Solitaire
Judith Stanton
My Solitaire app is my best friend, available any time of the night or day for a leisurely stroll through the suits, diamonds hearts clubs spades, or a sprint to finish the game.
No strolls or sprints with my husband, Walker Franklin Bailey, who expects me to have supper on the table every night at seven p.m., the moment he gets home from the upscale men’s clothing store he inherited from his father, and from which he’s outfitted every important local priest, politician, and professor, and oh, a couple of top-ranked football players here in Chapel Hill on their way to making millions in the NFL.
He handles all the bills, the stocks, mutual funds, and keeps us comfortable. I haven’t earned a dime in years.
“Emmeline,” he calls upstairs. “Honey. I’m home.” A cliché if ever there was one. “What’s for supper?”
Okay, I admit it. I was playing Solitaire and forgot to put his supper on the stove. What do I have for tonight anyway? Last I looked in the freezer, a chicken pot pie. Takes an hour, should have put it in at five-forty-five.
Didn’t, because ten games in a row, not one posted a single suit, let alone went to completion, which is some kind of record. I know, because I track my games in a palm-sized notebook I found abandoned at the thrift store, fifty cents. It has little lined pages, an elastic binding to keep it closed, a cover with a classic old-fashioned floral design I want to emulate in the new curtains I’m planning for my study.
Walker hates florals.
I turn back to my game. I love the slide of my mouse on my magenta wine-themed mousepad. I take another sip of cocktail hour Chardonnay. Solitaire is unpredictable but orderly and logical at the same time. Click on a card, click on another, and they fall into place.
“Honey? Dinner?” Walker calls up again.
“Pizza okay, darling?” I holler down.
My current game shows signs of completing after a boatload of no wins. When a game finishes, the screen lights up with fireworks and says, You win. I love that little pop of pleasure.
Walker stomps up our plantation-style curved oak stairs, his strides heavy as the defensive tackles he outfits for the big time. He watches Carolina football obsessively. When we were first married, I tried to learn the game, the rules, the plays, the names, so I could watch with him. Ha.
With a squeak, the door to my study opens. Feeling invaded, I minimize the screen.
“Honey,” Walker says, “we had pizza last night.”
Right. Frozen, meat supreme.
“Sorry.”
Or not. I lost my love of cooking for him after learning of his third affair. Met the bitch. Fixed dinner for her and her husband, not knowing. My housewife gene dried up on the vine.
“Honey,” he says again, sounding hungry. No doubt he thinks he busted his butt all day, always does, deserves his supper.
And no doubt I stayed home, and he doesn’t give a flying fuck that Marisol cleaned the house this morning, that I checked up on her after every room, the floors, the stairs, polishing the sinks. After she left, I did the weekly grocery shop—all quick fix and frozen stuff.
“I can start salad in five,” I say, faking cheerful. Just let me finish my game.
“Fine,” he says. It’s not fine with him.
A couple of minutes later, I follow him down the staircase, a palm sliding down the handrail, custom wrought-iron railings bowing out on either side. Mother’s boy, his mom approved. He’s shed the jacket of the Brioni suit he wears to impress his customers, ditched the Peter Millar tie, and opened the top button of his Peter Millar shirt. Sexy, not. And he already tuned into CNN, too keen an observer of economics and international politics to rely on the nightly network news rag.
I pick out the Majolica salad plates, Vietri Pesci to be precise, an anniversary present I requested from him back when I trusted him, long before I noticed his slow takeover of my life. Let me do this for you, honey, over and over, until, after a time, he was saying, Can’t you do anything for yourself?
I tear off chunks of romaine from my grocery shop this afternoon, dress them with the bottled Caesar dressing, my version of cheating, add store-bought Caesar croutons, cheating again. Then in the one authentic thing I still do, I shave fresh Pecorino Romano cheese onto the plate, best quality I can put my hands on, like twenty-four bucks a pound.
“Honey,” he says. “You should have used the Lenox.”
Our wedding china, American. He doesn’t believe it when I tell him the salad was invented by an Italian immigrant in a restaurant in Tijuana. His mother had her standards.
Still, he scarfs my salad which is fresh, crunchy and delicious but then turns on me, a purr that’s like a snarl.
“No steak? You’re pissing our life away at that damn computer.”
Solitaire’s my bliss, I protest inwardly.
He stands and grabs the collar of my yellow one hundred percent Irish linen camp shirt. He chose it for me, saying the haberdasher’s wife must keep up appearances.
“I want my fucking steak.”
Steaks, stakes. I look out the kitchen window to his garden. He stakes his tomatoes. He stakes peonies along his asphalt driveway. He stakes the places where he planted chrysanthemums until the loropetalum overgrew them and they died.
I look at the stake I hold in my hand, a high-profile Wüsthof chef’s knife. I could use it to slice the ribeye if I’d bought one. Or him.
“I’m going to put an end to this,” he growls, and grabs a gleaming golf club iron from his leather Brooks Brothers’ bag in the hall closet, “9” engraved on its sole. An anniversary present from me—his money, his order—and I shrink. He’s only ever used his fists, and only when I pushed him too hard.
No illusions about diamonds, no more hearts.
He shoves me aside and storms up the stairs, his nine iron clanking behind him, scarring his expensive treads. I run after him. He breaches my sanctuary like he owns it, which he does. Then plants his legs in front of my laptop and lifts the club over his head, Paul Bunyan with his axe.
“No,” I cry. “Please, God, no.”
Walker drives his nine iron into its plastic casing, and I swear I hear a tinny silver moan. He slams it again, and I shudder at the sight of keys popping off my friend, its keyboard, its insides flayed open, motherboard shredded, red bits splattering around the room like blood, dark bits floating down like autumn leaves.
He stops, heaving—more, I think, from anger than exertion—and turns on me, hands on the shaft, knuckles white. “No. More. Solitaire.”
I choke back sobs, outrage.
“Say, ‘I understand,’” he goes on in the courteous, measured voice he cultivates to calm a nervous groom in for the fitting of his first tuxedo.
“I understand,” I parrot.
I do not accept. Diamond hard, a gem of anger forms inside my heart.
He drops the club. “Clean up this mess. I’m going out to get a steak.”
I pick up the nine iron and follow. He doesn’t seem to notice I’m behind him or maybe he thinks I’m following him to fetch the whisk broom so I can execute his orders.
At the stairs, he spurns the handrail. He’s golfing fit and proud of it.
From behind, I hook the club head around his ankle and pull. He cartwheels down the curving stairs, careens against the railings, bellowing.
I hear the crunch of bones splintering, hear him scream in pain.
He lands in a lump at the bottom.
I descend slowly, shaking, a hand on the rail every step of the way. Once down, I crouch within striking distance, sure he doesn’t have a punch left in him.
“What are you waiting for, bitch?” he cries in a weak, hoarse whisper. “Call nine-one-one.”
He looks pathetic, crumpled. Beneath his Peter Millar shirt, an arm is bent double at the elbow, and a broken bone pokes through his Brioni trousers. Blood drips from his nose and a corner of his mouth, trickles from one ear.
He’s not moving, not writhing in pain as he should be.
“Honey,” I say and lean against the wall. It’s cool from the AC. “Call them yourself.”
“Can’t,” he groans, then his eyes widen, horrified. His breathing is labored and his eyelids flutter shut. I take out my smart phone and call up my Solitaire app.
Diamonds, hearts and clubs dance before me on the screen.
Soon spades will dig his grave.