A Hollow, Muscular Organ

By Meg Files

"A Hollow, Muscular Organ is a bittersweet, cannily precise anatomy of a love story-a meditation on connection and disconnection, and on writing itself, for the self, as connection and retrieval. Meg Files' riveting, wise novel, the story of Susannah and Griff, is unputdownable for its intelligence and its heart. I read it in one sitting and so

• Language: English
• Publisher: Accents Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Jan 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781936628902

Book preview

We tell ourselves stories in order to live… . We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion, The White Album

1

Dirty Yellow

When she found the twisted yellow hair tie in the car Thursday, she simply nodded. Of course. She’d been reaching for the pen Griff kept in the cavity below the radio. Her fingers, finding not the authority of hard plastic but the horrible softness, jerked back.

Of course. No wave of pain smacked her, plowed her under. Griff was having another one of his things.

Ah.

The hair tie was dirty. It was twisted with a knot in the middle. She didn’t see how it would work to hold hair, but she could see how it had been whipped off impatiently with a bold turn of the head and the long hair freed for Griff’s hands and how that hair would be wiped away urgently from the mouths—ah. She shook her head. No wave, but the undertow took her.

At dinner she waited until he’d filled his plate and taken two bites. So—you want to tell me about this deal with Danielle? she said. Once the food was on his plate and eating in motion, he wouldn’t walk away from the table, she didn’t think.

Say what? he said.

She didn’t suggest he wipe the spaghetti sauce from his lip. In company she’d have pantomimed wiping and he’d have squinted at her, trying to get the message. But she only stared across their little round table at his messy lip.

I guess you know what I mean, she said. She let no accusation into her voice.

He tore the heel off the loaf of garlic bread. Don’t go weird on me again, Suze, he said.

Tell me you’re not having an affair.

I am not having an affair. I thought you were going to do a salad. I don’t need this bread.

Contact with the hair tie had been like touching bare toes to a cockroach in a shoe. Or like reaching to touch live flesh and pushing a finger into white rot.

I found her hair thing. In the car. So don’t play semantics this time.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Really. I do not.

His face was clean now. His lips were smooth, straighter than most people’s, without that little dip where philtrum met upper lip. As a child, Susannah’d had a habit of stroking her philtrum. The finger so rightly fit the groove. Taking tuck, her parents had called it. She didn’t know why. Now she was a lip balm addict. Her lips were always dry. She had a dozen tubes of lip balm from all the times she’d had to stop at a drugstore on her way somewhere, desperate to smooth her dry lips.

Well, she said, where do you suppose that yellow hair tie came from? It’s not mine. That’s for sure. People don’t just break into cars and deposit their icky old hair ties.

He swallowed. Oh! he said. I know what it was.

She said, Oh, it’s— and stopped. Oh, it’s all coming back to you now. She took a drink of the Chianti. Everything was sour.

That time I took the hike with Ethan. We picked up some trash at the trailhead. I thought I threw it all away when I got back. That has to be where it’s from.

He turned his fork in the spaghetti. He wasn’t going to look to see how she took it. When she didn’t say anything, he swallowed and said, Listen, I’d really like it if we could take it easy on these dinners. I mean, I’m finally starting to get back in shape. I think you’re trying to sabotage my diet, my dear. She couldn’t tell anger from righteousness.

How was she taking it?

Okay, I’m sorry, she said. You are looking good these days.

She’d watched him through the thick shower glass the other morning as he turned and looked at himself in the bedroom’s full-length mirror, turned and looked and looked.

Oh, Suze, you know I love you, don’t you? he said. I have loved you all these years. These dozens of years. Half my life of years.

It was true. It was true. She believed it was true. A couple days ago there was some woman in Ann Landers crying about how she didn’t think her husband loved her anymore, she said. She’d found a press-on nail stuck to his underwear.

They laughed. He took a sip of the wine and then started laughing again and choked. She shook parmesan onto her spaghetti. Maybe she could eat it.

I’m curious, though, he said. Why did you think it was Danielle?

Danielle? Did I say Danielle?

He nodded. He was sipping from his green wineglass, one of the set they’d bought at an import store, he was twirling that spaghetti and sucking in the stray strands. He was safe and generous in his relief.

I don’t even know, she said. Maybe I’ve seen her wearing something like that. I don’t know. She saw Griff and Ethan shaking their heads at the slobs who pretended to be one with nature, playing Good Citizen and picking up Budweiser cans and an old sock and Ding Dong wrappers and a grungy hair tie and cigarette butts. Why had she thought Danielle? Now she shucked that tough young woman out of their dinner and reached to dab invisible sauce from Griff’s face.

In the living room, they read striking passages to each other and watched the late news and, past danger, went to bed where in the dark Susannah tucked herself down into dirty yellow sleep.

2

Black Water

Okay, all right, so she snooped. Found three little items. None absolutely significant on its own. But in combination—. One was bland: a note in his calendar book, 2 months. Two months what? On the diet? On the diet pills? Which she’d also found but hadn’t considered one of the items. Still, they were in a sport coat pocket, not on the shelf with the vitamins. Two months on the stairclimber?—a boring monster Griff kept penned on the back porch. You going to let it out for stud? she’d said. Damnit, she knew what it meant when the middle-aged guy—she’d say post middle but then she’d have to admit she was there too—anyway, when the guy suddenly started cranking, tightened the gut, et cetera. She’d seen it at work, the manager skipping the pizza ordered in and bringing raw broccoli to the Friday potluck. He’s jogging to work and Mrs. Manager starts calling the office to report the kids’ sneezes and he’s taking long lunches with the new hire. Why had she thought it didn’t apply to this particular husband, her own?

The second item was in his ammo box for god’s sake. Condoms. Class Act Ultra-thin & Sensitive. She thought, duh, subtle. Rubbers and bullets. Of course he’d always shot blanks with her. And lately hadn’t been shooting much at all. So, the condoms. Eleven of them. In a box of twelve, plus one bonus.

And then, in his briefcase, another one of his little notes to himself. Buy coffee. Or In early Tuesday. Or Ted 10 a.m. This one: 2 roses, Dan—19th. Duh? Roses