The Couple In Economy
By: Madelaine Hanson
Tags: Dark Fiction, Horror, Fiction, Short Story, Psychology

The Couple In Economy

Short character study written on the train home

1972

The affair had begun in late summer, as most seem to do, the leaves flooding the grasses and the sun dimming in heat and hours. She was young and unextraordinary, he was wealthy and bored of his wife. And so it has been, is, and will be in the lives of thousands of lovers yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

And yet, that morning, something felt strange to Boston’s commuters about this particular extramarital liaison.

June Carmick was curiously plain, in that way which makes one peer closer over the folded pages of a morning newspaper.

She had an unusually prominent jaw, an ugly, bulbous quality to her nose and a hairline that seemed to start too far up on her head. Still, her complexion was good, one supposed, unspoilt by cosmetics or scrubbing, and her eyes had a greenish light to them that could almost be attractive when she spoke with vigour about her latest paperback or purse.

A dull creature, but not quite ugly enough or stupid enough to be worthy of comment. Perhaps that made it worse. In the shudder of carriages, as she locked hands with the doting, handsome man who grinned down on her, you could almost feel the loud, echoing chorus of bemused questions from the travellers.

Why her?

The man accompanying her was a catch, but a married one. Handsome, late fifties, sprawling in a way which suggested money was not the reason he was travelling with her in economy class. No, he’d just come back from the suburbs with her, some unimpressive tenement block no doubt with peeling wallpaper, hard mattresses and obnoxiously loud cats. But he had stared at her, in the low swinging light of the carriage before the sun rose, like she was more beautiful than anyone in the world.

She worked in the typing pool, he was a partner. Isn’t that the way most of these stories start? They were discreet, her eagerly so in the desire to keep him, and him perhaps more so in the desire to keep the liaisons from his formidable socialite wife. Who knows how it began, this strange joining of an unextraordinary woman with an extraordinary man? Perhaps he grabbed her hand one day in an elevator and asked her to join him for coffee as the September rain wept against the cafeteria windows. Or maybe he wrote three words on the back of a memo with a number and left it on her desk as she chewed on a pencil, tasting the wet graphite and paint in her mouth. It didn’t matter, and it is lost to history. The deed was done, and they were set.

“You need to kill my wife,” he had said to her once, staring up at the bulb that flickered hard against the yellowing paper. She lay flat on her back, silent, wondering if he was joking. “If you kill Susan, we could keep everything. I could marry you.” The thought seemed to form in his mouth before his mind had fully formed the plan. “You have no motive, no connection to her. It would look like an overdose if you did it right.”

She had swallowed hard, turning to watch the slow crease of his eyes that sprang like tree roots from his temples when he was thinking. “Please, Robert, no,” she had said, hoping the words were less weak than she felt. “I’m not a killer.”

But it was useless, and he kissed and pleaded so fiercely that he had barely placed the pills in her hand before she had nodded an unspoken promise. Six small grey pills with a short groove down the middle that, when ground with a pestle, looked white, like sucralose. She didn’t ask what they were, or why. Just whether to ring the front bell of the great whitewashed house at the top of the hill, or ask for the staff to let her in from the kitchens.

“Oh no,” Robert had said, lighting a cigarette with a magnificent flourish of a lighter in one hand. “You must have tea with her. Susan would never accept a gift from a stranger without meeting them. Bad etiquette, June dear.”

“What then?”

“Just put the powder in the sugar bowl when she goes to show you a photo album or something. Say you don’t take it. Say you’re a historian of homes in Massachusetts or something. She’ll like that. Always enjoyed the glamour of academic attention, Susan.”

He said the words like she was already dead.

“How can you be so cold with her? Didn’t you ever love her?”

He laughed, the performative laugh of a man bred for dinner parties and polo. “Darling, in my circles, a marriage is about a merger at best and avoiding a bastard at worst. With Susan, it was about capital and daddy’s money. No one,” he finished, sounding rehearsed, “Ever loved Susan Jones-Vanderst.”

She let silence break a few words more from him.

“She’s cold, my dear June. Very cold.”

And with that, he turned back to her on the bare white sheets, cigarette in mouth, as if they had discussed whether to buy croissants on the way to the station that Thursday.