Patricia Caspers
The Blue Victorian
Eden locates the Victorian two blocks from Midtown. She climbs the dim stairwell, and the scent of garlic, dough, and pizza sauce waft through the door as it closes behind her. The building had been beautiful once; she sees it in the carved, scratched banisters, the intricate, green wallpaper, torn, and patterned with painted moths.
She opens the envelope half expecting to find a skeleton key dangling from the end of the tarnished chain, but it’s a solitary silver key, shining new. Nik probably made a copy of their own key, and something tingles in Eden’s chest as she imagines Nik at the hardware store, waiting in line for the key maker, for Eden’s key.
She finds Nik’s door on the top floor. There’s an opaque window in the top half of the door, and the hinges complain as Eden turns the lock. She hears water splashing close by and Nik making kitchen noises at the end of the hall.
“Hello!” Nik calls, as Eden glances at the walls and takes in family photos, the light obscuring small faces.
“I’ll wait in here.” Nik says, tinging a spoon against porcelain.
Eden turns back to the door and sees a kind of foyer to the left, and inside, an IKEA chair, a small, battered table, from a yard sale, and a beaded reading lamp. As Nik said it would be.
On the other side of the foyer is a narrow door, stained dark with a round brass knob. Eden opens it and steps into lavender-scented steam. A large clawfoot tub fills with water. She kneels, pushes up her sleeve and touches her elbow to the bath. She sees lavender buds floating circles in the water and turns the silver tap with the H on it. Righty-tighty, she thinks. After a few seconds she turns off the cold, and the apartment is silent, except for her breath, which she tries to slow.
Breathe out as if you’re blowing up a balloon her therapist often tells her, and Eden does that now. It’s a big, red balloon, like the one her daughter Kendy wanted at the carnival last September, the one Eden wouldn’t let her have because of the birds, how they swallow bright colors that tangle in their bellies and starve. She remembers Kendy’s gulping cry and catches herself holding her breath. She whistles her lips and releases her breath slowly.
A cup of jasmine tea steeps on a stepstool beside the tub. She breathes the milder scent, closes her eyes, sits on the bath rug, and pulls off boots and socks, revealing her wide, pale feet. The bathroom looks like it hasn’t been renovated since the 1950s—pink tile with burgundy trim—and Eden loves the clashing colors, how the design was outdated for years before it became chic again. Who else had soaked in this tub? A lady of leisure? She snorts at the thought.
Once submerged, she hears Nik’s footsteps. She hears the chair settle under Nik’s weight, the scrape of the lighter against thumb, the gurgle of a bong. Eden waits for the smell of cat pee she remembers from the college dorms to find its way under the bathroom door, but when the scent arrives, it’s a solitary skunk wandering a forest.
“I should’ve left a bowl for you,” Nik calls through the door, softly, raspy.
“I’m good,” Eden says.
“We’re all good,” Nik says.
“Have you always had this hopeful view of humanity?” Eden laughs.
“Honestly, I have to work at it,” Nik says. “Every morning I remind myself that I want to be the kind of person who believes we are more than the choices we make.”
There’s a pause full of silence then, on both sides of the door.
“What will you read?” Eden asks, finally.
“See if you recognize it,” Nik begins.
“From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.”
The poem reminds Eden of last summer when she and Michael bicycled through Capay Valley with Kendy in a baby seat attached to Michael’s handlebars. He doused Eden and Kendy with sunscreen but refused any for himself claiming his skin was too brown to burn, though Eden knew that wasn’t true. As they rode, Kendy pointed at cows, sheep, and pigs, and made their animal sounds until she grew cranky and made her own animal sounds. They stopped at a self-service roadside stand, bought peaches with sweaty dollar bills they tucked into a locked metal box, and then picnicked in the shade of the orchard. Kendy chose her own peach and carried it with her until it was a puddle in her hands, its juices covering her face, clothes, hair, and by twilight Eden swore Kendy would smell of the sweet fruit forever. Peach, Peachy Baby, and Frutita were the nicknames Michael gave Kendy for months after.
Eden’s thoughts wander back to the poem as her brown hair floats on the surface of the water and tiny air bubbles rise, tickle her scalp. Though she can’t see them, Eden pictures Nik as they read, leaning forward, elbows on knees, the book in both hands. Sometimes Nik pushes their glasses up the ridge of their nose when they read, and Eden thinks she hears those slight pauses in the poem, imagines Nik’s long fingers touching black frames, the tips of their fingers, the pink lines of their knuckles.
*
The dogs bark furiously at Eden until she opens the door, and lab and dachshund, equally greedy for attention, rush at her, pressing their noses into her body. Her own nose is numb from the cold, but she smells that Michael built the first fire of the season. He shoos the dogs and kisses her hello.
“Did you get a new perfume?” he asks, nuzzling his nose into her hair. “Is it eau de—weed?”
“Oh, I—”
“Was the Lyft driver baked again?”
“I think she was, actually,” Eden laughs. “What’s for dinner?”
Eden knows, of course. Wednesday is grilled cheese. Michael always makes hers with tomato slices.
“Surprise!” Michael said. “I ordered pizza from that new place on Q.” The plates are already out, and he’s made a salad, sliced carrots for Kendy. Her drawings and crayons are piled at the far end of the table.
“New place?” Eden asks.
“The one you said you wanted to try, next to that blue Victorian.”
Eden feels a blush clawing her neck.
“In fact, you have a doppelgänger. We saw someone who could have been your sister. Didn’t we, Kendy-Bendy?” he asks, turning toward a polka-dotted elephant sprinting from her bedroom and cradling something red in her arms.
“I said, ‘Hi Mama,’” Kendy said, jumping. “Hi, Mama. Helllooooo …”
“That wasn’t Mama, sweetie,” Eden says, hoping it’s true. “Mama was working—what do you have there?”
“Gwobo!” Kendy shouts and runs away patting the balloon against the dark curls on her head.
Michael shrugs. “I couldn’t say no,” he says.
“The albatrosses wish you had,” Eden says.
“Don’t be dramatic,” he says kissing her cold mouth again. “We’re a long way from the ocean, and you know I love birds as much as I love you.”
*
The lights are off, and they’re side-by-side in bed on separate devices, their faces glowing an underwater blue. After they take turns reading Kendy sleepy-time stories, after Eden washes the brights and scrolls Twitter, and Michael gathers the city chickens in for the night, lets the dogs out one last time, and watches a documentary about homesteading, that’s when he turns to Eden.
“What does it mean?” he asks.
Eden raises a single eyebrow, not turning away from her screen.
“What does what mean, Darling?” She began calling him darling ironically soon after they were married, and then one day—she doesn’t know when it happened—it wasn’t ironic anymore.
“The text about blossoms—on your phone,” he says flatly. “You know I don’t get poetry.”
“That’s not true,” she says, turning toward him. “You’re a great reader of my poems.”
“Eden,” he says.
“It’s a friend from work,” she says, lifting one shoulder. “We share lunch poems.”
“Lunch poems,” he says. “You’re not going to leave me for a smoldering hot rhymester?”
“You know I don’t like rhyme.”
“Have you stopped taking your anti-depressants?” he asks. “You seem—.”
“Thank you for picking up dinner,” she interrupts. “I liked the pizza.”
“Do you still like me?” Michael asks. “Would you still run away to Spain with me, open a bed and breakfast?”
She leans toward him, tugs his earlobe between her lips.
*
The camellias are blooming outside Nik’s building when Eden arrives, white sails tossing against waves of siding. She breaks one at the stem, carries it upstairs and leaves it on Nik’s chair before making her way to the bath.
There’s a tall glass of sweet tea with lemon beside the tub, and Eden takes a long drink before undressing. Afterward, she presses the cold glass between her breasts and holds it there until she can’t feel her chest.
“You promised to choose someone contemporary this time,” she calls as she steps into the tub and pokes a toe at a fizzing bath bomb. It shimmers and smells of honey and citrus. “I’m done with Donne.”
“Would I break a promise?” Nik asks quietly, their voice close to the other side of the closed door.
Eden startles. In all these months, Nik has never once crossed the threshold while Eden was in the bath.
Before Eden responds, there’s a sharp knock on the front door, and she startles again.
“Be right there,” Nik calls, and Eden hears them move away. She lets out her breath and is about to lower herself into the hot water when she hears his voice.
“I’m Michael,” he says too loudly. “You must be the person who’s fucking my wife.”
Eden lurches out of the tub, slips, stubs her toe on the stool, and sloshes glittery water over the bath rug and pink tiles. How did he find her? She wonders, thoughts flashing. Maybe it will be OK. Where’s Kendy? He rehearsed that line. As she tosses her bra and underwear aside and scrambles to put on her t-shirt and shorts, she imagines Michael behind the steering wheel driving over, silently mouthing the words, fucking my wife. In the hall, she sees Michael standing in the doorway holding a large, white pizza box.
“You should come in,” Nik says, calmly taking the pizza box. They jerk their head toward the kitchen, suggesting silently that Michael follow.
Eden’s legs tremble as she follows Nik. She doesn’t look at Michael, and she isn’t sure he’ll stay. In the kitchen, Nik slides the pizza box on the table, fills a dented silver tea kettle, clicks a gas burner until it lights with a small whoosh of blue flame.
“Where’s Kendy?” Eden’s voice scratches. Michael steps into the kitchen, shakes his head and holds his arm over his eyes to shelter his face. It’s a gesture Eden’s seen Kendy make a hundred times, and in it she sees the little boy Michael once might have been. She tries to reach for him.
“With my mom,” Michael says, pulling away, his voice deep, pressing against a dam of emotion.
“It’s not sex, Michael,” Eden says, looking at the floor. “Please don’t think that.”
“Why are you always wet?” Michael asks. “You’re always damp when you come home, and you always smell—herbal.”
“I—” she looks at her bare feet, bright pink on black and white kitchen tiles. “I take a bath.”
“You’re just getting naked together then?” he asks, his voice rising again. “Forget it. I don’t want details.”
“I bathe alone,” Eden says quietly.
“What the fuck does that mean, Eden?”
“Dude,” Nik says, pointing to a chair. “Take a seat.”
“Dude?” Michael snarls. “I don’t want a goddamn seat. What I wanted was to surprise my wife with pizza. Pineapple and mushroom—because that’s her favorite. Did you know?”
Nik shakes their head slowly, and a black twist of hair falls over their forehead. It’s been so long since Eden has seen Nik, and—even with Michael in the room—she wants to touch that curl, those ears, so sweet they remind Eden of the sand cakes she collects at Bodega Bay.
“I know her favorite poets,” Nik says, handing them each a cup of mint tea in handle-less mugs. “Bishop, Komunyakaa, Olds—.”
Nobody drinks. In the silence, Eden hears a harmonica drift from a neighbor’s apartment. Simple Twist of Fate, she thinks. No, it’s not coming from the neighbor’s apartment. It’s coming from Nik’s bedroom, across the hall where the door’s ajar, and Eden sees a sliver of Nik’s unmade bed, and a framed linocut, maybe of Paris’s Pont des Arts.
“Nik’s a poet,” Eden says, snapping back into the conversation. “We met at a reading last summer.”
“Eden said she was lonely,” Nik says.
“I didn’t say that exactly,” Eden cringes, “I said. Well, I said—"
“‘I’m floating above my life like an albatross spreading wide and brilliant wings above the sea,’” Nik recites. ‘Like joy, and yet I’m alone against that blue backdrop of sky.’”
An angry sob comes from Michael’s throat. It’s not a sound Eden has ever heard him make.
“Michael.” Eden interrupts. “Nik offered to read me poetry. That’s all it is. It was. I want to talk about poetry.”
She watches Nik place their mug of tea on the table. They could have been siblings, Michael and Nik, their short, dark, wavy hair, kind deep brown eyes, the way they care for her.
“To be fair,” Nik says, looking at Michael. “I’m not a marriage counselor. I do want to know your favorite kind of pizza, Eden. Your favorite dessert, too.”
“I’ve never hit anyone in my life,” Michael says, slamming the tea cup on the table so hard it sloshes over.
He’s burned his hand, Eden thinks.
He grabs the pizza box as if he plans to leave and take it with him, but suddenly frisbees it against the far wall. It smacks hard and falls upside down to the checkerboard floor, still neatly held inside its cardboard box, leaving only a small splatter of red sauce.
Eden sinks, her back against the refrigerator.
She watches herself dive. The wind presses against her, and she nears the shush of waves. She splashes, scoops prey and saltwater, gulps it hungrily. She shakes the sea from her feathers and senses the wrongness. It’s not squid. Of course, it’s not. It’s a tired bouquet of balloons, someone’s lost celebration, faded red latex deflated of helium. The tangled, sun-bleached rainbow of ribbon dangles from her golden beak.
Patricia Caspers is an award-winning writer and the founding EIC of West Trestle Review. Her work has been published in journals such as Ploughshares, Sugar House Review, and Cimarron Review. Her third full-length poetry collection, The Most Kissed Woman in the World, was recently released from Kelsay Books.
