Caroline Plasket
In a shared office, your husband sits behind you. He is on a work call. You look toward the window and think why did I hang that plant there? The north facing window makes the tendrils of the creeping shade-lover back lit. You keep it there imagining its elegance by its outline.
The video call your husband is on hasn’t been going long. A woman with brushed hair hanging on both sides of her face, notably younger, is talking to two men. She looks like an image through some app’s filter. Your heart quickens. What is it with faces? You moved so much when you were younger—you always remember faces. Your children have a memory card game of faces: match the faces, remember where they are. You think this is my childhood; this is my brain.
On the call they are laughing at something stupid someone says. It should be awkward, but it isn’t. They talk about numbers and words that mean nothing to you and bore you completely as you sip your tea and squeeze the bags over your cup before slinging them on the small stoneware plate at the end of the desk, next to another plant. There are plants everywhere so much your husband jokingly calls it a jungle. These days you can feel your stomach shake slightly when you walk, especially in the stairwell.
You should brush your hair. You should cut it, dye it something shiny that reminds your husband how bright and rousing your eyes are. They are getting off the call and they giggle slightly when they say goodbye. What is so fucking funny, you wonder. You hear your husband get off calls every day with men and no one laughs as they say goodbye. You type “What does flirting look like?” into your web browser and delete it before you hit enter.
You’ve been reading a lot of books about artists, which subsequently means you’ve been reading about a lot of male artists because any news of female artists is scant or super contemporary and slimly built. Those women fascinate you more than the men. You think about how all these men artists fucked women not their wives. How they were all a cult of beauty and aesthetics and loved too much maybe. You fix that thought: indulged too much. Maybe. The problem with that is that there’s always something not necessarily more beautiful, maybe of equal beauty, but most important: differently beautiful. Were the artists looking for their equals or something differently beautiful disguised as something worded better to anyone who might ask? The Rhetoric of Those Who Take What They Want. That is what you’d call that book. It is that. It is context: call it art and you have a word to live by; a fill in the blank meaning. A real reason. You think you’d probably check it out from the library.
Maybe you should study women who have taken younger men. Google “How to get power.”
You imagine yourself dying in a million different freak accidents a month and you already have your mind made up. You would never want him to marry again. Fuck those movies where women lay on beds, beautiful and gaunt, their perfect hair framing their faces, their mouth in O’s suffering weak, debilitating coughs, who say, no, no Gerald! I want you to be happy, I want you to find someone to take care of you, to love you. Forget me, I am going somewhere you can’t right now.<Wipes tear from long time lover’s eyes and dies>. No. you want him to die of a broken heart, right over your own body. The two of you could be buried like that. Someone in a different humanity would one day dig up what remains and study your teeth and say—these were lovers—because by then they could tell things like that.
But, no, the children…so instead you imagine him desolate and obsessive. Never sleeping, he discovers an art inside himself built on his desire and need for you, he buys canvases in bulk and paints you in every fashion. Makes you as a Fibonacci sequence, makes you in cubism, paints you as rainbows and silhouettes, he runs out of canvases. The world can’t make enough to satiate this need, so he covers the walls in the house, the couch fabric, the dog’s back. He paints the mirrors and windows so you are everything he looks out of and into. Someone catches him breaking into the observatory to paint you as the night sky. Many writers write books about him: The Lonely Lover: Never Before Was a Human So Capable of Love. And when he dies, they study his body and all its parts to see if they can learn through his anatomy what makes love. They see his brain is shaped like your face, shaped like your body at its best; the eyes so bright that little gems have formed where they are, like geodes in his skull.
You remember how when you were young, you were hungry for everything. How three months after you were married you fucked a stranger in the back of a car and it meant nothing and felt beautiful. You hadn’t seen Andrea in nearly a year and met her for breakfast. When Andrea left, you ordered yourself another donut. There wasn’t much you would deny yourself then. A stranger bent over the back of your booth, “I heard you talking about Stieglitz’s photography.” The stranger was beautiful. “But why do you think he became fixated on Paul Strand’s work?”
“Easy,” you turned toward the stranger. “Strand didn’t hold back…he wasn’t confined by someone else’s rules. And he got to be that way because he was a man.”
Soon after, your body was perpendicular to the stranger’s and you moved over him like the bright neck of a swan, you took his hands and put them where you wanted them.
Your husband will never know. But it isn’t the fact your past exists that terrifies you. You can make meaning of nothing and nothing of meaning. It is that it was so easy. Easier than flossing your teeth—even then there’s blood. Here there was no blood. Washed underwear and the ghost in the back of a car you no longer own. It is the uneasy feeling creeping in that if it was so easy for you, it could have been so easy for your husband, too. The way he was so comfortable talking to women and how that could feel intimate to someone. That is what you wake up in the night thinking about—obsessing over.
You remember how, in seventh grade, you felt sweaty and dirty against the other girls and their department store perfumes and emerging breasts. Your husband is not on any call now. He is stretching and you tussle his hair and smile at one another the way two things that know one another well do. He is lovely to look at. Too good looking for you, you think as you head to the kitchen to weigh your lunch on a scale. You’ve been slowly realizing that it is through beauty you have wielded any power you have. Where are you going to get it as the days diminish into something new? You make the chicken a little spicier that night, but no one notices, even if they drink more water than usual.
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Caroline Plasket’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, The Laurel Review, Cherry Tree, The Cortland Review, Atticus Review, Threadcount Magazine, and elsewhere. She was previously a mentee in the AWP Writer to Writer Program.