Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [3]
Keisha, who may have even less impulse control than I do, says to Larry, “Hell, she’s mad because she don’t know where you been sleeping. I’d be mad. Miss Priss and Miss Chef over there”—she gestures to Mary Ann and me—“we’d be mad if our man don’t come home, and we don’t know where he is or who he’s been sleepin’ with.”
Before I can jump in with a “Right on, sister!,” Shawn, a middle-aged man in an expensive suit, waves his hand in a dismissive manner and says in a clipped and condescending tone, “Oh, come on, that really isn’t the issue. It is not about what makes her mad. The point is, this guy, Larry here, is trying to get his act together. He knows there are probably a hundred little things his wife does that annoy the crap out of him, and when he’s drunk those hundred things become a thousand.
“He’s taking one step at a time, and if his wife doesn’t see that, to hell with her. This isn’t freaking marriage counseling. Larry’s got other things on his mind besides other women. Why is it you can’t understand it isn’t always about you?”
Shawn’s tone is full of disdain and thinly concealed misogyny. He hasn’t spoken before, and I wonder what he has done and why he is here. One thing I’m sure about, it somehow involves a woman.
Mary Ann, a traitor to her sex, replies, “Thanks for sharing that thought, Shawn. Would you like to say some more about that?”
Shawn puts his forearms on his knees, buries his head in his open palms, and says in a tight voice, “No, that will do it.”
Mary Ann turns her attention to Keisha and me and opens her mouth, poised to deliver a lecture, but before she can begin, before I even know it myself, I’m off and running. “Do you want to know what my trigger is, Mary Ann, Shawn, Larry?” I say, louder than I had intended. “Lying, cheating, scumbag husbands and their whores!”
I hear Mary Ann say “Mira,” and I know she’s about to tell me I’m smothering in the thick, black smoke of my anger. But I don’t care, and I don’t stop.
I blurt out my story, how I had hired Nicola to be the maîtress d’hôtel at our restaurant, Grappa, when I was seven months pregnant. How I suspected Jake and Nicola had begun having an affair when Chloe was just hours old; and how one night, when Chloe woke up and Jake still wasn’t home at two-thirty in the morning, I bundled her up and strapped her into the portable infant carrier, walked the three blocks to the restaurant, and snuck in the side door.
The door was locked, but the alarm wasn’t on, the first odd thing, because Jake always locks up and sets the alarm before leaving the restaurant. Chloe had fallen back to sleep in her infant seat on the way over, so I carefully nestled the carrier into one of the leather banquettes.
I crept through the dining room and into the darkened kitchen, where I could see the office at the far end was aglow with candlelight. As I moved closer I could hear music. “Nessun dorma,” from Turandot, Jake’s favorite. How fitting. On the marble pastry station I found an open bottle of wine and two empty glasses. It was, to add insult to what was about to be serious injury, a 1999 Tenuta dell’Ornellaia Masseto Toscano—the most expensive wine in our cellar. Three hundred and eighty dollar foreplay.
I picked up the bottle and followed the trail of clothes to the office. Jake’s checkered chef’s pants and tunic, Nicola’s slinky black dress, which I hated her for being able to wear, and a Victoria’s Secret, lacy, black bra. They were on the leather couch, Nicola on top, her wild, black hair spilling over Jake’s chest, humping away like wild dogs. Carried away by their passion, they were oblivious to my approach. I drained the last of the wine from the bottle and hurled it over their backsides where it smashed against the wall, announcing my arrival.
Before Jake could completely