askdljlskdjasd AND NOW FIC POST
The inimitable and mighty genarti gave this a skimming-over and has assured me it is fit for public consumption, unlike Haymarket fish.
Title: attempts on her life
Fandom: Dark Harbor ("What???" you are saying to yourself. I KNOW, RIGHT???)
Rating: Uhhh. NC-17. A bit. Actually yeah, let's go with that.
Genre: "Psychological thriller"?
Warnings: Character death. As the whole point. Spoilers for the film Dark Harbor, but dude you don't care.
Wordcount: ~4,500
Author's Desperate Rationalizations Notes: Okay, so, the other night while I was SEWING ALL THE THINGS, I finally watched this aggressively mediocre Alan Rickman thriller called Dark Harbor. It features what is apparently cinematography of ~deep symbolism~, as well as mushrooms, murder, and a big gay plot twist. (I know. I'm spoilering you. I am a harsh mistress.)
At the end of this movie, as I told some of you, I really, really could not help asking myself two questions:
1) Alan Rickman, given that your main problem in this movie seems to be your unhappy relationship, is it really SUCH a stellar idea to date the man who helped you kill your wife?
2) ... Alan Rickman, did you really HAVE to KILL YOUR WIFE??? Isn't there something that comes BETWEEN marital unhappiness and MURDER???
This fic attempts to answer these questions with the aid of an unreliable narrator and a bad, bad case of c whut i did thar. (Two examples: The character of the "Young Man" (played by Norman Reedus) goes unnamed in the film and the credits, leaving the task of naming him up to me. I chose to call him ... Reed. Also, the title, attempts on her life, comes from the title of a play in which the "attempts" include not only the attempt to kill/destroy the main character of Annie, but also to define, explain, and curb her.)
Why should you read this? To tell me where my prose needs work. To weigh in on whether I did what I set out to do! (Write a fic where killing your wife is NOT OKAY.) To boggle at how Alan Rickman's character makes EXCEEDINGLY POOR CHOICES. So that I will owe you a favor.
I could not have accomplished this without the ability to watch Dark Harbor on YouTube, and wax_jism's lolarious and painstaking transcript. I now look forward to getting some goddamn sleep and belonging to a fandom with potentially seven other living human beings in it.
attempts on her life
Life with a known murderer is easier than David had anticipated.
He himself, he supposes, is also a murderer-- though he's told, with a faint and teasing smile, that as an accomplice and coconspirator, at best he's murderish.
Somehow David fails to find that funny.
Still, things are better already. He's actually inspired to cook. The evening silences on the island (they've been there for days, he is letting his secretary in Augusta take care of the cards and the well wishes) are pleasant, comforting in their lack of self-conscious gaiety and precious, warbling chanteuses on the radio. They go for walks. The sex is incredible-- like drowning. David doesn't have words for it.
Even with Lex just a week in the ground, things are better.
"Are you scared of me now?" he is asked one night in bed, the smooth muscle of the other man's body curled luxuriantly against his. The fingertips brushing his jaw are gentle, the expression on the younger man's face dreamy but intent.
The other, much younger man.
Some people just buy a Ferrari and get it all out of their system.
Even now, he doesn't want him out of his system in the slightest.
"No," David murmurs, leaning forward until their foreheads touch. He reaches up to the hand at his jaw and winds their fingers together, pressing a penitent kiss to each fingertip.
"I did what you wanted." David hears the slight emphasis on you and he wonders at it, for a moment.
At Alexis' funeral, the priest had said something about her bravery, her joie de vivre, her perfect, untarnished innocence. David knows from years of experience that what passed for innocence was, in actuality, an immense wall of denial erected to ward off unwelcome cogitation, pampered and maintained like an honest to God artifact. He had been wailing at her walls for seven years-- pardon his mixing Jewish metaphors-- until the horns finally, finally brought her down.
"Yes," he murmurs now, and slides one thigh over the other man's hip, settling on top of him. He kisses him, slowly, finding his mouth welcoming him with a languid, hungry passion; the same passion that was content to wait, and wait, assured of its ultimate victory. "Yes."
The young man shifts under him, and a shudder passes through David's body.
"You did," he says, wondering, as his hands trail down, "what I wanted."
Sometimes, he is so angry at Alexis it's as if she's still alive.
*****
Accept David's apologies for his negligence:
The boy's name is Reed.
That's one thing Lex never managed to figure out during their little tryst. The way Reed tells the story, she didn't try particularly hard to know, either, or was too easy to distract.
"I still can't believe she bought that I never learned to write," he says, the laugh mostly in his eyes.
"She grew up reading about America's appalling public education system," David replies with an absent dryness. "I'm sure you played right into her prejudices." His attention is on the mushrooms slowly softening in butter on the stove. Reed never seems to resent it when he wanders.
Reed sits at the kitchen table now, absently carving something out of a bit of wood. He made a little trinket for Lex, which David had thought the exact type of maudlin sure to worm its way into her heart-- a heart which softened for everything, it seemed, except him. David tries to avoid these tangents, but he suspects that without Reed here, they would consume him entirely.
"But she did ask you," he says, taking the pasta off the heat. It's a question.
"Ask me what?"
The bowl is upended gently over their ancient colander, water hissing and steaming into the sink. A little sauce, and the mushrooms and crab, and a bottle of wine, and they'll have what amounts to comfort food for David.
David says, glancing at him, "Your name."
"Oh."
Reed's expression lights, amusement tugging at the edges of his mouth.
"She ... hinted."
"Hinted?" It feels good to be indulgent like this. When's the last time he had the luxury? He smirks faintly at Reed as he tosses the pasta with crab meat. Reed smiles back.
"I, uh ... told her my name was Wilma. She guessed Marilyn."
"Marilyn."
With an entirely charming smidge of smugness, "Monroe."
They both ignore-- or at least David does-- that his laugh comes out hoarse. A little later, when they're halfway through dinner, he mutters, "The crab's overdone."
"It's perfect," Reed replies.
(David also ignores the dread that fluttered in his gut when he walked into the kitchen that afternoon, overburdened with groceries, and saw Reed at the table. He was backlit by a sly slant of late-afternoon sun, but the knife in his hand was perfectly visible.
David stopped short, the conversation flashing through his mind:
Where is she?
It's okay.
She's gone.)
At the dinner table, Reed slips a hand over his knee.
David says, "You're perfect."
*****
Augusta, Maine, has been flirting with gentrification over the past decade without particular result. One of the more apparent testaments to its efforts is a series of hollow cinderblock factories, recently converted to grubby apartments for the student set. This is where David found himself whiling away the crisp wintry weeknights and Sunday mornings, making love on a lumpy couch to a man half his age and praying to God for the sake of his long-neglected sense of shame and sobriety that Reed's eternally caustic, eternally neon-haired roommate would not slam the door open with a snarl about Wildean antics and needing her sleep.
"English major," Reed said against his ear, and David could feel his sleepy smile.
He was fucking a student.
Reed assured him early on that he was twenty-six, back at school for his associate degree to satisfy the old man, and bare months away from graduating. It did not placate David particularly; nor did it quell the illicit thrill he felt driving through the cold to him. Fifteen minutes towards town, his only errand to park discreetly, ring at the door, and allow Reed to pull him into the shadow below the stairwell.
Good Lord, he was supposed to know better.
"Why won't you leave her?"
Reed says this in the early light of morning, his lips pressed to David's neck. November has turned to December without fanfare, and David can't bear to move-- though he is well aware of the rapidly encroaching demands on his time: Work. Dinner parties. Wife.
Even so, he can't suppress a thrill of pleasure that his affair-- his affair, David fucking Weinberg's-- is of sufficient seriousness that it has now begged such a question.
"I ... can't," he says.
"Sure you can." Light enough that David presumes Reed is making a joke. "File some papers, go to court ... walk away a free man."
"It's not that simple," David mumbles contentedly, as one of Reed's hands began to slide down his chest.
"It is," Reed breathes against the shell of his ear, "that simple."
"I can't--"
David chokes on the words as soon as they're out; Reed has slipped his hand below David's waistband and started to stroke his cock.
"Can't-- have a conversation like this," he concludes, shaky.
Reed laughs in a soft huff.
"I don't wanna talk."
David cooks for him. Night or morning makes no difference, he'll make a chilled carrot soup or a rich french toast with equal impunity. Those smuggled-out grocery bags of basil and fresh cheese, fine cocoa powder, in later and more ambitious stages lamb or truffle oil, all sit in judgment in the passenger seat of his car, in intimate knowledge. For Lex, cooking was-- and always had been-- purely functional.
*****
Lex.
Lex, Lex, Lex.
David wishes he could look back and say, with the self-deprecation of cheating husbands the world over, It's not as if I'm proud of what I did. But he is.
From the beginning, that was one small viciousness he permitted himself. The affair was revenge, for Lex's martyr syndrome, the depressive episodes she'd never talk about, her ostrichlike denials. The cheapness of her gaiety and flights of fancy, which drove them both without fail into the same old spiral: David's temper flaring, Alexis brightening to compensate, and David pushed even further into frustration.
Look at me, Lex.
He thinks that sometimes, sitting on the edge of Reed's bed as he peels off his shirt. This is what you miss when you bury your head in the fucking sand.
But the curdling certainty hits him that even if she could see him now, mouthing the tattoo that arcs across Reed's back, crouching between his legs, it would have no effect on her whatsoever. He can see the look of dumb betrayal, just as he can see it melt into her old tense cheer within the minute. Give it an hour and she'd be inquiring about dinner.
Saint Alexis. Our Lady of cuckolded wives.
There was something about her he'd found quite beautiful, once. They met in when he was in law school and she was hitting her late-twenties malaise, right at the beginning of her first major self-destruction. There had been something romantic, almost holy, in following her down through her own murk; in handling the bills (never paying: she could do that on her own) and cooking and reading her snatches of this and that, collecting her bits and pieces and reconstituting her entirely. It was a process, like remodeling. And somewhere along the line, she began to need him both too little and too much.
Why had he thought there was something to save in her? Something worth cherishing, worth preserving? He had not seen what was really there: the shell of a woman who was already burning her strength out. If there were pearls to be found in the cavern of her heart, only Alexis would ever know.
Though she seemed to unfurl easily enough for the rest of the world. Friends, children, stray dogs, waiters, store clerks. They all won the same easy currency of her smile, the little gestures, the impeccable memory for birthdays and small details. All this can be yours for the price of being a stranger.
It's possible, David allows, that it's more than the depletion of youthful energies that made Alexis more and more impenetrable to him when the opposite should have been true. Perhaps it's that he's the only one to come close enough to see how impregnable she truly is.
--Was, of course.
Impregnable she was.
Tenses continue to elude him.
*****
There are a few parts to this that pride or memory or scotch won't allow him to recall with perfect accuracy. For instance: he doesn't remember who began the game.
"... It would be nice if she disappeared." He's sure at the time that this is breaking some unuttered rule of marital infidelity: Don't talk about the wife. But he can't help it, in part because Reed is so curious. "Just ... I don't know, took a nice vacation to the Bermuda Triangle."
"Got eaten by sharks," Reed agrees, with a faint twitch of amusement. Reed's sense of humor is as black as his own.
David snorts, breath forming a little puff of cloud. "The Coast Guard recovered only a wide-brimmed straw hat and a half-eaten Polaroid camera."
They aren't at Reed's today, because of David's fears that in the light of day someone, somehow, might recognize his car in the lot. (It's convenient, though, how Reed's class schedule allows him lunches and odd afternoon hours off.) At this time of the year, in the middle of January, it's suicide or masochism to be in the park. That's what David counts on.
"Are you sure you're all right?" he asks Reed, who never complains. This talk of the tropics is making him cold even in his scarf and thick winter coat.
"'Mfine," Reed replies. He leans a little more heavily against David's side, a faint, mischievous sing-song to his scratchy voice. "I've got my love to keep me warm."
That's one thing he and Alexis have in common. A love of the classics.
From there, it would come up again and again-- little daydreaming ways to get Alexis out of his life for good. Deported to England. Reunited with her tragically ailing mother. It was a game between them: Who could come up with the most plausible, or the most preposterous story of escape?
Called to help the poor in Uganda. Run over by a moving van. David didn't think much of it-- why should he have? It was only in fun. He was at least tipsy, if not outright smashed, for a good third of the ideas they ever conceived.
Set on fire by a malfunctioning toaster. Tripped down an elevator shaft. Overdose of cough syrup.
Food poisoning.
Memory, pride or scotch may prevent him from recalling the details of the game. Lust, on the other hand, provides an excruciatingly accurate timeline of the rest of his affair with Reed.
Late September: He comes across him in the Augusta Greenway, during an anticlimactic muddle of a twilight. Reed kisses the inside of his wrist, unbuttoning David's cuffs so he can drag his lips up his forearm, inch by inch. By the time his teeth rake against the crook of David's elbow and his mouth slides down his collarbone to his throat, David is urgent and compliant in the same breath: oh god do what you want come on do it already. He has to see him again.
Early October: A week of distraction and increasingly vivid fantasy. David wanders the trail at off hours until he finds him, hooded sweatshirt obscuring his face. He sucks David off; David still doesn't know his name.
Mid-October: David gives his mystery man his cell number, with his name (first) printed below. Spends several days in pre-humiliated agony before the hoarse, amused voice says on the other line: "I don't really do house calls." They go on their first date, which is an agreement to arrive separately to a movie Lex doesn't like. This is where he learns his name is Reed.
Late October: They fuck, on the couch in Reed's apartment, after the third clandestine movie date. Reed is on top. David doesn't care.
November: The early days of the month yield the first dinner David fixes for Reed, upon learning how atrocious his student diet is. It is swiftly followed by others. David's grocery bill becomes astronomical. He wonders how Alexis can not know. The affair feels emblazoned across his chest, in scarlet most likely; he can smell Reed on everything.
*****
Originally, David had thought the sex might serve as a pressure valve on the stresses of life in a coffin. He might come to appreciate Alexis more, to mind it less that he had married for money and salvation and received (in any practical sense) neither one.
He found instead that he resented her more than ever. He resented her discomfort with silence. He resented her breakable smiles. He resented the spill of hair that fell unchecked across her face while she was reading, as though she were too joyful and careless a woman to bother with a barrette like everybody else.
As the months rolled by, his sense of asphyxiation had only increased.
He'd thought nothing could be worse than their Christmas, spent cloistered in a snowlogged resort in upstate New York. He'd never felt so disinclined to get Lex a gift, and not only because he was a Jew who had spent his youth presuming he would be safe from this holiday forever. Lex seemed enchanted with the rote jewelry; he ate a bad steak-- in self-defense?-- and was laid up until New Year's. But as awful as that entire excursion was, it met its match in Valentine's Day.
Maybe it was being back in Augusta, rather than in some exotic locale; knowing that he was, at most, twenty minutes from the heat of Reed's mouth and the reassuring strength of his body, but was ironically supposed to be demonstrating to God and the greater Augusta area how over-the-moon he was for his vampiric wife. How much he loved her, cherished her, wanted her or someone like her-- in the sense, at least, of being a 'her.'
At least a romantic dinner out would mean being in public. When they were alone he couldn't escape her.
"Mail for you," Lex says coolly, dropping it onto the kitchen table. Thwap. David winces.
"Give me that." Among bills, bills, advertisements, magazines, there is a small white envelope. Lex is sulking, so David can get it open without her seeing.
Inside is a pale-pink card.
David,
"On February 14th, 2010, Alexis Chandler Weinberg choked to death on a piece of Valentine's Candy. Paramedics have identified the fatal treat as a candy heart, bearing the inscription 'FOREVER.'"
Happy Valentine's Day.
After receiving that, how can he help but snort to himself occasionally for the rest of the day? Alexis fixes him with a sour look through dinner, seeming to intuit correctly that the joke is on her.
"Your sniggering is terribly romantic, darling," she murmurs.
"I'm laughing with you, not at you," David replies glibly. This is his third glass of wine.
"I," Lex returns, "am not laughing."
"Why don't you drink to us, darling?" David is on more solid ground when they are both being openly horrible. It's like badminton: he can be good at it if he puts in the effort. "I am."
"You're drinking to get drunk, dear."
"I think," David says, philosophical, "that it's really the same thing."
He doesn't want to be here, in an overbearingly French restaurant drinking overpriced rosé and pretending poorly not to despise his spouse. Just a week before, Reed had told him he loved him, and David has been turning over the words in his head ever since.
He can't spend another Valentine's Day like this.
"I love you too," he says fervently, biting Reed's ear. "I do ..."
Reed makes a sound between a laugh and a sigh and a moan, something in his throat and deeply intoxicating.
He grabs for David's collar and whispers, "Prove it."
*****
He doesn't know when it stopped being a game and started becoming a plan. When all the details of the barren life that he and Alexis share started to percolate between them into something cohesive.
We go to this island off the coast.
They're sitting drinking sweet black coffee on a frigid Sunday in March, David's old alibi about jogging and obscure errands still holding up beautifully.
Old wreck of a place, it's like a mausoleum to Chandlers past.
Reed has a way of listening to him when he talks about Alexis, of asking just the right questions. He's made it their shared sorrow, their shared trap. David wouldn't be able to help opening up to him even if he wanted to.
Tells these ridiculous, rambling stories when she's had a few--
Act like she's so fucking perfect--
On and on about the mushrooms, oh the glory of nature and God's gift of edible fungi ... even the poisonous ones ...
While it's not exactly sheer elegance in its simplicity, David draws incredible comfort from having a plan. Reed is, without a doubt, the perfect injured waif, and it's not as if David has to work to be an unpleasant husband. It's Reed who offers the poetic flourishes, all the insights.
Oh, you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of mushrooms? Ask her about the god damn Purple Julie sometime. Sex and death, sex and death ...
"You know ... she might be doing the same thing you're doing," Reed remarks to him.
"The same thing I'm doing?"
"Looking ... elsewhere."
An affair is a feeling of constant invigoration, like plunging into cold salt water. Every meeting David feels his heart in his throat, shuddering with the knowledge that he is risking ... everything. He can hear what people would say, all the fatuous self-satisfied cocktail gossip that would circulate about the latest perverse failing of David Weinberg. He imagines it the way you do your own eulogy. But the danger breathes urgency and electricity into every moment he spends with Reed, makes it somehow better than real. He can scarcely believe he goes to bed with him, shares secrets and fears and near-perfect apple tarts, can have him.
If Lex had ever felt this way, even for an instant, he knows he would have seen the change.
"I don't think," he says, dryness in his voice easing up as Reed settles beside him on the couch, "that it's her style."
"You never know." Reed reaches out for David's shoulders and begins to knead. "You said yourself ... she wants to be perfect. But she can't be. Nobody's perfect."
"No." David doesn't want to think words like purr, particularly not to describe himself, but as Reed's hands dig into the knots in his back, he does have to admit that the shoe fits. "Nobody is."
"I bet I could find out." That same teasing edge to his voice; David has to laugh.
"You," he says, "are going to discover whether my wife is as unfaithful as I am."
"What?" He can hear the grin. "You don't think I could do it?" Reed's voice drops; David can feel him lean forward slightly to speak into his ear. "Get her trust ... get her ... interested?"
David's eyes slide closed. "Mmm ... you're very interesting."
"That's what I thought." Reed presses a kiss to David's neck, below his ear. "I could do it, David," he whispers. "If you left us alone, just for a little bit ... it'd be long enough."
"Long enough," David murmurs, "for what, exactly."
Reed pauses, though his hands do not.
"It's dangerous, out in the woods," he says softly. "On the water ... nobody around ..."
David straightens.
"Good God," he says. He feels as if the color must be draining from his face.
"You're serious."
*****
Lex seems surprised that he could have got such a considerate idea. A little one-on-one time, a time for the two of them only. Back to where they began to be a them-- and how could Lex resist the sentiment? Maybe this time they'll really fix things.
(For David, this maybe is a certainty.)
He informs the office he'll be taking a week's vacation, May 24th through the 28th. He calls Reed to tell him they're on.
*****
"Where is she?" David asks hoarsely.
The rain hasn't let up as morning gloomed its way to afternoon. He gave up on chasing Reed and Alexis through the woods-- he didn't need to be at the scene, presuming this one went according to plan. He doesn't need to see it.
He went back to the house and made coffee, adding brandy to taste-- specifically, to the point where he could no longer taste coffee-- and dried off by the fire, in pajamas. He doesn't think he'll be able to stand it if Lex comes back from this alive. He can't think of another damned thing to say or do, aside from a messy and debilitating divorce, and that is untenable. He's half what people think of him, and while that may not be glamorous, it's not exactly ignominy, either.
He only has this one life, and it's more than half squandered already.
When the door opens he starts, half a dozen half-formed expectations flickering in his mind's eye-- but it's only Reed. Reed by himself, shirt soaked and jeans dark with mud and clinging grass.
"It's okay," he says.
Despite the rain, and the generally husky quality of his voice, David hears him as clear as a bell.
"She's gone."
David feels then, with a muddled certainty, that he has not yet had enough brandy.
"Gone," he repeats. His throat is dry.
Reed smiles, slow and faint, and shuts the door gently behind him.
"I left the suicide note ... just like we planned." He's walking nearer, the floor swaying like a boat on the water.
David feels suddenly as if he's going to be ill.
"Oh-- good," he says, hollowly. "Yes. Good-- thank you."
Reed reaches his chair, sinking slowly to edge a damp, denim-clad knee between David's knees. His hand on the back of his neck is clammy; it makes David shudder.
"I should--"
"We've got time," Reed protests, nose brushing David's. Their lips are close together, but David already knows that they'll be cold. "A little time ..."
He hesitates, inhaling the wet leafy smell of Reed's clothes. Water on his skin.
"... No," he says. He kisses him once, chaste as a goodbye note. "No-- you need to get dry. Get out of here." This is part of the plan as well. Reed will be gone, no one will have seen him; in a few hours, David will call the little clinic in Haroldsburg, delirious with fresh grief. He will have just found his wife's body cooling amongst the forest mushrooms, along with the suicide note written in her own hand.
When Reed is gone, the afternoon seems to have grown even dimmer. David puts off venturing into the woods out of what he tells himself is the spirit of realism. In reality, as much as he can't bear Alexis alive, he doesn't know that he can face her dead. He has too many uneasy thoughts, distasteful and occasionally verging on the fantastical, about angry ghosts and the second act of Giselle.
But twilight is going to encroach sooner or later, and for the sake of the timeline he will have no choice. David grabs a flashlight, and puts on a jacket, and goes out.
"Alexis!" he calls into the trees. Why? In case she's alive? To appease her corpse? "Alexis!"
David feels like a fraud, which he supposes he is.
Reed gave him rough directions, and David follows them inexactly; he knows where the damn mushrooms are, anyway. He knows Alexis.
He's relieved to find her cold and pale already, a porcelain doll of a wife. It's better that he can cry about it; Mike and Mary will find the whole thing suitably appalling, and everyone will find it believable. An ungrieving husband-- that would be an anomaly that could throw off the whole thing.
In the meantime, David runs back to their little house by the seashore as if he were really urgent. He dials the familiar number. After the clinic he'll call Mike and Mary, utterly distracted by the wildness of his mourning, even though he knows they're in Portland until tomorrow. He supposes he ought to wait until someone else suggests contacting Paul for a service-- thinking of arrangements right after the fact is so cold.
It feels strange to be standing in their kitchen, holding the phone, and knowing that Alexis will never return to it. He did that. He has blotted her out of existence.
As he dials the clinic, a snatch of poem remembered from high school floats to the top of his mind:
And I did the deed that all men shun,
I shot the albatross ...
It may be entirely imaginary, but he can feel Alexis Chandler hanging around his neck.
Title: attempts on her life
Fandom: Dark Harbor ("What???" you are saying to yourself. I KNOW, RIGHT???)
Rating: Uhhh. NC-17. A bit. Actually yeah, let's go with that.
Genre: "Psychological thriller"?
Warnings: Character death. As the whole point. Spoilers for the film Dark Harbor, but dude you don't care.
Wordcount: ~4,500
Author's Desperate Rationalizations Notes: Okay, so, the other night while I was SEWING ALL THE THINGS, I finally watched this aggressively mediocre Alan Rickman thriller called Dark Harbor. It features what is apparently cinematography of ~deep symbolism~, as well as mushrooms, murder, and a big gay plot twist. (I know. I'm spoilering you. I am a harsh mistress.)
At the end of this movie, as I told some of you, I really, really could not help asking myself two questions:
1) Alan Rickman, given that your main problem in this movie seems to be your unhappy relationship, is it really SUCH a stellar idea to date the man who helped you kill your wife?
2) ... Alan Rickman, did you really HAVE to KILL YOUR WIFE??? Isn't there something that comes BETWEEN marital unhappiness and MURDER???
This fic attempts to answer these questions with the aid of an unreliable narrator and a bad, bad case of c whut i did thar. (Two examples: The character of the "Young Man" (played by Norman Reedus) goes unnamed in the film and the credits, leaving the task of naming him up to me. I chose to call him ... Reed. Also, the title, attempts on her life, comes from the title of a play in which the "attempts" include not only the attempt to kill/destroy the main character of Annie, but also to define, explain, and curb her.)
Why should you read this? To tell me where my prose needs work. To weigh in on whether I did what I set out to do! (Write a fic where killing your wife is NOT OKAY.) To boggle at how Alan Rickman's character makes EXCEEDINGLY POOR CHOICES. So that I will owe you a favor.
I could not have accomplished this without the ability to watch Dark Harbor on YouTube, and wax_jism's lolarious and painstaking transcript. I now look forward to getting some goddamn sleep and belonging to a fandom with potentially seven other living human beings in it.
attempts on her life
Life with a known murderer is easier than David had anticipated.
He himself, he supposes, is also a murderer-- though he's told, with a faint and teasing smile, that as an accomplice and coconspirator, at best he's murderish.
Somehow David fails to find that funny.
Still, things are better already. He's actually inspired to cook. The evening silences on the island (they've been there for days, he is letting his secretary in Augusta take care of the cards and the well wishes) are pleasant, comforting in their lack of self-conscious gaiety and precious, warbling chanteuses on the radio. They go for walks. The sex is incredible-- like drowning. David doesn't have words for it.
Even with Lex just a week in the ground, things are better.
"Are you scared of me now?" he is asked one night in bed, the smooth muscle of the other man's body curled luxuriantly against his. The fingertips brushing his jaw are gentle, the expression on the younger man's face dreamy but intent.
The other, much younger man.
Some people just buy a Ferrari and get it all out of their system.
Even now, he doesn't want him out of his system in the slightest.
"No," David murmurs, leaning forward until their foreheads touch. He reaches up to the hand at his jaw and winds their fingers together, pressing a penitent kiss to each fingertip.
"I did what you wanted." David hears the slight emphasis on you and he wonders at it, for a moment.
At Alexis' funeral, the priest had said something about her bravery, her joie de vivre, her perfect, untarnished innocence. David knows from years of experience that what passed for innocence was, in actuality, an immense wall of denial erected to ward off unwelcome cogitation, pampered and maintained like an honest to God artifact. He had been wailing at her walls for seven years-- pardon his mixing Jewish metaphors-- until the horns finally, finally brought her down.
"Yes," he murmurs now, and slides one thigh over the other man's hip, settling on top of him. He kisses him, slowly, finding his mouth welcoming him with a languid, hungry passion; the same passion that was content to wait, and wait, assured of its ultimate victory. "Yes."
The young man shifts under him, and a shudder passes through David's body.
"You did," he says, wondering, as his hands trail down, "what I wanted."
Sometimes, he is so angry at Alexis it's as if she's still alive.
*****
Accept David's apologies for his negligence:
The boy's name is Reed.
That's one thing Lex never managed to figure out during their little tryst. The way Reed tells the story, she didn't try particularly hard to know, either, or was too easy to distract.
"I still can't believe she bought that I never learned to write," he says, the laugh mostly in his eyes.
"She grew up reading about America's appalling public education system," David replies with an absent dryness. "I'm sure you played right into her prejudices." His attention is on the mushrooms slowly softening in butter on the stove. Reed never seems to resent it when he wanders.
Reed sits at the kitchen table now, absently carving something out of a bit of wood. He made a little trinket for Lex, which David had thought the exact type of maudlin sure to worm its way into her heart-- a heart which softened for everything, it seemed, except him. David tries to avoid these tangents, but he suspects that without Reed here, they would consume him entirely.
"But she did ask you," he says, taking the pasta off the heat. It's a question.
"Ask me what?"
The bowl is upended gently over their ancient colander, water hissing and steaming into the sink. A little sauce, and the mushrooms and crab, and a bottle of wine, and they'll have what amounts to comfort food for David.
David says, glancing at him, "Your name."
"Oh."
Reed's expression lights, amusement tugging at the edges of his mouth.
"She ... hinted."
"Hinted?" It feels good to be indulgent like this. When's the last time he had the luxury? He smirks faintly at Reed as he tosses the pasta with crab meat. Reed smiles back.
"I, uh ... told her my name was Wilma. She guessed Marilyn."
"Marilyn."
With an entirely charming smidge of smugness, "Monroe."
They both ignore-- or at least David does-- that his laugh comes out hoarse. A little later, when they're halfway through dinner, he mutters, "The crab's overdone."
"It's perfect," Reed replies.
(David also ignores the dread that fluttered in his gut when he walked into the kitchen that afternoon, overburdened with groceries, and saw Reed at the table. He was backlit by a sly slant of late-afternoon sun, but the knife in his hand was perfectly visible.
David stopped short, the conversation flashing through his mind:
Where is she?
It's okay.
She's gone.)
At the dinner table, Reed slips a hand over his knee.
David says, "You're perfect."
*****
Augusta, Maine, has been flirting with gentrification over the past decade without particular result. One of the more apparent testaments to its efforts is a series of hollow cinderblock factories, recently converted to grubby apartments for the student set. This is where David found himself whiling away the crisp wintry weeknights and Sunday mornings, making love on a lumpy couch to a man half his age and praying to God for the sake of his long-neglected sense of shame and sobriety that Reed's eternally caustic, eternally neon-haired roommate would not slam the door open with a snarl about Wildean antics and needing her sleep.
"English major," Reed said against his ear, and David could feel his sleepy smile.
He was fucking a student.
Reed assured him early on that he was twenty-six, back at school for his associate degree to satisfy the old man, and bare months away from graduating. It did not placate David particularly; nor did it quell the illicit thrill he felt driving through the cold to him. Fifteen minutes towards town, his only errand to park discreetly, ring at the door, and allow Reed to pull him into the shadow below the stairwell.
Good Lord, he was supposed to know better.
"Why won't you leave her?"
Reed says this in the early light of morning, his lips pressed to David's neck. November has turned to December without fanfare, and David can't bear to move-- though he is well aware of the rapidly encroaching demands on his time: Work. Dinner parties. Wife.
Even so, he can't suppress a thrill of pleasure that his affair-- his affair, David fucking Weinberg's-- is of sufficient seriousness that it has now begged such a question.
"I ... can't," he says.
"Sure you can." Light enough that David presumes Reed is making a joke. "File some papers, go to court ... walk away a free man."
"It's not that simple," David mumbles contentedly, as one of Reed's hands began to slide down his chest.
"It is," Reed breathes against the shell of his ear, "that simple."
"I can't--"
David chokes on the words as soon as they're out; Reed has slipped his hand below David's waistband and started to stroke his cock.
"Can't-- have a conversation like this," he concludes, shaky.
Reed laughs in a soft huff.
"I don't wanna talk."
David cooks for him. Night or morning makes no difference, he'll make a chilled carrot soup or a rich french toast with equal impunity. Those smuggled-out grocery bags of basil and fresh cheese, fine cocoa powder, in later and more ambitious stages lamb or truffle oil, all sit in judgment in the passenger seat of his car, in intimate knowledge. For Lex, cooking was-- and always had been-- purely functional.
*****
Lex.
Lex, Lex, Lex.
David wishes he could look back and say, with the self-deprecation of cheating husbands the world over, It's not as if I'm proud of what I did. But he is.
From the beginning, that was one small viciousness he permitted himself. The affair was revenge, for Lex's martyr syndrome, the depressive episodes she'd never talk about, her ostrichlike denials. The cheapness of her gaiety and flights of fancy, which drove them both without fail into the same old spiral: David's temper flaring, Alexis brightening to compensate, and David pushed even further into frustration.
Look at me, Lex.
He thinks that sometimes, sitting on the edge of Reed's bed as he peels off his shirt. This is what you miss when you bury your head in the fucking sand.
But the curdling certainty hits him that even if she could see him now, mouthing the tattoo that arcs across Reed's back, crouching between his legs, it would have no effect on her whatsoever. He can see the look of dumb betrayal, just as he can see it melt into her old tense cheer within the minute. Give it an hour and she'd be inquiring about dinner.
Saint Alexis. Our Lady of cuckolded wives.
There was something about her he'd found quite beautiful, once. They met in when he was in law school and she was hitting her late-twenties malaise, right at the beginning of her first major self-destruction. There had been something romantic, almost holy, in following her down through her own murk; in handling the bills (never paying: she could do that on her own) and cooking and reading her snatches of this and that, collecting her bits and pieces and reconstituting her entirely. It was a process, like remodeling. And somewhere along the line, she began to need him both too little and too much.
Why had he thought there was something to save in her? Something worth cherishing, worth preserving? He had not seen what was really there: the shell of a woman who was already burning her strength out. If there were pearls to be found in the cavern of her heart, only Alexis would ever know.
Though she seemed to unfurl easily enough for the rest of the world. Friends, children, stray dogs, waiters, store clerks. They all won the same easy currency of her smile, the little gestures, the impeccable memory for birthdays and small details. All this can be yours for the price of being a stranger.
It's possible, David allows, that it's more than the depletion of youthful energies that made Alexis more and more impenetrable to him when the opposite should have been true. Perhaps it's that he's the only one to come close enough to see how impregnable she truly is.
--Was, of course.
Impregnable she was.
Tenses continue to elude him.
*****
There are a few parts to this that pride or memory or scotch won't allow him to recall with perfect accuracy. For instance: he doesn't remember who began the game.
"... It would be nice if she disappeared." He's sure at the time that this is breaking some unuttered rule of marital infidelity: Don't talk about the wife. But he can't help it, in part because Reed is so curious. "Just ... I don't know, took a nice vacation to the Bermuda Triangle."
"Got eaten by sharks," Reed agrees, with a faint twitch of amusement. Reed's sense of humor is as black as his own.
David snorts, breath forming a little puff of cloud. "The Coast Guard recovered only a wide-brimmed straw hat and a half-eaten Polaroid camera."
They aren't at Reed's today, because of David's fears that in the light of day someone, somehow, might recognize his car in the lot. (It's convenient, though, how Reed's class schedule allows him lunches and odd afternoon hours off.) At this time of the year, in the middle of January, it's suicide or masochism to be in the park. That's what David counts on.
"Are you sure you're all right?" he asks Reed, who never complains. This talk of the tropics is making him cold even in his scarf and thick winter coat.
"'Mfine," Reed replies. He leans a little more heavily against David's side, a faint, mischievous sing-song to his scratchy voice. "I've got my love to keep me warm."
That's one thing he and Alexis have in common. A love of the classics.
From there, it would come up again and again-- little daydreaming ways to get Alexis out of his life for good. Deported to England. Reunited with her tragically ailing mother. It was a game between them: Who could come up with the most plausible, or the most preposterous story of escape?
Called to help the poor in Uganda. Run over by a moving van. David didn't think much of it-- why should he have? It was only in fun. He was at least tipsy, if not outright smashed, for a good third of the ideas they ever conceived.
Set on fire by a malfunctioning toaster. Tripped down an elevator shaft. Overdose of cough syrup.
Food poisoning.
Memory, pride or scotch may prevent him from recalling the details of the game. Lust, on the other hand, provides an excruciatingly accurate timeline of the rest of his affair with Reed.
Late September: He comes across him in the Augusta Greenway, during an anticlimactic muddle of a twilight. Reed kisses the inside of his wrist, unbuttoning David's cuffs so he can drag his lips up his forearm, inch by inch. By the time his teeth rake against the crook of David's elbow and his mouth slides down his collarbone to his throat, David is urgent and compliant in the same breath: oh god do what you want come on do it already. He has to see him again.
Early October: A week of distraction and increasingly vivid fantasy. David wanders the trail at off hours until he finds him, hooded sweatshirt obscuring his face. He sucks David off; David still doesn't know his name.
Mid-October: David gives his mystery man his cell number, with his name (first) printed below. Spends several days in pre-humiliated agony before the hoarse, amused voice says on the other line: "I don't really do house calls." They go on their first date, which is an agreement to arrive separately to a movie Lex doesn't like. This is where he learns his name is Reed.
Late October: They fuck, on the couch in Reed's apartment, after the third clandestine movie date. Reed is on top. David doesn't care.
November: The early days of the month yield the first dinner David fixes for Reed, upon learning how atrocious his student diet is. It is swiftly followed by others. David's grocery bill becomes astronomical. He wonders how Alexis can not know. The affair feels emblazoned across his chest, in scarlet most likely; he can smell Reed on everything.
*****
Originally, David had thought the sex might serve as a pressure valve on the stresses of life in a coffin. He might come to appreciate Alexis more, to mind it less that he had married for money and salvation and received (in any practical sense) neither one.
He found instead that he resented her more than ever. He resented her discomfort with silence. He resented her breakable smiles. He resented the spill of hair that fell unchecked across her face while she was reading, as though she were too joyful and careless a woman to bother with a barrette like everybody else.
As the months rolled by, his sense of asphyxiation had only increased.
He'd thought nothing could be worse than their Christmas, spent cloistered in a snowlogged resort in upstate New York. He'd never felt so disinclined to get Lex a gift, and not only because he was a Jew who had spent his youth presuming he would be safe from this holiday forever. Lex seemed enchanted with the rote jewelry; he ate a bad steak-- in self-defense?-- and was laid up until New Year's. But as awful as that entire excursion was, it met its match in Valentine's Day.
Maybe it was being back in Augusta, rather than in some exotic locale; knowing that he was, at most, twenty minutes from the heat of Reed's mouth and the reassuring strength of his body, but was ironically supposed to be demonstrating to God and the greater Augusta area how over-the-moon he was for his vampiric wife. How much he loved her, cherished her, wanted her or someone like her-- in the sense, at least, of being a 'her.'
At least a romantic dinner out would mean being in public. When they were alone he couldn't escape her.
"Mail for you," Lex says coolly, dropping it onto the kitchen table. Thwap. David winces.
"Give me that." Among bills, bills, advertisements, magazines, there is a small white envelope. Lex is sulking, so David can get it open without her seeing.
Inside is a pale-pink card.
David,
"On February 14th, 2010, Alexis Chandler Weinberg choked to death on a piece of Valentine's Candy. Paramedics have identified the fatal treat as a candy heart, bearing the inscription 'FOREVER.'"
Happy Valentine's Day.
After receiving that, how can he help but snort to himself occasionally for the rest of the day? Alexis fixes him with a sour look through dinner, seeming to intuit correctly that the joke is on her.
"Your sniggering is terribly romantic, darling," she murmurs.
"I'm laughing with you, not at you," David replies glibly. This is his third glass of wine.
"I," Lex returns, "am not laughing."
"Why don't you drink to us, darling?" David is on more solid ground when they are both being openly horrible. It's like badminton: he can be good at it if he puts in the effort. "I am."
"You're drinking to get drunk, dear."
"I think," David says, philosophical, "that it's really the same thing."
He doesn't want to be here, in an overbearingly French restaurant drinking overpriced rosé and pretending poorly not to despise his spouse. Just a week before, Reed had told him he loved him, and David has been turning over the words in his head ever since.
He can't spend another Valentine's Day like this.
"I love you too," he says fervently, biting Reed's ear. "I do ..."
Reed makes a sound between a laugh and a sigh and a moan, something in his throat and deeply intoxicating.
He grabs for David's collar and whispers, "Prove it."
*****
He doesn't know when it stopped being a game and started becoming a plan. When all the details of the barren life that he and Alexis share started to percolate between them into something cohesive.
We go to this island off the coast.
They're sitting drinking sweet black coffee on a frigid Sunday in March, David's old alibi about jogging and obscure errands still holding up beautifully.
Old wreck of a place, it's like a mausoleum to Chandlers past.
Reed has a way of listening to him when he talks about Alexis, of asking just the right questions. He's made it their shared sorrow, their shared trap. David wouldn't be able to help opening up to him even if he wanted to.
Tells these ridiculous, rambling stories when she's had a few--
Act like she's so fucking perfect--
On and on about the mushrooms, oh the glory of nature and God's gift of edible fungi ... even the poisonous ones ...
While it's not exactly sheer elegance in its simplicity, David draws incredible comfort from having a plan. Reed is, without a doubt, the perfect injured waif, and it's not as if David has to work to be an unpleasant husband. It's Reed who offers the poetic flourishes, all the insights.
Oh, you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of mushrooms? Ask her about the god damn Purple Julie sometime. Sex and death, sex and death ...
"You know ... she might be doing the same thing you're doing," Reed remarks to him.
"The same thing I'm doing?"
"Looking ... elsewhere."
An affair is a feeling of constant invigoration, like plunging into cold salt water. Every meeting David feels his heart in his throat, shuddering with the knowledge that he is risking ... everything. He can hear what people would say, all the fatuous self-satisfied cocktail gossip that would circulate about the latest perverse failing of David Weinberg. He imagines it the way you do your own eulogy. But the danger breathes urgency and electricity into every moment he spends with Reed, makes it somehow better than real. He can scarcely believe he goes to bed with him, shares secrets and fears and near-perfect apple tarts, can have him.
If Lex had ever felt this way, even for an instant, he knows he would have seen the change.
"I don't think," he says, dryness in his voice easing up as Reed settles beside him on the couch, "that it's her style."
"You never know." Reed reaches out for David's shoulders and begins to knead. "You said yourself ... she wants to be perfect. But she can't be. Nobody's perfect."
"No." David doesn't want to think words like purr, particularly not to describe himself, but as Reed's hands dig into the knots in his back, he does have to admit that the shoe fits. "Nobody is."
"I bet I could find out." That same teasing edge to his voice; David has to laugh.
"You," he says, "are going to discover whether my wife is as unfaithful as I am."
"What?" He can hear the grin. "You don't think I could do it?" Reed's voice drops; David can feel him lean forward slightly to speak into his ear. "Get her trust ... get her ... interested?"
David's eyes slide closed. "Mmm ... you're very interesting."
"That's what I thought." Reed presses a kiss to David's neck, below his ear. "I could do it, David," he whispers. "If you left us alone, just for a little bit ... it'd be long enough."
"Long enough," David murmurs, "for what, exactly."
Reed pauses, though his hands do not.
"It's dangerous, out in the woods," he says softly. "On the water ... nobody around ..."
David straightens.
"Good God," he says. He feels as if the color must be draining from his face.
"You're serious."
*****
Lex seems surprised that he could have got such a considerate idea. A little one-on-one time, a time for the two of them only. Back to where they began to be a them-- and how could Lex resist the sentiment? Maybe this time they'll really fix things.
(For David, this maybe is a certainty.)
He informs the office he'll be taking a week's vacation, May 24th through the 28th. He calls Reed to tell him they're on.
*****
"Where is she?" David asks hoarsely.
The rain hasn't let up as morning gloomed its way to afternoon. He gave up on chasing Reed and Alexis through the woods-- he didn't need to be at the scene, presuming this one went according to plan. He doesn't need to see it.
He went back to the house and made coffee, adding brandy to taste-- specifically, to the point where he could no longer taste coffee-- and dried off by the fire, in pajamas. He doesn't think he'll be able to stand it if Lex comes back from this alive. He can't think of another damned thing to say or do, aside from a messy and debilitating divorce, and that is untenable. He's half what people think of him, and while that may not be glamorous, it's not exactly ignominy, either.
He only has this one life, and it's more than half squandered already.
When the door opens he starts, half a dozen half-formed expectations flickering in his mind's eye-- but it's only Reed. Reed by himself, shirt soaked and jeans dark with mud and clinging grass.
"It's okay," he says.
Despite the rain, and the generally husky quality of his voice, David hears him as clear as a bell.
"She's gone."
David feels then, with a muddled certainty, that he has not yet had enough brandy.
"Gone," he repeats. His throat is dry.
Reed smiles, slow and faint, and shuts the door gently behind him.
"I left the suicide note ... just like we planned." He's walking nearer, the floor swaying like a boat on the water.
David feels suddenly as if he's going to be ill.
"Oh-- good," he says, hollowly. "Yes. Good-- thank you."
Reed reaches his chair, sinking slowly to edge a damp, denim-clad knee between David's knees. His hand on the back of his neck is clammy; it makes David shudder.
"I should--"
"We've got time," Reed protests, nose brushing David's. Their lips are close together, but David already knows that they'll be cold. "A little time ..."
He hesitates, inhaling the wet leafy smell of Reed's clothes. Water on his skin.
"... No," he says. He kisses him once, chaste as a goodbye note. "No-- you need to get dry. Get out of here." This is part of the plan as well. Reed will be gone, no one will have seen him; in a few hours, David will call the little clinic in Haroldsburg, delirious with fresh grief. He will have just found his wife's body cooling amongst the forest mushrooms, along with the suicide note written in her own hand.
When Reed is gone, the afternoon seems to have grown even dimmer. David puts off venturing into the woods out of what he tells himself is the spirit of realism. In reality, as much as he can't bear Alexis alive, he doesn't know that he can face her dead. He has too many uneasy thoughts, distasteful and occasionally verging on the fantastical, about angry ghosts and the second act of Giselle.
But twilight is going to encroach sooner or later, and for the sake of the timeline he will have no choice. David grabs a flashlight, and puts on a jacket, and goes out.
"Alexis!" he calls into the trees. Why? In case she's alive? To appease her corpse? "Alexis!"
David feels like a fraud, which he supposes he is.
Reed gave him rough directions, and David follows them inexactly; he knows where the damn mushrooms are, anyway. He knows Alexis.
He's relieved to find her cold and pale already, a porcelain doll of a wife. It's better that he can cry about it; Mike and Mary will find the whole thing suitably appalling, and everyone will find it believable. An ungrieving husband-- that would be an anomaly that could throw off the whole thing.
In the meantime, David runs back to their little house by the seashore as if he were really urgent. He dials the familiar number. After the clinic he'll call Mike and Mary, utterly distracted by the wildness of his mourning, even though he knows they're in Portland until tomorrow. He supposes he ought to wait until someone else suggests contacting Paul for a service-- thinking of arrangements right after the fact is so cold.
It feels strange to be standing in their kitchen, holding the phone, and knowing that Alexis will never return to it. He did that. He has blotted her out of existence.
As he dials the clinic, a snatch of poem remembered from high school floats to the top of his mind:
And I did the deed that all men shun,
I shot the albatross ...
It may be entirely imaginary, but he can feel Alexis Chandler hanging around his neck.