Now she isn’t talking to him, just staring fixedly at the windshield. When he asks her what she wants to listen to, she says, “Whatever you’d like.” He pats her knee and she pats his hand but she’s still staring at the windshield.
“Seriously, you choose,” she says to the glass. Probably she’s upset because she’s missing what she calls her “treat day.” Every other Saturday night, she permits herself two double margaritas and enchiladas verdes at the Blue Iguana, followed by a Brownie Bonanza at Ben & Jerry’s. Though it scares and saddens him a little to see her hunger let loose upon a small complimentary basket of tortilla chips, he too looks forward to these Saturday nights. It’s the only night when her smirk goes slack, the noose of restraint loosened enough for her features to soften, her beauty at last unbuckling its belt. She is never more expansive and easygoing in conversation than when she’s snatching chips from the basket with quick fingers. He’s learned not to look at the fingers. If he does, she’ll stop. On those nights, they discuss what they used to discuss on those long phone chats and during her first visits: movies and books and their mutual music loves and hates. It’s good for a while. What he does not relish is seeing the naked disappointment splayed across her face when the last chip has been eaten, the final spoon of ice cream swallowed, the knowledge that there is another two weeks of sprouts ahead dimming her features like a pre-storm sky. And then of course, on the way home, she’ll begin to feel sick. I’m so full. I shouldn’t have done it. I didn’t even enjoy it. Do we have any Perrier at home? She’ll spend the rest of the evening scowling and sucking back Perriers from the bottle, too full and sick for sex.
“Hot Pocket’ll have chips and salsa there,” he tells her now. “Ice cream too. All that fun stuff.” He tries to pat her knee again, but she moves away.
She readjusts the jicama and fennel batons on her vegetable tray. Who puts jicama batons on a vegetable tray? He can picture some bleach-toothed Food Network chef saying to the camera, “A vegetable tray doesn’t have to be all carrots, celery, and grape tomatoes! Why not raise the wow factor by adding jicama, fennel, spring onions?” He can see Beth curled on the couch, nodding in agreement, jotting it down on her legal pad to try later, along with all the other kumquat-like items he can never identify that his life is suddenly full of, funking up his fridge and making all the bones inside his wife more visible.
“I can’t eat there,” she says now.
“Why not?”
“You know why not.”
The rain’s coming down again, but it’s one of those brief, intense showers they often get in summer.
“No, I really don’t.”
“I can’t eat in front of her.”
By her, she means Brindy, the ex-stripper Hot Pocket’s married to. Ever since that one time Tom let his eyes linger a little too long on her cleavage as she offered him pigs in a blanket from a tray, Beth has had it in for her.
“Do you think they’ll be okay barbecuing this?” she says suddenly, holding up a soggy Yves veggie burger in a plastic bag.
Tom winces at the sight of the fake grill marks, the sad little kernels of corn and pea poking out of the damp taupe patty.
“Don’t see why not.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to offend Brindy. Can we listen to something a bit less depressing?”
“You don’t like this? It’s yours. I found it in your collection.” He’d put on an old Dead Can Dance album she used to listen to on near continuous loop when he first met her. She would lie there while it played, looking up at the ceiling completely still, like she was dead.
Now she’s looking at the car speaker as though it is a spider she wants dead but is too afraid to kill. He turns off the music. “What do you want to listen to, then?”
“Whatever you want. Just nothing too amped up. And nothing too depressing.” That’s code for electronica, classical, and pretty much everything else he loves that she used to love too.
“This isn’t depressing. It’s just sad. Sad is beautiful. Sad makes me happy.”
“Well, it just makes me sad.”
He looks at her rearranging her shawl across her thin shoulders. This woman who, on their first visits, used to love nothing more than lying on her back on his hardwood floor, content to let tears drip from her eye corners and pool in her ears for whole Nick Cave albums.
“Her tits are fake, you know,” she says now. “Brindy’s tits.” She never ceases to remind him of this.
“So I’ve heard,” he says.
“Also they leak. She told me herself. She’s had to have, like, a million surgeries to correct it. Because they leak. It’s sad, really.”
“It is,” he says, eyes on the road. “Very sad.”
Brindy answers the door in cutoff jean shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, an outfit that Beth will later tell him she wore on purpose to taunt her.
“Tom!” Brindy cries, giving him a hug.