Opportunity

Margot sits at the table smoking a cigarette. Wisps of smoke curl up from the burning end of the tobacco-stuffed paper roll. Margot is dark and small like a doll; her hair is pulled back into two tiny bunches just behind her shell-like ears. Margot is dressed in black and white with splashes of red. She is bored. She has been waiting an hour or more in this kitchen.

A half-read book lies face down on the table, the spine springing up, making a tent of the pages. Margot stares out of the kitchen window at the rows of windows across the courtyard at the centre of this apartment block. Her husband is outstaying his welcome in the living room, talking to Chris who wanted to be somewhere else hours ago.

Margot isn’t the world’s best-looking woman, but she is smart and stylish and cute in her doll-like clothes and secretary glasses. She knows she could do better than Ian, who has a head full of conspiracy theories and whom she has to carry around with her out of a sense of obligation.

“Ian.”

There is no response from the living room. Margot’s barely raised, enthusiasm-deadened voice doesn’t carry through and can’t be heard above the sound of the tv show the men are watching.

“Ian.”

She hears him laughing like a fool at whatever piece of nonsense has just played on the screen in front of him. She imagines Chris with his attention fixed on the tv, counting the minutes he has already wasted sitting there that morning. She knows how many minutes there are. She has counted them herself.

He walks into the kitchen, goes to the fridge and gets himself a beer.

“It’s early,” she says.

“Not that early.”

“Just cause, huh?”

“You could say.”

He leans against the work surface, folds his arms across his front. His right arm hinges at the elbow, resting in the nook made by the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. His right hand holds the bottle of beer which is sweating in the warmth of the kitchen.

Margot has her back to him, but she doesn’t want to turn around. She likes the feel of his eyes on the back of her head, roaming over the back of her body. She knows that if she turns around the spell will be broken.

She imagines that he is mentally undressing her and it gives her goosebumps. The hairs on the back of her neck and along her arms stand to attention. She imagines his breath, cold against the nape of her neck, blown out in a thin stream from between his pursed lips.

“Ian.”

She says it louder this time. She hears him get up off the couch; hears the shuffle of his feet as he makes his way from the living room to the kitchen.

He leans in the doorway.

“What?”

“We gotta go. We’re late.”

“You’re late, you mean.”

“Okay, I’m late. So’s Chris.”

Her husband leans around the doorframe to look at Chris.

“Chris, man, I’m sorry. You shoulda said.”

Chris is silent and still Margot doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t want to know his reaction.

“So we’re going, then?” Ian questions her with impatience, as though she is the one holding things up.

Margot stands and stubs out the cigarette in the red glass ashtray. The filter tip matches where her lipstick has come off onto the paper. She pulls her jacket from the back of the chair and picks her purse up from the floor.

“See you,” she says to Chris who is lean and leaning. Margot tries hard not to think how his hands would feel against her body.

Chris raises his bottle of beer to her but doesn’t speak. As Ian bids him farewell he takes a swig of beer so that he can’t answer him.

They leave the apartment. She knew last night that Chris hadn’t wanted them to stay. Ian had been too cheap to get a cab home, so they had caught the train with Chris and sat up until too late, or too early, drinking Chris’ booze.

“You drank all his booze,” she says now, as they head down the hill to the station.

“You were drinking too.”

“There was over half a bottle left when he went to bed. It was still only half done when I went to bed. There’s none this morning.”

“What’s it to ya?”

“You drank all his fucking booze, you cheap fuck.”

Margot has stopped in the street. Her voice is rising in volume and pitch. It isn’t the booze. It isn’t even his cheapness. It’s everything. She wants nothing more than to walk away from him, to take a different train, to get home after him if that’s what it takes. She doesn’t want to sit next to him on the train. She doesn’t want to feel his leg against hers or hear his laboured breathing.

There is silence between them now. Ian is looking at her, just staring and staring, then he shakes his head and walks off.

Margot stays where she is. Back up the hill and across the way, she knows she can catch a train on another line that will get her to where she wants to go. She watches Ian head down the hill, sees the back of his head, the weird shape of his skull.

She flings her arms wide and throws her head back. She laughs at the sky.

“You dumb fuck!” she shouts after him, down the hill.

He is disappearing into the subway station. Margot stands there laughing to herself for a moment longer, then turns on her heel and walks back up the hill.

At the crossing, she sees Chris coming out of the apartment building. He is on his cell, laughing, apologising, animated. He hasn’t seen her standing across the street from him; the street that runs down the side of his building, with the fire escape that leads to the window to his room; the exit in his room protected by a grill, by bars, by a deadbolt lock.

Margot watches Chris walk across the street away from her, at right angles to her, heading down a different hill to the other subway station. She has two options now. She can go to the station where she knows that Ian will be waiting for her, thinking she will get over herself, thinking that she will turn up eventually and that everything will be okay, she won’t be shouting any more; or she can follow Chris down to the other station.

The marriage vows she made without thinking, the piece of paper she signed that bound her to him legally but not intrinsically, she knows that these are the things that should take precedence. She knows that she should honour the promises she made; that she should compromise again and work at this, keep it from falling apart completely. She knows this like a physics student knows the theory of particle acceleration

Margot also knows that she doesn’t want to keep working at this.

Standing on the swell of the hill, Margot doesn’t know if she wants to follow Chris and get into an explanation of why she’s there.

Just as she is about to turn and make her way back down the hill to where her husband will be waiting, letting trains come and go from the station without attempting to get onboard, she sees Chris return and stand at the opposite corner, waiting for the signal to change.

“Margot?” he shouts across to her.

“Hi.”

“Did you forget something?”

The signal changes and he walks across the road. There is never any traffic on the side street, so she crosses as well and they meet on the corner, at the apex of the triangle they were making.

“I left my wallet. Just came back to pick it up. What did you leave?”

He is walking away from her, towards the door to the apartment building, talking to her over his shoulder, smiling.

She follows him into the building, through the inner door and up in the elevator.

“Where’s Ian? Did he make you come back up on your own?”

Margot doesn’t speak, she lets him fill the silence with questions and breathless laughter. She follows him out of the elevator and along the corridor to the apartment. Chris lets himself in and she follows him there, too.

Margot stands in the hallway, uncertain why she’s there, how she got to be there, why she isn’t on a train with her husband.

Chris goes through to the living room, finds his wallet and comes back down the hallway towards her.

“You not looking for your stuff?”

“I didn’t forget anything.”

“Oh.”

They are standing opposite each other in the brightly lit hallway with its cream painted plasterboard walls and its blonde wood floor boards inlaid with ebony or mahogany or some dark, mysterious wood.

Margot looks at him and she knows that she would let him do anything to her. In the same moment that she knows that, she also recognises that Chris isn’t interested. She stands in the hallway, feeling as though she is naked, as though she has thrown her arms wide open again, but not as she did outside on the hill. She feels like she has sacrificed something by following him up here, by standing here in the hallway with him, wordless and heavy with paralysis.

She can see from the awkward way that Chris is still holding his wallet up to show that he has found it that he wants to go, to continue his day. Something prevents him from saying excuse me to her, though. It’s something almost like obligation.

Eventually the stillness and the silence is broken.

“I’m sorry I…”

“Yes, of course…”

“It’s just…”

“I know…”

They are awkward with each other now, there in the hallway. Eye contact is broken. The spell is broken. She would have let him do anything to her.

Chris starts to walk towards her. His hands are partly held out in front of him, as though he is going to usher her out of the apartment; as though she is a mildly inappropriate intruder.

“I’d better go and catch up with Ian,” she says. “He’ll be waiting at the station.”

“Okay.”

They go out into the corridor. Margot hovers, uncertain whether to linger, whether to make her way out of the building with Chris.

He pauses in the process of double locking the door and looks at her.

“You’re sure you didn’t forget something?”

“No. I didn’t forget anything.”

“Okay.”

As he locks the door, she can see him trying to work out why she’s there and whether it’s worth asking. She sees the moment when he decides that he doesn’t want to know. He wants to get on with his day. He doesn’t want a dark, small doll’s thoughts rattling around in his head.

He pockets his keys and checks again that he has his wallet, then smiles at her.

“Shall we?” he asks.

They make their way down the back stairs, which are narrow and less well used than the elevator or the front stairs. He walks down behind her, and she knows that he isn’t looking at her.

As they step out into the sunshine on the street again, she turns to say goodbye. He holds a hand up in a wave, flipping it back at the wrist.

“Later,” is all he says.

The signal changes for him and he’s off and away across the road before Margot can say anything in reply.

She sets off down the hill, knowing that stored up trouble is waiting for her underground.

© J R Hargreaves November 2006