Introduction

Ophelia, a professor of Dante, is stricken when she discovers that her husband Andy has been cheating on her with a winsome colleague. What follows is Ophelia' s figurative descent into hell as she obsessively tracks her subjects, performs surveillance in her beat-up Volvo, and moves into the property next door to Amber' s, which has gone into foreclosure. She spies on the lovers, growing more and more estranged from reality. Andy' s betrayal reawakens the earlier trauma of abandonment by her mother at the age of eight. When Andy and Amber become engaged, Ophelia snaps. The story is a jailhouse confessional, a dark comedy, an oeuvre of women' s rage, a suspenseful revenge fantasy, and a moving portrait of one woman' s psychological breakdown.

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Excerpt

1.

Some have questioned my sanity. Only a mentally imbalanced woman, they say, would spy on her estranged husband and his lover from a tree. Only a delusional woman would believe that the husband would one day return, when the evidence—viz., engagement to his lover, before the ink on the divorce papers was even dry—was demonstrably to the contrary. Only a woman unconcerned with how she is perceived by the outside world, by former spouses and law enforcement circles alike, would commit her observations of the husband and his lover to eight consecutively numbered spiral-bound notebooks, producing, in three months’ time, a comprehensive, incriminating document that would serve to confirm the prosecution’s theory that she was a spurned wife with rancor in her heart.

Leona Valentine, of the Saratoga County Gazette (investigative reporter of the year, five years running), called the notebooks “the work of a fragile yet malevolent mind.” Ms. Valentine cited instances of electronic interference and surveillance of the subjects to show alleged mens rea; she retraced the accused’s path, admittedly circuitous, to the Home Depot in Schenectady, where the accused purchased certain household items (zip ties, duct tape) she would later use in furtherance of her deranged aims. Jean-Claude, whom the reporter tracked down to a truck stop just north of the US–Canada border, informed Ms. Valentine that I appeared off when he encountered me on the night of August 5, 2011, that I was behaving in a furtive manner suggestive of criminal enterprise.

Our actions may all be explained by reference to certain formative experiences: whether we are loved; whether we are well-cared for; whether our parents wish we’d never been born.

There are coruscating wounds, wounds that do not heal. They fester and suppurate.

And so, I remember the last time I saw my mother. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich she made me, sliced on the diagonal, the crusts removed (I could never abide them). It sat on my plate with a note, remember I love you, Ophelia. There was still a moment in time when she was combing my hair, smoothing the cowlicks, remember I love you, Ophelia, that she might have reconsidered, removed the valise from the trunk, forsaken Bob, none of us the wiser. There was still a moment before the screen door clacked against the doorjamb, before she stepped out into the autumnal Saturday, the leaves fluttering to the ground, there to rot and turn to mulch, that she might have thought the better of her plan to escape to Florida with the used car salesman.

But she stepped over the threshold, clack, never looking back.

The prison psychiatrist counsels me to reimagine the past. To return to the pivotal moment, to imagine the dialogue as it should have taken place. I’m so sorry but I have to leave, I am in love with another man, your father just wouldn’t understand. She has me play the part of my mother, to enable me to see events through her eyes. She has me switch, play the part of my eight-year-old abandoned self, to impress upon me the fact that it wasn’t my fault. She gives me a supportive foam pillow and encourages me to take out my aggression against the mother who left, the mother frozen in time. She tells my adult self, the supposedly rational and reasonable self, to embrace the eight-year-old girl, to protect her, to scold the adults who were supposed to protect her but instead failed miserably.

Say what you want to say to her, she prods me. She never gave you the opportunity. She left you alone. To fend for yourself. Say what you want to say to her now.

What is there to say? I can pummel the therapeutic pillow, I can rip out its stuffing, but to what end? Nothing can alter the past. No amount of therapeutic role-playing or imaginative gestalt can change the script. The groove in my psyche is too deep.

Why did you leave me? Say it.

I cross my arms, stop role-playing.

Why did you leave me? Say the words.

I examine the diplomas on the wall. I play with the desk toy. One ball knocks into the next, initiates a chain reaction. Tick-tock. Set a ball in motion and certain immutable laws come into play, laws of gravity and momentum, laws of fate and inevitable consequence.

15.

It was important to demonstrate to the world that I was getting on with my life, going out, socializing, engaging in normal human interaction.

I recognized that certain behaviors, viz., peering into your shutters, staking out the bungalow, documenting Amber’s routines, might be misinterpreted, construed as obsessive or even criminal. The world frowned upon those who peered where they ought not to peer and rummaged through personal effects and eavesdropped on exes, documenting same in spiral-bound notebooks.

I was not inclined to confide in others, to reveal my innermost feelings. I had no confidante, no girlfriend who was the living repository of information concerning ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands and sexual experience levels and the like.

I was, however, acquainted with Madge Loomis, who taught freshman remedial writing. She lamented the dismal state of education these days—students’ inability to form a grammatically cogent sentence, to express an idea in an original way, to expunge like, uh, whatever, from the vocabulary.

Our assigned parking spaces were side-by-side. One night after class, she suggested, à l’improviste, that we go out for a drink. Being a college town, there is no shortage of pubs, taverns, and watering holes where one may imbibe spirits, drink oneself into a pleasing numbness, perseverating until alcoholic blackout.

We ended up at Paradise Lost, near the tracks, a place popular with inebriated collegians and aging bikers alike. In the Hudson Valley, we have many ex-hippies, aging radicals, former bicycle gang members, sixtyish men and women who prance about with faded skull and bones tattoos and full sets of dentures.

Madge’s drink of choice was Long Island Iced Tea, a hideous mix of rum and Coca-Cola. I stuck with whiskey, straight up. Madge marveled that I could choke down glass after glass of the “hard stuff,” as she put it, shaking her head in disbelief. She recalled an instance when, as a teenager, she had drunk half a bottle of tequila. When, vomitus still in her mouth, Eddie LaBruta fondled her.

I am not an avid conversationalist. I have difficulty discussing others’ adolescent traumas, their small-scale woes, their fermenting grudges. I can’t even look at tequila! Or crème de menthe! Once I puked an entire pitcher of Melon Balls! Did you ever try those? Still, I did my best to appear cordial.

Madge had not had much luck with men. From Eddie, it had all gone downward. A descent, a dizzying spiral. Nowhere to go but down, Dante remarked to Virgil. Down, down, falling through the air where the lustful specters float, longing for their corporeal selves. Sinking through the ground where the vain are piled up, rotting, no longer able to gaze upon themselves.

Richie, her current beau, was chronically employed or underemployed and in any event leeching off her. Madge’s elbow slipped off the bar.

“Bringin’ on the Heartbreak” was playing on the juke box. We had both of us grown up in the eighties. Electronica, drum machines, “99 Luftballons.” The interregnum between the classic rock masterpieces of the seventies and the arrival of grunge in the nineties. I try to block the era out of my mind, not the least because my mother was by then gone, the soundtrack to my woe not the soulful Billy Holiday, or the angst-ridden Nina Simone, but drivel like “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.”

“Forget about Eddie,” I suggested.

“Here, here.” We clinked our glasses.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to spill,” Madge said. I could already see that I was to be the designated driver, the responsible party, the one who would drag her out at the end of the evening, after she had thrown herself inadvisably onto one of the aging biker types congregating around the pool table.

After Mother left, I was forced to cook and do the housework, to learn to make do with canned produce, to mop up after my father when he collapsed on the floor, drunk yet again. I learned the ins-and-outs of hangover remedies (lemon juice to neutralize acid). I learned that I was the only one who could be unfailingly depended upon.

“Are you having fun?” Madge slurred.

“In fact, I am,” I said, motioning to the barkeep to fill up my glass.

“I’m really glad you came.”

“Me too,” I replied sheepishly. Truly, I was. If not for the kind invitation, the impromptu suggestion to Get drunk! extended in the faculty parking lot, I would have remained shuttered inside, rereading email correspondence, beating myself up for being over-the-hill and less-than-desirable. Instead, I was going out, consorting with others, learning about the biker counterculture, getting on with my life.

“You’ve got to get out there!” she exhorted me. “Take a chance! Your life isn’t over yet! You’re still young!”

Sadly, we were not still young. Forty had passed. Parenthetical creases had formed around our mouths. Our youthful skin was becoming dry and flaky. Hairs, intractable hairs, were popping up in unspeakable places. Hairs so resilient heavy-duty tweezers were required to uproot them.

We were desirable, perhaps, to a fifty-five-year-old. To an aging biker with a social security check and Medicare. To a retired state government worker with a pension who’d lived with his mother for most of his life. To the reclusive Bobby Archer who lived down the road, squirrel shooting for fun.

“Are we still hot?” She jabbed me in the ribs. “What do ya think, huh?” Madge spun around on her bar stool, nearly falling off.

The bikers obliged us with a wolf whistle.

“See,” Madge said, vindicated. She leaned in, whispering. “We’ve all been a little worried about you honey. We know this, uh, has been hard on you. Just know you’re not alone.”

Were they discussing me in the faculty lounge? Pondering my fate over limp Cup O’Noodles soup? Debating my future as they wheezed sad, watered-down coffee from the thermos? There she is, alone, puttering around the old, broken-down Victorian. Alone, while her husband (you were still my husband, in the eyes of the law) pranced around town with Amber, by all accounts, “a hot number,” “wowza.” Even my supporters were forced to admit that any objectively sane man, given the choice and the opportunity (ample opportunities, sales calls and conventions and product demonstrations), would choose Amber over me.

I winced. I recoiled from the arm she threw around me in a show of camaraderie, solidarity, sister-to-sister support.

“Have a good cry. Let it out,” she encouraged me. “You’re with friends.”

I resisted the invitation to let it all out. I do not like to make a spectacle of myself. I do not like to unburden myself, to reveal my innermost secrets. I am of the view that what is not spoken of does not exist, at least not outside of our tortured, obsessive minds, and thus have adopted strict non-disclosure policies about personal matters, ex-lovers, soon-to-be ex-husbands, estranged mothers, and the like.

I tried to steer the conversation back to Madge, back to her childhood traumas, her repressed memories of Eddie (the mind will bury what it does not wish to dig up, particularly where alcohol and numbing agents are involved). Thankfully, we grew up in an era where inadvisable sex could just be glossed over, forgotten about, where we could wake up caked in vomit, dust ourselves off, and return home, none the wiser.

There are those who believe trauma should be addressed. That we must forgive, but not forget, if only to escape the undertow, the swirling currents, of years of abuse or neglect. But there is a reason we forget. A reason why we drink ourselves into a stupor, why we aim for drunken amnesia, why we prefer to leave the past unexplored, hazy, shrouded in fog. There is a reason we respectfully decline to discuss our problems.

After four Long Island Iced Teas and a shot of tequila, Madge could not remember what she had just said, allowing me to escape the confessional.

“We should do this more often,” she elbowed me.

“Yes,” I concurred, as she slumped onto the bar. I positioned her head to the side so that she could breathe.

I stared out the window. The rustling shadows, the impossible-to-fathom night. The human heart, an impenetrable place. Lucifer’s heart is a frozen chamber. His eternal companions the traitors Cassius and Brutus. For there is no greater sin, no worse offense, than to betray those to whom you owe fealty, those to whom you are bound by blood or by vow, whether as vassal or slave or Roman publican.

I settled the bill and dragged Madge out of the premises. I stuffed her into the back seat of the Volvo, trying not to startle her. We were off, traveling down Route 25 into the ever-deepening darkness. Lucinda Williams clicked on as soon as I turned the engine over. The soundtrack to my despair. I drove with one arm, kept another on Madge so as to prevent her from rolling off the seat.

Driving around town, night after night, week after week, I knew intimately the curves and angles of the roadways, the shoulders and the gulches, the places one is likely to slam into a guardrail, the stretch of rural highway, just outside of town, where one wrong turn can catapult you seventy feet into a ditch. Roaming around after dark, speeding along straightaways, as if daring fate to take me. Whew, made it around the curve, I’m alive!

Startled, momentarily, by my acceleration into a curve, Madge awoke. She looked around her, stricken. And then fell unconscious again.

My intent was to drive around, enjoying the scenic byways, until Madge awoke from her stupor. To deposit her safely at home, to tuck her in, rolling her one her side so she did not choke on her stomach contents. To thank her for a fun evening. To make instant coffee and encourage her to drink same in an effort to counteract the effects of inebriation. But instead, I drove past Madge’s condo development, around the loop, and doubled back, heading toward Amber’s.

I slowed down as I approached the cul-de-sac and killed the high beams. Just a typical night, surveilling my estranged husband and his mistress, watching as they engaged in hanky-panky in the living room, shutters wide-open, not a care to who might be watching outside with high-powered binoculars (available for $49.99 at the Spy Shop). Watching as they blithely groped one another, chased one another semi-naked around the living room, and retired to the bedroom.

Given the number of drinks consumed over the course of the night (Drink, drink!), bladder control would prove difficult. My quota of small containers would soon be exhausted. Madge would bolt upright, looking for the nearest toilet, a patch of secluded weeds where she could relieve herself.

Watching as the husband emerges from the bedroom, stark naked, to fetch a glass of ice water. Watching as he contemplates the contents of the fridge—the rabbit food Amber likes to snack on; soy and wheatgrass antioxidant smoothies in their plastic-domed containers—trying to decide what to do. Wasting energy, shifting foot to foot. He could never decide, could he? Always wavered before all the options. He reaches in, grabs a Snickers from behind the head of kale. A single, contraband bar. Stuffing it into his mouth, careful to turn the wrapper inside out and to bury it in the garbage, there to molder among the compostable rot. He shoos away the Chihuahua, not now, Lulu. He’d never wanted a dog, had rejected the wife’s pleas to adopt one, saying they were too much trouble.

Watching as the husband wanders over to the living room (the bungalow has an open layout, allowing for unimpeded views). Naked on the sectional, he reads the paper. (The Post. He has it delivered, now that there is no principled objection.) He moves his lips when he reads. He lingers over the scores, the ongoing tallies, the statistical compilations. He shifts, scratching himself. He seems at once so familiar and so unfamiliar. The past lives on, an alternate version, a different arrangement of atoms. In this version, the husband and the wife live happily ever after, watching reruns of Hoarders.

What lives in our hearts, our thorny hearts, is known only to us. What we keep mum, what we choose not to disclose, what we selectively divulge, the interior closed loop. We can only make surmises, hazard guesses, apply our tired psychoanalytic theories, in trying to divine the true intentions of others. In trying to ascertain why, one day late in May, the husband left. Why, after slathering peanut butter on toast and trimming the edges, the mother jumped into a waiting Cadillac, never to return.

The husband opens the window. He inhales the fresh air, stares into the black beyond. He does not know the wife is out there (she has anti-glare binoculars, for total concealment). He does not know that she is watching him, that she is aware of his comings-and-goings, of his television viewing habits, of the secret places he has stashed his junk food. She is attuned to his moods, to the changes in his demeanor, even more so now, when she is not blinded by her own participation in events, but is merely watching him, a nonparticipant. Though she is sitting surreptitiously across the way, watching events unfold through high-powered binoculars, she feels connected to him, more strongly than when they were living together, there in the crosshairs of lies and warped versions of the truth, You’re just being paranoid, I am not having an affair, lots of people call the wrong number, hanging up without leaving a message. She feels she knows him, truly knows him, the unvarnished self, the unmediated self, the self that putters around and scratches his balls and stuffs his face with chocolates, the self who enjoys Snickers (much to the chagrin of Amber, who prefers blanched peanuts), the self who is dejected, at the end of the day, questioning his life’s purpose, the self who wonders whether there is something beyond peddling medical supplies, inserting catheters into verisimilitudes of the human body.

My observations end midsentence. The husband returns to sleep just after one in the morning, after reading the sports page and stuffing his face.

“Where the hell are we?” Madge bolted awake.

“Nowhere,” I assured her. “Just stopped for a pee.” I started the car, anxious to get away. I did not want to blow my cover. I did not want to be seen as a crazed voyeur, an obsessive ex-spouse, someone with nothing better to do than to eavesdrop on the lives of others. I did not want to be seen as the type of person who would purchase high-powered binoculars, a deranged observer obsessed with documenting every detail of my husband’s new life, recording every moment, chronicling what he did when I wasn’t there, so that in some sense, some warped, maniacal sense, I could continue to share his life.

I took a sharp turn at the end of the street and headed back on Route 25, the wind rustling through the window.

Marge rubbed her eyes and sat up. “Did we go home with those guys?” she asked, stricken.

“You mean Zeke and Rob?” I asked, watching her face in the rearview mirror. Their names had somehow escaped her, despite hours of drunken bantering, recklessly hurled darts, and promises to keep in touch.

“I guess,” she stammered.

“Sad to say, they were bitterly disappointed that we declined their offer to go home with them.” I had not sunk so low that I would accept any drunken lout’s offer to ride his motorcycle, that I would jump on the chance to exchange bodily fluids in the alleyway outside the bar, even in my battered, semi-functional state.

“They were nice guys,” Madge recalled wistfully. She had escaped with her dignity intact. Left with a telephone number, instead of a venereal disease. She had flirted and bantered, rather than fornicated in the bathroom stall on excrement splattered porcelain. All-in-all, a good evening.

I deposited Madge at her condo. Back to her life with Richie, the sporadically employed carpenter who spent his days watching Wheel of Fortune, his nights drinking Heineken, perpetually exhausted from filling out resumes and updating his profile on LinkedIn.

“We should do it again!” she brightened. She stumbled along the cobblestone path, disappeared inside. The number of Zeke written on the back of a matchbook and stuffed into her bra.

The mother left one day without explanation. For all intents and purposes, she had ceased to exist. She was no longer part of their lives. She might as well be dead, the father said. Then at least I could claim her social security benefits. The mother became fixed in time, the mother circa 1979, with plaid pants and a macramé vest, the mother who had a copy of Erica Jong stuffed under her pillow. These were the details from which she was to construct her, or reconstruct her, to try to ascertain her intent. The why. The moment when discontent, malaise, and garden-variety boredom coalesced, the moment when she gave herself permission to leave. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

Why do you think Ophelia behaves the way she does? What is her principal motivation?

Who is the most sympathetic in this love triangle? Why or why not?

Do you have a favorite secondary character (e.g., Madge, Mallory)? Why?

Can you relate to Ophelia’s predicament? Is it a universal predicament in some sense?

What does the author accomplish by telling the story as a jailhouse confessional, a decade after the events in question?

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