John had for some time tried to be a good man, until the death of Casey Farrow made the burden unmanageable. That night, after the phone had stopped ringing finally, he’d waited for Celia to fall asleep, waited for her breathing to deepen and smooth out, waited for the soft and feminine snore to begin, and slipped out of the bedroom and into the living room. Finding his hidden pack of cigarettes, stale and dusty, he went into the cold kitchen, sat down at the little-used table and smoked in the dark, staring at unfamiliar shapes: the fridge, the microwave, the door to the bathroom.
He thought about Casey Farrow’s wife, Margaret.
Sitting, he looked around the dark kitchen. It had been Celia’s apartment, now theirs. They had decided that Celia’s was larger and in a better neighborhood, that his apartment was cold and cramped. He regretted the decision, he wished for his own private space, someplace where he wouldn’t have to pretend to be normal.
He thought about Celia, the laughing girl he’d met five years ago, and never fallen in love with.
Celia was pretty but unspectacular. She laughed at too many things and took disproportionate joy in simple, everyday things. She was honest and affectionate and practical and willing in bed and hundred other attractive things, but for John there was always one thing she wasn’t, and would never be. She was not Casey’s wife Margaret.
For her part, Celia lay awake and imagined she knew what John was chewing on in the kitchen. The empty half of the bed seemed to glow radioactively next to her, his fading body heat an accusation.
She kicked at the covers. Sat up. Fell back to the mattress. Let out an explosive breath.
Celia had always been a popular girl, but one of those pretty tomboyish girls who garnered more emotional conversations than kisses. She’d made up for it with aggressiveness, making a cheerful habit of dominating conversations and attempting seductions carelessly. She had a reputation in high school, and several boyfriends in college, but John quieted her.
She was two years younger than him, and had known him since high school. In school she’d been able to walk up to any boy and say anything, she was famous for it. But around John, she’d always been tongue-tied. She found it almost impossible to speak two words to him, and so naturally they became friends in college, where she had chosen to attend the same school as he did. They met at a dorm party and he recognized her, which thrilled her, secretly. For some time, then, she settled into her familiar role as John’s faux-sister, providing emotional talks and quiet, non-physical support. It killed her, froze her brittle inside, but she settled for it, and made up for it by dating. Predatorily, she seduced well-meaning men around, men who hardly had time to decide whether they were attracted to her mix of pretty and broad shoulders before they found themselves in bed with her. John’s amused commentaries on her love life merely irritated her, but silently.
For his part, John had met and fallen in love with Margaret, asked her out, been refused, and settled with a companionable flirtation with her. Young, optimistic, and unimpressed with her choice of boyfriend, John had been quietly and self-satisfyingly sure that she would come around. She never did.
On the wedding day, John brought Celia as his date to watch Margaret marry another man. He drank and drank and drank but could not seem to get drunk. He sat with Celia and kept track of Margaret. He danced with Celia and watched Margaret dance. He talked to Celia and heard Margaret’s vows in his head. And after the reception, with a headache, with dust in his mouth, he took Celia to bed and thought of Margaret as he’d never seen her. Imagined her elsewhere, doing similar things.
Celia lay awake and remembered that night. Fully aware, she’d let him and could not bring herself to get out of bed, go to the kitchen, and tell him what a bastard he was.
What had happened, now three years into their marriage, was that Margaret and Casey had gotten into a fight, he’d left their house and met some friends for drinks, and he’d gotten hit by a truck while walking home blind drunk, and been killed. The truck driver reported to police that Casey had stumbled and staggered directly in front of his rig during a sharp turn onto a steep incline. Casey was killed instantly.
John had not allowed himself to think of Margaret as a person since the night of her wedding, instead mentally referring to her only as Casey’s wife, or, at moments of great and carefree self-confidence, Casey’s wife Margaret. Whenever he caught himself admiring the smooth curve of her white shoulder, or the happy crinkle around her eyes, or the pert movement of her hips beneath her skirts he reminded himself of Casey Farrows’ existence, cold water for his interior monologue.
As he sat burning cigarettes in Celia’s kitchen, he thought over and over again to himself that Casey Farrow, as it turned out, no longer existed.
In the bedroom, alone, Celia burned with a hatred for Margaret Farrow until she lit up the room, singed the sheets and covers.
The next day, John and Celia got dressed for the wake in stuffy, fussy silence, with a lot of rapid movement and minute attention to detail. When they met at the front door it was as if by accident, and they each blinked at each other for a moment.
John looked as he did every day for work, though glassy-eyed. He’d managed to drink half a bottle of bourbon during the process of dressing himself and had only succeeded in making himself numb.
Celia had attempted, for one of the few times in her life, to transcend her ordinary looks and thick frame. She had done her hair, and paid special attention to her make up. Wearing a pretty flowered dress and some borrowed earrings, she could not shake the cold dreadful certainty that she would still be eclipsed by every other woman in general and one in particular.
They drove to the funeral parlor in mechanized quiet, each of them watching the traffic for sudden moves.
Margaret attended her young husband’s wake with a look of blankness. Amidst friend and family she appeared to see neither, floating about like an unfettered balloon, batted about by the soft hands on her back, the grasping of an arm, gently pushing and pulling her this way and that. She spoke the same phrases to them all, polishing them into an unenunciated slur.
She was a beautiful woman, red hair and pale skin, careful in her manner. She normally had a tactile and approachable way with people, especially men, and was easily affectionate. She inspired breezy, itchy lust in most of the men she met, and naturally enough all the women hated her, to some degree.
As John and Celia entered the room in a cloud of cold air, John caught Margaret’s eyes and she smiled. As if the balloon had popped, leaving Margaret Farrow standing wan and puffy-eyed amidst friends and relatives.
It was John who looked away. Margaret blinked and shifted her gaze, and found Celia staring at her.
“She looks different,” Margaret thought to herself, “I hardly recognize her.”
John had brought a pint flask of bourbon with him and fortified himself with it at liberal, if discreet, intervals. Within an hour of arrival, he went from numb to fuzzy-headed to completely cockeyed. To the acquaintances and friends who attempted conversation with him, it appeared that his attention, ruddy and liquid from booze, wandered. In fact, his attention was fastened with precision onto Margaret. It was Margaret who wandered.
Celia abandoned John immediately, greeting and consoling individually, responding to comments and questions about John with vacuous smiles and monosyllabic answers. She studiously did not follow John’s unsteady progress through the room, bending so much of her attention to the effort of not paying him any mind she almost walked into Margaret.
The two women stared at each other.
“Oh!” Celia managed. She took one of Margaret’s hands in her own. “I am so, so sorry.”
Margaret blinked in a dreamy way. “Thank you, Celia.” She finally sighed.
They stared at each other for a moment more, and then Margaret gave Celia’s hand a squeeze and moved away. Celia stood for a moment, shaking her head.
Some time later, itching to leave, Celia looked for John and discovered both he and Margaret missing from the wake. Before she could bring herself to full simmer over this discovery, she was accosted by John’s (and hers by extension) friend Frank.
Frank was a good-natured fellow. He had been good-natured all his life and, seeing as it was generally working out for him, intended to remain good-natured for the foreseeable future. He very often could not see why people made such a fuss over things, especially death. In his view death was natural and came to all things, and therefore fuss and noise, drama, Sturm and Drang was all just unnecessary. As a result, wakes and funerals were the only occasions at which he was not popular. He felt uncomfortable at them as well.
Frank was a good-looking man as well, with an ever-growing coterie of female admirers who fervently worried for his soul, and wished he would find the right girl and settle down. Frank was of the opinion that he found the right women all the time. He was a cheerful Lothario, the sort of seducer who remained well-liked by his victims even after he walked out the door. He was good-natured in that as well, and once again saw little reason to change that.
Celia was a friendly challenge to him, an unspectacular girl who nevertheless resisted his powerful charm year in and year out, effortlessly. He was even good-natured about that, joking and nudging and winking. Everyone liked Frank.
Even, were she to admit it, Celia, who found herself laughing heartily at his opening salvo and noting for the first time the slightly handsome lines of his face, the faint and not totally unpleasant scent of his cologne.
“A few of us are meeting for drinks a little later,” Frank said, pushing a stray curl of hers back into place, “you and Johnny ought to come.”
Celia laughed a little. “Let’s go now.”
Frank managed to cover his surprise with a smile. “Well, okay.”
Celia’s apartment was an old place, in a sleepy-looking brownstone on a quiet street. The tenants had learned over the years to be wary of thin walls and the thick, silent air. They all moved carefully, spoke softly. Took pains to walk softly. Went whooping into their mornings, making noise, expanding.
Celia crept up the stairs, shoes in hand, turned the key in the lock slowly, deliberately, and slid into the kitchen doing a quick pirouette to slide the door shut silently. Resting her head against the polished wood of the door, she breathed in the dark room and collapsed a little.
“How long have you been sitting there?” she asked.
John was an orange coal at the kitchen table. “Half a pack. Since ten. Since I got home, alone.”
“Ten,” she said. “Ten.”
He cleared his throat. “You had a drink with Frank.”
“Yes.”
Neither John or Celia had ever been big talkers. John assumed all was well unless informed otherwise, Celia assumed disaster lurked after every word spoken, and sought always to avoid it.
In all their years together, they had engaged in only three or four serious talks. John felt this was due to the scarcity of issues between them. Celia thought it was due to her weakness of character, her cowardice in not bringing these issues to light.
As a result, in the dark kitchen with the building’s living quiet smothering them, they were in need of a serious talk as never before, and neither knew how to go about it.
Celia felt incapable of making sense. “I would have asked you and…and Maggie to join us…but you were…I couldn’t…so we…”
John laughed. It was a mean, dried-out laugh, the type no one had heard from John ever. To Celia it was as if the kitchen were dark because John was absorbing all the light. He glowed with negative illumination.
“I went looking for Margaret,” he said, his voice rough and rusty, “to offer her my condolences. I didn’t like Casey…I guess we all knew that. I guess I didn’t really try to hide that. I guess I should have. I felt like I owed her condolences. Politeness. The consideration I’d denied her.”
He cleared his throat. “I found her in a little out-of-the-way room upstairs at the funeral parlor. I offered her my condolences. She slapped me.”
Celia’s breath caught.
“She cursed me. She told me that to feign sorrow for him was the worst sin that I’d ever committed. That she hated me.”
For a moment the room was as quiet as it was dark.
John spoke again, softly. “I went looking for you.”
Celia was crying. In the dark, facing the door, she shook her head from side to side. Quiet, John waited. Wore her down.
“Stop it,” she finally whispered. “Please stop it.”
John shook his head sadly. “I’m not the one who betrayed me, here.”
“You betrayed me long ago, and in worse ways.” she said immediately, and then wondered why she did not regret it.
The air jellied around them. John, suddenly tender and remorseful, swallowed unfamiliar tears and sought the words that would heal the wounds and make it all better. After a few moments, he slumped forward and snuffed out his cigarette, and they were left in complete darkness.
This, John reflected, was what it was like to be a bad man, and he found it to be not unfamiliar.