Bad Time to Be in Love
Maria Carroll
There are no eyes in the carpet, Christopher Andersen tells himself firmly. There is no one following me.
It’s his first time there alone, and no one is following him as he walks into the dark, echoey foyer of the theater—no one, just his shadow, sliding across the thick mauve carpet behind him, faint in the chandeliers’ weak light.
He and his shadow find a seat in the sixth row. Chris sits, and his shadow coils itself around his feet, shifting lazily.
They both wait for the movie to start. Chris thinks of Sara, of the way she would sit next to him in her little red dress, leg curled onto the seat beneath her and elbow touching his. He remembers the glow of her eyes in the screen’s light, the way she would smile, or frown, depending on what the actors onscreen were feeling, her mouth mirroring theirs as though no one were watching. Her smell: leather, vanilla bean. The softness of her hair on his neck. Her long fingers absentmindedly twisting the red fabric of her dress. He inhales deep and tries to find any remnant of her scent, but it’s gone.
Chris’s shadow thinks about Sara too.
The eyes in the carpet blink slowly: open and shut, open and shut.
The doors sigh closed and darkness falls, total for a brief second. Chris feels like he’s alone with Sara for a moment, just the two of them, just like old times. He’s not, of course. There’s smoky blacker-than-blackness pooling around his feet.
Then the film reel starts and a grainy Barbara Stanwyck with a voice like dust enters the theater. She meets a man, as women in movies did back then. It’s love. Barbara walks through the city with her soon-to-be husband, and everyone can see her surety in her tilted-up chin and leveled-back shoulders. Her leisurely gait, her unruffled poise. Chris sees Sara up there, hips swinging as she walks down the street, a decorous distance from him. Everyone watches the woman in red.
Chris’s shadow does not see Sara, not now—but it doesn’t see Barbara either. It sees a woman in love. A woman about to be married. It sees Annie, her wide mouth and small teeth. Her thick gold band on her left ring finger, matching Chris’s exactly.
So there’s Barbara and a man, in love. And everything’s fine until a second man enters the picture, all at once and flickeringly, as damaged spots appear in the old film and the sound is replaced for a moment by an empty hiss. This man is desperately in love with Barbara. Chris hears the small sympathetic whimper of a woman three rows behind him, almost lost in the projector’s uneven hum. Who will Barbara choose? Her steady, strong fiancé—husband, nearly!—or this interloper. This new fellow. This narrow-framed, passionate-eyed would-be lover.
And it’s only now that Chris’s shadow thinks of Sara. It sees Chris twisting his ring absentmindedly, no doubt habit. Chris’s ring is shinier on the inside than it is on the outside, a sign of all those days with it off and nights with it on—and, eventually, nights with it off, too.
And there’s the difference: Barbara keeps an appropriate space between herself and her second man, even when she joins him on his yacht. She is all demure smiles and grace. Reproachless.
The shadow writhes beneath Chris’s velvet seat, shivers up his legs. It remembers other scenes.
It has evidence, and jumps to no conclusions, but others do.
As Barbara descends furtively from the yacht, the skirt of her red dress bunched in her hand, the innocent wrongly accused, something happens—there’s a tendril of darkness coiling around Chris’s neck. It squeezes unfeelingly, calmly, like it is something it has always meant to do.
The last thing Chris sees as he lurches sideways is the cold wet eye, all whites and no iris, gazing at him from the ground. Then it’s over and his own eyes are empty and fixed, his mouth gaping open. There’s a creak as his weight shifts in his chair, and then silence. No one notices as his shadow slides into the base of his seat, wrapping itself around wrought-iron roses. No one notices until quite a bit later that there’s a corpse in the sixth row. The film plays on.
“Who was the woman in red?” Barbara’s husband demands, a damaged frame of film temporarily obscuring his face. He is suspicious and yet oblivious. “I know she was on the yacht. People saw her. Who is she?”
“I don’t know,” the second suitor insists. Over and over. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t know,” Barbara says, later. “I’m telling you, I’ve been here all day. It wasn’t me.” She smoothes the skirt of her red dress over her knees self-consciously.
—————
Sara doesn’t go to Chris’s funeral. After all, why should she?
“We’re just friends,” she’d insisted to the policemen. Over and over. “We’re just friends.”
They kept asking her questions, though. Sara didn’t call a lawyer.
Why were you always at the club at the same time?
“A girl can have a tennis partner, can’t she? She can be friends with him, can’t she?”
Why did he leave you money in his will? Is that common among tennis partners?
“I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re just friends.”
And Where were you last night between the hours of six and nine p.m.?
“I was at a party. Plenty of people saw me there. You can check.”
“We will,” the policeman had assured her at that point.
It didn’t matter. She hadn’t killed him, and they knew it.
But that didn’t matter, either—she’d said it enough, and now she believed it. We’re just friends. We’ve never been anything more than friends.
The last she’d heard was when the police had called her up and (grudgingly) informed her that the death had been declared a result of heart trouble, and she was no longer under suspicion. No, that wasn’t the last thing—the last thing was a week ago, when one of her coworkers had told her the date of the funeral.
“Okay,” Sara had responded coldly.
“I’m sorry,” the woman had said, and Sara could have strangled her to get rid of the pity that was staining the woman’s face. Disgusting.
She’d settled for a sharp “Why are you sorry?” instead.
“Well... you were seeing him, weren’t you? That’s why the police—” She broke off as she saw the look on Sara’s face and rushed to apologize. “I mean, not that—I’m sorry. I know it’s none of my business. I just... never mind.”
“We were just friends,” Sara spat as the woman hurried away.
They were just friends, Sara told herself, and she was well shot of him now. It had been fun at first—glances from the other side of the room, meetings in the men’s restroom, words whispered in the silent empty theater—but he’d gotten suddenly much too serious, and there were younger, better-looking men that watched her when she went down the street, anyway.
She kept seeing him, of course, but she was detached. She watched him coldly, cataloguing his every glance, every subconscious movement. The more she thought about him, the more she hated him. She took a vicious sort of pleasure in watching him play tennis, his movements frantic, disjointed, uncontrolled. He was utterly graceless.
She always won.
It was all right, though—until he’d brought a stack of forms to a weekend rendezvous. “I want to divorce Annie,” he’d said.
Was he proposing? Sara had been appalled. They’d fought, and she’d left, and she didn’t think of him again until the police called her with questions about a murder that she hadn’t committed.
She had a new boyfriend now, a guy named Jake, who wore orange pants and thick-framed black glasses that he didn’t need. The tech startup he founded was going places, everyone said. Sara insisted on meeting him at his apartment before their dates, because he lived with four other guys and she loved the way they looked at her when she wore her tallest heels and shortest dress.
It’s a Tuesday when she and Jake go to Linfield Park. He’s made sandwiches, and they sit on the grass to eat them. They talk, but Sara is distracted. She looks left, again and again, again, until Jake asks her gently if she knows someone there.
She starts to deny it—but then nods an assent, and leaves him sitting there while she walks over to the cemetery. She hadn’t known it was right next to the park, but there it was, and she knew it was the one where Chris had been buried, somehow.
Everything goes quiet once she steps past the stone fence. She picks her way carefully across wilting flowers and mounded dirt until she spots Chris’s grave—and of course, it’s just her luck, isn’t it? There’s already someone there.
It’s Annie, in a black sweater and gray pants. She’s sitting in front of his headstone, clutching a bunch of roses, her head bent, dark hair falling in front of her face.
Sara looks at her figure and a wave of contempt passes over her. She remembers Chris’s eyes on her, always her, his fingers short and flat and ringless. She looks at Annie and thinks, fool, he didn’t love you.
She almost leaves the cemetery then (if only she had!) but she doesn’t—she lingers. But she feels no remorse, no regret—no, she remembers Chris’s small eyes, frantic tennis swing, the way half his face always seemed to be in shadow. She watches Annie and she thinks, fool, you can have him. She tosses her hair over her shoulder contemptuously.
It’s only then that she sees the headstone—with Chris’s name engraved carefully and expensively, no doubt—and the bloodless eye right in its center. The veins in the marble throb coldly and the pale staring eye looks at her emptily—but it’s alive, she can tell.
It blinks.
—————
Annie’s no fool. She knows about Chris, and she knows about Sara. And she knows Sara is standing behind her right now, staring with pity or contempt or perhaps both.
She knows this without looking, her head bent, eyes closed, tears still drying on her cheeks. She loved Chris despite herself, and it is unacceptable that this woman watch her now as unsympathetically as she does.
Sara tosses her head. She’s decided to move on.
And Annie sees this too. She sees everything, without watching, her eyes still closed—but the marble eye in front of her very much open.
Sara sees Annie then. She really sees her, for a terrified, disgusted second, before fleeing to the safety of the street, walking fast, holding the end of her long dress out of the way of her frantic footsteps. Everyone watches her as she walks.
Everyone watches the woman in red.
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