Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017

Bogus Lives by Tom Tolnay

Midwest Book Review called Tom Tolnay’s 2005 story collection Selling America “at times darkly comic, at times tragic... with biting insight...” Profane Feasts, his new collection of 13 connected stories, is due this fall from Toronto’s Scarlet Leaf Publishing House. Several of its tales of a Greek immigrant family — by turns moving, funny, and suspenseful — are from EQMM!

Arte was jolted awake at 7:13 A.M. by a nightmare in which a sly-eyed, bloody hooded vulture swooped off its perch, clamped claws into his shoulder, and snickered in his ear: “Mr. Composte, you and your wife were thrown together by the gods as a practical joke. Ha ha ha!”

Elbowing his spare, trembling body up into a sitting position — shoulder stinging — he peered at the brackish hair pressed into the pillow beside his: Deme was snoring pleasurably as if dreaming she was lying in the brawny arms of Zeus himself. As he tried to make sense of what the vulture had told him, the years he and Deme had lurched through together flickered across his brain like a fast-forwarded DVD, beginning at Saranac Lake where they’d met nineteen years earlier. After stabilizing his rented canoe at dock’s edge, he’d caught the eye of a tallish woman in a satiny white halter who showed off her long front teeth as she asked if he’d take her picture. Immediately, he accepted the camera and snapped off three frames with the roiling lake in the background. Then, emboldened by his three-day growth of reddish fuzz and crisp new hiking shorts, he’d said: “How’d you like to paddle into the sunset with an Adirondack guide?” (More than wanting company, he’d felt it would be less perilous if he sliced into those choppy waters with someone built as sturdily as she.)

She’d shrugged her broad shoulders and replied: “You look more like a lone wolf than a wilderness guide, but I’m willing to try anything at least once.” This response had sounded promising, so he waved his paddle to welcome her aboard, and the pair of ersatz adventurers buoyed away in tandem, managing to churn the waters for an hour and hoist themselves out of the canoe without tipping it over.

That evening they’d devoured rib-eye steaks and twice-baked potatoes in Saranac Hotel’s Boat Lounge, downed three or four picturesque drinks apiece, and concluded their summer escapade by landing one on top of the other in her bed. Six months later they found themselves married to each other and occupying a split-level in a suburb north of White Plains. How that had happened so summarily neither could have explained, but their interminable squabbling forever after strongly suggested their stars had indeed been misaligned. And as the years swept by, instead of becoming easier on them via familiarity and acquiescence, the pain of their togetherness had only increased. Had their serendipitous encounter at Saranac Lake been solely responsible for leading them up life’s trail with the wrong partners, he wondered, or had some other more powerful force — like the gods mentioned by that vulture — been at work behind the scenes?

Anxious to share the vulture’s disorienting disclosure with Deme, Arte realized just in time it would have been hazardous to rouse his wife out of sleep: She hated to be jostled awake — especially on weekends; besides, hadn’t he read on the Internet there could be grave psychological consequences if a human being is startled out of sleep, especially if it should happen during a hot dream? Barely breathing, he reviewed the wider ramifications of his nightmare: It wasn’t merely that he and his wife had apparently been mismatched maliciously by the gods, but that each of them was probably living the life of an entirely different person, while some other couple somewhere on planet earth was living the lives intended for them.

To Arte, dreams (horrific or transcendent) had always seemed little more than soporific hallucinations that the sleeper feared would — or desired to — become reality upon waking. In Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the world’s first psychoanalyst insisted that virtually all the bizarre scenarios surfacing in people’s minds when asleep (during what we now call REM cycles) involved symbolic wish fulfillment. Freud’s theory suggested Arte was actually hoping he was living the wrong life — that he suspected there was a life somewhere out there much better suited to his temperament and predilections. To some extent, this was true. But since he’d also read that Freud had kept revising this book, Arte sensed the psych had never settled in his own brilliant mind the question of what dreams meant. Nevertheless, because that vulture had looked and smelled so stinking real, and had made that shocking claim with confident, if jocular, urgency, he couldn’t get around the notion that what he’d dreamed amounted to a somber truth.

Off the mattress he slid, gingerly, tiptoed in striped pajamas out the bedroom door, stepped noiselessly down carpeted stairs. At the kitchen’s portal he was stung by a sharp sense of displacement, so he stopped to inspect the space, entering only after he’d recognized the antique metal-flapped table, the GE toaster, the Silex coffee maker. Arte palmed the stainless-steel urn, and since it was still warm, he retrieved his Saranac Lake mug from the dishwasher and filled it with pungent ebony fluid. As he sat down shakily at the table, it occurred to him he hadn’t heard Elly and Ollie, nine and eleven, shrieking like Skittles-propelled ninjas upstairs. Could it possibly have been Friday rather than Saturday, with his children already at school? Not a chance, otherwise he would’ve been clacking along on the 7:13 toward New York City, where he was employed as an unappreciated market researcher. Or had he been pinned down on the mattress by that vulture’s claws longer than usual, knocked out of his daily routine?

Sipping the muddy coffee — too harsh to swallow straight — he asked himself whether any of the other couples in their development might have been better served by traveling the psychological express he and Deme had taken to reach this time and place: Althea and Herm? Nappy and Melanie? Jorge and Grace? Barb and Bobby? Barb was working on her third and Bobby on his fourth marriage, which Arte considered persuasive evidence they’d stumbled upon the same truth and were trying hard to recoup their lost years. Nappy and Melanie reminded him of a pair of snarling wolves pacing back and forth in the cage of their split-level, ready to rip out each other’s heart at the slightest provocation. At a neighborhood gathering he’d once noticed Jorge and Grace wink at each other, but Arte had been married long enough to understand you never really knew how a couple got along unless you hid in their bedroom closet. His neighborhood sampling suggested that very few couples escaped the plague of misalliance, and this tended to confirm that the gods did indeed get a kick out of hooking up the wrong people.

At one point in developing the neighborhood in which they lived, some slick architect in cahoots with some savvy town planner decided to alter the facades of these identical split-levels, as if to encourage inhabitants to imagine they were living their own unique lives. If Arte should have been residing in one of those split-levels with someone other than Deme, he knew it had to be Althea, his friend Herm’s wife. Allie and Herm kept up a reputation in the neighborhood for being a “match made in heaven.” But Arte knew better. During a bash to celebrate this heavenly couple’s tenth anniversary, the gods had seen fit to place Althea and Arte alone in an upstairs bathroom. The two of them were swaying in a kind of ostrich mating dance behind the glass door of the bathtub when he revealed his innermost feelings, and, moved by his declaration of undying love, she applied a soft, wet, lingering kiss to his mouth.

Althea and Arte had been raised in bird-scarce cities in Connecticut and Massachusetts, so it was no surprise to their spouses that each had taken an interest in the birds fluttering about their respective upstate New York backyards. Of course watching birds is not the same as bird-watching. The latter is a scientific endeavor requiring constant vigilance to identify feathered creatures suspended on branches, bathing in dust puddles, soaring across the sky. But this pair of lovebirds spied on the little egg-bearers from a romantic perspective, extracting sensual gratification from the life-ways of these song-filled, brightly hued, jittery dancers, and they shared this private passion through deceptions which went beyond the occasional Tweet. Sometimes they would meet at Stop & Shop not so accidentally, chirping in the secret language they’d devised. “Did that yellow-bellied sucker make its way into the limbs of your crab apples?”

Smiling salaciously, she might reply, “No, but I did spy a naughty redhead pecking at my sunflower seeds.” Shoppers searching the supermarket’s shelves for Quaker Oats or a dozen eggs — including an occasional neighbor — were never the wiser. Peeking out from under her plume of silken hair, Allie would encourage Arte to drink from the shimmering pools of her eyes. And drink he did, lustily, until she took a fulsome breath, uplifting her robin redbreasts, and then shoved her shopping cart off to Produce to fondle carrots. Pushing his own cart into Meats to pinch turkey breasts, he would fantasize about how Allie and he would one day press their naked, pounding chests up against each other’s.

Though Althea was decidedly his first choice of life partner from their neighborhood, the more Arte thought about it, the more uneasy he became: The gods were known to be opinionated, so they undoubtedly had their own ideas about who should be matched with his fair-haired peacock. It seemed entirely possible the gods might imagine Nappy would be a better fit for her, Arte being a sallow, unimaginative market-research guy. He could’ve told them Nappy was nothing more than a hairy, gold-chain-wearing Lexus dealer, but he doubted they would have listened to him. Or perhaps the gods might’ve determined Allie would’ve been better off with someone in the next town, county, or state; with some French-speaking croissant baker in Montreal, a Kierkegaard scholar at Cambridge, a lesbian performance artist in Soho, or as a pasha’s sex slave in a land much farther away from where he resided in the Hudson Valley.

Arte knew the gods would also have their own ideas about who would be a good match for himself. Aligning him with another partner, no matter how agreeable and voluptuous she might turn out to be, would have multiple negative side effects: He’d have to move out of his sensibly appointed split-level, with its tripletiered bird feeder on .4 acres — and only ten years left on its mortgage. And who could say where they might’ve shipped him? He could’ve ended up carrying a spear and wearing a loincloth in New Guinea. What if the gods decided he should’ve been writing novels instead of reports on the buying habits of consumers and, lacking a talent for fiction, he ended up begging for beers in San Francisco’s artsy community? Such life changes could also mean he’d graduated from the University of Oslo rather than the State University at Albany, or that he’d never gotten into college, having been booted out of high school for selling crack in the cafeteria.

Someone or something began pounding on the front door. Arte Composte peered through the archway, not quite sure he was hearing what he was hearing. Reluctantly he stood up and scuffed in his fake-leather slippers to the front hallway. Opening the door just a crack — in case it should turn out to be that vulture — he discovered a man as round and yellow as a grapefruit wearing the bluish-gray short pants of the U.S. Postal Service. At the curb idled a white, red, and blue delivery truck, pumping carbon monoxide into Westchester County’s soggy atmosphere.

“Registered mail!” the grapefruit shouted, pushing the door open and extending a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. “Sign here!” Pointing a ballpoint pen at the green Post-it stuck to the package.

Arte accepted the pen warily, scrawled his signature, pocketed the pen, shut and double-locked the door — just in case the postman was actually one of the gods disguised as a grapefruit. The pounding on the door started again, but Arte refused to open up, even after the grapefruit shouted twice: “Give me back my pen!”

The Compostes rarely received registered mail, so he felt vaguely apprehensive as he carried the firm, wrapped parcel into the kitchen. He set it on the table guardedly, and sat down before his mug, watching the package from the corner of his eye. It was only after he heard the mail truck grunt away from the curb that he thought (without actually touching the package) to check its label: no return address, but though the street address — 24 Dryad Lane — was correct, the addressees were not Mr. A. and Mrs. D. Composte but Mr. Q. and Mrs. X. Morphus. The post office had screwed up again, unless the gods had misdirected this parcel to generate a cheap laugh. Arte speculated that Mr. and Mrs. Morphus may have been the couple the gods had originally assigned to reside in the split-level that he and Deme believed belonged to them, along with its hefty mortgage.

Entering the adjoining closet in which they’d plugged in a half-dead computer for scheduling household tasks and printing grocery lists, Arte balanced himself on the folding chair. After fifteen minutes of browsing the Internet, he managed to locate several couples surnamed Morphus, but none possessed the appropriate first initials. So he returned to his mug — the coffee was now cold, but at least Arte had established how he would go about finding the woman with whom he should have been paired: He would prepare a list of every woman with whom he was acquainted, including those where he worked and that cute blond hostess at the country club, and then Google each one of them. Scientifically speaking, it would be a very small sampling, but it would be a start, and his searches could be broadened as he proceeded. (He also made a mental note to check Facebook to see if any of his candidates had posted revealing photographs of themselves.)

More than an hour after he’d begun chasing these thoughts, Deme staggered into the kitchen in her satiny, coffee-stained robe. “What gets you up so early?”

“It’s past nine.”

When she glanced at the wall clock her bushy eyebrows jumped. “How come you aren’t at work?”

“Isn’t it Saturday?”

“If it’s Saturday, where are the kids?”

“I wondered about that.”

With a huff she said, “I’m getting this sick feeling it may be Friday.”

“If it’s Friday, the kids must be in school.”

“Okay, then how come I’m not at my desk in the County Republicans’ office?”

“And how come I’m not gathering reactions to Jazzy Pup at the agency?”

“Jazzy Pup?”

“It’s a new steroid-loaded chow for puppies.”

“What’ll the liberals think of next?”

“Please, I couldn’t take any politics this morning.”

A rare moment of silence engulfed them. While Deme was wondering how she’d come to marry a fool, Arte was thinking this exchange should have given his wife a hint that the gods had led them astray, and he hoped this revelation would save him from having to unload his nightmare on her.

“Last night I bagged pb&j sandwiches for Elly and Ollie,” she said. “Did you at least give them their lunches?”

“They weren’t here when I came down — must’ve grabbed their sandwiches out of the fridge and carried them on the bus.”

“Your children are so neglected.”

So are yours, he thought, and said: “I’d better call my office and tell them I had a life-altering stomachache.” But Arte was unable to scrape up the energy to stand and scoop his cell off the counter.

Surprising him with how long it had taken her to comment on the package, she said: “What’s that?”

“It was delivered as registered mail this morning, but it’s addressed to a couple named Morphus.”

“At this address?”

“They got the address right but the name wrong.”

“Why didn’t you give it back to the postman?”

“He took off before I noticed the mistake,” Arte said, clicking the ballpoint pen rapidly in his pocket.

“What’s that noise?”

Refusing to answer her, he said, “And the postman never bothered to check out my signature.”

This exchange struck him as additional proof Deme and he should have been living entirely different lives in different houses in other states or countries, with different partners and different kids, employed at different jobs — hopefully a job that didn’t require him to travel over two hours on a train and subway to reach.

After so many years together — regardless of whether their meeting at Saranac Lake had happened coincidentally or had been trumped up by the gods, Arte could envision only two options open to them: Do the best they could to trundle through the remainder of their bogus lives until strangers in dark suits shoveled dirt over their bodies, or chuck nearly two decades of cohabitation and make an audacious attempt, like Barb and Bobby kept doing, to get it right next time around. In America this meant hiring an ambulance chaser and citing “irreconcilable differences.” A very painful procedure, he acknowledged: ruthless haggling over division of property, alimony that would plunge him into poverty, limited visiting rights to his son and daughter, while mouthpieces stretched out the agony so they could pad their five-hundred-an-hour invoices. Of course he knew millions of Americans had been plowing through the heartaches of divorce ever since figuring out they’d gotten screwed by the gods. Only trouble was that Barb and Bobby, with five divorces between them, had never struck him as any happier. Quite the opposite! Hadn’t he also read that divorced couples lose several years in life expectancy?

Deme scooped the parcel off the table and began shaking it, causing it to rattle. “Sounds like it may be broken.”

“What does it matter? — it doesn’t belong to us.”

“Someone shipped it to our house, didn’t they?”

“Who says it’s our house?”

Deme stared at him confusedly, so Arte changed the subject: “I’ll have to phone the post office and let them know they’ve made another wrong delivery.”

“Since possession represents ninety percent of ownership, I think we should open it and see what’s inside.”

“That would be unethical, not to mention illegal.”

Shrugging her shoulders the way she had in accepting his invitation at Saranac Lake, Deme slid a long kitchen knife out of the table drawer and cut the strings around the brown paper.

When she looked away to set the knife aside he scooped up the package with both hands. “I’m not going to let you do this.”

“Since when did you become so self-righteous?”

“It would be the wrong thing to do.”

“As if you haven’t done plenty of wrong things in your life!” she snapped, quickly expanding the space between them by going to pour some melted pig iron into her Lake Placid mug.

Still clutching the package, he looked her over stealthily yet intimately — lackluster knotted hair, skin bunching up at the base of her neck, extra chin in its formative stage, red pimple on the tip of her nose. At the same time he couldn’t deny that her perfectly balanced oval face and alert eyes might’ve seemed somewhat attractive, even kindly to someone who didn’t know better, and this reminded him he hadn’t been annoyed, angry, or outraged with her every minute of every day during those years. Though perturbed by the sound of her nasal slurping of coffee, he came close to admitting that, despite being dreadfully mismatched, they had managed to scrape together a couple of spurts of what humanity calls happiness, especially in the early days when love was fresh and sex was still an option. Nevertheless, informed by his nightmare and the impending breakdown of her flesh, and because she seemed hell bent on opening a package that belonged to a couple who may have been living the lives intended for them, he had no doubt the road they’d been following could only lead to the dumps.

While Deme was continuing to make obscene slurping noises, Arte was thinking: If I’m going to undertake the challenge of searching for a life with my name on it, while helping Deme find hers, the smartest way to proceed would be to let her know what that vulture told me. To gauge her spirit of cooperation at the moment, and since she was still wandering glassy-eyed around the kitchen, he said: “While you’re up, would you mind refilling my mug?”

“Do you feel safe swallowing more of this gunk?”

“What’ve I got to lose?”

“I’m thinking your life.”

Without his asking for their help, the gods had provided an opening: “I’ve already lost my life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only that I’ve been thinking about my life a lot lately — about yours too.”

“Since when did you become a thinking man?”

Sighing stoically, he murmured, “Do you think you could sit still a minute while I tell you about a dream I had this morning?”

“Dreaming isn’t the same as thinking,” she advised, dropping his mug in front of him with a splash, and unloading the poundage she’d acquired, especially during the past two years, onto the chair across.

“Actually it was more of a nightmare.”

“Okay, tell me about your nightmare— I’m all ears.”

All mouth, he thought. “I’m not sure how to explain it to you.”

“Don’t worry, I’m smarter than I look.”

Thinking he’d better leave out the part about the vulture, he said, “I dreamed that only a handful of couples in the world are living the lives they’re supposed to be living.”

This confession left him gasping.

“Stop making that noise!”

He sat without blinking, profoundly depressed.

“Believe it or not,” she said, “I had a similar dream last week.”

Arte’s wife had always tried to make it seem she was one step ahead of him in all respects, or so he believed. But he feigned surprise: “You did?”

“Yes, and I gave it a lot of thought — I too got to thinking about the past and the future.”

“Fascinating,” he said. “Did you come up with any ideas about what could be done in this situation?”

“I considered downloading Ancestry.com to see if the stories of my ancestors might help me understand my present situation better and lead me to a path that’s more rewarding than the one you’ve dragged me along.”

Convinced the meager accomplishments, and possibly heinous crimes, of her forebears would provide no help in resolving their dilemma, he said: “What would you do if you didn’t find any useful clues on Ancestry.com?”

“Beyond that, I suppose we could Google people in our neighborhood to see if we could find a better fit close to home.”

“Amazing — I was thinking along very similar lines this morning.”

“I did this last week.”

Big deal — one week ahead of me.

“What about you?” she demanded. “Did you come up with anything that makes sense?”

“Like you said, I figured we might Google every one of our friends, coworkers, servers at the country club, clerks where we shop to see if we could find coordinates in personalities and lifestyles and goals that might match up better for us.”

“You probably fixed yourself up with Althea.”

“Whatever would give you that idea?”

“You don’t think I’ve noticed the chickadee grins you flash at each other?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“What about your rendezvousing with her at Stop and Shop?”

“Are you being serious or just trying to aggravate me?”

“Tweet tweet!”

“I strongly suggest you consider seeing someone about your problem.”

“If anyone’s crazy in this family, it’s the one who has birdies in his belfry.”

“Look, Deme, this banter is not helping us solve our problem.”

“Fine, just answer my question: Were you able to come up with anything constructive?”

Taking a painful breath, he said, “I came to the conclusion that it’s all far too complex, too interconnected, too locked in place for us to get the better of the gods who caused all this trouble.”

“You’re right! It’s the goddamn gods who did this to us.”

Pleased they’d finally agreed on something, he said in a tolerant tone: “How far did you get in your thinking?”

“I stopped searching for a way out of this mess once I took identity theft into account: Even if we were able to come up with congenial matches for ourselves, how would we know they weren’t scoundrels using someone else’s identities?”

A full minute of silent sluggishness filled the space as if a leaden cloud had flowed in through the window, seeped into their minds, and prevented them from thinking of anything to say. The coffee had become so thick at the bottom of the urn they couldn’t even use the slurping of that slimy substance as an excuse for not speaking.

At last Arte was struck by an inspiration: “When my vacation rolls around this summer, I wonder if the Republicans would let you take off the same week with a Democrat.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Maybe we ought to send Ollie and Elly to Camp Chingachgook while you and I steal away to that hotel in Saranac Lake.”

“The one where we shacked up nineteen years ago?”

“I’ll never forget those romantic lodgings.”

“Fabulous food, cozy accommodations, and, as I recall, even a bit of insipid sex.”

“Insipid sex?”

“You know, stick it in and pull it out.”

“Stop being crude!”

“Don’t tell me you thought it was great sex?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it great.”

“How would you rate it?”

“I don’t know — never thought about it.”

“Since you’re a thinking man, why not think about it now?”

“I have no interest in thinking about sexual favors we exchanged nineteen years ago.”

“It may have started a long time ago, but I can tell you it continues to hang over our relationship like a vulture on road kill.”

Arte thought it revealing she’d compared their sex life to a vulture, but what made her confession especially hurtful was that he’d always thought sex had been the one department in which they’d been reasonably well paired — at least in the early days. Now he was beginning to think that Deme had been one of the gods’ undercover vultures all along, and he could envision only one way out of this quandary: grab that long, sharp knife off the table and jam it between her breasts, an action he felt couldn’t have been instigated by the gods since he’d just come up with the idea. Such a deed would nullify any concerns Deme had with regard to being misaligned with her husband, he thought, but where would that leave him? Arte would still be hanging around — undoubtedly behind bars — continuing to carry the burden of his bogus life.

“I’m going to open the package!” she announced.

To distract her from what he considered her growing obsession, he said: “I may have a solution to our problem.”

“Aha, you’ve been thinking again.”

Arte allowed the ragged wings of Deme’s remark to flap over his head.

“Are you going to reveal this solution or are we playing Jeopardy?”

“In my considered opinion,” he said, “the only honorable way out of this dilemma is for us to establish a suicide pact.”

Gagging momentarily, she spat: “You’re the one who needs psychiatric attention — seven days a week!”

“Since neither of us has been living the lives that should have been ours, what’s the point of living at all?”

This observation must’ve crimped Deme’s vocal cords because she didn’t say a word. Arte kept going: “If I killed you first, or you killed me first, and the remaining spouse committed suicide, it would end this farce of bogus lives for both of us, while eliminating the need to search the world for the lives that should have been ours.”

Regaining her equilibrium Deme said: “You and I don’t agree on very much, so how do you expect us to decide who should go first?”

Having anticipated this very question, he said quietly: “Whoever guesses the flip of a coin correctly can choose to go first or last.”

Drawing a slow, wary breath, she said, “What do you propose the method should be?”

Arte stared intensely at the knife lying between them on the table.

Deme looked away. “Fair enough, but if I killed you first, or you killed me first, what would happen — I mean after the stabbing produced the desired result — if the murderer decided not to commit suicide?”

The word “murderer” took his breath away, for he’d never thought of it in that evil way, and having momentarily lost the ability to speak, he was able to respond only in the privacy of his head: The last person standing would be left to bear the burden of his or her bogus life alone, with the State — not the gods — preventing any search for the life he or she should’ve been living.

When Arte didn’t say anything aloud in response to her question, Deme took hold of the package and began tearing off its thick brown paper, revealing an ordinary shoebox. This time Arte didn’t try to stop her. He simply watched as she slowly lifted the lid off the box, having become just as curious as his wife as to what its contents might reveal about their future with or without each other.

© 2017 by Tom Tolnay