A man hasn’t heard from his lover in over a week. Desperate to know what’s going on, he risks going to a party where he knows she will be present with her husband just so he can talk with her. Their encounter proves deadly.

Compliments of the chef, please enjoy my short story, “Forever in My Arms.”

 

Forever in My Arms

by Daniel McInerny

 

Midway in the journey of our life I took myself to a party at Ned Cohen’s and Janet Mabry’s.

I knew I was reckless in going. You see, it was breaking one of our rules for me to go there. At the start Franny and I had made several rules. We agreed never to tell any of our friends about us. We agreed never to appear in the same place socially. We even arranged our schedules so that we would never happen upon one another on campus. Such extreme measures would hold until Franny received tenure in the spring of the following year. Her husband, John, had gone over to the dark side to be dean of the Arts College and was thus in a position to scuttle Franny’s tenure application. So we were going to take every precaution toward keeping our relationship secret–no matter how silly it seemed–until her tenure had been approved. Then we would confront John together from a position of strength.

So how did we arrange our merry meetings? We concocted an ingenious and giddy form of clandestine communication. Eschewing mobile calls, email, and texts, we met instead in the com boxes of a political blog we hated. Each of us took an alias and sprinkled our indignations and mini manifestos with coded messages. To use a phrase in a comment like “tighten our belts” meant that a rendezvous at my house was out of the question. The words “freedom” or “brave” indicated that we had a green light. Any politician pilloried by name was a stand-in for John. And so on.

But “Guinevere” hadn’t shown up in the com boxes all week.

That Thursday I took the unprecedented step of leaving her a note in her campus mailbox. I rattled up something on my computer and sealed it in an unmarked manila envelope. “Discussion group this weekend?” was all it said.

But still I did not hear from her.

From the first day of “Guinevere’s” absence from the com boxes I worried that John had found out and had pressured Franny into giving up our affair. I imagined him using her tenure application as blackmail. As the days of that week passed, I became more and more desperate to see her. Then I remembered that, the week before, I had received an invitation to Ned and Janet’s end-of-term party. According to our rules, it was not normally the sort of thing I would attend. Franny and Janet were pretty close and I knew Franny would enjoy going more than I. But as Franny’s silence continued throughout the week of the party, I wondered with increasing anxiety: should I go and try to see her there?

I was still hemming and hawing the Saturday of the party. I was at home that afternoon working on a poetic translation of a passage from Aeneid 4 (Dido’s suicide). Looking up a word in my Latin dictionary I suddenly felt a frisson of panic wash through me. I called out Franny’s name, and heard my small voice quickly absorbed by the bookshelves in my home office. When my panic subsided, it left something behind like detritus on a beach after a storm. A message in a bottle. A demand. I touched the pages of my notebook and fancied that poor heartbroken Dido, from the couch on her pyre, were crying out to me: Go to Franny. Yet there was something ominous in this demand I did not associate with my sweet Dido. In any event, I could wait no longer. I had to see her.

So I went to the party.

A swirling wind swept me up the front walk and into Ned and Janet’s house. Restraining myself from too zealously scanning the crowded company, I hopped upstairs and threw my coat on the pile of others in the spare bedroom. As I came back downstairs a song was playing through speakers hooked up to an iPod, a sultry pop diva ballad that was everywhere that year.

 

Let the earth dissolve

Let the mountains fall into the sea

You are my one resolve

You are the truth that sets me free–

 

I hated the song, really, and so did Franny. But it was the song that was playing when I first asked her to dance and so from then on, half jokingly, we referred to it as “our” song. I took the fact that it was playing as a good omen, a sign that I would actually get a moment alone with her and she would dispel my neurotic imaginings that John had found us out.

“My dear fellow!”

It was Huxton, a colleague from the department. Relieved to find me as untethered as he was, he accosted me full of pie-eyed bonhomie. He began treating me to a story of some absurdity committed by one of his students in his examination book. But I was hardly listening. The song on the iPod came to its desperate chorus:

 

I’ll let the devil take my soul

As long as I can keep you here–

Forever in my arms.

 

“I need a drink,” I said to Huxton finally.

“Good God,” said Huxton, “you don’t have a drink, do you?” He pointed toward the kitchen. “Just make your way through that mass who have lost the good of intellect. “La diritta via era smarrita.”

I squeezed through the groupings of revelers. When not alone with Franny that semester I had been absorbed with Virgil and so many of my colleagues had not seen me in weeks. Curious “Hi’s” smiled up at me; shrill laughter slapped my face. La diritta via era smarrita–“the right path was lost.” Not simply “lost.” Huxton, the Dantista, had once explained to me that smarrita meant more literally “overgrown,” “covered by brambles.” I hacked my way to the other side of them and entered the only slightly less crowded kitchen.

Janet was there and we exchanged a hug. Like a tipsy person I edited and re-edited my words before speaking them to her, afraid that I would blurt out the question that was pressing on my mind: “Where’s Franny?”

She was not at the party as far as I could see. Neither was John. My risk in coming had been for naught.

Janet whirled into another conversation. I was left alone again.

 

You are my one resolve

You are the truth that sets me free–

 

I took a bottle from the counter and poured the dreary merlot into an even drearier plastic cup. I drained it, and then, eager for a place to be alone, I escaped through the screen door into the backyard.

It was there that I found her.

 

The lights on the corners of the roof lit most of the small backyard, and Franny cut a disconsolate figure drifting along at the back of it. It was not a pleasant night to be outside. The black wind raked through the high branches of the trees. Her long dark hair whipped around her head like a trapped animal. When I first saw how sad she looked I worried, but when she noticed me she smiled so brightly that my hope returned. I wanted to run to her and take her in my arms. But I didn’t dare. The kitchen windows looked into the yard and I didn’t know where John was.

As best as one can saunter in such a wind, I sauntered over to her, colleague encountering colleague at the end of a long term.

“God, it’s good to see you,” I said sotto voce.

Her arms twitched for mine and I started to reach out for her. But we caught ourselves, and we even took a step apart as we turned our backs to the house.

“I haven’t heard from you all week,” I said.

“Do you know how much I love you, Paul?” she said. “Do you know?”

“Of course I know. You know that I love you, don’t you?”

“I remember when you first kissed me.”

“Why settle for remembering?”

“It makes me sad to think of those days.”

“Why? What’s the matter? ”

“I’m never going to give you up, Paul.”

“You won’t have to.”

“Never.”

In saying this last word she glared at me, her eyes wild with anger.

“What’s happened, Franny? Did John confront you?”

“Yes.”

I stopped myself from turning back toward the house.

“Is he here?”

“No. He’s not here.”

“How did he–?”

“I’m so sorry. I was sloppy. He got onto my laptop and saw the collection of your poems that you recorded for me. I kept the poems on my phone, but when I charged my phone on my laptop it synced with it. I forgot it does that.”

“That was enough to make him suspicious?”

She nodded.

“And he bullied the rest out of you?”

She smashed a tear in her eye.

“Darling! I’m not going to let him hurt you.”

“He’s never going to hurt me,” she said ruefully. “He’s never going to touch us.”

The dull, mechanical tone with which she said this made me uneasy.

“Did he do something to you, Franny?”

She looked up into the night sky. There was no moon or stars to be seen. Only the iron clouds in the low sky and the birds crying in the trees. The chorus of that song kept blowing through my mind–

 

As long as I can keep you here–

Forever in my arms.

 

She held her hair away from her face and said to me:

“I don’t regret what I did. We can be together now in peace.”

“What did you do? Franny, what happened?”

She reached out to touch my arm, but as she did so a terrified scream from inside the house rent the wind like a knife through a thin sheet. It was a woman’s scream from the kitchen. Before I could say or do anything the woman screamed again. There was a commotion of voices inside.

I looked at Franny.

“Let me see what’s going on,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I bounded into the kitchen and found Janet doubled over in anguish as Ned, a mobile phone in one hand, struggled to hold her up.

“What happened?”

Janet raised her face to me, the eyeliner running in dirty rivulets down her cheeks.

“It’s John and Franny!” she groaned and nearly collapsed onto the floor.

“Somebody help Janet to our bedroom,” Ned pleaded.

A female colleague escorted Janet away. Everyone else crowded into the kitchen and doorway and waited for Ned to explain.

“I just got a call from the police. John Figgis has been found dead in his basement. Shot himself, apparently, two or three days ago.”

After the initial gasps of disbelief, I was grateful that someone other than myself asked, “What about Franny?”

“The police found a new post on John’s blog. John must have written it several days ago but timed it to be released today.”

Ned held up his mobile, where the homepage of John’s blog was visible on the screen.

“It’s his suicide note. Seems he thought Franny was having an affair. He confronted her with it and they fought. He claims she came after him with a kitchen knife. He says she was intent on killing him, and in his fury to stay alive he–fought back.”

“How is she?” someone demanded over the gasps of horror. “Where’s Franny now?”

“She’s dead. He strangled her. The police found her body in the woods behind their house. John’s post led them to it. Must have been there nearly a week. John said he didn’t mean to kill her, that he was sick with remorse–”

Blind with fear, I slammed open the screen door and jumped down the steps into the yard.

But Franny was no longer there, and I fainted like a body stricken dead.