The Bedroom Door
By Chad Eschman
Gina was beautiful. She was commanding, both in the bedroom and in her career in corporate marketing. She never took no for an answer, and she made the best damn Manhattan on the whole planet. She also enjoyed getting high and playing croquet on the lawn. I don’t think we ever played it right, though. Basically, we just set the wickets out and started knocking the balls until one of us fell over.
I was working in receiving at a bookstore, which meant I carried a box knife and had a lot of time to let my mind wander. At night I worked on oil paintings of farm animals, which Gina somehow found charming, her favorite being the one with the chicken on roller skates. She let me fill her living room with canvases and paint thinner and brushes. I would run the fan over the stove to keep the paint fumes down. It didn’t really do anything, but Gina hated open windows.
So that’s how things were. We got along okay. We both had a thing for cheap Chinese food and old cartoons, we both liked sleeping in, and the sex was good. We were pretty happy, I thought. Then came the night that changed things: the night Ben called.
“Ben called.” She was tearing the paper off her chopsticks. I already had mine plunged into my cashew chicken and was chomping down my first mouthful. I swallowed.
“Who’s Ben?”
She smiled, sighed, set her chopsticks down, and touched her fingertips to her chin. “Ben and I were engaged. But we broke it off.”
“Okay,” I said. “What did he want?”
“He wants to try again.”
“Oh.” I looked at her, but she didn’t look at me. That stopped me from asking how she felt about it. I didn’t need to. She got up, went into the bedroom, and closed the door.
That night I sat out on the lawn with the croquet set but I didn’t set it up. I just held the mallet, sat cross-legged with the balls in front of me, and rolled them back and forth for an hour or two. I thought about Gina with a wedding ring on her finger. It didn’t look right no matter how I pictured it. I wandered back inside and looked at my paintings, wondering what I should do. I laid down on the couch. Gina had never, in all the thirteen-and-a-half months I had known her, ever closed her bedroom door.
My newest painting was on an easel at the far side of the room. It was a cow –– just a regular milk cow, except it was flying. There were no wings or anything; it was just sort of jumping through the air, past a windmill and stars, and the cow, instead of being white or brown or black, it was orange and violet. When Gina had seen it a few days before, she had asked me what it meant. I had told her it was how she made me feel –– like a cow that can fly, a cow with colors. She had said, “I like the windmill.” Now I sat and stared at it, thinking about all the ways Gina made me fly, about all the bright colors she made me feel, like when she would get drunk and sing Don Henley songs at the top of her lungs, or when she would wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me she’d had the dream again where she was an astronaut but couldn’t get out of the shuttle when it landed. “I just wanna see the damn moon,” she would always say.
Turning back to the uneaten Chinese food on the table, I saw the shiny crinkle of the fortune cookie wrappers. I tore one open and snapped the cookie, inhaling the cheap sugary smell. I extracted the little slip of paper and read it.
You will face a challenge, but soon a door will open.
I kind of laughed a little bit, but you can’t ignore something like that. So I decided to stay and fight for Gina.
The next week was weird. Ben came over a few nights and I slept on the couch. I could hear their heavy breathing and thrusting in the bedroom, which was unpleasant, but I just focused on the cow and tried to sleep. Then there was a night when they didn’t show up at all. I stayed on the couch anyway, because the bedroom door was still shut, and I was worried what would happen if I opened it.
I grew more quiet and introverted at work, not that I had a lot of people to interact with, anyway. It was usually just me in the back room, sorting through boxes of books, except when Kenny came in. He was part time, a high school kid who helped me out a few hours here and there. Thursday he came in and stopped to stare at me. “Dude, what’s wrong with you?” He had a stack of paperbacks and was flipping the pages of the top one absent-mindedly, making a sound like cards shuffling, but softer.
“My girlfriend’s seeing her ex-fiancé again. He wants to give it another go.”
“Ouch. Don’t you two live together?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn, man. That blows.”
“Yeah.” We went back to work, cutting tape and breaking down boxes, stacking books in tall groups, and it suddenly seemed strange to me that they didn’t fall over.
“So what are you gonna do?” Kenny asked. “You staying with a friend or what?”
“No. I’m on the couch.”
“The couch? You’re still there?” I nodded. He squinted. “Why?”
“I’m not ready to give up yet.”
“But...isn’t she like with this guy now?”
“Yeah. Well. She was with me and that didn’t stop him. Or her. Nothing’s for sure.”
“I guess so.” Kenny pushed a shag of hair out of his eye. “But they were engaged?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow. Man, you’re going to have to shit a sparkler to save this one.”
I rubbed the side of my face, then sighed and went back to work. Kenny was a straightforward kid. He also chewed a lot of ice and was convinced the moon landing was a fabrication, both of which made me a little uneasy, but about the Gina thing he was right. This was a tough one.
I came home that night and Gina had left a note on the table.
Clean up the paint stuff. Chow mein in the fridge. ––G.
I looked over at the side table and saw some of my mixing trays had been shoved aside and a few brushes were on the floor. Knowing Gina, they had probably been trying to screw on the edge of the couch and my stuff was in the way. I went into the fridge, found the food, popped open the box of chow mein, cracked apart some chopsticks with my other hand and pulled a mass of cold noodles up to my mouth. Turning back to the living room, I decided that before I put things away, I would do a few new paintings, but this time not of farm animals. I sat down with an easel and started working, and by four a.m. I had half a dozen new pieces, all of fortune cookies in various states: whole, broken, half-eaten. I lined them all up and tapped my brush against my knee. I felt better, but I still had no idea what to do.
“So what’s this guy like?” Saturday Kenny was in again since he didn’t have school. He was wearing a t-shirt that said I’m the mother flippin’. I didn’t get it.
“Actually, I don’t know. I haven’t really met the guy yet.” I thought about that for a moment. “In fact, I haven’t even seen him.”
“Woah. Hold up. This guy is staying over, doing your girl, and you haven’t even seen him?”
“They close the door.”
“You don’t even see him coming or going?”
“Nope.”
“How do you even know he’s real?”
“Well, I can hear them.”
Kenny started picking at a scab on his knuckle. “Know what, man? You gotta talk to this douche. Let him know you’re not bending over, you know? Like, you have to if you’re serious about this.”
“What can I say?”
“Tell him you love her. You do love her, right?”
“Of course.”
“Of course, so be like man, I love her, and I’m not letting go. He may not like it, but he’s gotta respect you for that.” There was something like wisdom in what Kenny said. I considered it, and it really seemed like the only thing to do: confront Ben.
“Thanks, Kenny.”
“No problem. Oh, man. This thing’s bleeding. I’ll be back.” He went off to get a paper towel.
The next day was Sunday. I had the day off –– Kenny wanted some extra hours, so I slept on the couch until the sunlight finally coaxed me awake. Slowly, I strained open my eyelids and cranked my head around so I could see the bedroom door. I closed my eyes, shook my face, and looked again. It was open.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t open, like open-open, but it was definitely ajar, and ajar is not closed, and this was the first time in a week that it hadn’t been closed. I thought for a moment. Sundays there was a farmer’s market over on Bentwood that Gina liked, so she had probably walked over there. I licked my lip. Was Ben still here?
Over in the corner, leaning against the wall, were my fortune cookie paintings. From the couch, I could clearly see the cracked-open cookie, the one with the fortune peeking out. Next to it was the cow painting. Still flying, the cow seemed to be looking right at me, and then, right then, just for a moment, I swear it winked at me.
I stood. Running one hand through my hair and clenching the other tightly against my leg, I turned. With a mighty breath, I walked over to Gina’s door. When I reached it, I paused. My face was hot. Was he there? Was he gone? Was I wrong, and Gina hadn’t gone to the farmer’s market? Maybe I would find only Gina, alone, sleepy, and she would open her eyes and see me and say “I’m sorry baby, I was wrong. Ben left last night, and I’ve just been waiting for you.” I nudged open the door.
There was no Gina. She was gone, her side of the bed tossed open and empty. On the other side, rumpled and warm, skin red and hair mussed, wrapped in my half of the blanket, was Ben. My breath quickened, then eased. He looked pudgy with his face mashed against my pillow, his lips just a bit too full for his face. I stepped closer, weaving my way through the clothes tossed on the floor, and I stood over him. His breathing was slow and lazy. I sat on the edge of the bed.
Ben mumbled, wiggled, then smacked his chubby lips. His eyes started to creak open, then suddenly shot wide. He sat up quick and his adrenalized pupils locked on me, contracting.
“Wha-what are you doin’?” He wiped a trickle of drool from the corner of his mouth.
“Ben,” I said, “I’m not leaving.” He stared at me, and I could tell his mind was working, trying to make sense of the scene, probably wondering if he was still dreaming. “I love Gina,” I continued, “and I’m not letting you have her.” His stare froze for a second, his mouth hanging loose. Then he grinned, and laughter, starting as a single cough, then growing into a wheezing convulsion, spewed out of him. His eyes wrinkled tight, and his hairless, freckled chest heaved up and down, shaking his belly beneath.
Sometimes I have a temper. I don’t know where it comes from, but today, after taking this huge step and opening the forbidden door, following my fortune cookie destiny, spilling my confession of love out in front of tubby Ben, and hoping for the respect Kenny had predicted, I was not pleased. I reached for the closest thing I could grab, which was the piggy bank on Gina’s little dresser, and I swung it full force, all the way around in a perfect arc that ended at the side of Ben’s head.
Do you know that feeling you got when you yelled fuck in front of your parents when you were six, when you were caught having sex with your second cousin behind the park dugout at the family reunion, when you were driving kinda buzzed and maybe a bit stoned in Porterville and you saw those blue lights in your rearview mirror? Those were nothing compared to the full-ton truck that pummeled through my chest when I saw the blood rush out of Ben’s temple.
His eyes went blank and he crumpled to the side, a warm red flood pitchering out and spreading over the sheets. The puddle grew slowly, so slowly I could hear it seeping into the cotton. That sound, the painful saturation of the dry fibers covering Gina’s bed, that was the most terrifying part of all. More sickening than Ben’s frozen eyes, more painful than the shards of porcelain embedded in my finger and his head, and more haunting than the smell of his sweat turning cold.
Now I’m sitting on the lawn. I have the croquet all set up. I also have my paintings arranged on the lawn, a fortune cookie by each wicket and the cow leaping next to the little goalpost. Here comes Gina. She’s carrying a bag of produce in one hand and a bag of Chinese takeout in the other. Now she stops, she stares at me. Does she know? I hold out a mallet for her. She looks for a second longer, than says “shit” and quickly turns. She drops the bags and runs into the apartment, the little white boxes tumbling onto the ground, and chow mein spilling out onto the concrete in a greasy mess. I turn back to the cow. He looks very, very sad.