Irondequoit, New York
July, 1999
I have dinner at Wendy’s apartment where she slips poison into my otherwise harmless glass of Merlot. Unaware of the deadly additive, I sip the wine, carefully squeeze it between my teeth and proclaim that it needs a year more in the bottle, maybe two. She smiles and tops my glass off, “I don’t think so,” she says. A metallic voice that only I can hear sings apology instructions that I repeat verbatim.
“Look Wendy, I’m really sorry.” She nods and plays with a rogue lamb chop. “I don’t know what came over me, but I promise it won’t happen again. Forgive me?”
“Maybe this time. I shouldn’t, you know. You are a complete bastard.”
I can’t deny the obvious and blow a wet kiss in her direction. I hear a shoe drop to the floor and feel nylon-wrapped toes exploring my calves. My head swims. I look at my watch. That swims as well. Holy shit! Doesn’t it swim right up my arm and around my shoulder where it leaps from my body into a overflowing gravy boat, splashing waves of gravy over Wendy’s clinging dress. She inspects the mess but ignores it.
“It will be hours before taking effect,” she says mysteriously. “We have plenty of time.” The food vanishes from my plate. The wine in my glass suddenly drains, and with the aplomb of a conqueror she sweeps the china, glasses, lamb gravy and wilting salad aside and pulls me onto the table.
“I need you inside me!” she demands. The vegetables on the floor flee in panic to avoid the galloping dining room table.
Next morning I lie in a coma, eyes staring straight up, my mouth slightly open, a small, viscous stream of nasty-smelling saliva flowing from one side. Nancy stares at me with a quizzical expression that suggests I must look incredibly stupid. I have no idea how I ended up here.
She says, “Can you hear me?” I can, but my mouth isn’t cooperating. “A little trouble with your love life?” All I can do is blink. “I thought so,” she says.
Nancy calls 911, but not before inviting the whole damn neighborhood in for a private showing. An ambulance eventually shows up. A paramedic gives me a quick examination, asking me questions I’m in no position to answer.
“Do you know what happened to him?” he asks Nancy at the same time he pulls my eyelid down and scouts around my eyeball.
“No idea,” she says. “He must have gone out somewhere last night, and when I woke up this morning, surprise! There he is—my future ex-husband.” She says the last three words an inch away from my face.
“Well, judging by the nasty smell, the pupil dilation, I’d say he was poisoned.”
“Interesting,” Nancy says. She seems much too clinical about the whole ordeal.
“It is indeed. Symptoms suggest physostigmine. Very rare. Seems someone’s an Agatha Christie fan.”
“Will he make it?”
“He’ll pull through—just enough to make him sick. But he’ll be down for a few days.”
Nancy treats the medical team to half-caf-decaf cappuccino and sticky buns as I wait drooling in the tenement section of the ambulance.
There are no available beds at Rochester General, so they sling me into a hammock in the corner of the employee’s cafeteria. Someone hooks up an IV; someone else shoves a freezing bed pan under my ass, and there I lie for days with no control whatsoever over my bodily functions. Even in my sorry condition I’m aware that this really sucks.
Three days later I finally have enough energy to move, and finding no nurse call button, hop out of my hammock in search of an attendant or the business office. I have no clothes or even a reasonable pair of pajamas, only this ridiculous hospital gown that my butt shows through. Even so, I manage to call a taxi and arrive at Wendy’s apartment at four in the morning. She answers the door in a translucent negligee.
“So what the hell was all that about,” I say, trying to sound a lot angrier than I really am. “You could have killed me!”
“Look I’m really sorry,” she says. “I don’t know what came over me, but I promise it won’t happen again. Forgive me?”
On impulse, I rip open her negligee revealing a body completely devoid of flesh and organs. From her neck, a column of bones leads to an empty rib cage, where a pitifully small heart-shaped clock dangles dangerously from a jetty of bone. I check underneath my own hospital gown and find much the same thing.
Must be the drugs.
She quickly closes her negligee, and before I can say another word she launches into a tirade, screaming at the top of her lungs, “You screwed her! I can’t believe you actually fucked that little tramp!” Lights go on in neighboring houses as Wendy follows up the ranting in a blur of punches, jabs, and scratches that leave my face a bloody, welted mass. “And on our vacation!”
She turns, runs back into the house and moments later launches a maelstrom of gifts, cards, letters and miscellaneous memorabilia—all the detritus from our failed relationship—from her upstairs bedroom window. She caps it off with an appropriate epithet, “Ass hole. Screw you!”
The porch light goes out leaving me standing there in the dark with my ass still peeping out and my self-esteem no where in sight.
“Forgive?” I yell back to her dark window. “Maybe this time.” And as I turn away I just can’t resist a parting jab, “But I broke up with you first.”
I turn and stumble down the sidewalk from her porch, leaving a trail of blood behind and sit down at the curb. As if the gods were watching, it immediately starts pouring. Hail the size of moth balls follows a few minutes later. And then of course, the thunder and lightning.
“Great,” I say. “Just fucking great.”
Copyright © 2010 Donald W. Bacon
21-December-2010
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