The Infidels

by Thomas Dietzel

Every Tuesday morning, Lydia Oliggo can be found at the Ugly Mug. On nice days she sits outside at one of the folksy-looking corrugated iron tables with the curlicue legs…and when it’s not so nice, which lately seems to be most of the time, she holes up at one of the wooden ones inside, usually proximal to the window so she can keep an eye on everyone coming and going…even though she knows she’s not doing anything wrong, the whole operation has the whiff of deception about it and it feels like she’d best look alive…

She has an answer prepared in case any one ever asks her what she’s doing. “Writing to my cousin in Nantucket,” she’ll say, and though she has only a vague idea of where Nantucket is, it sounds innocuous in a New England kind of way. No one ever asks anyway. Most people in the Rose City probably don’t even know what state Nantucket is in…she bites her lip…it is in Massachusetts, right? Maybe it’s Maine…one of those east coast M states…definitely not Maryland, though. She reminds herself to look it up later – maybe she’d be better off naming a place close to home like Vancouver, Washington…

…and she wonders why she feels the need to explain herself or what she’s doing to anyone at all – it’s just ingrained politeness, is what it is. She pictures running into one of the neighbors here – Mrs. Gleason, or someone – could she really say to Marnie Gleason, “None of your business!” Probably not…and being so polite probably has a lot to do with her current predicament.

The predicament, to the extent that it is a predicament, is one shared by millions of her fellow married Americans…it’s not that Frank is a bad guy, or anything – he doesn’t cheat on her or beat her, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t…well he doesn’t do too much of anything. Especially not to her.

She shoves Frank out of her mind with a mental grunt and opens her matronly purse, from which she withdraws a box of stationery and a silver ballpoint pen. The pen is, ironically, Frank’s – he got it a couple years back as part of his 25th anniversary with the firm of Angus and Duncan. It even has his initials, F.O., neatly embossed on the barrel. She found it in a desk drawer a couple months ago just before the whole thing started and there seems to be a certain amount of poetic justice in her use of it.

She opens the box of stationery and instantly feels the thrill of it all, the whole enterprise, seeing the scented lavender sheets lying there next to the lilac-colored envelopes. There is some sort of florid spiral design around the edge of the stationery – it reminds her of the way the iron in the corrugated table whirls and twirls about her legs, and she smiles to herself. This stationery and this table – they complement one another…and then she picks up a single sheet of stationery, loving the way it feels in her hands, loving the faint odor of lavender that wafts upward in the breezeless afternoon....and using the lid of the stationery box as a writing surface, puts her husband’s anniversary pen to paper and begins…

“My sweet Lydia,” she writes. “Although it has only been a week since our last encounter it feels like I have been sent into exile, or to prison…I can scarcely concentrate on the bare tasks of living, so ravenous is my flesh for your own.”

She smiles. Ravenous! Like he wants to…to devour her in a single bite!

“I can remember everything about the way you looked when we last saw one another…how your bare shoulders carried the light of the moon…the ravishing smell of your hair in my face…even now I feel like the memory threatens to overwhelm me and cause me to swoon.”

She pauses. Did men – swoon? Was swooning an unmanly activity? She watches a family standing in line inside: two young parents and a trio of silken-haired children pawing at one another like cubs…but in her mind she saw only…

Leo!

“I do not know how long I can bear to be apart from you,” Lydia writes. “The minutes feel like hours and the hours like years…when will you abandon that wretch and join me in your true life of bliss that the gods have set aside for us to enjoy?”

A pang of guilt ricochets around in her chest somewhere…a wretch? Where did that come from? Frank was many things but…a wretch? A wretch he was not. She pictured some pale, emaciated figure staggering through the rain, pulling out his hair and screeching. That was what a wretch did! Frank – well, he just wasn’t a wretch, that was all. But there was no way to change something you wrote unless you started all over unless you crossed it out so Lydia leaves it in…

After another hour the love letter is finished…She signs it, “Your king of the jungle of love, Leo.” This last part strikes her as bit much, a bit comic, but – so? Leo can have a sense of humor. She folds the lavender sheet and gently inserts it into one of the lilac-colored envelopes. Beautiful. She writes her name and address on it and for the return address she writes, in Leo’s handwriting: “Leo Cordis – Somewhere in the jungle of love…”

On the way home she drops it in the mailbox on the corner, well before the last scheduling pickup time of the day, 5pm, which means she’ll be hearing from Leo when Chuck the letter carrier shows up tomorrow morning. Can she wait that long? She’ll have to…and then she feels something close to a very unmanly swoon.

On this particular day Frank Oliggo is leaving work earlier than usual – it’s not quite three but he’s canceled his last two appointments and called a cab. There’s something nagging at him, worrying his mind like a puppy chewing on an expensive slipper…

“You’re sick?” James Duncan, accountant extraordinaire, one of the eponymous founders of Duncan and Masters, had asked him with an expression somewhere between empathy and disbelief. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You got the creeping crud?”

“Something like that,” Frank Oliggo had said. “I feel – I feel a little off, is all.”

“Off your game, eh?” James Duncan delighted in sports metaphors and applied them whenever possible.

“You got to be in it to win it,” Frank had said, and this seemed to please his boss.

“Go on,” he said, with an airy wave of his hand. “You’ve missed – what? Four days since you’ve been here?”

The truth was closer to ten but Frank had let it slide. “Something like that,” he said, and tried to smile, but it came out more like a worried leer.

So now he was on the bus – the bus! – on his way home… one of the agreements he and Lydia had made was that to save money he would take the bus to and from work instead of driving the Lincoln Navigator, which required a small fortune to park downtown. He didn’t mind the bus so much, really – it gave him a voyeuristic glimpse into the life of his fellow Rose City dwellers. In the neighborhood where there Oliggos lived, the dwellers weren’t visible too much; mostly they remained ensconced in their carefully maintained ranch houses or else drove to and from the supermarket…you hardly ever saw anyone walking anywhere…

…and again, the puppy chews and chews, and Frank is gradually lulled by the gentle rocking motion of the bus into a contemplative state, and then it hits him like a cartoon anvil…Lydia is…cheating on him…

When people have been together for many years, like the Oliggos, they become intensely aware of the subtleties of one another’s body language and tone, or so Frank likes to think. That’s the thing – there is absolutely nothing concrete to suggest any infidelity on her part, no unusual trips or phone calls in the middle of the night or any of the other red flags raised before the eyes of the unwitting cuckold…but there is something going on…lately she seems – well, a little distracted…kind of absent-minded, really…and there’s – well, there’s a spring in her step…whether of the coiled or vernal variety, he can’t be sure, but the spring is there all the same. And these two signs, taken together, are indicative of…

Well, he knows exactly what they’re indicative of. Now Frank (he reminds himself) has never been unfaithful to Lydia, not ever. Naturally there have been…attractions over the years (so many years!)…like the secretary James Duncan had a couple years ago – Christ, what was her name? Liza, with a Z…She had been something, all right – short red hair cut in a page-style bob with legs from here to the moon…and the scarves! He smiles, remembering – she had a variety of silk scarves she would wear at work – they all looked like they had belonged to the Queen of Sheba or something, with gold embroidery and little wisps of silver…he remembered how – how erotic it was to see her with those scarves wrapped around her pale neck…they inevitably conjured up visions of her nude, writhing beneath him, her wrists bound behind her back by one of the selfsame scarves…he shakes his head and the vision of Liza with a Z vanishes and instead there is the expression on Lydia’s face that he has become accustomed to in recent weeks…a look of absent-minded euphoria… but then again, there was that one time, when he and Liza were waiting for the elevator together, and she was standing there in one of her azure scarves, rubbing her wristwatch…and he’s said to her, “You know, you look really hot today…” He’d tried to make it sound jaunty, and he thought it did…she’d looked away from him – was she blushing? And when the elevator opened they’d gone in together and then the doors closed and they’d tumbled slowly toward earth, and she stood there looking down…was she blushing? And for ten seconds, Frank was in heaven, there, standing with her in the elevator, and then the doors opened, and they’d walked out and gone their separate ways – and they’d never mentioned it again but he knew that she knew – the attraction – the unspoken magnetism between them, the (verboten!) eternal impulse that could not be acted upon, because of circumstance…O Circumstance!

When he gets home Lydia is sitting in the kitchen drinking some herbal tea or something…Christ, women and their tea…he’ll never understand it. She looks surprised to see him but not displeased. “Oh, hi, honey,” she says. She’s reading some magazine, the pages opened to a glossy spread of a sumptuous living room somewhere. “You’re home early.”

He walks up behind her and rubs her shoulders. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I got the creeping crud.”

She cranes her neck to look at him. “The what?”

“The creeping crud,” he says, studying her face. Time has been kind to Lydia Oliggo – she doesn’t look all that different then when they met almost 30 years ago…Frank can’t say the same about himself. He’s got a buttery paunch that dangles over his pleated pants and his once magnificent pectorals are now completely obscured by layers of sagging adipose tissue…gynecomastia…man tits! He’s let himself go, he realizes, and for a moment he feels as though he might start to cry, but then Lydia says:

“Where’d you get that phrase from?” Lydia asks.

And then they embark on a discussion about James Duncan and his foibles and idiosyncrasies and his love of sports in general and sports metaphors specifically, and for a few minutes, James Duncan feels his conviction ebb a little, and his rational mind reminds him that this whole infidelity thing is pure conjecture, really, without any factual basis…he likes this phrase, without any factual basis…it reminds him of TV pundits or politicians, who, in the midst of debate, turn to the moderator and say, “What my opponent says is without any factual basis whatsoever…”

…but later that evening, he’s lying in bed, enduring his fictional creeping crud and nursing a Hot Toddy, as they’re called, which is whisky and honey mixed with lemon tea…and the paranoid feeling returns, even though it is without any factual basis…she seems…too happy, or something, happier than she should be, at any rate. He tries to remember how Lydia usually was, when she wasn’t in this – this state...she usually seems a little quieter, a little more reserved…then he feels ashamed…my wife is happy, and I’m accusing her of something, he thinks. He sips the Hot Toddy warily, and a crazy thought flashes through his mind – poison, she’s going to poison me, but then the whisky starts to blossom in his gut like a jungle flower, and the comforter and the sheets start to feel so…so comfortable! and then Frank Oliggo descends into sleep and dreams about Liza with her silk scarves…

It’s six in the morning when his eyes pop open. Lydia is huddled on her side of the bed with her back to him. Except for a few strands of hair she’s completely hidden in the cocoon of her enormous comforter. The memory of the previous day washes over him like a red tide and he knows there’s no more sleep to be had that morning, or maybe ever. He gets up gently and pads downstairs in his bare feet to the kitchen where he dials James Duncan’s office line.

“Jim,” he says into the messaging system. “This is Frank. Look – I won’t be in today. I’ve got the creeping crud something fierce and I’m going to take it easy. For a change.” He tries to fake a cough but it come out more like a gurgle. “Go team,” he says lamely, and then he hangs up and looks morosely at his cell phone. Sleeping pills, he thinks. I could take some Benadryl and go back to sleep for a while. Or maybe melatonin. Or both. Finally he decides against and goes into the den to watch TV. There’s some cooking show on when he turns it on – a muscular Asian man is stirring a sauce and delivering a lecture on the relative culinary virtues of chickens and ducks, from what Frank can tell…ordinarily he hates cooking shows – there’s something perverse about watching people cook! – but he can’t summon the energy to pick up the remote.

“It’s better to do less with more than more with less,” the cook says, pointing to his pot of sauce for emphasis. And sometimes it’s best to do nothing at all, no matter how much you have, Frank thinks.

Lydia wakes up around eight and comes downstairs to find her husband swaddled in an afghan on the couch, watching a rotund perky woman on television slice a beet into paper-thin slices. “Cooking kills the phytochemicals,” the woman says helpfully.

Frank doesn’t look at her when she comes in; he’s really into this show.

“What’s going on, champ?” she says, with her hands in the pockets of her bathrobe.

Frank manages a more realistic cough this time. “I feel like crap,” he says, which is true, at least.

She looks at him with kind brown eyes and smiles. “Well, I’ll write a note for your boss,” she says. “How about some soup or something? Breakfast soup.”

He shrugs. “All right,” he says.

She goes into the kitchen and starts rummaging through cupboards or something. “We have tomato,” she says from the kitchen. “No chicken noodle.”

“I’ll have tomato,” he calls to her. He could care less, actually.

“Fraaaaank,” she says. She reappears in the doorway but he doesn’t look at her. “You hate tomato.”

“So?” he says.

“I’ll run down to Star Market and get some chicken noodle,” she says. “It’s not a big deal.”

“All right,” he says. He feels- well, pitiful, is how he feels. Self-pitying. He wonders if he really is getting sick. He’s almost convinced himself.

Lydia disappears upstairs and comes back down again ten minutes later in her yellow windbreaker, her hair tied back in a ponytail. “Okay, Frank,” she says. “I’m going. See you in twenty.”

He manages to look at her this time and says, “Okay.”

She crosses the room and gives him a peck on the cheek. “I love you,” she says. “Don’t look so sad. People get sick all the time.” And then she’s gone.

Only when she’s standing in line at Star Market with six cans of chicken soup on the cashier’s conveyor belt in front of her does she remember the mail.

Frank shuts off the television after Lydia leaves and wanders into the kitchen. Maybe the food shows made him a little hungry after all. He opens the fridge and stares into it for a moment like he’s scrying something and then he sees their mailman, Chuck, coming up the walk. Chuck has a long white beard and walks with an odd shuffle that always reminds Frank of someone trying to keep their briefs from falling down after the elastic goes south. He walks to the door and opens it just as Chuck arrives.

“Well,” says Chuck. “I never expected to see you during the week. You get fired?”

“Home sick, Chuck,” says Frank, and this time he executes the cough perfectly. Homesick. Chuck opens his eyes a little wider and takes a step back. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m convalescing.” It’s nice to talk to someone besides Lydia or his coworkers for once.

Chuck doesn’t look like he believes him and he hands him the mail from a little further away than necessary. “Christ, don’t get me sick,” he says. “I’m supposed to go to the casino this weekend.”

“The casino?” Chuck says, leafing through the stack of envelopes he’s just received. “I didn’t take you for a gambling man, Chuck,” he says, and then he doesn’t say anything because he sees the lilac-colored envelope addressed to his wife from somebody called Leo Cordis, who apparently lives somewhere in the jungle of love.

When Lydia gets home Frank is sitting at the kitchen table with a strange expression on his face.

“Who died?” she asks. Christ, how could she forget? It wasn’t like she didn’t know what time the mail came.

Frank doesn’t say anything.

“I got your soup,” she says.

“I changed my mind,” Frank says. “Thanks anyway.”

And they look at each other and they’re both thinking the same thing: what about the envelope?

Frank goes back upstairs to lie down and Lydia paces back and forth in the kitchen. The six cans of soup sit on the kitchen counter, not put away and uneaten. She pictures herself asking Frank if the mail already came. Mail come? No matter how she rehearses it in her mind she can’t make it sound right. Mail come? She decides to pace in the living room instead and then she sees the stack of mail on the table in front of the couch.

All at once it feels like somebody has slipped Father Time a couple of Valium or something because Lydia feels like it takes her a thousand years to register this information and another thousand years to walk over to the table and pick up the slim pile of mail…and there it is – the lilac colored envelope – unopened! Her mind turns somersaults trying to make sense of this – did he see it? Did he – open it? She turns the envelope over and the seal looks intact…she holds it up to the light and peers at it closely…no, he didn’t open it. But did he see it? Did he see the return address? She feels hot and cold all at once like an icy fire is licking her spine…

Upstairs Frank is laying face down in bed with the comforter covering him completely except for his bare feet, which stick out over the end of the bed like a pair of pale magpies.

“Frank?” she says from the doorway.

Silence.

“Frank, are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?” She feels ridiculous asking this; what she really wants to ask is, of course: hey, did you happen to glance at the return address on that lilac-colored envelope Chuck delivered? Wait! She can tell him the truth! See honey, the reason I’m asking is that…well, I’ve been writing to myself in the guise of a fictional lover with long honey-colored curly hair named Leo Cordis, mostly because the excitement has largely vanished (largely vanished!) from our marriage and I’m at a loss as to how to make myself feel sexy…and then her heart drops somewhere into her abdominal cavity because she knows how unbelievable and ridiculous this sounds. Of course, if she did have a real lover, she would say exactly such a thing to try to convince her husband otherwise...and what if he didn’t even see the return address…Shit!

“Mmmmphhhh,” Frank says.

“Frank?” Lydia says.

Frank suddenly turns himself over like an automatic hamburger and sits up, pushing the comforter aside. “Christ,” he says. “What time is it?”

“Almost ten,” Lydia says in a mouse-like voice.

“You know,” Frank says, “I feel a whole hell of a lot better. I feel damn good, actually.”

“That’s great!” Lydia says. She tries to sound spritely but it comes out more like Tony the Tiger from those cereal commercials.

He stands up. He’s wearing cream-colored boxers and a white T-shirt.

“Are you going to go to work?” Lydia asks, and then wishes she hadn’t.

Frank looks her in the eye and smiles at her in a way that betrays nothing. “To work?” he says, as though she’s suggesting they take a vacation to Jamaica. “Why, yes, I think I am going to go in to work. Would you mind bringing me my shoes from downstairs? The black ones?”

An hour later Frank is on the bus in his black shoes. It’s a beautiful spring day – the flowers are already somewhere in Act II of Primavera (croci exeunt) and the sun is making angelic tunnels of light through the fir trees but it might as well be the dead of winter because Frank doesn’t notice a thing…he feels as though he is treading water in a vast ocean of sorrow (of tears!) swelling beneath a crushing gray sky…except for a single landform that pokes its head above the dark flow, a island with craggy peaks and lurid tropical trees…Vengeance Island…because the need (the need!) to break down into a helpless puddle of tears is held in check at this moment by something greater…the desire for revenge…blind revenge!

Revenge! He feels like a character in some Elizabethan tragedy…vengeance shall be mine…and he barely notices the churning of self-pity and sadness running like an underground river beneath these thoughts…but all this is precisely why the bus he’s on isn’t headed downtown at all – it’s going the other direction, toward 82nd Avenue, the boulevard of…well, if not of broken dreams, of car dealerships, Chinese restaurants, and…lingerie modeling shops. The lingerie modeling shop is an enterprise unique to Oregon, as far as he knows…the conceit is that there are young women inside who are delighted to prance about in their underwear to give their clients ideas as to what sorts of lingerie they might like to see on their wives or girlfriends…of course, there is no lingerie for sale at these venues – what’s on sale is the sight of the concupiscent models themselves sashaying hither and thither with their nubile flesh all aquiver…or so Frank believes, anyway. Until now, shops like these have been one of the items on the unwritten and unspoken (Verboten!) list of places You Shalt Not Go, O Married Man, which also include strip clubs, adult video stores, and sex toy stores…and the strange thing is that even as the whole cornucopia of forbidden delights parades in neon through the cavity of Frank’s mind, traipsing in circles in the shallow gloomy surf around the circumference of Vengeance Island, he keeps seeing, as though in his peripheral vision, images of Lydia – Lydia laughing at something on television, Lydia putting on her bicycle helmet, Lydia brushing her hair in front of the dresser mirror…all of which he violently wrenches back to the edges of his consciousness with a willful grimace.

Now what he’s planning to do once he arrives on 82nd Avenue, Frank isn’t able to articulate to himself…he knows the plan is to go into one of these places (Verboten!) and employ the services of one of these long-limbed nubiles to…to do what, he isn’t sure, but he’s confident that whatever sort of revenge he’s able to exact will begin here, on 82nd Avenue…the bus lurches to a halt and he realizes they’ve arrived. An elderly woman with hair the color of a Easter egg regards him balefully as he rises from his seat – he realizes he’s been staring at her chest for the last forty blocks and she probably thinks he’s some kind of pervert…He smiles at her half-heartedly as he steps off the bus.

Now Lydia Oliggo isn’t one to let boys be boys as long as an opportunity to intervene presents itself. She’s on to him and she’s a couple of car lengths behind the bus when she sees Frank hop off on 82nd…he looks like a defendant being hustled past queues of photographers – he’s blinking his eyes furiously and seemingly retracting his head into his shoulders in the intimation of a turtle. Wha’? He’s headed for the lurid florid front door of someplace called …Miss Kitten’s…this is what it’s come to, between Leo and me, she thinks…she pulls the car into the customer’s lot of a used car dealership called Chan’s and parks. Then she folds her hands over the top of the steering wheel and peers at the dusky lavender walls of Miss Kitten’s and watches her husband skulk up the concrete steps and pull the front door open – what a tawdry place! There were a pair of glittering heels, the kind that a prostitute might wear, with six-inch fuck-me stiletto studs, hanging in front of pink curtains with little silver stars on them.

Inside the décor is strictly of the Slag Downhome style, with a leopard-colored couch wrapped in thick plastic to the left of the front door, and on the other side, behind a podium, an aquarium of baleful red and yellow tropical fish pulses beneath lamps shining with purple and blacklight. Over the aquarium is a black dry erase board with Day-Glo letters in yellow cursive: “Your hostesses tonight are INANNA & CARTER.” The walls are indigo with lacy white curtains hung in the corners. Next to the aquarium is an ATM machine…of course there is…Frank’s hands race to the outline of his wallet on his thigh – he has, what ten dollars on him? He can take money out of the ATM, of course…but Lydia…Lydia the Ultimate Financial Bureaucrat who receives and peruses for discrepancies each document that Chuck slips through their brass mail slot or, presumably, into Mrs. Lydia Oliggo’s eager hands, watchful for word from her lover…Bah! And a maelstrom rages in Frank’s guts…and then the almost invisible indigo door opens in the indigo door and a beautiful young woman wearing a white thong bikini is standing there, surrounded by the gentle glow of a shady bulb from somewhere behind her. Her eyes are heavily done up with makeup like she’s got a couple of black eyes, and she has a tattoo of a dolphin on her midriff…Sweet Jesus! Frank thinks…and the nymph says:

“M’elp you?” She smiles shyly and then says in a high voice: “Oh, I’m Carter.”

M’elp you! At the moment Frank finds this positively endearing - he feels as though he’s taken a mighty draught of scotch, or Brandy – that nice Johnson’s Creek they used to get about four years ago…look at the way she’s smiling at him! Her eyes are…locked into his, and he can see for the first time that her eyes are blue orbs that flutter at him gently in their dark rings, like jewels. He feels himself standing up straighter and he gathers a deep lungful of air and says in his best Johnny Cash-type voice, “Well, I’m lookin’ for a model, I reckon.” I reckon? Where had that come from? Who did he think he was?

She only smiles at him more deeply, like she’s going to inhale him. “Well, we can do that – I’m a little –”…and here she drops her dark eyelids down and the blue orbs wink out – “-tied up at the moment.” And then her expression changes, and she looks more sort of friendly and perky but somehow more – detached than she was a moment ago, like she’s working at Target or something, ringing him up. “But Inanna can help you!” she says. “She’s really great – I’ll have her come out in a moment, OK?” And then without waiting for an answer she prances back through her into the mysterious innards of Miss Kitten’s and leaves him there in the lobby with the fish and the ATM.

He fumbles and finds the First National card in his wallet and slips it into the ATM and punches a couple of buttons to take out $200 and a little Atari 2600-looking message comes on the green screen and says: $5.00 Bank Fee Required. Ok?

A grumbling Frank Oliggo hits YES.

The machine reflects for a moment and then expectorates a crisp stack of $20’s, which Frank slips into his wallet as the door opens behind him.

“Mr. Oliggo?” Liza says.

Now meanwhile Lydia Oliggo has crossed over into the parking lot of Miss Kitten’s, and at this precise time, in her finest hour, she pushes the front door open and there, in the Slag Downhome décor, the full panoply of which at this moment fails to register on her retinae…instead all she sees is her husband standing there with one of his boss’ former secretaries…she’s wearing a naughty Catholic schoolgirl outfit with long white socks and a plaid skirt that barely covers her haunches – but it’s her! She recognizes her instantly from the Christmas parties, and the brunches – the slut!

“What the fuck,” she yells – and the two of them turn, and they both look at flabbergasted as she feels, especially her husband, who mouth is shaped like a grimacing crescent moon, like Tragedy in those Tragedy and Comedy things.

The smell of lilac incense rises in the air from somewhere in the bowels of Miss Kitten’s and forever pins this image to their limbic systems like a trio of exotic Japanese beetles being nailed into their display cases.

“Lydia!” Franks gasps. “Lydia what are you doing here?”

What am I… “What the fuck are you doing here?” she says. She jerks her head at Liza Donovan, alias Inanna, without looking at her, and adds…”with her.” This last syllable she says like she spitting rattlesnake poison out of her mouth.

“Who’s Leo Cordis?” says Frank. He remembers now.

“Who is Leo Cordis?” his wife repeats, and then Liza cries out:

“Mrs. Oliggo! I had no idea! I would never – he’s never been here before!” She looked scared. “In fact, I hate your husband!”

What? Frank thinks dimly.

She runs on in a torrential onslaught of words: “Mrs. Oliggo, Mrs. Oliggo, your husband – him – I’m so sorry – he was always hitting on me! At work! For years! He came on to me outside the elevators one time!” Her face was frozen in a glacier of perplexed terror. “He said – he said I looked hot.” She throws her hot pupils at Frank and says – “And then he rode down in the elevator with me – staring at me and sweating! Like he was going to – to attack me in the elevator! It made me so uncomfortable! I had to leave because of it – I really liked that job – except for – he always made me feel so uncomfortable, I’m so sorry, I have no idea what he’s doing here!”

And here she starts sobbing and making a keening sound like an ghostly army of ravens is flying overhead.

“Frank?” says Lydia. “Is that true?”

Who is Leo Cordis? “What?” he says in a faint voice.

“That you came on to her outside the elevator. That you were always staring at her.”

The puling Liza Donovan shakes as the tropical fish parade back and forth before the thick bluish glass.

“Not like that…,” says Frank, and he realizes that he sounds like a five-year-old.

“Oh yes it was!” cries Liza Donovan. “You know it was!”

Lydia looks back and forth between the two of them, and Liza doesn’t look like a slut anymore – she looks like a sad little girl who wants to go home. Her husband is – there’s no other word for it – aghast…

And there begins the first irreparable crack in the golden bowl that holds the Oliggo’s bounty of love, although neither of them know it yet, and the good intent drains away over the next year until there is nothing left…and though Leo’s fictional status is exposed and the elegant shifting of handwriting for the sake of assuming her imaginary lover’s penmanship demonstrated to the lawyers concerned, within a year, the two are divorced and living at opposite ends of the city, Frank going to live in the one true African-American neighborhood in the city, Kingsville.

“You see anything happen,” his new neighbor Mr. Gross says, who runs the grocery store on the corner, “you don’t really need to call the police, see? It ain’t necessary. You let my people know, and we’ll take care of it. Just let me know.”

“Ok,” says Frank.

Back at Miss Kitten’s one night, Jennifer Polk, alias Carter, says to Liza Donovan – “You know that woman, Lydia, the one whose husband was in your ass?”

“Yeah,” says Liza.

“You know what a Lydia is?” Jennifer says.

“No,” says Liza.

“It’s a hot, cool, chick, with brains, see? A fly girl.” Jennifer waves her hands in the air in testament to the excellence of this idea. “That woman was pretty fly, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” says Liza. “She really was.”

The fish look like they want to blink, but can’t.

April 2009