For Mi Dya U

Jeanne turned and smiled at her lunch guests. Not long before this charade was over.

She held the first two plates – salmon roulade, rocket leaves, a drizzle of balsamic reduction – in either hand as she approached the huge cedar dining table beneath their kitchen’s weathered eaves.

Her husband, James Bassett, looked round at her fondly as she approached the table, his glasses sliding slightly down his nose. He’d started sweating already. But then, that was hardly surprising when you were forty pounds overweight.

“Here we go”, Jeanne announced with a forced grin.

She set a plate down in front of Dave’s girlfriend, a blonde twig in her early thirties who looked like she hadn’t eaten a full meal in years. Dave had left his wife, Caroline, and two daughters for the Twig a few months ago: this Saturday lunch party was their first public outing. Dave was an enormously rich management consultant who was currently paying for his ex-wife Caroline’s therapy. To say nothing of a second house, two more cars and soon – Jeanne was sure – another family with the Twiglet.

Moving to the other end of the table, Jeanne put the other plate down in front of her university friend, Sally. Sally gave her a conspiratorial wink, her cheeks wrinkling into crows’ feet under her delicately-applied blusher as she did so. Clearly this first meeting with Dave’s new girlfriend was as trying for her as it was for Jeanne. As Jeanne straightened up from the table she noticed Sally’s immaculate bell perm, carefully dyed, had been cut long to cover the wrinkles gently emerging around her neck.

Jeanne turned back to the kitchen area to fetch the next two plates, her heels clacking on the slate floor. There were six of them in all for lunch: Jeanne and her husband Bassett; Dave and the Twig whose name Jeanne couldn’t remember; and Henry and Sally, other friends from university.

Apart from the Twig, they’d all known each other for more than twenty years. Why the Twig had to come and ruin their vibe, she didn’t know. But affairs happen, she told herself as she reached the vast expanse of Californian Oak that was the centre island of her kitchen. As she picked up the next two starter plates, she remembered Henry’s hands pulling off her jeans in that country house hotel near Doncaster. Those hands, rough from farm-work and sailing, reaching hungrily for her body. Her body tightening at his expert, delicate touch, his boyish, greying fringe on her throat as he kissed her breasts. How they lay on the sheets, sweating and panting, after the hottest sex she’d had in years – since the last time she’d fucked him, that is.

Now Henry sat at her dining table with his wife. And her husband James smiled across the table at them unknowingly from his perch in the near corner.

Jeanne turned back to the table with the next two plates, and set them down in front of Dave and Henry. Henry took a sip of Meursault and leaned further in to ask Dave’s Twig some question or other about her job in Dave’s financial consulting company. Henry pushed his fringe away from his face as he spoke in that flirtatious way she knew so well.

The last two plates – for her and Bassett. Her Lord and Master – not.

“There you are, my dear.”

“Thank you, my love.”

Those few words, banalities: banalities that hid, or perhaps captured perfectly, the boredom and slow accretion of resentment which characterised their marriage. Jeanne sat down at the far corner of the table and tried to listen to the Twig’s enthusiasm for Dave, and for her work.

“I mean, Dave’s so brilliant with the clients. He just looks at them and tells them what their KPIs are supposed to be for any project you care to mention – middle office, back office, trading – everything, really.”

Jeanne looked down at her roulade and the crust of the slice of sourdough bread on her side plate. She wondered idly whether she shouldn’t have left it in the oven for another ten minutes.

Then she thought of Henry’s tongue running down her belly, down into the trimmed nest of her pubic hair, between the thighs she’d tried so hard to keep slim. After that, she thought of sex with her husband, two or three times a year at best. Real ABC sex- anniversaries, birthdays and Christmas.

She tried to focus on the Twig, who was toying with her long blonde hair as Dave smiled at her proprietorially, his chins cascading into the space between his jaw and his shirt collar.

“And what’s your business, Henry?”, Twig enquired, turning the blonde strand she was twiddling towards Henry, who occupied the space on the bench between Jeanne and Bassett.

Wrecking marriages, thought Jeanne, and forked up the last of her salmon roulade.

“I run an organic farm in Shropshire,” Henry smiled. He looked at his wife, Sally, at the far end of the table. “Well, Sally runs it really. I just do what I’m told.”

“As if”, replied Sally in an attempt at the kind of bonhomie that suggested theirs was one of those marriages where they mucked along contentedly.

Jeanne knew the reality was different. Her first affair with Henry happened during their gap year as students in Chile. Fumbled, rough and clumsy sex up against the bathroom wall in a student residence somewhere in Santiago. The second, longer bout came when their children were toddlers and ended in silence and confusion after a few hurried episodes. The third bout between them had only ended a few years ago in that hotel near Doncaster when Jeanne begged Henry to leave Sally. He refused, she hit him, then swore at him and walked out.

This lunch was the first time they’d seen each other since. Four long years.

Conceived in part out of curiosity, Jeanne gave as reason for this gathering that they wanted to get to know Dave’s new girlfriend. In reality, though, none of them socialised that much any more. They all felt some vague obligation to see more of each other as the years passed and the shadows in their memories deepened.

Jeanne stood up and began to collect the starter plates. Bassett got to his feet manfully and offered round the Meursault, even though the next course – roast lamb, roast potatoes, carrots and runner beans – called for a red. Sally got to her feet and collected rest of the plates, following Jeanne over to the dark oak centre island.

“It’s all going marvellously, darling”, Sally offered.

Jeanne wondered if Sally knew what she’d done with Henry. She wondered if Henry might have blabbed in some moment of drunken sincerity. But nothing in Sally’s lined face, in her open, hazel eyes, her dyed chestnut fringe, gave anything away. Still, before too long it wouldn’t matter what Henry had told his wife, one way or the other.

Jeanne thanked Sally for her help, asking her to leave the plates on the centre island. She turned her attention to the lamb, which was still slow-roasting at 180 degrees in her Aga. For some reason, she thought of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels as she leaned down to take the meat out. She hadn’t given any thought to Marquez since she graduated all those years ago. Marquez had been the subject of her final year thesis – but Bassett’s proposal after graduation, their marriage and the arrival of their boys meant she’d not followed the cheery Colombian proto-Communist since. Quite why his name should come to her now was strange, to say the least.

She switched off the Aga and picked up the fork and carving knife.

As she carved the lamb against a butcher’s block on her centre island, she thought about her gap year. Back then, she’d loved to read, almost as a defence mechanism against any form of emotional hurt. She’d seen enough emotional hurt between her parents, who’d fought constantly but never divorced, her father’s many affairs with his students at Oxford notwithstanding.

The meat was perfect: unctuous, caramelised at the edges, falling off the bone. Jeanne took the roast potatoes and carrots out of the oven and tipped them on to a serving dish. She added the runner beans, trimmed and glazed with butter and olive oil, to the dish, shoving up the carrots to make room for them.

As she walked across the stone tiles towards the table with a stack of white China dinner plates for Bassett to serve from, she remembered reading Love in the Time of Cholera, Marquez’s masterpiece, seven times when she’d been in Chile. When she and Henry had first had sex, then not spoken about it afterwards. Not even touched each other. Just silence.

What was the opening line of that book again?

Honestly, Jeanne, she told herself. Today of all days, she was thinking about books after twenty-five years. When she was supposed to be busy with her guests – and everything she had planned for them.

Jeanne looked at Sally and made a carrying gesture. Sally put down her wine glass and got up to help. The two women walked from the centre island to the dining table, each with a serving platter – Jeanne’s piled high with steaming slices of roast lamb, Sally with the vegetables in their serving dish.

The men at the table all clapped and applauded, Dave’s Twig looking on amusedly. Jeanne noticed Dave’s amused, quizzical grin, almost as if he were above applauding someone else’s efforts even as his hands clapped in front of his overpriced “luxury” sports shirt. Jeanne had never liked Dave but – after he’d reduced dear Caroline to a state of extreme anorexia and put her in that tiny cottage to rot out the rest of her days – she hated him now. Arrogant bastard. Still, Karma would be served. And soon.

The two plates of food safely resting on the table, Bassett stood up to serve his guests. He used a carving-fork to spear the meat on to each plate and handed them round, motioning with his head at Dave in a sign that said, “Serve the wine.”

Dave nodded, stood up and, with a mock bow and an ingratiating smile, reached for the bottle of Cahors which had been opened to breathe at ten-thirty that morning.

Before she sat down, Jeanne cast a nervous glance at the refrigerator. The trifles she’d prepared carefully for pudding sat inside in two neat rows. She’d checked again this morning to make sure they’d survived the night.

Bassett called to her, “You must sit down, my love. You’ve been working all morning. Have a drink.”

Jeanne put her arms around the folds of fat that covered his midsection. “Bless you, my darling.”

She planted a kiss on his spherical cheek and took her place at the table. Dave handed her a glass of wine – again, that ingratiating, arrogant manner – and Bassett got to his feet to propose a toast:

“I hope it won’t seem bad form if I propose a toast, not just to our fragrant chef-ess – thank you, my darling – but to all of us?”

The table gave a general murmur of agreement and the ringing chine of fine crystal sang in the Wiltshire air. Then a general clattering of cutlery as people set to, Jeanne’s smile again fixed to her face as she thought about Bassett and his wringing wet proposal of marriage during a staged visit to the ruins of Reading Abbey.

She should have known, even then, that it would never work. But she was too damaged, too anxious to recognise how low her self-esteem was. How scared she was that, having finally attracted a man, he might leave her for some unknown reason – or, worse, that she might one day inhabit the same living hell of a marriage her parents had endured for almost fifty years if she were to displease him.

“Amazing lamb, Jeanne!” the Twig said brightly, her mouth stuffed with meat and potatoes.

Jeanne smiled absent-mindedly and looked down at her plate. She remembered the tears on Bassett’s cheeks, how the fat that would encase his features in the decades to come was already depositing under his chin.

In a sense, she had been complicit in Bassett’s grossesitude: terrified that he might leave her for another woman, she never thought of herself and her needs. He seemed to gain a stone every time he got promoted in his insurance job, his suits widening at the waist, the number on the collars of the shirts she washed every weekend rising in lock-step with his girth.

At first, she’d put her brief fling with Henry in Chile down to youth and stupidity, and to an extent that was true. But it wasn’t until their second affair, years later, that she was able to make unflattering comparisons between Bassett’s well-meant sexual ineptitude, and Henry’s expertise as a lover.

She shuddered inwardly, thinking of Bassett’s bulk covering her during their afternoon “rest” on Christmas day. Then she thought of how she’d arched backwards, crying out involuntarily in her joy exstasia to some God, as she came with Henry beneath her and inside her on a bed in that hotel just a few years ago. Orgasms. An unknown phenomenon in her marriage.

She should never have married Bassett. It had all been a mistake.

She stood up and walked round to Bassett’s chair, picking up the gilt-edged serving dish of roast lamb next to her husband and examining people’s plates for signs they might be ready for a second helping.

“Anyone for more?”

The men at the table all nodded their assent. Dave had scraped his plate clean of any scrap of food or gravy, his cutlery slung carelessly on the plate in anticipation of shovelling in more food. Bassett, who had been talking almost non-stop in his role as host, said he would have a little more. And Henry was still only half-way through his plateful, his movements when eating as slow and deliberate, as careful and precise, as they were in bed or on his farm.

Jeanne served the men slices of lamb. As she did so, she noticed that the Twig had hardly touched her food – and even then, Jeanne thought sourly, she’ll probably vomit what she’s eaten into the bushes outside the guest suite later that afternoon. Jeanne moved round the table to offer the Twig some more meat, realising she couldn’t even remember the woman’s name:

“Oh, no thanks. It’s delicious – I just couldn’t possibly. I’d better save some room for pudding.”

Jeanne smiled, and raised a quizzical eyebrow at Sally, who winked back.

“Yes please!”, said Sally loudly. “It’s gorgeous – just can’t say no.”

Jeanne heaped three slices of lamb on her friend’s plate, both of them knowing she wouldn’t finish it and that Sally had taken the extra food just to show the Twig how to behave. After she’d served Sally, Jeanne took the plate of meat back into the kitchen area, leaving it on the huge expanse of their oak centre island.

She looked back at the table, where meat coma and wine fug were beginning to weigh heavily on both the bellies and consciousness of her lunch guests. She saw Henry enthralling everyone with the tale of an eccentric who’d asked for a Big Mac in their farm shop, noted Sally’s muted but adoring gaze toward her husband, and the Twig fiddling with the gold pendant around her neck. She could tell the Twig wanted Henry as well.

Well, careful what you wish for.

As she rinsed some dishes, she thought about the hotel four years ago – when she’d asked Henry to consider leaving Sally. How she’d said her boys were nearly old enough and she was willing to leave Bassett. How Henry had smiled slightly, looked down and, after a pause, murmured the single word, “No.”

And then Jeanne lost it. Took a step towards him and punched him in the face and called him a fucking cunt. Kicked him until he curled up in a ball on the bed, then slid down the other side of the bed like the coward that he was, covering himself with the oversized, overstuffed pillows the hotel used to decorate its beds for new visitors.

Jeanne had turned and walked out of the hotel and driven home, her face red and neck pulsating with anger. Then she’d got as drunk as possible before Bassett came home. Mercifully the kids were away on some trip or other. Bassett asked her what was wrong, but she just shook her head and spent that night – and the next four nights – on the sofa before finally returning to their conjugal bed.

But all that was the past. And they were all together now – and it was high time Jeanne served dessert. Sally brought the dinner plates, thick with streaks of gravy, over to rest beside the sink.

“Are you all right, love?” she asked, the charm bracelet on her wrist falling down her forearm as she reached out to touch Jeanne.

“I’m fine. Just happy memories of us all together at Uni”, Jeanne answered. She smiled at Sally and stepped towards the refrigerator.

The trifles she’d prepared the night before were still there. The cream was perfect. There were two maraschinos on each. She withdrew the trifles for herself, Sally and the Twig, handing them to Sally and asking her to serve the ladies. Then she pulled out the others to serve the men herself. As she did so, she finally remembered the opening line of Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera:

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded Fermina Daza of the fate of unrequited love.”

– James W. Wood

Author’s Note: This began as a much longer piece of fiction before editorial comment persuaded me to significantly reduce the scene-setting and focus more closely on character and action, something I am working at quite intensely in my fiction at the moment. I have long loved Marquez’s work, and the opportunity to use his masterpiece as the fulcrum of a menacing take on middle-class morality was too good to resist.