Excerpted from:
Captain Fontaine possessed a rudimentary madness not commonly found in thirty-five year old men.
His affliction was usually reserved for middle aged women who suddenly find themselves amid a dreary marriage that has born shockingly ugly children, dwelling in frostbitten country full of fickle, violent weather, and working at a fancy law office for a finely dressed man on the cusp of old age with bad taste in shoes and good taste in wine. At this particular law office, the woman could compare the dark mahogany desks and satin chairs with her drab plaid couch and particle board entertainment center, perhaps imbibing herself with a greater madness and resolve to smother those ugly children with love and forget who or what she ever was herself.
This was exactly the situation in which Fontaine’s wife found herself after five years of cold dinners and waiting with their whining brood for him to return to shore. However, unlike her husband, she possessed the cool calculation of a Bengal tiger waiting in a bamboo forest, and, when the time was right, pounced and killed their marriage, picking their relationship clean like the bones of an antelope. Had she been the spouse who possessed this specific madness, there is no doubt she would have remained in their white house with the square rows of hedges at the end of Apple Blossom Road, dressing her not one but two pugs in ugly little sweaters and feeding the three children spoonfuls of mashed food while they dropped it on their clothing.
No, it was her luck that all that particular madness resided in Fontaine. And so when she departed quickly, leaving a scattered wake of bibs and pacifiers and frilly lingerie in the driveway, he remained.
His scant hair flitted in the breeze off the ocean, the only mistress he had ever known. At the end of the driveway he stopped following her.
Her name had been Galadriel, and she was pretty but not beautiful; a washed out blonde who froze in the winter like crystallized straw and burnt salmon-pink in the short summer months. They’d met at a dance on the common in Onset Beach when they were seventeen. Fontaine told her that her name sounded like a mermaid’s as he felt her breath on his neck beneath the gazebo, slow dancing two feet apart.
But that was almost twenty years ago, long before her unhappiness simmered into hatred, and he learned that her name had, in fact, been lifted from a character in Lord of the Rings.
The pale, membranous creatures burbled and cooed silly nonsense words at Fontaine, the oldest crying for mama. Not unlike the strange fish he pulled from the ocean, sucking greedily at spoons, the air, his fingers, the children became the last bastion of real love between Fontaine and his wife. He hugged and cuddled them, smiled at them, fed them bachelor meals like hot dog stew. Finally his mother arrived at the house. She stood in the doorway looking fearfully at the monsters on the couch, lined like bowling pins.
“I’ll watch them as long as you two need to sort things out,” his mother offered with a hint of hesitation. She knew there’d be no sorting out. They packed them, wrapped them in coats and scarves like tuna steaks in wax paper. The four of them, grandmother and grandchildren, trundled northward, away from the sea.
The white house with the square hedges on Apple Blossom Road slowly fell into disarray. Dishes crawled out of the sink and slunk across the countertop, a thick skin of crumbs and dried sauces covering them, like a giant, decaying animal with a porcelain skeleton had died beneath the faucet. Fontaine’s bed, forever rumpled, mattress skewed half off the box spring, became a vortex of discolored undershirts and stained pajamas, paint-spattered jeans, and, later, Chinese take-out and pizza boxes, newspaper classifieds. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet mirror cracked from the molding, stuffed with pictures of the hideous children and Galadriel, each in which she looked bored and the children looked hungry. Cigarette burns pocked the surface of the vanity, the rugs, the countertops, like craters in the moon.
And yet, despite the foul detritus, the house maintained the scent of emptiness, the musty smell of something living that isn’t there anymore . . .
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