October 19 - Jealousy

Angie Miller Reede was born at 10.52 pm on August the seventh. Angelica, (for whom the baby was named), had been ambivalent about having the child from the moment she found out she was pregnant. She had hated the morning sickness, loathed the ache in her lower back and her ankles, and above all, abhorred the changes to her distended belly, the stretch marks, the heavy breasts filled with milk (Milk? Humans shouldn’t be full of something that can be found in the refrigerator, she often thought). Yet the moment Angelica Miller stopped screaming away her larynx in a hospital bed and looked over at the white-coated doctor so casually snipping away her baby’s umbilical cord, something else came over Angelica.

“No!” she cried out. “Give her to me.”

Startled, a nurse placed the mewling babe in her mother’s arms, and had to insist ten times before the child was relinquished to the overnight care unit. “You’ll suffocate your child if you sleep with her, Ms. Miller,” the nurse said again and again. Angelica thought it might be better to suffocate her child than leave it in the care of someone who wouldn’t be as diligent as she.

Indeed, when Angie Miller Reede arrived, wide-eyed and silent, to her parents’ home, Angelica wouldn’t let anyone else hold the baby. Not her parents, or Nick’s parents (even though, between the four of them, they had seen eight children reach adulthood). Nick, the anxious father, laughed uneasily when friends commented that the baby would only think it had one parent, because Angelica still hadn’t let him hold his offspring. At night, Angelica would stay up as late as possible, watching her baby sleep. She learned to jolt from her sleep if Nick crept from their bed in the middle of the night, tiptoeing to his daughter’s cradle in the hopes of getting a moment of her time.

“No!” Angelica would snap. “Nick, you won’t know how to hold her properly.”

Nick frowned with worry. “I won’t know if you never let me.”

But Angelica was unmoved. She guarded over her child jealously, frightening other mothers from playgroup once Angie was a bit bigger with her insistence that none of their children were healthy enough or smart enough to vie for Angie’s attention. She shadowed her on the playground, even taught her a secret, whispered language that Nick tried to catch onto but couldn’t, so Angie’s first words were in this strange, foreign tongue. Angelica ensured that no one but she could answer her child’s needs.

“I don’t understand,” Nick said to his own mother, who had watched the drama from the sidelines. Priscilla Reede crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair and just shook her head.

“Jealousy makes people do crazy things,” she said, and then sipped her tea.

* * * * *

Matthew Diaz adored his wife. He had adored her from the moment they began dating in the twelfth grade, adored the way the sun played on her auburn hair, adored a shadow across her cheek, adored her wide, white-toothed smile. They had adored one another all through college – both had chosen to attend a state school together lest they risk not being accepted to the same, more prestigious private institute – and everyone had smiled secretly and known that they were the kind of couple to beat the odds, to graduate from puppy love to marriage.

Matthew adored his wife on their wedding day, watching her trail down an aisle of grass in her parents’ backyard in a short white sundress, daisies in her fists, and he often thought, even years after they were married, when he woke beside her, that she still looked as beautiful as a bride.

Katie gave him one, two, three children in rapid succession, and at first, he assumed that her lack of attention towards him was the normal wear and tear on any couple adapting to having other human beings thrust into their loving twosome. Matthew thought the kids were fun, and had no problem taking on his half of the parenting. As time went on, though, he noticed that Katie stopped devoting her attention to him as she had in the old days, and doted on her children in a way that went beyond being a good soccer mom. She no longer had time for their Saturday night dates out, or to go for romantic walks with him, to the museum or to the movies.

“Only if it’s G-rated,” she would say absently when he suggested the latter, smiling dotingly at where Alex, their youngest, was playing with legos.

“What about just the two of us, Katie?” he asked, reaching out an arm to her waist but she slipped away easily and knelt by her child. Matthew stifled a flare of jealousy. He couldn’t be jealous of his own kids! He shook his head at the ridiculous thought.

But he was, he realized, and not just for the way they demanded all of Katie’s time; they ate up her affection for him to. When he realized he couldn’t remember the last time she had shared his bed, it was the last straw. He stormed home from work, found his wife washing dishes at the kitchen sink while the children played two rooms over in his study, and he shoved her roughly against the counter. He hiked up her skirt and took her right there, a hand over her mouth. Katie’s eyes popped and she tried to nip at his palm, but she didn’t dare cry out because then the children would come running from the other room to see what was wrong.

After that, it was the only way Matthew could have sex with his wife. She never made time for it otherwise, and she began to hide from him when he came home from work. When she announced, two months later, that she was pregnant again, Matthew didn’t understand the satisfaction in her eyes. A few months after that, she began to show, and Katie wielded her growing belly like a weapon, shoving it towards the bursting erection held in by his pants with satisfaction. Matthew retreated, and fumed as he watched his wife leave for a museum with the children. They had won again.

* * * * *

Nitza loved to go dancing with her girlfriends. When she and Tom began dating, he thought it was adorable. It showed she was independent; it showed she had good friendships; it showed she was comfortable maintaining a life separate from their identity as a couple – all good things. Tom had dated one too many women who only wanted to cling on, and it didn’t interest him at all. Nitza loved her nights out dancing, and she’d giggle as she dressed, a broad smile on her face. It piqued his curiosity. A few months after they began dating, Tom dared to ask.

“What if I come along dancing tonight?”

Nitza froze in the middle of fastening in an earring. “You must be joking,” she said, lowering her chin, the sign that she was annoyed. Tom laughed and said, “Of course. Joking.”

The preparations for the Friday night dancing always took hours. Nitza would select what to wear, which jewels to accompany which materials, which heels, which jewelry. Soon, Tom grew to despise the sight of a lipstick tube, grew nauseated every time he walked past the makeup counters at the department store. He couldn’t believe she was dressing up for her girlfriends alone.

He began following, after she had left her apartment at night. He would wait at the coffee shop on the corner, and when he saw her saunter past in her heels, he would slink along in the shadows, ducking back if she glanced over her shoulder. Did she frown worriedly, that one time? Had she seen? He became more cautious. He would watch her enter the club – always the same one – with her girlfriends, arm-in-arm, five abreast, like a line of Siamese twins, but he didn’t dare enter. Once, he screwed up his courage and went inside, expecting the worst. He blinked in astonishment once his eyes had adjusted. It really was just her and her girlfriends, her fingers wiggling in the air as she held her arms up over her head and swayed back and forth to the rhythm, laughter erupting forth as one of the girls leaned in to say something in her ear. Tom stood up straighter and stared in astonishment. He saw her eyes narrow.

“Shit!” he yelled, startling a boyfriend and girlfriend – or perhaps they had just met – who were grinding against one another. He pushed to the door, made it to the sidewalk and vomited heavily. The revelers on the sidewalk picked their way around him without losing step. “Oh shit, man,” one guy said, but he, too, walked swiftly on.

Tom turned, wiping his mouth, and saw Nitza, hands on hips. “You followed me here? “ she shrieked. “You followed?”

Tom tried to mumble something, but she stabbed a finger towards him. “You don’t trust me,” she said. Her eyes changed from anger to pity. “Go back to your apartment, Tom. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

Tom wept as he walked home.

* * * * *

Every night after work, Marlene’s husband went to the one bar in town to hang out with his buddies. Tony, the bartender, Jack who worked at the diner in town and always came in for a few cold beers after he turned off the hot stoves and the grill for the night, Marty who worked construction on an irregular basis whenever he could convince one of the wives in town to feel sorry for him and hire him to do an odd job or two. Every night, Marlene would wait for Jim to come home, and think bitterly, “Tony knows more about my husband’s life than I do.”

She understood that he didn’t go because he was friends with the guys who frequented Tony’s Bar. He went because he was in love with the green glass bottle of beer he drank there. Oh, she had seen the way that he caressed his beer bottle, his thumb flicking up and down on the sweat beads that formed on a hot summer’s evening.

She didn’t remember the last time he had made her sweat.

That wasn’t even enough. When he came home from Tony’s, he still didn’t crawl into her arms, still didn’t plant a kiss on her lips, nipple, hand. “Anywhere!” she moaned to herself. No; he opened up the fridge, where a collection of those smirking, gleaming green bottles waited at perpetual attention for his whims. And he would come home, and the crack hiss of the bottle opening would scratch at her ears, and she’d run upstairs to their bedroom so he didn’t hear her cry.

She opened the fridge to see if there was any chocolate. That might make her feel better. Her stomach heaved when she saw those self-satisfied bottles just waiting.

“I hate you!” she screamed at them, giving the base of the fridge a little kick. “I hate you I hate you I hate you!”

And one by one, she took every last beer bottle in the fridge and smashed them out the kitchen window onto the pavement below, each shattering with a satisfying spasm of glass and liquid and foaming froth, semen exploding at the moment of orgasm. Only after, did Marlene catch herself, both hands holding onto the windowsill, her breath coming in heavy gasps.

Irrational, of course, what she had done. How could she be so jealous of an inanimate object? But she was, she realized with a soft cry, she was. When Jim came home, hours later, and found his wife sitting there, he couldn’t decide whether his wife was laughing or crying.

* * * * *

Monica loved watching her boss. The way he walked with such suave confidence, the way that his pant suits hung perfectly on his svelte but muscular frame, the stern voice he used with clients who came to the office and thought they could get the better of him. And of course, she loved watching because she could picture the naked flesh underneath, the dark curly hair on his chest that she loved to run her fingers through. She found her eyes trailing down to the crotch of his pants and had to keep from smiling at the image that floated to mind of what lay under the fabric.

Monica had been fucking Paul for six weeks now. It was always in a hotel, always quick, always tinged with the faintest hint that what they were doing was wrong, illicit, dirty, but that hadn’t stopped her yet. She found herself pausing in the middle of typing up a report, caught in the reminiscence of the way his hands had caressed her, or the way his lips had stolen a kiss just yesterday morning in the conference room when no one was looking. She bit her lip now until it bled, shivering. She couldn’t concentrate at work anymore, couldn’t stop thinking about when the next time would be. Jumping up from her chair, Monica thought to go to his office on a pretense, find a way to ask him. God, just the sight of him would get her through tonight!

Paul wasn’t in his office, the swiveling leather chair standing pompous and empty, the awards lined up in a compulsive row on his desk. Monica sighed and turned to go, and then caught sight of the smiling, silver-framed photos of his wife and family that flooded the space.

Why hadn’t he taken them down? She thought angrily. Surely, surely, these six weeks between them had been so magical that it was time for him to start thinking about leaving his wife. There was no way that what he and his wife shared could have been as intense and pure as everything they did, no matter that her six weeks were far shorter than Jane Horowitz’ eighteen years.

She voiced this to him two nights later at the hotel, clutching the grimy hotel sheet up to her breast and looking at him with tears in her eyes.

“You’ll leave her soon, right?” she begged, her voice trembling. Paul laughed as he pulled up his trousers, tapped her on the nose.

“You can’t be jealous, kitten. You’re the one who’s cuckolding my wife.”

But not the one who gets to sleep in your arms tonight, Monica thought bitterly. Oh the thought burned, it burned, it burned…

Paul saw her expression, frowned. “You can’t be jealous, kitten,” he scolded. “Or you’re not cut out to handle this the way I thought you were.”

After he was gone, she threw all the pillows and bedding off the bed, then tore down the one, glum painting that hung on the wall as an afterthought. Jealous? Jealous? She sobbed on the piss-scented carpet of that shitty motel room long into the night.