Unlovely (37 page)

Claudia got out of bed and dragged
herself to her kitchen. She stared at the cabinets, feeling more exhausted than
she'd ever felt in her life. She needed something sharp, but not a knife. She
was afraid of knives. What else would work?

Claudia took a juice glass from her tiny
cupboard and struck it on the counter, hard. Instead of breaking off into large
shards as she'd hoped, the glass broke into hundreds of tiny, useless pieces.
Claudia stared at them, unbelieving. She couldn't even kill herself. She
couldn't even get that right.

What now?

What else? Carry on. She walked over to
the sink and pulled out a brown paper bag from the cupboard underneath, and
commenced scooping the glass shards up with her bare hands and putting them in
the bag. A few of the slivers stuck in her fingertips and caused her to wince
in pain. That was a small comfort.

The next morning Claudia woke to the twin insults of a
blue sky and a chirping bird outside her window. It seemed impossible that life
could continue like this. It should have been pouring rain.

Claudia staggered out of bed to go to
the bathroom and wash up. She looked into the mirror over the sink, dreading a
confrontation with any human being, even herself. She met swollen eyes and a
blotchy, pale complexion. A mask of misery. Claudia turned the tap to splash
water on her face. When the water hit her hands she was startled by the sting:
she looked down at them and saw the myriad small cuts over both of her palms. Those
were going to take a few days to heal.

Claudia put on her slippers, then
wandered back through her bedroom, through the sitting room into her
kitchenette. She saw the paper bag full of glass shards sitting on the floor
near the small refrigerator. She sank down on the tile across from it, back
propped against a cabinet, and bent her knees to put her forehead on them. She
could see a few pieces of glass that she'd missed on the tile, and made a
mental note to vacuum them up. Claudia did feel slightly better than she'd felt
the night before, in the sense that she felt she was in her right mind again.
She was still profoundly depressed, but she'd pulled out of the last night's
dark confusion enough to be horrified by her attempt to hurt herself. To kill
herself. She had never thought she could be self-destructive like that, and it
scared her.

Claudia remained on the floor, wondering
what to do now. She didn't want to die. She didn't want to live, either. Out of
a habit acquired over the last couple of months she wondered what Mark was
doing at that very moment. Was he having a cup of coffee with his wife in their
sunny kitchen before heading over to campus to teach a summer class? Was he on
vacation with Susan and the kids at the beach?

Her tailbone began to hurt. Claudia
pushed herself to her feet, her hands stinging when she pressed them to the
tile for leverage, and shuffled back to the bathroom to take a long, hot
shower. She didn't shave her legs; the idea of doing it this morning after the
events of the night before was grotesque. She dressed in her most comfortable
corduroy slacks and a sweatshirt, and lay back on her studio couch to think
about what she should do next. One step at a time, one movement at a time.

The first thing she had to do was pick a
glass sliver out of her palm. She returned to the bathroom, sat on the closed
toilet seat and set to work with a pair of tweezers. It required some painful
digging, followed by a liberal dose of isopropyl alcohol, but it was finally out.
Claudia bandaged her hand, and then went into the kitchen to brew a pot of
coffee and toast a piece of bread.

As she breakfasted, having added a
medicinal splash of Schnapps to her cup, her nerves calmed and she felt like
she was reentering the land of the living. She was still in despair over Mark,
but her suffering was easing by the hour. By lunchtime, cautious, trembling
hope had been renewed.

After all, what had she learned last
night that was so shocking? Only that Mark might be married. Okay, time to be
honest: he was married. Claudia had been aware of the possibility that he had a
wife all along. Now the wife had a name, and that's what had thrown her: just
reading a name. The worry about their having children wasn't groundless, but in
fact, there had been no evidence of the existence of kids at all. That had been
a complete figment of her imagination. For some reason, just reading the name
Susan K. Adams had caused Claudia to run off the rails.

Claudia realized her emotions were very
close to the surface. If only there were someone with whom she could discuss
her relationship with Mark, someone upon whom she could unburden herself. She
didn't want to share everything – she was, after all, an intensely private
person. Still, it would be good to have someone who would understand what she
was going through.

She decided against it. Who could
possibly understand? Not even Melanie.

Claudia looked around her rooms. They
could stand a good straightening, but she just wasn't up to it, and she was
beginning to feel
peckish
. The thought of going to
the dining hall and confronting all those giggling campers was more than she
could stand, but her cupboards were virtually bare. There was no option but to
go out.

She went to a fast food place for
dinner. Having had little to eat for the past twenty-four hours, Claudia
discovered she was ravenous the moment she unwrapped her sandwich. She bolted
her meal, and still feeling a gnawing hunger in her stomach, returned to the
counter to get another burger and fries to take back to the residence.

Once home, she ate her second dinner,
finished her extra-large soda, and then sat down at her laptop to check her
email. There was a note from one of the other members of the curriculum committee,
reminding her of a meeting on Monday afternoon, but that was the only important
message in the bunch. She sent off a quick response confirming that she'd be
present at the meeting, and then felt psychologically free to pursue the task
currently consuming her imagination.

She put Mark's name and town into the
search engine again and looked at the links that appeared. She had been
rationing them out over the last few weeks, going down the list one at a time,
allowing herself only one or two links a week. Sometimes the links led her back
to the same places she'd been before, but she didn't cheat and go on to the
next one.

This time she clicked on a link that led
to a social networking site, foreign territory to Claudia. She'd heard of these
sites, of course, but assumed that they were mostly for high school students.
Claudia found herself confronted with a page of tiny pictures, each one labeled
"Mark Adams," and although there were lots of teenagers in the group,
many of them looked to be adult men. Her heart leaped at the possibility that
Mark's photograph could be among them. She hadn't seen his face in over fifteen
years.

This was going to be a tricky business,
though. There were a couple of hundred tiny pictures of men whose features were
barely discernible even with squinting. To see the enlargements she had to
register on the site herself.

This took all of three minutes. Claudia
was temporarily flummoxed when the site requested a photo. She had a digital
photo of her mom and herself in some file on her desktop, but she had no idea
how to post it. That would have to wait until tomorrow. For now she just filled
in her general information and a sparse biography: education, employment,
location. No one needed more than that. She wasn't on the site to make friends.

That task completed, Claudia was ready
to look at all of the pictures on the Mark Adams page to find the one she
wanted. She scanned the list; apparently there were many other
computer-illiterates out there, because a large number of the men listed had no
profile picture at all, only a white knob of a silhouette. Others, apparently
loathe to make their image public, posted pictures of sports cars, or animals,
or team logos. Annoying.

All Claudia could do was hope that one
of those pictures was the target of her search, that her Mark Adams was
actually registered on the site, that he had posted some kind of profile
picture, and that it would be one she could readily identify.

After a few minutes of careful checking
Claudia saw a picture of a dark-haired man who looked like he could be Mark.
She leaned in toward her computer screen and clicked on the name beside the
photo. She searched the tiny face of a man standing on the deck of a ship with
his back to the sunset. He was holding what could be presumed to be a cocktail
aloft in his right hand in some sort of salute to the photographer, and his
left arm was resting on the shoulders of a darkly tanned platinum blond wearing
a short white sundress. Was it Mark? Could that blond be Susan? She looked very
young and fit. Claudia glanced at the information on the profile page: no, not
her Mark after all. This one was too young. Relief. Claudia was prepared for
reasonable competition, but sundress-woman was intimidating.

After examining the page more carefully,
Claudia discovered that she could filter the results by location. Claudia typed
in the name of the town where she knew Mark to live and waited for a few
anxious seconds. Then a photograph popped up that made Claudia catch her
breath. It was her Mark. No doubt about it.

She leaned forward again, hands
trembling above the keyboard. It appeared to be a formal portrait, likely for
the campus yearbook, taken against a navy velvet drape. Mark was wearing a
brown tweed jacket, a small check shirt and a club tie. He was smiling, and it
didn't appear to be a posed smile, but a lovely, warm, welcoming one, friendly
and relaxed. He looked a bit heavier around his jawline, but there was no
double chin. His forehead was higher than she'd remembered, and there was a
considerable sprinkling of gray in his hair, but he was beautiful.

She stared at the picture thirstily,
gulping it in. The nose, the coarse texture of his shaved cheeks, just as she
recalled. His eyes: no, the picture didn't do justice to his eyes. Claudia
remembered Mark's eyes. They were blue, a color Claudia usually found insipid
and washed out (recessive traits in general didn't appeal to her) but Mark's
eyes were lively and as full of depth as if they'd been chocolate brown. His
eyes didn't twinkle – another image Claudia detested – they snapped with
intelligence and humor. They were the eyes of a saint or a genius. This photo
didn't convey that. Perhaps it was the camera angle. Claudia hoped it wasn't
the vicissitudes of life that had taken away the snap of his eyes.

Her pulse racing, Claudia clicked on the
name next to the picture and a new page appeared. Instead of his personal
information, however, there was a message that read: "Mark only shares his
information with friends. If you know Mark, add Mark as a friend." Claudia
clicked on a link to Mark's photos, but again she was denied access as the same
words appeared on the screen. She could see his face, but not learn anything
about him. It was frustrating to be so close. She certainly didn't feel
comfortable adding him as a friend without some sort of reintroduction. There
was a tiny envelope on the page she thought might lead to some message
exchange, and for a moment she toyed with the idea of sending him a message,
but quickly decided against it. That could wait.

On an impulse, Claudia went back up into
the search line on the page and typed in "Susan Adams." After getting
another enormous list, she filtered by location again. And there was Susan. It
had to be her. Claudia clicked on the name.

Mark's wife seemed to be far less
security-conscious than he. Some of her information was accessible, and at the
bottom of the profile page Claudia read Susan's relationship status:
"Married to Mark Adams."

Although this confirmation of their
marriage was ugly to read and made her heart momentarily constrict, Claudia was
left largely unmoved. True, she had hoped he would be divorced, but reading
Susan's relationship status wasn't a shock the way reading her name had been
yesterday. Instead, she felt curious.

First, the picture: clearly the work of
an amateur photographer. It showed Susan to be roughly in her mid-thirties.
She'd been caught in the middle of a laugh; her head was thrown back and her
mouth was slightly open. She had dark, shoulder length hair tucked behind her
ears, and very nice, straight white teeth. She was attractive enough, not fat,
maybe a little on the thin side. Her nose and cheeks were sprinkled with
freckles, as if she spent a lot of time in the sun and ignored the sunblock.
She certainly wasn't breath-taking, but she was nice-looking. Her blouse was
unbuttoned a bit lower than necessary. Kind of trashy.

On to the information: Susan had a
master's degree. She worked at some clinic for children with auditory problems.
Now that was interesting. Susan worked outside the home. While that wasn't a
guarantee of no children – many mothers work, after all – it might make it
slightly less likely that there were any. All Claudia could hope for at this
point was that there were no children. Children would be the worst thing she
could discover.

Claudia clicked on a link to see Susan's
pictures. There weren't many: she only had four pictures besides her portrait,
which turned out to be cropped from a larger photo taken at some restaurant
with a bunch of other women, all of them clearly drunk. There was a dated
school picture of a little girl; presumably it was Susan as a child. She was
cute, of course (why would she post an ugly one?). Another photograph showed
Susan dressed up for Halloween as a cat, with fake ears attached to a headband
and whiskers drawn across her face with an eyebrow pencil or something. How
many thousands of women dress up like a cat for Halloween? The only thing more
common was a sexy witch. Claudia was gratified to see this lack of imagination.