Women in Bed by Jessica Keener

Author:Jessica Keener
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fiction Studio Books
Published: 2015-05-12T22:07:24+00:00

Shoreline

In the morning I threw Jim’s pillow out the window. It flies like a white bird plummeting. The phone rings and rings, that’s all I can remember. Oh, yes. The clothes. Before I left, I kicked the bedroom closet door and took my clothes.

I met my husband on a summer evening five years ago at a post-graduation party in Weston, Massachusetts. It was one of those parties you hear about from a friend who heard about it from another friend of another friend. I didn’t know the people who owned the big house and the bigger backyard where the party took place, in the neighborhood where the streets flowed up and down like ocean swells, and the trees along the streets were so old and mature they dwarfed the estate-sized houses beneath them. I drove to the party alone. I had my liberal arts degree rolled up in its cardboard tube in the car trunk, but I was one of those people who didn’t know what they wanted to do after college except get a job, make money, fall in love.

So I got the job at a realty office, which promised big money if I worked hard enough. I got the one bedroom apartment in Brookline and, as for love, well, the party took place on a flagstone terrace behind the house. Bug repellant candles surrounded the pool and had been placed strategically in the darkest corners of the backyard. A tall, slender man with bright dark eyes came up to me. He had a job, too, in engineering. What was I planning to do with my life? he asked me.

“I haven’t planned that far in advance.”

“I want to make a lot of money,” he said. “Buy a big house, furnish it with English and French provincial furniture, and the best stereo equipment available. The best of everything,” he assured me. “Later on, have three kids.”

“Three?”

“Absolutely. Three.”

“You’re very sure about everything,” I said. “I don’t know how many I want. I don’t know if I want any at all.”

“You will,’ he said. “Everyone wants kids.”

“No,” I said. “No, they don’t.”

Sometime after midnight, he and I left the party and walked under those enormous trees. I wore a dress with spaghetti straps that slipped off my shoulder with every laughing breath. I had my black hair tied back in a clip. The next night he picked me up at my apartment and took me to dinner in the Italian North End. I ate in a restaurant with whitewashed plaster walls that made my dark hair look darker, my tanned skin tinted rose like the wine that I drank. On the way home, he undressed me in the bucket seat. I sank into the softest leather.

At the wedding, seven months later, I wore a taffeta dress, strapless this time. Two hundred people came to the Cape Cod estate that had been restored for public celebrations. Jim’s family paid for half. After the wedding, a limo took us to the airport and we got our connecting flight to Hawaii.

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