Friend Request
Maggie Schrodinger had just finished loading her grocery shopping into Biscuit, her decade old Korean hatchback, when she realised she had forgotten the eggs. Maggie would not normally bother to go back inside for a dozen eggs; to her they were an occasional weekend breakfast option. But one of her boys was a big egg eater. He claimed he needed the protein. Maggie was of the opinion that he would actually do better with less saturated fats, but she also believed that her boys were old enough to believe their own bullshit if they wanted.
Maggie sighed, relocked her car and walked back through the centre car park. As she walked closer to the shopping centre’s automated glass doors the sun lit her so she saw her reflection striding towards her. Maggie was struck by the irritation on her face.
“I just have to walk back to get a dozen eggs,” she thought, “I’m not running the country. I should chill a little.”
She also noted that the waves in her shoulder length hair were frizzy and increasingly grey and her stride was stompy and when the hell had she started to dress like her mother? As Maggie reached the doors she pushed her shoulders back and stood up straighter. All of which meant that she was preoccupied, so when she noticed the man walking towards her wearing a smile that was pleasant but somehow hesitant, it took a while to realise that the smile and the man were familiar. He was smiling at her.
She knew him back then, back when spines were straight, tummies were taut and hair was free of grey. And knew him well in fact, in the biblical sense as it used to be called with a nudge and a wink. That male body shape, short and stocky was not a favourite of hers but back during those teenage years at the beach she held with pleasure many young men of all shapes and sizes. At least until Dave asked her to marry him.
These thoughts filled the few seconds until the man stopped in front of her. He was going to say something. His mouth, average size with full lips, had opened to speak when Maggie surprised both of them by saying with surety and warmth, “Gerard!”
The look of a disappointment on his face at being beaten to the punch was priceless. Then his big smile came back.
“I thought it was you,” he said, “but I just wasn’t quite sure. It’s been a long time, Maggie. How have you been?”
Maggie found herself wishing she had dressed better before this shopping trip. But she just buying the weekly supplies and not planning on running into a past boyfriend. Especially one who, she had to admit, looked younger and happier than she was. Gerard still radiated the same self-confidence and considering that he was carrying some weight, his striped T shirt pushed against a small high pot belly, he looked surfer fit and his hair was thick and sun bleached. Still, by now, she should be more prepared for these so-called random meetings.
Maggie opened her mouth to say… Say what exactly? She remembered Gerard’s sarcastic sense of humour well enough…
“I’ve been busy Gerard, busy doing life. What about you?” Maggie thought she sounded more bitter than wisearse but Gerard didn’t show any offence.
“Well you know I moved to Sydney a few years after you got married, just more opportunities there. I ended up in advertising, bit of a cliché I know but I was good at it. In advertising you get paid for bullshitting, so my dream job really. I loved it but it was not great on relationships.”
The usual, Maggie thought. It was never their fault and they were always quick to suggest availability. From memory Gerard had form.
According to the beach towel telegraph as Maggie liked to call it back then, after they had split, Gerard had gone out with another girl, who only found out that he had left her and town when she went over to his flat and found it empty. He had thoughtfully left her toiletries in a neat pile on the door mat. By that stage Maggie was already in love with Dave so she hardly cared. She did feel a certain sense of “dodging a bullet.” For a time she had thought Gerard was THE one. Whatever the hell that meant.
“I knew you still lived on the coast but I didn’t know near here. Is this your local Coles?” he asked.
“Yes, just buying the groceries. I only have to shop for me these days but one of my neighbours loves his eggs. If you believe him, they are apparently essential to his very survival. I told him I would buy a dozen but I forgot so I had to come back in. If it wasn’t for forgetting the eggs you would have missed me.”
Gerard seemed to play it cool with the news that she was solo. The others had perked up when they heard that.
“I know how you feel, been feeding myself for a few years now so I’m used to it again. Never married or had kids so I’ve always looked after myself off and on. Now days of course it seems that every male can cook. Not as slack as our generation.” He paused.
“Maggie, I have some time to spare. I am up here looking at some property and one of the appointments fell through. Can I buy you a coffee?”
And there is the pitch but Maggie wasn’t sure yet. So she replied, “Sorry Gerard, I can’t. Got to get home. The man is coming to mow the lawn and I need to show him a bush I want trimmed.”
“No problem, it would be nice to talk further though. It’s been good seeing you again Maggie,” he replied with a broad smile.
“What’s your number? I will send you my details, maybe we can catch up another time. I am planning to be back up in a few weeks,” Gerard added.
Maggie gave Gerard her number with what she thought was just the right amount of hesitation. There was a mutual appraising look before he said goodbye and walked out the sliding glass doors.
This was happening too frequently for Maggie’s liking. Twelve months ago Maggie had run into Jason at a coffee shop near her house. Four months before Stefan had accosted her outside the nursery where she worked part time. And only six months ago Billy had appeared at her gym one morning. He said he was scouting for a new gym as he had just moved into the area. Four boys from her past, aged 50+, all single and all suddenly seeing her on the street. Rushing up to say hi, gushing “Wow what a coincidence!” and wondering if she would like further contact.
“Coincidence my big butt,” Maggie thought, a wry grin on her face as she walked back to her car.
**
Maggie said yes to Dave right away, she knew it was time to move on. Her mum was gone by then and her Dad was eager to stop parenting and start pretending he was twenty-five again. Now Dave and her Dad were both gone, dying within weeks of each other about two years ago. Her Dad’s death had been coming for a while; the cancer chipping away at him until his body just went that’s enough. But Dave was more a result of cause and effect. A heavy drinker and smoker from a family with a history of heart disease and piss poor decision making, Dave lived for a week after turning fifty-five. The heart attack dropped him at a petrol station, as pissed and way over the limit, he pumped petrol into his ute on his way home from work via the pub.
Maggie was on the way out the door anyway. Her increasing disappointment with the selfishness and stupidity of the male gender reinforcing a developing belief that marriage was overrated. Maggie was angry with herself too. Marry in haste, repent at leisure she remembered her Aunt, a three-time divorcee saying. Still she had things worked out now, better late than never.
That night Maggie sat at her laptop and logged on to Facebook. She opened up to Gerard’s homepage. Going by Gerard’s posts his hobbies and passions appeared to be the same as when they were teenagers. Surfing, horror fiction, lots of music related posts. He’d said he had never married or had kids but there were a number of years where there were photos of Gerard with a short curvy woman with long blonde hair and a confident way with the camera. Her name was Annika and she appeared to work in the University sector. Judging by the selfies they really enjoyed snow holidays and winery tours. About two years ago she dropped off the scene.
**
Gerard thought that there were middle-aged men who tried to win women by behaving like male bowerbirds. They built a nest, decorated it with pretty, shiny things and then, hoping for the best, paraded in front of it. Gerard decided long ago that bower birding was a waste of time. It was too passive. He thought there was a better way, one that would work for him. He figured that in love, lightning can strike twice. Even if it had been decades since the relationship had finished, as long as it finished well the first time i.e. nobody behaved terribly for the times and the circumstances, there was the chance to reopen the door.
So he planned to follow up all his Facebook friends who were female. Not just the old girl friends as that would not give him a big enough pool of prospects to try to win over. After all, Gerard thought, you have to presume only a third were now in some way unattached and then you have to account for a hit/miss ratio.
Finding Maggie’s profile was not difficult. On her news feed there were old photos of Maggie, her husband Dave and their two sons on holidays, at sports events, parties, the unchangeable Easter break at the in-law’s farm. All the usual chronicles of a growing family and the years rolling by until the boys went off to live their own lives. Then both Dave and his parents disappeared. For the last two years Maggie had rarely posted but for a keen observer like Gerard, nuggets of knowledge could be found. There were some tantalising hints, a trail of pictorial breadcrumbs. Posts of the high school reunion with the girls, posts of her with Jacko their Jack Russell [now also sadly gone,] a niece’s wedding. In every photo Maggie was clearly alone and not radiating contentment. The story and the possibilities were writ large if you wanted to read the signals.
**
Gerard was in bed on the edge of sleep. His plan has worked wonderfully well. He couldn’t get Maggie out of his head. So he was even more excited than he thought he would be when she answered his call a few days after the meeting. Their conversation flowed without effort and he hung up on a high after they organised a dinner date for the following Saturday night. To Gerard, Maggie still seemed full of good humour and quick one-liners despite everything that had happened to her in the last few years. Her long hair was now grey and frizzy and she was bigger, but weren’t we all? More importantly, the earthiness that he found so arousing when he was nineteen was still there. She was just like he remembered, not at all like her Facebook page. So when Maggie rang him back on the Thursday before the dinner date, his heart sped up when he heard her voice and seemed to stop when she said she couldn’t go out. Only to beat again when she asked would he mind if they stayed in and she would make dinner.
**
Gerard drove his hire car to Maggie’s house. On the passenger seat were flowers, a bottle of champagne and another of a quality Pinot. Maggie’s suburb was typical suburbia by the sea. Built in the golden era of brick in the 70s, her house was a standard three-bedroom, mass-produced home with tan brick walls and a tiled roof, perched at the top of the steep dead end. With the summer sun setting behind, the house cast a large shadow down the length of bitumen as Gerard drove up the street.
He noticed that the other houses in the street looked very run down. Driving slowly, Gerard saw unmown lawns, faded paint peeling off architraves, a brick fence leaning crookedly and a car up on blocks. “No bower birding going on here,” he mumbled to himself. The first house on the right had a sagging For Lease sign in front of it.
Gerard focused on the second house on the left, where a man in outdoor work clothes lifted a small lunch cooler out of the tray of a dirty black ute. As Gerard drove by the man looked up. Gerard instantly knew that he had seen him before but couldn’t place him. Then at the last house before Maggie’s he caught a quick profile glance of another man, very tall and very skinny with a wild head of greying corkscrew curls. The sun lit his profile for a second as he turned and Gerard gasped. Surely that was Billy Hooper, older but with the same wild hair and vacant grin. He knew that stupid grin anywhere.
After he and Maggie had broken up Billy had rolled up at a party with Maggie hanging off him. Gerard had wanted to jam a beer bottle into his stupid smirk. Instead he just slunk off home. Gerard almost stopped but Billy, if it was Billy, had already gone inside, shutting himself behind a paint-faded front door. Gerard shook his head and thought, “I guess it’s not impossible for Billy to live in the same street as Maggie. We are only a suburb or two over from where we all grew up.”
Gerard drove into Maggie’s driveway, turned the car engine off and wondered why instead of excitement or anticipation he felt edgy, almost afraid. The first man, there was something in his look when he glanced at Gerard. He looked like he knew who he was looking at and he wasn’t happy about it.
**
Maggie checked the bedside clock. It was 11.51. The dinner had gone well, beyond her expectations. Gerard hadn’t changed. He was still witty and full of talk and opinion. They both loved Breaking Bad and Hillary Mantel’s books. They talked about old times and she told parenting stories that he listened to attentively. They knew enough about each other from Facebook and of course from the first time around so that it was not like starting from scratch. By the time dessert was on the table, she knew they would end up in bed. That part was good too but Maggie thought the talk better.
She got up and drank some water from the tap in the ensuite and peed. Maggie felt both sore and numb.
“Never been one not to be ready,” she thought. From fifteen, before she really knew how fortunate she was, Maggie always loved how quickly she could get lost in the act, how easily she achieved orgasm.
She walked back to the bedroom. Gerard was sprawled on his back and the scene looked so familiar that she was almost sixteen again. So she asked Gerard to stay the night, just like that.
He smiled, thankfully not in that smug way that some men had when they took underserved credit for your orgasms as well as their own, and then he said no thanks.
Maggie was both surprised and disappointed. So the farewell was awkward but she agreed that another date would be great and that Gerard would be more than welcome to ring again soon blah, blah, blah. It was all a bit clichéd although the kiss at the door was nice. He was still such a good kisser. Then he was in his car and reversing down the drive and onto the street.
Turning to go inside Maggie saw movement on the footpath a few doors down as if something or someone watching had quickly moved into the shadows. “Jealousy is a curse,” she thought as she shut the front door.
Gerard headed down the street to the intersection and the left turn that would take him back to the hotel. When Maggie asked him to stay he had almost said yes, but he thought for a second and decided against it. Instead he put on his best “I want to but I can’t” smile, said no thanks and started getting dressed. The night had brought a strange mix of sensations. He was delighted that his plan had worked. Nothing pleased him more than success. But it was too soon to be playing favourites; he had his list to work through. At the same time Gerard felt sorry to be going, more than he thought he would be.
The night was humid and the hire car’s small engine lost a few revs when Gerard turned the air conditioning on. He glanced down at the tachometer and when he looked up there were men standing in the middle of the road. Brightly illuminated by the headlights they did not move. Gerard slammed on the brakes and came to a stop a few inches from them. Through his shock he realised that one of the figures was the man that he saw earlier. He still couldn’t place him. One of the other men was Billy.
But it was not Billy who opened the driver’s door.
“What the fuck?” Gerard begun but then he saw the third man, the one at his elbow, the one who opened the car door.
Gerard recognised Jason Jeffries immediately. He had gone out with Maggie before him and one night not long after Maggie had moved her affections to Gerard, Jason had tried to beat him up. Others had pulled Jason off Gerard, who had not seen Jason or the punch coming. It was a misdirected sneaker punch that hurt his pride more than anything as Jason’s drunken blow had bounced off his shoulder and scratched his ear. Then Jason, yelling and bawling like a baby rushed him. Gerard, drunk himself, was still trying to work out what the hell was going on when a couple of Jason’s mates grabbed him and pulled the bubbling, babbling man-child away.
And now Jason, older and paunchier but with the same bovine eyes pinned Gerard in his seat and whispered to him to shut up. He reached in and with improbable skill took the car key out of the ignition and applied the handbrake. The engine and the car radio stopped. In the sudden silence Billy finally opened the back door, slid in and then the last man opened the passenger door, sat in the passenger seat and pointed a very large hunting knife at Gerard’s ribs.
“Stefan, that’s your fucking name,” Gerard yelled, his memory working at last, too late to do much good. Suddenly the early part, the good part of the evening, the part where his plan had brought immediate results seemed long ago and far away.
“Good to see you again, Gerard.” Stefan said with a grin. His skin was badly damaged from years of sun and there were white wrinkles in his face that opened and closed when he spoke. In the corner of his mouth there was some dried egg yolk.
“I hope you enjoyed tonight but as you can see, we got here first. So tell me and think carefully before answering, what are your views on polyamory?”
The End
Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash
