Absolution

by Alice McDermott

I knew we would have speculated about what kind of guy Kent really was, or what Charlene was after—all the delicious mysteries of other people’s marriages.

Charlene plotted and schemed and traded on the black market; she pushed people around, drove like the devil, swept into rooms, popped pills, raised money; she was a dynamo. She laughed readily at other people’s foolishness, and while she might suppress her anger at their stupidity—confining her fury to two impatient fingertips flicking each other under her cigarette like a flint against a stone—she did not let that stupidity pass. When her husband belittled her, good-naturedly, of course—it was the way all husbands belittled their wives in those days—she replied silently; she ducked her head demurely but managed nevertheless to make the gesture seem as defiant as a raised gun.

The way this builds! The concretion of the fingers as flint amidst the litany of adjectives. Wow.

We were having scrambled eggs in our own kitchen after the cocktail party. Moments before, Douglas had been disgruntled, as whiny as a child, much as he always was after cocktail parties where he hadn’t eaten enough to call it dinner but had eaten too much to want a real dinner once he got home.