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City Life

Edith Gallagher Boyd

    Diane Dean lived in the same apartment for nearly twenty years. The swooshing sound of a bus slowing, or the clatter of a trash truck were woven into her dreams. She loved city life. Her landlord once knew her uncle, so her rental fee was minuscule compared to her neighbors.
    It pleased Diane greatly that her arrival on Chestnut Street pre-dated the settling in nearby of her boss Mr. Wagner and his wife Jill. Much of her energy was wasted at Cooper Products, hiding the flames of desire she had for Mr. Wagner, as she watched him on the phone with clients, his feet up on the desk. How she longed for those feet to be strewn across her lap as they watched the movies he liked.
    How much a trial it was for her to attend his wedding, a small elegant gathering of friends, his children glaringly absent. How false Diane’s smile was when she had to endure in-person gatherings with Jill Wagner.
    “Call me Jill,” the bride would say when Diane greeted her as Mrs. Wagner, a name Diane hoped would reinforce how off-limits David Wagner was.
    It took a long time for Diane to pass by the Wagners’ apartment on her walks to the Merry Muffin. Should David Wagner, five years her junior, pass her while jogging, she could always point out her addiction to the corn muffin, its upper skirt slightly browned, the way she liked it. David noticed her so little, she may be able to let him trot by her, unseen.
    On many of her furtive trips past her boss’s place, she noticed the shades pulled higher than the middle of the window. She mused that Jill Wagner was fond of light, as Diane herself liked to keep her shades down to keep the sunlight from browning her wooden bookcase.
    When Mr. Wagner’s divorce from his former wife was final, there were many casualties, including his BMW and his relationship with his kids. Through her ardor, Diane was able to see David’s flaws and sensed the shiny black auto may have been a bigger loss to him than his kids. Rumors at work were that Jill Wagner was not going to work to support David’s first family. And so the newlyweds settled into a city apartment not much fancier than Diane’s own.
    Diane enjoyed her work as an accounting assistant, and she had, as her teachers used to say, “a mathematical mind.” Coming from a culture that didn’t expect women to excel, she settled into her slot as accounting assistant, outlasting many a man, and more recently a few women, as her immediate supervisor.
    When her annual evaluation was due, Diane felt confident that her supervisors would note her attention to detail, her professional demeanor, and her skill of noticing trends in the business. There were many reports that praised her punctual arrival to her workplace, but one supervisor chastised her bringing her Merry Muffin breakfast to her desk. What started as a love of corn muffins morphed into an opportunity to stroll by the marital lodging of David Wagner.
    Diane vacillated between wishing to run into his sweat-stained body, to finding herself hiding behind the thick trunks of the maple trees that lined their streets. When she saw someone approaching, she strained to see if it could be he....her David.
    If she saw no form approaching, she darted her eyes to the window of his unit, imagining Jill relaxing, entertaining friends, or just simply watching TV.
    In the work place, Diane Dean and David Wagner didn’t have a great deal of contact. In some ways, this increased Diane’s ability to watch him move across a room to greet a client, squaring his shoulders and exuding the charm that drew her to him so strongly.
    How welcome he made new employees feel, their downward glances masking their pleasure at his words. He was especially warm to attractive young women, and Diane chided herself for how happy it made her that his wife would be jealous if she saw him with them.
    Was it early on, or closer to the trial, that Diane noticed David’s attentions to Chelsea Springer?? While crouched behind a solid part of a neighboring cubicle, Diane caught sight of Chelsea’s strawberry hair leaning into Mr. Wagner’s desk area with a sense of familiarity. Diane surprised herself that she didn’t gloat or feel ill will to Jill Wagner, but rather experienced a general sense of unease.
    It was during cross-examination that Diane resurrected this memory, although there were other disturbing events that emerged in and around Cooper Products. David’s ex-wife arrived one day while Jill was joining David for lunch. Jill Wagner was leaning against a column in the converted hotel which now housed Cooper Products.
    The former Mrs. Wagner stormed through the office and and shouted “You’re late with the support check again, Mr. Big Shot!” Then she turned and walked across the room, its rug absorbing the click of her heels. Jill Wagner walked into Diane’s cubicle uninvited and put her finger to her lips in a shushing way, but failed to escape the notice of her predecessor.
    “Jill, I see you there in Diane’s office. He’ll cheat on you, too,” she said, and exited the office without a backward glance at the wreckage left behind.
    Jill obscured Diane’s view of David by slumping in the chair adjacent to Diane’s desk and muttering “Sorry.”
    “Mrs. Wagner,”
    “Jill.”
    “Jill, you didn’t initiate the disturbance” Diane said, surprising herself with her boldness.
    “Diane, I didn’t break up the marriage. David was free when we met,” she said, and her wide-set eyes revealed the truthfulness of her admission.
    “None of it is my business,’ Diane said, although she was eager for any scrap of information that involved David Wagner.
    Moments later, David leaned into the opening of Diane’s cubicle and said to Jill, “Sorry, Babe. She’s lying, as usual,” ignoring Diane completely. “Did you call the office about our apartment’s busted street door lock?” Jill flushed as she arose to join her husband, but she did acknowledge Diane as she left.
    “David, we’ll talk at lunch,” she said, and turned to Diane and said, “Enjoy your afternoon, Diane.”
    Diane stiffened in her chair, hating the bold fact that of the two, David and Jill...Jill was clearly the finer person. Diane dreaded that her fantasy life may be ready for an overhaul, but she had dreamed so many times of handing David the remote control on her brown couch and sneaking peeks of his profile as they sipped their cabernet.
    Her thoughts became crowded with words like lying....and Babe, but not enough to stifle her glee that the entrance to their apartment may be free for her to get a little closer to the Wagners’ home.
    One Saturday morning while Diane was walking near David’s apartment, she caught sight of him escorting Jill across the short walk and holding her close to him before she entered a vehicle whose driver helped David close the door. Diane assumed it was a ride share vehicle, as David’s divorce also cost him his personal driver.
    While Diane added butter to her muffin, she sipped her coffee, picturing herself knocking on David’s door and his meeting her in a warm embrace. She had heard that Jill was originally from Chicago, and imagined that to be her destination.
    Diane bought a few things at the Super Shop, none of them perishable, as she was inching towards entering David’s apartment building. She practiced her story of why she was inside the building, in the event she got caught. She chose the staircase, stopping every three or four steps to chastise herself for this bold invasion of privacy.
    It was during her deep breaths behind the door window of floor three that she caught sight of a strawberry mane entering the Wagners’ apartment.
    Diane nearly screamed at the thought of Chelsea Springer’s brazenly entering the Wagner home as if she had been there before.
    You have no right to him, she wanted to scream. He’s a married man, and he’s Jill’s, she thought, noticing her pivot away from thinking he was hers. Diane pictured Jill’s taking off her shoes and placing them in the grey bucket while going through security, completely immune from the happenings in her household.
    Or was she?
    The lawyer for the prosecution leaned into Diane during her testimony.
    “When did you notice the liaison between David Wagner and Chelsea Springer?”
    The judge leaned over in Diane’s direction and said, “Do the best you can....but you must answer the question.”
    It was then that Diane pictured the strawberry hair close to David in his office.
    “Shortly after Miss Springer’s arrival at Cooper, I noticed her body language seemed familiar with Mr. Wagner in his office.”
    “Can you tell us of other signs of closeness between Miss Springer and Mr. Wagner?” the lawyer next to the testimony box said, leaning his elbow on the arm rest
    “Objection!” Diane’s lawyer shouted through the courtroom.
    “The witness is neither a relationship expert nor a psychiatrist. She is a simple clerk in the accounting office.”
    Yes, she was just what had been publicly stated. A simple clerk in an accounting office who used to stalk her boss and his women.
    Diane hiccuped on a suppressed sob and had difficulty continuing to speak.
    The judge ordered a short recess.
    Sitting in the chilly courthouse hallway, Diane shivered at the sequence of events that led her here, cringing at the thought that her obsession with her boss and his private life would become front page news.
    “Will you mention the Merry Muffin?” she asked her lawyer when she felt the testimony was nearing whom she saw on which day, and why was she there in the first place?
    “Diane, everybody knows you were in love with him. One jerk at the Union League made a reference to it during a business card exchange,” he said. “Told David he should stick with you and save himself a ton of grief. The guy went on to say you worshipped David and would never drag him in and out of court like that friggin ex of his.”
    The enormity of absorbing that she was a subject of gossip among David’s peers hit Diane like a baseball bat swung at her midsection. She straightened up in the chilly courthouse hallway, reminding herself that she was breathing and had her life to live, as unremarkable as it seemed to others.
    Luckily, during the trial Diane was spared a great deal of grilling, as David himself was asked repeatedly if he knew Chelsea to be unstable, and capable of firing a shot into his wife’s forehead, killing her instantly.
    Others at Cooper Products were asked about the affair between David and Chelsea Springer, who became progressively unhinged, over the edge, and overt in her infatuation with David, and her growing hatred for his wife, Jill.
    Although Diane had walked by her boss’s place countless times, Diane experienced an ominous feeling the morning of the murder. The shades were not opened, and as she lingered behind a tree trunk, deciding what to do, she chastised herself for her obsession with the Wagners. While lingering behind the tree, Diane spotted the darting figure of Chelsea Springer bang the outer gate of the building as she ran to her right.
    Mute with shock to see Chelsea, as Diane knew David was in Houston, Diane advanced through the still broken door into the apartment building, and arrived at David’s door and saw that it remained open. She crept down the hallway and saw Jill alone in the bed with a red wound right in her forehead, and blood on the sheets.
    She screamed, then stifled herself with her hand cupped to her mouth as she exited the Wagner unit feeling bludgeoned in a way that nearly made it impossible to walk. She needed the hand rail to steady herself back outside and then she called 911. Her fear of being implicated was less than her revulsion at what she had witnessed: her boss’s wife, lifeless in her marital bed, robbed of a future. A woman Diane had begrudgingly begun to admire for her decency, her gentleness.
    The early forensics team arrived shortly after Diane’s call, and the police caught Chelsea in mid stride near the Wagner apartment. They were early enough to check Chelsea’s hands for gun residue.
    Chelsea was convicted of murder one, and as she was escorted from the courthouse, her family openly sobbing, Diane was unable to move from her chair in the back of the courtroom.
    Why are love and hate such close neighbors she thought, and she vowed to expand her life away from obsessions about unavailable men and their lovely wives, one of whom named Jill was buried behind Old Christ Church.
    Jill was a woman Diane had come to admire, and as she made her way out of the chilly courtroom, she didn’t head for the Merry Muffin, she boarded a bus to take her to Old Christ Church to pay her respects.

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