Page 37 - Vol. VII #1

than to answer Carl’s old landline. It rang again, and she got up to follow the cord behind the bed where it plugged into the wall. There, she found Carl’s gun.
~
Veronica opened the window, though it was freezing outside. March had rewound to winter, and that made it all the colder, but the crowded, smoky party needed air. At the CD player, she flipped through
a stack. She wanted something clean and sharp,
even if it hurt—a full moon, stars. She didn’t want
a life where selling shoes meant a tentative victory over addiction. Getting divorced had been like one
of those movie scenes where somebody crashes through a glass ceiling in a hotel and lands in a swimming pool, but unlike Carl, she did not have the ability of a stuntman to come away unscathed. She was flailing away on the bottom of the pool, weighed down by cold shock. Down at the bottom, where new shoes could not help her.
Debbie arrived at the party late, with two guys, both well-scrubbed, wholesome, and years younger. An entrance designed to impress. Veronica wondered why Carl had invited her. Why did he need her there to be part of his triumphant promotion? It wasn’t clear, despite the rehashing among his friends, why they’d actually split up. She wondered how she could be jealous of the ex-girlfriend of someone she wasn’t going to marry. She felt, more than ever, part of Carl’s sticky web, his club of aging hipsters reluc- tantly approaching things she’d already dealt with in her marriage: health insurance, mortgages, savings accounts....She’d emerged on the other side, while these wily veterans of the party were still stack-
ing crooked sandbags up against the flood, while
her school friends were theorizing on whether the sandbags would be enough, how high the water would rise, and what forms to fill out when it did. She recalled the pure faith of her long-distance love with Roger. She felt like a nun who’d lost the calling but couldn’t afford her own place outside the convent. If it was the beer talking, she wanted it to shut up.
“I’m not going to Denver. I don’t know why he told you I was,” Veronica said. Jack had wandered over to her after Debbie showed up.
“Maybe he doesn’t want me hitting on you. Why are you telling me you’re not? Sounds like you want me to hit on you.” Jack leaned in close, and she got a stiff whiff of his cologne. She didn’t know anyone who wore cologne. She backed away and left him standing alone.
Where could she go? Carl and Debbie were laughing over old times—or perhaps more recent times, she couldn’t tell—but she didn’t want to be friends with Debbie or Larry or Jack. She didn’t want to be part of their story, the long narrative of those who imagined themselves wiser, the veterans of messy entangle- ments that played themselves out in parties like these until who slept with who became irrelevant.
She wanted it to matter. Mistakes to matter. Roger had gotten a special cell phone just for his affair. That detail killed her, that calm calculation.
What made Carl think he loved her? He thought she was a child, yet he wanted her to talk to him like he was a child, to tame the rascally rabbit, to give him an out so he could blame settling down on her.
Veronica put on some old Stones and cranked it up. The Stones, whose mistakes mattered, who wore the burden of their mistakes on their gaunt, grizzled faces.
“She’s So Cold,” a tune for drunk dancers, and Veroni- ca quickly stepped to the shaky middle of the crowd- ed floor. She was twenty-five, and Debbie could go fuck herself because she would never be twenty-five again. Veronica closed her eyes and swayed her hips, alone in the middle of the rumbling stomp of other dancers. She raised her arms above her head where they were free, where they touched nothing.
~
“Hey Babe,” Carl said. “Are your friends having a good time?” He reached his arm around her and pulled her toward him. She had met Debbie. Why did she have to meet her again?
“You remember Debbie?”
After her grand entrance, Debbie had shed the two pups, Veronica noticed—props, this woman needed props.
“So, where are all your friends?” Debbie asked her.
“These are all our friends,” Carl said.
Veronica looked away. She felt like she was being pulled down into the little box that everyone had already checked for her, trying to confirm her role when she didn’t even have the script.
“Yeah,” she said, though she wasn’t sure.
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