Goldilocks | 26 August 2021
Once alone in the place, I couldn’t help myself from touching absolutely everything. It was almost a compulsion. Why was I like this? I had to know what that fabric texture felt like, what the view looked like through the antique telescope, what the drying herbs hanging from the window tasted like, and what the cold weight of the jewelry on the dresser felt like. I prayed there weren’t cameras in there.
BNR Response
The old wooden floors groaned under my bare feet and startled me, the first noise that had broken the silence of my invasion. This moment represented the culmination of hours that stacked back-to-back, blurring into sleepless days of obsession over the past seven weeks since I found her key on my husband’s key ring. I wasn’t a fool. I knew my husband damn well, just as any woman who’s paying any attention at all knows her husband. I couldn’t put my finger on it…was it something at the lab? Was it concern over tenure? The trip we had to cancel because of my unexpected promotion?
I felt a sharp ringing in my ears the night it happened. I was rinsing the “nice” wine glasses as we awaited company for dinner, and as he stood in our pantry-cum-wine cellar he absent-mindedly called to me, “Alex?” He said, half focused, “Do we want the Petite Syrah or the Malbec? Do we want jammy?” He emerged from the dank and got unexpectedly caught in my eyes…I wasn’t drifting away, my laser focus frightened him. As he realized I had been just a mere few steps away, he became befuddled. “Why didn’t you answer me?” I remained frozen, squeezing the spindly stem of a goblet until it nearly snapped. “You didn’t ask me. You asked Alex. Who the fuck is Alex?”
The impending arrival of our guests coupled with my roast beeping at me from the oven bought him some time. It bought me some time as well. We both played it off during dinner, returning to the old habits that evolve after ten years of life with another human. As we cleaned up after supper the air was thick as if we were strangers, each expecting the other to mention her but neither of us doing so. After a few days, routine returned. But I’m no fool.
It was easy to figure it all out. It was all so goddamned cliché. An address scrawled on the back of Brophy Bros. calling card, water ring across the top. Late night text messages and mysterious calls from “work”. Everything shy of red Revlon on his monogram. Alex Ainsley. Some internet sleuthing, if you could even call it that, gave me enough fodder to last a lifetime: single white female, never married, 46, dog lover, blah blah blah. Worked at the University, there you go. Lived off of East Beach and was a regular at the coveted Opera Gala. Turns out this bitch made her rounds at all the non-profit events. Apparently, she’d donate a kidney if it got her at Steve Martin’s table. While it was only a minor society circuit compared to nearby LA, she certainly wore the rug thin therein. This woman had been photographed at least once a week over the last few years, after she had secured the Endowed Chair in Bioscience and was able to round out the diversity quotient for the bigger named charities.
I hated her success. I hated her confidence. I hated that she had incredible fucking taste! My fingers danced across the silks, satins, and sequins hanging idly in the spare room she devoted to her clothes. Fabrics that only the wealthy can afford to actually live in and also maintain. “Must be nice!” I said aloud, relishing the edge I heard in my own voice. She had left a window open on her way out this morning, and the breeze was delicious and brought the music of the harbor with it. The light was cloudy and orange in the kitchen and waded around the tops of orchids on the brushed concrete countertop. There was only a glass left in the 1992 bottle of Pinot. Stag’s Leap. Bitch.
I knew I wouldn’t find what I was looking for. It didn’t stop me. I was looking for why. Why her. My forehead felt hot and I felt myself drop into a chair. Fucking Le Corbusier. I was spinning, physically reeling with the unravelling of my marriage and all that goes into binding those ties. I was in what some might consider a dangerous place: I knew it was over, I was full of very real rage, and I had nothing to lose. “Let the bridges I burn light the path ahead,” I thought I’d read somewhere, and I cackled as I reached for a fresh wineglass and pulled the Pinot cork free with my teeth. Three quick swigs later and I had found the remainder of her collection, I jostled a sleepy bottle of Fiddlehead from its dust and rustled through her drawers until I found the corkscrew.
I found her stereo system and flipped on the turntable. The ache of Billie Holiday swam in the air around me, “Oh my man I love him so, he’ll never know. All my life is just despair, but I don’t care.” I glided into that gilded closet, shimmying out of my boyfriend jeans and bathing myself in a slinky kimono. I retrieved my glass and danced down the hall, opening the receding floor-to-ceiling glass doors and bringing the sea air into the living room. I walked out onto the patio and found myself next to the telescope. I quickly noticed there was a little set-up here, this is where she brought her men to impress them: globe lights crisscrossed overhead, outdoor speakers brought Billie into the fresh with me, and a wine bucket half-full of lukewarm water was on a stand by the scope.
I leaned easily against the wooden railing, finished the second glass of cab, and gazed out at the boats in their slips, seagulls drifting on the breeze. “What’s the difference if I say, ‘I’ll go away!’ when I know I’ll come back on my knees someday…for whatever my man is, I’m his forever more.” “Well, fuck that noise,” I said as I sauntered back through Alex’s home. I refilled my glass and slid to the back of the house into the milky white light of her bedroom. I opened all the doors leading to yet another wrap-around porch, put my glass on the bedside table, and nestled into the down comforter…and waited. It was Alex’s turn to discover that someone’d been sleeping in her bed.