Malcolm in the middle.
By: Jayne Moore
Tags: New York City, Short Fiction, Lovestory, Short Story, Human Condition

Any Given Tuesday — Week 6

There’s something about an empty space that has just become yours. The first turn of your own key in a door. Everything is amplified. You can actually smell the wood floor, the dust and the varnish, every footstep louder and more exposed than it will ever be again. The light bounces off freshly painted white walls, still pungent, with their cheap and chalky last coat. It’s the humm of potential, the buzz of a new beginning.

Today was lease signing day. He needn’t be there for this, his line was signed, his cashiers check too. They’d asked surprisingly little really, bank statements and a few tax forms, but no face was needed to the name. However, he wanted to see Milena have this moment, the thrill of independence, the liberation of your first apartment, and he was paradoxically torn by wanting to be part of it.

He reckoned the girls would be here around 2 pm and be far too excited to eat, so he ducked into the cafe on the corner for a bite before they arrived.

It was a cold, brisk day with a sharp wind, but the sun was brilliant, the air clear, and the light was crisp and illuminating. They hadn’t seen a single snowstorm this year, for the first winter he could ever remember in his 32 years as a New Yorker, and it was both a relief, and somehow missed. How Global Warming was still in debate, he had no idea.

The metal handle was freezing to the touch as he pushed open the clumsy door, but he was immediately greeted by a wall of heat and the rich smell of sizzling garlic.

The sweet waitress from his previous visit wasn’t there today, and he was greeted by a blank-faced young man, who waited for Malcolm to speak.

“Just one please, any chance of the corner?”

“Yes, wherever” the waiter nodded with a shrug, and followed him to his chosen spot with menus.

“Can I get you anything to drink?”

“Ah, yeah, a black coffee would be great, thank you.”

Checking his phone, he opened a message from his daughter, which showed in large font on his phone — all the details that age you.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! Mtg Sam at leasing office at 1, I will text when on our way! Eeeeeeeek!

He smiled at Milena’s excitement. He had always tried to keep a level head as a parent, tried to approach it all with the calm sense of objectivity that he did everything else in his world, but Milena was truly the light of his life, and he poured far too much hope, worry, ambition, and allowance into her than was healthy for one human being. She looked a lot like him, which was unsettlingly beautiful in a female form, with his gold-flecked green eyes, dark hair, and strong jawline. She had her mother’s lips — if you were to really go looking for something — but little else, as she took on his height, his elegance, and his easy sense of self. Milena was, without a doubt, the north star of his compass, and his saving grace. She made him feel lucky, and reassured him, with every day of her existence, that he had made the right choices in life.

There had, at one time, been a point at which Malcolm had stood at a fork in the road. A fork so sharp and demanding, he had spent a year staring at it, waiting for some goddamn sign to appear and make the answer obvious. The trouble is, with signs, they are open for interpretation. You will simply find the ones you are looking for. A heart in honest conflict will see signs in all directions, or none at all.

Malcolm was born an old school gentleman. Raised by a judge, the bar was high set, with his father always operating at a moderated and thoughtful calm, speaking only when he had something powerful or necessary to add, tuning out most of his mother’s psychobabble, gossip, and social affairs. Malcolm’s father had generally avoided social outings — like all the street fairs, schooling events, and seasonal shindigs in his local area — having little patience for small talk and narrow mindedness. But now and again, his parents would host dinners, and he would watch his father come alive, eyes sparkling as he brought games to the table, injected spicy topics of conversation, and told mischievous stories, clever jokes, and tortuous riddles. Malcolm always noticed how other women looked at his Dad — adoring, flirtatious, dishonorably — and how his father would politely disengage, circling back to his mother with a rarely seen warmth and tenderness — the women swooning all the more. His father was a class act, and the apple had not fallen far from the tree.

Malcolm had been introduced to his wife through friends. Sarah was petite, sweet, and quiet. She was studious and introverted, two traits that made her especially interesting to Malcolm, and while she was definitely flattered and embarrassingly shy around his emerging affections, she wasn’t heady around him, she made no extra effort to tell her story, voice her opinions, or put on a show, unlike so many women before her. She was not flirtatious or suggestive, in fact, he wasn’t sure she even liked him, and if she had exams or simply didn’t feel like it, she wouldn’t come out at all. These little details made Malcolm want her all the more.

Their first date was almost painful, her voice — a powdery whisper — made it hard to hear her across a table, and all the usual banter between two people seemed to disappear between them. But he persisted. Their second date he managed to elicit a delightful giggle out of her, one that brought the color to her cheeks, water to her eyes, and a deeper curiosity in his heart.

He kissed her on their third date. A tender, honest kiss, her little face lifted to his, where he saw the depth of the admiration he felt mirrored in her eyes. She was the proverbial onion, with every layer he peeled off, with every conversation, she unraveled, her confidence blooming beside him, as this thoughtful, intelligent woman found her voice.

He’d asked her to marry him exactly one year later from their first date, and she giggled out her yes. That was their love story, quiet, intimate, and tender.

They had been married three years, together for five, when Malcolm had met B.

It had been his fault, as B had so often reminded him. A friend of his was sitting in as the guest drummer for a band, and they were playing at a music venue not far from one of his clients. 20 mins, he had told himself, just to show face. Keeping to the back of the room, with his jacket determinedly still on, he had grabbed a glass of wine to support the venue. As he was jostled by the crowd he had immediately regretted his choice of red wine, and retreated further back where the crowd thinned out. He hadn’t intentionally stood next to B, she just had space, that much he was sure of, it was an honest move to that extent, but then, something had gone sideways. He was aware of her scent, both earthy and sweet, and found himself glancing at the smooth round skin, taught over her exposed shoulder. Later she would scream at him, ask him what he was thinking, but in truth, he wasn’t. For the first time in Malcolm’s life, he just wasn’t.

B had many of the traits that he admired in his wife, a reserve, a privacy, a studious nature, but it came with a passion that reverberated from her skin. She was challenging, argumentative, suspicious of life, and crazy about it all at once. She noticed everything and hungered for more, and quickly turned to Malcolm to find it. His wife made him feel like her comfort and support, like her anchor, her safe place, but B made him feel like her catalyst, her sails, and her partner in crime. B made him feel like anything was possible, and that is a very very dangerous thing to feel.

Sarah, you approached, you coaxed, you stirred. B rose to meet you, and then asked to go higher. Sarah was subdued, and their sex was tender, and sweet, and vulnerable. B was vivid, her body forceful, her sex intoxicating, her needs urgent and never met.

He had never meant to be this man. Never thought it possible. But there he was, loving two women so completely, living two alternative lives. If Sara was the love of his life, Betina had become his lust for it.

That year had dragged out as one of the most exhilarating and miserable of his life, all at once, and he found himself walking in the shoes of a man he had always detested.

As an outsider, it undoubtedly seemed obvious, as the same arguments circulated in his mind, the same angry put-downs and self scorning. But it wasn’t. He wanted them both. Which sounded greedy and selfish and masochistic, even to himself, but one he loved the way he made her feel, and one he loved the way she made him feel.

He had ended it with B, more than once, and these painful tangled weeks would draw out, where he saw her in every shadow, would hear her laugh in a crowd, and every innate object would remind him of her, someway, somehow. And right there, when the dark had gotten so dark he knew only dawn could be on the other side, she would appear. She would write, she would sit on the bench across from his office, she would go to their favorite cafe, and his idiocy would find himself going there too, and just like that it would reignite, with a new fervor, a new hunger, and new late-into-the-night pleas and promises. The cycle would do-over.

There were times, he almost came close to leaving Sarah. He would sit late in his office staring at nothing, rehearsing the conversation, laying up points, wishing better for her than someone as wretched as him. But then he would go home, and it would be exactly that. Home. And Sarah would emerge from some pocket of the apartment, padding across the floor in that way that she did, and fold herself into him. Sarah just fit. Her angles slotted so perfectly into his, his limbs locked so comfortably around hers, in a way that B’s just didn’t. Sarah’s very goodness, her selflessness, her questionlessness, melted every rehearsed line and earlier conviction. And on and on it went.

In losing B, he was well aware of what he would be giving up, and in losing Sarah, he was maimed by who he would be giving up on. It was just a jump he wasn’t willing to take, and a heart he wasn’t willing to break.

And then B disappeared.

No announcement, no bitter break up, no cruel accusations. Just a sudden silence. It was late November, on the cusp of December, and manhattan was aglow with Christmas.

Christmas belongs to the young. As adults, it serves more as a recurring milestone, a benchmark, a tinseled red and green reminder of anything that’s missing. For adults, Christmas hurts.

While shopping for Sarah he could only find gifts for B, and the guilt in buying gifts for them both twisted bitter knots in his stomach. He found himself angry at B for even expecting to see him over Christmas, and yet a deep-rooted ache at the thought of her waking up alone, as he went off to his in-laws to play the perfect man.

But no letters came, B never appeared across the road, and never waited in their cafe, as she would, typically, hopefully, every Wednesday night. As Malcolm mentally prepared for another hard conversation, another build-up to another end, B never appeared to receive it. Eventually, well into December at this point, on the 12th in fact — he remembered every date — he had gone to find her.

He went to her apartment on a bitter cold and damp night, and buzzed on the downstairs intercom. He buzzed and waited, and buzzed again. Her apartment was on the back side of the building, not visible to the road, so you couldn’t look up at it, or shout at a window. He had stuck around for about 15 minutes before heading home, a sense of ill-ease creeping in.

He found himself irritated with Sarah, and unfocused at work, fluctuating between annoyed at, and anxious about, B. He returned to her apartment the next night, with a note to leave this time, and once again the buzzer remained unanswered, so he left his note.

After no reply, he returned on the 20th, for one last attempt, he told himself, and again, his buzzing was greeted with silence. This time he buzzed all the buzzers, until someone else buzzed him in, and he took the three flights to her apartment, two steps at a time, so that he was out of breath when he arrived at her door. He knocked, and waited. Buzzed the bell, and waited. And then, eventually, he tried the handle. It turned, as did his hammering heart, and the door opened slowly, revealing an apartment in darkness. He had stepped in, and reached for the switch, already knowing what he would find. The apartment was empty.

Of all the things he could have felt, numb was all he was left with. A puddle of coldness, somewhere at the center of him. Relief, well, yes, there could be some relief, but it was laced with a poison, a deep-seated grief, that he wasn’t free to express, and a slow drip horror in all the unknowns.

Christmas came and went, as did New Years, and he’d ticked all the boxes. He’d kept it together and kept it to himself. Just. And time passed by.

But B hadn’t completely disappeared. Not quite. The same way he would take certain routes, pass certain cafes, and pick up supplies in neighborhoods he had no reason to be in, eventually, so did she.

For all her seeming bravery, for all the cold cut ambition, there were still gaps in her story. Still doors left open. Cracks of light through the veneer.

They had their spaces, their places, and their meeting points. The benchmarks of their story. And despite her resolutions, she weakened and sought these places out.

Occasionally.

Sometimes.

When she was most unlikely to see him. But there nonetheless.

Eventually, their paths would cross. Malcolm found himself watching her profile one afternoon, in their favorite little park, the skies already pulling the blanket of night around them. He was pulled there, as if by magnet, but this time, one that stopped at the gate.

She had made the first big decision in their ending, but Malcolm made the last. Every time he saw her, her profile outlined in the window of a cafe, or the back of her head through park railings, or her face glowing in the dim light of their favorite bar… he would make the decision to respect hers, and walk away. Time and time again. And every time he turned away, swallowing hard as a piece of him yanked back, he would tell himself he was walking in the right direction, until eventually he just stopped going there at all.

As if the Gods were applauding his decision, everything in his public universe sped up, and life suddenly moved very quickly. He got a promotion that made him partner, a leapfrog maneuver he could never have planned, and Sarah fell pregnant. In a blink of an eye. All within two weeks from the last time he turned his back on B. It was at this point, as the world started leaving little gifts at his doorstep, that he realized how numb he had become, how unsure he was of any feeling, in any direction.

Sarah had been told in her early 20s that she was unlikely to be able to have her own children. The paralyzing cramps that crippled her small frame on every irregular cycle had whispered of what lay beneath. Her womb was woven thick with endometriosis, endless knotted fibers that tugged on all her threads. They told her she was too skinny, too slight, her frame too fragile and her spirit too frail to conceive naturally, and three years of a loving marriage had supported the thesis. And then suddenly, she had.

Malcolm had come home, sluggish and apathetic, aching for the woman he missed, to find a flushed and tearful Sarah, pacing the apartment.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, the second he’d stepped over the threshold, and the world got so silent it was deafening.

“What?” he exhaled and she repeated, through a wobbling smile

“I’m pregnant”

He’d fallen to his knees in front of her and pulled her in, his ear to her ribcage, where he listened to the laugh in her sobs, and stifled his own.

Four days later he was asked if he had any interest in making partner. His cool reserve was crumbling into confusion, a man that now tripped over his words and finished sentences merely with nods and eyebrow raises. But the world seemed forgiving. There was more work but more money, and as both stacked up, he slipped out for every pre-natal appointment, doctors words running by his ears, leaving him none the wiser, and still numb.

One of Sarah’s colleagues moved states and vacated a 4000 square foot, rent-stabilized, Tribeca apartment. Another gift that just fell into his lap. Stunned but operational, Malcolm moved forward, puzzle pieces falling into place before him. His inner panic was replaced with productivity, and within two months Malcolm found himself staring at a completely different life. Their sweeping apartment, with exposed beams and raw steel fixtures freakishly sticking out of the walls, was transforming in Sarah’s hands. She was nesting. Her swelling belly protruding beneath these newly emerging breasts, his entire inner world in conflict, how you could love one so hard and ache for another was dizzying him.

And then there was Milena.

Milena was enormous. Literally. An 8.2lb baby born of a 115lb woman. As Sarah collapsed backward, after the birth, her face wild with the effort, raven hair plastered across her sweating face, Malcolm had stared at her in an awe nearing fear, at the superhuman feat she had so quietly steamed through. And then he was handed Milena, a face that was mainly cheeks, furiously scowling in an eyebrowless expression of rage, and flashing eyes that looked at him with absolute disdain. How he had laughed at that little face. Laughed with relief, laughed with love, laughed with confusion and conflict and overwhelm perhaps, laughed at how this human was the first to look at him like he felt he deserved. She was perfect.

Milena pudged out quickly, demanding every calorie Sarah had to give, and would laugh at anything, slapping her own fat thigh like a raucous old man cracking dirty jokes. She was a loud little creature, hooting and hollering at her quiet mother, making her demands known, and Malcolm was obsessed with her. He would snort her toes, putting her whole fat foot, chubby like cactus succulents, in his mouth, causing Sarah to squeal and Milena to fold over with laughter. She was the first thing in a long time that truly made any sense.

Having a child is like a glass bomb exploding. A graphic, brutal description, but true. Every milestone she hit felt like a shard of glass, being pushed in a little deeper, closer to the heart. Her very existence hurt. Or maybe he was just hurting.

Malcome only grew to love Sarah more. That much he knew. And their life blossomed into a peaceful and happy one. Calm compatibility. But never, not in 20 years, had Malcolm not felt slightly winded by an unspoken bereavement. An un-mourned grief.

Swift punches would land him in the shower, the breath knocked out of him at a memory, eyes burning at the thought of her laugh, her voice still in his ear, that searing sting, a twist of the knife.

And that’s how he lived, between shards of glass, a well-lodged knife, and the ache of undeserved betrayal, wondering which love would kill him first.

His thoughts were abruptly interrupted by a banging on the window, disrupting the whole room. And there was Milena, grinning, with Sam at her side, both pressed up against the window as if thrown there. They made their way from outside to in, radiant and victorious, both dangling keys from their obnoxiously colored nails.

“You are early,” he said calmly, raising an eyebrow

“Let’s goooooooo” Milena crowed

“Hi!” Sam half waved

“But I’m just enjoying my coffee” he shrugged, taking an amused and indulgent sip

“Let’s goooooooooo!” Milena replied, grabbing his mug and swallowing a large, hot mouthful. “Hot” she nodded and put the mug down “let’s gooooooooo!

He was laughing now, “alright alright, let’s go”. He got to his feet, pulling a $10 bill from his wallet, and nodding to the waiter that he was headed out. Retrieving his coat, the girls already wiggling their way out of the cafe, he followed, heart buoyant on their girlish energy. Buttoning up, he watched them, 10 feet ahead of him on the curb, looking so painfully young, and uncomfortably beautiful. The glass embedded deeper. Breathing in, and sighing out the burn, he caught up to them as the light changed, pulling out his phone to film their very first entry as apartment “owners”.

Another thumbnail to add to the 22,609 memories on his phone.

6 minutes later, B walked into her cafe. Smiling at the waiter, as she headed to her usual spot. He met her there, placing two menus on the table, and picking up a half-full mug of coffee, a $10 bill, and clearing the debris of a sugar packet. B reckoned she had about 20 mins before Bridge got there, and as usual, relished the time.

“Can I get a coffee lovie? Milk on the side please?” she said, offloading her bags and coat, stuffing them into the corner, before heading to the bathroom. Somethings never change. She really had to pee.