The Market
by Greta Igl
Perhaps it’s his lack of vision that has him in this predicament, standing under a canopy in a hot, crowded farmer’s market while some stranger embraces his wife. He plays it over in his head, the look on her face. First, surprise, as she looks up from the fingerling potatoes and sees this man, whoever he is. Then, the worrisome softening.
“David.” Her voice surges.
Now she’s in this David’s arms.
Mark watches. The sun beats down hot on the braid of people browsing asparagus at white-canopied tables. The capitol dome arcs across the too-blue sky. A relaxed Saturday morning scene, complete with shoppers reclining on the thick green lawn, Ecuadorian pan flute music drifting over from the corner. Someone yells Get your hot and spicy cheese bread here! Cheese bread, for God’s sake.
David.
Mark feels like he should know the name. But he never wanted to know about what came in Leslie’s life before him. It was neater that way. Less room for misinterpretation. Only now he sees the error in his thinking. Leslie plus this grabby David person equals a complete unknown.
Then David leans over and presses his mouth to Leslie’s cheek.
There’s something in the way his lips linger, like he’s reveling in the curves and scent of her. Leslie’s lashes drop and Mark’s throat tightens. He knows that look, how she hides behind her lashes.
Mark notices she doesn’t pull away.
“David,” she says again, when David eventually pulls back. “What a surprise!” Her voice is too high and a little skittery, like the time she told him about the ding in the Lexus.
“I live here now,” David says.
“Oh! I didn’t know!” She laughs and her fifteen years with Mark makes him feel her nervousness like a hot wire.
“What about you?” David says, whoever he is. “What are you doing here? Do you live in Madison?”
David’s hopeful nosiness makes Mark inhale with a slow rasp.
“No.” Leslie’s hand fiddles with the potatoes, turning them like worry stones, her eyes locked on them. “We just came for the day.” A flush splotches her cheeks. Mark feels the awkward hanging of her we.
Mark clears his throat, taking it for his cue to enter the peculiar stage play.
Leslie turns. “Oh!” Her hand flutters to her chest. Time stretches. “David. My husband. This is Mark.”
Mark tries to ignore the juxtaposition, but it makes his legs and smile stiff as he staggers forward. He holds out a sunburned hand.
“Mark Jacobs. Don’t worry. I’m the husband, not you.”
The joke trips and lays there.
Mark notes David’s hand is clammy.
“David Shaw.”
Whoever that is, Mark thinks, then reminds himself he’d probably know if he wasn’t such a damned coward.
“Is your wife here?” Leslie asks, then she must catch herself. “I’m assuming you’re married. I mean, I think someone told me that.”
Mark wonders who she heard it from, this helpful friend or acquaintance or maybe even relative who provided news flashes to Leslie about old boyfriends.
“Yeah,” David says, his own hand dropping to the potatoes. “She’s here. Somewhere.” He looks around, shrugs. “She wanders.”
Mark feels his eyes go tight and squinty.
A large family pushes past, Indian, the women in saris, while the men and children wear American t-shirts and shorts.
“Excuse me,” the woman in the yellow sari says. She reaches between Mark and David to examine some bunched scallions. Mark steps aside, making David a pair with Leslie. David’s arm brushes Leslie’s and she starts.
“Sorry,” David says, but Mark sees he’s not, that his breath has grown shallow and his eyes are melting as he stands there touching Mark’s wife.
Leslie looks down, eyes again behind her lashes. Mark’s heart beats with helpless panic.
The sari woman pays for her onions and leaves.
“David!”
Mark shakes off the jittery heaviness. A woman in a denim jumper and white t-shirt prances up, smiling, clearly oblivious.
“Excuse me,” She says as she squeezes between David and Leslie. “Wait until you see the strawberries I found. Fabulous! I thought I’d make…”
Something must register with her. She steps back and looks at the uneasy group clustered around the fingerlings.
“Hi.” Her voice is careful now, in front of this larger audience.
David clears his throat. “Nancy.” He runs a hand through the hair at his nape. “This is Leslie. And her husband. Mark.”
Mark sees Nancy stopped listening at Leslie. Nancy’s eyes narrow, then she forces a smile.
“Leslie.” She gives Leslie a hard stare that clashes with her smiling mouth. Mark sees a side to her that David must find a bitch to live with. “How nice to meet you.” She threads her arm through David’s crooked elbow and hangs.
Leslie smiles, but behind it, her face looks guilty. “Yes,” she says, her voice a murmur. “So nice to meet you, too.”
They stand there, lost in their own shades of awkward.
“I just can’t believe this coincidence,” Leslie says eventually. Of course, Leslie is the first to speak. She never could stand those uncomfortable silences. He remembers their first date, how they’d sat fiddling with their drinks, their minds stretching for something to talk about.
He wonders if she’d struggled like that with David.
“Yes,” David says, grabbing her conversational lifeline. Then the pause comes back and David seems reluctant to let things go. “Of course, I’m not one to believe in coincidence,” he continues, “Isn’t that right, Nancy? You know how I’ve always believed in fate. And that’s what this is. Fate. It must be. It’s fate that we ran into each other.”
Leslie’s eyes widen. Nancy clamps her lips tight. David smiles sheepishly with an apologetic eye wrinkle.
“Yes,” Nancy says, her eyes drilling into David. “I’ve spent hours listening to your discourse on fate, David.”
Mark shifts on his feet, looks away from David. As much as he dislikes the guy, he can’t violate the unspoken rule: no man ever watches another man get henpecked.
“Can I help you?”
Mark tries to shake off the funk he’s in, sees the woman who runs the stand smiling at them with exaggerated patience. Mark can’t blame her for not wanting their little drama to unfold at the feet of her business. She looks like a forty-something, hippie version of Heidi, two gray-laced brown pigtail braids trailing over her pendulous, unbrassiered breasts. A tie-dyed sleeveless sack dress brushes the burnished buckles on her Bierkenstocks.
“Did you have any questions?” she asks, her smile widening now that she has their attention. “Perhaps you wanted to purchase some potatoes?”
“Um, yes,” Leslie says, slipping into her usual smiling self. Mark knows she’d never be rude to a stranger, even if her world was crashing down around her. “I’ll take two pounds of baby Yukons.”
Hippie Heidi starts scooping them into a paper bag. Before long, Leslie hands over the money and the transaction is complete.
“Well!” Nancy says, her mouth a wedge of counterfeit glee. She places a hand on David’s arm. “As lovely as this has been, we’d better get going, David. My mom has bridge with her lady friends in about an hour.” She says it as though it explains everything.
David looks down. The toe of his left sport sandal scuffs the sidewalk. Again, he looks up with that sheepish grin. “Kids,” he says. “Nancy’s mom had the kids overnight.”
Leslie lets out a long breath, swallows and nods.
“Yes,” she says, hugging her bag of fingerling potatoes close to her chest. She shakes her head and smiles. “Yes, it’s been lovely seeing you, David. And to meet you, also, Nancy.”
David’s eyes meet with Leslie’s and Mark watches from the sidelines, wishing he could erase whatever was happening, go back to this morning before they saw this David, go back even further to all the nights he stayed late at work when Leslie begged him to come straight home. If he’d only dawdled a little over his shave this morning. Or refused to take Addison as a client. It was Addison who wore Mark down, with his complex portfolio and his questionable ethics. It took all Mark’s shrewdness to keep his feet this side of legal.
Nancy pulls at David’s arm and David starts to drift with it, a few shuffling steps that put him back in the stream of pedestrian traffic. He’ll be gone now, Mark thinks, this David and his penetrating looks and his unhappy, fake-smiling wife. He can feel something humming off Leslie, a resonance that stands his neck hairs on end. It will pass, he tells himself. They’ll go home and she’ll feel badly for awhile, a little melancholy for whatever she thinks she’s missing. But slowly, they’ll drift into their comfortable routine: Leslie busy with her garden and her painting, Mark with Addison and his portfolio and tax landmines.
Then David stops and turns.
“It really has been great seeing you again, Leslie.”
Leslie lets out a shuddering breath.
“You too, David.” Her words float out on a sigh.
They watch each other again, his wife and David. Mark’s eyes meet Nancy’s and it’s like a carnival mirror, fear reflecting fear reflecting fear into infinity. He can’t tell which one of them is the source.
“Perhaps…,” David says and his eyes blaze. “Perhaps we could get together for lunch when you come into town next? Or I get back to Milwaukee often enough. It would be nice to catch up. You know. When we have more time.”
Mark waits, his breath held. The crowd braids around David, the stream of men and women and children diverting and converging around him. Mark wants to pull Leslie close, to squeeze her shoulder, but he’s too sour with fear and the pounding of his cowardly heart.
“Sure,” Leslie says. “That would be nice.”
Mark sinks. He waits for Leslie to offer their phone number, for David to hand her his card, but the stream of pedestrians grows denser and Nancy’s tug on David’s arm more relentless. David teeters, fighting the flow, but a lady with a double stroller presses the surge until slowly, David is swept away, one splayed hand raised toward Leslie.
“I’ll call you!” he cries over the laughter and the convivial Saturday morning chatter. Then David and the moment are gone.
The sun beats down. The capitol dome gleams white under the sunshine. The crowd flows past, full of harmless faces.
Mark makes a choice.
“How nice for you to run into an old friend.” He strokes a hand down Leslie’s sun-warmed arm.
Leslie looks down. Mark holds his breath. Eventually, she raises liquid-sad eyes. Her mouth slides into a melancholy smile.
“Yes,” she says, hooking her arm into the crook of Mark’s elbow. She lets out a long breath. “Now, let’s go home,” she says. “I think I’ll make a torta with these little potatoes.”
Something wells in Mark. He presses a kiss to her temple. “That sounds delicious.” His voice croaks, thick with relief.
This time, he decides, he’ll pay closer attention, watch more carefully, come home every night before six. Okay, seven. Come Monday, he’ll tell Addison to go to hell, to find some other financial advisor to deal with his tax evading bullshit. That will fix this mess, make Leslie happy. Maybe he’ll plan that trip to Europe they’ve always talked about.
His hand finds the small of her back, absorbs her familiar feel. Warm, with enough curve to rest his hand on. They merge into the throng of pedestrians, the bag of potatoes clutched to Leslie’s chest. They’re swept toward the car and home.
Copyright
2009 by Greta Igl