Getting the Message
by Ray Morrison
After she has left her apartment to go to The Flaming Wok to pick up their carryout, he ambles into the kitchen for a beer. He looks about the room and it dawns on him that it is the first time he's been alone in her place. In the past three months, since he has been coming there, he has become comfortable already, but their time has been spent mostly in the bedroom.
She is a doctor, a surgeon, and her kitchen reflects an orderly precision he assumes she brings to her work. The stainless steel pots and pans that hang in a row, in descending order of size, gleam under bright fluorescents. When he opens the refrigerator, there is a puff of cool, citrus-scented air across his face and arms, and he notes that the refrigerator's contents—jars of relish and mayonnaise and olives, storage containers with carefully saved leftovers, a carton of 2% milk—appear thoughtfully arranged for easy retrieval. Four bottles of Corona are lined up like soldiers along the top shelf. He grabs the second one from the left, and the gap it leaves seems glaring.Her phone rings, startling him, and he closes the refrigerator door. He wonders if she is calling him with some question about his food order—was it steamed rice or fried?—so he walks back into the living room toward the phone. Just as it rings for the third time, he reaches for it, but stops. No, he thinks. She would call his cell phone. He listens as the fourth ring is cut off by the answering machine.
The greeting is short, to the point, and it is, he realizes again, so like her. At its conclusion, a female voice, made slightly tinny the way all voices are changed by these machines, begins to leave a message. In a trick of the mind, he conjures an imagined face for the voice (not too young, dark hair cut short, wide intelligent eyes) as he stands listening while it is recorded. The unopened beer bottle sweats onto his hand.
"Hey, sorry I missed your call. I've been thinking about what you said and, as much as I hate to agree, you're right that this is only headed for trouble. When any married man, even one who's separated, tells you that you need to be patient so he can 'resolve' things, then he's in no hurry to get a divorce. I'm sorry, sweetie, but you two do need to have the talk. Anyway, call me when you get in. Bye."
The final word hangs in the air and lodges in his head, which begins to feel heavy. He had thought it odd that she wanted to get together tonight, on such short notice, but assumed, in his arrogance, that she missed him as much as he did her. He thinks about the weekend just past. They had driven out of the city, to a secluded spot by the river he knew well, and there they had a picnic, lying in the dappled sunlight beneath a tall oak, embracing until they rolled off the blanket onto the cool grass, where they undressed each other and wrestled and laughed with a soft breeze blowing off the water, chilling their sweat-slicked skin. Afterward, they pulled on their clothes and he kissed her. The bliss he felt was enormous, seeming to fill every cell of his body. He'd whispered to her: "This is what I've been searching for."
After several minutes, he goes again to the kitchen, where he replaces the beer in its place in line. When he walks back into the living room, he stares down at the blinking light on the answering machine, and he is filled with an emptiness that is surprising in its heft, like a lead ball in his gut.
He hears her fighting the key into the door lock. He imagines her in the hallway, balancing cartons of hot and sour soup and jumbo shrimp as she fiddles with it. He will go and help her with her burden, even though he has lost his appetite, but before he goes to her, he reaches down to press the button that erases the message.
Ray Morrison's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Carve Magazine, Aethlon, Ecotone, moonShine review, and The Rose & Thorn. He is a practicing veterinarian who lives in Winston-Salem, NC, with his wife and three children.