Defective Woman
Perhaps it was the first time I had noticed something different than all the shades of gray and copious angles of loneliness. I thought a rose, showing her elaborate head with quartz petals now glanced at me with her red animated eyes, yet it was just a small hole. I felt that if I ran my fingers through its core, waves of laughter, earthy perfume, some obscure sense of confidence, or even fireworks would be unleashed.
As I leaned towards this peculiar entrance to a new universe, the sun glistened to reveal the outlines of a painting.
Then, I remembered. My new home once belonged to the widower Xius.
I had too like him faced the allegations of a Faustivian deal.
While he sold his wife’s house for an inappropriate sum, I had given up my marriage for a Yale economics degree. So does the incessant thread of associates, family members and friends that has now become invisible to me believe.
Afterall, they needed a proper justification to abandon me.
But what was mine?
Instead of filling my apprenticeship hours, or immersing myself into the world of bonds, I had been staring endlessly into the hueless ocean from my new Colombian house. While the sullen waves perpetually chased each other, I could feel my abandoned responsibilities culminating in the eye of a tornado with its windy silver swirls piercing through my heart as if they were metal blades.
I stared some more into a hole of transcendent memories on my wall. Maybe I had to run away more.
I picked up an iridescent dress with no sleeves, nor a necklace. The opaque sequins of the dress made me look like an imperceivable being. Just as I wanted.
I arrived at a laughably huge mansion. The golden flashing of the gutters was the only separation between the grey house and the endless sky of nothingness. I needed to go there.
As I walked in, I felt like others whispered with their eyes until I heard my old teammate from the rowing team assert, “She certainly did more than her SATs to get in there, especially as a woman”. “Oh, she would probably even sell her fiance Dyonis to get in, or didn’t she already”, replied a woman with a golden threaded dress I had never seen before. “What do you expect from a freak who spent the New York summer in Radley’s mental institution, and now fled to Colombia” said Iseult, my old neighbor. “Honey, don’t be so harsh. She is just a defectious, vulnerable woman” commented my cousin Icarus.
A burning parfum like liquid immediately entered my body, I couldn’t mutter a word. I didn’t need a mirror or another light reflectant, to know that a sulfur tint of sickness or perhaps anxiety had formed on my face.
So I sought to drown it in what others called the Hemmingway special with liquor. Maybe it worked because the insipid juices started to feel like airy stardust. Or it could be for I had seen another outsider.
It was a lanky androgynous man with a peculiar face of undistinguishable age – it looked like he had stopped counting his years, the hours of daylight, and of course the shots of vodka. He evoked a sense of familiarity which enticed me. Perhaps he had been submerged in the ocean from across my house for a while for his small red beard resembled algae, or had these red eyes occupied the sea of memories in the hole?
The man’s tired lavender eyelids sparkled as he pronounced, “Hello, dear. Another party enjoyer I see”. His voice was smooth as he had seen the same scene play out a thousand times with amusing predictability.
“Not really”, I answered. “More like trying to repair my old friendships and lifestyle. Without much success as you see”.
“You know what they say. Bringing something dead to life never comes without hurt”, eye wrinkles appeared near his confident gaze as leaves of grass around a sunflower.
“You are right. But this time I will change. They will see that I am not just another defective woman”, Hemingway made me say what I had been ruminating for the last month.
“I have to go, dear. You are not the kind of friend I was hoping to see. Farewell, Mr. Rothchild”.
“He knew me”, I thought, “and wasn’t even repulsed by what I had supposedly done”. His silhouette evoked a profound hunger for the obscure flavour of human friendship.
I stopped him, “Stay, I’d like to be around someone different. In this case, I mean normal. What’s your name?”.
His lips curled in an uncontrollable grin, “Pandora”.
“Only on boring party nights I am hoping. What is it?”.
“It’s Estelle Zenith”, as he said this his smile reflected the eternal sunshine.
We drifted across the dance floor like two autumn leaves caught in the ocean currents.
Suddenly, a black satin dress had engulfed the room, suffocating the last remnants of ease. It was Her. “Darling, how are you feeling at the party? I haven’t seen you in a while, why is that?”, she asked Estelle, while meticulously dissecting every piece of me with the corner of her grey eyes.
I was thinking about the time the prospect of my marriage came to an end. I hid under the bed in my room just to avoid them as they didn’t know I was home. Ironically, that was just the spot they had comfortably positioned themselves and their words slowly turned into creaks from the bedframe. That day I, the eternal fugitive, waited hidden in suffocating silence for hours to know that my ring had meant nothing.
Her gaze slicing through the little air left flicked at me. Her eyes gleaming like a predator eyeing his prey persisted on her sharp face, now performatively patted with veins of care and pity, “How are you with money now that the well has run dry?”.
Before I could engage with Oedipa’s inappropriate question, a flock of drunk men whose peak excellence had reached the moment they made the high-school football team decades ago, experiencing the anticlimax of their glory, invited us for a hunt. As Oedipa declined their offer, I chose to ignore my sensibility and join them with Estelle. Afterall, the world always bends to the logic of these types of exemplary gentlemen who never bear the consequences of their miscalculations. I also wanted a shield from her sharp eyes.
While their laughter exploded with the deafening echo of champagne corks, I couldn’t help but notice that the yellow car we were located in had committed every possible artistic sin. Suddenly, the men started to chant old hymns of our ancestors with voices thick of alcohol and invincibility and hug, and swear, and try to speak in Spanish. Finally, the crack of a gunshot unleashed, putting the exclamation point of the frenzy.
“Estelle, my man, have some fun”, Horras, our lycee’s quarterback, with a wide dull smile reflecting the richness of his mind handed him a weapon.
“No thank you, dear, I will be enjoying the view for now”, Estelle answered, while a purple vein throbbed on his forehead in hesitation.
“Come on. Don’t ruin the fun, be a non-complice comme nous, isn’t that what you claim to be”.
The madness caught up to his mind, “One isn’t enough to kill anything”.
“I see a huge beast there, probably a bear. You got the guts?”, Horras pressed.
Then, I watched as those red eyes flickered perhaps into a hidden message in the air. Even the ominous Estelle couldn't decipher it so he shot.
The extravagant car jumped up in a gorging frenzy of laughter. I felt sick from its lurid yellow color. I suddenly began to hear a stream of screams and invectives, this time not from the car, as they were defined by vulnerability and urgency. I squinted my eyes to make sense of the source. I became certain that those weren’t the silent screams of my repulsion.
“ A man!”, I screamed. Nobody heard me. “A MAAAAAAAN. You pigs have killed a man”.
The man started to plug the hole in his heart with lemongrass. Nonetheless, the stench of eroding iron prevailed as did his bleeding. He was anxiously collecting the blood in the basket he had used for forest mushrooms and drinking it. As the blood continued leaving his fragmented body, a livid, sad, yet proud expression hung like a luminous otherworldly body in the dark night.
We immediately ran towards the man, whom I immediately recognised. It was the good arab man Yamil Shaium who had helped me move my New York bagage to the bendida. I remember that sunny morning as I heard his name, I used my broken Arabic to tell him an inappropriate anecdote about a man and a taxi my Yemenian nanny had taught me. That was the first genuine smile I had earned from the time I wrote my wedding vows.
The flock of cackling excellent gentlemen was wondering how to destroy the body.
My disappointment summoned my enormous power as I quickly strode towards the lemon smelling corpse, I picked it up, and ran towards the car, leaving the declining gentlemen and my timidness behind.
This time their eyes did not whisper, they yelled for what they called justice. Or did they even know the meaning of this peculiar concept?
As I was driving towards the police station, the yellow car did not seem so repellant, rather liberating and somehow prudent.
The dead corpse in the trunk suddenly anchored me in reality from this baloney state. I had decided to give all of my money to Mrs. Shaium for justice.
Was I worried about earning them back? I am a Yale economics student afterall, a defective woman by choice. I was gonna triple them next year.
While thinking about that, I was repeating my wedding vows: for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. I used to detest them, but now that I looked into a new face saying them I suddenly believed in them again.
For a second I thought the red horn rimmed car mirror was gleaming with a defiant shimmer, but then I noticed my rosy cheeks.
I was me again.
I was going to Connecticut as soon as possible.
I had divorced my past forever.
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