Marsden was at Elliot’s, and I worked in the house in near silence until noon yesterday. The only sounds interrupting my flow all morning were old house sounds. The creaks and occasional random thumps that this house emits makes it feel like the authentic fake it is. When Elliot left, he bought a new farmhouse designed to look like an old farmhouse for me and Marsden to move into.
“You always said you loved old farmhouses,” he told me.
“But this isn’t an old farmhouse,” I had to point out.
Elliot likes new things that look old. He left me for a woman who is five years younger than me but looks ten years older. I like new things to look new and old things to look old, but I am still surrounded by new things that look old. A deep-hued red underlayer of paint peeks through the steel blue overlayer in spots on the kitchen cabinets that have been sanded down to look like wear-and-tear. The exposed wooden beams that frame the house aren’t just made from reclaimed wood, they are reclaimed wood that was further battered and beaten.
Everything in this house is distressed, even its inhabitants.
In our old house everything looked perfect, because if we looked perfect, we’d be perfect. Only we weren’t. I didn’t believe it when Maya told me she heard that Elliot might be having an affair. “With who?” I asked.
It didn’t strike me as possible that he was sleeping with somebody else, but I was curious as to who he would have a rumored affair with. Who did people think he was sleeping with? “Midge Montgomery,” Maya said.
“Who’s Midge Montgomery?” I asked before reassuring her, “Elliot’s not having an affair.”
When I tried to picture what someone named Midge Montgomery would look like, I could only conjure an image of Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched. Could Elliot be secretly cavorting with a woman with a magical button of a nose? No. Of course not.
Maya didn’t bring it up again. Not directly. But the idea had infiltrated my thoughts. I reassured myself with the knowledge that Elliot was too nerdy and too honest to have an affair. But I watched him more carefully. At that point, he was spending almost all his free time in the backyard working on his fruit trees. He was experimenting to see how many different types of fruit he could successfully graft onto a single tree. His most successful had nine different types of fruit growing on it. But he wanted more.
That was the part of his personality I hadn’t considered. Elliot always wants more.
And then one night after he got home late from a squash game with Mike, I asked him, not because I believed it was true, but because I wanted his reassurance that it wasn’t.
I honestly felt guilty about asking.
ME: Elliot, I have a crazy question for you. Maya mentioned something and I keep thinking about it, so I’m just going to ask you. I’m actually asking more for Maya than for me.
ELLIOT: What’s your question Elise?
ME: Never mind.
ELLIOT: Okay. I’ll never mind.
ME: Okay, I’ll ask. I’m sorry to ask this, but are you having an affair? Maya heard something.
ELLIOT: Do you want me to call Maya with the answer, or would you prefer that I tell you and then you can relay my answer to Maya?
ME: I shouldn’t have asked.
ELLIOT: I’m seeing someone.
A year and a half after that conversation, the house with the fruit tree that grows apples, pears, nectarines, plums, and peaches had been sold and Elliot had moved out on me and in with Midge Montgomery, who thankfully looks nothing like Elizabeth Montgomery.
And a year after that, Maya tells me I need to stop obsessing over Elliot.
I told her, “If time was money, I only spend a dime a day on Elliot.” I probably sounded defensive, too thou dost protest too much-ish. But I don’t believe, like Maya implied, that I am self-delusional. She didn’t just imply it. She said it straight out: “Elise, stop creating characters for a moment and look at yourself. You are self-delusional.”
After Elliot emptied out his side of the closet, after his toothbrush and shaving supplies were gone from the bathroom and space opened up for new signs of sickness in the medicine cabinet, after he left his wedding ring on his bedside table, where he used to keep a pyramid of three books—the books would change but the pyramid always stayed the same—the one thing he couldn’t take, the thing he inadvertently left behind was his scent. He had moved out, but our bedroom still smelled like Elliot and for three months I didn’t wash the sheets, sweep, vacuum, or even clean the toilet, for fear of losing his scent. When Elliot announced that he planned to sell the house and would buy a smaller place for me and Marsden, I was forced to clean. Maya came over and helped me. We sniffed everything that had touched Elliot before scrubbing and sanitizing, and then to commemorate the end of eau de Elliot, we opened a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and curled up on the bed and planned my future.
I don’t want to be thinking about him, but he lurks and he lingers.