Afternoon Saturday, February 24th, 2024
Lyrou saw in her refrigerator a gradual invasion of protein powders and supplements. They’d gone from occupying a corner to taking up an entire shelf, and then smaller bottles were materializing in the door. Her eggs were vanishing, also. She went to find Garin in the basement, as had become the norm, working out. He didn’t greet her; he was gasping and sweating his way through a set of bent-over rows. She sighed and returned up the stairs.
Later, in the kitchen, he questioned her, “What was that about… did you want to say something?”
Lyrou had cooled down since and thought about what she’d say, not to cause an argument. “Garin, my love, you’re overdoing it. What about moderation?”
Garin laughed, pulling out a bucket-sized container of protein powder and preparing a mix to drink down. “The strength training? There are guys who live it, but I spend hours each day with my ass at a desk…”
Lyrou took a concerned route. “You won’t inject or take pills or…”
Garin stirred his mix, spoon clinking the glass loudly. “No. No. I’m afraid of the side effects. Those guys grow their muscles, but then they also grow squash tits and bloated-out livers, cut a decade or two off their longevity, enlarged hearts, shrunken nuts, leathered acne skin… couldn’t be me.”
Lyrou made such sad eyes at him as he took a drink of his powdery brew. “You’re fit and strapping now as you are. Better than ever, but I don’t want you to go over the cliff with it. Go easier, please. Have rest days, muscles need to heal.”
Garin nodded. “That’s an appeal to good fitness science. I’ll take a rest for you and maybe chomp down a couple of donuts.”
Lyrou smiled. “Are you allowed to think about donuts?!”
Garin slumped his tired, sore arms at his sides. “I haven’t seen a donut in ages. Tell me… do they still have holes? Or has shrinkflation enlarged their diameter?”
Lyrou stood and walked toward her car keys, grabbing them up and turning to him with a flick of her hair. “Come with me, and we’ll check if they do or do nut.”
Garin let out an overwrought laugh, rinsed his glass, leaving it in the sink, and followed Lyrou out the door to the car for a trip to the bakery.
⚜
Noon Tuesday, March 5th, 2024
Lyrou lay on her yoga mat. She’d practiced for the 40 minutes she’d set aside for aerobics, stretching, and posing. She was making progress to her standards, and now she might lie and satisfy her itch to use her phone. Turning it on, the screen glowed across her face, and her pupils contracted. She began watching shorts in her feed, content fed to her based on what she most usually and recently tapped on, much of it in French.
Lyrou had once lived several years in the US and hadn’t realized how cut off from the day-to-day of France she was, so that when she returned, she experienced a touch of reverse culture shock. She had to put away habits she picked up in the US, read French with the proper pronunciation, though her brain tried to read it as an American would, and had wandered through a host’s home unthinking as if she were in an American’s home, to her profuse apology when discovered. And she had so much to catch up on; the political and social landscape of France had changed noticeably in just the few years she was absent.
But now, with social media, she’d a tether to France that, like an IV, regularly dripped bits of today’s France into her arm. She could see the trends and the humor, the references, the news, and thousands upon thousands of French people’s comments. She was still removed from France, in body, but digitally she wasn’t.
What’s more, when other French online came to understand she was an expat in the US, it made her a netizen of mild interest. French people thought it was cool and curious, and she’d stand in as an observant authority on any question regarding the US, matters she could speak on, like “Aren’t you afraid to send your children to school?” following school shootings, and on matters she couldn’t speak on with certainty, like “Will Americans elect a woman president?” Some had read her lengthy comments about the US and asked if she had a video blog channel that they could subscribe to. She didn’t do such a thing; splaying herself out like a vivisected frog on a medium by which potentially millions of anonymous pairs of eyes could see into her life, her flesh flayed and pinned open, her internal organs bared to the light and air. Impossible.
What Lyrou liked more than that, though, was looking at other women; beautiful, popular women who did want that kind of uncurated come-one-come-all attention. And then she liked to look at the handsome men, many of them popular celebrities and athletes. She didn’t care to study soccer, but the shirtless millionaire star players were another matter, and she was sure to tap a like for them.
Lyrou burned an hour swiping her finger across the screen; funny shorts, couples playing pranks, cute animal hijinks, social justice statements, cosmetics tutorials, models on beaches and with other picturesque backdrops, fine dining experiences, fun pop quizzes for the commenters, and so on.
She came to one short by a woman explaining her life post-divorce, which led her down a rabbit burrow of woman after woman in various states of marriage or divorce. She read through the comments there and found more personal stories with a dose of gender flame war. She came to one comment that caused her heart to quicken as she read; a man in Suisse romande explaining how he’d discovered his wife’s infidelity, but they’d decided not to divorce.
Like Garin?
He explained that he couldn’t imagine life without his wife, and though he hated her, he also loved her. The Swiss man explained that they had children, that she was a good mother, that he pitied her. The man left such a long comment and got several replies, to which he left more comments with more details. He was well-off and didn’t mind the nastiness of splitting assets, custody, and so on, but that he couldn’t throw away his wife.
The man answered a reply to someone asking if he’d any self-respect, to which he answered, “No. I would let her shit down my throat and send a video of it to everyone I know. She could scoop cyanide into my drink and watch me gulp it down, then tell me so as my stomach begins to ache. I’d kiss her with my mouth foaming over and my eyes bulging out, her votary.”
Lyrou turned her phone over flat down and buried her face against her yoga mat, her joints locking tight and letting out a muffled groan. Is he Garin? No. What does it matter if he isn’t? He’s a man in similar straits as Garin, and it’s probable Garin would answer precisely that: “No.” No self-respect.
There was little to think about; the implication was radiating from her phone like an ingot of plutonium. Garin had said nothing like that, but how could he not feel so? Lyrou lifted her heavy head and turned her phone back over to read more. To her disappointment, the man left only one more reply to the point that he’d remain with his wife even if she were to deceive him again in the same way. Even if, in his words, she put them back to “zero,” he’d start again with the same woman.
Was it honorable, admirable, pathetic, disgusting? She’d a mind to leave a comment telling this man to wake up and leave her. In his love sickness, he was gulping down poison, and it would kill him, even if his wife was Lyrou herself.
She didn’t.
⚜
Noon Thursday, March 14th, 2024
With Terry and Mel, Garin crossed into Manhattan for a rapport meeting with a corresponding trio of representatives of a prospective client. They had a meeting lunch at a newly opened build-your-own meal place and then stood in a plaza in the shade of skyscrapers on all sides. There was little need to be extra-sharp today; all the formal stuff and figures had been communicated and would be rehashed at some date in the near future. This was a let’s-go-see-their-faces-for-the-first-time kind of meeting, and the bunch of them shared their personal and professional histories, made safe jokes, and just became friendly with the flesh-and-blood men behind the emails, phone calls, and operations of their respective firms: Dmitriy, Mikhail, and Roman from StroyMaks Capital Group.
“The main man, Mel,” spoke a terrible lot, and Terry played sidekick for once. Garin allowed Mel to boost him, “…my shock trooper, Garin is my special forces…” and put on, not too inaccurately, that he was the quiet operator with the machine mind.
Mel referring to him in such a martial manner caused Garin to think again about Krav Maga, what he’d read and watched on it. He people-watched past the heads and over the shoulders of these guys they were meeting, and thought how Krav Maga purports itself to be suitable in all situations. With his ears and focus on the back-and-forth, he held a little side daydream to leaven this dry bread day: what if these unsmiling people we hardly know pulled out pistols, hostile and rehearsed, whipped Terry one cold bloody punch across the mouth, and forced them into a screeching van as it pulled up?
Kidnapped by FSB agents!
Garin smiled as if to what they were saying in the now, but he was mostly amused by the skit playing in his head. Could he fend for himself and his office brothers? Would his Krav Maga skills, never once practiced but entirely stitched together from literature and video tutorials, save the day in front of these countless bystanders?
Without warning, Mel deferred a question about sanctions to Garin, and without a hiccup, Garin cracked the bat and knocked it out of the park.
“Sanctions are a known quantity, but they’re also a moving target. We stay ahead by tracking OFAC designations in real time, modeling around SDN list volatility, and stress-testing every transaction pathway for secondary exposure risks. Our framework’s built to stay compliant under sectoral sanctions, fifty percent rule thresholds, and even ad hoc designations… so whether it’s primary restrictions or upstream entanglements, we don’t just adapt, we pre-adapt. We engage without exposure, clean on both sides, regardless of the regulatory noise.”
With Mel and the other side very visibly pleased, their venture was assured. He jumped back into his daydream.
Garin thought about the tree overhead. He could use that! He might grab hold with both hands and kick these Ruskies in the chest as they came at him. Maybe he could wrap his thighs around one of their necks and choke him out, or let loose of the branch and come flip-tumbling the agent over and out. Or he might snap the branch off and use it to bust one of these spies in the throat; he’d go back onto his ass choking.
Mel would be sure to fight in his college jock fashion, using Greco-Roman wrestling. A Spetsnaz veteran would handle Mel, but it’d be tough. Terry, though, see Terry would be pulled into the van, complying and crying to save his life.
Garin wondered if he could neutralize one agent quickly enough to intercept Terry. Garin had to be realistic at some point, even in this daydream; he wouldn’t be able to do anything for Terry. Terry would be gone to Siberia.
Terry would be bound, blind, and gagged, smuggled out to Vladivostok.
He’d never be seen again.
Terry would learn to speak Russian in a frozen gulag, first by parroting the guards verbatim, then forming his own clumsy sentences. Terry would convert to Orthodox Christianity, communicating with other prisoners by a system of tapping sounds. He would have the suka beaten out of him. He would be crowned by the Vor v zakone; a vory would bestow a cat tattoo across his back.
Terry would go through a crucible, attempting to escape, befriending guards over cigs, bartering the simplest possessions. Nobody would recognize Terry if he ever did get out; he’d be bald with an enormous grey scraggly beard, he’d have a piece of his ear and his pinky tip missing from frostbite, he’d know what life and death are.
Garin held in his laugh, and when Mel deferred a question to Terry, the mere sound of Terry’s voice going into a brief statistics lesson almost caused him to burst. But he held it in.
⚜
Afternoon Saturday, March 23rd, 2024
At noon, Lyrou was with Paulo at a music recording studio where his assorted mess of musicians and a producer of sorts would fall together and “fuck around with sound,” as he put it. This assemblage would willy-nilly get on the boards and mics, blunts in their lips, and throw together a “sticky beat” or a “crunchy verse” or a “sick composition,” all between shouting angrily, laughing hysterically, kicking chairs over, hugging and dapping each other up, punching holes in drywall, making group phone calls on speaker where they would all talk over one another, and lastly banging gothy Nightcore and Jirai Kei trap bitches in full sight of all present.
Lyrou wasn’t there to be passed around between this pack of bandits like some of the fêtardes who came in there, tattooed up from foot to face, fiending for a line of cocaine to snort up on the spot, and getting sodomized over a table of beer bottles in good cheer. But she was there. If giving Paulo some loving was the price of admission to this marijuana-smelling, acoustically conflagrated, trashy-sexy crevice, that was a bargain and part of the fun.
“Don’t be a shy lady…” Paulo vocal-fried at her as he sat back in a broken-down couch. “Come.” Patting his lap.
She straddled him face-to-face. They kissed, and he pulled down his jeans for his swollen rod to come bouncing out and around like a freestanding punching bag. Her skirt was only long enough to obscure from the view of those several randos in the studio her vagina being penetrated and plunged by his rod, slick and foamed with her cream.
Her hips moved to a rhythm on his lap. She gyrated her clit into his pubic base, and his hands came around and under her skirt to seize her ass cheeks and pull them apart, lifting the curtain, exposing everything from her tailbone, anus, and lips to his glistening shaft and nutsack to any passing person. She looked behind and around while working it around, her eyes meeting this shaggy spectator or that stoned symphonist, losers she hardly knew taking in the view.
She reached a hand behind, censoring the scene, but Paulo took her firmly by the wrist and pulled her only fig leaf of modesty away.
In the afternoon, she was driving home through the rain. Coming in the front, dripping wet, she wore the sheepskin of the married mom taking care of household duties. Surprise: just then, l’époux texted he’d be at work late.
So… why not?
She tore a bag from the freezer and dumped it in, shouting up the stairs, “I set the timer on the air fryer, keep your ears open for your curds. I’ll be home later.” Back through the rain, tearing off the sheepskin, time enough to fit another in.
In the evening, Lyrou was with Tom, shotgun seat in his convertible. He took off through traffic, driving like an absolute prick, blazing through semis and almost killing them. “These tires don’t hydroplane,” he said, one hand on the steering wheel, thick forearms in tight rolled-up sleeves.
The vibration of the engine and his country-rock playlist reverberated inside her, and spontaneously she pulled off her top. Looking side-eyed over her pair, “I knew I’d regret replacing my shocks,” and reached over to fondle as he drove.
After a bit more racing and purring down an exit ramp, then through a shit neighborhood, Tom parked it. Against the chill and grey sky, under a loud overpass in an abandoned industrial lot, they were out of the storm and out of view. He put the power-folding top down as he pulled his seat lever, sliding it back for ample space.
Her hands pressing on his meaty shoulders and chest, her tits hanging in his face as she crawled and tumbled over onto him, she felt that feel she was after, the feeling she left her house today for, the feeling that made her giddy in anticipation when she read her husband’s text that he’d be working late.
By accident, her ass pressed into the steering wheel, giving two honks. She laughed and looked around; there was nobody to see, dilapidated factories, crumbling warehouses, and a dormant smokestack.
“Virtueless Vandal. Vile vestige.”
The wind blew her hair around, and while she brushed it out of her face, Tom guided his thick smokestack up and into her. Coming down on it with an alternating flex of her hips and legs as if riding a 10-speed through the breeze, she hugged to him for his warmth as the coolness of the drizzling night raised goosebumps across her back, and he gave her what, in her mind, he existed to give her.
Lyrou’s triptych sabbath.
⚜
Afternoon Friday, March 29th, 2024
Paulo had been told to his face by another, better-known and lauded musical mastermind that while his beats were “elegiac and libidinous in their glissando, these lyrics mar your legato… hate to say it, hate to hear it, you’d have a sound that sells if not for that one phonic flaw.” Now he was at a poetry slam with Lyrou to gather inspiration for better lines.
Held in a repurposed firehouse, wordsmiths packed in and took turns in a garage where red engines once parked, now to set fire to their ears.
The crowd stood and sat about in a semicircle. In back, Paulo leaned against a pipe that ran along the wall, and Lyrou leaned against him, his arms round her waist.
A stunningly bony but cute woman shared a monotone but frightening piece about appliances and belongings coming alive and murdering her in her apartment for “…cloaked ambitions choked by oven mittens,” and finishing with “et tu bootie?” then pulling down her turtleneck to reveal shoestrings wrapped round her throat.
Soft claps, whispers. Lyrou and Paulo exchanged a glance of consideration.
Next came from before them a handsome Nilotic man in maroon trousers, a maroon dress jacket, a black T-shirt under it, and black sneakers, who stood with arms at his side. He left the viewers in suspense, waiting, and then began jumping Maasai Adumu, letting out a single syllable with each jump, jumping faster and faster, speaking more breathlessly as he went, going like this for such a duration, some began to worry he’d keel over from exertion.
“…love-not-my-po-ten-tial-love-not-my-riv-al-love-not-my-sha-dow-love-not-me!”
He folded down onto the concrete, his body heaving for air. To claps, he crawled from the center and gulped down a water bottle on the sides. Lyrou clapped. Paulo clapped louder.
Then, while Lyrou kept her seat on the wall pipe, came forward Paulo. Head down and feet apart, in a fitted button-down, satin, beige shirt undone to his navel, high-waisted black denim featuring a giant silver belt buckle on a black snakeskin belt and a tightly defined bulge, and pointed-toe black-spotted snakeskin riding boots, he balled his fist up and simulated a fast jab to the air.
“These fists are bitch-seeking missiles and punch so fast the knuckles fucking switch their pitch, freaking whistles and crunch bone mass.”
The gathering nodded to an unheard beat. They watched and pretended to be urban desperados with him.
Seizing his face between his hands and looking to heaven, “My life is scene after scene of steam, great sex and riches, take a peek in and see I mean what I mean when I say I’m seeking green, paychecks and bitches. Your opinion? Vale verga. Haven’t heard, huh? Gatas, plata, lobas, lana… wanna, gotta love us a fat ass.”
A cheer of laughter, wooohs from those present, a few fist pumps, and a woman ululated a high-pitched tongue-rolling grito.
He went back in for more bandito bars. “My life is sin after sin of greed, excess, and stitches, between speaking and speaking my black heart begins leaking and leaking, el diablo hisses in my ear, and I confess my wish is to transgress my best this year. I picked my part in this pitch-black art. I’m he who kisses your missus and never looks back. Every ending’s a start. I’m the worst danger to your nuts, the lone ranger to your sluts, the rearranger to their guts!”
Each person in attendance now fully submerged into his llanero-in-the-city identity, he closed, looking as many there in their eyes as would look him back. “My will is the whole of the law, ha-ha, but only ’til I fall, wa-wa, only make mi madre bawl, but six feet down feeling fucking tall in my casket, damn it, no rush nor regret. Now, no clowning, who’s down then for Russian roulette?!”
In a quick movement that looked like he jigged his leg up in a Castilian boot slap, he pulled a revolver from his concealed ankle holster, pressed it under his chin, rapid-fired five empty clicks, and then, raising it to the sky, blasted one into the ceiling to the squeals and screams of these jittery gringos, his long dark hair falling over his wide eyes, de loco.
Lyrou remained seated, hand on her heart, biting her lip as he reholstered and gave a matador’s bow.
⚜
Noon Monday, April 1st, 2024
No sooner than he’d made a circuit through the aisles of cubicles, having checked that his subordinates were on the missions he’d given them, Garin came home from work, damp from the rain, without notice. Not to be spotted, he decided to park in the temporary guest parking at the nearest condo complex, and he walked a short distance to his house. He came up his block and turned down the alley to approach and enter without being seen.
He thought he might catch Lyrou with anybody, maybe a lover like in the movies, or maybe something innocent like Reine over for a visit. He hopped his fence, not to make noise at the back gate, crossed swiftly through his backyard, and, using a key, entered the first floor. The ambience of the rain on the windows and wet-whooshing of passing cars would help cloak him.
Staying quiet, he began his sweep of his own home, ground-floor, room by room. He found nobody. Before checking upstairs or the basement, he looked in the garage to see Lyrou’s car was gone. His wife was out. He didn’t know where.
But he asked himself how that was different from if he’d been at work and not known where she was. He couldn’t remember the last time he was in this big house at this early hour with nobody else present. He thought, this must be what Lyrou experiences each day. This must be why she’s out. He wouldn’t like staying here by himself for hours, day after day, either. He was awed at the insight, how she saw it with him always out doing whatever he was doing while she was left by herself to… this. Echo… echo… echo.
He was in her shoes now, wasn’t he? He snickered to himself at the thought of seizing this moment to really get Lyrou’s perspective. He could tear open her drawers and closet and put her bra and panties on, then lean into her vanity mirror, putting on her lipstick, and then squeeze into her clothes.
And then the real Lyrou would come home and see him, dropping her bags and her jaw. Mad! Her husband in drag?!
Garin waved his hand and laughed at the idea. What if he were to do that to her? No. It would be hysterical but cruel. A prank too far, and impossible to assure her it was “just a prank, bro.” She’d think he really was a transvestite cross-dresser and maybe fear he intended to wear her skin next.
He would send her up a wall to just remind her to moisturize. “Ceramide-to-protein ratio, lest you wither, honey! Let’s talk about therapy now, honey! Would you peg me? I’d peg me. I’d peg me hard!”
Crazy funny, but crazier than funny. Scratch that. Seriously, what’s wrong with you, Garin?
Garin went upstairs and saw into Penny and Alan’s bedrooms. He looked in briefly, not crossing the threshold into them, and headed into the bathroom. He’d been holding a shit since he pulled out of the parking garage downtown. Speaking of which, he’d have to walk back to the condo complex to retrieve his car when he finished.
But there, on the John, he had his best idea, as is the special power of a man alone through the entire house, on the John with the bathroom door wide open.
When Lyrou came home, Garin was gone, and she found no sign of him having been there. Going for a change of clothes, she also found no sign of her makeup at her vanity. Gone, all of it.
“Mais… pourquoi?” she began searching.
There, on the fireplace mantel, hidden behind Penny’s framed photo, was her eyeshadow. She took it into her hand and went searching as though for Easter eggs, room by room. When her kids soon came home, Penny saw what her mother was doing and excitedly joined it.
“Found a pair of tweezers!” in a potted plant. She’d only seen its metal glint in the sunlight through the window the plant sat by.
Alan interrupted his mother, up to her elbow into the couch, presenting a crumpled paper. She took it in her free hand and read it.
“From the nurse?” Alarmed, she sat straight on the couch and read. “Afflicted with… what is… Nice Tourette’s Syndrome?”
Penny chirped, “He has a syndrome! I said it a thousand times!”
Alan stood rigid and shouted, “Genius sister… smart… smart!”
Lyrou let the paper fall in her lap and lay back on the couch. “I see,” she resigned.
Alan excused himself. “I’m terribly sorry, I’m doing my best with it…” He turned his head and faked a cough into his shoulder. “You’re awesome! Ahk! An awesome human being!”
Lyrou frumped her fingers through her hair, looking to heaven. “Next year I’ll remember this tradition, and I’ll show all of you who the foolish fish is.”
Penny came forward, presenting her mother with a handful of cosmetics and a blow dryer. “The blow dryer was in the freezer.”
Lyrou took her chilled hair dryer from Penny. “Consumed by its opposite, was it?” Lyrou didn’t care to ask if that would damage it, rubbing its cold plastic exterior; just to have it back was enough.
Alan covered his mouth, grunting not to speak. “Errrmm, good job, Penny! Errrmmm… you’re the coolest!”
⚜
Noon Tuesday, April 9th, 2024
Lyrou lay legs wide apart with Paulo licking down her thighs into her crotch. Not his place; they were at his compinche Diego’s ceiling-dripping, exposed-lath, asbestos-and-lead-hazard two-bedroom. The pair was occupying his daughter’s bedroom while she was at school, a bad one.
Covering her face with a ’90s cartoon princess pillow, a pink bedsheet coming off the corners and twisting up under her feet, Lyrou got her open womanhood breathed on and tongue-bathed by the jobless jodedor.
Quietly letting him work, it built and… there.
Pushing his head away, Paulo sat up and watched Lyrou clap her thighs shut and absorb her orgasm. Flipping her pillow off her face and onto the floor, into a plastic dollhouse, she opened her arms, and he lay atop her, where they kissed for a moment, tongue to tongue, mouth to neck.
He slid beside and between her and the wall with its sticky fruit-sicle stains, and propped up on one elbow he fondled her breast with his opposite hand.
“Did your room look like this as a kid?”
Lyrou looked around at it. “No.”
Paulo nodded. “Richer?”
Lyrou perked her lips. “I didn’t have mice growing up. I thought that was just in the animations.”
Paulo cleared his throat, looking out the bedroom window at a neighboring window aligned such that it could potentially give a view of them and what they had done, should someone be looking back. “Forget mice. We had rats that didn’t run away. I would’ve been spoiled to live in a place like this one.”
Lyrou checked her phone to find a text, a dentist appointment reminder for Alan and Penny. “Impoverished people shouldn’t have children. Or at least not breed until they can manage to stop the vermin from breeding.”
Paulo’s face turned deep red, and his smile so big he placed it down into Lyrou’s chest. She pet his hair for a moment before he raised back up, a soft smile.
“I told mi madre that before I came to this country. Exactly that. But why do I want to beat you for saying it?”
Lyrou smirked. “Because one’s betters are not polite to tell the truth about you, and in the scrapyard, you come from violence is how manners are corrected.”
Paulo kissed her eye. “How are manners corrected where you come from?”
Lyrou thought for a moment. “They’re not.”
Paulo snorted. “Yes, that’s right. I see that.”
Lyrou also noticed that the window across the way offered full spectator rights. “I told mi madre, before I came to this country, that I would be home within a few years; four, five, six…”
Paulo gave her a firm squeeze. “Hmmm… seven, eight, nine, ten… and some more… right? But in a way, you kept your promise to her, yes? Didn’t you make yourself at home here?”
Lyrou gave him a firm squeeze in return. “Home is wherever you’re yourself.”
⚜
Afternoon Monday, April 15th, 2024
Garin, at work, skipped lunch without realizing it. He spent three hours in Terry’s office radically revising terms for a client in need. Garin, in his lightning-strike manner, had been the one to put it forward as a possibility when an unsatisfactory and unfortunate turn seemed unavoidable, and big boss man Mel was very much relieved to hear the better, creative option.
Taking a moment to clear their heads and come back at the ceaseless jumble of print, confounded legal quantum physics, and financial witchcraft, Terry and Garin had a rare, but at first not unprecedented, personal chat.
Terry rubbed his eyes. “If I’d known there would be this totality of tedium today, I’d have snorted two cokes with my coffee instead of one.”
Garin smiled at this well-worn office inside joke they had. “Hey, that’s an idea… a cocaine provision in the revised terms.”
Terry snickered in a Colombian accent. “Mel, we are now the narco-netwórk.”
Garin impersonated Mel’s gravelly voice. “Right! I want Terry in charge of dismembering and stringing up late payers from the overpass.”
Terry laughed, suppressing his cackle. “This is what I’ve been doing anyway.”
Garin sputtered and let out an amused sigh. “They solve it with violence down there. You know it’s legal or de facto legal across Latin America that if a man catches his wife in bed with another man and he divorces her by means of blade or bullet in that moment, at that place, he won’t do time, or if he does, then it’s in and out.”
Terry’s laughing demeanor vanished. He took on a grim expression, slouching in his chair, finger to his lip. “Damn. That’s brutal, Garin.” He forced a single little chuckle. “Yeah, that’s savage, isn’t it?”
Garin noticed he’d disturbed Terry. He made the decision not to walk it back but to double down.
“Si, mi amigo. The offended paisano can, if he doesn’t hesitate, perforate them both right there and then. I read a case in which the lover was the son of a drug kingpin, and the big papa wouldn’t touch him, never mind harm the betrayed husband.”
Terry cocked an eyebrow. “He didn’t go missing or… nothing?”
Garin shook his head slowly. “…because it’s a sacred man code, that if you get caught with another man’s wife, you get what you get, and it doesn’t matter who you are or who you know.”
Terry took a moment to silently digest it. Garin had taken his gory comment and turned it into a cool factoid, lessening the weirdness of having said it.
“Double damn. That makes me reconsider my passport bro plans.”
Garin raised his eyebrows as if to affirm. “Maybe try Pattaya first. Yo, we have to eat eventually.”
Terry stood at once, pointing emphatically at Garin. “Now that’s an idea. You’re not yourself when you’re hangry.”
And the two headed to the elevator to go for a quick bite at the Thai place downtown.
⚜
Afternoon Monday, April 15th, 2024
Lyrou determined that this afternoon she wouldn’t read, as was her instinct and habit. She would work on her English poetry, using her poetry guide she’d received as a gift. She chased the idea of writing a poem in such elite-tier English, like Nabokov, despite English being her second language, that English native speakers would gawk in amazement at her written work, sense it deep in their guts, be moved by her prose, and know her soul.
Could she do that, she wondered.
But then, sitting at her kitchen counter with notebook and pencil and poetry guide, she felt that reluctance she expected and resented. The process was slow and mentally taxing, and she most hated to write something she’d be disappointed with, something that confirmed how untalented in English poetry she was and threw it in her face how far uphill she had left to go.
It was a poem about Garin. She had started it because she wanted to be a wife who writes romantic poetry about her husband, a poem she could give to him and touch his heart. But as she read it halfway through, she stamped it with her closed fist.
“C’est une catastrophe.”
It occurred to her, gently swiveling in her stool, that Garin was just too much to write a poem about now. It would be so much easier, she felt, to write a poem to any other man. Tom, for instance. Her mind flooded forth with poetic lines she might write about Tom, to Tom. And though she didn’t write them, she shook her head at herself.
“J’ai tellement à lui dire, à Tom.”
And she sighed.
But to give a poem to Tom would be humiliating. Would he even read it? Would he even keep it? Would he ever write a poem to her?
“Hors de question!”
And this caused her to imagine what would happen if she stopped contacting Tom. She knew what would happen; he wouldn’t contact her either, and they would part without ceremony, without goodbyes, a fade away on this, her meatiest, tastiest, craziest affair.
She set her pencil and notebook aside on the counter, closed it, and cringed at herself. Just the notion that Tom wouldn’t care about her absence from his life made her wet, not figuratively; she was now turned on and making a real spot in her panties.
She opened her phone, logged into her infamous sidedick app, and found her messages to Tom. How embarrassing. Forget giving him a poem; her messages to him were truly humbling. Never mind reading what she had said to him, a quick scroll through and anyone would see she was the vast majority of the messages, always the initiator, always larger blocks of text.
Sometimes Tom didn’t bother to respond for days. Sometimes she would have to text him a second, third, or fourth time to get so much as an emoji thumb in reply.
Springing up from her stool, she fled up the stairs to the shower. She would need to finger herself, or she’d be pent up with these thoughts the rest of the day.
⚜
