Torsade Literary Space An Odd Man Out (part six)
The Resident
Chapter Four
An Odd Man Out
[rerunning the last several entries to help readers catch up, because I haven’t added to this story for months]
“Look at the little cups and saucers! John! I love pink roses! Can I have both kinds of cake?”
Claudie was better. John asked his burning question. “What Billy Joel song?”
“The one on the radio.”
Aura brought An Innocent Man, and those were the songs they danced to, ate to; in their fair isle sweaters, said goodbye to…the kind people of Oathbreach Farm.
But not goodbye. Claudie started a class after the holiday break. “I’m going to learn to work at a hotel.”
Why? Did those people talk you into it? I thought you didn’t need to work. These, and something more sinister, that she wanted a failsafe to this marriage, in case she stopped standing him, reduced John to answering, “Uh huh.”
“I did agree, I know. I’m not a hugely disciplined person. And I have John.”
Their phone was on the kitchen wall. He was in the shower, using a credit card, reconstituting a bar of soap with each scraping added to the dish.
This might be a brilliant idea…
Then his wife, and her affair with someone she’d met at Oathbreach, stilled his hand.
He began to scrape furiously.
“Gemma, I know. I’ll sound awful to you, but they can’t undo it, can they? They’re stuck with me whether I survey for them or not. Anyway, they have plenty of… Okay, that. I would never tell him.”
A long pause. A different pause, somehow, than waiting for the other person to stop talking.
A lower voice: “Okay, yes, he is in the apartment. Um…bathroom? That doesn’t mean he’s hearing me.”
John emptied the card, looked up to meet Claudie’s eyes. She had the phone cord pulled all the way to the bathroom. “Can you hear what I’m saying to my friend?”
“No.”
“I’m always careful. I’m always trying.” Her voice faded on the way back.
Gemma was a girl’s name, though. He felt he’d never heard it, but felt again that on PBS, the British shows his mother had watched in the 70s…
He could almost believe in a Fawlty Towers actress, or a Poldark one, a subsumed recollected Gemma.
At a later point, when you could look up every idle question’s answer on the internet, he would have tidied the loose thread and put Gemma away. First—before confronting that his wife was not dating a classmate.
He took his soapy MasterCard to the kitchen sink.
“Why doesn’t the shower clean itself?” Claudie asked. “That is actually strange.”
“It’s like lard. Soap. What’s left after the suds is waterproof.”
“I guess that’s not one hundred percent true,” he added, to her disbelief. “It dissolves in water, but it takes extra time.”
She went off, returned, after he’d heard the shower running. “But why?”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Oh, she’s Aura’s… She’s Aura’s friend.”
42
Tithonians
An Odd Man Out (part one)
(2022, Stephanie Foster)
Welcome! Questions?