LBD

The black or the brown? Claire stood in the section of the closet that Clive had assigned to her. The house had been a new build and the master bedroom’s design included two large walk-ins: one for him and one for her. Claire resented the fact that Clive’s athletic wear had migrated to what should have been her closet. She kicked at one of his running shoes, imagining the scent of sweat and dirt wafting from it and permeating her clothes with its aggressive stink.

She buried her nose into a sachet that was hanging from the pink, satin-padded hanger that her mother had used for hanging up her bathrobe when Claire was growing up. The familiar scent of her mother’s favorites, raspberry and vanilla. The combination that Claire had once loved was now aching and visceral. God, she missed her mother. Her mother would have known what to do. Talked Claire off the ledge. Claire's intestines cinched themselves into another half hitch. My poor gut. How the hell am I going to ever escape with my soul . . . my sanity . . . intact?

The black or the brown? Which to choose? Claire ran her fingers over the cool smoothness of the black and the satiny luster of the brown. Claire didn’t care. Either one would be suitable. Either one would do the job.

The ceremony and dinner for Clive’s Man-of-the-Year award was that night. Since the nomination process had begun in early November, Claire had been hoping that Clive’s “good works” in the community would be eclipsed by another, more deserving nominee.

Claire even took to making deals with God: "Please, God. Don’t let Clive receive that award. I hate him." She promised that she would start going to church on Sundays. She would begin a meaningful correspondence with a child from Papua-New Guinea. She would read to the blind. She prayed that the sexist selection committee would recognize that it was finally time to honor a female. Any female. Anyone but Clive. Clive the Liar. Clive the Slut. Clive the fucking hypocrite.

But God didn’t care. Clive won the whole shebang, hands down. There was never a doubt, and that was according to glad-handing Clive himself. Clive golfed with the selection committee on Saturday mornings. He met them on Wednesdays for morning coffee at Rustic Coffee. Clive was a good ol' boy. Of course, he was chosen to receive the award.

Claire felt like a flaccid sausage casing, squeezed empty by Clive’s infidelities. How could they not recognize that Clive’s halo only glowed temporarily for those he ultimately cared the least about. It was all a show. A shit show. Claire hated Clive like she never imagined hating.

Claire felt the familiar snag that hooked her heart to her bowels. The feeling that would send her to her knees before the toilet in supplication. Claire had once read that ancient prayer warriors meditated on their bowels, their guts, before entering the battle of good vs. evil. It made sense to Claire. It is where the demons live.

Clive as Man of the Year. Clive’s white-as-tube-socks perfect teeth flashing for the applause. Clive’s proclivity to sleep around with any fit blonde with a good pair of legs, a minus IQ, and a D-cup. Claire felt bile bubbling up into the back of her throat. She had to throw up, but Clive was in the bathroom, taking a shower. She went down the hall to the powder room.

Of course, Lisa would be there. Or “Lise,” as Clive liked to call his personal assistant. Claire called her Clive’s personal ass. It didn’t take Lisa long to realize that Clive was more interested in her history as a stripper in Alaska than he was in how many words she could type per minute or her enthusiasm for filing. The only thing that Clive was interested in filing was his dick in her drawers.

Claire intuited that Clive might be feeling differently about Lisa than he did about the previous office blondes. That he might be thinking long-term with her. That she wasn’t just another piece of office ass that he could reassign to another department when he grew tired of her high breasts and tight ass.

Stop it! Claire told herself. Just stop it!

Late afternoons at the office had bled into early evenings. And early evenings had seeped into later evenings. There was even a night or two when Clive “had fallen asleep” on the couch in his office. Just couldn’t keep his eyes open and wanted to rest them for a few minutes. Next thing he knew, it was morning. “So sorry, Claire. You understand, don’t you? Can you bring me a clean shirt and a different tie when you are on your way to your yoga class?”

The definition of a white lie is that it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Clive’s lies were beyond white; they oozed green-black pus like an unattended wound in a war zone. He ripped off the scab, further advancing the infection, whenever he came home with a bunch of white tulips for Claire. A pair of earrings. A carved wooden box. Claire felt utterly invaded by these tokens of his guilt. And she felt that the outcome was terminal. There were no antibodies that could kill the sickness that spread through her system each time she saw Clive “just talking shop” on the phone with Lisa at home, his head ducking to hide the smile when Lisa made reference to the tryst they had just shared under his desk.

Poor Claire. She could see her death certificate. Death by Putrid and Rotting Greenness. The color of jealousy. The color of envy. The color of money.

But Claire wasn’t totally stupid. She knew that life with Clive came with benefits. As much as she missed the quiet and serenity from her years working as a wilderness lookout, she knew that the lifestyle changes she had made to be with Clive weren’t all bad.

She no longer had to fill her three kerosene lamps each evening or haul water in a 5-gallon bucket. She could now drive to the post office, rather than walking the 4-1/2 miles to get her mail, and fresh groceries could be bought daily from Larry’s Organic Market. Her days of alfalfa sprouts, lentils, black beans, and bulgur were over. There was finality in all of that. A death had occurred. Little did Claire know that her sense of self would be dead in 3 short years of being married to Clive.

Yes, things had changed when she adopted Clive’s lifestyle. She was now driving a late-model BMW with an extraordinarily good sound system. She had her hair dyed at a certified Aveda salon, the stylist using three different bowls of color. She had a housecleaner in twice a week and now received regular chiropractic treatments. She worked out at the best gym in town and attended classes called Yogilates and 30 Cycle/30 Core. Claire looked pretty good for a 46-year-old. Peri-menopausal and experiencing the side effects of hormonal slow down, she had added some muffin top to her hottest and tightest jeans – a malady that she just couldn’t seem to burn off, no matter how many Core Strength classes she sweated through.

Claire knew that a little muffin top wasn’t what driving Clive to stay late at the office screwing Lisa. She knew that Clive had once thought that he loved her. Loved her enough to marry her.

But Claire had become boring. Colorless. Invisible. She didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but it had. Clive had fallen in love with Claire as a wilderness ranger, not as a suburban housewife. The romance of talking to the other attorneys at the firm about dating someone who carried a Leatherman, a shovel, and an ax for a living carried far more currency than talking about a woman who now owned a top-model Cuisinart and a bread machine.

Claire’s sister, Sadie, became furious with Claire when she spoke this way aloud. Sadie, a get-‘er-done redhead with a righteous cause in life, knew that life in real time shouldn’t be wasted worrying about who some tool of a douche with a 401K plan was screwing.

Claire knew Sadie was right, but the easiness of Clive’s income had seeped into her psyche, day by day. Claire had been seduced by the freedom that discretionary cash had to offer. Want new towels for the guest bath? Charge them. A quad grande nonfat shaving-cream foam cappucino at Starbucks everyday after a workout? No problem. Stuff a $2 tip in the barista’s Lucite cube and run home to shower and change.

But for what? Rush home for what? Flipping through home decorating magazines? Catching up on email? Re-organizing her shoes? Claire had become superficial, redundant, a non-essential – within her own skin. Sadie was right. Money can’t buy love. It can’t buy back your soul either.

It was as if Clive’s wealth were a disease, capable of an osmotic process that could overtake and inhibit poverty. Claire had grown herself into a state of helplessness, easily succumbing to the ease of it all. No wonder she was throwing up all the time.

But at what point does ease transform into disease? Claire knew that she needed a transfusion that would save her from her own succumbing, but she had sealed a deal with the devil and knew that her marriage would be on life support for a few more years before she would be summoned by divorce papers. Death by Divorce. Although there would be no coroner’s report, Claire’s life, as she now knew it, would be euthanized. Clive would surely pull the plug when the right time came. When Lisa felt it appropriate to go public with the relationship, post Art’s death.

It didn’t help that Lisa’s husband, Art, and Clive had been adventure buddies, weekend warriors, before Art died suspiciously in Argentina in a climbing accident on one of their trips. Art and Clive had been on a few trips together, all of them involving some idiotic midlife crisis: dehydration in Chile to the point of needing an ambulance to rescue them; becoming lost while bicycling in Cambodia; spraining an ankle in a Guatemala jungle and having to create a makeshift splint. Lisa, appearing broken on the surface after hearing of Art’s demise in Argentina, quickly moved into a position of helplessness when Clive expressed his compassion and concern for Lisa's welfare after the funeral.

Lisa, stripping for tips in the land of the midnight sun, had easily attracted Art’s attention. One shake of her plunger cup implants in Art’s sweating face had been enough for Art. He asked Lisa out, and they were married shortly after that first lap dance, moving Lisa into the sphere of Clive’s and Claire’s lives.

Sitting across the table from Lisa at the Thai restaurant where the two couples had met for dinner, Clive had hired her on the spot. Claire intuited that their marriage was to be forever cursed as Lisa gushed her thanks, reaching across the table and touching Clive’s hand. God, how Claire hated Lisa.

Claire wanted out. A clean break. Thoughts of divorce circulating – always circulating – like a Mobius strip that she had once made in 4th-grade science class. Around and around her thoughts traveled, knowing that she would never escape the track unless she reached up and cut the strip. Cut her life free from Clive.

Claire always wondered if Clive hadn’t taken some small pleasure in knowing that he was slumming it when he first asked Claire out. Like he was taking a page from Art’s playbook. Like he was flaunting his family’s new-money standards by marrying down by choosing a simple, woodsy kind of gal.

How he could have thought this, Claire didn’t understand. Yes, she knew how to bake bread in a wood cookstove and could fall and buck up the tree that fed the wood box to bake the bread, but she had pursued higher education before eventually choosing a life in the forest over tenure. Claire was the real deal: practical living meets academia.

Not that there was some wealthy heiress from a neighboring estate awaiting a marriage proposal from Clive. Still, his parents – the nouveau riche snobs that they were – had not hesitated to nudge pre-nuptial advice in Clive’s direction when he had announced their engagement. “After all, Clive, you are a lawyer. Don’t you know what will happen when things don’t turn out and you get a divorce?” When. Not if.

Clive had refused to consider the pre-nuptial. But Claire knew that he now must be wishing that he had. Love or lust, both are powerful demotivators. Fearless enough to render the brain senseless. Clive’s portfolio had grown quite thick over the past few years.

There was now more – much more – that would be declared as community property once papers were served. Clive would hate the agreement upon which the attorneys would eventually settle over a game of golf, their billable hours greedily profiting from each dollar or asset that would be shuffled back and forth between Clive’s column and Claire’s column. Claire hated lawyers. She wondered why she had married one.

Claire appeared to be broken down alongside Route 542 with the hood up on her ’59 primer-gray Chevy half ton when she and Clive first met. The truck had its share of problems with a sticky right blinker, excessive oil consumption, and a temperamental idle, but it was a beast that could be persuaded to keep on running.

Claire knew the idiosyncrasies of her truck well. Sometimes the engine needed extra oil, sometimes the idle required an adjustment with a screwdriver. It had been running especially rough that day, so Claire had pulled over at the widest turnout – the graveled parking lot of Cathy’s Coffee Cup. Time to get out the flathead that Claire kept in the glove box and work a little magic under the hood until the old beast was ticking just so.

Clive had pulled up in the lot beside her in his graphite Boxster. Got out of his car. Cell phone raised in his hand. Checking out Claire’s rear, liking the way that the short skirt rode up over her rear when she reached under the hood for the idle. Trying not to look like a rapist with a good haircut or a chainsaw murderer in an Armani suit. Claire could read the headlines in the paper: Woman Found Dead, Bludgeoned by Yuppie’s Cell Phone. Just another roadside attraction. Cathy’s Coffee Cup would become the new local shrine, her body outlined on the pavement for the press and the looky-loos.

“Do you need some help?” he had asked. His arms involuntarily going up and out to his sides like some holy roller at a church meeting when Claire turned, screwdriver in hand, pointing it at him.

Claire was no coward. Clive would never have taken sexual notice of her if she had been. She stood there in her short, flared print skirt, bare legs, and her black patent Daisy Duck shoes with the wide platform heels. A girl could do some serious damage in those shoes. The screwdriver easy in her hand, looking like she was in some movie scene from the Bronx, waiting to carve up the next person who dared to give her some shit. No wonder Clive held his arms away from his body, awaiting his one-way free trip to heaven.

In the beginning, the sex had been good. Great, actually. Claire had no doubts that Clive was faithful and was only having sex with her. His auto-erection poking at the small of her back each morning. His playful way of letting her know that he was ready and available to make himself feel good before he started his day.

Claire was beautiful. In the curious sense, not the classical. She inspired a second look. And a third. Her hair was long and curly, the color of toasted almonds – not quite blonde and not quite brown. And she had deltoids that rivaled Michelle Obama’s. The rough and not-so-easy times in Claire’s life had lent Claire an air of authority, a velvety confidence, that generated notice. Men either were suckered in by Claire or they felt gelded by her.

Once she was walking back to her table at Taco Lobo carrying two small bowls from the salsa bar. A college girl came in the door just then, looked at her, and asked if they should wait to be seated or seat themselves.

Claire stood there in her ponytail, yoga pants and sweaty bra tank and didn’t understand, at first, that she had been mistaken for a seating hostess. She wanted to ask the girl: “Do you think that the boss here would approve his hostess dressing like this?”

But confusion gave way to good manners and Claire, knowing the restaurant well, assured the girl that they could sit anywhere that they pleased, that they should order at the counter, and that someone would bring their meals to their table. The girl was embarrassed when she realized that Claire didn’t work there, but Claire told her not to be. Claire was used to this sort of thing.

Pre-Clive, Claire did not spend a lot of time in front of the mirror applying expensive makeup that was calculated to fool others to view her features in a more attractive light. No cleavage-enhancing push-up Wonder Bras. No tummy-tightener control panels in her panty hose. Claire bought other people’s cast-offs that had been donated to the Value Village or the Goodwill. Some things went together better than others. Her closet sometimes smelled like the unwanted, the unwashed. No matter how many times Claire washed what she brought home, she could still smell the second-hand stink in some of the clothes.

Claire detested the expression “I earned my degree from the School of Hard Knocks,” but she supposed that was a good way to describe herself. Although she had two advanced degrees – one in linguistics and one in French – and her master’s in education, she still thought of her alma mater as the seedy southside: a squat yellow house on the corner of 14th and Washington, across the street from the backside of Yorky’s Market.

Her father had owned a run-down juke joint where all of the local Polish went to drink cheap, strong drinks and dance their cares away on a floor dusted with yellow dance wax. Live polka music for all of the misplaced Poles. Piano and accordion and a bass. Sometimes a clarinet if they could get Fat Jimmy to put down his vodka soda. Dancing and drinking all night and no tipping for the scurrying, sweating waitresses.

Claire’s father had a gambling habit. A problem. An addiction. Not Vegas-style but the pull-tab variety. He couldn’t pass up the pull tabs at any bar that offered them as a way to kill time while throwing back a few pints.

Claire and Sadie grew up poor. They didn’t each own more than a few pairs of clean underwear and socks. Sadie would take Claire’s last pair of clean underwear out of Claire’s drawer, so Claire would have to wear her own dirty pair again. Claire remembered the 6th grade when one of the Polish aunties had given her two pairs of knee-highs for Christmas. The colors must have been the going concern in Warsaw that year: hot pink and neon orange. Claire never touched those socks. They remained in her drawer until she moved to the west coast.

Claire heard the shower go off. Clive would soon be done grooming himself for the awards ceremony. And for Lisa. Claire’s fingers reached for the brown, the black sliding a few inches away from her on the upper shelf of the closet. After all, isn’t brown the new black? Claire sat on the edge of the bed, waiting to hear the shower go off.

Clive stepped out of the shower. Clive liked being naked. Walking around the house with nothing on after his shower for sometimes an hour or more. He hated the way Claire dried herself off from the shower and then immediately got dressed. He seemed to enjoy bossing Claire when she was bent over and toweling her nakedness dry, reminding her of her prudish shortcomings. He once told Claire that she was somehow damaged concerning her own nudity. Fuck you, Clive.

Clive stood in the doorway, drying his dark hair with a lavender towel. His penis wet from the shower and hard, pointing first at Claire and then the corner where the ceiling meets the wall. Probably thinking of Lisa doing a pole dance while he showered.

Clive didn’t even look at Claire. He said, “Claire, get ready. I told Lisa we’d pick her up on the way. We don’t want to be late.” Claire didn’t answer. “Claire.” More sternly.

Clive turned to look at Claire, his arms, once again involuntarily going up and out to his sides and dropping the towel. Yes, it is time for the Holy Rollers, Clive.

Claire aimed the gun. First at Clive. She then put the gun’s barrel in her mouth. The smooth grain of the grip panel's brown walnut like a caress in her hand. She could taste the oil on the barrel. Metallic, but sweet. She thought, This will be the last thing that I ever taste.

Claire removed the gun from her mouth and pointed it again at Clive. She pointed it at the mirror on the wall. She pointed it at the floor near the shoes that Clive would be wearing that night. She pointed it at a silver-framed picture of the four of them on the dresser: Art, Lisa, Clive, and Claire.

She looked up at Clive, his penis having shriveled to a button on a fur coat.

Claire fired.