The Dregs

Leah had been married to Gordon for four and a half months and had not had a job in more than six. Now, instead of the pantyhose and high heels she wore when she met Gordon, working in the assistant pool in the tax law firm at which he was a partner, Leah wore a uniform of loafers and jeans with holes in the knees, and drank green tea at ten o’clock in the morning. She gazed out picture windows on a long, gravel driveway that curved around a bend of trees and faded out of view; she walked down a pine-chip trail to the dock on Lake Washington where Gordon housed his cedar canoe, and she fed ducks from the gourmet challahs and pumpernickles she brought home from the organic grocery.

Gordon was older than Leah by about 30 years, and she liked him at first because, unlike the other partners, his voice was gentle as a pediatrician, and he said unusual things to her, like "please," and "thank you," and "when you have time." Gordon folded his napkin in his lap, and used it to blot a tiny bit of vinaigrette off the corner of his mouth when they had lunch together the first time. He was good at selecting wines; he never pressured her with too much touching or the kind of awkward whispered confessions her younger boyfriends had often murmered in her ear. She had not even been sure they were dating until he proposed, but Leah often felt she was viewing the world through a long, distant lens, and this proposal was not the first thing in life to bewilder her. He asked her casually, one day, over a cup of coffee in the office kitchen. She had raised her eyebrows, took a sip from her mug, and nodded her assent. She turned in her two weeks' notice that afternoon.

There was nothing to do. Gordon had a cleaning lady named Consuela who came in for a couple of hours every day to straighten things and dust things and rinse things. Connie was also much older than Leah, and Leah often felt like she was in Connie's way no matter where she sat: at the dining room table, she tried to surf the internet on her laptop, but Connie needed to wipe the surface and change the flowers in the vase. In the living room, if she watched daytime television, Connie needed to run the vacuum cleaner and fluff the pillows. Even in her bedroom, she could not merely stay in bed; Connie needed to tuck the sheets into hospital corners and straighten the duvet. After two or three weeks of this, Leah started going to a yoga class while Connie was at the house, or else taking a walk through the woods, or else wandering through the grocery store, reading the labels on packages of free-range chicken breasts.

Before she married Gordon, Leah ate things like Top Ramen and Saltine crackers and 10 for $10 pasta specials for dinner. Now, they ate out three or four nights a week- and not fast food- and on the other nights, she cooked things that took her several hours to make, bent over pages in thick cookbooks she got from the Bellevue library. Gordon had a way of saying a lot without words, and the pause he took to smile at her said a lot more than any effusive words of gratitude could. Leah had never even heard of osso bucco before she made it the first time. Gordon had seconds, but worked on a case briefing at the table.

There were days Leah thought she could stare at a pinecone, or the lake water lapping the stony shore, or three different kinds of glinting forks in a drawer in the kitchen, until the objects themselves absorbed her and she ceased to exist. More than once, she found herself waking up as if from hypnosis, stirring a cup of coffee that had gone cold in the process. She thought about taking a pottery class. She tried sitting on things that weren't meant for it: the dining room tabletop, a kitchen counter, upside down on the sofa. She spent a week trying to teach herself how to skip rocks, and finally gave up.

"Here, try this," Gordon told her in the evening. He handed her a delicate, bulbous wine glass, 1/3 full of a sweet, golden drink. "Gewürztraminer." She sipped it and turned the pages of a recent crime novel idly.

"I hate book jackets," she murmured. Gordon didn't answer or look up; he readjusted his reading glasses and made another note on his yellow legal pad, then entered some figures on a calculator. Leah looked at him over the lip of her wine glass. Her husband was handsome; he wore none of the middling flab of many men his age. His salt-and-pepper hair lay thick and debonair, and the lines his face bore were distinguished and kind looking. He was the sort of man who was most comfortable in slacks and a buttoned shirt; she could only tell he was feeling casual because he'd removed the customary tie and jacket, and was wiggling his toes inside his argyle trouser socks against the plush pile of his Afghani rug. Leah looked at him through the sweet wine, and he blurred into gold tones and swimming lines.

She drank deeply.

-

In bed, Gordon fell asleep right away. During the rare nights he didn't, his cursory attentions were short-lived and wordless. He insisted on using protection every time; they had agreed, no children. Leah wanted to ask him why he always closed his eyes; why his face held that expression of determination. More than once, she reached her hand up to touch his face, to ease that tension, to brush her fingertips across his rigid sealed eyelids. More than once, her hand faltered; her hand hovered, retreated. She bit her lip and thought of the lakeshore, of the tide washing in and out over smooth stones that time had worn into uniformity.

-

In yoga class, there was a new man; there weren't many men in the class at all. This one was in his mid to late 30s, sweet-faced with wide, expressive dark eyes, athletic body, gorgeously thick black hair. He kept his distance from the rest of the class and practiced his Downward-Facing Dog with intensity and rigid muscles. Leah wondered at the straight line of his back. Everyone else in the class- mostly women who, like her, didn't work, or didn't work much- seemed to collapse into their poses, flop around the yoga studio like they were made of gelatin. They huddled in groups and giggled about the pose names, gossipped about their husbands and their husbands' lovers, sipped expensive fruit smoothies with protein boosts. Yoga was incidental to most class members; something to call the time they spent socially; an excuse to wear sweatpants in public.

The new guy made yoga seem like a mission for world peace.

After yoga class, Leah rolled up her mat, shoved her towel in her gym bag, and drove in Gordon's spare car to the grocery store. She had an idea that she might cook something new tonight- maybe a swordfish steak with something unusual accompanying. She sniffed melons, lingered by pomegranates, gently squeezed citrus fruit to test their ripeness. She turned a corner.

There was the man from yoga class, wearing a sweater, leaning pressed against the frozen dinners case. He looked at Leah, looked quickly away, then looked back at her again.

"You're in my yoga class," Leah said. The man looked strained; he looked wildly around, like he was looking for a way out. Leah took a step back. "Sorry," she added. "You're probably busy."

"Oh," he said. He looked at her for a moment, then relaxed. "No. No, sorry. I'm not."

Leah looked at the wall of gluten-free entrees behind him, then held out her hand. "I'm Leah."

"Yes," he said. He looked at her hand. She paused, then lowered it. "Um. Elliott."

"Nice to meet you," she said, sincerely. Elliott was the first new person she had met since she married Gordon, if you didn't count Connie. Whom Leah had, technically, met prior to their marriage. "Have you been doing yoga long?"

"No," Elliott said. He had no shopping cart, no basket, no merchandise. In the fluorescent lights of the store Leah could see, now, what had not been apparent in the yoga studio: deep, rutted circles under his eyes, a sunkenness in his cheeks over the well-defined jaw, a defined downward pull at the corners of his mouth.

"I was just shopping for dinner," Leah said. "For my husband and me. He's in tax-"

"Look, I need to be somewhere else," Elliott said. He hurried past Leah and out of the aisle. Leah looked down the length of freezers at the corner he'd disappeared around, and held her breath.

-

Leah had dinner keeping warm in the oven when Gordon called from his office. "Why don't you meet me out for dinner tonight?" he said.

"I already cooked," Leah said. She stood in the kitchen, smelling the pomegranate swordfish wafting from the oven. She caught her reflection in the darkened window, and rested her hand, delicately, delicately, on the new wood of the cutting board. She could not see the lake for the darkness pressing in against the panes.

"Oh," Gordon said. He sounded disappointed.

"I guess I can reheat it for lunch tomorrow," Leah said. She turned the oven off the warming setting, leaned against the counter. She wiggled her toes in her socks against the tile floor, and ignored the gaudy hot house orchids and birds of paradise Connie had arranged on the counter.

"Good. Great. I have a client I'd really like for you to meet."

"Sure," Leah said. She picked at a thin slash across the cutting board. Sharp knives. The kitchen seemed so bright.

"So, maybe that new place, the nice one, with the kind of art deco thing going on inside," Gordon pressed her.

"I'll wear a dress," Leah said.

"See you in an hour." Gordon hung up, but Leah stayed on the phone. A dial tone sounded, after a moment, in her ear. She tried to hum along in pitch. Every time she thought she was close, the tone seemed to shift.

And after dinner, when they were finally back home, Gordon went to his study. Leah tried not to bother him when he was in there; it was a strictly work-oriented place, and the large cherry-stained desk and high-backed Windsor chair and thick carpets and walls lined with legal journals and tomes of tort and appeal and tax legislation all intimidated her. When she worked at the firm, Leah never was intimidated; when she worked at the firm, not had impressed Leah as mattering very much to her own happiness. Tonight, Leah pushed open the door that was already open a crack and stepped into the study.

"I thought you might want something to drink," she said, softly. Gordon didn't look up, but rested his hand over his brow and continued studying the sheets laid out in front of him on the desk. It looked like he was peering into the distance, but the distance was only two feet away. Leah quietly padded across the room, still wearing the elegant black dress and stockings she'd put on for dinner. Dinner had comprised of Gordon and his client, a wealthy local land developer, trading tax evasion jokes over lobster while Leah smiled politely every time they laughed and sipped her chardonnay with a growing ache in her chest until the soft tinkle of wine glasses and forks against plates began to ring in her ears like the loudest pealing of church bells and she thought she'd die of a migraine when finally dinner was done. Her head hurt less now; she'd taken a prescription narcotic Gordon had left over from a back injury two years ago, and flushing it down with a pinot noir she'd picked up at the grocery to go with the swordfish, her head felt, finally, marvelously light. She set a glass of the wine in front of Gordon and hovered near his elbow.

Gordon took a drink of the wine and made a face. "What's the rating on this one?" he asked his papers.

"Rating?" Leah answered, blankly.

"Never mind," Gordon grumbled. Leah dug her big toe into the carpet, looked into the depths of her wine glass, and then downed the rest of the crimson liquid.

"There's a new man in my yoga class," she said.

"A man in the yoga class." Gordon repeated it, but not as a question. He put his pen down, took his glasses off, and rubbed the space where the nose pads had left impressions on either side of his nostrils, his eyes pressed closed. Then, he opened them and looked at her wearily.

"I ran into him at the grocery store afterward," Leah continued. She didn't know why she was telling him this, this unimportant, insignificant detail of her day, except this was the first new person she'd met in months; except Gordon still hadn't asked her how her day was; except she hadn't said a single word to anyone all day except her polite hello and goodbye at dinner and the strange exchange she'd had with Elliott in the frozen food aisle. "He was really strange, very awkward to talk to."

"Why did you talk to him then," Gordon said, turning back to his paperwork. Leah shrugged.

"His name was Elliott," she said, wiping some dust off the desklamp. It was a touch lamp; the room went dark. She felt Gordon's hand suddenly touch hers, and a thrill went up her arm and into the pit of her stomach - but he was only turning the lamp back on, and his hand retreated.

Now he was looking at her.

"I have to get some work done," he said briskly. His face looked drawn. His voice - ever gentle - had something new in it. Why did Leah want to call it fear? She studied her husband's eyes for a moment, then nodded.

"Sorry to bother you," she said. She picked up his rejected wine glass and left the room, drinking as she went. She went to bed alone.

-

In the middle of the night, Leah awoke. Gordon wasn't in bed. She wondered if he was still working, and if he was, if she ought to bother him and tell him to come to bed. She looked at the bedside clock. It was 3:17 a.m. She slipped out of the bedroom, rubbing her eyes, and tiptoed downstairs. When she got to the kitchen, she hesitated just out of view. Gordon was speaking to someone on the telephone.

"I can't believe you," Gordon was saying in a low hiss. "This is inexcusable." He paused, then, "Stay away from her." Leah frowned, and entered the kitchen.

"Gordon?" she asked. Her voice sounded blurry and buried under pillows; Gordon put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

"East coast opposition," he said. He was frowning. "Go back to bed." He turned his back on her, and continued into the phone, this time in an urgent whisper, "I mean it. No more."

-

Elliott waited after class for Leah to roll her yoga mat and slip into her shoes again. "Hey," he said. His tone sounded bashful.

"Hi," she said. She was surprised he was talking to her.

"So, listen, when I ran into you in the grocery store," Elliott said. He smiled apologetically. "I was just having a kind of a weird day. Sorry about that. I mean, my god! Who is that rude, anyway?"

"Oh, no, that's okay," Leah said. "I get like that sometimes, myself." She had never, ever been like that to her recollection. When she was single, Leah had been wild and vibrant in her early twenties, and bold and assertive by her thirties. Elliott gave her a friendly, but skeptical, look, and hoisted his gym bag up on his shoulder. "Listen," she said, as Elliott was turning to go. "Um, I've been trying these recipes at home, and no one eats them but me, really, and I'm not sure if I'm just getting used to my cooking or if it's actually getting better. And last night's dinner got postponed and will go to waste if I don't have some help eating it, so..." She glanced hopefully at Elliott. "Would you maybe like to come over for lunch and have some swordfish and maybe a cup of coffee?"

Elliott grimaced. She was sure he was going to say no.

"It's really not far, only ten minutes, maybe. I'll drive and bring you back when you're ready, if you like," she said.

"Oh, no, I can drive myself," Elliott said. He smiled, a bit of a grim smile, but still a smile. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, lunch sounds great."

-

"So, how long have you been married?" Elliott asked Leah when she set a plate in front of him.

"Oh," she said. "A few months." She sat down at an angle to him and smiled. "Cheers," she said, raising a glass of iced tea to him.

"How long did you know him before you got married?" he asked after a thoughtful bite. "This, by the way, is heavenly."

"Thank you," Leah said. She had to agree: the fish was succulent and tender and tasted of just a hint of tangy, sweet pomegranate. She speared a bite of saffron potatoes on her fork and took another bite happily before answering. "We didn't know each other long. Not really. I mean, we worked together but there was nothing until, I guess, all of a sudden there was."

"What did he like about you?" Elliott asked her. He set his fork down. Leah raised her eyebrows.

"Usually I guess people ask the other way around, don't they," she said. She thought for a minute. "I think he and I liked a lot of the same things in one another. It seemed like we could make a life together."

Elliott was quiet for a moment, and then, "You didn't have lives before one another?"

Leah smiled and pushed a stray lock of hair back behind her ear. "Well. He certainly did, but all professional. Gordon's always working." She paused, and her smile wavered, but only for a moment. "Even now, really."

A pause. "And you?" Elliott asked. He wasn't eating.

"I was aimless for a long time," Leah said. "I thought I maybe wanted to make art, but, well. That never pans out."

"It does for some people," he retorted, but in a quiet tone. Leah paused, looking at him carefully. Elliott studied his hands in his laps, and pulled at a cuticle. "I make boats," he said, by way of explanation. "Artisan boats."

Leah frowned. She was tired of feeling interrupted, and argued with. "Anyway," she said, her voice louder than she intended, "I think Gordon and I just were both ready to settle into something, and we saw something in one another that told us we could have a quiet kind of life together." Her heart was pounding. Why was her heart pounding?

"You have a lovely dock," Elliott said. His eyes were scanning the water through the back windows.

"We get a lot of ducks," Leah said, still feeling uncertain. She tightened her grip around her fork. "You're not eating."

"I guess I didn't work up much of an appetite in class after all," he said. He still stared at the lake. Leah started to cut another bite for herself, then gave up and set her fork down halfway. They sat in silence for a moment.

"Would you show me the boat?" he asked suddenly. He was already standing. Leah scrambled to take her napkin off her lap and follow, stumbling, behind him as he went assuredly outside and down the cedar path to the dock.

"How did you know we have a boat?" she asked. Elliott stopped, turned, and looked at her. There was nothing friendly in his face.

"You have a boat house," he said, condescension dripping from his tone like a melting icicle. He turned and continued, and she had to jog to keep up with him. When they reached the boat house, he flung open the door and stepped inside. In the middle, on the risers, was Gordon's cedar canoe. Elliott approached it almost reverently and ran a strong hand along the boat's smooth flank.

"Gordon's very... particular about this boat," Leah said. Her voice seemed to echo in the dark coolness; the lake chopped briskly at the floor beneath their feet.

"Why do you think that is?" Elliott asked, his attention fixated on the seams of the boat, the craftsmanship, the grain of the wood.

"He's never said."

"You've never asked." He was guessing. Leah told herself he was guessing.

"No. I never have." Leah paused. "My husband can be very private."

"Even with his wife?" Elliott's voice was bitter as quinine.

"Even with his wife," Leah echoed softly.

"How can one man hide so much?" Elliott asked. Leah didn't get the impression that he was asking her. She watched his muscular back as he caressed the boat, and then he turned to her. "You don't know, do you."

"I guess anyone can hide anything," Leah said, but Elliott was shaking his head, and there was pity on his face, not clear but multifaceted like the dial tone, like she couldn't quite catch the pitch of it, and then he was before her, and her face was in his hands- rough hands, strong hands- and he was kissing her, his lips were pressed to hers, and she couldn't breathe, it was a jumble and she was pushing him, pushing him with her little hands, pushing on his chest, and then he was away, and he was sobbing, like a child, and shaking his head, and his head was in his hands, and he could not face her.

"There are things you can't hide," Elliott gasped between great, heaving tears. "There are things a person should never hide."

-

In bed, that night, as they lay side by side never touching, Gordon spoke in the darkness. "I don't think you should keep going to that yoga class," he said. He paused. "I don't want you to ask me why."

"No," Leah agreed. "No, I think I'm done with yoga." They were both quiet for a moment. 1500-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Leah ran her hand over them, and pictured Elliott running his hand over the boat. "I think I'm going to go away for a while," she finally rejoined.

"Take a little break," Gordon chimed.

Another long pause. Then: "Just a little vacation. Get away from things for a bit. Maybe give you some space to get through this case," Leah said.

"Maybe after we finish in court, you and I can do something."

"Just the two of us."

"Something quiet," Gordon said. Leah pictured it in her head: a smooth rock was in her hand. She held it between her thumb and her first two fingers, and she brought her arm back, held the stone parallel to the surface of the water. It had been washed over so many times, was a perfect sheen of gray, like the sky, like the depths of the lake. She brought back her arm, brought it back, brought it back, and then, she released. The stone skiffed across the surface of the lake like Gordon's cedar canoe; it was airborne and immaculate. Then, her skipper disappeared into the surface of the water with the tiniest gulping sound, like it was only one of the dregs being swallowed from a glass in a throat too drunk to cry out.