly throw themselves between her and a malevolent cactus—or a strafing goshawk—should the need arise. Funny how much a woman can learn about humanity after she has suffered a major eye opening.
“Helloooo!’ said a voice as he thumped with leaden fists on her door. Then Martha hears the person belting on the next door and the door after that. All the way down the line of doors and back to hers.
“Who is it?” She calls back. If the Screech owls aren’t going at it, silence a cappella screams in the night for a couple of moments before the beating on her door resumes.
“No way I’m answering that door,” she muttered to herself, but still she puts on her shorts in case the door comes off its hinges and crashes down. Which would not have surprised her, given the flimsy state of the motel architecture. She doesn’t want to be caught dead standing there in her sleeping T-shirt with no panties. What if it’s her dead husband, Neil? Come back from the grave to haunt her? No, if he’s still hanging around before going to hell, he knows she would kill him.
Grief notwithstanding, here she is, in her single lodge room, in the center of night (a full moon no less), smack in the middle of Arizona, with some insistent person belting on her door—and no answer when she asks who is there. Which eliminated all of her birding group, because they would have knocked and simultaneously yelled out their names.
“Oy vey, I need Oprah.” Martha stands right near the window, trying to peer out the slit between the drapes and the window frame. She sees nothing but dappled moonlight flit over the deck between the two sets of rooms.
Martha is definitely feeling uncomfortable. A slight shifting of her skin sends a ripple of nervousness through her. That same feeling she had eight months ago, at the time she went online to clean up her dead husband’s computer files—and explored some unknown file named “other”.
Here she is in the Chiricahuas with a persistent madman outside her stinky motel door and she’s thinking about the night she opened her dead husband’s email. She begins to space out. That unconscious shift in one’s conscious state—like slipping through a velvet mist and coming out somewhere else. Profoundly, on the other side of reality.
At home. Eight months ago. It’s time to take care of the last of Neil’s business so she can move on in new own life. She misses Neil—even his sexual appetite. Depression has gathered her to its bosom. Martha sets about her final task. With her mouth open she takes a sharp inhalation. Feeling the cool air gallop across her tongue and pound its way down the back of her throat. She glances over her shoulder. Checks she’s alone. That the den door is closed. A quickening of her pulse (God knows why—he’s dead) as she clicks online, gets into his email and starts sorting through his messages. Almost finished, she opens up a file titled “other” and is immediately transported to a page heading called “E-SoulConnect”.
Find your Soul Mate—Find Your Eternal Match—Find Your Life Again. That person you have been waiting your entire lifetime to find. Matchmaking with no hassles and all the benefits of fulfillment. We take Mastercard, Discover and Visa. No American Express. $200 fee. Sign up for your soulmate now. Privacy guaranteed.
She pushes herself back in the swivel chair. Away from the computer. She stands and drags a free-standing desk chair to the closed door. She tips the thing on an angle and jams it under the door knob. The way she did when she had her own bedroom at home and suspected her parents might put in an unexpected visit without knocking—only to discover their precious eleven-year old daughter blithely masturbating and praying she wouldn’t go blind.
Back to the computer—Neil’s computer, was how he put it. Not hers. And with another click of the ENTER key, there, in a bold black Arial font, size 12, on a lush iridescent blue and pink background, was her husband’s profile. All of it. And then some. Height (he lied). Weight (he lied). Preferred diet (he lied). Body Surface Area (he lied). Scars. Moles. Loves champagne. Likes. Dislikes. Hours spent keeping in shape. How. Sexual preference (she never knew that one). Gender preference. Age preference (between twenty-one and thirty-five with a good figure meaning humungous in the bust department -- figures he’d go for a top-heavy woman thirty-five years his junior). Racial preference (white or latino). From his hating anchovies to the three most important things in his life—his children—his cycling—his job (taking the Hippocratic Oath and all that). No mention of the wife in the wings. Her. Martha. Oh, and a macho snapshot of him posing in his neon green and black spandex, his three thousand dollar racing bike wedged limply between his legs. She’d taken that snapshot one day right before she’d dropped him off at the beginning of one of his fifty-mile cycling marathons. They should only have seen him after he finished the race. He wasn’t so buff and smiley then.
There it was. Laid out before her unbelieving eyes.
Nice.
What a guy!
Martha sucks in air. Feels as if the room is imploding around her. As if her breath alone is coming out of her mouth in sharp little daggers, ripping her lips to smithereens. Her hair turns into a bed of rattle snakes writhing uncontrollably over her scalp. A veil snaps down over her eyes and for a few seconds she has no viable thought process. Her head keeps on nodding as if she is a heroin addict. She peers at the screen again. Her vision swings from double to triple and back to acute. Sweat bursts out of every pore her body ever made. Dripping off the end of her nose. Clogging her eyelashes together. Her pits are slick wet plastic. Her crotch is slimy and murky and most unsexual. Heat detonating her blood vessels like a lit match dropped on a gasoline leak at an ammo dump.
“Oh my God, Neil? How could you?” Martha hisses this. After which she systemically goes into shock. Feels every one of her detonated blood vessels suddenly constrict as if a set of giant fingers is squeezing the life out of them. She focuses on trivia—did she turn off the Mister Coffee downstairs? Her pores close down and now her clothes are wet and freezing with the sweat she recently poured into them. The back of her throat turns to a parched landscape. There is a fluttering behind her eyes as if something is living just beyond her consciousness. An insistent ringing in her left ear and chinking in her right ear. Next she will go into kidney failure if she doesn’t get her act together. “Suck in air. Suck in air,” she orders herself to do. And she does that. Until she is hyperventilating, nauseous and dizzy.
The computer screen beckons her back. She stares. She takes in more than air.
To Neil’s inaccurate profile (lying bastard) he has twenty responses. Six on hold. Two with five little hearts beside their names and profiles. The two women with five little hearts apiece are profiled: number one: Alicia, lawyer, five foot nothing, a hundred and six pounds, busty latino, lives in Connecticut, loves cycling, sex and sin—no, no, not “sex and sin”—loves cycling, sun and sand. A beachy chick. And dates marked for their meetings. All dates starting four years ago. Martha mentally goes through all the petite young women at his funeral, searching her recollection for any short, skinny, latino lawyers with burgeoning cleavages and bawling their eyes out over Neil’s formalin-preserved body.
She cannot remember.
All the women she, Martha, did not know, claimed, through their tears and condolences, to be his patients.
A likely story.
Enough, no more. She can’t even examine the second woman’s profile with five little hearts beside her name. Martha is about ready to have a coronary herself. She diligently hits save file and logs off. She curls up on the floor for hours before her bladder cries out for relief. That’s when she starts to think about this revelation.
Betrayal. The ultimate betrayal. Because the bastard has purchased agricultural property, Martha will never be able to have an answer to her question. Did he love her at all? It seems his marriage had been one big orchestrated sham. A lie. Well, if he lied in his soul-mate-searching profile, of course he lied in his marriage. And if he lied in his marriage, she was just glad she didn’t have to divorce him to get everything. Among which was his precious Mercedes and an inordinate amount of spandex cycling outfits.
Her bladder. Her bladder. The fact is, if she doesn’t go to the bathroom now, Martha will pee in her panties. And then she realizes that she is not at home looking at Neil’s betrayal, but in some Spartan motel room in the middle of the Chiricahua mountains with someone banging on her door. Again. Still. And her bladder is full. She must go to the bathroom now.
“Ma’am, do you know what room the herpetologists are in?” yells a voice—finally—from outside her door. How does he know she’s a “ma’am”? Oh, yes, he must have heard her ask who was there when he wasn’t offering his name.
“Hang on,” Martha answers, curious, but with trepidation, because now she thinks she knows the voice. “Hang on.” She heads to the bathroom first. Pees. Takes care to wash her hands with soap and water and dries them thoroughly on the skimpy towel, before she gingerly approaches the room door.
Luckily for the knocker, she has recognized his voice as the voice of an artist she’d been talking to at dinner that night. Her birding buddy had the guy sign their T-shirts, because it was his artwork on the back. A very nice painting of an Elegant Trogon.
The light of the full moon zaps into her as she stares out at the guy. He’s about as skinny as a snake and five foot eight. Dressed in nothing but denim shorts and an indelible tan. Hair back in a ponytail with a short, trimmed (thankfully) beard.
“Howdy, Ma’am,” he says to her, sounding grateful someone in the motel finally opened up their door for him. “I’m a’looking for those two snake guys in the dining room at supper. I been a’knocking on everyone’s door but I cain’t find ‘em nowheres. You see I picked up a couple of snakes to show ‘em. Got ‘em in me van.”
“Yes, well, no, I don’t actually know where the snakers are or who they are. I’m with the bird tour.” Martha peers across the deck. A small light illuminates the drapery in her friend Molly’s room.
“That’s okay, Ma’am,” he gushes at her, standing perhaps a bit too too close to her. “You wanna see some snakes?”
If Martha never sees another snake in her lifetime, it will be too soon for her. She’d formally been living with the biggest, most treacherous snake in the book, and was fed up with all of them.
“Thanks but no thanks.” Martha starts to close her door. “Snakes aren’t my preference lately. Not for over a year.”
“I got a Mojavi rattler and a Western Diamondback rattler right out here in my van. Most beautiful rattlers you ever saw. And that diamondback, he’s jes’ so docile. He’s all sleepy from being on the warm road.”
Martha suddenly remembers her “Life List”. The “List” where she’s been documenting every species of bird and animal she sees, so she can write a book like that woman in Madagascar who saw over eight thousand species of birds before she bought her angel wings. In a rapid reassessment of her position, Martha thinks, why not? Not likely he’ll kill her, because she’d scream first and have the entire bird tour out of their uncosy beds in a heartbeat. In high school she was voted Best-Screamer-With-Hollywood-Horror-Movie-Potential.
“Well, I guess.” She’s trying to sound bored. Doesn’t want to appear too anxious. “I’ll see if my friend wants to see the snakes too.” After which Martha dashes past the guy, across the deck and belts on Molly’s door, screaming, “Mollllllyyyy, it’s Martha.”
6 a.m. The sun is a beauty. Pinioned to the day in temporary captivity. Morning is glorious. Cottonwoods glisten. One-seed Junipers and Silver leaf oaks give themselves over to the solar symmetry. Sycamores envelope Martha’s heart. She loves those trees. Roadrunners dash madly along the road. Gambels quail coveys skitter into the mesquite. Air feels like magic. A Violet-crowned hummingbird on her nest out-stares an entire group of birders. Unfortunately, as all “listers” know, Martha’s list does not have two more snakes on it because the snakes—despite being “wild”—were in temporary captivity—which makes them uncountable. The snake man did not try to murder or otherwise hit on her and her friend, Molly. He turned out to be simply obsessed with snakes whom he knew were snakes—which is something she, Martha, did not know all the while she was married to one. Slithery snakes are so much prettier, and she doesn’t regret peering into the barrel at the snakes—at the exquisite mosaic pattern of the Western diamond-back rattler. She knows how one can be lulled by beauty, deluded into trust—then wham, bam, thank you ma’am—the rattler strikes. Martha kept her distance. Martha is on another path. No more delusions.
And as she maneuvers into the birding chariot for the day’s birding adventure, she thinks too bad she can’t just add that other snake—the one from her married life—to her Life List.
©2006 by Victoria May Collett
