Cocktailopoly

Ben must have taken her pot roast. Rose came home from work and it was gone.

Where’d it go?

The lime Diet Coke was also gone. Why had he taken the pot roast and Diet Coke? Nothing else was missing. It had to be Ben. Damn him. She had made the pot roast as a special dinner to reward herself for working the Friday before New Year’s Eve. Sunday dinner on Friday.

Now there was nothing.

She peered into the refrigerator. She supposed she could make sandwiches. There was always something for sandwiches. Tomato and cucumber. Tuna. Turkey.

She poured a glass of water. She flopped in the easy chair and pretended she was drinking alcohol. A cocktail maybe. She had bought Cocktailopoly for Christmas and Ben had refused to play. She had played the game with Avdo, who had never drunk a cocktail in his life. She made him “virgin” cocktails with orange juice and 7-Up as a base. He kept laughing and saying, Cheers.

Rose had not drunk cocktails--what she used to call “mixed drinks”--for almost thirty years. She might have had a Daiquiri 25 years ago at a restaurant. But the game was a blast.

Well, she had no one to play games with now. Her marriage was essentially lonely. Had anyone ever had such a lonely marriage? Ben was so sociable. No one would guess that he paid little attention to her.

No one except Megan, that is. Megan disliked him and thought he despised her little sister.

How can you stand it? It doesn’t have to be like this. My husband and I were close.

Yes, it does have to be like this, Rose said firmly. Ben’s busy. He’s always been busy. We have a different kind of relationship.

She was not going to admit to anyone that her marriage was sometimes joyless. She had been married years before--years and years ago--and that marriage had ended in failure. It was during a decade when people questioned monogamy. She had fallen in love with another man, a painter. He was more exciting than her husband, a newspaperman. Her husband had not been able to stand the affairs. She had moved in with the painter and been happy for a number of years. Her profession seemed to complement his art.

She met Ben during a period when she was alone, after she had left the painter. When she married Ben, she was rapturously in love. She had married him with the full intention of remaining faithful. And she had. She had been faithful through everything. He was the one who had affairs. He worked the graveyard shift at the hospital every winter to make up for the money he lost at his law office and she saw little of him then. Pro bono in law, pro pecunia in medicine.

Right now Rose felt full of self-pity. She had seen her therapist after work and they had gone over her feelings about being raped as a teenager. The therapist had suggested she consider suing.

I’m married to a lawyer. I kind of get enough of that. Anyway, isn't there a statute of limitations? I want never to see Ms. Bottle again.

It’s no joke, said the therapist earnestly. You could sue her.

Burning her photo helped. I've had fewer nightmares.

I’m glad. I take this seriously, Rose. If you ever need anything, call me up.

Rose went home to talk to Ben about her day. He was gone. He had even taken her pot roast.

Rose tried not to be bitter. She could do anything she liked . She could leave him if she wanted to. She supposed she didn’t want to. So she put some music on and made a fire in the fireplace. Then she picked up Rex Warner’s Aerodrome, a novel about fascism published in 1941 and often compared to Orwell’s 1984. According to Anthony Burgess in the introduction, Aerodrome was superior to Orwell’s novel. “It lacks the popular elements of Orwell’s book--sex, overt brutality, explicit and recognizable ideology.”

Rose loved the book. It was one she had discovered while browsing at Alibris or some other internet bookstore after buying some classic science fiction novel or other, possibly The Day of the Triffids, possibly The Stars My Destination. At first she had read it with a sinking heart. The style was so simple. She could not believe so quiet a novel would prove to be a classic. But it grew on her. It was narrated by a ingenuous young man who appreciates the beauty of nature and plans to live a quiet life, to enter the Civil Service. Then on his twenty-first birthday he learns that he is not his parents’ son. Before he can learn who his parents are, his adoptive father is killed by a flight lieutenant at an agricultural show. This accident augurs the fall of the feudal village and the threat to its agricultural way of life by the fascists at the nearby aerodrome. The complex relationships of the villagers are also threatened.

The sun went down. Low in the sky, then dark. She missed Binkie. Where was Ben? She looked at the Christmas tree. Time to take it down, she supposed. It had old-fashioned tinsel that she had bought at a garage sale, silvery strands hanging from the tree, and colored lights.

She got up to take it down. Then Ben came home.

Darling, we’re eating out tonight, he said cheerily.

What happened to the pot roast?

Oh, I fed it to Henry. He has bronchitis. I wrote him a prescription for penicillin.

You’re not hungry, are you?

Well, no.

They burst out laughing.

Why don’t we go somewhere in the neighborhood? You can have coffee.

Don’t you want to go somewhere fancy?

Not particularly. I’m in my jeans.