Kyle Hemmings
My Wife’s Posse
Lately, my wife has been spending more time chatting on the phone. Each night, it's a different woman she's speaking to. Every couple of days, it goes back to the first woman who called at the beginning of the week. On some nights, she speaks in an excited tone to most members of the posse. I believe this posse is trying to poison her mind.
I catch fragments of conversation, unscramble the shapes of sounds. So far, this is
what I got: His name is Bill or Phil or Gill. Outrageous. Hot.
Is into herbs and free weights. He asked me. I think they drink pastis in France.
Honey, take angelica to simulate the gallbladder. I said he asked me. Orgasms
like a doughnut factory, that`s funny. His tongue. Something from outer space.
Is that what you said? Oh geez, Hermaine, that's funny.
I haven't met the members of my wife's posse. I don't think I'd recognize them individually, in jeans or jogging pants, at the outdoor markets, the bistro, the tanning salon, the gym. But as a group, I could definitely say, this is my wife's posse. They'll wear dresses of Madras plaid or cotton twill. They'll cross their legs a certain way. If there are five of them, at least two will carry condoms in their purses.
At a café, they will all hold their wine glasses with an air of smugness and elitism, lick their lips while one of them speaks about the next election, or what men don't do enough of in bed, or what house chores they don`t do at all. One of them will ridicule the style of her husband's underwear.
One of them will say, "They still make Fruit of the Loom?"
Another will chip in. "He sounds like a fruit." At that, they will all laugh together.
One of them, perhaps the oldest, will bring up what Marlon Brando did in the famous sex scene in
Last Tango in Paris. Another will make a joke about butt hole surfers. Another will announce that she prefers butter over margarine. Always did.
The word posse makes me think of old Westerns. When I was young, I saw movies, countless ones, all with a similar plot. A bad guy came into town. He was handsome and could shoot straight. Had no respect for tin stars or posted rewards. The sheriff's wife fell in love with him. And her sister. They fought. The bad guy shot the town's one arm bailor, robbed a bank, then, fled on a cinnamon colored horse named, Candy. In the climatic gunfight, the sheriff was killed as were three members of his posse. A young sloth-eyed deputy was the one who did the bad guy in. As a child, I couldn't make up my mind whether I wanted to be the deputy or the bad guy. As an adult, I am still that indecisive child.
I am not living in outer space. My paranoia is grounded, but I'm not sure just where home base is. There are danger signals. Fog warnings. My ship is stuck in mid-ocean. There's going to be a squall. In a squall, can you call Dr. Phil?
When my wife and I make love, she is no longer consumed by passion. She lies stiff, as if awaiting a flogging. I imagine she wishes she was blindfolded. I imagine she wishes I was a handsome pirate who has kidnapped her and stolen her father's dowry. After her death by sex, she apologizes, blaming her non-involvement on work-related stress. She turns over, and I dream of island girls with perfect legs and bikinis of clashing colors.
Sometimes, I will go to the window, brazenly naked without my Fruit of the Loom, and watch what seems to me the most distant star.
Something or someone on that star is calling me Bill.
At times, the phone rings. When I pick up, the caller waits, then hangs up.
I can never hear him breathing. It could be a prank call by a fish.
Last week at the dinner table, while my wife passed me the asparagus, she accidentally called me Bill. Her face flushed. Mine froze. When I asked who was Bill, she said he was an old college fling she was thinking about. She said she had taken French classes with him at college long ago. I said I bet Bill knew how to French kiss like a Spanish prisoner. My wife dropped her fork and told me to chew my food slowly. I asked her if Bill was really a fish.
I'm going to meet Bill. I'll research him on the internet. I'll find out where he lives. Trailing him in my car, I'll get his routine down. Bill works at H. D. Haddock & Sons, the same office where my wife and her posse spend eight to ten hours a day.
I'll run into Bill on the street. I'll tell him I was his substitute teacher back in PS 24. I'll say, Bill, after all these years, you haven't changed that much. What? You don't remember me? Well, I remember you. You always sat in the back, quiet as a piece of chalk. A real wallflower.
I'll invite him for a drink and a dinner of clams Zuppa and shrimp Fra Diavolo at an outdoor restaurant. My treat. Bill will be dressed in double-pleated houndstooth trousers and a bengel striped shirt. The trousers have five pockets. Bill's hair is longish and his eyes can speak French sunsets. Bill's stare is distant and his face is fashionably half-shaven.
I'll pry into his social life, the women he's recently dated. When he mentions my wife's name, my ears will perk. I'll plow him with questions and listen patiently. He'll tell me that she feels her husband doesn't know her. He'll tell me that he is ambivalent towards her husband: he really deserves better; he really deserves less. Poor bastard. Lucky devil. He doesn't even help out with mopping the kitchen. The grease stains on the floor are usually his. There's so much her husband doesn't know, he'll say downing the clams with a glass of Cinzano. He'll tell me she prefers a Chateau D'Issau to a Cabernet Sauvignon. He'll tell me that my wife's favorite novel was not the one she told me,
Vanity Fair, but rather, Tristam Shandy. He'll reveal that my wife has a secret fear, a morbid one, of public toilet seats. (I did notice once that she carried a thin roll of toilet paper in her pocketbook when we dined out.) He'll tell me that her favorite sex position is not missionary. He'll tell me how he enjoys fucking my wife in elevators, in stairwells near red emblazoned signs reading Fire Escape. He'll describe the exact pitch and timbre of her ecstatic cries in a hotel room. He'll make a joke or two about this. Her voice could break glass. She should try for a role in an opera. He'll tell me how they did it doggy style one or two times in a public bathroom, or in an empty movie theater. He'll tell me that she always pays for the hotel room. He'll describe her favorite childhood memories in a quiet reflective tone, as if he grew up with her. He'll tell me that she thinks her husband is a wimp and could vie for the title of The Most Boring Man on Earth. He will tell me that my wife ended her affair with him because she finally accepted the fact that Bill tired of her. He will tell me that on more than one occasion, my wife cried that she was no longer young. Bowing his head to the table, he'll claim that he turned my wife into an insatiable love addict, a dreamy-eyed child with a sweet tooth, and my wife for him was nothing more than free candy. Bill will claim that she gave really incredible blowjobs.
As Bill is telling me all of this, the posse will be sitting across from us, eyeing me with a deadened stare. Then, their eyes will swerve to Bill and I watch as their pupils turn to new and hopeful moons.
Bill's confessions will leave a taste of something bitter and slightly familiar sticking to my palette: artichoke leaves, crushed pieces of dandelion.
Despite the fact that Bill is younger than I and stronger, I will be tempted to turn the table over, splattering Bill with grease and rich tomato sauce. Bill's face will be smitten with clams and garlic oil. Taken by surprise, just like the bad guy in a Western, he will be speechless as a stuffed squid. I will laugh out loud. I will laugh with a child's vigor and sense of release. He will stand up, screwing up his face, perhaps, he will draw his hand back to form a fist. I will keep laughing at Bill, and call him a fish. Bill will attempt to knock me off my chair with an amazing roundhouse. After all, he works out at the gym. I will step back and deflect the blow. I will call the waiter and tell him that Bill tried to steal my wallet, that he refused to pay for his portion of the meal. I will threaten to press charges against Bill for assault. The overturned table, I will point out, was something that Bill did to get a replacement, a free dish of Fritto Misto. I will watch with glee as the managers escort Bill from the outdoor patio and into a police car.
The members of my wife's posse will look horrified, terribly decomposed, as they squirm like school children who have just wet their seats. A posse member will stand up to see Bill one more time, if only behind a car's glass window. Her desire for Bill will not attenuate, but rather, grow stronger. I have just turned Bill into a magnificent and irresistible outlaw.
Then, one by one, the members of the posse will eye me up and down. They will make faces at me. Their lips will scrunch up in the shape of wine corks. As a group, they will file out.
My wife is sleeping at her mother`s. We had a fight and I accused her of cheating on me. She denied everything and broke down in tears, something she rarely does. I pointed out how the sex is never as good as it once was, and how we never become giddy over each other. But on the phone tonight, I apologized, and promised her we would take a cruise and work everything out. I'm hoping for at least a seventy per cent solution. It's better than a fifty per cent outcome.
She still can't understand my obsession with Bill.
I stand at the window and look up to the most distant star. The bedroom phone rings, jolts me back to planet earth. At this hour, who could be calling? I don't answer. Not because I think it's Bill, but because I don't think Bill exists for her anymore. Not in the sense that Bill still exists for me.
Bill, she kept saying, was a distant memory. Perhaps more distant than the star I am watching. Back in college, she told me, Bill only got to second base.
That tiny star flickers. Perhaps the caller is now standing somewhere on that star. I imagine answering the phone. The voice at the other end, faint, hardly disguised--sounds like my own. Traveling across light years of transmission, the caller tells me he has kidnapped my wife with the help of members of an intergalactic terrorist posse. I ask him if the group is all female. He hesitates and says yes, and how did I know. I tell him some things just come intuitively.
I'm trying to picture his face. He must resemble a Johnny Ringo or a Black Bart decked out in astro gear. It gives me a chuckle, then a chill. If I had a super sonar ray gun, I'd shoot him from this distance.
I ask this anonymous caller about the ransom. How much do I have to spend to get her back. There is a long silence. The silence is both his and mine. We both clear our throats at the same time. How much, he says in a fading voice, are you willing to spend? The caller hangs up.
But the phone keeps ringing. I pick up. Hello, I say. I repeat saying it. There's a long stretch of silence, the distance from here to some parallel universe and back again. This time I think it's the real Bill at the other end, the one she‘s been having an affair with in the present. And not the Bill she invented at the dinner table, an imaginary Bill of her past to throw me off. This time I can hear him breathing. The Real Bill.
His breaths are slow, rhythmic and very very far away.
"Hello," she says. "Do you still love me?"
©2009 by Kyle Hemmings
