I threw the phone on the bed and rush-stumbled my way into the bathroom, really thinking I was going to vomit. I shut the door and crouched down beside the toilet like I had done earlier in the day in the office, except the toilet in my own house wasn’t cleaned as regularly, and the familiar but sickening smells made me retch immediately. In an instant I was willing it, embracing it, giving myself over to it. Yes. Yes! Get the sickness out, push it out, purge it, now and forever. But still, nothing would come up but phlegm and stomach acid, stinging my lips and dripping uselessly into the bowl.
“Alan? Are you all right? Alan?”
It was Jenny, gently tapping at my bathroom door.
“Yes,” I said, coughing, spitting, drooling. “Yes, I’m all right. Just felt like I had to throw up again.”
It was a lie and the truth at the same time, exactly the kind of strange dichotomy that had characterized so much of our marriage. I pulled down the toilet seat, knowing that it was likely to be cleaner than the rim of the bowl, and laid my head down upon it.
“Do you need anything?”
“No,” I said. “No. I’ll be okay. Just give me a few minutes.”
“There’s still time to make that doctor’s appointment. If you’re feeling up to it.”
What? A doctor’s appointment? When? What time is it now? Should I? Shouldn’t I? Could I?
“Alan?”
Fuck. “Just give me a few minutes, okay?”
There was no response from Jenny, but I watched as her shadow moved away from the light at the bottom of the door.
“Where’s Daddy?” I heard Jacob say distantly, a frightened curiosity in his voice.
“He’s in the bathroom, honey. Come on, let’s go watch one of your videos.”
When they were clearly gone, I lifted my head up and sat back against the bathroom wall. I didn’t know what I was feeling, but it wasn’t good. I didn’t think I was going to throw up anymore, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Regardless, I had no compelling desire to get up and go back to whatever it was that was waiting for me on the other side of the bathroom door. Sitting there, still in my work shirt, rumpled slacks, and loose socks, I entertained the idea that I would simply sit there forever, wedged between the toilet bowl and the small laundry basket filled with Jacob’s bath toys. They included a set of squeezy animals that were designed to take in water and then spit it out in a steady stream from a tiny hole in their mouths. There was a hippo, a frog, a fish, and a turtle, each a different color but each obviously rendered in the same design program and birthed on the same injection molding machine. I plucked the turtle out from the basket, the yellow paint on some segments of its shell long since flaked off to reveal the unblemished orange rubber beneath.
A long time ago, when Jacob was just able to sit up unassisted in the bathtub, I remember playfully giving each of these little animals a name -- Henry Hippo and Freddy Frog -- but now, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what they had been. As I held the nameless turtle up and examined it closely, it seemed to smile back at me, keeping the secret of its identity to itself. When I squeezed him, a few drops of mildewy water bubbled out of his face.
So Wes Howard thought I was sleeping with Bethany Bishop. In my addled state, I started to obsess over that, desperate to figure out how he had come to that conclusion. I’ve seen the two of you together, he had said, but where? I tried to think of all the times that the three of us had been in the same room together, and was able to conjure up only a tiny number of instances -- all of them in some kind of work setting, and none of them where it had only been the three of us alone. The idea that I had someone signaled with my behavior that Bethany and I were sleeping together in one of those situations seemed impossible for me to believe -- especially since Bethany and I were not, in fact, sleeping with each other.
Yes, I’m sure. What kind of question is that? Wouldn’t I remember if I was sleeping with Bethany? Geez.
No, I had done nothing to give Wes the idea, so someone must have told him. Someone with an axe to grind against me. That seemed a lot more plausible. Because Bethany and I were friendly with one another. At least until recently, we had been friends, and now I realized that there were any number of times that people from the office would have seen us being friendly to one another. I thought of all the lunches we had had together in the Cellar -- sitting by ourselves but in full view of others. All the times I had innocently held her chair for her, or retrieved some forgotten item for her, or touched her hand as we talked about our lives and our marriages.
Who? Who would want to start such a rumor against me? I started running through a Rogue’s Gallery in my mind, seeing each of their faces in the bright bathroom air and, with each appearance, the fanciful reason why they might want to sabotage me, each probably more ludicrous than the last. Gerald Kreiger: angry at the way I had torpedoed his client-stealing scheme. Michael Lopez: angry at the way I had humiliated him in front of the others. Susan Sanford: angry at the way I had refused to protect her and her team from Wes’s predations. Amy Crawford: angry at the way I had gotten her fired. Mary Walton: angry at the way I had failed her and hoping to drive me into an early grave. Bethany Bishop: angry at the way I had started to shun her and--
My thoughts stopped in midstream. Not me, I realized suddenly. Everyone in the gallery probably hated me and would love to see me fail, but what if the rumor hadn’t been started to destroy me? What if it had been started to destroy Bethany. And what if Wes had started it himself?
“Wait a minute,” I said out loud to the squeezy turtle. “Does that make any sense at all?”
The turtle smiled cryptically back but said nothing.
Bethany had said that Wes was spreading rumors about her, talking to the junior members of her team about her, but had not told me what those rumors were. If, like Susan, Bethany was standing between Wes’s meat hooks and the young women that worked for her, it would fit Wes’s pattern to start spreading rumors about her. With Susan, it had been about her incompetence and her prudishness. With Bethany, could it be about her infidelity and sluttiness?
But if it was Wes who started such a rumor, why would he tell me about it? When he spoke to me, he certainly sounded like he believed it, not at all like he knew that he had made it up. Or was that part of his plan?
Ugh. I threw the turtle across the room, and he bounced mindlessly off the back of the door and landed on the floor under our pedestal sink -- exactly the hard to reach place that everything dropped on our bathroom floor seemed to end up. I buried my face in my hands. What the fuck was going on? And what was I going to do?
Whoever had started the rumor, Wes Howard was now using it to blackmail me into doing his bidding. It wasn’t true, but evidently that didn’t matter. Even if Wes knew it wasn’t true, what would stop him from telling Mary -- or Jenny -- that it was true? He certainly had no scruples when it came to this kind of thing. One way or the other, he was going to get his way, and the only thing I had to do was play along.
But with what, exactly? What was it that Wes wanted me to play ball on? A bunch of meaningless committee appointments? Who cares? Did it really matter if Neil Richards or Kathleen Meyer was the chair of the Bylaws Committee? It certainly didn’t matter to me.
You know it’s not going to end there.
I looked up, thinking wildly for an instant that someone else had spoken. I looked over to where the turtle had landed, and I could just see his laugh-lined eye peering at me from behind the porcelain.
No, it’s not. It’s going to start with committee appointments, but it’s going to progress to other things. What other things? Anything illegal? Immoral?
I rubbed my eyes, trying to blot out the images that had arisen -- ridiculous, yet oddly compelling things that a man as unprincipled at Wes Howard could try to involve me in, could try to use me and the organization I worked for to give him access to. They weren’t hard to imagine. They fell into the three essential categories of the corrupt: money, women, and power -- things like embezzlement, like sex trafficking, like ritual murder. I didn’t know where I could draw a line. Everything seemed completely unbelievable and entirely possible at the same time.
Tap, tap, tap.
“Alan? Alan, are you all right, honey?”
It was Jenny, back at the door.
“I’m okay,” I said, lying, and knowing that it wouldn’t be the last one I told her. Most of me wanted to tell her -- wanted to get in front of the lie rather than risk having her hear it from Wes -- but some small piece of me wasn’t up to it. At least not then.
“I really think you should keep that doctor’s appointment,” Jenny said, lovingly. “If you’re feeling up to it, that is.”
I considered my options. I was feeling sick to my stomach, but I was certain that had more to do with Wes Howard than any migraine I might or might not have had.
“Yeah, okay,” I said, slowly getting to my feet, and flushing the toilet, mostly for show.
“I’ll drive you,” Jenny said. “If we leave in the next ten minutes we’ll be able to make it.”
I opened the bathroom door, and saw my wife standing there in her bare feet, the worry on her face even more prominent than her pregnant belly.
“Okay,” I said, giving her an awkward hug. “Let me change into something else first.”
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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