Third Arm

Ginger Strand

In  Milwaukee Alice decides to leave her husband. She does it in a time-tested way, by beginning an affair with someone else. She has had affairs before, and Noel has always taken them to be proof of his particularly enlightened worldview. This time he takes it personally, because he can tell that she means it as the end.
    “Why did you bring me all the way to Milwaukee just to leave me?” he demands early on, like a petulant child. Alice just goes on hanging Molly’s clothes on the sagging line stretched across the dank, cinder block cellar. Her lover has a languorous southern accent. Her daughter is upstairs, napping.
    They are in Milwaukee for two months because Alice has won a fellowship to attend a workshop for unproduced playwrights. She has decided to be a playwright. Noel has often pointed out that writing is one of those things you don’t make a decision about; you either do it or you don’t. Still, he does the things to indicate that he supports her aspirations. He has packed his bags and left his comfortable Greenwich Village apartment for the Midwest just at the point when he should be finishing his deeply thought analysis of pre-Civil War riots and preparing for his tenure review. He has let Alice make all the arrangements. He acts enthusiastic about the opportunity to spend the summer with a backyard, a front porch, a barbecue grill—the accoutrements of family life they have always professed to despise. Only once has he pointed out the irony of an artist leaving Greenwich Village in order to work in the Midwest.
    “Eugene O’Neill spent his summers in Provincetown,” she shot back.
    “I was joking,” he said. For Alice, the memory of little exchanges like that has become evidence that things have been wrong for a long time, that what she has done is not sudden.
    In Milwaukee they strike a bargain. She goes to concerts and readings with her new lover, who is also in her workshop, every other evening. On those nights Noel stays home with Molly. On the other evenings, he gets to choose what they will do. Then they stay in, or go out together. Mostly they go to a local Serbian restaurant, a family-owned place in an old public house down in the docklands part of town. They eat big cuts of meat glistening with fat and brown gravy and drink glasses of sweet slivovitz. Molly eats potatoes and bread.
    “Butter please,” she says with each slice. One of them slathers it on.
    “Slivovitz,” Noel says more than once, “must go some way towards explaining the Balkans.”
    On these evenings, Alice and Noel get along fine, as they always have. He will let go of her slowly, she believes. It will be easier this way.
    “He’ll never let you go,” her lover says as they walk home, like schoolchildren, from the afternoon’s workshop on July third. He is given to melodramatic pronouncements.
    “He needs time,” Alice responds, as she always does.
    “Do you think you can get away for the fireworks tonight?” her lover asks. Milwaukee, inexplicably, is having fireworks on the eve of the holiday. It is her husband’s night.
    “No,” she says. “I don’t know.”
    Noel has decided they should have a barbecue that night. In the late afternoon sunlight, they walk to the grocery store together. She is wearing a sundress, he a pair of plaid shorts and a T-shirt. The store is two blocks from their borrowed house, in a little strip of nice shops: a bakery, a butcher, a jewelry shop, a dry cleaner. He carries Molly on his shoulders. He puts her in the shopping cart seat, and Alice follows as he fills the cart. He buys hamburger meat and hot dogs and buns and ketchup and mustard and pickle relish and some nice mango chutney they have on sale. He buys a family size bag of potato chips and two-liter bottles of Pepsi and Sprite. He puts a heavy bag of charcoal on the bottom rack of the shopping cart and puts lighter fluid in with the groceries. They have sparklers in the grocery store, so he buys two boxes. As he stands on the line, Molly points to a purple and pink pinwheel, and he puts it in her hand.
    Noel grew up in an apartment on the Upper East Side with a lawyer for a father and a mother who wrote books about medieval lyrics. Alice wonders how he even knows what to buy.
    They barbecue hot dogs and hamburgers. Molly sits at the picnic table in the backyard and eats three hot dogs.
    “It’s hot,” she says with a three-year-old’s seriousness, “but it doesn’t look like a dog.” Alice kisses the ketchup off Molly’s forearm and compliments Noel on his invention, a perfectly charred burger that reveals a little burst of chutney on the inside. He spins the barbecue spatula and grins, and she thinks, He could have been, happy living in the suburbs like this. Milwaukee is not the suburbs, but it seems like the same thing to her.
    After Molly goes to bed, Noel sits in the living room reading a book on durable goods in the early nineteenth century by one of his colleagues. Alice moves from room to room. The owners of the house have furnished it with mostly period furniture. She is impressed by the consistency of vision, the planning and self-controlled buying implied by the home’s Arts and Crafts look. It is a spacious house, with open hallways and large doorways. Large windows look out from the living room to the front porch. She stands at one of them, fidgeting. Noel puts down his book.
    “Why don’t you go out,” he says. It is an act of generosity in the midst of what she knows must be awful unhappiness and disappointment. She is so awed by his pain that she can’t even take it into account.
    “I’ll be back later,” she says. She knows exactly where she will find her lover, in the little park where he first kissed her, on the bluffs overlooking the lake. Setting the scene for her arrival.
    It is near one when she leaves her lover. He is living in a sublet apartment only a few blocks from her own temporary home, just past the block of shops. As she walks through the empty parking lot behind the grocery store, she sees a sparse circle of people. In the middle is a man. She can see his black tank top but can’t see what he’s doing. She hears a loud, repeated cracking sound that she can’t quite place. She draws nearer. In Milwaukee she finds she is fearless, willing to approach any situation. At home in New York, she is more careful. As she approaches the loose circle of onlookers, she sees that the man has a bullwhip. With an elegant undulation of his arm, he is cracking it against the hot asphalt, again and again.
    She stops and stares because the scene seems so incongruous. It’s what she would expect in the Village, not in a mundane middle-class neighborhood in a small city in Wisconsin. She doesn’t know what to think of these people. Are they militant gays? Proud members of S & M societies? Plumbers and dentists who like whips? She watches for a moment then goes home to her child and the husband she is slowly abandoning.
    “I want you to move out,” Noel says when she gets home. “This is too hard for me.”
    She sits down on the staircase, planting herself next to the banister as if she’ll need to hang on by force. The staircase in the foyer is large and grandiose, in a 1920s, squared-off way. It is made for entrances.
    “How can I move out?” she asks. “We’re only here for another month.”
    “Move out,” he persists. “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to see your stuff.”
    “I can’t move out.” She is beginning to cry, which hardens his upset to fury. “I’m Molly’s mother.” She has no idea what happens from this point.
    “Then you have to stay with him,” he tells her. “On his nights you stay with him.”
    She feels the, insult in his words, and the pain behind it. But she doesn’t know what to do next. She can see how her late-night returns after passionate encounters must be upsetting to her husband. But she can’t stop herself any more than the man in the parking lot could have stopped the startlingly loud crack from issuing once he had flicked the whip.

“You should get a lawyer,” her lover tells her, as they lie across the bed in his creaky sublet. He looks at her with an expression that is clearly calculated to be earnest and knowing. She is looking at his body. He is flaccid and somewhat overweight, both heavier and older than her husband, but somehow she desires him and not the man she married, the father of her child. Three years’ worth of lust has attached itself to his unlikely frame.
    “I miss Molly,” she says and begins to cry.
    “That’s your grief now,” he says. “You’ll get used to it, like a third arm.”
    She stares out the window, feeling her grief fold itself to her chest, extra, unwanted, but attached. He has given her a gift. She knows he must have heard or read it somewhere. He’s not that eloquent.

The next morning she stops at the grocery store on her way back to Noel and Molly. They have flats of flowers for sale, stacked on racks outside the store. She buys two flats of pansies.
    When she gets home they are still asleep. She finds a little shovel in the carriage house. The flower beds at the side of the house are in disarray, unattended since the owners left in early June. In four weeks she and Noel and Molly will leave and the owners will come back. For some reason, she wants the house to look cared for when they do.
    It takes her an hour to dig up all the weeds. She makes a big stack of uprooted weeds in the driveway. The dirt is churned up from the removal. She cranks the faucet on the side of the house and turns the hose onto the beds to wet the dirt down. Then she begins to make holes for the plants.
    She realizes that getting the dirt wet was probably the wrong idea because it sticks to her hands when she pokes holes for the pansies. Still, she is this far and not willing to turn back. Methodically, in rows, she plants the flowers.
    Noel comes outside, wearing shorts and some sort of jacket, as if he has run out of T-shirts.
    “I called my family last night,” he says. “I told them you’re leaving me.”
    “That’s good I guess,” she replies, absent in her dedication to the task at hand. She unearths a worm in the dirt, and it makes her think of her lover, blind and groping. Noel stands and watches her.
    She doesn’t know when she stopped loving her husband. She thinks about it all the time, but she can’t establish a time or a reason for it, even for her own satisfaction. Love was there and then it was gone. When Molly was born they stopped having sex, but they attributed that to childbirth. Alice knows it happened sometime before that. She wishes that even now he would say something to her that would justify her lack of emotion. You bitch, he could say. I never loved you either.
    I would love him if I could, she tells herself. But that’s not enough. “I still like you. I want us to be friends,” she had told him at the beginning.
    “Don’t do this, Alice,” he had replied.
    “I pushed Molly on the swing last night for as long as she wanted,” he says now. “I started at 8:30. She kept going until twelve past ten.”
    Alice stands up. She has finished planting the flowers. They look spindly and sparse, as if alarmed by their new location. But she will water them and the sun will shine. There are four weeks left. By the time the owners return, the flower beds will be lush and colorful. They will pull into the driveway with surprised delight. How lovely, they will say. They will have forgotten. how nice their house is while they were gone. Isn’t it beautiful? they will say to each other. If it’s late afternoon, the light will be falling on the side of the house like a benediction. In the car they will pause, hold their breath. They will be so glad to be home.

“Third Arm” appears in our Autumn 2001 issue.